 Let me begin with the Niti Aayog although that's not what I really wanted to talk about. Essentially, I think Niti Aayog we all know was something born out of an almost sudden announcement on the first Independence Day address that I'm going to get rid of the planning commission. So it really was getting rid of a Nehruvian legacy and the Niti Aayog is something which is a bit of an afterthought that there is that institution there, what do we do with it? And so you've got an institution which is housed in the same building and in certain respects resembles the old planning commission. However, as of the current year we do not have any plan. The 12th plan continued up to last year and from this year onward there is no plan and there is no plan to have any further plans. The budget of the Government of India and of the states now look very different. The budgets of the Government of India and of the states used to have a planned side and a non-planned side, all of them with the budgets which were tabled roughly in February, January, February, March of this year. Do not have that distinction anymore. Some states do, Kerala is an exception. They have their own planned expenditures. So really what has happened is that planning is out. So what does the Niti Aayog do? It's supposed to be this set of wise men who are supposed to create a vision rather than a plan and they are in the process of creating a three-year, a seven-year and 20-year visions and programs of action. The big thing that the Planning Commission had been criticised for was the argument that it was too centralised an outfit. It didn't consult the states often enough. It was entirely a central agency and it was an agency which was not responsible to Parliament and that it reported essentially to Government itself. Now some of that is obviously correct except that on most of these things the Niti Aayog exactly fits the same bill. The promise was that the Niti Aayog would actually be something where chief ministers all over the country come meet and they are the ones who drive the Niti Aayog. Well, about two meetings have taken place so far and not all chief ministers have come. So the idea of this effective decentralisation is more in terms of intentions rather than in terms of actuality. In the meantime what has of course happened is that the Niti Aayog without its allocative role is more or less toothless. What the old Planning Commission really had was power not so much over the states. It hardly gave any money to the states but really over central ministries. The money that went to the states and a lot of states were extremely upset about the way the money was distributed had to do with centrally sponsored schemes of one way or the other which was allocation by the central government amongst its departments and those departments were the spending agencies. Now therefore the power that the Planning Commission really had was not directly on the states. It was on the way central ministries worked vis-a-vis each other and the priorities that were set. All of this now has gone out of the Niti Aayog because Niti Aayog has no money to give to central ministries and average meeting of the Niti Aayog does not draw the level of say officers or certainly the seriousness with which officers attend those meetings. It's simply that you know if you don't have the money to give why should I come and listen to you. That power has obviously now passed on to the Ministry of Finance and that other being which was always there which is now much more. It's always been low key but very important and that's the Prime Minister's office. And essentially that's where departments get their direction, make their plans and also that's where they think that ideas are to be looked from rather than from this think tank called the Niti Aayog. The Niti Aayog does try to of course say various things as the moment coming out slowly with its three or seven year, twenty year agenda. But I think you know that's simply not planning and most importantly because of the fact that that agency is not there which in the case of the planning commission was the only agency in the government of India which was independent A of cabinet and B of the each of the ministries. It had an independent vision from government although being appointed by government. But because it came directly it was quite independent of the processes of government. It didn't have any means to implement anything but it had huge allocative powers. Niti Aayog doesn't have any of this. And what has I think really happened and I think much of what you listen from the others because I mean don't talk about Niti Aayog is that the development agenda of government that is viewing the economy as a matter of development and of future growth has been replaced really by two types of things. One, what the finance ministry does for most of the time which is balance budgets, make cuts here, make cuts there. It is essentially a accountant's view of the economy rather than an economist or a development person's view of the economy. And as far as the development side is concerned it has got replaced from programs or plans to projects. That is we've got to have these smart cities, we've got to have the following, we've got to have railways which are of a particular type rather than an agenda of development of where we are going. Although some of these ideas obviously continue because A, they're part of the DNA of the ministry's concern and B, because we are part of an international system in which certain things have to be done. But essentially what has happened with the passing of the planning commission and the Niti Aayog is number one that the development agenda has been made very secondary to the agenda of the finance ministry which is really a fiscal management agenda. And second, that the long period and coordination matters have moved away from that agency which looked at the development side to agencies which want some things to be done very quickly and others who want to actually make sure that the balance. The coordination is one of balance and of saying that the following project should go ahead quickly rather than say that this is the direction in which the investment structure of the economy should move. And I think that's useful to remember because of what later speakers will say, but since I've got a little bit of time let me actually move away from the Niti Aayog thing. I'd say what exactly has happened, I'll keep the Niti Aayog peg to some extent, but let me give the big things. Now one of the things which happened right at the beginning of this government, actually two things which happened right at the beginning of this government, which has had its impact in all three years so far, are two things, one a great windfall and the other a setback. The setback was that you had a very bad monsoon and it was repeated the subsequent year. That is you had a bad monsoon in 2015 and you had a bad monsoon again in 2014 and then again in 2015. And the sequence of two bad monsoons is rare and that was obviously something which was not, I mean it wasn't, it was nature bestowing something unkind to the government. So some of what the government has achieved has to be seen in that rather unfortunate context. But the other is of great fortune. When the UPA government left office, oil was $120. Soon after that and for most of the time it has hovered below $50. Now an economy such as India depends so much on oil, that is imported oil, that it has tremendous impact on our balance of payments, on our budgets and most importantly on inflation. Now one of the things that you therefore see is that the bad monsoons did not actually lead to inflation. You got the bad monsoons but the price level was essentially delivered on the fact that oil prices were low and pulling everything down along with it. And of course the oil prices gave the government the ability to actually go on something of a spending spree. And then the next three years questions are