India's Economic Growth Vision by Sanjie Sanal

so if you haven't had your coffee now I would say don't bother the next speaker is is going to inject you with so much adrenaline you won't need you know a cup of coffee um we have with us sanjie sanal he has walked and being at the most of the top economic policymaking offices in the country he was a former banker and in 2017 he was appointed the principal adviser to the economic uh you know to the finance Minister now he serves as a member at the economic advisory Council to the Prime Minister he's one of the most popular voices both within and outside the government he's also a popular historian and a very popular commentator on economic and policy reforms so with that I'm looking forward to having a discussion with him on a vision for Indian economy welcome sanjie G um would you like to open the the discussion start with your opening remarks yeah so thank you kishan and a very good afternoon Cambridge how are you all doing good so I have to say some polite things for 10 minutes I am told um so let me get going um well this meeting um event takes place at a very interesting point in India's economic uh history um this financial year uh India will turn um um $4 trillion in terms of size um so this will make it about the same size as Japan of course we've been helped by the Japanese Yen uh coming down so it's not entirely our effort I must admit but nevertheless India will this financial year uh cross the $4 trillion Mark in a nominal dollar terms uh which makes us as I said about the same size as Japan we we remain uh the fastest growing economy in the world by some margin last year as many of you know we grew at 8.2% uh which came as a bit of a surprise to us as well I must also admit uh but this year we should do more than 7% and that too will be faster than pretty much any major economy in the world now when people come up with these numbers what does it really mean and what I'm going to talk to you a little bit about is to give you a sense of why these numbers are now bringing India to a critical mass where the sheer compounding process will really begin to talk now all of you have studied compound interest rates in high school and you know they are powerful but very often people begin to forget how powerful they really are so I'm going to really illustrate this for you vividly when India began to liberalize its economy in 1991 India's economy in nominal dollar terms was only 270 billion that's how small India's economy was it took us 16 17 years to cross the first trillion dollar Mark yeah it happened oddly enough in the middle of the global financial crisis in 20078 that's when we hit a $1 trillion mark it then took another 7 years for India to hit the $2 trillion Mark which happened in 20145 now from there it should have taken 5 years but then we lost 2 years to covid so it took another 7 years to hit the $3 trillion Mark which happened in the year just very recently in 20 2122 since then just three years to get the next trillion dollars which is this year we will cross $4 trillion now we will need only two years to hit $5 trillion on unless some major unforeseen shock happens which can of course obviously happen but apart from some major shock uh we will cross $5 trillion in 24 months from now and so on and so forth and even if we keep up the current pace so not any faster 7 uh% in real terms plus a little bit of inflation and some adjustment for exchange rate uh we will end up in 2047 when we'll be 100 years as an independent country we would be somewhere in the range of a 30 to 32 trillion economy right so I'm just telling you why compounding is so power powerful now whenever I say this somebody I know is going to say yes but what about um uh relative prices what about um purchasing power parity and all this kind of thing so let me tell you the same story in purchasing ing power parity terms and in terms of the share of our uh of the world economy and here it is equally Vivid so in 1980 the US was by some margin the world largest economy with a share in PPP terms of 21% of the world economy okay India was only 3% of the world economy and China after all the joys of maist uh policies cultural revolution Etc was not even 2.5% of the world economy then the Chinese little bit before us began to improve and liberalize the economy and have more rational policies and so on and a little bit later in 1991 onwards we also began to liberalize our economy and began to improve it so by the year 2000 China's economy and their share of the world GDP in PPP terms Rose to 7.2% America's drop to somewhere in the 16 177% range and ours also Rose from 3% to 4% today in PPP terms China is by some margin the world's largest economy with a share of 19% of the world economy okay they're almost where the US was in 1980 the US in US dollar nominal terms is still the world largest economy but in PPP terms it is a distant second with a share of 15.4% and we are at around about 8% so in PPP terms we are about we are more than half the size of the US economy is is and we are growing much faster than than uh the US and also faster now than China now how did China get here when it was pretty much at the same level as we were a generation ago well compounding they G grew by a few percentage points more than us and compounded it this is why compounding is the single most important thing we need to do and focus it and do it for a generation and you reach a completely different level therefore first point I I'd like to make is whatever need is needed to compound this needs to be done and we should never get too excited about trying to maximize growth in a particular year because this is about sustaining it for a period of time now despite becoming the world's third largest economy in about two years time when we will go past Japan and then Germany we will still be a very poor economy not surprising we will be the world's third largest economy but of of course the world's largest population by so once you divide one by the other we are still a poor country in PP top terms we are our uh uh annual per capita income is about uh $10,100 in nominal terms it's much much less it's not even it's now 2,800 or thereabouts it'll be a little over 3,000 but in PPP terms we are now reaching the point of 10,100 and again as I said compounding so the game as I said is to keep this going to keep it going there are three important uh mantras that we will use at least as for the time being and probably into the foreseeable future so what are those uh sort of principles broad principles that we that will guide our Economic Policy the first and most important thing is to realize that we are Unapologetic Supply Siders so we intend to keep investing in the supply capability the productive capability of our economy to keep this GDP growth process going this requires building infrastructure this requires continuous reforms sometimes structural reforms sometimes nuts and bols process reforms something I spent a lot of time doing and I can talk about it more a lot more but it is important to keep doing this we'll occasionally hear some well-known economists make statements to the effect that India is growing faster because we are a poor economy and we just catching up well we were even poorer in the 1960s and' 70s so why won't we growing fast then there are lots of poorer countries than India why aren't they growing faster than us so policies matter and a single-minded focus on keeping growth going matters number one second macroeconomic stability is absolutely critical so if you look at the amount of effort we have put in to make sure that inflation is anchored remember we used to be an 8 to 12% inflation country not an Argentina type inflation country but at high inflation country and we have now anchored it well into the 2 to 6% range which is our macro which is our inflation Target occasionally we have been outside it but very rarely and the monetary policy committee has done a a good job of anchoring our inflation here we have continuously accumulated foreign exchange reserves many people crib that you know why have we accumulated so much foreign exchange reserves precisely because we have this worldview that we need to create buffers and we have now about 65 something billion dollars worth of Foreign Exchange reserves which is interestingly more than our external debt so India is actually by by a small margin a net creditor country to the rest of the world remember that we have cleaned up our Banks they're among the most um well- capitalized profitable banks in the world and so on and so forth why are we so F fixated on macro stability because of History if you go back to the90s there were several countries particularly in Southeast Asia which were called the Asian tigers Thailand Malaysia Etc with the Asian crisis of 200 sorry 1997 98 many of them fell off that thing they were they had serious problems in their financial sector and so on and they never came back yes they recovered from that crisis but they never got quite got back on the rails of high growth so this is the point I'm making is that we should never I mean you might get lucky and sustain it like China and then have the problems that they're having now but let be very clear they are the exception many