Wecome back.
Pretty much everything important has no taxes or very little taxes.
TIL petrol, LNG, LPG, automobiles, clothing, and snacks have little to no taxes. That's not how it feels when I pay for my groceries and living expenses, though.
It's less to do with taxes and more to do with the way they spend.
And there you go, trivializing everyone under the sun. Do you understand that someone could use the same line when you complain about your state government increasing prices?
In India, traffic cannot be managed.
When you talk of Mumbai, its not only traffic. It's everything you hate in Bangalore but dirtier, less maintained, and multiple times more expensive.
Now it's the richest city by per capita in India
True, it's twice as rich as Mumbai (per capita), which says a lot given Mumbai's head start when India became independent.
What's more important is managing inflation and maintaining low debt levels. Double engine helps with that.
Low debt levels? I keep repeating Madhya Pradesh because it is a perfect example of near-continuous BJP rule since the start of the century, with a double-engine government since 2014. It has high debt levels, mediocre living standards, and a widening per capita income gap.
And as mentioned, Odisha did a phenomenal job at managing growth and finances while maintaining a generous welfare state. It did not have a double engine until 2024.
Life has improved in these states, just not as much as other states that have managed to attract FDI and remittances.
That doesn't say much since life has improved in almost every state except for a select few.
What's interesting is West Bengal used to be one our richest states and Kolkata was our richest city.
This is where I agree. Bengal is a national tragedy. It once used to be the richest state in India, richer than Tamil Nadu or Karnataka. And now it's a wasteland, drowning in its hubris as other states leapfrog it. And as for Kolkata, yeah, it's a mess of epic proportions.
The level of stagnation should be apparent in that Rajasthan, a bimaru state, has a higher per capita income today than Bengal.
WB is what will happen when leftists take over.
More like that is what happens when incompetent communists take over. There are many examples of economically left-wing governments that have overseen successful economic growth in their respective states. The Tamil chief ministers, some Karnataka chief ministers, Naveen Patnaik and, to some extent, CBN and KCR, are examples of the same.
And a reminder to everyone: It was the sangh that supported the current chief minister of Bengal to take down the communists.
Almost all GDP growths that you see reflected on paper (like India's 7%) are current prices.
No, you are mistaken here. The GDP growth figures you see are real GDP growth. These are calculated at constant prices, or base year prices, which currently happens to be 2011-12 for India.
The growth you see reflected on headlines (like India's 6.4% in 2024-25) are in constant, i.e., 2011-12 prices. The growth estimate is 9.5% for 2024-25 in current prices.
Similarly, the growth figures you see for states (like Tamil Nadu's 9.69%, Bihar's 9.38%, and Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh's 7-7.35%) are in constant prices.
While you are correct in stating that Bihar's 15% growth rate is in current prices, it appears you believe that this growth is without taking inflation into account, which is wrong.
Reference:
PRESS NOTE ON SECOND ADVANCE ESTIMATES OF ANNUAL GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT FOR 2024-25
In the above source, refer to Annexure A,
Statement 1A: Statement 1A: Second Advance Estimates of Annual GDP for FY 2024-25 and its Expenditure Components(at 2011- 12 Prices) and
Statement 2A: Second Advance Estimates of Annual GDP for FY 2024-25 and its Expenditure Components(at Current Prices)
You are confused between nominal and real, that calculate for inflation.
If you mean real GDP includes inflationary effects in the calculation, then you are wrong.
Real economic growth
does not include for inflation. Real GDP is the value of all goods and services (subject to usual conditions) calculated in
constant/base-year prices. It means you are calculating the value of goods and services produced without factoring in their increased value due to an increase in their prices (inflation). You are essentially discounting inflation. This is because you are trying to calculate just the increase in the production of goods and services or an improvement in the value addition to the same amount of goods and services or both.
But you calculate your nominal GDP (and therefore your nominal growth rate) at current-year prices. Since your current-year prices will be different from the base-year prices (or the last fiscal year prices), you are factoring in inflation (the change in the current-year prices). This price change (inflation) ensures an increase in your GDP, even if the production of goods and services is essentially stagnant. In other words, your production output might be the same in quality and composition as last year (which gives you zero real GDP growth), but if their prices have risen (merely due to a rise in demand due to a money supply or population or some exogeneous factor), you will have a nominal GDP growth.
