Quote of the Week..
…or should this be “Joke of the week?”
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would have grown by another 2% if there would have been no RTI delays
Dr Choubey, Director General, SCOPE
Quoted in HT. Â Image courtesy: Scope
Also read: Â Prime Minister wants relook at RTI ‘grey areas and a related video snippet from my talk at IIM Indore last month: “On Open Government, Information and RTI“.
Ironically, Dr Choubey was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from Amity University (in Feb ’08) “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the overall development of social and business economies” [link]
Must be a mighty univ to confer a filmfare award for research. This guy seems to be openly justifying the statistical benefits of crony capitalism 🙂
Shantanu, you make a very important point in your video. Since private (health related) information is forbidden to be released under RTI anyway, every other information should be made available openly on the internet (at the minimum). That is MUCH CHEAPER to the economy than the RTI method, and also dramatically more effective in aligning the incentives of the bureaucracy with those of the people who are paying their salaries through taxes.
This is typical of arm chair intellectuals, in this case an economist. Yesterday (17/10/2011) was listening to a debate in CNN worldwide between Tim Forbes, Paul Krugman (Nobel prize for economy) and 2 others on the effects of Quantitative Easing. Only showed how, many of these so called eminent economists, apart from making policies based on hypothesis, have no connect with ground reality. They rely on statistics collected from random data, which is never a wholesome figure, for there can never be a wholesome figure.
This isn’t new. The Keynesian model of economy that is still in vogue in the West has destroyed the Japanese economy. Sadly now the people who still believe in upholding this theory have made an important change – That Keynesian model works well in places that are geographically big. So that’s why this model didn’t work in Japan.
Was this how our great kings and emperors ruled Bharata Varsha. Fact is every community in that kingdom flourished under the kings. I’m talking of the Hindu kings alone. Just seeing the ruins of Hampi tells the grandeur of Vijayanagara Samraajya under Sri Krishna Deva Raya.