C.P.C avoids blaming Congress for high inflation

The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : The blame game around food prices

Among the reasons reportedly cited for the price rise in the course of deliberations at the conference were increases in the minimum support price for farm produce instituted to help the farming community, increases in international prices, increases in demand “due to the increase in purchasing power” resulting from higher growth, excess liquidity in the system, “inefficiencies” in marketing of farm produce and the high cost of intermediation.

C.P.Chandrasekhar makes the right observation that the PM is acknowledging that high inflation is inevitable. At this point, C.P.Chandrasekhar could have listed down what he thought were the reasons for inflation. But that meant he would have to give recommendations to the Congress Government. The article is striking for this reason: it tells the State Governments what to do to counter the problems created by the Congress Government at the Center but it has no recommendations for the Central Government.

Take this example: "All this helps divert attention from the longer term and more recent
policies of the Central government that were responsible for generating
the current high levels of commodity price inflation even when
demand-supply imbalances are restricted to a few commodities." Clearly, C.P.C lays the blame on the Central Government. Then he moves on to say how PDS and Forex reserves cannot resolve the high inflation problem. Who said they can? Because he did not identify the root cause of the inflation, he failed to come up with solutions. But the set of recommendations he came up with betray his own political affiliations.

At one point, he was giving recommendations to non-Congress governments on how to tackle the problems created by Congress Government. Shocker!

Overall, a poor article with improper analysis and useless set of recommendations.