many countries IES have had Latin America has plenty of such examples Argentina once used to be a high growth country so do not ever sacrifice macro stability for a year or two of high growth because once you fall off the rails it's very difficult to get back on it so that's the second Point macro stability and we have demonstrated in the height of covid we maintained significant macro stability yes we did spend a little bit more on stabilization on the fiscal side monetary side but compared to say the UK on most Western countries we were very very restrained at the risk of being facing a lot of personal criticism by the way which I faced uh from Western um economists and econ Indian economists based in the US for example had many things to say about me personally at that time but I think I've been proved right on this so macro stability the third thing is while we keep all this growth going we keeping it stable there will be a section of the population that needs direct support this fits with our concept of targeting absolute poverty we have a term called Anto Anto literally means the rise of the bottom or the last so this is a concept of targeting absolute poverty we will do continue to do Direct transfer of uh support whether it's in terms of DBT which is direct benefit transfers to the jundan accounts or helping them build their houses through the prime minister's AAS yoga or you know giving them gas cylinders whatever it is direct support and I want to contrast this with the debate that may be happening in the west which may or may not be pertinent to the West which is that of inequality you know because much of that debate then diverts are intention to how many billionaires there should or shouldn't be in India let me be very clear we are one6 of the world's population I'm of the view we should have one sixth of the world's billionaires Pik is not going to create those jobs it is Tata berla Amani adani they going to create the jobs right so we have no problem with the billionaires as long as they're following their rules paying their taxes and investing to create jobs this whole corrosive discussion about billionaires inheritance tax wealth tax may or may not be relevant to to the West it is an unnecessary diversion from our focus on absolute poverty so with that let me stop and say this is the framework that we we uh have uh for U pushing our agenda uh supply side growth Focus macro stability and direct support for the very poor and that has to be then sustained for a full generation and as I told you this is a game of compounding don't worry about how far China may look today they got here by the same process and this is an arithmetic point it is not an ideological point and it works with that let me hand it back thank you sanjie that's sir that's a fascinating set of themes that you have set for the discussion let me begin with what I think is one of your fundamental contributions so thinking about when you occupied the office around 2017 we had just finished the asset quality review Banks were in big trouble so you got in and you were instrumental in cleaning up of the banks and also instrumental in coming up with the IBC the insolvency and bankruptcy court so how was that experience and you know can you set the context of how important this was for for the economy so yes so clearly it it's directly related to point number two that I I talked about and this is not unique to India I mean many emerging economies tend to end up with a banking system that is bust and then have great difficulty getting out of this so we got into this basically among many reasons because during the 20078 global financial crisis obviously our economy slowed down but the policy makers of that time decided that keeping the economy going required loosening up the uh control strings on our banking Bank lending and there was a burst of lending at that time a lot of that ended up in unproductive assets so much so that by about 2013 2014 there were already questions being raised about our macro stability and specifically about the viability of our banking system in fact we were listed as part of the fragile 5 now in the subsequent few years 2015 16 uh what happened is that as this problem began to sort of explode out and began to infect other parts of the economy as well so the non-banks and so on also began to have problems there was an asset uh quality review uh which was done in 1617 which showed that clearly there were very serious problems in our banking system so this is about the time that I joined the banks uh joined the government not the banks uh as the principal economic adviser to the Finance Minister and so um uh my then uh boss uh um uh Finance Minister Arun jley called me in very early in my uh uh time there uh and said look you come from a banking background uh so maybe you should have a look at this problem so I looked into it and this is the the context in which this conversation is happening is that the banks were beginning to jam up and um their lending was having been restrained they were being lots of Demands on capitalization was being imposed on them so it was further jamming up systems and so I began to dig into this now the conventional wisdom of that time was to create a bad Bank uh many of my colleagues in the finance ministry including the then Chief uh economic adviser wanted to create a bad Bank where they could basically transfer all the bad stuff and then recapitalize the banks and get going now I was sort of a uh I was against this because my view is that it would effectively have created another bfr those who are familiar with Indian econ IC history will remember this uh warehouse for Bad Assets where all these assets would be sent off they would stay there festering forever large amounts of taxpayer money would be put into them and of course entrepreneurs who in this would be very often just siphoning that money away so you had all these zombie companies and by the way since I had worked in the rest of Asia after the Asian crisis I had seen this happening in many other places in Southeast Asia as well so I was totally against creating a bad bank but that's one thing to oppose one thing but what do you do so I when I began to go through the numbers I discovered something very interesting that 50 companies accounted for 70% of the problem just 50 companies and 12 companies accounted for 30% of the problem okay so I give them the name Dirty Dozen and I came up with this idea that we had this completely brand new law at that stage called the insolvency and bankruptcy code and maybe we should take this 50 companies and take it through that insolvency process now immediately the point was raised that look it's a brand new thing the NTS have never been tested before how do you know this is going to work and this is a really major thing and supposing it fails so my argument which uh I first took to the then banking secretary uh lady called aneli Dugal and then I took to the head of ibbi uh Dr sahu and finally to The Reserve Bank and once I convinced them and I took it to to finance minister jley and the argument was the following the complicatedness of a case is uncorrelated to the size of a case right now most of the 12 cases as it turned out to be were steel companies and stuff like that very simple cases so all we needed to do was to bankrupt them and sell them off and so we began doing that and nobody believed this would happen but some of India's largest companies got bankrupted and sold off and when we did that it dramatically changed the credit culture of the country and suddenly of the other 38 companies hardly any of them actually had to be bankrupted many of their promoters came back and paid back the money so suddenly in 2018 2019 our banks were flushed with money and it didn't happen a moment too soon because in 2020 of course we got hit by the covid crisis if this had not got solved and we had the 2017 banks in 2020 we would have had a serious problem in the middle of Co with our banking system uh just breaking down so you know uh this is something we managed to do and as I said many people helped in this there was um as I said banking secretary um aneli Dugal um Dr sahu of ibbi um there were several of the uh Deputy governors of RBI including viral aara with whom I disagreed on monetary policy bitterly but on this we worked very closely together but in the end it got cleaned up and we as I said have a great banking sector now thank you I want to take you back to the first initial points that you made while the great convergence is is the story of the century there's also a fascinating thing happening in Europe now most of the European countries are about 50 or 60% of the US GDP per capita their downfall is somewhat apparent to many people how does how should India prepare for this new world order is is it going to affect our way of thinking about the global economy so there are multiple ways in which this affects us um first of all uh the relative decline of Europe is you know quite clear but it is a problem for us because this stagnation means that there is one big Market to whom we cannot export and and in fact the general dysfunction of the global economy not just of Europe is that at least for now we cannot do what China did in its high