Yantrakaal

The month of May will ring out the old government and ring in the new. Irrespective of which party wins and who gets the right to address the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort in August, what we need is a vision, a roadmap, a set tasks and milestones that will help chart the way to peace and prosperity of this nation. This post will define the contours of such an agenda by identifying three major areas and will then propose solutions based on available and cost-effective technology. There are many areas where India lags behind the rest of the world, for example gay rights, environmental hazards and so on, but here we will focus on some three key areas that, if addressed adequately, can lead to automatic improvement in all other areas. Seal from Harappa   First is education -- a nation consisting of people who can read, write and are aware of their surroundings can solve many of its problems on its own. Which is why our political classes, despite the much hyped RTE,...

image borrowed from http://integral-options.blogspot.com The Indian judiciary in general and the judges of the Supreme Court in particular have been in the news for taking some spectacular action in certain high profile cases like Sahara / Subrata Roy, Srinivasan / IPL, 2G / CWG scams and now of late, after the Nirbhaya episode, in rape cases. However, for the vast majority of Indian citizens, the Ram, Shyam, Jadu, Madhu who sit outside numerous high courts and district courts sipping tea and waiting for their cases to be heard and disposed of, the great terror is delay ! In India, litigation never ends -- it goes on and on and on until litigants die or use money and muscle power to settle out of courts. The complex series of adjournments, non-availability of dates and legal skulduggery ensures that cases never end and the Indian judicial system must be the poster boy for the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied. All this is well known, what is not known is what can we ...

The failure of Nandan Nilekani and the UIDAI to introduce the Aadhar card into the the mainstream of India's economic life is one more example of management failure in India. What is most frustrating in the case of Aadhar was that there was a clear need for Aadhar, patterned on the US Social Security Number, and the biometric technology was very much in place to uniquely identify each "warm body" and connect him or her to a unique number. Yet we failed - Why ? Let us study this in a little detail and then try to generalise the same for other similar projects across the country. I believe that Aadhar failed because of a combination of one or more of the following reasons : In general Indians are suspicious of and reluctant to adopt new practices. Starting from social mores like homosexuality and inter-caste marriages to business practices like insisting on revenue stamps and stamp paper for legitimizing contracts or looking for three (possibly dummy) tenders for eve...

Everybody wants to become a data scientist but given the huge number of tools and techniques that are available no one really seems to know where to start and how to go about acquiring the right skills. image taken from  http://www.rosebt.com In the process of teaching data science to students at the Praxis Business School I have realised that there is a huge amount of information that is freely available on the web and thanks to Google, one can find this information very easily. If one is motivated enough, one can learn data science on his own. In an earlier post I have given a very broad Introduction to Data Science but in this post, that I plan to update every now and then, I have tried to assemble a collection of tutorials, grouped by topic that will help anyone get a good grip on this subject by actually doing something practical. R : Statistical Programming Language Forget about SAS, SPSS and other proprietary languages that want to extort money from you and simply...

Ever since Mohandas G dreamt up the concept of civil disobedience, Indian politicians believe that bandhs, dharnas, rail-rokos, chakka-jams and other anarchic activities are the only tools available to do anything for the welfare of the people. Even educated people like Kejriwal and Jyoti Basu (may he NEVER rest in peace for the damage that he did to West Bengal ) have taken the easy way of out by creating a ruckus on the road to get their point of view across. Let us see if there is a sane way to fight corruption in this country. We all know that the basic rules of checks and balances are all there. Approvals, authorizations and the inevitable CAG audit followed by a CBI investigation should have been enough to stop corruption but when the "policeman is himself the thief" then all these checks and balances go right out of the window and are of no use anymore. So what else can be done ? "Sunlight is the best disinfectant," is a well known quote from the US Su...

In an earlier post, " First Look at a New Currency ",  I had written about my hesitant entrance into the world of the Bitcoin economy and today, the Economic Times has an article that shows that even the regulatory bodies in India have started to have a point of view on this strange and disruptive technology. Since then, many people have been asking me about this piece of technology so let me take a stab at trying to understanding this currency that has appreciated from just US$ 200 to US$1000 in the space of just one month. First question : What has caused this sudden jump in the value of Bitcoin ? Well the answer is that US Regulatory agencies have declared that there is nothing inherently wrong or illegal with the usage of this currency and the US cannot fall behind the rest of the world, and particularly China, in adopting this new technology. This has set off a flurry of trading activities that has resulted in this huge increase in the price. Second question : Is...