In yesterday’s musings on whether education promotes development, I had promised to outline a proposal for making India 100 percent literate within three years. Here is the modest proposal. Continue reading “A Modest Proposal for Making India 100 Percent Literate within Three Years”
Category: Solutions
Rajesh Jain’s article in Business Standard on Rural Economic Development
Today’s Business Standard carries Rajesh Jain’s article on Transforming rural India, the hub way in which he discusses the RISC model. Continue reading “Rajesh Jain’s article in Business Standard on Rural Economic Development”
Simple Encrypted Exam Questions System
The recent spate of leaked exam papers is crying out for a solution. Here is my proposal. It is simple and cheap and will avoid the humongous costs of leaked questions.
Continue reading “Simple Encrypted Exam Questions System”
As India Develops
My business partner at Deeshaa, Rajesh Jain has been focusing his Tech Talks under the heading As India Develops where discusses challenges and opportunities along the road to a developed India. The topics he introduces in these series of Tech Talks lie at the core of what needs to be done for India’s transition from an underdeveloped to a developed economy.
RISC, Deeshaa, and Rajesh Jain — The story so far
The latest issue of Businessworld has an in-depth interview with Vinod Khosla in which Vinod refers to the economic model RISC — Rural Infrastructure & Services Commons. (Unfortunately, the reporter does not get the name of the model correct in his reporting.)
Continue reading “RISC, Deeshaa, and Rajesh Jain — The story so far”
Biodiesel
An email exchange with Reuben got me thinking about biodiesel. I wrote saying:
I am not sure what ‘biodiesel’ is. I am assuming that it is some sort of oil that is extracted from some plant that is grown for the purpose and which oil can be used to fuel a diesel engine.
Continue reading “Biodiesel”
The CAT and Transaction Costs
It is important to remind ourselves from time to time what poverty is all about. Poverty has something to do with production. Not exactly the most esoteric bit of knowledge but often it gets forgotten in the shuffle. To produce you need to have what we call factors of production which are usually broadly classified into land, labor, and capital.
Continue reading “The CAT and Transaction Costs”
Culture and Development
In an email to Yuvaraj, Mr. M V Subbiah of the Murugappa Group wrote:
Thank you very much for sending me the RISC model.
I have read it with interest and entirely agree that India has very little chance of being a major player in world without integrating the rural economy. Having said that and having been trying in our own small way to integrate the rural areas which we are working with in our sugar factories, I am beginning to believe that we need to get some help from specialists who understand the social anthropology of our people. I do not know if any one else in your team feels the same way.
I could not agree more with Mr. Subbiah that the cultural context of our economy is extremely fundamental to our economic development and therefore having the insights of cultural anthropologists is important.
In a sense, economics and anthropology are intricately linked because humans are cultural creatures and our aspirations and our drives are shaped by the culture that surrounds us. Our thinking is bounded by the limits that culture places on us and any fundamental shift in our thinking has to accompany, if not be induced by, a cultural shift.
Fortunately, we are immensely pliable creatures and given sufficient reason to change, we change. India’s economic woes can be traced to at least some extent our culture of acceptance of the status quo and a fatalistic acceptance of what is instead of striving to improve our lot. We need to expound a new vision and spread it throughout the nation so that we start to acknowledge our potential and thereby take the first step to realize it.
Change in the way we think about the problems we confront is critical because the same sort of thinking that has created the problems cannot possibly get us to the solutions. It is the avowed goal of our team at Deeshaa to think very deeply about the source of our problems to understand what it was that created them. Then we proceed from that understanding to the next step, that of creating a solution that is not mired in the old mistaken ways of thinking. Finally, we propagate the solution to all corners of the country, the first step of which is to implement the solution as prototypes to demonstrate that the proposed solution is feasible.
The Logic Behind RISC
Understanding what motivates a specific solution to a problem is important if we are to have some reason for pushing the solution. Here is mine with respect to RISC – Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons .
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 