Month: April 2011

From a post a year ago:

Looking at the mess that India’s politics is (and this is across all political parties) and an era of quotocracy (as Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it in an Indian Express article recently), I cannot help feeling that at some point of time Middle India will need to stop sitting back quietly and actually do want to do something about it. This will happen soon – probably before the next Lok Sabha elections.

Parties are pandering to their respective votebanks. The small numbers who band together are getting more than the large numbers who are divided. We need to think of a way how we in Middle India can come together to create India’s biggest votebank – and get solutions and money to improve daily life in the urban sprawls that we live in. The Silent Majority cannot and will not be for much longer.

This week’s links:

• 6 verbs for the next 20 years: From TechCrunch on a talk by Kevin Kelly.”Screening, Interacting, Sharing, Flowing, Accessing, Generating.”
• The Rise of the Second Internet: GigaOm discusses a report by Wedbush. “What is the thread that ties together the rapid rise of companies as different as Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, The Huffington Post and Quora”
• How anger can make us more rational: posted by Christian Jarrett. “Imagine you’re in a room with four people, one is lip-snarling angry, the others are calm. Who among them would you consider the most likely to think rationally? A surprising new study suggests that in at least one important respect it’s actually the angry individual who will be the more rational decision maker. How come? Because they’ll be less prone to the confirmation bias – our tendency to seek out information that supports our existing views.” (via RajeevM).
• Do less slower: by Seth Levine.”While early stage companies are always trying to squeeze just a bit more out of each product release, or streamline this process or that, or expand their product vision; sometimes slowing up a bit, refocusing on the core of the problem you are solving and taking a deep breath is exactly what’s needed.”
• India’s Education problem: from Wall Street Journal. “So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.”

With India’s big cities bursting at their seams and with small towns growing rapidly (as the latest census shows), India is urbanising rapidly. Even as one focuses on what can be made to improve quality of life in the existing towns and cities, there is a need to think of creating entirely new cities.

The fact is that India needs to urbanise and villages are not where the future lies, even though some in high places still hold views to the contrary. The reality is that the history of development and economic growth is also the story of urbanization and cities.

Consider the challenge that lies ahead for India. In the next 10-15 years, urban India will have to accommodate about 200 million Indians who migrate from rural areas away from agriculture and in search of manufacturing and services jobs. How will our cities manage?

Contest Overview.

It is a shocking fact that apart from a few notable exceptions, India does not have adequate uninterrupted electrical power supply. Our energy policies seem to be a decade or more behind our needs. And with oil prices staying in the $100+ per barrel range, energy availability  becomes a key issue that has the potential to constrain, if no derail, growth. Economic growth is impossible without greater energy supplies, and economic growth itself induces increased demand for energy. Cutting back on energy consumption as we develop is an impossibility.

China realised this over a decade ago, and has made huge investments in Africa and other regions. It has also made clean energy, especially solar, a key foundation for the future. India has still not woken up to the challenges ahead.

What are the big ideas that India needs in its energy policy? If resources (investment money) were no constraints, what would we do?

Contest Overview.

For India to develop, the shift from an agricultural economy to one driven by manufacturing and services is critical. Labour needs to be freed up from agriculture. For that, agriculture needs to become more productive.

Reforms in the agricultural markets are important for increasing farm incomes. There are too many intermediaries – including the government – which drives a very wide wedge between the price the farmer receives and the price the consumer pays. Making the supply chain shorter and more efficient through competition would help producers as well as consumers. Additionally, improved information systems would make price discovery easier and reduce the arbitrage opportunities that attract intermediaries.

So, what are the transformations that Indian agriculture needs? From availability of water and power to ensuring the land under cultivation can produce more, how can Indian agriculture be made more efficient?

Contest Overview.

India’s first-generation of economic reforms started in 1991 and continued for much of the next decade under different governments. But over the past few years, for a variety of reasons, they have stopped. Even as the economy chugs along powered by the private sector, there are clear limits to how fast it can grow and how far it will go.

