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Comment by thevardanian | Hacker News Reader

Across almost all metrics, infrastructure, corruption, ease of business, electricity, even cleanliness India has improved on. This isn't just another election year innovation, this is just another list of innovations that have been added, which also include things like investments in clean energy, and providing rural impoverished citizen with gas to cook (people in rural areas would cook in wood fired stoves that would produce a lot of smoke and be terrible for their health).

You can be a pessimist, but I don't see that, and most investors are very optimistic about the Indian market.

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This is totally wrong information about the current state of affairs of India.

1. Ease of doing business

The Indian government had stopped LLP registrations all together for no official reason. For Pvt ltd registrations from past June 10th rejections to form a new company or even subsidiary company has skyrocketed.

Source: LLP halt is reported in media, which still has some spine to stand against the government. Regarding rejections, all data is hidden even from RTI but you can talk with literally any CA/CS to understand the nightmare of MCA.

2. Investors

Its straight 5th-year FII has removed billions of dollars from the Indian market. Still, Indian Sensex is surging on the wave of the domestic mutual fund industry. Those "mutual funds Sahi hai" ads didn't start out of nowhere. There's no problem with the rise of the mutual fund industry, but to use it as a parameter for Indian economy's performance is nuts. Actually, rational investors are actively avoiding the Indian market.

Source: moneycontrol.com

Regarding corruption, infrastructure, education, jobs, credit rates and liquidity and other macroeconomic parameters, in general, are totally telling a different story. It would be really good to have the facts for all of the above claims. If I get to see the facts, I'll be satisfied with the claims.

Wake up before its too late! I just want people to question their government rather than defending them, irrespective of any political party.

Edit: Fixed indentation.

1. Business Ranking

"India climbs global business ranking. But it's not that simple" https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/31/news/economy/india-ease-of-...

2012 - 132

2013 - 132

2014 - 134

2015 - 142

2016 - 130

2017 - 130

2018 - 100

http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/india

Samsung is also opening the world's largest Mobile phone manufacturing plant in India. That's a tremendous investment from them.

2. Corruption

India's Corruption Ranking

2011 - 95

2012 - 94

2013 - 94

2014 - 85

2015 - 76

2016 - 79

2017 - 81

https://tradingeconomics.com/india/corruption-rank

3. Infrastructure

Road construction by km per day built / awarded

"While a total of 4,410 km highway stretches were constructed in 2014-15, it increased to 9,800 km in 2017-18." Furthermore just look at the spending. It's booming.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/highway-constructi...

4. Electricity

There's pretty consistent growth, although growth isn't the only story. A strong reliable grid is also important, along with having investments in green technology to make the electricity generation more green. Reliability isn't up to standards yet, but it has gotten better, in my opinion. There have also been tremendous investments from the government in green tech, like solar.

https://tradingeconomics.com/india/total-electricity-output-...

From the article:

> Another criticism is that countries get credit for passing laws, even if they haven't been widely implemented yet.

This would be my biggest concern with these rankings. India might sound better on paper (from a very high level abstract look comparing countries) for ease of business but that doesn't mean it has translated to day-to-day business life there.

The recent additions are not just laws, they're tangible initiatives, and infrastructure the government has built.

Creating infrastructure, and reducing friction is the only thing a government can. The government is merely a mediator, a facilitator, that lays out the field and its rules, but it's up to the citizens to independently exploit that opportunity.

Care to also publish rankings of the country over the years in freedom of press, law and order, mob violence, transparency, economic growth, journalists/writers murdered, appointments/shortages of RTI commissioners, RTI rejection rate, lack of lokayuktas, appointments/shortages of judiciary by govt etc. (or just look it up for yourself)

> There have also been tremendous investments from the government in green tech, like solar.

The goal setup was a 100GW of solar capacity by 2022. It was about 2KW in 2015 and is about 20KW in 2018. We are most definitely not going to achieve the goal, perhaps not even get close. Lofty goal, sound familiar? I am sorry, I take lofty goals and promises of the Govt. with a pinch of salt until I see some actual implementation.

Did you deliberately change GW to KW?

20 GW in 2018 with process falling 15% year on year can lead to a sudden increase. Let's pass judgement in 2021 when things are clearer.

Edit: ...2GW in 2015 and is about 20GW in 2018...

Typo, and HN doesn't allow me to update it now. Anyway, my point was that in the past 4 years we achieved 20GW and we expect to achieve 80GW in the next 4 years.

But it isn't linear. Price is falling exponentially (15% every year). And adoption will be more rapid as solar suddenly becomes economically viable.

For a benchmark, look at China's adoption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China . Not at how many years they too from 20gw to 175 gw, but how much solar became viable for them last year.

Yes. Go ahead and publish them. I dare you to. At best there are only marginal negative shifts. So please list all the data that you have.

Furthermore you’re behaving as if having ambitious goals for a government is bad. I would rather have an optimistic, ambitious government that gets somewhere near the goal than a lazy “realistic” government that always ends up underestimating itself.

Reaching a goal isn’t necessarily as important as simply producing a better product. Having a high expectations is a prerequisite to creating a great product. There are, again, so many improvements that India has achieved recently.

The best way to judge your theory that the overseas investors are so very optimistic about India is to simply follow the money.

Contrary to what you are saying, the data actually says that there is a huge outflow of funds from India.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/markets/fiis-pull...

>> Across almost all metrics, infrastructure, corruption, ease of business, electricity, even cleanliness India has improved on.

Source?

> Across almost all metrics, infrastructure, corruption, ease of business, electricity, even cleanliness India has improved on

You are drinking ruling party’s a lot of cool aid

What are you talking about? There are very few metrics that you can list that show a decline. So how about you show me the data for decline.

How about freedom of press as an example (World Press Freedom Index)

2018: 138

2017: 136

2016: 133

A good rule to follow, formulate an opinion after you gain enough facts to argue the other side, else you'll keep seeing only what you want to see.

You can't pick one index to your convenience and even then, I have looked at the website - https://rsf.org/en/india which I think is your basis of the rankings.

Their headline was > Deadly threat from Modi’s nationalism

Scaremonger much? I don't buy the fact that in the Internet age, you have to be some reporter to write against the government policies. If someone has any groundbreaking evidence against anything wrong the government is doing, all it takes is one youtube video anonymously.

They rank the United States at 46, the United Arab Emirates at 128(better than India) and India at 138. Seriously? There has been a mention of 3 isolated incidents against journalists who were affected. All these are criminal incidents where the police have started investigating, just like the thousands of criminal incidents against ordinary Indians.

There has never been a prime minister who was hated this much by an Opposition and god forbid there will never be. I really hope the opposition in India talks about development than scaring ordinary citizens, after 4 years of peace, you can't scare them.

> I don't buy the fact that in the Internet age, you have to be some reporter to write against the government policies.

We don't need reporters anymore because we have the internet? :)

I won't engage further. You're free to believe what you want, but here's what I would like to say - You can interpret the current situation however you want, but others might disagree. And, anyone that disagrees with you or criticizes the govt, isn't necessarily the opposition or the enemy. - The govt is not a victim of opposition's hate, opposition and press are free to and supposed to criticize the govt, and they always have.

India has been in a downward trend in terms of freedom of press since 2011. Unfortunately.

Rather than being prentious and accuse others of being half asses, or ignorant, I suggest you only stick to facts as you claim you do.

I am most definitely not denying that everything is perfect. There are things that have gotten worse, however the benefits of what have gotten better are far more tangible, real, and affect daily life than this one data point you provided. There are others which are more tangible that India has faultered on, but again the good far outweighs the bad.

Isn't this true almost everywhere in the world most of time?

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