Moneycontrol | Supreme Court’s push to fix medical rates is unjustified and counterproductive

In the Indian blockbuster series of judicial interventions in policymaking, the latest episode on fixing the rates of medical services charged by hospitals in the country dropped last week. The Supreme Court of India, overcome by the pressing concerns of rising healthcare costs and disparities in costs of treatments availed at public and private hospitals, heard a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by the NGO ‘Veterans Forum for Transparency in Public Life’. In the characteristic style of PILs, the Court directed the Union Government to find a way to fix the price bands for all medical procedures and treatments offered by hospitals in the country and report back in 6 weeks. Or else, the Court threatened to impose the medical rates charged under the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) on all hospitals as an interim measure. Hospital stocks responded promptly by shedding more than a few points. Read the full article here.

Moneycontrol | Bangalore Water Crisis: Marginal pricing of water, subsidies to poor may curb water woes

Barely a few days into summer and there are already reports of Bangalore facing a severe water crisis. Groundwater is depleting and borewells are running dry. The price charged by private tankers have doubled. Some apartment complexes and RWAs are already rationing water and cutting off water supply to households for a few hours in the daytime. Meanwhile, the state government has decided to nationalise all private water tankers in the city. This is a complex problem with multiple causal factors – geography (Bangalore is situated far away from any naturally occurring water body), weather (weak southwest monsoons), and mismanagement. Mismanagement takes the shape of encroachment and building property on lake beds, failure to enforce rainwater harvesting systems, not providing piped water supply to peripheral areas, and unabated exploitation of ground water. Read the full article here.

Times of India | Un-fare policy

Why it may take a Bangalorean 37 tries to book a cab

Traffic rules are seen as mere suggestions for drivers and riders in Bangalore. In the same vein, principles of economics are considered as an optional extra while formulating policies. Both are more honoured in the breach than observance.

A recent doozy is the Karnataka govt decision to fix the prices for taxis in Bangalore based on the cost of the vehicle. What is idiotic about this? For one thing, we have centuries of literature on govts trying to meddle with prices and fix them. And for centuries, govts have failed in doing so. Read the full article here.

Moneycontrol | Karnataka’s plan to fix prices for Uber-Ola cabs is going to boomerang badly

There’s ridiculous and then, there’s this! In a long list of antagonist policy decisions taken against cab-aggregators by Indian state governments, the latest one by the Karnataka government takes the cake. In a policy that plans to emulate the pricing structure of the city’s autos, the Karnataka government plans to fix prices for all taxis in the state. In the new fare structure, all taxis will be categorised into three segments based on the purchase value of the vehicle and the prices will be fixed for each segment. Read the full article here.

We need more trade, not a trade war

The decision by the Trump administration to withdraw preferential treatment to Indian goods should serve as a strong warning to the New Delhi that prioritising narrow domestic politics over good economic policy can have dangerous consequences.Trump’s decision to levy import duties on erstwhile exempted goods did not, as commonly understood, come out of the blue, nor was it the first strike in an emerging trade dispute. The US Trade Representative has appealed to New Delhi multiple times in the past to remove the trade barriers that it has imposed on US goods and investments. This move by the US is largely due to three distortions introduced by the government that hurts not only US business interests but also Indian consumers. These are the price caps on cardiac stents and knee caps, the new FDI in e-commerce industry rules that prohibit foreign e-commerce firms to run inventory based retail, and the ban on American dairy products.It is not in India’s national interest to get into a trade war with the US. We have more to lose than them by doing so. India should drop the threat of escalating the trade war. Relative size of an economy and dependence on trade with the other partner are crucial in determining whether trade barriers can achieve the necessary outcomes. The US is a lot more important trading partner for India than India is to the US.Geopolitical realism instructs us that India cannot afford to indulge in such a trade war and that the damage we can inflict upon the US is not big enough to force it to change its trade regime. If India escalates the matter, it could very well lead to a full-blown trade war that could potentially witness bigger retaliation from the US in the form of higher tariffs on pharmaceutical products or non-trade barriers on Indian software products, which can truly hurt the Indian economy. We could also suffer due to decreased investment by US firms in India and, at a time of decreasing domestic investment, this can be damaging.Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/panorama/we-need-more-trade-not-a-trade-war-with-us-722934.html