By Ishaan Sengupta
Every single day of my college life, I have been continuously pondering about the choices I made. Here I wanted to do something related to Public Policy but alas! Delhi University’s curriculum for Economics is too textual and hardly any practial experience is being provided to the students. Second Year dawns upon me and grave choices for DC 2 (Minor) subjects keeps on haunting me. So I decided to have a talk with the Head of the Department, regarding this issue that kept on bothering me.
After a brief span of small talk, my Teacher told me that my choices lied on what I would want to do in future. Suddenly he asked me, ” Son could you tell me why our economy is in such a crisis?” reminding me of my textual curriculum.I answered that generally laymen cannot understand the reasons for certain economic issues and the reasons for such issues have a deeper explanation than what they think. He replied,’ Every problem our economy faces, has in general two ways of solving it. It is the job of the Politicians to decide which road to take and accordingly steer the country for the better.” He reminded me that Policy makers find out the two optimally achievable ways and that the politicians decide which one to take.
‘Good Politics is often bad Economics’
A topic like Fertilizer subsidies can get arguments from both sides, like one party could talk about how fertilizer subsidies increase the burden on GDP, which in turn increases fiscal deficit, which in turn increases poverty in the country, similarly the other party could argue that fertilizer subsidy’s increase the price of final products and hence ultimately cause more poverty. However solving this problem is innumerable but choosing the better solution is what politics tries to do. However a good political decision sometimes causes heavy burden on the economy.
It is particularly important to understand this correlation and how our economy works. Interdisciplinary studies ensures us a better scope in future yet, if such a study is made practical, then it would be benificial for every student in understanding the problem faced by the world and finding the right and optimal solution.