Byapaar.com – The Indian Business Blog

Its election time folks. One can feel it in the air through out India. I too can feel it.

It has been quite long since I blogged on my favorite India business blog or my education blog which are so dear to me because they are my personal blogs and in no way commercial.

The UPA government led by Dr. Manmohan Singh just presented its last budget for the current five years term and it can only be known after elections if  people of India give them another chance or they vote for a change. Elections, whether local, regional or nationals are always the biggest events simply because India, the largest democracy in the world has a unique political system in the sense that hundreds of parties vie for election glory.

With elections, come populism. True, it is the norm for every government in the world to entice the electorate with popular measure on the eve of elections – but they pale in nature and magnitude when it comes to India. True to the style, the UPA government announced huge salary hike for its close to three million civil servants costing the exchequer nearly $8 billions. It also waived huge amount of agricultural loans to farmers costing around $15 bilions. On top of it the Mumbai horror caused the government to allocate more extra funds to the armed forces. In between came the global economic crisis that resulted in the government spending hundreds of billions to infuse the liquidity starved market with more cash.

But all these has not deterred political parties rulling different states of the country to announce populist measures ahead of the national election slated to be held form 2nd week of April. Just the other day, Uttar Pradesh government led by Bahujan Samaj Party chief Ms. Mayawati as Chief Minister announced employment of 26,000 teachers at a time when experts says $782 billion bail-out package of the USA government is not enough and 50 million people around the world are to loose jobs by end of 2009!!

Still, the Railway Minister of India, Mr. Lalu Prasad Jadav of Rastriya Janata Dal (RJD) (continue reading…)