growth phase in the 2000s because we cannot export our way to 8 9 10% GDP growth rate uh last year we did 88.2% but let me say we did it with no help really from exports we're getting a little bit of help from Services exports which are doing okay but frankly it's not generating those kinds of growth and certainly merchandise exports was pretty dead for several years it's doing a little bit better now but you know that fire is not there so we are having to generate these growth rates uh from entirely internally generated Dynamics which maybe we can sustain for a while but it does mean that we cannot press accelerator to generate higher growth because if we attempted to do that our Imports would begin to grow faster than we could possibly export and immediately rule number two that I had discussed earlier would come into play so this is for now a big constraint to us that you know an important part of the world is um in disarray uh even the us although it is it is growing it is growing with all kinds of stresses I mean at least in my view their fiscal policy is way too loose their monetary policy is way too tight and they're trying to control the stresses of their fiscal policy with monetary policy which is not efficient but all of that means that Global monetary conditions are far tighter than should be under these current situations and so on and so forth so I can go and talk a lot the point is the world is not as uh conducive to an export generated uh pathway which I would have preferred for but that is how things are so for now uh keep your head low keep investing in domestic generated don't overdo it uh and keep it going the world goes through Cycles at some point it'll turn the world will begin growing at some point and then then by that time hopefully we will have moved enough of um Global capacities and Supply chains to India to take full advantage of it thank you now I want take you to um you know a key document that you've helped prepared many times the economic survey of government of India and for people who have not read one of these surveys it's actually a fascinating document it's far reaching and very broad so there there are things that discuss even Beyond economics so I want to take you to one of your things that you frequently comment on is legal reforms um if you want to pick a couple of you know two or three top most legal reforms that you would look for in the next coming 25 years what would they look like so um you're absolutely right I have two pet peeves uh so there are lots of reforms I want to get done but there are two major reforms that I always always argue uh need to be done to understand the context of this you take a little bit of a longer history see what are the reforms we have done since 1991 at a very broad level they are about withdrawing the Indian state from things that should not do right that's what why the word liberalization and reform are usually spoken of in the same same breath but from here on we need to get the Indian state to do the the things it should do right and the two things it needs to do is General Administration which the bureaucracy does and the other is delivery of justice and enforcement of contracts which is what the Judiciary is supposed to do and therefore these are the two areas big structural reforms which won't happen in you know a sudden this is these are generational reforms take us decades to do but we got to start now these are the two big areas of reforms that I think and it makes no sense for us to have some 40 million cases stuck in our Judicial System we've got to do something about it and you know I can give a long lecture on a million things that need to be done from speeding up the process to reducing the number of vacations that are HED Judiciary takes and so on much of which becomes uh you know much disliked by the bar associations if you just Google it up but point of the matter is we need to create a modern uh legal system that enforces contracts uh on time delivers Justice on time and um I I think if there is uh if there are two things in which we need to invest in uh you know the bang for the buck would be the highest it would be in these two reforms got right before I open up to the audience I have one last question so this has got to do with the recent comment that you made on the upsc which is the predominant way of recruiting bureaucrats um you called it you know Poverty of aspirations I would like if you could you know tell us more about what you envision to be some of the bureaucratic reforms that I think most people would agree that we do need a change how do we think about this so this comment was not about the bureaucracy actually it was specifically about the culture of taking this test and this culture has now in my view gone completely out of hand um literally uh hundreds of thousands of people tens of hundreds of thousands of people take exams in for the upsc where only about some 1200 people get through okay the success rate I calculated is less than. 1% it's something like 8% okay so hundreds of thousands of people are taking an exam and B basically you have a near 100% chance of failure now this is completely ridiculous and it's not the dumb kids of the class that are taking this right typically a family will take the brightest kid in in their family who's done done well put them in the system where they may spend 56 years living in some place like mukarji nagar they will spend money on uh coaching classes so it's not a cheap Enterprise so bright kids at their Prime of their life spending money to take an exam where they're almost 100% not going to succeed by definition now there is no bigger waste of time than I can imagine it's perfectly okay for those who get through by the way and that is not the point I'm making right if you really want to do this yeah go ahead take a couple of shots it works great so quite quite different from this is not about uh uh uh um administrative reform which I will come to shortly but the issue of this whole culture and why are there so many kids doing it well partly because there's huge amount of social pressure parents many of these kids have no interest in the civil service by the way many of them just become habituated to taking these exams I actually know uh uh uh uh civil servants who succeeded got through to say the Indian Revenue Service and then took the exam again to get into the Indian administrative service I mean this is basically opium okay so the point I'm making is that there is a whole culture to it there's a huge amount of resources now these um these coaching systems have got a lot of resources they're raking in the money they are you know there's a huge ecosystem even pumping movies out to to to promote this called 12th fail or pass or whatever it is point is this is madness if such a large number of young kids with so much talent are putting in so much effort into literally anything else we will get more Nobel laurates more billionaires more gold medals in the Olympics all kinds of other things why are we doing this and no amount I mean this is a national effort to the most pointless thing on earth so so I so I made a comment at a in a podcast saying that you know this is a Poverty of aspiration if you must Aspire for something aspire to be Elon Musk why do you want to be a joint secretary and then a lot of these coaching classes which have these motivational speakers they got all very annoyed with me and if you Google go to to the YouTube and write sanjie sanal upsc there at least 50 videos by these motivational speakers on how evil I am several of them interestingly are former bureaucrats who now run uh coaching classes after having resigned from the service so my point is this is great this is exactly what I want you to do become entrepreneurs you're an ex do what you do not what you say with that let me open the questions to the audience um from the audience I will take two questions at once because there will be many let's begin with the gentleman there and then and just right behind the lady there I thought hi sanjie um so my question is going to be on economics borderline geopolitics I think Sonia talked about global South and the borderline emotional so uh my name is pul I'm an entrepreneur based in Cambridge startup raise some few million dollars in Investments running good let's keep the question very brief please we have we have five minutes that's the background context uh do you think in the near future I'm going to make the same statement or a future entrepreneur is going to make the same statement of raising that money globally in Indian rupees absolutely there's no question about the fact that we uh our own Capital markets are rapidly growing Indian Equity markets are now World glob Global sizes they're not small by any size are the quality of the infrastructure the number of transactions the sheer size of money that will be raised just this in this financial year will be world class World size so it absolutely and we have now created another unit which is like a safety valve to the rest of the world called gift City sort of what Hong Kong was to China we are building gift as to India and so it's sort of like an offshore Center for people like yourselves maybe and so both between Mumbai and gift we