The Ignited Indian

Helicopter Money| The army has been designated with this humongous task of distributing money among people. Its going to be chaotic. Be ready for the mess when the army helicopters passing over the sky and air dropping the freshly minted currency notes all over your town. Sounds just like a scene straight out of  Season 3 of  Money Heist right?  But oh wait! what the writers of Money Heist have literally wrote and hastily executed in the series.. is not actually what the word Helicopter Money denotes. The actual meaning of the term Helicopter Money buzzing offrecent is pretty different. While it may not sound as elegant at the plan of Sergio a.k.a. The Professor, it is quite simple yet a lot chaotic. More often than not, due to natural disasters, floods/ famines, social unstability or generally due to bad economic policies, countries find themselves in a an economic mess, where people don't have the money to buy goods/ services.. resulting in falling reven...

There is a slowdown buzz all around the world and is visible also in India. Sectors such as automobile and real-estate are often making headlines and not for a good reason. It is only to report the falling sales figures, or slowing growth rates. In the latest quarter, non-oil, non-gold imports are down — indicating that Indians are buying less of imported goods too. On the other hand, the movie business is doing very well. Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has cited that Rs 120 crore business done by three Bollywood movies on a single day suggests the strength in the fundamentals of the Indian economy, but he was actually articulating a real economic phenomenon playing out in India currently. It may be puzzling to see how few businesses such as Movies, and Electronics are performing so well despite the apparent slowdown in most of the other segments of economy. It does not mean the movie industry is defying the slowdown. It’s the ‘Lipstick Effect’ at play. It was first ob...

The Debt Trap Diplomacy A case study of China Debt-trap diplomacy is a type of diplomacy based on debt carried out in the bilateral relations between countries. It involves one creditor country intentionally extending excessive credit to another debtor country with the alleged intention of extracting economic or political concessions from the debtor country when it becomes unable to honour its debt obligations. The conditions of the loans are often not made public and the loaned money is typically used to pay contractors from the creditor country. This is an extension of the well-known strategic foreign policy which openly uses economic aid and investment between countries to curry diplomatic favours. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can be said as the leading example of Debt Trap Diplomacy. BRI hopes to invest an estimate of US$ 8 trillion in infrastructure financing to 68 countries in Asia, Europe and Africa most of which are under developed. Critics of Chinese lendin...

There is one thing commoners miss while reading currency fluctuations. It is that they are dealing with two variables. It is not the rupee that is weakening, but it is the dollar that is appreciating. Let me illustrate: About 5 years ago 1 Great Britain Pound equalled about 101 rupees. Now, it is worth only 89 rupees. One Euro bought about 85 rupees, now it buys only 79 rupees. A Brazilian real equalled about 26 rupees and now it is about 18 rupees. A Russian rouble equalled 2 rupees back then and now it is on par with the rupee. In short, the rupee was getting stronger over the past few years against many other currencies and that was worrisome to many economists and exporters. In fact, not long ago publications that are highly critical of the BJP like ‘the Wire’, etc., were complaining that the Indian government was keeping the rupee too high. ( https://thewire.in/banking/rising-real-exchange-rate-hurts-indias-exports ) This is one of the reasons why RBI has slowly...

The amendments to POSCO Act by introducing death penalty as a possible punishment for the rape of a girl below 12 years is a perfect example of lawmaking that is as thick on rhetoric as it is on empirical evidence. Reactionary reforms are often the easier ways adopted by any government, when it wants to perpetrate an image that they really care about protection of citizens. Though child sexual violence is one of the relatively better documented areas in criminal justice, it appears that little of that research is reflected in the imagination and passing of these amendments. The argument is attractive because it appeals to our intuition that fear of the harshest punishment will prevent individuals from committing child rape. But social, economic, cultural, psychological and other factors in each of our lives interact in far more complex ways than just that simple equation. Also, multiple studies on the working of special courts under the POCSO Act conducted by National Law ...

Cauvery crisis is a victim of water mismanagement and chauvinism of both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Both sides come from an imaginary “state pride” and listen little to reason. Both sides don’t understand that neither owns the river. Both sides are filled with insecurity and inferiority complex. Karnataka believes that it doesn’t get heard by higher authorities and has a victim mindset especially when the Supreme Court is involved. Tamil Nadu believes that it doesn’t get heard by neither national parties as neither of them are viable in the state (and would not try anything to get political voice either). Karnataka’s Point of View : 1.  It is not getting half the share of water as the original agreement between the Madras presidency and Mysore was when Madras had an upper hand. 2. The drinking water crisis of Bangalore supersedes agricultural water needs. World over drinking water is prioritized over other uses.  3. The times when it was asked to releas...