Deepika Highlights Choices of Women

Ce Qu'il Faut Savoir

About the empowerment fund is that it has been a resounding flop and is a component of Shaitanomics. You can think of it as a sister to the aborted Mansoor plan. All of this of course has ensured that five years have gone by and we're pretty much stuck with the same old problems.

Not exactly what you would call progress.

Why A Ministry For Social Integration Doesn't Make Any Sense

Like Ramgoolam has promised yesterday if he wins the May 5 polls. Well for the same reasons it was ridiculous to brutally disempower people with inequality-creating and opportunities-reducing policies from morning till evening and then come up with a funny contraption called the empowerment fund.

If your policies are right you're not going to leave a lot of people by the wayside.

The Ultimate Red-Tape Machine

That would be a fitting name for the Empowerment Foundation which had blazed some new trails last year by... changing its name from the Empowerment Fund. That's because after 3 years in operation it has spent only Rs800 million instead of the Rs3 billion pompously announced by you know who. That's barely more than a quarter of the budgeted amount in case you're wondering.

The unspent Rs2.2 billion has gone towards reducing the deficit and debt-to-GDP ratio as per standard bean-counting practice. For sure it hasn't meant lower wastage levels. Nope. The damning government auditor's report constantly reminds us that this is yet another area where Sithanen has miserably failed to deliver - he referred to it as the bloody report in 2005 and promised to wage war against the Rs5 billion that's wasted every year.

It would be also interesting to find out about the administrative costs of this foundation and compare them to traditional public service delivery.

Why Sithanen's Stimulus Package is Just A Flash in the Pan

One reason obviously has to do with its tiny size: 0.16% per year for the two-year period until December 2010 -- that's about 16 times smaller than the US package and five times less than the British one. Another is continuity: come end of next year Sithanen would have been out of office for close to a year. Which kind of gives you some perspective to his claim that he's doing more than the 2% prescribed (he's in fact doing about 7 times less) by one of the Bretton Woods sharks and if he's able to spend such a large amount it's because of the success of his reforms and not because he's been taxing us to death and not spending the billions that he's been budgeting for the past three years.

So I guess you want to know how I came up with my numbers? Simple. Of the Rs10.4 billion (3.8% of GDP) announced as additional stimulus package, we have to subtract Rs6 billion because that amount was part of last June budget (6 funds of Rs1 billion each which we've covered here). The remaining Rs4.4 billion (1.6% of GDP) have to be discounted because we know Sithanen's notorious reputation of being an intellectually dishonest bean-counter. What kind of discount should apply here?

A good estimate would be 20% because that's the proportion of the budgeted amount the Empowerment Fund spent in the first two years of its existence. So that gives me 0.32% for the two years or 0.16% per year.