Category: Blogs

Sugar has been produced in India since ancient times and the sugar industry is a big business in India. At present, this is the second largest agro-based industry of India after cotton textile industry. White sugar is not good for health. Different health organizations have different recommendations for the amount of sugar you should limit yourself per day. But they all agree that there’s room for some sugar in a healthy diet. Hence, the consumption of sugar in this nation should be meant for the poorer people of India. So, the Government of India can impose GST at 12% on sugar. Therefore, sugar should get directed into the bottom of the pyramid. Rich people and people with diabetes will not consume sugar. Sugar that goes into food preparations, pharmaceuticals and related will help the sugar economy. So the Government of India will realise a higher revenue along with State Governments. Sugar production in the nation is higher than its requirement. Sugar draws a lot of energy as well as water from the system. Soil nutrients like Urea are subsidised and therefore the overall costs to the nation are high. It would be therefore good to regulate the sugar production economy by imposing a necessary condition that all sugarcane farmers should form themselves into a producer company. Every sugarcane mill should be buying from a producer company and not necessarily from individuals. Individuals and groups can continue to make jaggery with it or give it to vendors of sugarcane juice. The sugar mills are well organised and producer companies can be supported by the state and central governments by channelling the necessary infrastructure and assessment. The sugarcane economy is working at the optimum efficiency level. The producer, the farmer and the delivery system are well organised and all the sugar cane producers are now in the formal payment system. Sugar companies have established accounting relationships with the sugarcane farmers. The beauty of the sugar mill system and relationship with the farmers is that 100% of the produce is purchased with all facilities given to the producers from harvesting to delivery. This ecology is great for the nation. India needs to have sweets for the poor. They can make it themselves in home industries. Therefore, the Indian economy should drive the sugar economy into making the right chemistry for sweets to reach the poor every week. Sweets mean celebrations but overindulgence in white sugar has health issues. The calories required by the labour class can be enriched with energy bars, so that nutrients are absorbed by a low-income family. They need to consume it directly rather than through the cooking process. The food processing facilities that are required can follow the strategy of FMCG giants. There should be a baker in every village or can be created. A value chain can emerge from the sugar industry. The number of farmers who are employed in the sugarcane growing can be incentivised to move to the quantum of required production of what the nation needs in a regulated way by incentivisation, motivation and also technology transfer especially crops like soya bean, green gram and ground nuts.

G Sadananda Prabhu, my dear father picked up a skill from Shri K P Hegde, the Manager of Kanara Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He would always have a writing pad and would note down a ‘To-Do List.’ He was very fond of Mathematics and as was the norm during those days, without calculators, the ability to retain numbers was reduced to simplicity, as one had to be very agile in the competitive field of commodities, to learn to buy and sell. It was also very important to maintain relationships. He invested in a telephone connection, as communication is the most important aspect of life in business. The ‘To-Do List’ was always interesting and classified. Even the requirements for home or something he would like to do after a few weeks was jotted down. This is an element of memorising and compiling your activity to the list of things one must do. Remembrance: He was always organised for the day, or the week, or the time ahead. In today’s atmosphere of doing as much as you can or as much as you should with the aid of tools has expanded the scope of one’s abilities. The beauty of Sadananda Prabhu’s action was that he wrote as much as he wished to accomplish, he wrote as much as he could what he intended to do. The other aspect of it was, whenever a thought came to his mind, even in the middle of the night he would take out the pad and write it down before he went back to sleep. So, this act of writing down was not a decision. It was a thought. This is what helped him to build relationships. He was welcomed by the business community and his chosen friends because of choosing the few ones he wanted to keep a relationship with. Even when encountering a stranger visiting his office, he would smile and make them feel at home, enquiring about their whereabouts. He had that uncanny knack of even getting to know all about that person. This endeared him to both suppliers and customers. His actions were always beneficial to people. He was very wary and alert that he made no mistakes or errors. Many times, I have seen him doing compound calculations on a slip of paper, which arrived exactly to 2 decimals, something we take for granted in the calculator today. He said to me once, “who is good in math is good for life”. When I ponder over this, yes, successful people have always been good at numbers. It is valid for business or economy. But when I studied logic after many years, I found that mathematics and logic are something that go together. We should stop the nonsense in our public life and bring sense. Common sense is there in everybody and he had it in abundance. Whenever he spoke, he had the art of making sense and that is what made him dear to all.

