India Today Errata [Who Thought of That?]

Every year has its share of marketing disasters, quixotic government policies and plain nonsense. There was a particularly good crop of bad ideas in 1997.

Not a bad idea in itself, but it has opened a Pandora's box of demands. Already struggling to find the Rs 11,000 crore to pay its bureaucratic hordes, the Government found it needed an extra Rs 7,100 crore after caving in to demands from unions of lower officials (clerks, peons, etc). Where's the money coming from? A desperate Government tried everything: from unsuccessfully trying to sell shares of its companies to raising taxes on foreign travel. Finally, it now wants to dip into the contingency fund, an emergency stash used only thrice before: in 1972, 1979 and 1990. Now, employees of Central and state government companies are demanding similar pay hikes. What would that cost? A piffling Rs 96,000 crore.

Nixed

Accused of interfering with religious freedom, the Delhi Police hastily exempted sardarnis (Sikh women) from a new law requiring helmets for pillion riders on two-wheelers.

Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray forced the Sena-BJP Government to carve out 250 food stalls on prime Mumbai real estate and hand them over to select entrepreneurs. Their brief: Sell zunka bhakar (gram-flour curry with a kind of chapatti) at Re 1 to poor workers. A laudable way of fulfilling an election promise. The only problem was the stall owners quickly realised there were better ways to make a living than selling zunka bhakar -- the Government subsidy be hanged. So they now sell everything from pizzas to dosas. Yuppies in ties line up outside. Oh, you will get zunka bhakar too -- but at five to ten times the promised price.

Big is bad news. It was in the automobile industry. The flooding of the market -- based more on hope than reality -- with mid-sized Opels, Daewoos, Fords and Mercedes was an unmitigated disaster. Consider the first-off-the-block Cielo. It projected sales of 72,000 cars for 1996-97. That figure was continuously scaled down during the year until it fell to 35,000. Even then the company sold only 17,000 cars. Its competitors are similarly stuck with unsold cars. India's middle class clearly needed small cars priced around its average annual income: Rs 1.8 lakh. To make it big, car companies have to sell small.

A crumbling Government couldn't announce a civil aviation policy, yet domestic airlines were clearly told that investment from foreign airlines was unwelcome. Waving the flag of swadeshi is fine, but no Indian company has the deep pockets -- let alone the know-how -- to buy planes and run an airline. So the prime candidates for putting up money for domestic airlines are now sundry tea, toothpaste and soap companies.

January 5, 1998