 India needs another Nehru and what do I mean by that? I do not mean another Nehru Gandhi but I mean a prime minister who believes in the public sector, in the positive powers of the public sector and how it can help an economy. And why am I saying that? That is because currently India's massive economic problems cannot be solved by private enterprise. India's private sector caters to the top 10% at best the top 20% of people. That is what it produces for whether it is goods or services except for a small a few things like telecom where it's become affordable for the poor because of pricing wars between big companies who want to become monopolies. So if you leave that out overall the bulk of India's private sector production is for the top 20% and that is how it is bound to be because 80% of Indians cannot afford what India's private sector produces. They just can't afford to buy it and no amount of direct benefit transfers, universal basic income handouts is going to change that. They're not going to be able to buy what big Indian companies produced. And you've seen what has happened to SMEs with the consolidation of production into the hands of the big companies since GST came. It started with demonetization and then GST basically broke the back of India's small and medium enterprises. So anything that is bought by the poor is largely essential and some kind of services like education, they want their children educated. They have to spend on health because they fall ill. If you leave these two out more or less the only thing they spend on is food. The bottom 20% can barely spend on food. They will not survive unless they are given subsidized food. Above that the next 30% barely have enough to spend on anything beyond essentials. And if they have anything in their hand, you know what they buy? They buy cheap Chinese goods which have flooded the Indian market. And this is not what I am saying. A recent group of ministers said this exact same thing. The Chinese goods have completely taken over and had for a long time. Whether it's what the poor buy, batteries, torches, chargers, even shoes, clothes, everything that is coming in. The cheap products are Chinese products, sometimes fake Chinese products. Because Indian companies are great at producing things for the affluent middle class but not for the poor. Because there's nothing, no margin, no profit in products for the poor. So how doesn't that be solved? That can be solved with the Nehruvinism 2.0. Why am I saying 2.0? Because the original form of Nehruvin socialism. I'm saying socialism in inverted commas, care codes, why? Because I don't believe it was socialism. It was state capitalism. That capitalism was aimed at building heavy industry, in creating infrastructure, in creating capital investments so that India could become self-sufficient in future production. It did manage to do that. Whether it is steel, whether cement, coal, a lot of things, India has become self-sufficient because the public sector created the conditions through government spending, through planning to do that. Now we need a second stage and we need the second stage for consumer products that the poor can buy. Let me start by looking at the three main reservations against this. A typical middle-class person who is watching this video, this is in English, is going to have the number one is that they say government products are bad, no one wants them. No one wants to buy bad quality, shoddy looking, badly finished products. Number two, that the government companies, they all run on losses because they have low productivity, they're inefficient and their workers don't want to work because they've guaranteed salaries and jobs. So they are inefficient and they run on losses. And the third is that the government cannot, planning is never an efficient way of allocating resources because you never know what people really want. It's the only the market which can send signals of what people demand and then producers and entrepreneurs react to those signals, demand signals and they fill that space and that is why the market is the efficient way. Let me start with number one, which is that government products are shoddy. Most of you probably don't remember but you might remember that your parents had HMT watches. There was a government made products, it was a public sector company and they lasted for 20 years. They weren't great. They didn't make you feel like, oh wow, look at my beautiful watch. This is something that I can show off and maybe people think that I'm so rich. Yes, it was true that an HMT watch used to be something that people used to buy for their weddings in the old days but they lasted for many, many years. Chinese products at the poor buy, they don't last, they don't look great. They're badly finished. They buy the poor buy fake imitation shoes, imitation clothing. They look bad. You might not buy them, right? They still buy it. The cell phones that you talk about where you say that look at it, such great cameras. These are not the ones that the poor are buying. The poor buy cell phones which are usually not even smart phones. They're feature phones at best and the government has to aim, target at making similar products. You don't need a fancy shampoo bottle that looks beautiful on your bathroom shelf. What you need is cheap shampoo, soaps, good quality, sturdy clocks, sturdy watches, sturdy batteries, sturdy bulbs. You need things that last. They don't have to be brilliantly