The finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has been doing a series of press conferences to announce measures in-order to revive the Indian economy, which is now in the midst of a slowdown.In a press conference on September 20, last week, the finance minister announced a major cut in corporate income tax rates. The idea was to align the corporate tax rate with other countries South East Asia and “thereby provide boost to ‘Make-in-India’ initiative of the Government”.There are multiple questions that pop up here.Lower corporate income tax rates could have easily been announced when the budget was presented just two and a half months back on July 5. Why wasn’t it done then?More importantly, why is the government going about announcing its initiatives to revive the economy in such a piecemeal manner, press conference by press conference.The answer for this question lies in the fact that the current government has mastered the art of headline management. If all the economic initiatives are announced at one go, then they will dominate the press only for one or two days.But if these initiatives are broken up and announced press conference by press conference the government can dominate the headlines for many days, which is whatit wants.In politics, it is very important to be seen to be doing something in order to address a problem. When it comes to economic problems, most citizens do not understand the details. What they are interested in, is in seeing whether the government is doing something.Once we take this into account then the government announcing the economic initiatives a piecemeal manner in order to revive a moribund Indian economy, starts to make sense. With multiple announcements, the government dominates the media over multiple days and in the process, the citizens get the feeling of the government doing something, over and over again.There is another point that needs to be made here. We live in an era of information overload. We have a limited period of time available and more and more information demands our attention. Hence, it makes sense for this government (or for that matter any government) to divide the announcements over a period of time.In the book The Truth About Us, Sanjoy Chakravorty talks about the principle of simple information. As he writes: “The principle of simple information is that complex information must be reduced to its simplest forms for it to provide cognitive utility.” The government has followed this by dividing the announcement of economic initiatives to revive the economy, across several press conferences.The larger point here being that the government may have an incentive to spread out announcements in order to show people that it is doing something about the economy. While, it makes political sense to do so, it doesn’t make much sense, if the idea indeed is to revive the economy.Why? Let’s take the example of the cut in corporate income tax rates. The idea behind lower income tax rates is to encourage Indian and foreign companies to set up new businesses and new industries and factories, in India.The question is will a businessman make a fresh investment just because the tax rates are now lower than they were in the past. In case of the Indian industry, there is a lot of idle capacity at this point of time and given that they have no real need to expand. Also, what about other important factors like solving the overall complexity of the Goods and Services Tax. No answers have been offered for such important questions.As far as a foreigner setting up an industry for export purposes is concerned, will he just look at the rate of income tax. That will be one of the parameters he will be looking at. He would also want to take a look at the genuine ease of doing business, the turnaround time at ports and so on.To conclude, while breaking down the economic initiatives across different press conferences does make political sense, it doesn’t tell the prospective investor in the Indian economy about any overall vision that the government has in order to revive the economy.And that can’t possibly be a good thing.