Lucidity Information Design, LLC to make maps
India remains a poor country.
The average citizen earns less than $2,000 a year.
To be counted among its richest one percent required assets of just $32,892
(according to Credit Suisse in 2016).
But that same one percent now owns more than half of national wealth,
one of the highest rates in the world
India’s last election in 2014 cost close to $5 billion
The phrase “Gilded Age” came from a novel by Mark Twain, describing a period that glittered on the surface, as if painted in gold, but was decaying underneath. That decay was to be found in politics above all, as the expansion of the franchise in the early 1800s gave birth to the rampant corruption of the “spoils” system.
2013 India GDP per capita, adjusted for the cost of living, was $5,200.
The US hit that same level at the height of the Gilded Age in 1881.
Antilia’s monthly energy bill - seven million rupees ($109,000),
The threshold for entry into the wealthiest “one percent” differed wildly across countries, according to research from Credit Suisse in 2016. In North America it required $4.5 million in assets; in an average European country $1.4 million. In India the same figure was just $32,892. Yet within that group, the richest one percent owned fifty-eight percent of wealth, one of the world’s starkest gaps, up from thirty-nine percent at the start of the decade. Meanwhile the bottom half of the country owned a paltry four percent.
Piketty compiled data from tax records to show that the share of national income taken by India’s top one percent was at its highest level since records began to be collected under the British Raj in 1922
The much-feared Factories Act of 1948, for instance, included rules setting out when a factory owner had to whitewash staircases or varnish window frames.
Fifty-seven permits were needed to open an industrial plant, according to one estimate, or ninety for a hotel. United Spirits, the liquor group formerly owned by Vijay Mallya, once claimed it needed a staggering 200,000 licenses to operate. There was then a fearsome array of enforcement officials—the chief inspector of factories, the vigilance inspector, the boiler and pressure vessel inspector—who could bring production stuttering to a halt.
Modern academic models suggest that democracies rarely succeed in poor countries.
In one study, the Polish-American political scientist Adam Przeworski found that countries below a certain level of GDP—$6,055 per head, to be precise—almost never manage to sustain democratic government
The name changed to Chennai in the mid-1990s to honor Damal Chennappa Nayagar, a local ruler from the time before the East India Company arrived in 1639
Buffett aphorism: “If past history were all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians".
"gold-plating” --- Here a business approached a bank with a proposal to build a project, say a steel mill, costing $2 billion. Of this a portion—$1.5 billion, for instance—would be funded through bank loans, while the remaining $500 million would come as equity put in by the owners. The trick was that the entrepreneur knew the steel mill could actually be built for $1 billion. The difference between the amount raised from the banks and the true cost—in this case $500 million—could be pocketed as profit and used to fund investments elsewhere.
It is no longer correct to speak of the ‘globalisation’ of cricket,” the Australian writer Gideon Haigh once said. “We face the ‘Indianisation’ of cricket, where nothing India resists will occur, and everything it approves of will prevail.”
Unimaginable as it might now seem, as late as the 1960s cricketers in India were paid just Rs250 to play a five-day test match—a per diem rate of Rs50. If the team performed well, and won in four days, they were docked a day’s wages !!!
Vineet Jain, one of the brothers who own both Times Now and the Times of India, displayed a notably relaxed attitude to editorial standards. “We are not in the newspaper business,” he once told The New Yorker. “If ninety percent of your revenues comes from advertising, you’re in the advertising business.”
The average Indian earned about $1,600 a year when Modi won his landslide in 2014, lagging far behind Asian countries such as China or Malaysia, with roughly $8,000 and $11,000 apiece. Some projections suggest India will reach roughly double its current income level by 2025, placing it firmly among the middle tier of what the World Bank calls “lower-middle-income” economies. With luck, within another decade or so, it should reach the level China has attained today. But when people talk airily about India’s “rise,” they are really referring to the stage after that, which could come around the middle of this century, when the country closes in on that magic threshold coveted by all poorer nations: a “high-income” economy, meaning one in which the average person earns $12,236 or more
Arun Shourie, a brainy ex-BJP minister and onetime Modi admirer, put these most waspishly. “When all is said and done,” he wrote in 2015, “more is said than done"
Latin American economies with the widest social divides have proved less economically stable and more likely to get stuck in the “middle-income trap,” in which poorer nations achieve moderate prosperity but fail to become rich. The more successful countries of east Asia, by contrast, grew prosperous while managing to stay broadly egalitarian, partly by building basic social safety nets. Of the two models, it seems clear which India should want to follow.
Only one percent of Indians pay any income tax at all, and barely 5,000 people do so on earnings above Rs10 million ($155,000).
For any society to lift itself out of absolute poverty it needs to build three critical state institutions: taxation, law and security,” according to Oxford economist Paul Collier. All three in India—the revenue service, the lower levels of the judiciary, and the police—still suffer endemic graft.
The optimal level of corruption will not, in practice, be zero,” as Robert Klitgaard wrote in Controlling Corruption. By this he means that the cost of wiping out profiteering would require unacceptable collateral damage. “Fight corruption too little and destroy the country,” as one Chinese communist leader is supposed to have said. “Fight it too much and destroy the party"