What India needs is the next-generation of economic reforms. These have been promised many times, but not yet materialised. From labour to the judiciary, from police to the administration, from FDI in retail to reforms in the insurance sector, there is a lot of unfinished work in India to ensure that economic growth can exceed 10% on a sustained basis.

Which are the most important economic reforms that the government should focus on?

Contest Overview.

Even for a lesser cricket fan like me, the win on Saturday night was something to savour. The way it was done was amazing. It brought back memories of me as a cricket-crazy 16-year-old watching India’s 1983 win on TV, and it banished memories of another final 8 years ago when we got thrashed by Australia. The defining moment of Indian cricket and spirit for the next few years will now be defined by the night of April 2, 2011.

Like some, with India’s openers back in the pavilion, I too had given up hope. But this Indian team is unlike many in the past. With a captain willing to lead from the front, make bold decisions and take responsibility for the consequences, there is a self-belief and confidence that belies the age of the youngsters in the team.

A generation ago, Kapil Dev’s team came from nowhere to win. This time, Dhoni’s team withstood the intense pressure to justify the favourites tag.  There is no greater stage – and no greater pressure cooker situation – than playing at home in a World Cup final. Saturday night was an exemplary lesson for anyone watching in leadership, courage and teamwork.

From a post a year ago:

Over the recent Holi holidays, as I sat thinking about life past, present and future, I realized that I could take life in five-year chunks and think of a dominant theme for each of these chunks. So, here goes:

• 1984-1989: Education (IIT-Bombay and Columbia)
• 1990-1994: Work and Error (NYNEX, and failed efforts at doing a startup)
• 1995-1999: IndiaWorld (India’s first Internet portals, sold to Sify in Nov 1999)
• 2000-2004: Experiments (tried a number of digital ideas; none of them worked)
• 2005-2009: NetCore’s Growth (put the company on a growth path)

What will the next five years bring? Two things that I would like to do are: ensure NetCore can grow to a dominant consumer mobile data company, and help bring about a change in India’s political and policy climate.

This week’s links:

• The Edge Question: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” 164 contributors.
• On Android: by Bill Gurley. “Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not “products” in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own “economic castles.” Rather they are very expensive and very aggressive “moats,” funded by the height and magnitude of Google’s castle.”
• Mapping the economic power of cities: from McKinsey. “Today only 600 urban centers generate about 60 percent of global GDP. While 600 cities will continue to account for the same share of global GDP in 2025, this group of 600 will have a very different membership. Over the next 15 years, the center of gravity of the urban world will move south and, even more decisively, east.”
• The quest for low-cost solar power: from strategy+business. “[Stan Ovshinsky’s] inventions from 50 years ago enabled cell phones, laptops, and flat-screen TVs. Now, at age 88, he’s aiming to make solar power cheaper than coal.”
• In India, Doubts Gather Over Rising Giant’s Course: by Paul Beckett in Wall Street Journal. “No one is disputing that the boom has created huge wealth for the business elite and much better lives for hundreds of millions of people. But the benefits of growth still haven’t spread widely among India’s 1.2 billion residents. And a string of corruption scandals has exposed an embarrassing lack of effective governance.”

The last question on the governance model (before we move on to specific sectors) relates to how India should be perceived globally and in the neighbourhood. Sandwiched between Pakistan and China, India has few options to maneuver.

Is there such a thing as a soft state? Is our ‘softness’ with its genesis in the non-aligned movement now becoming a handicap in dealing with the rise of China? How should we deal with the rise of Islamic threats, especially in Pakistan?

The global situation is changing rapidly. Who could have anticipated the rapidly unfolding developments in the Middle East? What should India’s response be – even as it has ambitions of a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, but is still unwilling to take a clear stance on Libya? Is there an argument to be made for India to flex its muscles much more on the global stage and be seen as a regional counterweight to China?

Contest Overview.