Letters to the editor dated December 4, 2020

Apropos ‘Ending years of suspense, Rajini to float party’ (December 4), Tamil Nadu has a history of being ruled by film- personalities, and quite efficiently too. Now Rajinikanth, another cult figure, is entering the field. Will he succeed as a political leader? Today’s voters look beyond glamour to make their choice in elections. His promise to give “corruption-free and no-caste-no-creed politics” is tempting but prima facie unrealisable. Moreover, he has a major hurdle to cross. His late announcement to enter politics gives him inadequate time to establish his party, get good candidates and reach out to people.

Pune

Apropos ‘Political parties and election manifestos’ (December 4), the latter contain such utopian, even if fiscally imprudent, promises that not even the party leaders take them seriously.

Take the promise made by the Congress during the 2019 parliamentary elections ‘to provide a cash support of ₹6,000 per month, to about five crore poor families’, amounting to roughly 2 per cent of the nation’s GDP. No credible explanation was then offered as to how the party would find the resources to fulfil the outrageous promise, if voted to power.

Another time-tested promise made by most parties is the ‘waiver of farm loans’, including those taken by the rich farmers. Though the educated voters of the nation, realising that nothing comes free in life, shrug away such absurd promises, the poor and uneducated are still taken in by them.

As there is no mechanism to hold the politicians accountable to their promises, they manage to enjoy the spoils of power, uninterrupted, for five years.

Chennai

‘Back to the basics of manufacturing' (December 3) highlights the declining trend observed on the manufacturing front.

There are a number of reasons for the lacunae that exists and to wriggle out of this becomes difficult. One of the main reasons is that labour cost is still higher than in China, which also offer other welfare measures like subsidised housing, electricity and food, which go a long way in the mitigation of financial woes of the labour.Productivity is yet another worrisome factor in India.

Considering these hassles, most of the entrepreneur find it easier and cheaper to import from China and other competitive countries.

Bengaluru

With reference to ‘Retail lending is like riding a tiger’ (December 4), though the category of lending is predominantly against the underlying assets and protects the banks in safe lending, the intricacies involved in the process are multifarious, apart from the borrower selection and the critical factors of economies of scale.

Upon sanction of loan based on the initial income assessment, any depletion in the income of the borrowers due to personal preferences of location or job changes or pandemic like scenarios impacts the repayment cycle, which ultimately sublimate to increasing defaults, NPAs and gearing up recovery expenses for the lenders.

To maintain the healthy gearing ratios, managing the empirical balance between new and old loans on a continuous basis could be cumbersome for lenders. Fudging of I-T returns and submission of spurious title documents add to woes of the banks in retail lending.

Bengaluru

Joe Biden is more in the mould of Barack Obama, under whom he served for two terms as Vice-President. Biden will, like Democrat leaders before him, wield a sweet tongue but hold back on substantive politico-economic issues that would most concern us.

The pandemic will keep him engaged initially, after which he will have to address issues such as repairing frayed relations with other major nations, the sagging economy, reset of accords and trade equations. In Biden’s term, India can expect little beyond predictability and bonhomie.

Navi Mumbai

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