My Lai and the saviours of the world !!

Remembering My Lai ...

Forty years back on 15-16 March, 1968, the so called glorious US troops, considered saviours bringing pece and prosperity to the world, after raping, mercilessly slaughtered about 500 villagers in th South Vietnam town of My Lai.  The villagers consisted  of mostly women, children and elderly. It was the presence of mind of a helicopter pilot Colburn, who landed his helicopter between the senseless, marauding US troops and the hapless villagers which saw the end to this massacre.

The fact that finally US hopelessly lost the war in Vietnam, six years later which it entered as a saviour is a shameful and different story.

History brings to the fore true colours of civilizations and people !!  I grew up and still vividly remember seeing these ghastly photos in the newspapers and the Life magazine around early seventies!! !!

The two photographs which shook the conscience of the world at My Lai... Villagers after being raped by the marauding, senseless US troops, minutes before being mowed down by US bullets...

George Easaw

Agri-loan waiver, pain or promise??

The Rs.60,000 crore agri-loan waiver, peanuts or a bane for the economy ??

Every year industries are handed over tax concessions, corporate tax rate cuts and to top it loan defaults are waived off. The Central and state government employees are given out doles amounting to thousands of crores in the form of DA increases for continuing their shabby, inefficient and in some case corruption in government service. From 2000-04, Central govt wrote off about 44,000 crores, with this list topping to record levels when NDA govt was to move out. This is not discussed anywhere, no budget speeches talk of this massive drain on the exchequer, nobody sheds crocodile tears for this massive write-off. No budget speech mentions of this dran, because this is a dole to another person from the same high economic bracket as the speaker making the budget speech and so on. The beneficiaries are mostly very well-to-do industrialists who have siphoned off the money for some unaccounted businesses or to their swiss bank accounts.

The forward community of Indians, while discussing the govt write-off of Rs. 60,000 crores have been discussing whether this was really deserved by the farmers, who will support them again next year, whether it was attacking the symptoms of the agri loan defaults than the causes..

Let us analyse these in detail.

Writing off bank loans is the part of action initiated by the government to reassure the farmers that if nature is unfavourable to them, the Central govt is concerned and will do it's best to save them from debts. It is a sort of unwritten guarantee given to the farmers. In other words this works out as a subsidy which ensures that the farmers  continue working on the farms, or in other words continuing to support the backbone of the country. Even though it is a fact that agriculture contributes just 18 % of the GDP of the country, consider the percentage of population which depends on it for livelihood, almost 70 percent.

The other comforting factor is that the rs 60,000 crore writeoff which the govt has announced now is going to the banks who otherwise would have spent more than double that amount trying to recover these loans from the farmers. It is only in the case of advances to Industry that write-offs are more common as there is high greasing of palms possible.

Consider the masive subsidies the developed nations are pouring into their agribusineses and how thay are supporting their farmers. Considering that this waiver is just peanuts !!



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Kind regards,

George Easaw 

Links to turnaround of Indian Railways..

Links to turnaround of Indian Railways..

http://www.goodnewsindia.com/index.php/Supplement/article/a-white-elephant-turns-pink/

http://www.goodnewsindia.com/index.php/Supplement/article/a-white-elephant-turns-pink/P1/

http://indiainteracts.com/columnist/2007/07/21/Tracking-the-Indian-Railways-turnaround-saga/

http://george-easaw.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_archive.html

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/~graghu/critical_appraisal.pdf

http://www.dnaindia.com/sunreport.asp?Newsid=1031735


Kind regards,

George Easaw

victory at Gabba ..

The drubbing the proud Aussies received from the hands of Indians was pathetic !!

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Kind regards,

George Easaw 

Beer distribution game - learnings .

Learnings from the Beer Distribution game (A MANAGEMENT SIMULATION GAME OF THE DISTRIBUTION SIDE OF A BEER DISTRIBUTION CHAIN)
The need to collaborate between the different players in the supply chain to reduce the total supply chain costs.

