Inside the mind and heart of Venkatesh Sridhar

Today, I was just browsing the Times of India website and I came across their editorial page titled “DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Bye-Bye Tata” by Sauvik Chakraverti, I was intrigued by the title and I clicked on the link to further read it and I found this article by Sauvik was about the recent land acquisition controversies in Singur. As I read on, I was shocked and appaled and I decided to let Sauvik know why, click on more to see what I wrote to him.

Pardon my comments if the article was meant as a satire, if not, then please do go ahead and read my comment.

Your article was fine till the line where you spoke about the rise in wealth of Bengal will be possible only if there is a rise in the wealth of the average Bengali and that every ordinary Bengali should own a car.

After that your article took a deep dive into harakirism. I was in utter shock when you mentioned that pre owned cars, buses and trucks should be imported from abroad and not buy local manufactured products to REPLACE autorickshaws, Ambassador taxis and Tata buses and trucks. I was amazed at the absurdity and the lack of a common sense. If you were to replace all of this especially in Bengal, you are killing a lot of people’s livelihood first of all, whose lives depend on the very same ‘outdated’ modes of travel you mentioned.

Also, it will not be possible for them to replace their ‘outdated’ stuff with the USED imported stuff, which means that you are replacing an outdated model with an outdated model, so what is it that you will achieve, except ensuring that bonafide local manufacturers (including foreign companies having their manufacturing plant in India like Ford, Hyundai, etc) are prevented from selling their products in your model and the social impact that may cause if a local manufacturer was unable to sell (do not forget the local manufacturer’s dealerships and service stations which may be affected if your model is followed) and the fact that you will be screwing India’s trade deficits by an enormous amount.

And also your original stated dream of every Bengali owning a car will be unfounded due to the Custom Duties levied on Used cars for the very same reasons by the GoI and Custom Duties is uniform across India and it is the GoI who has the authority to change the %age of duty w.r.t Custom Duties. It will not be changed for a single state.

So, an average Bengali will pay more for an used vehicle than his counterpart across the country. So there goes your dream of every ordinary Bengali being able to afford one.

I agree with your point about the State disengaging itself from the land acquisition and directly allow the companies to acquire them, but Indian Land acquisition laws decree that the land cannot be bought for industrial purpose directly by a private company.

That was the only good point in your article after the introduction.

Regarding the increase in the value of land, any student of accounting and finance knows that land never depreciates and it usually appreciates or remains at the same value. In any case, real estate prices go up once the area becomes developed. So, I am not going to buy your point on the same.

I agree with your point on Bengal losing out due to communism. Overall, I was appaled that such an article with loads of factual errors appeared in the Times of India Editorial.

I would appreciate if you could enlighten further about the ideas that you have espoused as probably I may have just brushed the surface and you may have a deeper philosophy on this, if you do so I would be more than willing to discuss this with you.

Regards,

Venkatesh

Times of India did not approve my comment, so much for liberty of media that they so fondly hold on to. This is another case in point where the Indian media does not want to engage in a dialogue that makes sense. This is because of the ‘holier than thou, smarter than thou’ attitude that the Indian media, when in fact its most rotten free press media in the world.