I don't know what macro economic impact it had. Pretty much all the currency came back through the various loop holes in the rules. The liquidity crunch continues to create lot of problems to majority of the country who do not have access to banking and financial services. Nobody really knows the cost of all this and all for what? I still see unaccounted money floating every day and nothing seems to have actually changed
"Data shows only 1% of population pays income tax, over 5000 pay more than 1 crore ($145K USD)"
Only "six individuals fell in the high-end earning bracket of Rs 50-100 crore (7-14 Million USD) of salary income."
Wow ! Just 6 individuals. India's got NO shortage of millionaires & billionaires. The abysmal income tax collection clearly indicates a gaping problem with rules & their implementation.
Growth of capital is not an income, because it is subject to uncertainties in valuation and depreciation.
Income is usually measured in a set amount of currency, and is generally perfectly liquid, while capital can sometimes only be valued if there's a buyer.
So no, it is not also an income. This is one of the most common misconceptions here on HN (I often see wealth and income used interchangeably)
Besides the points raised by other two commenters, the difference is also that capital gains (i.e. income from liquidating capital) is often taxed at different (lower) rates than job income. I think that't patently absurd, but I guess our world works according to the "might is right" principle.
"It’s like the PM is cleaning a pond to kill the crocodiles, forgetting that crocodiles can survive even on land. Big crocodiles have survived. Small fish have died." [1]
The immediate reaction of the common man on de-monetization of higher currency notes (followed by replacement with newer ones) was euphoric. A popular thought process was that people can tolerate inconvenience for a few days because it'll invalidate the "black money" [2] and thus rein in inflation, property prices and corruption to some extent. However, the moment this was announced, people have been brazenly finding loop-holes to convert their currency notes through unofficial means. Example : back-dated receipts for expensive items (gold, cars, property), fake accounts, hiring poor folks for conversion via official channels, bulk purchase of coupons / cards for essential items that are permitted to accept older notes, etc..
- Using employees salary accounts to rapidly deposit and withdraw money.
- Bribing officers in Banks.
I was downvoted earlier on HN when expressed skepticism, since this policy is definitely not intended on curbing this so-called "Black money".
After the massive influx of cash, PSU banks have gotten more reserves to pay for their earlier bets that have now run foul (which they were forced to place by the state).
I can't believe for a second that BJP managed to prevent some lowly Greenpeace activist from leaving India, but was unaware of Mallya's escape. This is not surprising considering not much has changed politically since when the dude responsible for Bhopal was escorted and allowed to flee by the then Prime and Chief Ministers - one of whom was apparently hiding in his princely bungalow far far away from the leaking MIC.
BJP is essentially a Hegelian dual for the INC (& associated fools), nothing more nothing less (the policies clearly show this).
> However, the moment this was announced, people have been brazenly finding loop-holes to convert their currency notes through unofficial means. Example : back-dated receipts for expensive items (gold, cars, property), fake accounts, hiring poor folks for conversion via official channels, bulk purchase of coupons / cards for essential items that are permitted to accept older notes, etc..
Plugging loopholes is the only enduringly useful thing that would come out of this exercise. Although, yes, the ones you mentioned have been marginally successful, the administration is doing a decent job at addressing them. For eg, people exchanging cash need to have their nails marked with indelible ink to foil crowdsourced attempts at laundering money, people with abnormally high deposits, with respect to their I-T returns, will need to explain their source.
I remain ambivalent about the approach, or its immediate benefits. However, what will prove effective isn't necessarily an excellent tax collection for the year, but making a big leap towards a transparent economy. That, however, remains to be seen if it's only a pipe dream.
The modus operandi (of loopholes) is nothing new, it's second nature to many businessmen. I wonder why there weren't enough checks in place when the plan was announced.
don't for a second take any populist politician out there by word - they always over-promise to get elected and under-deliver. after all, it's all just a power game to them.
I know you are a very talented developer so I'm curious :
Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ?
P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort.
