Showing posts with label microfinance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microfinance. Show all posts

Monday, September 11, 2017

बिजली, पानी, इंटरनेट और Access To Credit



सबसे जोड़ access to credit पर होना चाहिए। जिसको अमरिका में small business sector कहा जाता है और इंडिया में जिसे informal sector कह के dismiss कर दिया जाता है, भारतके अर्थतन्त्रका सबसे महत्वपुर्ण हिस्सा वही तो है। Job creation होगा तो उसी सेक्टर में होगा नहीं तो नहीं।

आधार revolutionary चीज है। Biometric ID से रास्ते खुलते हैं। विश्वके प्रत्येक व्यक्ति तक इसे पहुँचाना होगा। छोटेमोटे प्रत्येक बिजनेसकी रजिस्ट्रेशन उतना ही आसान कर दो। प्रत्येक चायवाला लोन ले सके ऐसा कर दो। Job creation आप हो जाएगी। Small business सेक्टर को एक पांच साल का टैक्स holiday ही दे दो। नहीं तो taxman के डर से बिना कारण बहुतों रजिस्ट्रेशन ही ना करबायें। और बगैर रजिस्ट्रेशन के वो बैंकिंग सेक्टर से जुड़ सकते नहीं। Demonetization का एक बड़ा फायदा ये हुवा कि जो बहुत पैसा बैंक में न था वो अब सब बैंकों में जमा हो गया है। मोदी FDI के लिए दर दर भटक रहे थे। पुँजी घर के भितर ही पड़ा था काफी। Now the banks can lend more. उतना ही नहीं बैंको पर प्रेशर बढ़ गया है। लोगों को बिजनेस लोन नहीं देंगे तो कैसे होगा? बैंक में जमा किया गया पैसा ब्याज मांगता है।


प्रत्येक गाओं तक गीगाबिट हाई स्पीड इंटरनेट पहुँचाना --- प्रत्येक भारतीय को कॉलेज डिग्री दिलाने का इससे अच्छा इससे सस्ता तरिका क्या हो सकता है? गाओं गाओं में हाई स्पीड इंटरनेट पहुँच गया तो फिर उसके बाद किसी को सरकारी दफ्तर जाना ही क्यों?

प्रत्येक को स्वच्छ पिने का पानी मिल गया तो स्वास्थ्य के हिसाब से एक ट्रिलियन डॉलर का फायदा समझो। वो और सुबह सुबह एक घंटा योग। मैं RSS का कोई बड़ा फैन नहीं हुँ लेकिन अगर उसी बहाने सबके सब सुबह योग करने लगें तो मैं कहुँ सब ज्वाइन कर लो।

प्रत्येक चायवाला को access to credit मिला कि नहीं? उसी प्रश्न के जवाब में मोदी का भविष्य है।



Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Rethinking Education, Health And Entrepreneurship

Hillary Clinton taking the White House, the Senate and the House and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren beating the drums in the US Senate creates a perfect environment for a progressive agenda like has not been possible since the time of FDR. This is not about making the right noise, this is not about reckless tax and spend your way to utter powerlessness, this is not about whiny liberalism when you would rather be in opposition so you can sneer at power and take delight and get nothing done. This is about creating a new American majority and being the natural party of power for a generation.

I am for tax increases and tax cuts and closing the loopholes of corporate welfare. The most immediate thing America could do for global warming is stop subsidizing dirty energy.

A 65% death tax is of utmost importance. Everyone with a net worth of $5 million and above should take one look at Donald Trump and conclude "I don't want my children to end up like that" and eagerly agree to a 65% death tax. Love one another was never meant to stop with your family.

Health has to start with wellness. Industrialization is not the only thing America has messed up and brought the planet to the brink. The American antibiotics industry and the industrial scale agriculture industry and the media have colluded to kill half the gut bacteria of Americans. That is the number one reason Americans are so fat. Eating right is half of wellness. More fruits and vegetables is so important somebody named Michelle Obama could become president just on that agenda.

America should import as many yoga gurus from India as it has imported software engineers.

If Americans simply learned to walk more and talk more, that would go a long way. When someone is lonely they are more likely to overeat. Gluttony is sin. Because you are abusing a body that God created in His own image.

