I have been promoting that idea — that the solution to rural development lies in urban planning — for a few years. The RISC model (Rural Infrastructure & Services Commons) is about planting the seeds of in situ urbanization in rural India. Glad to see that the idea that urbanization is essential for development and growth is gaining momentum. One of these centuries, the government of India may even wake up. Although by then, I will be with yesterday’s seven thousand year.

Although I had planned to, I will not be attending the “5th National Conference on Electoral and Political Reforms” of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR). It’s happening in Mumbai, and I alas, am in Pune. My colleague Rajesh Jain is going there to be on a panel on “The role of business and Government.” Rajesh mentions on his blog the context of the event.
Since 2002, the major impacts of these campaigns have been on criminalization of politics, and transparency in candidate and political party assets. Leaders of both …

Item: Chyetanya Kunte wrote a blog post “Shoddy Journalism” on Nov 27th, 2008. I cannot give you a link because he has since removed it from his blog (although you may be able to read it on google cache). He posted an apology to NDTV and Barkha Dutt on Jan 26th:
I hereby repudiate and withdraw my post dated November 27, 2008 titled “Shoddy Journalism” and, more specifically, the following allegations / statements made in the post titled “Shoddy Journalism” namely:
* a lack of ethics, responsibility and professionalism by Ms. …

Governance matters because how a society functions is clearly determined by how it chooses to govern itself. I have my doubts about democracy as a good form for organizing society — smacks of majority rule — but it’s better than many of the available alternatives. Democracy is, in my opinion, a first-best solution applied haphazardly in a second-best world. But given the world we have rather than the world we would like to have, democracy is the best we can do for now. So when it comes to choosing between …

“Death to the (Zionist) Juice” urges the demonstrator in London. Why? Because it’s written in the holy book.

From a review of the movie Slumdog Millionaire by Dennis Lim in Slate:
A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity. The film’s evasiveness is especially dismaying when compared with the purpose and clarity of urban-poverty fables like Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, set among Mexico City street kids, or Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, set in inner-city Los …

At the intersection of high-tech gadgets and public spending on education in poor countries lies XO, the machine from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project led by Nicholas Negroponte. I have been a critic of the program right from the start. I have argued before that the idea of providing one laptop per child is well and good if money were no object. Unfortunately, in resource-strapped economies such as India, the opportunity cost of providing school children with laptops is prohibitive.

“HUBBLESITE . . . Out of the ordinary, out of this world” has pictures. I could spend days checking them out and indeed I have. I am sharing a small collection from there: “Astronomers Select Top Ten Most Amazing Pictures Taken by Hubble Space Telescope in Last 16 Years.”
Here are the pictures. The text associated with them is from Nov 2006 article by Michael Hanlon of the Daily Mail.

The Sombrero Galaxy – 28 million light years from Earth – was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. …

I get to watch TV news only occasionally, mostly at airports, hotels and while visiting friends. Today at my friend’s place in Delhi, I woke up to TV news. It was wall-to-wall coverage of Dr Manmohan Singh’s heart surgery and the gunning down of two Pakistani terrorists just outside Delhi.
On the 24-hour news channels, the presenters have to keep talking non-stop about whatever is the breaking news. Naturally, it is humanly not possible to say something meaningful about any event without some time to think about it. So the …

Netaji Bose was born on this day in 1897. When and where he died is a mystery. The airbrushing of his image from the consciousness of Indians bears testimony to M K Gandhi’s success in crushing his opponents. Gandhi appointed Nehru as his successor and the rest is, as they say, history.
Gandhi cast a very long shadow on India. Mao is supposed to have replied, when asked about his opinion of the French revolution, “It is too early to tell.” The official line in India — and therefore the …

Your turn to say what you will in the comments. You need to be registered to comment but fortunately now you can register yourself within a few seconds.
And here’s a poll. Just for the heck of it.
How long have you been visiting this blog? ( surveys)

I am off to Delhi for a few days. I hope Jet Airways — the same airline that ferried me back and forth to San Francisco just a few weeks ago — gets me there from Pune uneventfully tomorrow afternoon. I am attending the 19th Skoch Summit in Delhi on 22nd and 23rd. Then I will spend the weekend with friends in Delhi and return on Republic Day, perhaps after attending the republic day parade.
I am excited about this visit to Delhi. As you know, politicians are my favorites …

Institutions as Ideas
Institutions defined most generally are essentially ideas. They are big ideas, ideas that are persistent and which have a profound effect on the populations that evolve, and adopt, the ideas. Examples of powerful institutions – therefore powerful ideas – are easy to find: markets, state constitutions, legal systems, systems of governance, and so on. The institution called democracy is also an idea. The instantiation of an idea — its embodiment or implementation or incarnation – varies from place to place, and from time to time. How an institution …

Have you had any economics courses in school? ( surveys)

This year, 2009 CE, marks the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882), and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Contrary to what one may suppose, the phrase “survival of the fittest” does not occur in that book. It was Herbert Spencer (1820 -1903), who coined it in his book Principles of Biology, (1864).[1]
Spencer warned that “the ultimate result of shielding men from …

Worth recalling from that Hindi song:
kaviraj kahey
na yeh taaj rahey
na yeh raaj rahey
na yeh raaj gharana
preet aur preet kay geet rahey
kabhi loot saka na koi yeh khajana
mera naam raju
gharana aanaam
behti hai ganga jahan mera dhaam
Sung by the incomparable Mukesh. Pity that it can’t be translated from the Hindi.

An Air India ad: “If you fly with us, your wife flies free.”
Seen today on a huge billboard on the road from Pune to Mumbai. The generous explanation is that Air India perhaps does not know that everyone does not have a wife; some people actually have husbands. But perhaps Air India is staffed by male chauvinist pigs, just like the rest of Indian society.
{Earlier I typed “fee” instead of “free.” Sorry for the typo.}

One in every ten people lived in urban areas a century ago. Now, for the first time ever, most people live in cities. By 2050, the United Nations projects, almost three-quarters of the world’s population will call urban areas home. The majority of this growth is centered in struggling, developing countries of the Global South, but cities in developed (or Global North) countries face increasingly complex challenges as well.
Around the world, unplanned urban expansion is multiplying slums, overburdening housing, transportation and infrastructure systems, stifling economic growth, and leaving millions vulnerable …

Gaurav Srivastava wants Shri Arun Shourie to be the BJP’s candidate for prime minister. He believes that the core constituency of BJP — the urban middle-class voters — are not particularly impressed with Shri Advani.
It would be good if Shourie were the PM. The man is smart, courageous, ethical, and has the national interest at heart. Which is more than you can say about Shri Manmohan Singh. I wish India had good political leadership but if wishes were horses . . .

Upstream and Downstream Choices
It is fairly well understood that information and communications technologies (ICT) tools expand choice. We all have access to a very large set of information and have the freedom to choose what we want to read, watch, listen to, etc., etc. ICT expands our “downstream” choice. What is not as well understood is that it expands our “upstream” choice also. It is a two-way medium, unlike say broadcast and print media which only allows us downstream choice: using ICT we send back information indicating our choice and …