When Yogi Adityanath was approached by cane growers, he passed an order that the sugar mills should pay the cane farmers IMMEDIATELY along with interest. Great.

Boy gets education loan after writing to PM, bank had rejected due to father’s credit rating. Wow PM, tusi great ho.

Woman tweets to Suresh Prabhu and the train toilets get cleaned immediately. Wow.

PM passes an order saying that ‘stents’ will be priced at a particular price….and Presto prices fall! Last week, he inked an air ticket pricing scheme of capping tickets at 2,500 rupees, IMMATERIAL of fuel pricing. When you book air tickets you see how much of that is paid to the government as taxes. The government tries price control on stents, and the jury is out on that. Modi hinted that he might force doctors to control what medicines doctors could prescribe!

Arvind Kejriwal says ‘all class rooms should have air purifiers’

….etc.

Politicians think it is easy to solve sporadic problems but have no time to change the system. When the loans / NPA are reviewed the banks in UP will say “we gave loans to sugar companies….” and the money got used to pay the farmers.

Then when the sugar mills will want to sell sugar at Rs. 80 per kg (fair price given the high price for cane in UP) the same Yogi will pass a diktat saying “sugar will not be sold at a price more than Rs. 50 per kg”. The same PMO will ask PNB why they have so much NPA in education loans.

It is sad that the politicians (Congress is of course worse) think that simple solutions exist. If students do not study in schools, politicians have said ‘there will be no exams till class 9’. This is ridiculous. The challenge is to make the children learn better. It means getting better teachers, making the syllabus more relevant, making schools better,….and not some stupid easy solution like ‘no exams till class 9’.

Drug (stents, medical services, etc) pricing is not easy. In India we do have municipal hospitals (about which nobody complains – the chatteratti does not use it) and 5* hospitals which charge a bomb. Clearly a case of demand and supply. They co-exist within a few km of each other. Govts. have tried everything in medical services delivery and pricing. Simple solutions do not exist.

None of us like the more difficult solutions. If there is a rape hanging the rapist is NOT the only thing to do. In most parts of India WOMEN think it is fine for their sons to seek sex outside of marriage, but the women are held to much much higher morals. So one has to go about changing the mindset of the women – start from the older women. Do some kind of a profiling of all rapists and start training young men and women about sex. May be in class 8. It is not easy, it is not popular, it is not visible and it does not get TRP, and it might take 25 years to yield results, but that is the way to go.

If the price of water was to be included in the cane production, NOBODY would grow sugarcane. We would look for beet sugar or some other variety of sweeteners. Asking the sugar manufacturer to pay more and still sell sugar at a unprofitable price will just mean that no capital will come into that industry. Obviously price of sugar will keep going up – or we will be forced to import sugar. This will hurt the lower class of the population, not the upper class.

Of course talking about A Kejriwal is a waste of time, and I do not have enough readers in Delhi for me to waste one blog post in talking about him…

Remember Economics 101? If you control pricing, supply vanishes. Services / Products like to find the optimum price. This explains migration.

Think before you ‘solve’ problems. Set the system right, and do not just come out with sporadic solutions.