Opinion Semi-Column: What a little UP town can tell the new government

This town lives on it. As part of the extended Taj trapezium zone, this is the only fuel permitted to fire any manufacturing industry in this area. The owners of the 300-odd factories that ring the approach to the town track the price of gas and the government gas policy with far more fervour than they shower on the grand temple at the centre of the city. Make no mistake–gas prices need to be raised for domestic production to be incentivised.

But the glass factory owners are convinced that a doubling of the price of gas to $8.4 per mmBtu from the current $4.2, will wipe off most of them. Gas prices now account for 33 per cent of the cost of their production, independent data shows. Another 30 per cent is the cost of skilled labour.

Some of these mills will close. Most will migrate to automated processes as the best ones are already doing. Either way, of the roughly 20,000 workers these factories employ, most would lose their jobs. The artisans are all from the rural areas. For the graduate population, the town provides not even this option. Their position is like the approach to the best hotel in this town. From the wrong side of the traffic, on the GT Road. Instead migrate to Agra, half an hour away or a bit further — three hours to Delhi.

A manager of a public sector bank from the town told me they are encouraging the units to become capital intensive to catch large orders from abroad, which China monopolises now.

But chief minister Akhilesh Yadav’s cousin Akshay Yadav, who won the seat, never brought this up and neither did Akhilesh in his frequent trips to the prized constituency. They could afford to since the state will have little role in setting the price, but the one thing they could have offered was to provide a VAT relief on gas prices. It too can change the cost dynamics as the tax rate would have come down to 4 per cent from the current 12 per cent.

This is why through the hot summer day the lead swung till the evening. The people here will now be hoping the Centre steps in where the state government abdicated. It is in fact the key lesson, why 282 constituencies of India put all their hopes in one basket. But it magnifies the challenge for the NDA government at the centre. Changes, like that of gas prices are not a corporate battle any more. Far more stakeholders are now involved than the last time when they ran Indian economy.

Subhomoy is a Deputy Editor based in New Delhi.

subhomoy.bhattacharjee@expressindia.com