Pawar Punch; Moon Walking; $6 trillion Loss
Opinion Watch
Pawar Punch
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) founder Sharad Pawar is undeniably a master of the political chess and his moves have outsmarted even those who assiduously worked on the image of being a Chanakya. The Asian Age has richly applauded Pawar for his “Chanakya-esque staretgy” to appoint loyalist Praful Patel as working president of the NCP with eyes on eventual elevation of his daughter Supriya Sule to the top post.
The daily credited Pawar for ensnaring Shiv Sena out of the alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and also crafting Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) in Maharashtra to checkmate the saffron outfit. The newspaper concluded that Pawar has outsmarted his ambitious nephew Ajit Pawar who has been nursing alternative plans.
The Maharashtra politics is filmy, carrying imprints of Mumbai-based script writers. Pawar also is the sole Maratha leader whose appeal hasn’t diminished. But he too is falling victim to dynasty politics.
Moon Walking
Union Ministers now playfully speak of trillions of dollars of targets for several sectors, and the master of this gaslighting is arguably Piyush Goyal whose ministry, Commerce, is aiming of $2 trillion in ecports by 2030. The Economic Times in its Editorial has sought to make a sense of data on global growth, dipping to 2.8 per cent in 2023, and inflation, coming down to 7 per cent in 2023 from 8.7 per cent in last fiscal, to argue that the target is too ambitious.
The business daily reasoned that achieving $2 trillion in exports of goods and services by 2030 will need 14 per cent annual growth, while also adding that in the last nine years the actual exports’ growth was just six per cent against the target of 11 per cent.
India is currently stated to be a $3.47 trillion economy, and to expect that $2 trillion exports in another seven years target could be achieved may sound more of day-dreaming even for incorrigible optimists. One may look at the percentage of manufacturing in Indian’s GDP in the last nine years to make a sense of such playful targets.
$6 trillion Loss
Quoting a study published in The Lancet on the prevalence of diabetes and other lifestyle ailments, The Indian Express in its Editorial has warned that India could be staring at a loss of $6 trillion by 2030. The study done by Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialist Centre, said the daily, was the biggest in sample, which revealed that one-tenth of the people in India have diabetes, 35 per cent suffer from hypertension, and 28 per cent high cholesterol.
The Noida-based daily lamented that India lacks facilities for behavioural changes. Also, it argued that the healthcare sector is not alive to the challenges.
The findings of the study are alarming, and they surely point to some serious issues, which may include long working hours amid blatant flouting of all labour laws by the private employers and also deepening insecurity on the back of near non-existent social security for working class.
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