Cyclone Phailin

Cyclone Phailin: imaged by IMD at 8:30 AM on 11 October, 2013.

Quartz claims:

An atmospheric beast is forming in the Bay of Bengal and heading straight for India. Cyclone Phailin—pronounced pie-leen; it’s a Thai word for “sapphire”—has exploded from tropical storm strength to potentially the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane.

While bracing for the super cyclone, you can use Z News:

Odisha has opened control rooms for the cyclone. The helpline number of the Odisha Central Control Room is 0674-2534177, PTI report.

The district control room mumbers are :

Mayurbhanj 06792-252759, Jajpur 06728-222648, Gajapati 06815-222943, Dhenkanal 06762-221376, Khurda 06755-220002, Keonjhar 06766-255437, Cuttack 0671-2507842, Ganjam 06811-263978, Puri 06752-223237, Kendrapara 06727-232803, Jagatsinghpur 06724-220368, Balasore 06782-262674, Bhadrak 06784-251881.

IE quoted:

“We expect that the cyclone Phailin will make landfall at about 6 pm on Saturday, October 12,” Dr Mrutunjay Mohapatra, Chief of India’s Cyclone Warning Division, said.

Elsewhere IE quoted IMD officials saying that Cyclone Phailin will be the worst storm since 1999:

Cyclone Phailin, the strongest cyclone to form on the Indian seas this year, Thursday moved closer to Orissa coast, bringing back memories of the 1999 supercyclone as Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik wrote to Union Defence Minister A K Antony seeking assistance from the IAF and Navy for relief and rescue operations.

Phailin, which was formed over North Andaman sea two days ago as a low pressure area, Thursday developed into a severe cyclonic storm with a well-marked eye in its centre as it moved northwestwards. Met Department officials in Bhubaneswar said Phailin would continue to move northwestwards and make landfall close to Gopalpur on sea in Ganjam district, which will bear the cyclone’s brunt, by Saturday evening. By the time Phailin hits the coast, it would have a maximum sustained wind speed of 175-185 km/hour, with gusts reaching up to 200 km/hour. “In comparison to the 1999 supercyclone, Phailin is just a notch below. We expect it to wreak massive damage after hitting the coast,” an official said.

In 1999, almost 10,000 people died and 19 lakh houses were damaged in 14 districts.

Far away, in Mumbai, on the other side of India, the skies are overcast and there is an occasional drizzle. HT reports:

Days ahead of Dussehra, a widely celebrated festival in the region, government officials are getting ready for rescue and relief operations in the coastal districts.

The Odisha government had already cancelled the Durga Puja holidays of employees in all districts.

Around 600 cyclone shelters have been set up in Orissa and are being stocked up with dry and cooked food as well as medicines.

The Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force has been deployed while the armed forces are on standby.

Using trucks and buses, authorities evacuated 40,000 people from 40 villages to government-run shelters, schools and buildings in five districts of Orissa state, said Surya Narayan Patra, the state revenue and disaster management minister.

Patra said authorities plan to take another 100,000 people to safer areas before the cyclone hits the region. “No one will be allowed to stay in mud and thatched houses in the coastal areas,” he said.

Authorities also planned to shift thousands of people and cattle to safer areas in neighboring Andhra Pradesh state, the state government statement said.

DNA reported:

12 IAF helicopters will arrive in state tomorrow, says special relief commissioner PK Mohapatra. 300 Army jawans, 50 doctors from Navy and 29 rescue teams will arrive in state tomorrow, he added. Evacuation of 6 lakh people from 7 districts is going on. Cooked food will be provided from tonight [11 Oct], says special relief commissioner PK Mohapatra.

As many as 64,000 people in the north coastal districts of Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh are being evacuated to safer places.

Washington Post carries this report:

The storm is the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane, which comes with these kinds of impacts, according to the National Hurricane Center:

A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

“A Category 5 (equivalent) landfall on that region will be unimaginable,” says Brian McNoldy, Capital Weather Gang tropical weather expert.

By far, the greatest threat from Phailin is its storm surge. When the storm makes a landfall, it is likely to push ashore a devastating wall of water up to 20 feet high just north of its center, inundating vast, highly-populated areas.

A storm surge disaster is practically unavoidable writes Hal Needham, a research climatologist and storm surge specialist on staff at Louisiana State University.