intend for our financial systems ability to raise money to be in serious scale and and we are absolutely moving in that direction as far as the rupe is concerned that too we are systematically internationalizing the rupe as you may be aware we are increasingly allowing uh more and more of our trade in fact we've allowed more or less for our trade to be now be denominated in rupees to be settled in rupees uh there are many bilateral uh stuff that we are doing on payments systems etc for places like the UAE Singapore and so on France interestingly where our UPI system is being now uh allowed so any uh anyone can should should be able to go and pay through our uh payment system uh and so on and of course the rupee itself is being internationalized now what do you want for an internationalized rupee you basically first of all need to have macroeconomic stability people should believe that the rupe is a stable currency so we have now for since 2016 demonstrated so now for eight years demonstrated that India is a well-regulated monetary system which uh can maintain the value of its rupee I control inflation we have demonstrated that we now as I said are a small creditor country to the world we continue to uh have a banking a payment system that is increasingly internally it is world class but globally also we are able to function we already have actually internally inside India a system of payments messaging called sfms which is better than Swift and we are happy to uh you know give it to the rest of the world and so on and so forth so all the micro structures needed for creating a international uh rupee is being put in place now at this point somebody always takes the conversation towards D dollarization and let me say this is unconnected we merely want to be a hard currency like the other existing hard currencies like the Singapore dollar British pound Yen Euro and so on we are not trying to replace the dollar as the world anchor currency that is not our aspiration at all but we do want to be a hard currency and to be a part of the SDR basket of the IMF in about 8 nine years time just the lady there hi good afternoon Mr sanal thank you so much for that invigorating and insightful discussion I am Kat PIR I am a lawyer interested in trade policy and sustainability so that's also where my question comes from uh we were talking about where the future of India lies and there is a lot of Promise in terms of economic growth what I wanted to ask you about is where do you see sustainability playing to this uh discussions specifically looking into you know Carbon taxes being introduced across the West which is seen as a celebration in the west of this is where the future of international trade lies but uh there is also a lot of push back from the global South including India that uh you know the West has polluted and has been a contributor towards climate change over the years and now since the global South is undergoing that industrialization that there should that charge of the tax should not be on the global so where do you see that playing into the Indian Economic Policy going forward so let me say we take sustainability very very seriously at multiple levels so I'll keep the conversation to to uh energy it's not the only kind of sustainability we need to think about but let's take energy see India for whatever it worth is not blessed with large amount of hydrocarbons we are poor in oil we are poor in natural gas we have a little bit of coal but frankly not that much even of that so this we import all of our carbon based energy so even if there was no CL climate change we would want to shift because the Cs may not have given us hydrocarbons but given us plenty of sunshine and we get it at exactly the time we want it which is in summer because our energy uses Spike right now in delhi the highest ever so it coincides the the we get we have lots of sun we get it at exactly the time we want it so we are sold with solar because that works to our advantage anyway plus other things as well things like um nuclear energy and so on we will not however go one way on this we recognize that there are certain problems with these Renewables because of spikes their ability to deal with spikes and so on so we will continue to build some conventional energy capacities as well because we are expanding so fast and our energy requirements are growing so fast that we need to also invest in some of the conventional sources although the mix will clearly change quite rapidly because we will build a lot more of one compared to the other so to answer your first question is are we doing an energy transition and are we serious about it absolutely we are doing lots of investments in fact we are The Cutting Edge of certain areas like green hydrogen we are probably the biggest investor in the world into that technology so that is to answer the question now as far as the rest of the world's taxes and all these kinds of things are concerned let me say that we are happy about some of it and suspicious about some of the others and I'll give you the example here of ESG now those of you are not familiar with ESG it stands for the Norms related to environmental social and governance Norms yeah now I have no problems with having some International rules about environmental social and governance issues but the way they are it is all coming together suggests that it is some sort of a seeking effort by uh North Atlantic um Nos and uh consultancies and even by Academia because you know Academia has also found this as being some sort of a money spinning system I'm sure I'm 100% sure um Cambridge has all these new ESG courses which are scheming charging large amounts of money from poor students so you know the best thing they could do is do it free since it's socially beneficial um but the point is this is a scam I'll tell you why let me give you the history of this in 2016 a paper came out an innocuous paper from the UN talking for the first time about ESG it didn't Define what ESG was and everybody said yes yes I mean after all who's going to say we shouldn't have some environmental social and governance norms and so there it remained till it slowly began to find its way through various think tanks Banks and Academia and other people began to Define what these Norms was I want to be clear that there was no Global conference to decide on any of this it was unilaterally decided by some of these uh groups all of them in the North Atlantic in fact there's not even a large number of them much of the way these things are defined are defined by a very I dug into this is defined by a tiny number of think tanks actually all of them in the North Atlantic and they are funded by the same people and let me name them all these think tanks are named funded by George soros's open Society they're funded by a couple of U EU agencies Ford Foundation Rockefeller Foundation right and then they have funded a whole bunch of other agencies which have funded in other agencies reminds me a little bit about how money is laundered this is how ideology is laundered and in and without any conversation with the rest of the world we have had these Norms have now been imposed on everybody else okay and now you cannot function in many Industries particularly if you're exporting to for example European Union you cannot do this without having to comply with these Norms but where did the Norms come from who are these North Atlantic agencies who uh decide whether you're a good boy or a bad boy and give you certifications and in every one of these cases is they're effectively skimming gizia this is a form of gizia tax rent seeking so it has to be called out and I would go so far as to say this is a form of neocolonial control that is being imposed by the North Atlantic on the rest of the world and we will oppose it I have no problem with environmental social and governance Norms I do have a problem with having these Norms without any discussion with anybody else green steel for example is defined in a very peculiar Way It Is defined in a way which requires you to do processes where all the patents are held in the same North Atlantic countries how convenient so I am going to argue that yes we need to have maybe some sort of a global Norms but those Norms can only be imposed if there is an Equitable discussion across the table with all the players at least India because we are a large economy and so on we can talk loudly about it go to Africa all these Norms are applied on all of them and none of them have a voice in any of the Norms that are applied upon them and who is to say these things are I mean this is the if if you're going to talk about governance and a rule-based order the question is whose rules so I am very very susp suspicious about this whole ESG effort as it has turned out and as I said this is essentially a scam being run by North Atlantic uh consultancies Nos and I'm sorry increasingly North Atlantic academic institutions so with that um we have run out of time thank you so much sanjie s

