India’s policymaker keep making dumb policies to promote agriculture in the country which leads to huge losses for taxpayers and leads to no gains for poor farmers.One such policy is to give a interest rate subsidy of 3% to farmers who have repaid their loans.This means that if you are getting a loan from the banks at 7.5% normally,you will now get it at 4% if you are a farmer who has repaid his loans.Note the condition “repaid his loan” is meant to sound as it he has great thing like saving someone from a burning building.Last time I though all loans were meant to be repaid.But evidently different rules apply to farmers who were in the election year in 2009 were given a loan waiver.The government effectively allowed the farmers to convert their loans to a grant.It was an indirect gifting of billions of dollars to farmers to get votes and it worked splendidly for the ruling Congress party.A winning idea is seldom abandoned even it leads to perverse economic outcomes.
India has been plagued with a large number of scams and scandals in recent days.Not that it has made much difference to the functioning of politicians and bureaucrats.India’s Agriculture Minister was blatantly defending favored business interests while India’s PM seems more interested in Big Business Privacy rather than tackling corruption.The Stock Market after falling for a couple of days due to increasing number of stock market scandals,has returned to normal.However the Indian politicians keep shocking the country with even more and more brazen acts of corruption and nepotism.
Now the Investigative Bureau (IB) has said that another stock market operator Rathod was colluding with promoters of agricultural companies like Ruchi Soya,Karuturi Global and KS Oils to rig stock prices.This was being done through various front companies and maverick investor C Shivasankaran was behind these moves.Note these companies have become the darling of brokerages and media being touted as the next big thing with vertical integration and acquisitions of agricultural land in Africa.The media hype that these companies got also makes one suspect that some of these firms were also involved in this scam.The Modus Operandi was again the same as followed by Dangi and Ashika group firms earlier.It remains to be seen if prosecution results in any jail time for any of these offenders.Generally nothing happens in corruption scandals in India as a SC Judge recently note that corruption had become a way of life.