Thursday, December 4, 2014

Around South Asia & South East Asia [12.04.14]

India

"He is popular and aims to modernize —and may further liberalize—the economy.

he wants to see foreigners building railways, ports, factories and “smart cities”, starting in 2015.

implementing a nationwide goods-and-services tax—a long-delayed measure to free internal trade by creating a single market.

India’s dismal place on the World Bank’s ranking of countries according to the ease of doing business will rise dramatically (?)

using speeches to urge an end to Hindu-Muslim violence." 


"Big on quantity, short on quality"





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"More moderniser than market reformer, Narendra Modi relies on his bureaucrats.
Mr Modi is a strong-willed moderniser, a man who thinks a capable bureaucracy can fix much of what ails India. 
In office for only five months, he spends a lot of time with civil servants, preferring to meet them instead of ministers. He and they have been looking for fixes, such as shifting the paperwork needed to open a business onto the internet, or freeing firms from petty inspections. Meetings are said to have a corporate air, with Mr Modi as chief executive. Dates for specific targets—the “deliverables” of corporate jargon—are set.
Mr Modi presses his civil servants to think big. In August he called for 75m more Indian households to have bank accounts by February. The aim is to increase access to banking in a country where two-fifths of households lack it.

India’s most modernising effort by a mile: Aadhaar, the unique-identity scheme, in which biometric data are to be recorded to create a digital identity for every Indian. This can now be used, say, to open a bank account or get a passport. The prime minister’s chief civil servant for e-government, Ram Sewak Sharma, spells out what might follow once Indians have digital identities. Last year in Jharkhand state in eastern India Mr Sharma installed a system to track the daily attendance of nearly 14,000 officials. Each day at the office they log in and out by scanning a fingerprint or iris. The data is then published live, online. Taxpayers can even see which civil servants are at work or not.Both Mr Sharma and his boss think technology can do a lot to lessen rampant corruption. Measurably better performance is what excites Mr Modi. The prime minister wants India to be among the top 50 in the World Bank’s “ease of doing business” index. It is currently 134th. Next, a commission will report on restructuring the huge and lumbering Indian Railways. Another will look at how to modernise the Food Corporation, which sits on much of Indian agriculture.If the bureaucracy works better, implementing market reforms later may prove easier. "




Indonesia

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