Clockwork orange

The recent Budget has added a new colour to India’s already colourful economy

This year’s Annual Financial Statement – known to its chums as the Budget, with a capital B to show how important it is – made mention of something that intrigued me.

Govt is relying a lot on the Orange economy to put the nation’s hisaab in good order, which all this while has been relying on the public and private sectors to provide employment and keep everything tickety-boo, perhaps more boo than tickety.

I’d heard about our 1960s Green Revolution in agriculture, and the White Revolution that made us the land of milk, if not honey. But what is this Orange biz that presages an economic and social revolution equal to, if not greater than, the two previous Revolutions combined?

To investigate the matter I went to the local sabzi mandi. Sure enough, people were buying santraas. They were also buying kinnows and maltas which, like santraas, are also orange.

Could this be the Orange economy that is to be the cornerstone of the Budget? But people at the mandi were also buying cauliflowers, and bhindis, and potatoes, and onions, all of which are decidedly un-Orange in hue, with equal enthusiasm.

So it seemed that the Orange economy which the FM in her Budget was rooting for wasn’t based on santraas. Or kinnows and maltas. Indeed, the Orange economy has nothing to do with fruits or veggies of any kind, whether orange or not.

The term was coined in 2013 by two Colombians, Ivan Duque Marquez and Felipe Buitrago, in their book The Orange Economy: An Infinite Opportunity.

Orange is deemed to be the colour of creativity, and the economy that the shade symbolises is fuelled by cultural, artistic, and intellectual activities such as making animation films, and creating music, designs, and fashion, all knowledge-based pursuits which do not require large organisation or the infusion of capital in order to function.

The Orange economy is seen as the self-employed cottage industry of the global village in the digitised world. And in that it promises to put the economy on the credit side of the financial ledger, Orange is the new black.

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