This is once again another bitter truth about Indian govt incompetence that is leading to huge national waste.
They could have saved thousands of millions of rupees every year if only they had the foresight to frame simple economic fiscal policies.
Take the energy saving lamps. By simply giving free import license to import duty free the components for these lamps, the government could have encouraged so many small scale industries to make these lamps at a low and sell into the market. The excise duty should also be removed. The loss in revenue would have been a few hundred crores to the government. But the savings in terms of energy costs to the nation would have been 10 times or more.
Here is a simple example. Lets say there are 100 million poor households who have the present incandescent lamps. Lets say these poor homes consume 1 unit of electricity a day. That is 365 units er year.
For 100 million homes, it would be 36,500 million units a year.
If the energy saving lamps are used , one can save 80% of this energy consumed.
Which is nearly 30,000 million units of electricity per year.
Thats a lot of savings. at the cost of Rs 2 a unit it works out to 60,000 million rupees.
Or Rs 6000 crores per annum in savings. Most of it in imported oil costs.
Mind you, we are taking a conservative figure of 100 million households with just 2 light bulbs. The figure could be much much more.
But you see, to do these pro-active policies, you need forward thinking minsters and bureaucrats. Not text book oriented sahibs. And all it require is some minor tax policy adjustments.
India lacks pro-active forward thinking ministers . Hence we end up wasting huge amounts of money and pay to foreign Arab countries for the oil that we import to waste in our country, due to text book quoting theoretical and non-practical leaders who are often wrongly venerated as great experts in good policy and economic administration.
Which they are not.
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