P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space :
I wanted something small that I could get off the ground without spending a year or two on development. It's also a fantastic fit for Lambda, and I had already built the apex(1) tool so it seemed like a decent place to start.
As far as why use my tool? When you have so many to choose from, I'd say choose the one you enjoy. That's my goal really, to create things that I, and hopefully other people enjoy using. I'm trying to surface more information as well, so I think it's definitely a bit on the dev-centric side of things.
I also take it as a challenge when the space is already saturated, if you can enter the market late and still have a "hit" then that's pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of you can (or cannot) do the same with larger products.
I think almost every space is pretty crowded now to be honest. If you can name some that aren't crowded let me know :p. I would say the same of so many tools: oh another PaaS, another analytics tool, another email marketing tool.. blah blah haha. Doing something truly unique, AND by yourself is unlikely these days. I'm new to this stuff, I could be totally wrong, but I think picking a big market is key, and lots of people have sites/apps/apis.
A related story : There's a mega mall in Chandigarh, India that wasn't given approval for a power connection for quite some time (politics / corruption).
Real estate is super expensive & the owners couldn't afford to sit idle and play games with the government so they decided to run the mall from morning till night on diesel generators. That's ~ $4500 of diesel each day, probably 6-8k litres. This is an example of a pollution source that's completely avoidable. I'm not sure for how many years this continued on.
What's worse is that there was no widespread public outrage. Why didn't people boycott the mall that's polluting their city and at the same time put pressure on the government to set things right ?
For a perspective, the city I'm talking about is a modern affluent city, close to Delhi (~ 160 miles). Home to a lot of politicians & celebrities, one of the most well planned cities in the world [1] & one of the cleanest in India [2]
> "Let me give you a lesson in practical politics. It is a mistake to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort."
Why would people boycot the mall? Why not instead the disfunctional gov? By boycotting the mall you would only make it easier for the gov to ask for a bigger bribe.
The grid in India is pretty broken. My dad had dreams of going back to India to retire, but on his last trip he told me housing was now super expensive, the pollution was still terrible, the air not fit to breath and the water still unsafe to drink.
In other countries we take a national grid for granted. In Europe, power can be bought and sold from country to country. India may be lacking in capacity, but even if they're not, the grid is fragile, unreliable and not a national one.
There are over a billion people living there too, in a land mass way smaller than their more populous neighbour to the north (and let's not forget all of China's trouble with pollution as well).
> You can draw a strait line in China with 6% of the population on the larger half, and 94% of the population on the smaller half.
America's most populous county, Los Angeles County, is approximately the same. The northeastern part is mostly very hot high desert or national forest land (severe building restrictions). By contrast, the southwestern part is coastal and much more suitable for human habitation.
You could draw a straight line across any country that divides the population into 6%/94%, but I doubt there are many countries where the 94% side would be smaller than the 6% side for any line.
This is such an interesting idea! Lots of potential.
Given n (city,population, area) tuples for country C, find 2 cities, the line thru which slices C into two land masses M and N. M would then have k tuples and N would have n-k, such that the ratio of aggregate population of k tuples to the aggregate population of n-k would be 90+delta:10-delta, for delta in interval [1,9], whilst simultaneously you have the ratio of the aggregate area of the k tuples to the aggregate area of n-k working out to 1+nabla:1-nabla, for nabla in [0,0.5].
No idea what the optimal algorithm would be, short of brute force so O(n^2).
This is the sort of DS project a HuffPo would run - you can slice up countries not just based on 94:6 population but also crime rate, education, victims of homicide, what have you; all you need in tuples with larger arity.
"tuples with larger arity" is just computer scientist speak for "take more things into account".
Given the generality and popularity of sweepline algorithms in computational geometry, I'm wondering where the problem is here. Can't you just move a sweepline across a given territory in any direction and get a result? If you want maximum outrage (largest value of X in smallest area), I agree that's more complex and I'm not sure how you would prove an optimum result.
Given the city-local nature of most population density, I'd imagine a grow-out-from-cities + line fit model would work fairly well at lower computational complexity.
