The Hindu Business Line : Blind man’s buff with inflation

It is highly gratifying to see that, contrary to past experience in such matters, Ministers have not been dismissive about the Prime Minister’s missive to practise austerity by eschewing the practice of organising jamborees at tax-payers’ expense at five-star hotels and remain glued to India and do an honest day’s work, without falling for the temptation of gallivanting in different parts of the globe at the slightest provocation.

Following this circular, the public has been treated to a cascade of titillating tid-bits about cancellation of foreign junkets by several Ministers. It was an astonishing spectacle, the public never suspecting the degree of ingenuity and inventiveness shown by Ministers in finding flimsy excuses to be wandering at will on the broad, sunlit fairy-lands around the world. How long these acts of self-abnegation will last is anybody’s guess.

Those of you who have tried to clean up the drain with insecticides know what I mean. The bugs (or critters, to use the delectable appellation given to them by the Americans) lie low for a while, only to rear their ugly heads soon enough. So also, it should not be surprising if the foreign jaunts so far cancelled are the only ones to suffer the axe, and if, before you say ‘cockroach’, the Ministers are flying off to their favourite foreign haunts without let or hindrance.

In order to create an illusion of momentous official issues being at stake, they take with them a retinue of personal aides, Secretaries and other high officials, and their hangers on.

This does not mean that onerous tasks on the country’s behalf are undertaken. There are Ministers, as the disclosures of the past few days have shown, who go to derive inspiration from flower-shows, imbibe ideas from industry fairs and find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones” by attending seminars and workshops.

It is high time, methinks, somebody issued a similar missive imposing a ban on interpretations and forecasts about the uncontrollably raging inflation by the leading lights of the Government at all levels.

I say ‘somebody’ because the Prime Minister himself would have to be the first to be brought under the ban, followed by the Finance Minister, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, experts on talk shows, et al.

Confusion

Never in the affairs of state was so much confusion spread by so many to so little purpose or edification. Everybody who is anybody has been jumping into the fray, spoiling for spin.

They have split hairs like nobody’s business, giving what essentially is a simple phenomenon — rise in prices of goods and services — a variety of names: core inflation, headline inflation, demand-pull inflation, cost-push inflation, imported inflation and what have you.

There are so many causative factors attributed to it that the head of an average household simply reels on hearing them. For instance, it has been said to be driven by prices of whatever comes within the cross-hairs of commentators — food items, oil, cement, steel, commodities, you name it.

All the predictions that Ministers and officials have been recklessly making about beating it down within a stated period have come unstuck. There has been a relentless movement upward with every chance of its crossing double digits very soon.

The bigwigs of Government look like having run out of all the weapons in their armoury. They may as well resign themselves to be mute bystanders, without shooting their mouths off or speaking differently from different corners of their mouths.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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