Move is underway in top corridors of power of the Gujarat government to “revive” the high-profile Mandal-Bechraji special investment regions (MBSIR), which houses the proposed Maruti-Suzuki plant, which was pruned to nearly one-fifth of its original size -- from nearly 50,000 hectares (ha) to 10,172 ha. The MBSIR in North Gujarat was proposed a major auto hub. It had to be pruned following a long-drawn-out farmers’ protest last year led by Jameen Adhikar Anadolan Gujarat (JAAG). JAAG has emerged as a powerful farmers’ group campaigning against dozen-odd SIRs coming up in Gujarat.

  Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched his ambitious Jan Dhan project by “enrolling”, according to an official claim, about 1.5 crore Indians as new bank account holders. But what is most interesting is that during his stewardship as chief minister, Gujarat remained a poor performer vis-à-vis several major states in financial inclusion – which is what Modi is seeking to "promote" by targeting around 10 crore people across India as new account holders by the next Republic Day. A report by the top consultants, Crisil, prepared in alliance with American agency Standard & Poor, released in January 2014, said Gujarat’s financial inclusion (Inclusix) index was below national average.

  A recent study on ascertaining the impact of watershed development project (WDP) and Krishi Mahotsav, the two important programmes by the Gujarat government to improve agricultural practices, suggest that they have benefited the rich farmers more than the marginal and poor farmers. The WDP is a flagship policy initiative for development of groundwater resources, especially in drought- and desert-prone districts in the state – has suggested that benefits of WDPs were confined mainly to landed households, despite a clear emphasis to include the landless as project beneficiaries. “Among the landed households, those with medium and large landholdings had a larger proportion of beneficiaries as compared to marginal and small farmers within a village”, the study, based on a sample of 6,458 beneficiaries, said. Part of the chapter “High Growth Agriculture in Gujarat: An Enquiry into Inclusiveness and Sustainability”, by Amita Shah and Itishree Pattnaik, in the just-released book, “Growt...

Top-level Bloomberg View columnist William Pesek has termed much of what Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke on the Independence day as rhetoric, phrasing it as a “loud hissing noise you hear coming from India is the air escaping from the Modi bubble.” Pesek, who won the 2010 Society of American Business Editors and Writers prize, regrets, “Since taking office, Modi has scuttled a global trade deal, sidestepped much-needed subsidy cuts, and refrained from letting foreigners hold majority stakes in key domestic sectors. He remains vague about the broader structural reforms partisans hoped he would inaugurate.”

Contradicting the Gujarat government’s loud claims, a recent survey, sponsored by high-profile NGO working on child rights, Child Rights and You (CRY), in 249 schools has shown that while 97 per cent primary schools do have toilets, as many as 204 (or nearly 82 per cent) of them are used by both boys and girls, suggesting utter lack of girls’ toilets at the primary level. In fact, if the survey results are to be believed, only four out of 249 schools surveyed have separate functioning toilets for girls, and in most cases girls and boys must use the same toilets.

 A top international non-profit think-tank, based in Sydney, New York and Oxford, has ranked India a poor No 143rd in global peace index among 162 countries it surveyed on the basis of the data sourced from the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the World Bank, various UN Agencies, peace institutes and the EIU. The only consolation for India is, Pakistan ranks 156th, Israel 149th, and Russia 152nd. The best performer is the tiny Nordic country Iceland, ranking No1. Japan ranks No 8th, the US 101st, and the UK 47th.

  In one of the most significant critiques in the recent past, Gujarat’s well-known industry consultant Sunil R Parekh has said that though Gujarat’s industries may have grown faster than most states, this has failed create matching jobs, generate enough taxes for coffers, and provide safe environment. Worse, he finds Gujarat’s performance in the area of innovations discouraging. Despite 17 per cent of industrial output of India, in patent filing, Gujarat accounted for less than 1 per cent of national filings; “Maharashtra, Delhi, and Tamil Nadu, together contribute 60 per cent of national filings.”

Edited by three senior Gujarat-based experts, Indira Hirway, Amita Shah and Ghanshyam Shah, the book “ Growth or Development: Which Way is Gujarat Going ”, is an exceptional commentary on the view taken by three well-known scholars – Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya and Bibek Debroy – who in the recent past were instrumental in creating a web around Gujarat “model”. 

The influential British weekly “The Economist”, in its latest issue dated August 2, has sought to trigger hornet’s nest by calling top tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) a “rotten role model for corporate India”, insisting, “When it comes to governance this secretive and politically powerful private empire is not a national champion but an embarrassment”. The title of the comment itself is enough to raise eye-brows: “An unloved billionaire: Why Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, needs to reform his empire.”