The Reserve Bank of India on April 6th prohibited banks from:
dealing in Virtual Currencies or from providing services for facilitating any person or entity in dealing with or settling Virtual Currencies.
This is not strictly a ban on people from mining bitcoins or possessing them. Perhaps, it’s not even possible for RBI to enforce that ban given the decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies. Nevertheless, prohibiting banks from dealing with any cryptocurrency is symptomatic of how quickly governments resort to blunt policy instruments in India.
Carrots, Sticks, and Sermons has a wonderful classification of policy instruments. It argues that any government primarily has three policy instruments available to it: information (moral suasion, transfer of knowledge, communication of reasoned argument, advice, and persuasion etc), economic instruments (grants, subsidies, charges, fees etc), and regulation (absolute bans, prohibition with exemptions, obligation to notify etc).
Now, which of these three policy instruments should governments choose? The book has this to say:
All other things being equal, in most cultures at least, the use of coercive power is more alienating to those subject to it than is the use of economic power, and the use of economic power is more alienating than the use of information and exhortation. Or, to put it the other way around, exhortation and information tend to generate more commitment than economic instruments, and economic instruments more than regulatory instruments.
The book says that even politically, it is rewarding if these three instruments are applied in a sequence:
politicians have a strong tendency to respond to policy issues (any issue) by moving successively from the least coercive governing instrument to the most coercive. The idea is that over time a policy problem is tackled in three different ways: first by the provision of information such as uttering a broad statement of intent, subsequently by the application of selective incentives, and lastly by the establishment of regulations accompanied by the threat of sanction. The underlying notion is that in solving social problems the authorities employ instruments of increasing strength in successive stages.
But is this order followed in India?
It would take a thorough study to investigate this. But if the regularity of prohibitions is taken as an indicator, it appears that even if this order is adhered to, the predilection in Indian policymakers is to pick the coercive option fairly quickly. And this says a lot about India. It can be taken as a proxy for how liberal political philosophy is stillborn in India. A liberal society would default to a minimal constraint principle – cause as less trouble to the populace as possible. Policy instruments are ends in themselves as they determine the style of policymaking in a polity. So, a high number of bans and prohibitions indicates that at the margin, greater government control is the default in India. Seen through this lens, the RBI note does not surprise.
