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Price hike of natural gas will hit common man hard
Over the past several years prices have become a chronic malady in India's national life. The rupee is plumbing new depths. Factories are producing less, exports are not growing, investment is down to a trickle, and companies are offering fewer jobs, while cost of living continues to remain high.
Rather than nursing the economy of the country, the government has hailed a call for an impending mayhem that is the decision to double the natural gas prices from April 1, next year.
Inflationary are doing a plenty of mischief and the people of middle class families are finding it a Himalayan task to make both ends meet. But this petrol price hike will even push the price one pays for everything from food items to public transport. Nearly everything that guzzles natural gas will become costlier. Vehicles that run on compressed natural gas will make public transport dearer while electricity bills will edge up because some power generation units use natural gas as feedstock. Even the steel, paints, cement and fertilizers will turn costlier and there will be heavy taxes to deal with too, as a consequence.
The fixed-income groups like salaried people, wage-earners and pensioners are the most helpless victims. Such hikes in the petrol price can erode their real incomes. For instance, a family of five members earning Rs 5000/- per month is at parity with respect to poverty to a tramp who earns maybe nothing and is already poverty stricken.
More than four out of ten adults in India still do not have a bank account-a statistic that tellingly brings home the importance of financial inclusion in India's development strategy.
And by keeping the poverty line low with exuberate cost of living-petrol price hike being the harbinger, is the government denying that India continues to remain a very poor country despite being a major emerging economy?
The petrol price hike can become a sensitive topic to have a debate on as at the very least, the debate has catapulted, poverty and growth into the centrestage of India's current political discourse which has surely hit the common man hard-a welcome and progressive departure from the shrillness of the divisive caste-religion discussions.
For a common man, it is now a job-spill which cannot reach to a bliss-point, when such issues do not bring back their halcyon life, when their expenditure is double or more than their earnings or savings.
"Mom, please no more curfews! I am half in awe and half in envy of those food critics with stomachs of steel and livers of iron who chomp their way with plateful of goodies every weekend on TV, whose life's work consists in flitting from restaurant to bistro to cafe and back again. I am so ardently dreaming of such an existence. Anyways, mom you promised me a pizza today! So shall we?"
And the regret of not being able to fulfil a petty demand may leave this mother in a deadpan, and the case may be worse for the rustics, where it might be even more difficult to earn just a single meal a day.This showcase might be appropriate as a cat-call for this demure issue of petrol price hike which is truly the harbinger of the wafted depression for a common man.
Well, it seems that we are grasping the enormity of such blunders only in the hindsight!
- Ishani Mishra
