Water, IPL and the ease of doing business

The latest controversy surrounding the just-about-to-start ninth edition of the IPL (a court case challenging its staging in Maharashtra while farmers are dying in Vidarbha) is a clear illustration of why the ease of doing business in India doesn’t look like it will improve.

At the bottom of it, the IPL is a business, with the IPL and teams having invested heavily in team building and marketing and infrastructure. They have made these investments so far hoping to recover them through the tournament, by way of television rights, gate receipts, etc.

Now if the courts were to suddenly decide that the IPL should not take place in Maharashtra, it will mean that alternate arrangements will have to be found in terms of venues and logistics, teams which have prepared grounds in Nagpur, Pune and Mumbai will have to recalibrate strategies, and most importantly, the people of these cities who have bought tickets (they clearly believe that the value of these tickets is higher than the price) will also end up losing.

Farmers dying for lack of water is a real, and emotive, issue. Yet, to go after a high-profile event such as the IPL while not taking other simpler measures to curb fresh water wastage is a knee-jerk reaction which will at best have optical effects, while curbing the ability of businesspersons to conduct legitimate business.

There has been much talk about how policy measures such as the retrospective taxation on Vodafone or Cairn have been detrimental to investor sentiment and curbed fresh investments in India. This court case against the IPL days before it began is no different, and a strong signal that India’s policy uncertainty is not going away quickly.

Unless the political class manages to fix this, and provide businesses more stable environments to operate in, it is unlikely we’ll see significant increase in investments into India.

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