India is going through a social upheaval. India’s problems have always been social, not political or economic, said Swami Vivekananda. Has democracy made a difference in the last eight decades? Leading to independence, the methods employed to secure independence have been India’s modern history. But social change has been more intense in the last two decades. And this change has manifested itself into a political change. But political consciousness in a democracy requires understanding that democratic values and democratic institutions need to evolve. When sudden changes are imposed in a democratic milieu, the understanding of the people will improve for democracy with all its nice aspects of the ruling by the people, for the people and of the people runs through institutions. Democratic institutions need to be strengthened all the time. Democratic institutions in India are to be addressed for the sanctity it deserves. The major democratic evolution needs to happen when we address the means and methods for strengthening the democratic process, the opposite is happening. These are the methodology of gathering a mass of people in political rallies, in pre-election rallies, in post-election celebrations, in organising meetings, mass meetings and small meetings, etc. These processes have been addressed in various fora. But the calling of bandh and hartal, which is, imposing your will on the entire population, and in some cases, it is done by parties who are ruling. It is also done by parties in opposition. It is already been declared by the courts and Supreme Court of India that it is a violation of fundamental rights when a group or an individual with that clout declares that there is no economic activity on the following day or that there is some activity which is organised in a way that it hurts even a section of the city or a smaller portion of the community, institutions, roads, etc. Therefore, India and its politics require a recognised arena. In London, there is one small corner in Hyde’s Park, where anyone can stand and express his opinion and it is restricted into that area in terms of freedom of speech. Now, in India, the concept of freedom of speech has gone beyond proportion to taking away the dignity of the individual and harming the processes of mature and measured thinking. So, as Swami Vivekananda said, ‘thinking and doing cannot be at the same time.’

India has a criminal justice mechanism, which is regulated and empowered under the Criminal Procedure Code, the CrPC. The familiarity with the criminal justice process is an open process and frequently the newspapers and media carry news of persons arrested and granted bail. Those poor souls who cannot afford bail are then sent to jails and housed there until the trial or formal prosecution process starts. They are called undertrials. It is frequently mentioned that in India jails are overcrowded. There are more people in the jails than what the jails can physically accommodate and hence overcrowded. For example, if the capacity of the jail is 1200 and there are 1763 prisoners inside, then that jail is called overcrowded. The facilities are granted, but the physical accommodation is something that a convict or an undertrial can experience. The Indian cinema has portrayed the inside of a jail in many ways. However, to see the inside of a jail is not difficult for a citizen. The jailer is kind enough to grant permission for well-meaning citizens to go around. Convicts can be visited by friends and relatives; undertrials can be visited by family and lawyers or their lawyer’s assistants. The purpose of this writing is for the Government of India to have a programme to separate the term — Convicts and Undertrials. This process is very important that convicts are to serve their sentences for some time, for a specific duration that can be as low as 30 days or even less, or as high as life imprisonment, which means a certain duration. If the convict is 63 years old and is serving life imprisonment, then it would mean different from a 33-year-old serving life imprisonment. The term life imprisonment signifies that the person is not fit for normal social life. In India, it is time to expand the physical facilities by building high quality, highly secure and comfortable prisons. But the public observance is that people who are acting against society deserve harsh punishment. India has a debate going on, on whether death sentences deserve to be in the law at all. But as and when death sentences are pronounced, according to CrPC, hanging is the method of execution in the civilian court system. A democratic country allows the procedures for appeals and occasionally the process is quick but sometimes the process is lengthy too, depending on the person’s capacity or the person’s supporters who try to save the life of the person. The basic presumption here is that a person who is not guilty is to be allowed the maximum recourse in the law and that there should not be a manipulation of the justice system for a not guilty person to be pronounced guilty. However, the normal practice in India is, a person who is guilty and even if the person accepts it, the lawyers persuade him to say ‘not guilty’ and then the manipulations begin. This is not a rule but an exception. The justice process consists of judges and lawyers. Rarely, individuals get to participate. In many instances, individuals have argued for themselves, not with a manipulation purpose or avoiding fees or avoiding lawyers, but the fact that they know the law and want to defend themselves in the case. Indian history, even before the British system is full of stories of how the law was administered and justice was delivered. In different monarchies, different kinds of law and justice prevailed. India had 700 kingdoms and the process of law was individualistic to that kingdom – there were corporal or normal punishments, imprisonments, or flogging. Death by trampling under an elephant’s foot was one of the visible demonstrations of showing the public that wrongdoing would not go unpunished and served as a deterrent. There were also pronouncements of banishing from the kingdom. The person was free to go and settle outside the kingdom or migrate to the Himalayas and merge into the anonymous and the unknown, repenting for life. There was a newspaper article from 2015, which wrote that the United Kingdom had 407 Indian citizens who were held prisoners and the UK wanted to deport them to India so that the Indian government could take care of them for the rest of their terms. This would be under a government-to-government arrangement. It also mentioned the cost of maintaining a prisoner in the UK was around £ 25,900 a year. In today’s terms, it would be more than 22 lakhs a year. In India, the cost of having a prisoner who is a convict in any jail has not been studied and computed. Perhaps it is an assignment to the Indian Institute of Public Administration, to study the conditions of various jails to determine the cost to the taxpayer. However, the proposal now is that India should build at least 1600 jails to host only convicts. The current jails can be administered for undertrials till they are released or convicted, as the legal system is familiar with these jails and therefore more visibility will be there as a distinction between convicts and prisoners who are awaiting or undergoing trial.