It'd be curious what different countries look like in terms of gradient decent difficulty on population density. I'd imagine most look fairly similar (densely populated regional urban areas surrounded by rural), but I imagine there are exceptions to some degree out there?
There are not that many city's in any given country so N^2 is probably not a big deal. However, you can get approximate results by drawing a line at every angle through a country and then moving that line up and down. Then just look for city's near any good candidate lines.
> drawing a line at every angle through a country and then moving that line up and down.
This part is quite messy. For every given (c1,c2) city pair, you'd get 1 straight line that connects c1 to c2. Then for every city ck, you need info on whether ck is above that line or below - you can compute that by point-slope geometry with the lat-long coordinates ( given point p(x,y) & line l with some slope, is p above l or below ).
Consider a country with utterly uniform population density. It is trivially false that you can draw "a straight line with 6% of the population on the larger half, and 94% of the population on the smaller half" in such a country. I would be very surprised if all countries in the world were far enough from "uniform population density" for your statement to apply to them.
Is it really uninhabitable? The territories in the north maybe too harsh, but with global warming helping too I think the southern half is quite alright, which is huge. It's all forest, lots of lakes, no lack of water and not too high, and no desert.
Uhm... Canada, not China. I responded to the comment that said
> You could probably do the same in Canada fwiw.
I would not ask about China, I've seen enough documentaries about their deserts and high plateaus. Some of them about the silk road, which was not an easy one because of that geography.
It's no more uninhabitable than the uninhabitable areas of China. But it is non-arable.
Most of the eastern half of Canada north of a certain is "Canadian shield" and is granite shield rock with little if any topsoil.
The other half is boreal forest and some of it is indeed farmed to a fairly high latittude (central Alberta where I'm from) but once you get up high enough the growing degree days are not sufficient to grow a lot of crops. It's good for grazing if that. And also fairly arid in spots.
~94% of 1.357b = 1.28 billion population.
~40% of 3.7 mill = 1.5 million square miles.
= ~0.85 billion people per million square miles.
India
1.252 billion people on
1.269 million mi
=~ 1 billion people per million square miles.
So, India is around 15% denser. Of course you can avoid the strait line cut and push China's density much higher, but the point is they are not that far off where people actually live.
I'd be interested in knowing if all housing prices in India are going up or just for certain demographics. For example, I'd assume that there is a large burgeoning middle class based on tech / offshoring in places like Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. And also, there are probably a lot of newly minted millionaires that are involved in politics, finance, etc. - a lot of investment money has gone to India in the last 20 years.
But are the rents even increasing for the majority poor that live in the very cramped areas surrounding most cities? How about the rural population?
I ask because, while it makes sense that places like London, SF, and Vancouver would have huge property price increases due to increases in demand (foreign wealth, start-up success, etc.) it seems very disturbing that more and more areas where wages have simply not risen at all for decades are also going through prices increases.
For example, the rents in the Midwest city I come from have gone up about 50% in the last 7 or 8 years, though housing itself has not. Wages have actually gone down, adjusted for inflation.
As far as I know real-estate prices in almost all of the cities are going up, even after adjusting inflation. Rents are low because of really high supply. Wages have gone down post inflation. Most people attribute the ever increasing prices of real-estate to illegal money/back economy, there are estimates that 23%-26% of Indian economy is unreported/black.
1. Most Indian power generation is Coal, there are hydel, and Nuclear is stuck in Gen2 (thanks to sanctions due to Nuke testing - the current Gen is 5)
2. There is scarcity of Coal, and Coal that is mined in India is high-soot
3. The demand for electricity outstrips Supply.
4. The supply never caught up with the demand because Transmission lines are owned by Government(state-level) and there is rampant theft
5. Because of theft and subsidies money is lost by government and the more the cost of generation the more loss the government will incur, so renewable is mostly costed out till recently.
There is hope though, Russia is building six nuclear power plants in India, more dams are coming online and investments in Renewables have increased.
