sunil-bhandare-on-enlarging-the-constituency-of-reforms-in-india

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toFirg2z7bQ Duration: 333.8s

Sunil S. Bhandare (00:06): What I would call the constituency of reforms or constituency of liberal economic thinking is still restricted, is restricted to a the urban class within urban class to the elites of the urban class, the professionals, the business people, the industrialists, the traders and so on. It has not gone to the bottom end of the pyramid. Now, how does one expand that constituency of reforms, because that is the major challenge for the liberal thought process. That constituency of reforms requires a great deal of communication skills, the kind of communication skills which probably the Prime Minister Modi is trying to display. Now, that communication skills amongst the liberals is still found wanting. Now, that credibility issue comes into the picture, because people still as you said very rightly look upon with lot of suspicion on the private enterprise. The reason is that there have been number of those scams and scandals and people are familiar with what is being said as a crony capitalism, and that crony capitalism arises of the because of the fact that there are still gaps in the entire regulatory judicial system, because the system of justice, system of taking actual recourse to the various kinds of grievances that still found wanting. Now, if you have that system in place, a proper regulatory system in place, institution system in place, judicial reforms in place, probably large part of this skepticism will get out of the system. Also political leadership needs to be showing some degree of maturity, maturity in terms of what they preach and what they perform. So that is not going to be there, and I think it’s going to be a very long drawn process. The long drawn process because the fact that last fifty years people have sort of completely disillusioned about the system. And because of that disillusionment, it takes very long time. For example, even the Swachh Bharat Yojana. Now if you go and ask people walking on the streets of Shivaji Park, all all of those people, they say it is a photo op operations. It’s a photo kind of a session. And therefore, people don’t believe. People say that this is not going to happen. So number of such schemes, which probably are seen to be doing some good is not being looked upon with certain degree of confidence and credibility. And for that mindset to change I think will take many many more years to come. Basically, I think there will be multiple approach one can think about. One is of course, there has to be good networking amongst the institutions which are working to on the similar cause. For example, I think your organization that is Centre for Civil Society, Freedom First, Liberals India for Good Governance, Forum of Free Enterprise, I think they need to network and there may be many such organizations in Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Calcutta. So, at least in cities where such organizations are there, they should do good bit of networking. The second important thing is that you normally make use of this sort of all these e-publications, those e-publications need to be shared amongst wider audience. But, you see but, that again you know all these networking e-communications and all that serves limited purpose, because people are not sort of you know used to accessing them. The third of course, is that you need to have many more sort of you know interactions to workshops being held and we need to find out a good sponsors typically the media kind of a sponsors. So, is a media organizes number of those annual summits and meets they should also organize similar kind of meets and summits of the for the liberal thought process. So, that is the kind of thing one could think about immediately. The Project for Economic Education also got subdued. The one reason for this is that there is basically a leadership problem, and the second is the funds problem, organizational problem. So and I think just for the liberal thoughts, nobody is going to give you funding. So one has to find out the right kind of funding mechanism, right kind of leadership, and organization for these things to really get off the ground.