1. The presence of lead times for supplies between entities adds to the complexity of the supply chain. Not to mention of longer lead times !!
2. The back ordering phenomenon, whereby unmet sales are not lost, but met in a subsequent period also adds to the complexity of the ordering and distribution in the distribution chain.
3. The presence of many players adds to the confusion as they add their own lead times, shortages to the supply chain and make it unwieldy.
4. Non-availability of customer demand at the retailer for the upstream entities of the distributor and manufacturer adds to the complexity of forecasting.
5. The wholesaler having to meet the demands from the two retailers has to decide on his rationing process in events of stock shortage during distribution. Also he has to keep track of the downstream demand and supply processes, with the resultant shortages, adding to the complexity of the process.
   
6. The wholesaler was observed to be playing the key role in the chain as they were shared the customer demand by the retailers and were in turn directing the distributors how much to procure and the manufacturers how much to manufacture, in order to keep the supply chain costs of holding and shortage low.
7. Even though the teams were aware of the finite horizon of the game, they were unmindful of the fact that unsold stocks at end of horizon are a burden. These excess stocks incurred heavy obsolescence costs and caused the supply chain costs to shoot up.
8. For very short changes in demand at the customer end, the manufacturer had to deal with very high variability of production, incurring heavy costs of outsourced/borrowed machine time, revised raw material procurement plans, holding, transportation costs etc. This is also another contributor to the costs of the supply chain. This effect is popularly called the Bullwhip effect (variance amplification in orders placed as one proceeds upstream in a supply chain). 

Given these facts of the game and the learning gained, if the game is played yet again, how would you respond. The aim is to keep the total supply chain costs low.

Instructor : George Easaw

India tells US the facts of the Indo-US nuclear deal..

It was very heartening to hear the Indian Foreign Minister Pranap Mukherjee mention in the Indian Parliament today, the 3 rd of March 2008 regardng the Indo US nuclear deal.

In very simple terms the Minister made it clear to the representatives of the Indian people in Lok Sabha that, what rights and obligations are due to India and expected from India due to the deal are only based on the 123 agreement betwen India and the US and not based on the Hyde Act, which was enacted in the US Congress subsequently. We are not interested in knowing whether the Hyde Act was a subversive act to torpedo any Indian plans to assert itself. The Hyde Act is only for the US Congress and Senate to worry about. If the US Sec of State Ms. Con Rice is reading too much into the Hyde Act and how she expects India to comply with it, she is  outrightly misinterpreting it to her convenience. She is free to do it to any extent she so desires, as long it does not concern us.

Not that even if US agrees to go back to the 123 Act to give US businesses a boost, India would ever budge from it's stand of not giving up it's sovereign right to decide when to use the nuclear weapons if a need arises, the very process of bullying is evident in the statements and actions of US statesmen and decisionmakers.

And we Indians never believe that the people sitting in Capitol are interested only in US interests and not bilateral interests between India and US. We Indians also do not believe that the same decisionmakers at Capitol are so dumb as to think and initiate actions unilaterally unmindful of the future global economic, commercial and strategic equations.

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George Easaw

Another great budget by P Chidambaram ..

One guiding factor in the budget presented by the Finance Minister this year is the concern for socially weaker sectors in the society and more especially the farming community who have been doing so much to the country. The announcement of the Rs. 60,000 crore waiver of farmers loans is something unheard of in earlier budgets. That can be made up with just two years of profitable running of the Indian Railways, by proper utilisation of it's resources and infrastructure.

Laffer curve effect is a very special phenomenon observed. As the tax rates are reduced, the tax collecton a s a whole increases. Last year when the taxes were reduced, the complaince and hence collection increased by almost 40 percent. This year the collection is supposed to be much more.

The Laffer curve tells us that tax revenues have increased with decreasing tax rates and there is an optimum level of tax rates at which collection will be maximum. Laffer , a Raegan time economist, attributes this not to his own work but to a 14 th century Islamic scholar Ibn Kaldun and more recently to Maynard Keynes.

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Kind regards,

George Easaw