so if you haven&#39;t had your coffee now I would say don&#39;t bother the next speaker is is going to inject you with so much adrenaline you won&#39;t need you know a cup of coffee um we have with us sanjie sanal he has walked and being at the most of the top economic policymaking offices in the country he was a former banker and in 2017 he was appointed the principal adviser to the economic uh you know to the finance Minister now he serves as a member at the economic advisory Council to the Prime Minister he&#39;s one of the most popular voices both within and outside the government he&#39;s also a popular historian and a very popular commentator on economic and policy reforms so with that I&#39;m looking forward to having a discussion with him on a vision for Indian economy welcome sanjie G um would you like to open the the discussion start with your opening remarks yeah so thank you kishan and a very good afternoon Cambridge how are you all doing good so I have to say some polite things for 10 minutes I am told um so let me get going um well this meeting um event takes place at a very interesting point in India&#39;s economic uh history um this financial year uh India will turn um um $4 trillion in terms of size um so this will make it about the same size as Japan of course we&#39;ve been helped by the Japanese Yen uh coming down so it&#39;s not entirely our effort I must admit but nevertheless India will this financial year uh cross the $4 trillion Mark in a nominal dollar terms uh which makes us as I said about the same size as Japan we we remain uh the fastest growing economy in the world by some margin last year as many of you know we grew at 8.2% uh which came as a bit of a surprise to us as well I must also admit uh but this year we should do more than 7% and that too will be faster than pretty much any major economy in the world now when people come up with these numbers what does it really mean and what I&#39;m going to talk to you a little bit about is to give you a sense of why these numbers are now bringing India to a critical mass where the sheer compounding process will really begin to talk now all of you have studied compound interest rates in high school and you know they are powerful but very often people begin to forget how powerful they really are so I&#39;m going to really illustrate this for you vividly when India began to liberalize its economy in 1991 India&#39;s economy in nominal dollar terms was only 270 billion that&#39;s how small India&#39;s economy was it took us 16 17 years to cross the first trillion dollar Mark yeah it happened oddly enough in the middle of the global financial crisis in 20078 that&#39;s when we hit a $1 trillion mark it then took another 7 years for India to hit the $2 trillion Mark which happened in 20145 now from there it should have taken 5 years but then we lost 2 years to covid so it took another 7 years to hit the $3 trillion Mark which happened in the year just very recently in 20 2122 since then just three years to get the next trillion dollars which is this year we will cross $4 trillion now we will need only two years to hit $5 trillion on unless some major unforeseen shock happens which can of course obviously happen but apart from some major shock uh we will cross $5 trillion in 24 months from now and so on and so forth and even if we keep up the current pace so not any faster 7 uh% in real terms plus a little bit of inflation and some adjustment for exchange rate uh we will end up in 2047 when we&#39;ll be 100 years as an independent country we would be somewhere in the range of a 30 to 32 trillion economy right so I&#39;m just telling you why compounding is so power powerful now whenever I say this somebody I know is going to say yes but what about um uh relative prices what about um purchasing power parity and all this kind of thing so let me tell you the same story in purchasing ing power parity terms and in terms of the share of our uh of the world economy and here it is equally Vivid so in 1980 the US was by some margin the world largest economy with a share in PPP terms of 21% of the world economy okay India was only 3% of the world economy and China after all the joys of maist uh policies cultural revolution Etc was not even 2.5% of the world economy then the Chinese little bit before us began to improve and liberalize the economy and have more rational policies and so on and a little bit later in 1991 onwards we also began to liberalize our economy and began to improve it so by the year 2000 China&#39;s economy and their share of the world GDP in PPP terms Rose to 7.2% America&#39;s drop to somewhere in the 16 177% range and ours also Rose from 3% to 4% today in PPP terms China is by some margin the world&#39;s largest economy with a share of 19% of the world economy okay they&#39;re almost where the US was in 1980 the US in US dollar nominal terms is still the world largest economy but in PPP terms it is a distant second with a share of 15.4% and we are at around about 8% so in PPP terms we are about we are more than half the size of the US economy is is and we are growing much faster than than uh the US and also faster now than China now how did China get here when it was pretty much at the same level as we were a generation ago well compounding they G grew by a few percentage points more than us and compounded it this is why compounding is the single most important thing we need to do and focus it and do it for a generation and you reach a completely different level therefore first point I I&#39;d like to make is whatever need is needed to compound this needs to be done and we should never get too excited about trying to maximize growth in a particular year because this is about sustaining it for a period of time now despite becoming the world&#39;s third largest economy in about two years time when we will go past Japan and then Germany we will still be a very poor economy not surprising we will be the world&#39;s third largest economy but of of course the world&#39;s largest population by so once you divide one by the other we are still a poor country in PP top terms we are our uh uh annual per capita income is about uh $10,100 in nominal terms it&#39;s much much less it&#39;s not even it&#39;s now 2,800 or thereabouts it&#39;ll be a little over 3,000 but in PPP terms we are now reaching the point of 10,100 and again as I said compounding so the game as I said is to keep this going to keep it going there are three important uh mantras that we will use at least as for the time being and probably into the foreseeable future so what are those uh sort of principles broad principles that we that will guide our Economic Policy the first and most important thing is to realize that we are Unapologetic Supply Siders so we intend to keep investing in the supply capability the productive capability of our economy to keep this GDP growth process going this requires building infrastructure this requires continuous reforms sometimes structural reforms sometimes nuts and bols process reforms something I spent a lot of time doing and I can talk about it more a lot more but it is important to keep doing this we&#39;ll occasionally hear some well-known economists make statements to the effect that India is growing faster because we are a poor economy and we just catching up well we were even poorer in the 1960s and&#39; 70s so why won&#39;t we growing fast then there are lots of poorer countries than India why aren&#39;t they growing faster than us so policies matter and a single-minded focus on keeping growth going matters number one second macroeconomic stability is absolutely critical so if you look at the amount of effort we have put in to make sure that inflation is anchored remember we used to be an 8 to 12% inflation country not an Argentina type inflation country but at high inflation country and we have now anchored it well into the 2 to 6% range which is our macro which is our inflation Target occasionally we have been outside it but very rarely and the monetary policy committee has done a a good job of anchoring our inflation here we have continuously accumulated foreign exchange reserves many people crib that you know why have we accumulated so much foreign exchange reserves precisely because we have this worldview that we need to create buffers and we have now about 65 something billion dollars worth of Foreign Exchange reserves which is interestingly more than our external debt so India is actually by by a small margin a net creditor country to the rest of the world remember that we have cleaned up our Banks they&#39;re among the most um well- capitalized profitable banks in the world and so on and so forth why are we so F fixated on macro stability because of History if you go back to the90s there were several countries particularly in Southeast Asia which were called the Asian tigers Thailand Malaysia Etc with the Asian crisis of 200 sorry 1997 98 many of them fell off that thing they were they had serious problems in their financial sector and so on and they never came back yes they recovered from that crisis but they never got quite got back on the rails of high growth so this is the point I&#39;m making is that we should never I mean you might get lucky and sustain it like China and then have the problems that they&#39;re having now but let be very clear they are the exception many many countries IES have had Latin America has plenty of such examples Argentina once used to be a high growth country so do not ever sacrifice macro stability for