finished. And this is an important point because that's going to lead us to the second one. When you don't waste money on finish because design is a very important cost of any company and you don't waste time on brand building, money on brand building and advertising. Another huge cost, sales and marketing and brand building, advertising, huge cost. You don't spend and you don't pay 2, 3, 4, 5 crore to the CEO, chief operating officer, the CFO. Then you save a huge amount of money and that money is a buffer which you can use. Yes, it is possible that the products are not going to be the greatest because they're not going to be. They're not meant to be the most beautiful products. They're meant to be utilitarian products that the poor need use. And if they become affluent over time, they can go and buy the better quality products. No one is stopping the private sector from producing what it does for the top 20%. What I'm saying is that the public sector, government sector has to produce for the bottom 50% and people above that who want to buy those products. That's number one. I told you about the wastage. The wastage involved in huge salaries for profit maximization, right? Advertising, marketing for fighting in the market. That wastage will not exist. That immediately reduces the cost, allows things to be sold cheaper. And yes, the government might have to subsidize these products and sell them at a loss lower than cost to match and fight and counter the cheap Chinese products that come in, right? But that will mean losses. Yes, because the profit motive, profits do not automatically lead to the proper allocation of resources for the benefit of all. So when resources have to be allocated, things have to be produced for a better living standard of others. This is a social good. And that means there has to be budgetary support. It has to come from taxes on the rich. And yes, it is ultimately the objective is for the government and there again the issue of efficiency is to generate employment. Automation is not required in the government sector. There is no need to say that only a machine can cut this thing because only a machine can produce such a brilliant finish. Human beings should do that. They get jobs and when they get jobs, they get decent wages. They get enough money to be able to buy the products and services they produce. That is what the government sector's objective should be to ultimately make enough profits so that it can lead to further investment. Not to create private wealth, which is the objective of the private sector. So yes, initially it will learn losses, but that is for social good. It has to be cross subsidized just as the government does in infrastructure. So it has to be cross subsidized. It has to come from outside, budgetary support. By running big fiscal deficits, it has to be done. And finally, the misallocation of resources. We have heard about how in the socialist countries or even in the old days there would be long queues for basic things like a telephone connection. We had to wait for 3-4 months because it was not available and because it was not properly planned. There were stories about how in the Soviet Union there would be no soaps because it wasn't properly planned. The output wasn't properly planned. No one knew what the demand is. Today we have huge amount of ability to collect data and the government is everyday collecting data. We have that data, consumption data that can be processed through artificial intelligence at 1 millionth the speed and with 1 millionth the effort that was required in the old days of planning. So planning today has become extremely easy. In fact, the corporate sector constantly plans. Private companies constantly plan and predict and decide how to reduce those resources by planning and predicting what the demand is going to be. It is for the government to do that as well and it's become much, much easier to collect data from individuals, run it through AI and come up with solutions. So it's become much, much more easy to make accurate predictions about how to allocate resources. So even that is for the government to solve and yes, this will be another expense maybe. But this is an essential expense. It will create more jobs. It will create the demand once those jobs come and yes and as I was saying that you might say what happened to the private sector? When the private sector will continue to have its market which is the top 20% no one is touching that. Plus when the government hires, managers, supervisors, white collar jobs, more administrators, fills its vacancies to run these companies there will be demand created for products which the private sector creates. So in both ways this is actually what in management parlance is called a win-win situation. Remember what I'm saying is that this is a pragmatic solution. This is not a radical solution. This can be done within the existing system without touching the elite. The elite will ultimately gain from this process. That is why they're saying make more Mandrega and who's stopping the poor once they have jobs from buying what the private sector produces. So therefore the objective is to come up with a pragmatic solution. A pragmatic solution that Nehru had come up with and the Nehruvian government had come up with in the 1950s. We need exactly that. We need a new Nehruvian government, a Nehru 2.0 which is pragmatic and understands that only the public sector can solve in their demand problems.