Atanu Dey on India’s Development

The National Rural Corruption Guarantee Scheme (NRCGS) was the title of a post from Nov 2007, one of a series of posts dealing with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, starting with one in Nov 2004 on “Sir, won’t you buy this bridge and the Employment Guarantee Act?”

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Today I make my way to Delhi for some days. And then on to Chennai. So I will be reporting from the capital of this great country. I have not been in Delhi for many many moons and I am looking forward to a very exciting visit.

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Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die
They just fade away.

Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji “Sam Bahadur” Jamshedji Manekshaw MC (April 3, 1914 – June 27, 2008)
Here’s a warm farewell to Sam Manekshaw from a little boy. And from a soldier to Sam Bahadur.

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Having grown up in the age of the USENET, I am intimately familiar with Godwin’s Law. “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” The corollary to which has always been that whoever equates his opponent in a debate to Hitler or the Nazi, he has […]

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The title of this post is from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, The Deserted Village (1770). It appears here:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed […]

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Time to do the numbers. This blog has been publishing since September 2003, just a few months short of five years. During that time, it has accumulated over 1,100 posts, and people have commented over 7,000 times. Around 1.1 million pages have been viewed in the last three years, going by the numbers Sitemeter reports […]

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Here’s an idea. You are going to take a flight sometime in the afternoon. You SMS a particular well-known number. It reads, “Start flight S26641″. Immediately you get a response, “Welcome to updates on Jet Lite flight from Pune to Hyderabad. Estimated 20 minutes delay. ETD 1540 hours.”
Later, around 1 PM, you get another […]

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Here’s Jeff Dunham with Achmed, the dead terrorist. Is it work safe, you ask? Most certainly not. And besides, you should not be watching YouTube at work. Nor reading this blog, come to think of it. It is a waste of your employer’s money.

That video has had an astounding over 52,000,000 views and has […]

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Papers by the Scores
A recent report by Goldman Sachs, Ten Things for India to Achieve its 2050 Potential, makes for interesting reading. Part of a long series of papers, this is Global Economics Paper number 169, and their fourth paper dealing with India and its growth potential.
I found it hard to avoid reading it […]

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Commenting on this blog requires a registration on this site. It is a simple half a minute process, and one gets to choose one’s handle and one’s password. But it was being abused by spammers and I decided to disallow users to register themselves. That means, if one wishes to comment, one has to write […]

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Government schools in rural AP are losing strength because students are deserting them for private schools, according to this news item. (Hat tip: Ramesh Jagannathan)
People who have the ability to move, vote with their feet. So if they are moving away from free government schools to private schools where they have to pay, it speaks […]

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Who woulda thunk that! This blog is now being mirrored in Hindi. It’s author is Alok Kumar and is called “Bharat ka Vikas — Atanu Dey“.
My Hindi is nothing to write home about. But even I can tell that Alok’s translations of the posts are excellent. I realize that my writing style is not […]

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BBC reports that Israel conducted an exercise that amounts to a rehearsal for an attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. It is a strong signal — to all including the US, Europe, and Iran — that it is serious about halting Iran’s nuclear bomb-making ambitions. Good for Israel and good for the world.
All this […]

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An electric car is what we chiefly need. So someone has to do the hard work and develop it. Glad that the Norwegians would. [1].
A story in Business Week talks about an innovative Norwegian company, Think Global, that is producing electric cars that make sense:

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It’s about half past midnight and I am writing this offline. I just got off the phone with Tata Indicom customer service. I was on the phone for half an hour. At midnight, Tata Indicom terminated my internet connection. I had renewed my subscription three days ago and yet the connection was terminated at midnight. […]

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I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 and instantly regretted it. I have been struggling for the last couple of hours to access my Google toolbar bookmarks and it is not working. I even attempted to roll back to Firefox 2 but now even FF 2 does not work.
Consider yourself warned. FF 3 sucks.

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I am in Hyderabad for the next three days visiting exciting places and meeting new people. Which means that I will not be writing on this blog for a few days, which is a good thing, wouldn’t you say? I will catch up with you all in a few days.

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I am a fan of Mukesh Ambani. He is good. I hope he makes a lot of money. Here’s a NY Times write-up about him: Meet Mukesh Ambani — India’s richest man.
. . . (Hat tip: Tarang_72)
Related Posts:
Reliance Rural Business Hubs
Mr Ambani’s Home
The Better Faster Way to Help Rural India

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Dear Mr.Tata,
I trust that you will take the decision to locate the proposed commercial port in coastal Orissa only after due consideration about, and the serious study of, the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. Thank you.
Kind regards,
Atanu
[Reference.]

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(Via R S Malapati) Reuters reports Water-fuel car by Genepax unveiled in Japan
The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car’s tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese […]

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