a year or two of high growth because once you fall off the rails it&#39;s very difficult to get back on it so that&#39;s the second Point macro stability and we have demonstrated in the height of covid we maintained significant macro stability yes we did spend a little bit more on stabilization on the fiscal side monetary side but compared to say the UK on most Western countries we were very very restrained at the risk of being facing a lot of personal criticism by the way which I faced uh from Western um economists and econ Indian economists based in the US for example had many things to say about me personally at that time but I think I&#39;ve been proved right on this so macro stability the third thing is while we keep all this growth going we keeping it stable there will be a section of the population that needs direct support this fits with our concept of targeting absolute poverty we have a term called Anto Anto literally means the rise of the bottom or the last so this is a concept of targeting absolute poverty we will do continue to do Direct transfer of uh support whether it&#39;s in terms of DBT which is direct benefit transfers to the jundan accounts or helping them build their houses through the prime minister&#39;s AAS yoga or you know giving them gas cylinders whatever it is direct support and I want to contrast this with the debate that may be happening in the west which may or may not be pertinent to the West which is that of inequality you know because much of that debate then diverts are intention to how many billionaires there should or shouldn&#39;t be in India let me be very clear we are one6 of the world&#39;s population I&#39;m of the view we should have one sixth of the world&#39;s billionaires Pik is not going to create those jobs it is Tata berla Amani adani they going to create the jobs right so we have no problem with the billionaires as long as they&#39;re following their rules paying their taxes and investing to create jobs this whole corrosive discussion about billionaires inheritance tax wealth tax may or may not be relevant to to the West it is an unnecessary diversion from our focus on absolute poverty so with that let me stop and say this is the framework that we we uh have uh for U pushing our agenda uh supply side growth Focus macro stability and direct support for the very poor and that has to be then sustained for a full generation and as I told you this is a game of compounding don&#39;t worry about how far China may look today they got here by the same process and this is an arithmetic point it is not an ideological point and it works with that let me hand it back thank you sanjie that&#39;s sir that&#39;s a fascinating set of themes that you have set for the discussion let me begin with what I think is one of your fundamental contributions so thinking about when you occupied the office around 2017 we had just finished the asset quality review Banks were in big trouble so you got in and you were instrumental in cleaning up of the banks and also instrumental in coming up with the IBC the insolvency and bankruptcy court so how was that experience and you know can you set the context of how important this was for for the economy so yes so clearly it it&#39;s directly related to point number two that I I talked about and this is not unique to India I mean many emerging economies tend to end up with a banking system that is bust and then have great difficulty getting out of this so we got into this basically among many reasons because during the 20078 global financial crisis obviously our economy slowed down but the policy makers of that time decided that keeping the economy going required loosening up the uh control strings on our banking Bank lending and there was a burst of lending at that time a lot of that ended up in unproductive assets so much so that by about 2013 2014 there were already questions being raised about our macro stability and specifically about the viability of our banking system in fact we were listed as part of the fragile 5 now in the subsequent few years 2015 16 uh what happened is that as this problem began to sort of explode out and began to infect other parts of the economy as well so the non-banks and so on also began to have problems there was an asset uh quality review uh which was done in 1617 which showed that clearly there were very serious problems in our banking system so this is about the time that I joined the banks uh joined the government not the banks uh as the principal economic adviser to the Finance Minister and so um uh my then uh boss uh um uh Finance Minister Arun jley called me in very early in my uh uh time there uh and said look you come from a banking background uh so maybe you should have a look at this problem so I looked into it and this is the the context in which this conversation is happening is that the banks were beginning to jam up and um their lending was having been restrained they were being lots of Demands on capitalization was being imposed on them so it was further jamming up systems and so I began to dig into this now the conventional wisdom of that time was to create a bad Bank uh many of my colleagues in the finance ministry including the then Chief uh economic adviser wanted to create a bad Bank where they could basically transfer all the bad stuff and then recapitalize the banks and get going now I was sort of a uh I was against this because my view is that it would effectively have created another bfr those who are familiar with Indian econ IC history will remember this uh warehouse for Bad Assets where all these assets would be sent off they would stay there festering forever large amounts of taxpayer money would be put into them and of course entrepreneurs who in this would be very often just siphoning that money away so you had all these zombie companies and by the way since I had worked in the rest of Asia after the Asian crisis I had seen this happening in many other places in Southeast Asia as well so I was totally against creating a bad bank but that&#39;s one thing to oppose one thing but what do you do so I when I began to go through the numbers I discovered something very interesting that 50 companies accounted for 70% of the problem just 50 companies and 12 companies accounted for 30% of the problem okay so I give them the name Dirty Dozen and I came up with this idea that we had this completely brand new law at that stage called the insolvency and bankruptcy code and maybe we should take this 50 companies and take it through that insolvency process now immediately the point was raised that look it&#39;s a brand new thing the NTS have never been tested before how do you know this is going to work and this is a really major thing and supposing it fails so my argument which uh I first took to the then banking secretary uh lady called aneli Dugal and then I took to the head of ibbi uh Dr sahu and finally to The Reserve Bank and once I convinced them and I took it to to finance minister jley and the argument was the following the complicatedness of a case is uncorrelated to the size of a case right now most of the 12 cases as it turned out to be were steel companies and stuff like that very simple cases so all we needed to do was to bankrupt them and sell them off and so we began doing that and nobody believed this would happen but some of India&#39;s largest companies got bankrupted and sold off and when we did that it dramatically changed the credit culture of the country and suddenly of the other 38 companies hardly any of them actually had to be bankrupted many of their promoters came back and paid back the money so suddenly in 2018 2019 our banks were flushed with money and it didn&#39;t happen a moment too soon because in 2020 of course we got hit by the covid crisis if this had not got solved and we had the 2017 banks in 2020 we would have had a serious problem in the middle of Co with our banking system uh just breaking down so you know uh this is something we managed to do and as I said many people helped in this there was um as I said banking secretary um aneli Dugal um Dr sahu of ibbi um there were several of the uh Deputy governors of RBI including viral aara with whom I disagreed on monetary policy bitterly but on this we worked very closely together but in the end it got cleaned up and we as I said have a great banking sector now thank you I want to take you back to the first initial points that you made while the great convergence is is the story of the century there&#39;s also a fascinating thing happening in Europe now most of the European countries are about 50 or 60% of the US GDP per capita their downfall is somewhat apparent to many people how does how should India prepare for this new world order is is it going to affect our way of thinking about the global economy so there are multiple ways in which this affects us um first of all uh the relative decline of Europe is you know quite clear but it is a problem for us because this stagnation means that there is one big Market to whom we cannot export and and in fact the general dysfunction of the global economy not just of Europe is that at least for now we cannot do what China did in its high growth phase in the 2000s because we cannot export our way to 8 9 10% GDP growth rate uh