DesiPundit

Karthik writes that India is not shining for him. He tells us not to forget the agricultural sector.

Many of us (including me) work in the IT sector. Like other private sectors we enjoy medical claim, health insurance and many other such benefits. And yet, we crib when we fail to make it to that particular grade during our appraisal period which would have given us a 20% salary hike instead of that 15%.

India can lead the way because it now knows how to develop global solutions that work on a very large scale, especially those that are technology intensive (witness India’s response to Y2K). Interestingly, India still is a chaotic, third world country, so it understands the need to adapt First World solutions to the chaotic environment of the Third World.

Mark Fidelman at Seeking Alpha lays out the framework for boosting India’s innovation system [warning: long post]. He appeals to the Indian government to lay the groundwork for improving infrastructural capability for ensuring long term economic growth. This is vital especially as other developing nations catch up to India just as we did few years ago [hat tip: Faisal].

Nitin has a public interest message for Karnataka voters - please cast your vote tomorrow!  He has also included links to help you find your polling booth and to check your name in the voters’ list.  There are also links to the helpline numbers you can reach.

So if you are reading this blog and are eligible to vote in the Assembly elections, please go out and vote !

Kerala Tips is of the opinion that the arrival of private companies has improved the efficiency in certain public sector and government departments. In Kerala, instead of improving the standards of government run projects, politicians are trying to destroy the private sector.

But yet politicians in Kerala are very allergetic to the concept of efficient private sector companies. Many in Kerala view companies such as TATA as enemies. In contrast, TATA is a very reputed company in north india mainly because of the ethical way they conduct business and because they give jobs and livelihood for millions of Indians.

Take another example - Government schools are notoriously hopeless. Even poor people take loans to send their children to private schools! Why? - sending your children to government school is something that will fill you with horror! Instead of improving government schools, politicians are trying to take over private schools and to destroy them as well. Oh God! the perils of democracy…

In the absence of political leadership with strong commitment to the causes of the weak and underprivileged and also due to lack of concept of community development, movements like the Dravidians have not taken root in Pakistan. The feeble but disorganised voices for share in jobs and other resources and also for preserving sub-cultures have not made an impact.

Mehmal Sarfaz, a visiting scholar from Pakistan comments on the Dravidian movement in South India and the lack thereof of similar movements in Pakistan. [hat tip: Vinayak].

When George Fernandes, who blatantly said that China was India’s No. 1 enemy, visited Beijing three or four pretty women were made available to him all the time. Now First Secretary MM Sharma, an official posted in the Indian Embassy in Beijing has been sent back to Delhi after he developed some relation with a Chinese women. Apollo thinks the Chinese are using honeytraps.

This is not an one-off incident but a part of a determined and sustained attempt by Chinese intelligence services to compromise the Indian establishment from within and any complacency on this aspect would prove very costly to Indian interests in the medium to long-term. The Indian security establishment should ruthlessly crush all such attempts at penetrating and compromising Indian security to the point of acting decisively against any and all such Chinese plants and compromised sources regardless of their so called position or status.

It is hard, even for a moment, to believe, that Dow Chemicals is not getting special favors from Indian government. Despite recent exposes of a Dow subsidiary paying off government officials to get approvals on poisonous pesticides, and despite Dow’s tainted history with its Indian companies, the government hasn’t come clean to people on if and why the approval process was subverted for Dow’s newest ventures in India.

Indiatime fears that the recent approval for a $100 million R&D facility by Dow Chemicals in Pune might be the next Bhopal in the making given the shady and hasty approval deals in the background and finds the apathy of the Pune youth disappointing.

When the economy was liberalized in 1991 by Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, Dr. Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister. In 2008, the same man is asking corporate sector to cut wages as an act of national sacrifice.

Nitin says that Dr. Singh is shamelessly masking his government’s failure with this moral posturing.

The national duty of every citizen is to make as much money as legally possible. Anyone who suggests otherwise cannot have the best interests of the Indian people at heart. Oh, he’s only referring to the top executives, you say? Well, first, depressing wages at the top will cascade down and result in lower earnings for everyone in the pyramid (just as increasing wages at the top will increase wages for everyone).

Neelakantan has a better suggestion for Dr. Singh

Maybe he can ask the politicians in his party to declare all those assets stashed away to come up with a voluntary disclosure of black money, benami assets, Swiss bank records etc? May I request a self imposed ceiling on bribes, kickbacks, favours and ostentatious lifestyle including star weddings as a means to drive down demand. Some of these measures can be directly used to alleviate poverty (it has alleviated poverty of many a politicians families 7 generation, I talk of the larger good.)

Neelakantan moved to Bangalore from Mumbai 8 years back and now he contrasts the infrastructure development in the two cities.

In Bombay when the Shiv Sena government came to power, they built a whopping 50 odd flyovers and then some. It was a widely criticised move at that time by the press - and all sorts of allegations including kickbacks were written about. But the city got work done. The construction contracts (with its rewards and penalties system) got most of the flyovers designed before time. Subways were built under the highways and there are long stretches where vehicles can go fast without having people crossing roads. Then, the overburdened suburban railway system - Bombay is all set to get a metro rail. That government turned the tables of Bombay elections for ever.

Majeeb liked to think that SAFE was a social experiment, but he knew that it was a business like any other. It existed to satisfy an unresolved need like any other successful firm. Only time could tell what long-term changes his entrepreneurial abilities could shape. For now though, he would be happy just to provide law and order in the void that was Kerala’s traveling experience.

Abhishek at Save Kerala weaves a fictional tale with real experiences on the state of entrepreneurship in Kerala [hat tip: Rakesh].