“The storm conditions 18 hours before landfall tend to correlate best with storm surge heights,” writes Needham. “This means essentially that a catastrophic storm surge is a certainty given the forecast intensity and size at 18 hours before landfall”

Needham adds: “Tropical Cyclone Phailin has the potential to generate a surge at least 6 meters (20 feet) high.”

HT added:

The warning brought back memories of a killer cyclone which left nearly 10,000 people dead in 1999 and caused widespread devastation whose effects are felt by the state even now.
…
This time, however, the state government sought to calm fears and said it was better prepared. It broadcast cyclone warnings through loudspeakers and on radio and television as the first winds were felt on the coast and in the state capital, Bhubaneswar. Army and disaster management teams are on the standby to help in evacuation and rescue measures.

Union home secretary said nearly 12 million people will be affected by the cyclone.

October 13, 2013

About 12 hours after the storm struck, DNA reported:

National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) vice-chairman M Shashidhar Reddy said as per preliminary reports, situation in Gopalpur in Odisha’s Ganjam district appeared to be encouraging and the wind-speed has come down significantly and the National Disaster Response Force was trying to asses the damage there.

“Wind speed in Gopalpur where the eye of the cyclone passed through has come down to 90-100 kmph at 8 am. We are still trying to assess the devastation caused by the disaster,” he told PTI here.

According to M Mohapatra, Scientist (Cyclone Warning) with the IMD, by 5.30 am on Sunday morning the cyclone started showing signs of weakening with the wind speed reducing to 160-170 kmph.

He however, added that it is still a “very severe cyclonic storm”.

Z News reports a startling casualty figure:

The death toll due to Cyclone Phailin is feared to have gone up to 15 with more bodies reported to have been found in Ganjam district of Odisha. Police said two bodies each were found in Berhampur town, Purosottampur, Ganjam town and Rangelilunda areas.

Considering that counts of deaths in 1999 ranged from around 10,000 to 45,000, the disaster preparedness is startling. Part of the reason may be that it will be some time before communications are restored. But part is due to the enormous improvement in storm prediction in the Bay of Bengal. Post landfall prediction is harder, so there may eventually be more casualties from neighbouring states.

HT reported:

Operations to rescue those trapped under the debris are on in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, where more than 3,000 personnel of NDRF have been deployed.

Meanwhile, authorities are struggling to restore power supplies and telecommunication links as the winds snapped thousands of trees and poles, while buildings and some communication towers were destroyed. Before Phailin made landfall on Saturday, power supplies were shut down as a precaution.
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The remnants of the storm are likely to dump “heavy to very heavy rains” across Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in the next 24 hours. Parts of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh were also expected to see heavy rainfall.

Authorities in Odisha were assessing the damage that Phailin would have caused overnight before moving inland, but their task was complicated by a prolonged power shutdown and snapping of telephone services in the affected areas.

Eye witness reports said the powerful winds on Saturday snapped trees like matchsticks and swept away rooftops besides flattening paddy crop across a large swathe of farmland. Heavy damage is feared in Odisha’s Ganjam district and the coastal stretch between Andhra towns of Kalingapatnam and Ichapuram.
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Odisha’s top rescue official said 860,000 people moved before the cyclone made landfall on Saturday evening, while at least another 100,000 were evacuated further south in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Residents were also evacuated from coastal regions of West Bengal.

The government had said on Saturday evening that some 550,000 people had been evacuated but efforts to persuade people to flee to safer areas continued until shortly before Phailin made landfall at around 9pm.

About 6.5 lakh people were evacuated from the storm’s path, in what is said to be the biggest peacetime human movement in the country in 23 years. More than 1,700 soldiers besides rescue teams from the navy were kept on standby for emergencies.

October 14, 2013

Two days later, this is what BS had to report:

Although damage to property was estimated at several crores of rupees, loss of human lives was minimal in comparison to the 1999 super cyclone, in which more than 10,000 people died.

Officials said the latest cyclone and flooding has caused 21 deaths so far. The low casualty figure this time was because of timely evacuation of affected areas, following accurate predictions from the weather office, officials said.

This example could be a turning point in the relation between the government and the electors in India.

