…doesnt win elections, says Swami Aiyar. Read the piece, for some data that will throw light on how prosperity is spreading, albeit slowly, to the rural areas. Agricultural growth has been very slow, and rural areas without connectivity have grown less than globally-connected cities. English-speaking urbanites have got high paid jobs while rural folks have [...]
“If you believe that the money exists for building amazing futuristic cities in India, you must be certifiably insane.” That is the standard reaction to my scheme for building 600 cities for the 700 million Indians currently trapped in 600,000 villages. Where will the money come from? My answer is simple: out of thin air. [...]
I have a little game going on with some of my friends to place bets on which Indian airline will go out of business first. Given the cutbacks on routes and redeployment of airplanes, most of us came to the conclusion that Jeh Wadia’s Go Air would be the first to exit the ruthlessly competitive [...]
Responding to our Mint op-ed, a couple of readers wrote to me asking what exactly Dr Ambedkar had said about villages and life in villages. Well, Dr Ambedkar said a lot of things about villages and those who glorified it, including Mahatma Gandhi, but I did some quick digging around and found some of the [...]
Planning is uniquely human. Planning shapes not just human institutions and artifacts but indeed creates the future that is unknown and unknowable. Granted, the best laid schemes of mice and men, often go awry, as the poet lamented. When it comes to central planning, or planning by an all-powerful government bureaucracy, you can say that [...]
Creating a compelling vision which has the power to inspire is the first step to economic growth and therefore towards development. We have to imagine the future state first before we can make it a reality. Imagine that instead of 600,000 tiny villages, the same 700 million people were living and working in cities. Imagine [...]
“Can India Afford its Villages?” is the title of an opinion piece in today’s livemint.com (a joint HT and WSJ newspaper). The subtext says, “The answer to the problems of our rural economy paradoxically lies in urban development.” If you are familiar with my obsessions, you would suspect that I had something to do with [...]
Microfinance is touted as the big thing that can alleviate rural poverty. I personally believe, like a lot of others, that it is surely one of the means for the same. It is one of those things which gives us hope. Businessworld has been covering microfinance for a while now and I found a few [...]
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