one, there is one area in which this government has obviously done much, much superior to the UPA and that is of course in inflation. But as I said that the story of that has to do to a very large extent on the oil. And if you remember this combination of relatively bad agricultural seasons and bad agricultural performance and low inflation is something which had even happened in the earlier NDA regime. And that is the situation period in which you had this peculiar thing happening that in 2002 you had a massive drought and prices didn't rise. And in fact in many cases prices fell and farmers were faced with not only output being bad but prices being bad along with it which is exactly the opposite of what was expected. And it is precisely in the last half of the 90s up to the beginning up to about 2004 or 2005 that you had this huge increase in farmers suicides and the whole story of a gradient crisis. Which is the bad agricultural performance in terms of output coinciding with very poor outcomes in terms of prices. And that in some sense returned in the first two years of the present government. Obviously one can't blame the government for the two bad monsoons but one can actually say that there was a management problem especially when you knew it's happened before and not so long ago. And this is the sort of thing I would have thought that an agency like the Niti Aayog if it had any teeth would be actually pointing out. The second big thing which I would the other thing I would like to actually simply point out because others will take up the theme is partly again I think because the Niti Aayog is a bit toothless. Is something which I think other speakers will point to if not directly then at least indirectly let me say it directly. This is three years of a government about which we know very little in terms of hard data. The official statistics have not really been coming out with as much data they should have been and whatever they've been coming out with is getting too involved in people quarreling about it including within government. An example of the second is the whole sequence of national account statistics which changed in the beginning of 2014 and you had a spat with the Reserve Bank governor, the economic advisor to the chief economic advisor and the central statistical office each quarreling with each other about what it is. Things have settled down to something of acceptance but that's the national accounts. And the national sample survey has not come out with any worthwhile statistics which refers to any year after 2014. So the statistical situation that is the ability to say something solid on the basis of data given out by government is something which has been weakened. And again I think that's the sort of thing. A more toothful Nithya Yog would have been actually because after all it used to be planning and statistics at one stage would have been careful about. Now given the paucity of data anything that you say about the economy in the last three years is bound to be something on which people will quarrel a little bit here and there. But therefore instead of saying the following happen let me just tell you what the mild take on what happened is. So it's a purely subjective set of statements because the objective data is to some extent lacking. What is objective is that that is the case that it is lacking. My subjective view of what has happened is that much of the economy has been running on autopilot. That is it's running roughly on a steam which has built up autopilot in the sense that in any case in a liberalized economy much of the economy runs on what the private sector wants to do. What matters is number one how is the private sector managed both by the Ministry of Finance as well as by the RBI. That actually had a very strong autopilot side except Raghuram Rajan and then especially the current governor trying to move it towards inflation control. Where in a situation where that was not really a problem at all. So doing nothing very much because you're saying that you're doing inflation but inflation is low because of external factors. And the finance ministry essentially for a very long time simply doing what it knew how to do and government expenditure which till as I said this the budget of this year was really the 12th five year plan. So there was an autopilot going on and much of what you see is the autopilot. Now what rate of growth that autopilot has delivered people will the government itself if we add up its figures is a little higher than 7% but not much higher which is considerably lower than the highs of the UPA. Somewhat higher than the last two years of the UPA and certainly lower than the average of the UPA. So it's no big deal to talk about in terms of growth rates but as people would say that you're getting not much lower growth which lower inflation and you know it's a toss up. I mean so you so you know I think so Jid Bhalla wrote exactly this yesterday or day before yesterday. However we all know that the decision to do away with the Niti Ayog which as I said was let's get rid of this Nerovian stuff. It almost came as that was the decision and everything else followed. These sudden decisions are being taken and we need a voice within the government to actually say that such sudden decisions at least need to be debated and their consequences be made at least known to the public. If not go further and say that let us see the pros and cons and have a public debate. What are the things of that nature which is now going on is on the whole issue regarding the cattle economy. I mean we have gotten to a situation where there is no agency within government which is able to say that look here this part of the economy which is now roughly 25 percent of the total agricultural economy. The fastest growing part of the agricultural economy and an economy and a part of the economy which can have devastating effect if it is the case as a lot of people have told us that the costs of keeping cattle may actually go up very substantially and therefore people might have to actually cut back. So the effect of trying to save the cow may be bad for the cows and if so it will be bad not only for cows it will be bad for the cattle economy and that will be bad for the rural economy in general. Now obviously there will be debate on this. What is interesting is that on such an issue and this is not the only issue there is no real debate and no real reason given why there is no debate. It's as if you know there are certain things we don't talk about you just accept. I think I'm going to stop here because but let me end by saying that looking forward. Sorry let me obviously say that one obvious thing I didn't among these impulsive and sudden decisions is obviously demonetization. And since I'm sure others will talk about it I won't talk about it much but that of course is even bigger although probably more short lived than the effect on the cow economy. And again we have the situation where I think given that our system still have certain things which are solid. I think the statistical system which I have criticized a little bit actually did a pretty good job with the numbers that they gave very recently. Those numbers I think make the statistical system look much better than the numbers it had given out when the advanced estimates were released in February or rather in January. Then a lot of people had turned around and said these guys are giving us false information. I think I'm convinced that they're not giving us false information they're working with a bad methodology but they've been true to that bad methodology. And I think that's what comes out with the present numbers which is that however bad the methodology it will eventually pick up on things which are happening and those you measure. The badness of the methodology lies in that we don't measure any of our unorganized sector. And that is what is being hit by most of the things which are going on including the absence of the Nitiayoga.