Why US politics is like India’s

During the sessions of parliament, we see every day on TV how fractured the houses are, and that, as a result, completely common sense measures are not taken. Many believe that this is because of the huge numbers of different political parties; sometimes it seems that a party with 5 parliamentarians can form an effective pressure group. Some have come to accept the contention put forward by Anna Hazare and his fellow travellers that this is the source of corruption in the government.

Some people look admiringly at the US legislature with its seemingly stable two-party system. The complete paralysis of the legislature in the US then bothers them. Now an article in BBC seems to solve this riddle:

After Vietnam and Watergate, there was a reform spirit that wanted to open and democratise the process of selecting party candidates for office, as well as get special-interest money out of politics.

The first part worked too well. Party candidates all came to be picked through open primary elections. In the process, the parties lost the ability to select loyal candidates in smoke-filled back rooms – they lost a source of power and persuasion.

The campaign finance reforms, however, backfired entirely. The post-Richard Nixon idea was to stop party bosses from doling out money from local moguls, unions and corporations. Instead, the reforms deformed and opened the spigots for money to flow directly to candidates from all the old sources, bypassing the party machines. The quantities of money have grown to gargantuan proportions.

By the 1980s, politicians were essentially free agents. They didn’t need the parties to get nominated or to fund campaigns. Pollsters, advertising wizards and fundraisers replaced the party bosses. And the party leaders in Congress lost their leverage.

Contrary to appearances the US is no longer a two-party system. It is not even a multi-party system. It would seem to be a legislature of what we would call independents. That does explain the shutdown.

India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh

WSJ reports on India’s deals with its neighbours:

India Monday signed an agreement to build a large power project in Sri Lanka, a move that reflects New Delhi’s eagerness to counter China’s growing influence in the region.

India, a traditional political and economic ally of its southern neighbor, is worried about increasing Chinese investment in the island nation and this is prompting India expand its economic cooperation with Sri Lanka, according to foreign-policy experts.

Under the deal, state-run Indian power producer NTPC Ltd. and Sri Lanka’s Ceylon Electricity Board would jointly build the 500-megawatt coal-powered plant with an investment of at least $500 million.
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The move to revive the project signals “awakening within the India government” of the inroads China has made in its neighborhood, Bharat Karnad of New Delhi think tank Centre for Policy Research said.

China has been working on strengthening its economic and political ties with Sri Lanka ever since it supported Colombo in its operations against Tamil guerrilla forces. China is present in Sri Lanka’s infrastructure space and has built port and power projects and is looking to tap more opportunities.

Bilateral trade between China and Sri Lanka totaled 2.6 billion in 2012, according to data on the website of Sri Lanka’s Department of Commerce. Of this, Sri Lanka’s exports to China accounted for $108 million.

India’s trade with Sir Lanka totaled $4.6 billion. This included $625 million of exports from Sri Lanka.

According to media reports, Sri Lanka and China are set to sign a free-trade agreement, which could further boost businesses between the countries.
…
Monday’s agreement with Sir Lanka follows another deal under which India began supplying electricity to Bangladesh starting this weekend.

Have you had this feeling of deja vu before?

10 headlines today:

1. Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar: Fairytale journey for one and dream win for the other at CL T20– old cricketers never fade away, they keep retiring over and over again
2. Shah Rukh Khan’s strategist defends his JK Rowling ‘inspired’ speech– Bollywood plagiarises is inspired by others
3. Besharam: Senseless and disastrous– Bollywood copies from is inspired by the tired ghosts of other Bollywood movies
4. Jayanthi Natarajan slams Narendra Modi– politicians call each other names
5. BJP claims Nitish sabotaging Modi rally in Patna– politicians accuse each other of trying to be sneakier
6. Am using Italian so Centre understands, Chandrababu Naidu targets Sonia Gandhi– politicians past their sell-by date attempt comebacks by climbing bandwagons
7. Fresh sexual assault complaints against Asaram– godmen are, well, bad men
8. India Successfully Test-Fires Prithivi-II Missile– India has the world’s most well-tested missile
9. Samsung Galaxy Gear adverts show smartwatch as fictional gadget that’s come to life– newspapers pass off advertisements as news
10. RBI to relax norms for forex futures after rupee stabilizes– everything will be better after the rupee stabilizes

Transitions to new states

IT reported on the fall out of the union cabinet’s decision to create the state of Telangana:

Vizianagaram, a town in coastal Andhra, has been roiling since the Union Cabinet’s decision to create the state of Telangana out of the existing state of Andhra Pradesh.