last year we did 88.2% but let me say we did it with no help really from exports we&#39;re getting a little bit of help from Services exports which are doing okay but frankly it&#39;s not generating those kinds of growth and certainly merchandise exports was pretty dead for several years it&#39;s doing a little bit better now but you know that fire is not there so we are having to generate these growth rates uh from entirely internally generated Dynamics which maybe we can sustain for a while but it does mean that we cannot press accelerator to generate higher growth because if we attempted to do that our Imports would begin to grow faster than we could possibly export and immediately rule number two that I had discussed earlier would come into play so this is for now a big constraint to us that you know an important part of the world is um in disarray uh even the us although it is it is growing it is growing with all kinds of stresses I mean at least in my view their fiscal policy is way too loose their monetary policy is way too tight and they&#39;re trying to control the stresses of their fiscal policy with monetary policy which is not efficient but all of that means that Global monetary conditions are far tighter than should be under these current situations and so on and so forth so I can go and talk a lot the point is the world is not as uh conducive to an export generated uh pathway which I would have preferred for but that is how things are so for now uh keep your head low keep investing in domestic generated don&#39;t overdo it uh and keep it going the world goes through Cycles at some point it&#39;ll turn the world will begin growing at some point and then then by that time hopefully we will have moved enough of um Global capacities and Supply chains to India to take full advantage of it thank you now I want take you to um you know a key document that you&#39;ve helped prepared many times the economic survey of government of India and for people who have not read one of these surveys it&#39;s actually a fascinating document it&#39;s far reaching and very broad so there there are things that discuss even Beyond economics so I want to take you to one of your things that you frequently comment on is legal reforms um if you want to pick a couple of you know two or three top most legal reforms that you would look for in the next coming 25 years what would they look like so um you&#39;re absolutely right I have two pet peeves uh so there are lots of reforms I want to get done but there are two major reforms that I always always argue uh need to be done to understand the context of this you take a little bit of a longer history see what are the reforms we have done since 1991 at a very broad level they are about withdrawing the Indian state from things that should not do right that&#39;s what why the word liberalization and reform are usually spoken of in the same same breath but from here on we need to get the Indian state to do the the things it should do right and the two things it needs to do is General Administration which the bureaucracy does and the other is delivery of justice and enforcement of contracts which is what the Judiciary is supposed to do and therefore these are the two areas big structural reforms which won&#39;t happen in you know a sudden this is these are generational reforms take us decades to do but we got to start now these are the two big areas of reforms that I think and it makes no sense for us to have some 40 million cases stuck in our Judicial System we&#39;ve got to do something about it and you know I can give a long lecture on a million things that need to be done from speeding up the process to reducing the number of vacations that are HED Judiciary takes and so on much of which becomes uh you know much disliked by the bar associations if you just Google it up but point of the matter is we need to create a modern uh legal system that enforces contracts uh on time delivers Justice on time and um I I think if there is uh if there are two things in which we need to invest in uh you know the bang for the buck would be the highest it would be in these two reforms got right before I open up to the audience I have one last question so this has got to do with the recent comment that you made on the upsc which is the predominant way of recruiting bureaucrats um you called it you know Poverty of aspirations I would like if you could you know tell us more about what you envision to be some of the bureaucratic reforms that I think most people would agree that we do need a change how do we think about this so this comment was not about the bureaucracy actually it was specifically about the culture of taking this test and this culture has now in my view gone completely out of hand um literally uh hundreds of thousands of people tens of hundreds of thousands of people take exams in for the upsc where only about some 1200 people get through okay the success rate I calculated is less than. 1% it&#39;s something like 8% okay so hundreds of thousands of people are taking an exam and B basically you have a near 100% chance of failure now this is completely ridiculous and it&#39;s not the dumb kids of the class that are taking this right typically a family will take the brightest kid in in their family who&#39;s done done well put them in the system where they may spend 56 years living in some place like mukarji nagar they will spend money on uh coaching classes so it&#39;s not a cheap Enterprise so bright kids at their Prime of their life spending money to take an exam where they&#39;re almost 100% not going to succeed by definition now there is no bigger waste of time than I can imagine it&#39;s perfectly okay for those who get through by the way and that is not the point I&#39;m making right if you really want to do this yeah go ahead take a couple of shots it works great so quite quite different from this is not about uh uh uh um administrative reform which I will come to shortly but the issue of this whole culture and why are there so many kids doing it well partly because there&#39;s huge amount of social pressure parents many of these kids have no interest in the civil service by the way many of them just become habituated to taking these exams I actually know uh uh uh uh civil servants who succeeded got through to say the Indian Revenue Service and then took the exam again to get into the Indian administrative service I mean this is basically opium okay so the point I&#39;m making is that there is a whole culture to it there&#39;s a huge amount of resources now these um these coaching systems have got a lot of resources they&#39;re raking in the money they are you know there&#39;s a huge ecosystem even pumping movies out to to to promote this called 12th fail or pass or whatever it is point is this is madness if such a large number of young kids with so much talent are putting in so much effort into literally anything else we will get more Nobel laurates more billionaires more gold medals in the Olympics all kinds of other things why are we doing this and no amount I mean this is a national effort to the most pointless thing on earth so so I so I made a comment at a in a podcast saying that you know this is a Poverty of aspiration if you must Aspire for something aspire to be Elon Musk why do you want to be a joint secretary and then a lot of these coaching classes which have these motivational speakers they got all very annoyed with me and if you Google go to to the YouTube and write sanjie sanal upsc there at least 50 videos by these motivational speakers on how evil I am several of them interestingly are former bureaucrats who now run uh coaching classes after having resigned from the service so my point is this is great this is exactly what I want you to do become entrepreneurs you&#39;re an ex do what you do not what you say with that let me open the questions to the audience um from the audience I will take two questions at once because there will be many let&#39;s begin with the gentleman there and then and just right behind the lady there I thought hi sanjie um so my question is going to be on economics borderline geopolitics I think Sonia talked about global South and the borderline emotional so uh my name is pul I&#39;m an entrepreneur based in Cambridge startup raise some few million dollars in Investments running good let&#39;s keep the question very brief please we have we have five minutes that&#39;s the background context uh do you think in the near future I&#39;m going to make the same statement or a future entrepreneur is going to make the same statement of raising that money globally in Indian rupees absolutely there&#39;s no question about the fact that we uh our own Capital markets are rapidly growing Indian Equity markets are now World glob Global sizes they&#39;re not small by any size are the quality of the infrastructure the number of transactions the sheer size of money that will be raised just this in this financial year will be world class World size so it absolutely and we have now created another unit which is like a safety valve to the rest of the world called gift City sort of what Hong Kong was to China we are building gift as to India and so it&#39;s sort of like an offshore Center for people like yourselves