Nitin 11 months ago

Hats off to you Mr. Deodhar, for this eye-opening piece. No doubt, LEDs are the future, and will contribute in no small measure, to conserving precious energy resources.

Indeed, if the prices of LEDs do come down substantially going forward, Indian manufacturers need not set up manufacturing facilities in China; they can do it here. This can potentially lead to employment generation too.

pravin varma 11 months ago

what a joke.arent chinese manufacturers satisfying the needs of indian consumers? arent the direct beneficiaries of the chinese govt's doles to those manufacturers,the indian public? we should rejoice that our neighbors are giving us stuff for cheap.
what deodhar really wants is to draw an imaginary economic line between india and china and pretend that goods of chinese/yellow -name-your-racist-epithet origin is somehow bad for indians and therefore we citizens should ask our govt to subsidize deodhar and co so that they can get rich .this thinly veiled attempt at psuedo patriotic themed theft is age old.swadeshi was a political idea.in an independent nation,it has no place.swadeshi or videshi -the indian consumer should be the only arbiter.the indian manufacturer is owed NOTHING by indian taxpayers.if you cant make LED,go to china and make it.or shut up and stop asking for my money

Rajiv Khanna 11 months ago

I has become fashionable amongst Indian Entrepreneurs to cherry pick when it comes to picking the examples.
When they want deregulation to show some stray examples in US.
When they want subsidy they point out at China model.
In this case self serving erroneous conclusions that P.S. Deodhar has arrived are based on the wrong/ incomplete assumptions and faulty method to compare the economic desirability of promoting a product.
IN fact Government should be involved in promoting a product until or unless there are gross externalities involved int eh market and in that case the government should only take measures to internalise the externalities and nothing more and leave it for the market to do the corrections.
In this case the market seems to working perfectly fine in not promoting the LED use in India.
The trick lies in the interest rate which is assumed to be zero by him to eliminate the interest cost. Another assumption is that a single bulb keeps lighting the whole day. if replaced with assumption that average individual uses 3 bulbs interchangeably during the day in different rooms to aggregate 6 hours of use in a day then the entire economics changes and tilts the decision in favor of less capital intensive bulb (Indecasent) with the prevailing rate at 12%. the LED becomes economical at 6%

Rajiv Khanna 11 months ago

I has become fashionable amongst Indian Entrepreneurs to cherry pick when it comes to picking the examples.
When they want deregulation to show some stray examples in US.
When they want subsidy they point out at China model.
In this case self serving erroneous conclusions that P.S. Deodhar has arrived are based on the wrong/ incomplete assumptions and faulty method to compare the economic desirability of promoting a product.
IN fact Government should be involved in promoting a product until or unless there are gross externalities involved int eh market and in that case the government should only take measures to internalise the externalities and nothing more and leave it for the market to do the corrections.
In this case the market seems to working perfectly fine in not promoting the LED use in India.
The trick lies in the interest rate which is assumed to be zero by him to eliminate the interest cost. Another assumption is that a single bulb keeps lighting the whole day. if replaced with assumption that average individual uses 3 bulbs interchangeably during the day in different rooms to aggregate 6 hours of use in a day then the entire economics changes and tilts the decision in favor of less capital intensive bulb (Indecasent) with the prevailing rate at 12%. the LED becomes economical at 6%.