Good Intentions. Bad Ideas
Filed under: Infrastructure, Labour market, Regulatory reforms — Amit Varma @ 1:49 am

A version of this piece was first published in the Asian Wall Street Journal (subscription link).

The road to hell is paved with good intentions—and nobody knows that better than India’s poor. There can be no better intention than removing poverty but, for more than half a century, a well-intentioned and bloated state has only perpetuated it with misguided policies and regulations. And New Delhi still hasn’t learned from these mistakes. The Indian government is soon to embark on perhaps the grandest waste of taxpayers’ money yet: the Rural Employment Guarantee Bill.

The REGB, recently passed in parliament with unanimous support across political parties, is supposed to provide 100 days of work in a year to every rural household across the country that wants it. This is expected to cost Rs. 40,000 crore (around US$ 9.1 billion), which amounts to 1.3% of......

Join Now to view the rest of this term paper!
Members: Login to view this research paper.

Title: Good Intentions Bad Ideas
Approximate Word Count: 2914
Approximate Pages: 12 (250 words per double-spaced page)

With the Term Papers Lab Membership Pass, you get instant access to every essay on this site, including this essay on Good Intentions Bad Ideas, for as long as you remain a member.

Other essays sites charge almost $100 for a single term paper. At Term Papers Lab, you can get instant access to over 100,000 research papers for as little as $29.95!