Americans were fat enough in 1980 but if Americans were to slim down to the obesity levels of 1980, America saves over a trillion dollars in health care. That is how you save Social Security and Medicare, by everybody slimming down.

By the time you turn 35, you should eat half of what you were eating before. By 45, it should be 50%.

But once you fall sick, you fall sick. Adding the public option was liberal fantasy when Obamacare was enacted, now it has become a national emergency. And expand Medicaid and Medicare. Enlarge the network of free health clinics. Fund them better. You want to get the best of Canada and America. The blend is the best.

Mental health has to be elevated to the same status as physical health. That is the right way to fight the war on drugs. But America is such a fundamentally racist country the resultant stress among African Americans alone gives rise to mental health issues. America has to cure racism like it has to cure obesity. The cure now exists.

Every father and mother on earth is but a foster father and foster mother. It takes a planet to raise a child. All children were created by God. No child should have to go hungry. Pre-K education has to be universal. Only strong families and strong communities can sustain strong schools, but strong schools can help foster strong families and strong communities. Faith is the glue that brings it all together. African Americans should learn gratitude and forgiveness more than anyone else if they want to get ahead of everyone else. The best prayers are prayers of gratitude.

Digital technologies have not been used enough in education to bring the costs dramatically down. Every textbook at school and college should be available online for free in PDF format. There should be online communities of students. All lectures should also be available in video format online for free.

Prices on education should be falling like prices on computers have fallen over the decades.  

And America should legalize the 16 million who are already here. You save a trillion dollars immediately if you do not round them up and deport them. Also, the American economy would quite literally collapse if you do somehow manage to deport them. America wanting to deport the 16 million is like a semi truck moving at 70 miles per hour saying, I am flying now, get rid of some of those wheels.

And bring in one to two million  new people every year. You don't want to create all sorts of high paying jobs and have no one to take them. Immigration is the only reason America is the number one economy. Immigration is the only available way to shore up Social Security and Medicare. Besides all world will become one country long before 2050.

America has a mission. That is a total spread of democracy. Instead of invading countries it should give immigrants voting rights. Irish immigrants used to vote in Boston as green card holders. America is not a white country of white immigrants. America is a country of immigrants, period.

Sin is sin. If you are poor and sinful, you are sinful. If you are rich and sinful, you are sinful. Donald Trump is an unrepentant sinner, a messenger of hate, a Pied Piper to what he calls "the poorly educated." And he is in good mood because he is going to milk that crowd all he can after November. He is going to build a TV network. Trump University was a fiscal scam. Trump TV is going to be a moral scam. The dude envisions peddling hate all the way to making a billion dollars, or so he thinks.

The Democrats should not give up on that crowd. The message should be, repent, let go of the hate, come to love. Love all your fellow human beings. Racism is sin. Sexism is sin.

This crowd most stands to benefit when the Universal Basic Income is enacted.

Women and minority populations could gradually break the corporate glass ceilings, but the faster way is to simply blow it all up through entrepreneurship. It is for the progressives in power to fight monopoly situations, and to bring forth the education and health paradigms of a knowledge economy, and to expand access to credit so more people can go into entrepreneurship.

2017 should be a great start to a great progressive year.  

America should consider spending 10% of its defense budget to connect every human being to the Internet. You can not bring everyone to America but you can take America to everyone.

Getting global warming right is super important. Global warming is proof humanity has not handled industrialization well. Only a humanity that can do right by climate change could truly harvest the technologies of the future. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, biotechnology, all these are much deeper digs into nature than old industrialization. They could be much bigger disasters than global warming, but they don't have to be. They will not be if Universal Spiritual Centeredness is achieved. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, biotechnology are all limited to the first four dimensions. God is the Ultimate Intelligence, the 10th dimension, the final dimension.

Barack Obama experienced racism from racist Republican Senators. Hillary Clinton should be prepared for some sexism on the global stage, to be blunted with the might of the most powerful political office on the planet. You should hear some of the things Duerte and Zhirinovsky are saying. Ordinary women around the world are watching with much hope. It is about them. 160 million women in America should wake up on behalf of the three and a half billion women out there.

