India Economic Survey 2017: When Survey surveys Gandhi, Keynes, Shakespeare to become prose

Time was when economic report cards were drab annotations—numbers, trend lines and tables peppered with texts. Until not so long ago, even the Economic Survey, the government’s official report card, conjured up images of graphs and statistics, a thought that often intimidated those who are uncomfortable with large data sets.

Not any longer.

In recent years, the annual pre-budget Survey has become as much an evolved work of literature as it is about insightful economic analyses.

The 15 chapters and the Preface of Economic Survey 2016-17, authored by Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian and his team, is punctuated with words of wisdom from saints, politicians, economists, poet laureates and the contemporary litterateurs to reinforce economic arguments.

Indeed, the authors are aware of their literary accomplishments, and perhaps deservedly unapologetic in stating their ambition about the Survey’s standing among the top rungs of contemporary non-fiction.

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“Last year, to its dismay, the Economic Division of the Ministry of Finance – the authors of this Economic Survey – discovered that there is indeed a higher form of flattery than imitation: brazen pirating, and that too on the most globally public of platforms, Amazon,” Subramanian says in a signed Preface of this year’s Survey.

“The anguish suffered by this violation of our intellectual property rights was more than offset by the gratitude we felt in achieving wide circulation for the Survey. We strive to do better this year, risking that the Survey might be consigned to the ranks of popular fiction,” he said, the pun purely intended.

Critics often mock professional economists for suffering from a “two-hand” syndrome: arguments that are hedged by pointing out risks and rewards with different scenarios. Short-term pain and long-term benefits of demonetisation are a case in point.

Subramanian uses Shakespearean analogy to respond to this. “Clearly, the Survey needs to do full justice to all these short term developments, or else it risks being Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark”.

A work of modern economics cannot do without referring to, arguably, the discipline’s greatest practitioner—John Maynard Keynes.

The Survey quotes the British giant “[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else,” while detailing India’s policy contradictions in a chapter “The Economic Vision for Precocious, Cleavaged India,” and the need to strike an equilibrium in a country characterised by deep social fissures.

In another instance, while seeking to answer the difficult question “Demonetisation: To Deify or Demonize?” the Survey quotes spiritual leader Ramakrishna Paramahamsa “Taka mati, mati taka (Money is mud, mud is money),” along with British author George Eliot’s 19^th century novel Middlemarch “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”

On the problem of twin balance sheets—the fiscal deficit and the current account deficit—the Survey quotes the 5^th century Greek orator and statesman Antiphon the Sophist who famously said, “The most costly outlay is time.”

The Survey discusses the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), a targetted subsidy programme, as a conversation that the Mahatma might have had with himself, concluding that it merits serious public deliberation.

 “Wiping every tear from every eye” based on the principles of universality, unconditionality, and agency—the hallmarks of UBI—is a conceptually appealing idea, the Survey says.

“How nice and wise it would be if the donor were to open institutions where they would give meals under healthy, clean surroundings to men and women who would work for them…only the rule should be: no labour, no meal,” it quotes the Father of Nation to buttress the same point.

It quotes Gandhi in another instance on fiscal discipline: “I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any”, as also St Augustine to reinforce the argument favouring fiscal righteousness: “Lord, give me chastity and continence but not yet.”

On India’s potential to become a manufacturing hub, the Survey fortifies it by quoting Lee Kuan Yew, father of modern Singapore who argued that “Since the industrial revolution, no country has become a major economy without becoming an industrial power”.

 “... real development cannot ultimately take place in one corner of India while the other is neglected,” India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had said, which the Survey said underpins the significance of scaling up efforts on social development indices.

India is on the verge of rolling out a Goods and Services Tax (GST), a system that promises to stitch together a common national market by removing an untidy patchwork of local levies into a single tax. The Survey underlines the need for it by quoting none other than poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore : “Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.”

On social mobility and labour movements, it quotes Dr B R Ambedkar, the father of India’s Constitution who said : “An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts”.

In a chapter titled “The ‘Other Indias’: Two Analytical Narratives (Redistributive and Natural Resources) on States’ Development,” which examines whether the pathologies associated with foreign aid and natural resources internationally also afflict the Indian states, the survey quotes Aravind Adiga, author whose debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize: “Please understand, Your Excellency that India is two countries: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well-off. But the river brings darkness to India.”