RBI failure cause of reduction in India’s growth to 8%, China leads at 9.5

The International Monetary Fund has revised the growth projection of Asian countries. It has projected a downward trend of Indian’s growth for 2011 to around 8% owing to high inflation and overall global economic turmoil created due to rising prices of commodity goods and oil. Anoop Singh, the director of Asia Pacific department of International Monetary Fund stated on May 9th that as new downside risks have emerged across the globe and particularly in Asia Pacific economies IMF have revise downwards the growth for the region and also for India, where the growth momentum would be reducing to around 8%. On the other hand, China is expected to lead the rest of the region by growing at 9.5%. This announcement was made while presenting the latest reports of IMF on the Regional Economic Outlook for Asia and Pacific -Managing the Next Phase of Growth to the officials of Reserve Bank of India. This news comes as another slap on the face of Reserve Bank of India, who has been annoyingly failing to control the growing Inflation in the country. There is no doubt that the lower growth projection of the country is due to RBI’s step of excessive increase in interest rates, that too repeatedly in the last fiscal. For instance, the RBI has raised interest rates by 50 basis points recently, almost double of what the market was expecting. This was not only excessive but such continuous hike in interest rates by RBI is now proved to be uncalled for and it is evident that the government has failed to understand the root causes of inflation. The RBI has evidently come up with the wrong tackling solutions for tackling inflation and the growth rate projected by IMF has now showed the dark side of RBI’s wrong decisions.

RBI fails again – Inflation mocks Government Prediction

Proving an absolute failure by the Finance Ministry as well as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in controlling inflation, the annual average inflation rate in the country has climbed up to a record high of 9.4%. This comes as a grave concern as the rate of average inflation in the previous year of 2009-10 was a low 3.6%.  It is to be noted that exactly a month ago on March 17^th, the Reserve bank of India had raised the interest rates for the eighth time in the last twelve months. The policy rates were raised by 25 bps, the repo rate (the lending rate) rose to 6.75% and the reverse repo rate (the borrowing rate) rose to 5.75%. This was all with a big claim by the RBI that controlling inflation was their first priority and that the increase in interest rates would bring down inflation in the country. In fact, the Reserve Bank had forecasted that with the increase in interest rates, the inflation would be limited to 8% by end of March. However with the inflation in March rising to about 9% (8.98% accurately), the projections of both the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been proved to be wrong.  The Indian Government is continuously making big claims about India’s high growth rate and using it as a principal political campaign. However, if the inflation continues with the same increasing curve, the growth in India will be unsuccessful. For the lives of 1.2 billion people of India to get better, the growth rate makes sense only when the inflation rate is under control.  It is an absolute necessity for the Reserve Bank of India to undertake additional policy changes to tighten its grip on the economy. All eyes are now on the monetary policy meeting of the RBI scheduled in May.

RBI action against PayPal as new edition of capitalism - Priyankan Goswami

The ongoing issue in the country between PayPal the new RBI guidelines is being shamelessly portrayed as a correct step of Reserve Bank of India by the bureaucrats, stock brokers and high capitalists of the country. Although the new rules of PayPal are set to disturb and create huge inconveniences to the Indian freelancers and small scale & growing IT Service providers, these lots are found to continue giving reasons for the guidelines. The 7 day time limit within which PayPal users are bound to withdraw money is being portrayed by the pro-RBI lot as a mandate which will allow better tax flow and help boost economy. However in actual, -by the new guidelines PayPal was mandated by RBI to pay interest to its Indian users for keeping money for more than seven days, something which a global virtual monetary service can never comply because of obvious reasons.  This is plain dictatorship from RBI in either bringing PayPal into a framework within which the Banks in India operate, or to tie down their hands and restrict their powers in Indian market ( one of the biggest globally) so that other Banks in India can take benefits off the gap created by the situation. In fact with PayPal being tamed down, it is bigger and better chance to reap benefits for other Payment gateway services of other banks / Providers in India & abroad such as ICICI Payment Gateway (PAYSEAL), Citibank Payment Gateway, HDFC Bank Payment Gateway and AXIS Bank Payment Gateway and even third party gateway providers like CC Avenue- Mumbai, Transecute- Mumbai & Time of Money.  It would be worth mentioning that with the increasing popularity and huge fan following of Pay Pal amongst Indian customers was hampering the business of Banks in India more and more, until these dictatorial guidelines restricted PayPal, at the cost of huge blow to Indian freelancers of course.  Another question that arises here is why the Indian freelancers who work for their living for foreign services have to pay taxes to the Indian Government, apart from paying service taxes for using Internet and Phone connections. Such freelancers are mostly dependent on small projects (ranging from data entry to creation of small software’s) of foreign companies and clients because of the inability of the Government and current system to provide them with their daily bread and butter. They would work for another country with no aide and help from the Indian government and yet pay taxes to Indian Government. What for?  With the new guideline asking PayPal to report any transactions above 500 dollars to the government, the RBI tried to showcase that the Government is now trying to have better transparency and control of funds flowing in and out of the country. But the question is, – all this while was there no check or verification on transactions taking place to and fro? The answer is YES, there were of course verifications of the PayPal transactions. As reported in a previous article in Times of Assam, the flow of funds to Indian PayPal customers is actually through PayPal India, which is monitored and transactions verified by Authorities. So the claim by RBI and the pro-RBI guideline group is nothing but a false propaganda, misleading public, to tie up PayPal and thereby help the capitalistic banks in India to rise and shine. We cannot ignore the fact the millions of fraudulent money hidden by Indians in Swiss Banks have been ignored by Government so far by Authorities except for giving Ashwashan (Assurances) to eradicate it. In fact a huge number of such people whose money is well hidden in Swiss Banks are the bureaucrats, stock brokers, bankers, etc who run the show in capitalistic India. Ultimately the entire game plan of RBI in this gimmick is something similar to the Government’s lowering down costs of vegetables and food items for the public and increasing price of petrol or cooking gas at the same time, so that the people ultimately pays more (yet be happy to see onion or brinjal prices going down!). There’s no doubt rulers of India are getting more and more capitalistic, helping the same rich section getting richer by sucking everything out of the common public. The Pay pal RBI story is part of the same ploy; inconvenience to freelancers, small scale IT service providers are going to create opportunities to the bigger players, restriction on PayPal would allow Indian Banks to capture more market.