On the launch of the Simputer, a sort of Palm clone meant for the poor, PicoPeta chairman Prof. Vinay said: “Amida allows people to share information, stay connected and bond emotionally. It does these by breaking the fear of technology.”
Damn, now I know what was preventing me from bonding emotionally with people — my fear of technology. Now that Simputer is here, I will get over my fear of technology and bam! I will be bonding emotionally with people. Now I will finally …

In late February, immediately upon my return from my brief trip to California, I went to attend what is called the Baramati Conference in Baramati. Baramati is a small town in Sharad Pawar’s constituency. The conference was on “Information Kiosks and Sustainability”. I sat through the presentations. After a while it gets mighty boring to hear about ICT-this and ICT-that and all the wonderful things that computers and the internet are going to do for development of poor people. My mind wanders when I get bored. So …

In the last three posts, I went on about the need to adopt innovations whereever we find them. There is nothing new under the sun. No problem we face is novel. Someone somewhere has encountered and solved every problem we face today. We have to have the smarts to understand what ails us, and then go out and find the solution.
Let’s discuss education. India has the largest collection of illiterates and semi-literates in the whole universe. India is also very poor and therefore cannot afford the …

The depth of the Indic civilization is awe inspiring when you consider that it has been around for many thousands of years. The Vedas were composed long before the start of the Common Era. The people of India can claim direct lineage to those who composed the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Rig Veda epitomizes in one of its invocations what I am concerned about: adoption of ideas.
Let noble thoughts come to us from all universe.
The puzzle therefore is why has modern day India …

In my previous post I wrote

As a development economist, I have often asked myself what are the invariants that underlie development. I know for sure that high technology (computers, internet, cell phones) are neither necessary nor sufficent for development. Most of the developed economies of the world developed at a time when all those were not yet invented. I believe that one invariant is the ability to adopt innovations.

People, societies, economies which can successfully adopt innovations tend to do better than those that don’t adopt innovations. The operational word …

An ironic bit of popular wisdom goes

Don’t sweat the small stuff.
It’s all small stuff.

In the context of economic development, I totally agree with the latter bit, but strongly disagree with the former bit. If we don’t sweat the small stuff, we don’t have much hope of managing the big stuff since the big stuff is exactly what arises from an aggregation of all those small bits of stuff.

Prasad requested a bit more on the distinction between development and growth. Consider the life-cycle of a normal human being. The initial stages are marked by growth and development; the later stages by a cessation of growth but continued development (hopefully). Growth, apart from that required in the initial stages, is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. One can have one without the other.

Like a bad penny, articles on BPO and its backlash keeps turning up again and again. The best I have seen so far was a New York Times article by Hal Varian of UC Berkeley called What Goes Abroad Usually Comes Back, With Benefits. (Thanks to Reuben for the link.)

Thomas Friedman is a one-man factory churning out outsourcing stories by the dozens. He asks and answers the question below in his latest column.

How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to the brainy country that is going to
take all our best jobs? Answer: good timing, hard work, talent and luck.

I would have asked a slightly different question:
How did India, in 15 years, go from being perceived as a country of massive poverty to being perceived as the brainy country that …

This one is to be filed under “INDIA IS A SUPERPOWER” category.
The newsletter from US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) contained this:
We need support and financial contribution from at least 50,000 Indian Americans by March 2004 to persuade the US government to support India in its fight against HIV/AIDS. The US government has already funded 14 nations in curbing the HIV/AIDS menace. With your support, India can become the 15th country to receive the much-needed US funds for fighting the epidemic.
Begging bowl all shiny and ready, I suppose. What the …

It is easy to defend the view that resource scarcity is a crucial causal factor in most conflicts. And since scarcity of resources increases with increasing populations, a greater balance between resources and population numbers could reduce strife.
I see the result of extreme imbalance between resources and populations every day in Mumbai. People lose their dignity in the face of dehumanizing poverty. I have also seen the other extreme — of affluence. I have lived in the US for over a couple of decades …

Rajesh Jain is continuing on his series of posts on As India Develops. His focus is on education and it set me thinking.
India is a land of opportunities. By that I mean, that we have so much to accomplish, so much to get done, so much has been neglected for so long, that everywhere we look, we find things that need to be done. There is a veritable surfeit of opportunities and one has a hard time figuring out where to begin. The whole set of …

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth –in short, materialism– does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited. E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful
THE ETHICS OF POLICY
Economist Thomas Schelling defined the ethics of policy ‘as what we try to bring to bear on those issues in which we do not have a personal stake.’ It can be convincingly argued …

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.

Rajesh Jain on his Emergic weblog has been writing a series of articles called As India Develops.
In these set of articles, he traverses a wide range of topics and lays out a road map for India’s development. (Disclaimer: I am necessarily biased in favor of his point of view because of two reasons. First, he quotes from my writings. And, second, he is my business partner.)
Also of interest is his series he calls Tutorials on Development. There are four of them, the first of which is here.

Of course India is shining. Just ask the guy who is raking in the stuff from his BPO company. Or ask the those who are buying all the electronic gizmos from the mega stores in the mega cities. India, defined strictly as those people at the top of the heap who make a shining living because the supply of people at the bottom of the heap is so abundant that they work for next to nothing, is shining and how.

This is a rant. Displaying equanimity in the face of adversity is an admirable quality. I am afraid that there are times when one has to give vent to one’s true feelings and come out openly and call a steaming pile of excrement a steaming pile of excrement without mincing words. I am refering to the recent Supreme Court decision to support the reduction of fees for the IIMs from Rs 1.5 lakhs to Rs 30,000.
Today’s Times of India editorial calls it a senseless subsidy. …