School Lunches Are An Excellent Idea

Modi's Blind Spot: Smriti Irani?

School lunches are an excellent idea. And it should be universal. All government schools should implement this all the way through high school. दिन में कमसेकम एक बार स्कुल अटेंड करने वाले प्रत्येक बच्चे को संतुलित आहार मिल जाए --- balanced diet. नहीं तो मोदी demography, demography करते रहते है, अगर बच्चे बड़ी संख्या में malnutrition का शिकार होते रहें तो कोइ demographic dividend नहीं मिलने वाला।

स्कुल लंच के बहाने भी बच्चे स्कुल आएंगे, कि चलो पढाई कम मटरगश्ती ज्यादा करेंगे लेकिन लंच तो खाएंगे।

लेकिन खाना अच्छा होना चाहिए ------ balanced diet. दाल और सब्जी पर ध्यान दो तो ज्यादा खर्चा भी नहीं बैठता।

In America they don't do it right. बच्चो को कोका कोला पिलाते हैं। ये भी कोइ तरिका है? बच्चे मोटे (obese) हो जाते हैं।

एक स्कुल लंच और दुसरा प्रत्येक स्कुल तक ब्रॉडबैंड पहुँचा दो फिर देखो कमाल।

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Global Warming With A Twist

This image shows the Arctic as observed by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on September 16, 2007. The image shows a record sea ice minimum in the Arctic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The phrase global warming draws this image where everything is the same except the temperature keeps going up and up, gradually but relentlessly. And that was never to be. The weather is a complex phenomenon. That is why predicting the weather is such a hard science.

So the earth warms up due to green house gases. That melts ice. One place that happens is the Arctic. Used to be land and ice were connected all through the year. Now in summer there is enough melt that you can navigate around the Arctic. Well, that has implications. Now the super cold winds in the North have more room to play. And they come way South.

And so you get more turbulent summers (like Sandy hitting NYC) and colder winters. Global warming actually means more cold. Go figure.

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Modi: The Politician I Read Most About

Deng Xiaoping (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, being escorted by United States Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld through an honour cordon and into the Pentagon. They met to discuss bilateral security issues including the war on terrorism: see DefenseLINK news photos. US Department of Defense (). Retrieved on . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Narendra Modi has become the politician I read most about these days. Deep inside it is my suspicion that he might be India's Lee Kuan Yew, that he might be India's Deng Xiaoping. I need Modi to give India double digit growth rates, year in, year out, no dips, no recessions. Double digit is not eight per cent, not nine per cent. Double digit is 10% or more.

Culturally speaking I am an Indian. I am an Indian who grew up in Nepal. And I want Modi to succeed. I like his laser focus on the economy. I like his no nonsense attitude of management. I like his decisiveness.

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Bihar: Beyond Agriculture (2)

Bihar School (Photo credit: stevewright316)

Bihar: Beyond Agriculture

The idea would be to largely skip industrialization and focus largely on the knowledge and service sectors. Make Bihar a hub of organic farming. The goal should be to send Bihari vegetables to every kitchen table in India and then beyond. There is margin in green.

You can't have a knowledge economy without 24/7 electricity. And clean energy will come from the mighty rivers upstream in Nepal.

Start out by turning all of Patna into a free WiFi zone. If you can get to Patna from any place in Bihar within six hours, then it makes tremendous sense to turn the capital city into a free WiFi zone city. But you can't stop there. Much road building and bridge building has happened. Next in line is free WiFi, first in the capital city and then in every district headquarter.

You couple free WiFi with cheap Android smartphones. Just like the Chief Minister has been running a bicycle scheme for girl students, he should, after building the free WiFi zones, offer free smartphones to all students who finish high school if they live in free WiFi zones.

Universal primary and secondary education and universal basic health care are key. But then you have to build a string of higher education institutions across the state. You want to launch IITs and IIMs all over Bihar, or their equivalents.

All education and no job creation are no good either. Knowledge workers trained and working in Bihar could be serving companies all over the world. There is software work. There is customer service work. There is back office management work. Those jobs will be created in the private sector, but political guidance helps. You create the right environment, and you sell the vision.

Knowledge workers create more wealth than industrial workers. An emphasis on the service and knowledge sectors might be how Bihar grows from being the poorest Indian state to being a state that compares itself with the leading European economies in a few decades.

And knowledge work is not just about software. Training teachers, professors, health care workers, nurses and doctors is a big win idea. There are huge global opportunities for employment in the education and health sectors all over the world, as in Bihar.

Bihar is well-positioned to compete globally. It has to start imagining a per capital income of $5,000 a year. And the lifelong education concept means even adult Biharis are fair game.

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Modi Mantra

Districts of Gujarat (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Doing Big Business In Modi's Gujarat

In the most recent available data, Gujarat’s GDP shows a compounded average growth of 13.4% during Modi’s tenure, outstripping the national rate of 7.8% for the period. Thanks to Modi’s policies it has attracted investment in sectors like auto manufacturing and solar power. It has made advances in rainwater harvesting and irrigation, and offers a near 24-hour electricity supply statewide....... Miles of smooth roads, occasionally lined with pink, orange and white bougainvillea and kept clean by sweeping machines, let you zip around the massive city within a city that is Adani’s special economic zone. The idea is to have export-focused companies set up their factories in the SEZ, close to the Adani port. As additional incentives the billionaire has built a 40-mile railway line, linking the port to the national railway network, as well as a 1.1-mile-long private airstrip that SEZ tenants can use for their chartered flights. So far 23 companies have signed up. Thus Gujarat has gained some output and employment, but Adani has captured the rents. ...... The Adani Group was established in 1988 and became publicly traded in 1994. But its real rise happened under Modi’s reign in Gujarat. From 2002 to last March the group’s revenue rose from $765 million to $8.8 billion while net profits climbed even faster. During this period it constructed its SEZ, bought mines in Indonesia and Australia to ensure it had a steady supply of coal for its thermal power plants in India and launched Asia’s largest coal import terminal in Mundra. In 2011 it further expanded in Australia, buying for $2 billion Abbot Point, a coal terminal in Queensland. It also tacked on a hefty amount of debt–$13 billion–more than doubling since 2011. ....... the Gujarat government took some 930,770 square meters of his village’s grazing land for Adani’s SEZ. Adani got it for 19 cents a square meter. ...... has plans to expand its 7,350-hectare SEZ to 18,000 hectares.

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