Content in Reputation economy & Social Capital

While some believe that the World without money but with reputation economy and social capital will bring all round happiness, others deem wealth as an important ingredient than ethics and decency. Real wealth is in each of us, and value addition to life and environment is greater than monetary wealth one can acquire. “Content makes poor men rich, while discontent makes rich men poor” (Benjamin Franklin). When some Indian is included in the Forbes list of millionaires, which goes on enlarging, the percentage of growth in terms of new entries gets news space. Plethora of previews about the millionaire, varied views regarding their capacity, reviews of their work and interview to elicit their riches story, all make headlines. Some are born great, some achieved Greatness. This tribe belongs to the second category. Monetary wealth gives them the reputation of being the lucky few, who get the lime-light and make them famous. What is their value addition to Life? The rich gets invitation to the Chambers of Commerce, gets their Honorary Membership, toasts from Community Organizations like Rotary, Lions, and others, gets invited to Clubs where the rich and mighty Socials meet and they are introduced in the Hall of Fame. They might beget some Padma Awards as well, invitation from Rashtrapathi Bhavan, Governors House for Republic day tea, or a dinner meet with some dignitary from abroad. Look at the contrast. The Below Poverty Line person is given a definition. A person who spends Rs 32/- per day. And for he will spend the Rs 32/- is quantified. For him, no body is bothered except those mighty Politicians during the eve of election canvassing Votes promising him the Moon, but after elections, he has to moan for his discomfort. He is evicted out of the House, even though he had resided there for two generations, and there was nothing in it except the man in the Forbes list found the area lucrative to expand his industry. He was investing capital, providing wages, spending money on goods and services, which will make money, circulate, and he would sow the seeds of development so that our Gross Domestic Product would grow by double digits. This growth would make India surface as one of the most emerging economies of the world. The poor man who was displaced, uprooted from his home where two generations spent their years, living on an arithmetic sum to be called ‘Poor’ would continue to live elsewhere, with the same adjective, and meager means, while the land where he lived will breathe prosperity. When the bank increase the interest rate, the Forbes millionaire who has invested money out of the borrowed capital, and his tribe would make hue and cry, and though undesirable to the Government which gave him everything, he will make a popular speech at the expense of Public discourse, frequently misinformative. Squalor and valor have different connation in different circumstances. When the world works for its betterment without money, value addition to life changes from monetary wealth to social wealth. When reputation is wealth, only those, who do good and well unto others, are the richest. There is a Science to creativity, after all. Men are rated by human qualities, on a person to person basis, and not in terms of the Bank balance running into their SB account. When reputation is wealth, only those who do good and well unto others are the richest. When the Poor talks about his poverty, the rich always say something about another having nil gross value except it gets published in news-papers and telecast! Issues which are worthless. Well, India needs to focus on Reputation Economy and Social Capital rather than on materialistic pursuits and maintain its rich traditiona

Conservative and derided Indian Middle Class?

The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class. Could the Great Indian Middle Class be the Great Indian Mythical Class? A persistent source of confusion surrounding the term "middle class" derives predominantly from there being no set criteria for such a definition. From an economic perspective, for example, members of the middle class do not necessarily fall in the middle of a society's income distribution. Instead, middle class salaries tend to be determined by middle class occupations, which in turn are attained by means of middle class values. Thus, individuals who might fall in the middle ground on a societal hierarchy as defined by sociologists do not necessarily fall into a middle ground on an economic hierarchy as defined by economists. As a result, intuitive colloquial and journalistic usage of the term casts a wide net and does not necessarily coincide with an academic sociological or economic definition. National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has held that a family with an annual income between Rs 3.4 lakhs and Rs 17 lakhs (at 2009-10 price levels) falls in the ‘middle-class’ category. Applying this arithmetic, NCAER hold that the middle-class households would be 53.3 million (267 million people). This unwieldy definition base puts the statistics to ridicule. The same way, Planning Commission calculated poverty as per day spending equivalent to Rs 32/- in urban and Rs 26/- in rural area. The absurd methodology adopted by these bodies to calculate the basic statistics is to arrive at a high figure in the case of ‘middle-class’ and a lower figure at the Poor category of the Population. Growth rate has never been able to reduce the unemployment rate which stood at 9.4%(2009-10) while average quarterly growth rate has been averaging around 7.45 % between 2000-11, even though in Q3 of 2003, the growth was 11.8%, Q3 of 2002 was 1.6%. Rob Peter to pay Paul. This seems to be the economic philosophy of the Government. In spite of persistent, consistent, aimless designed social security programmes with outlay of Rs 1 lakh Crores end up incomplete with neither the physical nor the monetary targets accomplished. The Policy editors have narcissist temperament, deceptive assumptions and outrageous greed. Against laudable objectives with which the Scheme was ambitionally lodged the Result is dismal emptiness, creating an un-necessary class war. The Poor continues to be poor, and the generation gap sees another poor taking over from his ancestor (Munishi Premchand’s famous story), when our well worked Planning Economics take us half way to zero, mathematics no longer work! Horizontal organizing, democratic decision making challenges, technocratic governance driven by credentialed experts, takes Indian economy to the dark jungle economy of wealth for none! The term “middle-class” is a classical example of a semantic plot! It is a widely misused term. People of the ‘cattle class’, legacy of the Victorian era, is it not linguistic outrage? The rich are busy counting their cashes. The Poor, darling of the political class, social scientists and so called intelligentsia, while, the ‘middle-class’ forlorn and uncared is without a Patron or a God-father but increasingly, the Finance Minister wants him to buckle his shoes by making him pay dear and dearer. His salary is cut in the mode of Tax deducted at source, service tax clamped while Government is pretending to be lax in collecting taxes from their favourite Corporate who enjoy plethora of tax concessions and benefits and in case of trouble can approach the ‘settlement commission’ The income earned by the Cricket Board which vulgarly displays wealth is exempt from taxes. What public purpose they serve, only the North Block die- herds know. Tap funds from these people who figure in Forbes list, increase the tax slab for the high rich, those who build houses worth Crores Float high interest Government bonds and compulsorily make these corporate houses to purchase them, so that the additional income earned can be used for reducing fiscal deficit. World Bank has pointed out that Indian Government is very liberal with low taxation base at the higher income slab- only some 15-16% of the GDP is collected as direct taxes, mostly they are the ‘middle class’ who can be meddled in any way to shell out, as compared to 25-40% in developed countries, enough taxes from the taxable lot. But the Corporate rich, who play the victim card, say that the jealous Indian Middle mentality in them feel that they want to take somebody else’s ‘Cadillac’ for nothing! In India, the middle class is a neglected constituency. Hike, hike, hike in the domestic interest rate on a regular level, while allowing the Corporates the luxury of availing Credit from External markets at low rates, increasing the prices of petrol incessantly, not because of high crude world prices but for making the Public sector navaratna bulge their profits, tinkering with indirect taxes, and reducing the taxable portion of income from the Corporates while hiking the rate for the middle-class. The population share of the rich is shrinking, the Poor is shrinking but the middle-class is growing. This augurs well for the prophets of high, higher, highest growth in the Indian Economy.