The development of financial literacy in India and the drive towards mobilizing people’s savings from currency notes or physical forms to banking transactions has been very fascinating. This has been with the advent of the development of banking technology’ as it is called now, which has moved rapidly and Indians developed the banking software for India. This has also extended to other parts of the world. This has reduced the requirement of personnel at the front end of the banking system, the physical brick and mortar, and what we were accustomed to as ‘counters.’ The elimination of many mundane tasks, especially cash transactions, has moved to automatic teller machines, where cash dispensing and now cash accepting have been automated. However, it still does not take away the fact that mechanization or automation still requires a human element to service this equipment and devices. The entire hardware and software that delivers this require constant attention and maintenance, now on a 24-hour basis – 365 days a year. This submission is about the conventional ‘across the counter’ system, it is felt that it requires better quality of service and what the people are missing. The topic is also about the increase in employment, that the look and feel and personal service should be in the banking sector. India requires the deployment of competent, young and experienced and mature people in the same arena, as banking constitutes the core and heart of the financial transaction regime. On this note, the Negotiable Instruments Act is one of the established legislation to deal with many aspects of Negotiable Instruments, which are common but are not in the public domain. Students of Commerce and students of Law are engaged in the study and knowledge of the application. The social aspect of India is that there are more than 500 to 700 communities that are spread all over the country and they have celebrations of various kinds of festivities. There are leaders of national stature and community leaders who were prominent enough that their days of birth are celebrated as holidays. Also, there are many religions in a diverse place like India and these religious communities celebrate various festivities and in a different nature and fervour than other parts of the country. The Negotiable Instruments Act empowers the State governments to notify these holidays at the beginning of the year before the year starts and this is done by a gazetted order and the commercial banks are bound to give a holiday to their staff at these respective locations. The questions are: 1. Are these holidays necessary in the context of development processes in India? 2. India as a single currency nation and where transactions are increasing across states and borders requires that the State governments declare these holidays 3. If a bank has a holiday in one state and its branch in another state has different holidays will it hurt the efficacy and efficiency of transactions? 4. Is it proper for the government to declare more holidays for their own staff and to the banking system than necessary? If one looks at the long list of holidays and the options that are given, the transactions for the public will get restricted to the number of days open. There are many more transactions than just transfers or cash handling in the banking system. A decision-making process is involved and Banks are required to administer and police the advances made, the loans made and the interaction that is required between a banker and clientele. India deserves more employment in the banking sector, not at an additional cost but to excel in the services that this nation needs, to become a 400 trillion economy. <p The banking sector can be state-owned or managed by co-operatives or any form of development banking, transaction banking and international banking that can expand the services to all six days, sometimes all the seven days, at particular points that the public can transact at convenience. Bank employment can increase to the point that the number of holidays can be enjoyed by the staff as optional even if the banks give reduced or truncated services during these days. The Banks and the Reserve Bank can notify the nature of transactions with limited staff that can make these banks function. It is therefore submitted to consider that: 1) The Negotiable Instruments Act be amended that the banking holidays are decided in consensus by State governments and Central government by the end of November of each year. 2) The number of religious holidays can be brought down to zero and employees can be given optional holidays that they can exercise leave to celebrate without hurting the banking transactions of the day. 3)The national holidays are brought down to a bare minimum of what is important. And in the course of this, the banking transactions will be spread across days and hours that the banks are kept open for transactions, which enlivens the economy. The banks are then able to deploy their people better in their functions and improve their internal quality of performance, as well as the external. In conclusion, State Governments and Central Government should establish a Banking Council of India, where there is a structure to integrate the various functions that the banking industry direly needs today in terms of cohesion to develop a national perspective. This includes various enactments and legislations to assist the banking sector in recovering their money lent. Ensuring an atmosphere of self-discipline and more importantly, to unify the handling of currency, which is a national perspective, as well as take care of the minute details and experiential aspects of banking from now to the next seven decades that will make India the greatest economy in the world.