Pro life is caring about every child on the planet at concrete policy levels. Microfinance is the magic bullet with which to touch two billion women. Did I say entrepreneurship? Put 10% of America's defense budget into microfinance.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

2016 And Gender

The real gender issue this election cycle is that the fourth industrial revolution is going to balance it out for women in the workforce.
  • Universal pre-K education everywhere in the country. 
  • Universal child care, many at the workplace itself or very near it. Self driving cars will mean less space needed for parking. 
  • Paid maternity and family leave. 
  • Universal public transportation everywhere in the country. It should no longer be a NYC or big city thing. 
This will also mean more women entrepreneurs will take the plunge. Capitalism moves fast when new companies get formed fast and furious. 

And there is a global dimension that is by now so in your face, thanks to social media. Gender empowerment is not a national issue. 
If anything technology makes gender more of an issue. You can ignore it less and less. Sexist jokes and sexist comments should be offensive. 


Saturday, June 06, 2015

The M-Pesa Concept Applied To Voting

Just like the blockchain technology can be used for bitcoins but also for many other things, I believe the basic technology and promise behind the wonderful m-pesa can be leveraged for the cause of democracy in the developing world.

You should be able to vote through SMS. You should be able to participate in internal voting inside political parties. You should be able to use this for what is often called electronic voting. You would reply to a SMS, send 1 for candidate A, send 2 for candidate B and so on.

Mobile phones that do voice calls and text messages are pretty widespread by now. Almost everyone has one.

I believe SMS can also have ecommerce applications.


Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?
Paying for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York ...... now used by over 17m Kenyans, equivalent to more than two-thirds of the adult population; around 25% of the country’s gross national product flows through it. M-PESA lets people transfer cash using their phones, and is by far the most successful scheme of its type on earth. Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money? ...... Once you have signed up, you pay money into the system by handing cash to one of Safaricom’s 40,000 agents (typically in a corner shop selling airtime), who credits the money to your M-PESA account. You withdraw money by visiting another agent, who checks that you have sufficient funds before debiting your account and handing over the cash. You can also transfer money to others using a menu on your phone. Cash can thus be sent one place to another more quickly, safely and easily than taking bundles of money in person, or asking others to carry it for you. This is particularly useful in a country where many workers in cities send money back home to their families in rural villages. Electronic transfers save people time, freeing them to do other, more productive things instead. ........ M-PESA has since been extended to offer loans and savings products, and can also be used to disburse salaries or pay bills, which saves users further time and money (because they do not need to waste hours queuing up at the bank). One study found that in rural Kenyan households that adopted M-PESA, incomes increased by 5-30%. In addition, the availability of a reliable mobile-payments platform has spawned a host of start-ups in Nairobi, whose business models build on M-PESA’s foundations. Mobile-money schemes in other countries, meanwhile, have been held up by opposition from banks and regulators and concerns over money-laundering.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

$100 Billion Plan To Save The World

The bitcoin logo
The bitcoin logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  1. Scale out the Google/Facebook drone initiative to blanket the planet with internet access, effective immediately. Cost $25 billion.
  2. Design a $25 smartphone and flood the Arab countries (and subsequently rest of the world) with them. The dollar a day crowd gets the phone for free. Distribute shared solar chargers alongside. Cost $25 Billion. 
  3. Use Bitcoin technology (zero cost for money transfers) and mPaisa technology (bank account on your phone, you get money on your phone, you pay back on your phone) to radically expand microfinance globally. The goal is to not generate any profit, just to keep the fund intact. Cost: $50 Billion. Anyone with a phone with internet access can borrow upto $100 per year as long as they keep up with their monthly payments. If they miss three monthly payments in a row, they don't get to borrow any more for the following two years, after which they can choose to get back in the swing. You need a phone, and you need to send in an image of your fingerprint to a central database, and your picture perhaps. There is an app for that. A credit rating agency is instantly being set up. This program comes from the air. There is nothing between the dollar a day crowd and the internet. The interest rate on the loan is 5% per year. This is to make room for the fact that 5% of the borrowers will default. You can only get $100 per year for now. The next Warren Buffet should add another $50 billion to this. This would be the magic bullet of curing poverty. 
The best way to fight ISIS (population: 20,000) is to show to them and to the two billion Muslims and everyone else how small and irrelevant they are. They don't speak for two billion people. This political challenge is primary. The military threat, though very real, is secondary.