SRINAGAR: Trade and Business organizations of Kashmir have boycotted the pre-budget deliberations being held by the state government and led by Finance Minister Dr Haseeb Drabu. While terming it a black day, the Business organizations of the valley Monday slammed the Mufti-led coalition government for its anti-state, anti-business policies.
Accusing the government for its failure to take post-floods steps to raise the business sentiments, Muhammad Yasin Khan, Chairman KEA said that the state government has failed to convince the union government to sanction appropriate amount of flood package even when Mufti Sayeed justified the unholy alliance for getting a generous package and liberal funding.
The litany of allegations leveled by the trade and business community of Kashmir against the Government are not mere rants; the government should not be dismissive of these. The overall economic conditions of the state are indeed bleak.
Business and economic activity has not really picked up after the 2014 floods. This has affected drastically the tone and tenor of economic life in the vale. Consumer Purchasing Power is at its lowest, trading activity is minimalist, money in the coffers of the government is not flowing. Whatever money is circulating in the market is government salaries and other small expenditures by the government and a wee bit of profits which are ploughed back into markets to repay loans, debts and what have you.
Those who have excess money are investing it in land thereby adding to the land bubble- leading to the inflation of land prices.
Obiter Dictum, land especially in the city and its precincts is beyond the middle classes now. All this will have future ramifications: there will be a drastic increase in Non Performing Assets (NPAs) of the J&K Bank-the mainstay and pivot of the states economy. This, in turn, will affect the banks lending and investment decisions. It could, if the drift of events continues in the same insalubrious direction, focus more on consumer and consumption finance which guarantee the Bank a Rate of Return and cut down on what it would hold to be risky lending. The rudimentary trade cycle of the vale will the thrown into disarray with far reaching negative consequences.
The complaints and allegations of the vales business and trade community should then be taken seriously.
But the question is what can the government do?
Theres basically two options available to the Government: one pertains to Centre State relations and the unique political constellation that obtains in the state contemporarily. If the Government has not been able to cannibalize the PDP-BJP coalition for political purposes it can and must do for economic ones. This could mean assertion by the state vis a vis the Centre and then negotiating on the plank of development and welfare of the people. Reasonableness and rationality suggests that the Centre ought to listen. The second option is policy rationalization in the state. There is a gnawing gap in policy conception, execution and implementation in the state. This is not peculiar to the current regime but cuts across administrations and regimes. A tight policy fit needs to be devised and subject to scrutiny through government performance measurement and management approaches. The premise and end goal of each policy or policy vectors should be the welfare of the people. This is the yardstick that performance of the government and policies should be judged.
In combination, rejigged or in the least, tweaked Centre State relations that redounds to the benefit of the state and a reorganization of the policy process from conception to execution and implementation- with equity, efficiency and effectiveness as the benchmarks could ameliorate the economic conditions of the vale as well as the state at large. The business fraternitys complaints then come at the right time and should be viewed more in the nature of portents of things to come, if the drift of events continues as it is now. As they say, a stitch in time saves nine.
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