A Government to Control Onion Prices?

Have you ever wondered what made you go out there and vote for your representative in the last election, if you did i.e.? Did we vote him so that he could go and sleep in the parliament? Did we vote for him to go and bargain fuel prices, or worse-still, bargain for onion (among other vegetables) prices in our locality? Well, the latter is nearly what is happening at the central govt. of India lately. An excerpt from Governance Now of 21st Dec 2010 goes as below:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today expressed deep concern over the sharp rise in onion prices and said effective steps should be taken to bring down the prices to affordable levels.

What steps is our Prime Minister hinting at here? Although the question immediately apparent from the PM's above comments is "What can the government do?" the question we the people should really be asking is "What should the government do? And what it should not do?" In other words I wish to ask, why should a government, elected by a people after spending 1120 Crore Rupees, interfere in the fixation of prices of onions in markets across India? Now the reason I ask such a question may not be immediately apparent. It becomes easy to decipher when one gets to know what are the typical tools and moves available to an elected government in correcting a market! Subsidy, for instance, is a commonly used deadly weapon by governments to 'subside' inflationary prices but little do many people know where those subsidy moneys come from, and what adverse effect such subsidies could have on the creators of such commodities - onion farmers in this particular case.

The "Street" has only two curves - Supply & Demand.

Irony strikes, of course, when the left front in the parliament (CPI et al.) alleges the government's pro-market policies to be reason behind this "defeat" of the governing side to market forces! On one hand are the ruling parties unaware of the real structure of a pro-market government, and on the other hand, we have a (part of the) opposition, with a much acute ignorance about pro-market governance, that believes the government has "totally surrendered" to market forces. Interestingly although such a situation is required for a healthy market, it would be better termed as co-existence instead of a surrender to market forces.

Given all this, will you cast your vote to someone to go out there and "play" with our markets? Will you cast your vote to the best bargainer of onion prices?! Or will we vote for those who know what a market is, and help keep it sacred and separate from governance? In democracy, like in a market, there's no free lunch. Unless we the people put in our efforts and get educated and use it, our societies and markets will not get better.

Worse still...
Just before publishing this, found in today's Kannada Prabha was this snippet citing Mr Veerappa Moily, our home-grown lawyer turned union law minister, commenting against the Karnataka state's stance in this regard just because he sits on the other side of the table in the Parliament! Stuck between the jaws of such governing machinery is our market and we, the customers. I guess its time we peeled the onions in this regard.

This ATM tells Hindi before Money

Quite sometime ago I had seen this on someone's T-shirt : "My Dad is an ATM." Good joke, but looking at most of our ATMs in Karnataka (like the one in the pic), I feel most Dads in our state still have long time left before real ATMs replaced them! Why? Because the ATMs in our state are hard to use and employ an alien language even today. Shockingly, this Bangalore ATM believes it has given its users a language choice!

A HDFC ATM in Bangalore (Photo taken in Jun '09)

The Indian government, under the Rajbhasha prerogative, regulates the national bank, RBI, to instruct all Scheduled Commercial Banks of India to follow a language policy in their operations; a policy fleshed in Hindi but clothed by the fabric of consumer welfare. Now, where in the democratic world, running a market economy, would a government regulate banks to use a particular language in their functions, operate their ATMs in a particular language? What such banking regulation and packaged goods rules prove is the existence of scrupulous efforts of Indian policy makers in spreading the blanket of Hindi imposition as wide across the society as possible. And all this, at the cost of every commoner's hard-earned money.

That a consumer's language has been exiled and replaced by Hindi in these ATMs is not the only concern here. The biggest concern is really about the customers' wallets! A concern about dwindling funds of customers when banks end up having to make unnecessary expenditure towards upkeep of all those Hindi implementation programs in their operations; programs while seldom serving any purpose to a majority of customers in India, has also caused harm in many an occasion. Of course that doesn't include stray incidents of losses customers incurred because of faulty transactions due to miscommunication and language mismatch! In a time when every Rupee is considered valuable in investing towards a better future, each such Rupee wasted because of such language policy is but a wastage of people's hard earned money and a crime no less.

The question we as citizens need to ask (ourselves first) is 'did we elect a government so that they could spend our moneys on imposing an alien language such as Hindi on us?' If not should the government not stop elevating Hindi as opposed to our language in banks in our own locality too?