This is why a very rough way of calculating nominal GDP growth is to add your real GDP growth rate with your CPI (Chained Price Index: different from the retail CPI).
In short, real GDP growth is calculated without adding the effects of inflation (increase in prices), while nominal GDP growth is calculated by including inflationary price changes.
The govt's revenue sharing is pretty much even, based on population.
My comment was more about a state's revenue generation capacity but sure.
Fixing this requires investment, but now they cannot compete because most of South India consciously kept Congress out of its politics and reaped benefits.
Agreed. Do you know who else most of South India consciously kept out? The BJP. And they will keep doing that, mark my words, and mostly, they'll keep outperforming BJP-ruled states (maybe except Gujarat, which they'll match).
That said, the party you hate is wrecking havoc in Telangana, so you might be right about them, for all I know. But then, the party you love is being an utter disgrace in Maharashtra (and the triple-engine Mumbai), so who knows?
They are now the surplus labor, cheap wages states and with the right reforms will start attracting manufacturing investment.
They have been saying this for a decade now, and except for Uttar Pradesh, I've yet to see significant manufacturing investment flow into these states. Even for Uttar Pradesh, and the immense amounts of money and patronage it receives from the union government, its economic performance is mediocre compared to Tamil Nadu or Karnataka.
Central-govt funded universities remain the best.
Name it. Which central government-funded university are you talking about? And best compared to what? I can speak for the engineering and management domains. I studied at one of the 5-6 universities that you would consider the very best (tier-1, institute of eminence, you name it). I visited multiple of these universities you would consider the very best. Heck, my graduation was pretty recent, so I know what I'm talking about.
And the "best" universities in India don't hold a candle to other premier universities in Asia (forget about the West).
Rich privately funded universities and schooling systems (like ICSE) remain high quality.
Again, seriously, name it. Which private university do you consider high-quality? In engineering, there's only BITS Pilani (barely 1000 BE seats in its main campus). Name one more. I'll wait. In management? There's ISB Hyderabad, SP Jain Mumbai, and XLRI (all combined, <1600 seats). Name one more. Again, I'll wait.
Do you seriously, honestly, think 1000 engineering seats and 1600 MBA seats that you could call high quality in the private sector are enough for a country like India?
The rest have always been dregs.
What dregs are you talking about here? Do you realize that the budgets for IITs and NITs have been frozen for a few years now? And that the budgets for IIMs were halved last year? If these are your dregs, it's better not to talk seriously about education here.
As for private schools, they have always been expensive, atleast for the last 2 decades.
I finished my schooling only towards the end of the last decade, so I'm not sure about the last 2 decades part. If you wanted to study in the CBSE board, in good private schools, you could study in Class XI or XII for Rs 60-70 thousand a year. These days, you have to pay Rs 2 lakhs to get your child into primary school. And then another Rs 1-2 lakhs on coaching and tuition. I have seen these prices rise in real time.
You're blaming the wrong people.
No, I am not. The central government can always increase Kendriya Vidyalayas. They can always improve their existing schools. They can always fund education. Their not doing so is a policy choice. Keeping CBSE central school seats frozen is a policy choice. And no student old enough to opine on these considers this policy choice as healthy for education.
Maybe you should demand more from the government as well.
The only way to fund a high quality life is to get lucky at a young age (lottery, career etc)
That's not luck. That's hard work, ambition, skills and sacrifice, for both the parents and the children.
Your father could be a middle-class employee and can choose to invest in your education instead of bribing his superiors. You could grind yourself down and secure seats in the best colleges. And then you could invest time and money on studies in the said college instead of alcohol and sex and get placed in a good company. And then, you could be a filial son and care for your parents for burning away their life to lighten yours up.
So yeah, that's not luck. And by not funding education, the government is merely making it ever more difficult, ever more draining, for both the students and their parents.
You are then just one major medical problem away from bankruptcy.
You know your dad could do all that you mentioned, and you could still be forced to maybe sell assets or (if you have a good job) drain yourself dry if you find yourself with a health scare. That's how expensive private healthcare is, and unless you are a politician's relative, you are not getting into AIIMS Delhi.
And if you plan on saying people should live healthily, mind you, I'm pretty young and fit. That doesn't make me immune from the thousand different ways I could end up in a medical emergency.
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