1. How do we define Crony Capitalism? When the govt makes rules that favour a few and gives these few an unfair (but, by virtue of these crafted rules, now legal) advantage over others.
2. What was the govt's idea behind #InstituteofEminence? To unshackle higher education from UGC's regulations and monitoring.
Why? Coz govt believes these UGC regulations are bureaucratic, cumbersome and hold higher education institutes from delivering with flexibility
3. Then, why not just wait and unshackle all of them? Why select only 5 running institutes to be free and another non-existent one to develop free of regulation?
4. In coming days, the govt is going to squeeze the rest hundreds of other higher education institutions of funds, turn their grants into loans and require them to seek more funds from market. Yet all of them would continue to be regulated by one or the other bureaucratic regimes
5. This would make life of these institutions more difficult (as if they are doing great right now) while the chosen few shall prosper free of regulatory oversight (at least financially). This is what an unfair advantage etched by the govt in the laws looks like.
6. This is what as my friend @misraudit said, is regulatory capture by the powerful over a weak govt. This unfair advantage over the rest, etched in rules, is worth it all, the super rich pvt players, whether its Reliance or Manipal, know. That's why they hankered for it...
7...Even when there is no money from the government to go with it. They get to grow taller in the higher education market by state fiat.
8. The non existent colleges getting the tag is plain stupid. Came out of an awkward arrangement govt tried to provide for a few to bypass UGC.
9. Is their any direct written proof of Reliance's #Jio institute being favoured by Modi? Of course not. But if you are asking for it from journalists you are only fooling yourself and your friends/readers
10. Instead ask the Modi govt to put all the applications, all minutes of proceedings and meetings, all deliberations in public domain - as the RTI Act requires. Especially records of all that transpired on it in the PMO. Stop blaming just the HRD ministry or minister for this.
11. Better still. Knowing the govt wont disclose voluntarily - it never has, file an RTI for it and put it in public domain - including a possible refusal of govt to share. Wait. Why am i telling you to do it? I shall do so today. And report back to you with the results.
End.
Oh, and do tell particularly where you disagree. I would learn.
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#GST thread. Stay with me: This govt wont share real GST data. Instead we fall for its stupid press releases every month. They mean near zilch. This is what the central govt has really collected by August. Net of refunds and settlement - the only way GST nos should be read.
It is erroneous to merely compare total Rs 1 lakh per month target for states+centre with press releases which do not account for how IGST was settled each month. So, these cant tell what the Centre really got. This table shows how erratic IGST settlement has been.
Then you got to look at states and their revenue separately. Here is a chart of how state revenues are doing. After a year some are doing quite badly. Why? Ask.
#thread i remembered there was a colour to the memories of those years. There were so many people who brought the depth of that colour to my life. Pulled a very few of them out.
RBI revealed this in an RTI: At the end of March 2018, a record high 7,990 borrowers of above Rs 5 crore had not repaid a whopping Rs 3.71 lakh crore to banks for 1-30 days after due date. That is a four-year high record of early defaulters! 1/n
2/n. These early defaults rose by a record 281.9 per cent over December 2017 when they stood at only Rs 972 billion . On a year-on-year basis, the rise is almost 228 per cent - the highest growth of early stage overdue repayments in 4 years.
3/n. More than 5,000 of these 7,990 were new and unique early defaulters of loans above Rs 5 crore. What does this number tell us? We have been told that all bad loans are of UPA era. This number tells us that Modi govt might be brewing its own banking crisis as well.
Thread #ChipkoMovement 1/n: The movement began as a protest by both men and women of Reni and Lata village in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand asking for their rights over lands and forest resources, including rights to be the labour that harvests the timber.
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#ChipkoMovement 2/n: It was a movement to control land, forest and labour resources. It was later given this 'save the environment' hue to suit other interests and narratives. In fact one of its key leaders in the Chamoli hills came from the and was not of the Gandhian views.
#ChipkoMovement 3/n: Other leaders and interests from middle hills got involved much later to stretch the movement into something else. This included timber merchants that had lost timber harvest contracts.