As the new year dawned, the banks looked forward to the future. They felt they needed some new wisdom. So the Indian Bank Association invited R.B. Burman, a director in the Reserve Bank of India, to address them. He told them that by charging their customers for access to their automatic teller machines, they were robbing their clients of their consumer’s surplus. That was immoral; they should free their ATMs of all charges, and make them available to all clients, their own and others’. It is not known where he learnt his economics, but the purveyor of the advice had forgotten that ATMs cost money. If banks could not charge for ATMs, they would not set up any more, or fill the ones there are with cash. That would be the end of ATMs in a country which needs perhaps 50 times as many as it has.

In true democratic fashion, the RBI floated the idea that ATM charges should be abolished. Apparently, the responses it got were overwhelmingly in favour. Evidently, the RBI is no good at asking questions. If it had asked the public if they would like to be paid Rs 100 every time they withdrew cash, it would have got an even more favourable response. And if it had proposed that a withdrawer of cash should get a million rupees every time, it would have created a mass movement of indigents itching to make their millions. They would have carried the governor of the RBI on their shoulders to Delhi and made him the country’s supreme dictator.

But the governor is hardly to be blamed for populism; after all, he may have picked up the virus on one of his frequent visits to the prime minister’s office. It has prevented government oil companies from passing on increases in the cost of crude oil, and made them pay for the resulting losses from their profits on other activities. Now it emerges that the Indian Oil Corporation has been spending too little on the development of the oil properties where it has discovered oil abroad, and that it pleads it does not have money because of the subsidies it has been made to give on its product sales in India. The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation is too discreet to make such an admission, but it has far more promising properties abroad, and has spent far more on subsidies at home. So this, in effect, is the cost of the government’s populism at the cost of businesses it owns. Oil has been getting more expensive in recent years and will get even more expensive as its reserves run out all over the world. India will then be compelled to rely on whatever resources it owns. In the hope of buying some votes in the next election, the government has ransomed the future of the country.