Leapfrogging Indian Labor Laws

A lot of ink gets spilt on the intractable nature of Indian labor laws. Indian labor laws are considered by many as a retarding factor of growth. Inflexible labor market regulations are believed to be hindering large-scale investments, technology absorption, productivity enhancement and high employment growth in Indian manufacturing. Inflexible labour market could also be one of the reasons for the share of manufacturing in Gross Domestic Capital Formation hovering around 30% since 1970s, and growth in share of services sector in GDCF from 39% in 1970 to 51% in 2010.

hiring and firing

However, what if, we have reached a point where it doesn’t matter anymore?

robots per 10000 employees in manufacturing

Indian labor laws exist to protect current employees. But what if entire new production lines are setup without having to employ labor at all?

What if, instead of this:

people

We start with this:

robots

Industrial robot manufacturers are reporting between 18% and 25% growth in orders and revenue year on year.

Even newspaper articles are being written by algos. An algorithm called Quakebot is programmed to extract relevant data from USGS earthquake reports and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor. Narrative Science, a company that trains computers to write news stories, predicts that in the next 15 years, 90% of news would be written by computers.

Connecting the dots, we can imagine a future where our existing idea of a “corporation” might appear quaint.

Corporations can be thought of as information-processing feedback loops. They propose products, introduce them into the marketplace, learn from the performance of the products, and adjust. They do this while trying to maximize some value function, typically profit.
 
So why can’t they be completely automated? I mean that literally. Could we have software that carries out all those functions?
 
The CEO of an automatic corporation will be a devops engineer: fixing software bugs, writing “features” (i.e. new ways for the corporation to behave), watching performance dashboards (imagine all the pretty graphs!), and providing some vestige of human input to tune parameters used by the software. Eventually they can take their hands off the steering wheel, having configured everything to run on auto-pilot, and set up alerts to page their phone if something really goes wrong.

 
Why bother our netas and babus for reforms when we can directly leapfrog in to the “Automatic Corporation”?

Sources:

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Mutual fund positioning: Feb 2014

We are trying to figure out if tracking mutual fund purchase and sell decisions can help us be better investors. What fund managers do, vs. what they say, can provide insights into their decision making process. Here are their biggest moves in February this year:

Added on aggregate
M&M
TATAMOTORS
SBIN
CADILAHC
TCS
GODFRYPHLP
KOTAKBANK
LUPIN
ADANIPORTS
IGL
Removed on aggregate
MCDOWELL-N
NESTLEIND
BHARTIARTL
BANKBARODA
SSLT
CAIRN
IDEA
HDFCBANK
OFSS
ABIRLANUVO

Five month aggregates

mf removed

Reversals: Reliance(+), Bank of Baroda(–), Petronet(+)

mf added

Reversals: TCS(+), State Bank of India(+), Titan(+), Cadila Healthcare(+)
 
 
NOTE:

  • Only open ended funds that were in the “accumulation” phase were considered
  • Funds named “growth” and with the “direct” option alone were considered
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Transferring Your Holdings to Your New Account

To bring your existing holdings over to your new account, you will need to execute what is called an “Off Market Transfer.” This will be initiated by you, with your old broker.

  1. Obtain a copy of your Client Master Record (CMR) from Composite Investments (signed and sealed.)
  2. Attach the CMR to the demat account “close and transfer” form of your old broker.
  3. Submit these to your old broker along with your self-attested PAN card.

Once you submit the request for transfer to your old broker, it typically takes about two weeks before your positions are reflected in your new account.

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