Salman Khan, a portfolio manager in California has created hundreds of free educational videos, available on his web site, the Khan Academy and on YouTube. These videos cover the basics of banking, finance and the current credit crisis — I saw a couple and they’re quite good.

Even more importantly, there are hundreds of videos on mathematics (algebra, calculus, trignometry, probability and more) and physics. Salman has three degrees from MIT and one from Harvard, so he knows what he’s talking about.

Anyone, anywhere in the world can benefit — all you need is access to the Internet. A good idea, fantastically implemented.

Thank you, Salman for investing all this time and energy.

Hygiene doesn’t make it too often to the media. However, as anyone who’s spent more than 24 hrs in India knows, the lack of adequate toilets is a huge, huge issue.

Two links on that subject: Bloomberg – India Failing to Control Open Defecation Blunts Nation’s Growth and a more rigorous analysis from Nimai Mehta -The Preference Bias in Sanitation: Explaining Failures in Public Provision

In the Wall Street Journal, Peter Wonacott says India Defies Slump, Powered by Growth in Poor Rural States.

Rama Lakshmi of the Washington Post said as much last month: Vast Rural India Sparkles As an Expanding Market

About 72 percent of India’s billion-plus people live in rural areas. For years, the poverty of rural India was seen as reining in the country’s economic growth. But today, analysts say, rural India is a critical audience for marketers because it has been relatively insulated from the crippling blow of the global slowdown.

India’s rural destiny still depends on good monsoon rains and robust agricultural production, but four years of bumper crops and heavy government investment in rural infrastructure have given birth to what some analysts call an emerging economy within India.

Last month, Patrick Barta of the Wall Street Journal called it The Rise of the Underground.

Given this, it’s not entirely coincidental that The American, the journal of the American Enterprise Institute wonders how Lalu Yadav managed to turn around the Indian Railways, the world’s 2nd largest employer (the Chinese Army is #1) and in doing so, morph from Huey Long to Jack Welch — The Indian Railway King

Now, with the cancellation of the IPL tournament in India and its move to South Africa, what message has gotten sent out?

Is the “offshoring” of the tournament a signal that the government is unsure of the overall security situation? Is this an indication of how over-stretched and creaky the governance infrastructure is?

What signal does this send to investors? After all, perception is everything, and for really large investments, it is typically “which BRIC ie, Brazil or Russia or India or China” which is often key.

Of course, it is also possible to read too much into one thing. Apparently England also got pushed out because their security would be over-stretched, so the questions raised above need to be qualified.

India’s elections ARE a mammoth exercise, and even more so, with terrorism threats.

What do you think?

India: Toward High-End Outsourcing: Vivek Wadhwa in Business Week claims that “companies on the Subcontinent (are taking) the outsourcing industry to a new level of expertise and competitiveness”. Well, with the rupee’s recent fall, presumably even low-end outsourcing is very attractive :-)

The Rise Of Delhi: Suman Bery has an interesting piece in the Business Standard on “the increasing range and intensity of accessible, close to world-class public discourse on issues of public policy on a very broad range of subjects” in Delhi. I suspect that this trend may well accelerate. I certainly don’t see anything remotely close to this in Chennai (during my quarterly visits).

The blogs that barked: How the blogosphere outed the Stanford fraud (in the US and in the Caribbean) before the SEC or mainstream media did. Question for readers: are there any instances of bloggers outing corporate or government fraud in India before the regulators or mainstream media?

If you’re a whistleblower in India and disillusioned by the lack of checks and punitive action, Harry Markopolos’s travails in his attempt to unmask the Madoff Ponzi scheme might sound familiar

Richard Fisher, President & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, tells it like it is. Commenting on C-Span about the “Buy America” provisions in the stimulus package:

Protectionism is the crack cocaine of economics. It may provide a high. It’s addictive. And it leads to economic death…We just cannot afford to go down that path. And I hope our senators, Democrats and Republicans, will be very sensible on that front (Link)

Alas, I fear we’re already started going down this slippery slope, whether it’s the “Buy American” guff or this ban on TARP recipients hiring H1-B visa holders (HT for latter link: Mohit Satyanand, via email)

Tying defence expenditure to GDP is no substitute for policy making.

India’s defence expenditure this year is pegged at less than 2 per cent of the GDP which is lower than India’s defence spending in 1962 — 2.1 per cent of the GDP. After the Chinese debacle, it jumped to 4.5 per cent in 1964. By 1994, it was slightly less than 5 per cent of GDP and it has been on a downward path since. In the mid 1980s, there was a demand to peg defence expenditure to a minimum of 5 per cent of the GDP.  For the last few years, the Parliamentary defence committee, Eleventh Finance Commission, retired military brass and strategic analysts have been active in the media asking for that figure to be pegged at 3 per cent of the GDP.

GDP is an important measure for determining how much India could afford to spend on defence, but it provides no insight into how much India should spend. Proponents of fixing a certain percentage of GDP as the minimum defence expenditure are status quoists, who use this argument as mere rhetoric, rather than as an articulation of defence policy. After the Mumbai terror attacks, it is politically taboo to disabuse this notion of a GDP-indexed minimum defence expenditure. Any analyst, politician or policymaker who dares to publicly question this argument risks being labelled unpatriotic, soft on terrorism and anti-national.

India could spend a great deal more or great deal less on its military capability than it does today, but that does not mean it should choose either course due to a mathematical formula. When there are fewer threats, the defence spending would be less. When there are more threats, a nation spends more. As threats evolve, funding should evolve along with them. Defence expenditure should be determined according to threat-based analysis and there are many substantive reasons why a proposal to bind defence expenditure with a fixed percentage of GDP is totally misplaced.

1] Using GDP to compare current defence expenditure to figures in the 1980s is misleading because India’s GDP has increased substantially over the last two decades. India’s GDP now is five times the size of what it was in 1980 (in dollar terms). Arguing that defence expenditure today is at a historic low as a percentage of GDP, and should thus be increased, is like a landlord arguing that because the tenant received a well-deserved pay hike, their rent should also be increased.

2] In the current economic climate, GDP does not necessarily provide the reliability in defence budgeting that many cheerleaders hope for; especially if India was to enter a recession, like the US or Europe. If India’s GDP decreases tomorrow, would the Indian armed forces support a concomitant reduction in their budget. