Article - 100 Week 26 Our Export Story

Article - 100  Week 26

Our Export Story

2011 saw 300 billion USD of exports and this FY, growth is seen to be slow in the beginning. Surprisingly China's exports surged to 15% in April with robust exports to USA & Eurozone. While our Ministers and experts are never tired of talking about the Eurozone crisis to explain away all our pains like low GDP growth to slow export growth, the reality is beaming  bright in China and other Asian countries. There certainly is an economic volatility, but that has not put the nations to sleep. All are working round the problems and bumping onto gold mines like China's unexpected export spurts. And here we are hiding behind the excuse of Eurozone crisis, so as not to see the real problems of the real people in our own backyard. Unless we want to see our real problems, we can not see them. It is disturbing to see ourselves frozen and floating backwards in the world of economic deluge. 

There is a big problem with Eurozone, and it would go away with time, considering their matureness and historical strength. We have a bigger monster, that would metastasize over time. We ignore the fact that our Shipping Ministry and its execution wing is brain dead. Our terminals are slowly and surely getting paralyzed. Exports are getting throttled at every point. The terminals are deliberately cutting their productivity and especially going hard on exports. Export containers are being forced into buffer yards and are subjected obscene handling, storage, and documentation costs, in addition to the insufferable delays in shipments. Extremely high Service Taxes are being slapped on export services & handling. The export procedures and obligations are still being kept complex, ambiguous, and riddled with daft duplications  under various government authorities forcing long delays, wastage & cost of man hours. Corruption at every level of passing of files is ubiquitously growing rather than abetting. You even need to pay Rs 100/ to get a simple stamp from the peon after the file is printed from the online computer system. And that after being signed by the officer (after paying his dues). Manual processing is the norm, with a lethargic & complexly rigid on-line systems in place at a huge cost. Rail connections are unreliable and unreasonably costly. For example, the cost of carrying a laden 20' container from New Delhi could be as high as 1000 USD vs the cost of carrying this container from Nhava Sheva to China at 1/10^th the rail cost. Road costs are even immensely high. These high costs are due to the cascading effect of a multitude of silly taxes, dumb red tapes and rent extraction as user fees. 

These are the real problems. These are the real people struggling hard to fight these problems to continue their export businesses. New entrepreneurs are afraid to come into this heavily mined territory. We need to look into these real problems of the real people. Solutions are not difficult, so long as we recognize these problems. We need to stop looking at the ghosts in the Eurozone or volatility in the world market.  We need to stop pretending that our house is in disarray because of some economic crisis in the west. And cosmetic and political rhetorics like interest subvention is not going to solve any such problem. If we clear our own mess, we can push our exports to 500 billion USD even in the current FY, rather than looking into a distant unknown future to get there.

Brgds

Capt Rath

Article - 99 Week 25 OUR SLICE OF THE POLICY PARALYSIS

Article - 99  Week 25

OUR SLICE OF THE POLICY PARALYSIS

Nhava Sheva Terminals are sinking to their all time lows. All three terminals are helpless, clueless, and trudging along aimlessly. The exporters are having nightmares. Some of them are losing their orders. The ships don't get berth easily and when they get they are decreed to limited move-counts, precluding most of the exports. Form 13, Gate Opening & Closing Of Windows at unpredictable timings, SSRs, and shut outs are funnily avoidable relics of the past, and wastefully expensive.

JNPT is a PSU, mired with its inherent culture of unaccountability & speed money issues. Add a dollop of Union strikes or a few sporadic shadow boxing by the local political outfits and you have a sense of perennial semi-paralysis on expected lines. Ironically, when the private Terminals of GTI & NSICT are on a big ticket drive to scuttle their own productivity, JNPT appears to be the neighboring island of hope & promise. 

The big question : Why are these two private Terminals so hooked up on cutting productivity? The popular perception is that these Terminals made obscene amount of profits in the past years due to faulty BOT contracts and TAMP authority came in late to spoil their party - exactly like our Mumbai cops who sadistically tear down any residue of  fun & gaiety among the innocent people in pubs and restaurants, on the basis of badly cooked up rule books of the government. The issue from the authorities and a large section of the public is - 'How can those guys have so much fun, while we are on the drab end of the stick?' Call it jealousy, insensitivity, cruelty, or even policy paralysis. It's the same psyche that has pervaded the administration in our nation. Stop the party! Hang the party goers! Looking from within, TAMP is a futile and thoughtless mechanism to dictate market pricing. Nhava Sheva's Terminals have that vantage position of milking the market. The terminals are few in number and sitting on the (economic & trade) heart of India. Therefore, they can not be perceived as free market players. JNP as the big Daddy just needed to suck in the highest possible share of the revenue earned by the Terminals and sit tight. TAMP is like an vestibular appendix, brain dead from its inception and potentially incapable of being constructive in any manner. With a brain dead organ like TAMP around, no one has the gumption and ability to decide on the matter - not even the judiciary. The toxic end of the policy paralysis is hurting us real bad. Most of the  bureaucratic mechanisms have grown self-destructively comatose, with increasing complexity and hidden motives. Simplicity has been made incomprehensibly opaque, complex, ambiguous, and laboriously long for common mortals like you and me. And the result is the setting in of the paralysis to Nhava Sheva's Terminals. The writing is on the wall. We are building a Kolkata like port out of the fully functional gateway to the prosperity of India's exports. A wild plague of Policy Paralysis is knocking us down in Nhava Sheva.

Brgds

Capt Rath

Article - 98 Week 24 | THE POWER OF A “NO’’

Article - 98  Week 24 | 

THE POWER OF  A "NO''

We are born and brought up in a culture of saying "yes". We are supposed to say yes to any one and sundry, who remotely happens to be senior to us in age, kinship, relation, gender, social status or rank. Saying "no" is perceived as disrespect, naivety, rebellion, or even heresy! Under such a tremendous social and cultural conditioning, the body language, spoken language, the intonations, & the intents of the speaker point in conflicting directions while conveying a message of negation. The listener needs to average them out, after discounting the noises, to understand what he wants to understand in his own version. The process is complex, blurry, and at times eats up productivity.

Recently I had this deal with the owner of a very large business. The deal was negotiated to all its important points and closed verbally. The only caveat being, the agreed points would be emailed to me before sealing the MOU. Days passed. The mail never came. The phone was never picked. After days when we could manage to get him, he would politely say things like - he was busy on a second call and would call back later or similar such things. Days dragged. He could not muster up enough courage to say "no". The process wasted a whole lot of time, man hours, other resources, and indecision. 

Even within organizations, we come across such peculiarities. Bobbing the head up and down or side ways, looking down at the floor and saying "yes",  wearing a smile with a muted 'yes', a dazed look with a famished "OK" cringing through the teeth, or even an aggressive & high pitched staccato of many "yeses" are some of the examples! People just refuse to say "no", even at the risk of being at the receiving end of the consequences. A simple "no" would be a simple and effective weapon on our way to excellence.

Brgds

Capt Rath