maybe and so both between Mumbai and gift we intend for our financial systems ability to raise money to be in serious scale and and we are absolutely moving in that direction as far as the rupe is concerned that too we are systematically internationalizing the rupe as you may be aware we are increasingly allowing uh more and more of our trade in fact we&#39;ve allowed more or less for our trade to be now be denominated in rupees to be settled in rupees uh there are many bilateral uh stuff that we are doing on payments systems etc for places like the UAE Singapore and so on France interestingly where our UPI system is being now uh allowed so any uh anyone can should should be able to go and pay through our uh payment system uh and so on and of course the rupee itself is being internationalized now what do you want for an internationalized rupee you basically first of all need to have macroeconomic stability people should believe that the rupe is a stable currency so we have now for since 2016 demonstrated so now for eight years demonstrated that India is a well-regulated monetary system which uh can maintain the value of its rupee I control inflation we have demonstrated that we now as I said are a small creditor country to the world we continue to uh have a banking a payment system that is increasingly internally it is world class but globally also we are able to function we already have actually internally inside India a system of payments messaging called sfms which is better than Swift and we are happy to uh you know give it to the rest of the world and so on and so forth so all the micro structures needed for creating a international uh rupee is being put in place now at this point somebody always takes the conversation towards D dollarization and let me say this is unconnected we merely want to be a hard currency like the other existing hard currencies like the Singapore dollar British pound Yen Euro and so on we are not trying to replace the dollar as the world anchor currency that is not our aspiration at all but we do want to be a hard currency and to be a part of the SDR basket of the IMF in about 8 nine years time just the lady there hi good afternoon Mr sanal thank you so much for that invigorating and insightful discussion I am Kat PIR I am a lawyer interested in trade policy and sustainability so that&#39;s also where my question comes from uh we were talking about where the future of India lies and there is a lot of Promise in terms of economic growth what I wanted to ask you about is where do you see sustainability playing to this uh discussions specifically looking into you know Carbon taxes being introduced across the West which is seen as a celebration in the west of this is where the future of international trade lies but uh there is also a lot of push back from the global South including India that uh you know the West has polluted and has been a contributor towards climate change over the years and now since the global South is undergoing that industrialization that there should that charge of the tax should not be on the global so where do you see that playing into the Indian Economic Policy going forward so let me say we take sustainability very very seriously at multiple levels so I&#39;ll keep the conversation to to uh energy it&#39;s not the only kind of sustainability we need to think about but let&#39;s take energy see India for whatever it worth is not blessed with large amount of hydrocarbons we are poor in oil we are poor in natural gas we have a little bit of coal but frankly not that much even of that so this we import all of our carbon based energy so even if there was no CL climate change we would want to shift because the Cs may not have given us hydrocarbons but given us plenty of sunshine and we get it at exactly the time we want it which is in summer because our energy uses Spike right now in delhi the highest ever so it coincides the the we get we have lots of sun we get it at exactly the time we want it so we are sold with solar because that works to our advantage anyway plus other things as well things like um nuclear energy and so on we will not however go one way on this we recognize that there are certain problems with these Renewables because of spikes their ability to deal with spikes and so on so we will continue to build some conventional energy capacities as well because we are expanding so fast and our energy requirements are growing so fast that we need to also invest in some of the conventional sources although the mix will clearly change quite rapidly because we will build a lot more of one compared to the other so to answer your first question is are we doing an energy transition and are we serious about it absolutely we are doing lots of investments in fact we are The Cutting Edge of certain areas like green hydrogen we are probably the biggest investor in the world into that technology so that is to answer the question now as far as the rest of the world&#39;s taxes and all these kinds of things are concerned let me say that we are happy about some of it and suspicious about some of the others and I&#39;ll give you the example here of ESG now those of you are not familiar with ESG it stands for the Norms related to environmental social and governance Norms yeah now I have no problems with having some International rules about environmental social and governance issues but the way they are it is all coming together suggests that it is some sort of a seeking effort by uh North Atlantic um Nos and uh consultancies and even by Academia because you know Academia has also found this as being some sort of a money spinning system I&#39;m sure I&#39;m 100% sure um Cambridge has all these new ESG courses which are scheming charging large amounts of money from poor students so you know the best thing they could do is do it free since it&#39;s socially beneficial um but the point is this is a scam I&#39;ll tell you why let me give you the history of this in 2016 a paper came out an innocuous paper from the UN talking for the first time about ESG it didn&#39;t Define what ESG was and everybody said yes yes I mean after all who&#39;s going to say we shouldn&#39;t have some environmental social and governance norms and so there it remained till it slowly began to find its way through various think tanks Banks and Academia and other people began to Define what these Norms was I want to be clear that there was no Global conference to decide on any of this it was unilaterally decided by some of these uh groups all of them in the North Atlantic in fact there&#39;s not even a large number of them much of the way these things are defined are defined by a very I dug into this is defined by a tiny number of think tanks actually all of them in the North Atlantic and they are funded by the same people and let me name them all these think tanks are named funded by George soros&#39;s open Society they&#39;re funded by a couple of U EU agencies Ford Foundation Rockefeller Foundation right and then they have funded a whole bunch of other agencies which have funded in other agencies reminds me a little bit about how money is laundered this is how ideology is laundered and in and without any conversation with the rest of the world we have had these Norms have now been imposed on everybody else okay and now you cannot function in many Industries particularly if you&#39;re exporting to for example European Union you cannot do this without having to comply with these Norms but where did the Norms come from who are these North Atlantic agencies who uh decide whether you&#39;re a good boy or a bad boy and give you certifications and in every one of these cases is they&#39;re effectively skimming gizia this is a form of gizia tax rent seeking so it has to be called out and I would go so far as to say this is a form of neocolonial control that is being imposed by the North Atlantic on the rest of the world and we will oppose it I have no problem with environmental social and governance Norms I do have a problem with having these Norms without any discussion with anybody else green steel for example is defined in a very peculiar Way It Is defined in a way which requires you to do processes where all the patents are held in the same North Atlantic countries how convenient so I am going to argue that yes we need to have maybe some sort of a global Norms but those Norms can only be imposed if there is an Equitable discussion across the table with all the players at least India because we are a large economy and so on we can talk loudly about it go to Africa all these Norms are applied on all of them and none of them have a voice in any of the Norms that are applied upon them and who is to say these things are I mean this is the if if you&#39;re going to talk about governance and a rule-based order the question is whose rules so I am very very susp suspicious about this whole ESG effort as it has turned out and as I said this is essentially a scam being run by North Atlantic uh consultancies Nos and I&#39;m sorry increasingly North Atlantic academic institutions so with that um we have run out of time thank you so much sanjie s

Transcript for:India's Economic Growth Vision by Sanjie Sanal

Transcript for:
India's Economic Growth Vision by Sanjie Sanal