A POOR MAN'S SUPERPOWER

LAST week at Davos, there was the usual contingent of Indian chief ministers and central ministers along with a familiar bunch of media representatives.

- C P SURENDRAN

Seeming quite cosy among themselves, they might as well have been sitting in a TV studio in Mumbai or Delhi, having tea before going live.Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said his government signed 19 memorandums of understanding worth ₹30 lakh crore, focused on green energy, data centres and semiconductors.

Jharkhand reportedly signed an agreement with Tata Steel worth over ₹11,000 crore for advanced ‘green steel’ technology. Why could this not be inked in Jharkhand?

Madhya Pradesh secured a logistics hub deal with DP World to boost the state’s export competitiveness.

Since there have been annual MoU jamborees by the dozen in India almost every year, none of the above is a reliable indicator of the future. Indeed, it would be good to conduct an audit of the MoUs that the country and the states sign with compulsive cheer every year. How many of them have actually materialised?

To the sceptic, Davos bared India’s painful position, both politically and economically. And the main reason for that was articulated by Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard. The session moderator asked her rather hopefully about how India would deal with the trade tariffs put in place by Donald Trump, one of the most disruptive US presidents of all time, and Gopinath said that air pollution in India was a far graver economic and health threat than tariffs.