India needs Hindustan Zaveri Bank, a wholly-owned Bank by the Government of India to handle all the required transactions in the bullion trade, which is gold, silver, platinum and precious metals. Indians have been acquiring gold for ages. India produced what is best possible and the people always enjoyed the surpluses and the form of savings was gold. As far as the 1930s, gold and silver were traded freely in India without any taxes because it was held as a form of currency. It was natural that whenever there was distress and crisis, individuals or institutions who held gold used to sell it and meet their requirements. Wealthy always had the preference to have gold and silver as their reserves. The introduction of currency has not reduced this intensity. The Reserve Bank of India is the only entity that holds gold in India and abroad. It should work with the Central Government to establish the Hindustan Zaveri Bank with a capitalisation of whatever gold that is held in reserves by an arrangement, which will make the establishment of the Hindustan Zaveri Bank. This was proposed by Professor B R Shenoy. The duty on gold was recently reduced in the central budget. Gold is such a freely moving precious metal that if there is a slight difference from one geography to another, one place to another, one nation to another, there would be a movement. Gold is held by central banks all over the world. The presence of gold as collateral will always mean that the bank will have the ability to have current account deposits as a matter of trust and reliability. This means that the Hindustan Zaveri Bank will be able to have current accounts and savings bank accounts at zero cost from global currencies. This will also mean that India will be emerging as the bankers to the world. Trust and reliability constitute the core of banking. Banking is not necessary just for individuals but for institutions around the world and they will have the highest level of trust when there are gold reserves. In India, individuals hold gold to such an enormous extent. The buying of gold in India is absorbing the surpluses of gold in the world. This can be channelled through the Hindustan Zaveri Bank as the controller and regulator for all gold activities in India by legislation and by conduct. Recycling gold is very important in the Indian context as individuals sell their gold at times of necessity. Gold related activities have reached new heights. Lending against gold is at the lowest cost and banks are actively promoting gold loans because it is the safest form of lending. India has very few gold mines; the one which was famous, the Kolar Gold Fields has been redundant and another small mine in Karnataka called Hutti Gold Mines also has lower yields. Gold depositories in India can improve employment and a movement of gold will involve more focus on the necessity of efficient logistics for precious metals. Depositories managed by the Hindustan Zaveri Bank can act as custodians for Indian and global gold. Regularising gold holdings will mean a lot of projection of substance and wealth. India is borrowing externally at high costs. This is because of certain weaknesses in the system, not necessarily of one institution or the government. The Government of India’s borrowings have reached a peak of over 90,00,000 crores along with the State government’s and the interest payout is almost 10,00,000 crores a year. The Central Government can borrow even in rupee terms with a structured arrangement with the Reserve Bank that will tide over the overwhelming expenditure of the Government of India, which is currently in the range of 6,50,000 crores. <p This is a legacy of inflation management of 10 years when enormous amounts were borrowed for the sake of expenditure and this can be pared down. The Government of India should be able to borrow at less than 2% per annum for at least half of its outstanding debt if it begins to make a structural arrangement. In the initial steps towards this, the Reserve Bank of India can entrust the gold to one nationalised bank and Exim Bank of India for two purposes: 1) To make available gold at international prices to all entities who are engaged in the fabrication of ornaments for export 2) It can act as a conduit for international trade by inviting gold as depositories and based on the daily transactions, make available gold at all designated branches officially. It is required to structure this in order to prevent gold smuggling, which is still present. Gold smuggling has got its collateral damage as a parallel economy is in circulation. Eliminating that parallel economy means that a minimal margin is charged at all levels on the basic transactions of gold. The gold economy can expand for India and abroad once it comes under thorough regulation. In this case, a strong government presence is a necessity. Eventually, people of integrity and networking will enable higher performance in the gold-related sectors and associated with precious metals like platinum, silver and similar materials. This can extend to diamonds also, where India has a very strong world presence. But the institutional support that is required needs resources, which can be channelled to make India the centre of precious things in the world.