Once distributed solar becomes affordable, the electricity owes in many parts of India would diminish or become tolerable.
I am afraid this picture is far from accurate.
Power plants on the whole are running at a very low PLF for some time. Very cheap power is available in the short term markets[1].
The transmission system has also improved in the last two years and now prices are more or less uniform across the country[1].
Last mile distribution infrastructure is still a WIP in many places but the real problem is financial. Many distribution companies are owned by state govts. and unable to charge/recover for the electricity they distribute. This incentivizes them to procure/supply as little power as possible.
Many states have now opted for a financial restructuring [2] and I expect demand will pick up sharply.
Complaining about pace is moving the goal posts here, and yes power shortages are a lot scarcer.
I sell gensets in the southern states and the market is shrinking.
Additionally what's being missed in this entire chain is that the new CPCB norms were released a few years ago and all gensets sold in india now conform to it one way or the other.
To still add to this - most gensets don't run as much as they are able to. For a majority of sets they run very little in the span of years.
The OP gave an example where power was not given to a mall due to corruption, not lack of power.
I'm not sure there is really a scarcity of coal. Market prices are low by historical standards and India is currently looking at ways to expand coal exports because of overproduction and record stockpiles at power plants.
India currently has sufficient electricity but the distribution system remains broken.
> why isn't the market for electricity working in India?
Electricity in India is a government monopoly. Even using a generator is illegal if you produce electricity above certain level. In very few cities government has allowed private players like Tata and Reliance to produce electricity and yet given them a complete monopoly over certain parts of the city.
Land acquisition in India is a big mess. People dont have proper property rights, clear land titles etc. It is illegal for a private company to buy land for commercial purposes if the land is not under particular zone. For example let us say I want to build my own power-lines over 100miles. I cant erect a pole in a farmland because erecting a poll is a commercial activity and the land is meant for farming only.
So the companies have to ask government to acquire land. It is a huge corrupt mess.
Electricity is unaffordable to vast mass of people without heavy subsidy. It is same with every infrastructure sector. One can say well phones are available and affordable to 1.1 billion Indian people. However ARPU for telecom companies is less than $2/month which might be one of the lowest in the world. Most companies are in heavy debt with not much to upgrade infrastructure as a result user count is getting very high but quality of network is getting lower.
Any infrastructure sector which requires heavy investment to produce but once there can be used by anyone will remain in bad shape. That is why India has many world class hospitals, 5-star hotels etc because they can be made exclusively available to those who can afford. While roads, piped water supply, sewage systems, public transport, education remain in terrible shape.
I think you are missing the point. The protest should be against polluting the city to power a non-necessary activity by not going to the mall.
AND if the government purposely delayed an electricity connection by months or years, then you should protest against them too. The above problem doesn't seem to be an issue of supply & demand of electricity, but more of a power tussle between the builder & authorities for possible kickbacks.
Related, it seems like India is almost power surplus according to these sources : [1] [2] [3]
That is not true. India has sufficient electricity to meet its needs besides Malls and Movies indeed something that people want given their explosive growth.
Vehicular pollution, construction dust, diesel generators are a common problem in almost all big cities in India.
However you are looking at the advantages of villages as a visitor with a point of view towards being closer to nature. There are other problems in villages that you probably won't encounter unless you live there on a day to day basis. Finally, grass is always greener on the other side (holds true for both villages & city dwellers).
> A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously
Cancer isn't uncommon in villages and city pollution isn't the only cause.
True, I think if you lived in the village it would be hard for you to escape it and get highly educated.
For that you prolly need to move to a big city, but from my immediate reasoning, I could work remotely from the village for the rest of my life as a programmer and could have a higher standard of living then being in the city.
But I guess that is due to the nature of my job, rather than anything.
You may not get your favorite loaf of bread, although you'll get fresh organic eggs. You may not be able to watch the latest movies in a theater. A good gymnasium probably won't exist, but you can always run in a grass field. There are countless other differences. People are materialistic & not everyone can make that compromise :)