“Lot of violence was reported, with the protesters indulging in arson, setting a bank on fire, and damaging public and private properties. In view of the violence, authorities ordered a curfew late last night,” Dwaraka Tirumala Rao, IGP (North Coastal Zone), said.

TOI reports:

According to sources, the legal advice was that the defeat of the bill in the Assembly could form the ground to challenge the proposed division of the state in the court of law. “Never in the past had the creation of a state faced such resistance from the people as in this case. So, if we defeat the bill, we could challenge the decision to bifurcate the state on the grounds that it is anti-people and anti-constitutional,” [Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy] told the meeting [of 60-odd Seemandhra ministers, MLAs and MLCs], the sources said.

Politically necessary exaggeration perhaps. The Hindu recalls history in a leader:

The Central government found reorganising Bombay State after independence ‘the thorniest problem.’ The Dar commission set up in 1948 by the Central government to look into reorganisation of States, and the 1949 Congress high-power committee, composed of Nehru, Patel and Sitaramayya (JVP committee), recommended that Bombay city must be a separate entity and not part of any State. Nehru and his supporters argued that the city was multilingual and cosmopolitan, and it should retain that character. But the Marathi and Gujarati speaking residents of the State did not agree.

Agitations intensified in 1955 when the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) recommended a unified bilingual state with Bombay as the capital. Things turned worse when the Central government overlooked the SRC’s recommendations and declared Bombay a Centrally administered territory. Even proposals to merge Vidarbha State with Bombay State did not appease the protesters. Nehru’s personal appeal for “sweet reasonableness” did not work. Violent protests continued, claiming 27 lives in Bombay city and 12 in Ahmedabad.

The Central government dropped its plans for Bombay city but persisted with the idea of a bilingual state. On November 1, 1956, the composite state of Bombay, including areas of Saurashtra and Kutch, was inaugurated. However, the demand for two states — Maharashtra and Gujarat — continued.

The Congress, which did not do well in the following elections, realised that the bifurcation of Bombay was a political necessity. It proposed that Maharashtra get Bombay city and the new State pay Rs. 50 crore to Gujarat for building a new capital and balancing the budget. On May 1, 1960, Gujarat and Maharashtra were formed.

State assembly elections

TOI reports:

Assembly elections in five states were announced by the Election Commission of India on Friday. Elections for Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Mizoram assemblies will be held in a phased manner.

While polls to elect the 70-member Delhi assembly will be held on December 4, polls for 200- member Rajasthan assembly will be held on December 1 while elections for 40-member Mizoram assembly are scheduled to be held on December 4.

Chhattisgarh has to elect a new 90-member state assembly for which polls will be held in two phases, November 11 and November 19, while Madhya Pradesh will vote on November 25 to elect 230-member state assembly.

Announcing the poll dates, chief election commissioner VS Sampath said all measures are in place to assure free and fair elections. Sampath added that the commission is taking adequate steps to provide ‘NOTA’ (none of the above) option to voters following the Supreme Court directive.

Counting in all states will be held on December 8.

IBN Live frames the issue:

The fight is between the Congress and the BJP in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi. In the tiny state of Mizoram, the ruling Congress is facing the Mizo National Front (MNF).

The Congress is in power in Rajasthan, Delhi and Mizoram. In Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the BJP has been in power for the past 10 years. For the first time, Delhi is witnessing a high decibel triangular contest with the newly founded Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of Arvind Kejriwal in the fray as a serious contender.

LiveMint asks Modi ka jadoo chalega kya?

Having dealt himself into the game, Modi has raised the stakes for himself. Though opinion polls give the BJP the clear edge in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the party’s prospects in Delhi and Chhattisgarh are slim. Given Modi’s very high profile campaign, only a clean sweep will silence his critics—both within and outside the BJP.

Mumbai is drowning in sh**

ET reports that Mumbai is being inundated by untreated human faecal matter:

It’s common knowledge that the sea off Mumbai is not the best to wade into. But what’s shocking is the rate at which the quality of the water is worsening.
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Senior civic officials said a chief reason was untreated sewage flowing into the sea. “Our discharge standards are deteriorating,” admitted one.

The presence of faecal coliform, which can cause a number of diseases, has shot up all along the western coast. At Versova, it is up from 811 per 100ml in 2011-12 to 1,650 in 2012-13, a rise of 103%. The accepted standard is 500/100ml. At Juhu beach that sees the maximum tourists every day, the pollutant has jumped from 914/100ml to 1,325, a 45% rise in one year.
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At Girgaum Chowpatty, another tourist spot, the coliform has risen from 1000 per 100ml in 2011-12 to 1455 in 2012-13, a jump of 46%. It shows that it has come down only at Malabar Hill.

Land use around Girgaum chowpatty has not changed for some time. So an increase in faecal coliform here could imply widespread contamination of waters around Mumbai.

For the record, the Mumbai city budget for 2014-15 is Rs. 28,000 crores. This is a large fraction of the New York City budget of Rs. 97,360 crores.

Telangana now

Z News reports the cabinet decision to create the 29th state of the country:

“The Cabinet has given its approval for the creation of a new state of Telangana,” Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters after the meeting that lasted more than two hours.

He said it was decided that Hyderabad will be the common capital of the two bifurcated states for 10 years.

After the creation of the new state, the security and guarantees including fundamental rights of the people of coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana will be ensured, he said.

The Cabinet approved a [Group of Ministers] that will go into the issue of a special financial disbursement that may be required from the central government for the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh, for building its capital and to cater to special needs of the backward regions.

In the meeting, Ministers M M Pallam Raju and K S Rao voiced their opposition to the move, sources said. They are believed to have said that bifurcation will lead to problems.

The new state will have a geographical area of 10 of the 23 districts of undivided Andhra Pradesh. Out of 42 Lok Sabha seats and 294 Assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana is likely to have 17 Lok Sabha seats and 119 Assembly seats.

A pro-Telengana web site called Mission Telengana gave an outline of the process required to create the state:

12 STEPS TO STATEHOOD

1. The resolution for the creation of the separate state will be prepared by the Union Home Ministry that will take around 10 days.
2. A Cabinet note will be prepared that will take 30 days.
3. The note will then go to the Group of Ministers (GoMs) that will require 90 days.
4. A Cabinet note will again be firmed-up that will be inclusive of the State Reorganisation Bill and the Recommendation of the GoM, that will again require 15 days.
5. It will go to the Cabinet for its approval that may take 7 days before forwarding it to the President.
6. The President will refer the Bill to the State Legislature for its opinion, which requires about 2 days.
7. The State Assembly and Council will require 30 days for considering the same. The Legislature will vote upon the Bill and send it back to the Centre. Significantly, the views expressed by the State Legislature are not binding on the President or Parliament.
8. The Bill at the Centre will be vetted by the Ministry of Law that takes another 7 days.
9. Accordingly, the Cabinet Note will be prepared in about five days time.
10. Two days will be required for giving notice for the introduction of the Bill.
11. 15 days will be required for the Bill to be passed by both the Houses of Parliament by simple majority, like any other piece of ordinary legislation.
12. President’s Assent, which requires two days.

IBN Live reported about major differences which arose within the government:

Hours after the Cabinet approved the formation of Telangana, Tourism Minister K Chiranjeevi on Thursday resigned following the announcement. Chiranjeevi, who hails from coastal Andhra region, protested against the Cabinet’s decision.

Soon after the Cabinet took a decision on the formation of Telangana, protest erupted in the Congress party with Human Resources Development Minister Pallam Raju likely to resign, said sources.

Sources close to Raju said he made the offer to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who, however, asked him to continue.

HT reports:

Scores of anti-Telangana supporters protested outside the Prime Minister’s official residence on Thursday afternoon where the Cabinet meeting was be held.

Holding banners and shouting slogans against the division of the state, the protestors called for ‘Saving Andhra Pradesh’ and tried to enter the Prime Minister’s residence at 7 Race Course Road by breaking through the barricades. Police stopped the protestors and bundled them into police vans before taking them away.

14 ministers and about 50 legislators from Andhra Pradesh’s Seemandhra (Rayalaseema and coastal Andhra) region also met in Hyderabad to chalk out their strategy. State minister S Sailajanath, who heads the Congress leaders opposing the proposed bifurcation, said after the meeting that they remained committed to ‘samaikyandhra’ (united Andhra).
…
Out of 42 Lok Sabha seats in the undivided state, 17 would go to Telangana state and 25 to residuary Andhra and out of the 18 Rajya Sabha seats in the undivided state, 8 are proposed to be given to Telangana and 10 to rest of Andhra Pradesh. The 294-seat legislative assembly would similarly be split with 119 going to Telangana and 175 to Andhra. The cabinet note, however, does not spell out any proposal for the 90-member legislative council.

BS had reported earlier:

Thousands of people attended a massive public meeting here Sunday to demand the central government to speed up the process for formation of separate Telangana state.

The meeting organized by Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) at Nizam College Grounds in the heart of the city urged the central government to take immediate steps to carve out the separate state.

Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief K. Chandrasekhara Rao said separate Telangana state would soon be a reality but warned of another agitation if any hurdles were created.

Making it clear that there will be no compromise on Telangana state comprising 10 districts with Hyderabad as the capital, he asked the people to remain alert and continue their movement with the same spirit till the goal is achieved.

Building down

BS runs a story which is beginning to appear more often than disappear:

After a huge inventory pile-up and delivery setbacks, the numbers for housing launches appear bleak, too, thus firmly establishing the real estate gloom story. Launches till July this year fell by 38 to 59 per cent across key markets such as Gurgaon, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Noida and Kolkata, compared with the same period last year. Bangalore has bucked the overall downtrend by reporting a rise in launches.

The highest drop, of 59.5 per cent, was seen in Noida, with only 5,994 units launched till July this year, down from 14,797 in the same period of 2012. In Gurgaon, launches dipped 38 per cent to 11,955 till July, from 19,310 in the corresponding period of 2012.

Similarly, launches were down 40.3 per cent in Navi Mumbai, 46.6 per cent in Pune and 41.6 per cent in Kolkata, according to data by real estate research firm PropEquity (see chart). Overall, launches across India in 15 major cities were down 15.8 per cent to 188,145 units in all segments till July this year.

A report from Moneycontrol may go part of the way to explain why the housing sector is late in reacting to the slowdown:

India has topped the global chart of remittances with a whopping USD 71 billion in remittances in 2013, just short of three times the FDI it received in 2012, according to a revised World Bank forecast issued on Wednesday.

Top recipients of officially recorded remittances for 2013 are India (with an estimated USD 71 billion), China (USD 60 billion), the Philippines (USD 26 billion), Mexico (USD 22 billion), Nigeria (USD 21 billion), and Egypt (USD 20 billion), the report said.

The gross domestic product

The gross domestic product is a measure of the productivity of a country in terms of the goods and services produced. This is generally understood to be a more solid measure of the economic strength than stock price indices. It is interesting to see how it has varied in the near past. The short answer is that national politics does not seem to correlate with the growth rate, but wars do.

The World Bank provides data on the year by year growth of national economies. The figure above summarizes this data, both as rate, and the GDP relative to a base taken in 1980. Also marked in purple are the years of general elections. The most noticeable feature of India’s growth is the steady increase over the last thirty years. In 2012 the actual value of the GDP stood at about INR 52.4 trillion. This is relatively small, being just over 1 rupee per capita per day. Presumably an increase in GDP will require more industrial production, more efficiency in farm production, and more automation all around.

The next most interesting feature is the almost complete independence of the growth rate and politics. The years with Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister saw steady growth of around 5%, and a single spike of nearly 10%. Then there was an incredible dip in 1991, which people older than 30 may remember. The economy stabilized again during the Narasimha Rao government. Contrary to the wisdom from TV pundits, the pace of growth actually increased during the following unstable governments, and reached 8.5% in 1999. Recall that this was a year of utter instability, when the Vajpayee government was repeatedly destabilized by Jayalalitha. The economy fell back to around 5% during the first few years of the NDA government, and did not take off until past the middle of its term. The UPA 1 government saw the longest period of high stable growth. Subsequently, the global economic uncertainty has been reflected in India’s growth rate, except for a single year (2010) in which the pace of growth was the highest ever recorded in India.

For the record, RBI’s published data indicates that the average growth rate before 1980 was approximately 3.9%, and since then has been about 5.6%. It could be that the trend has accelerated again very recently. This is shown in the figure above. Economic slowdowns are seen as the economy falling below the trend lines. This is clearly so in 1991. But note also the tremendous slowing of the economy after the 1965 and 1972 wars.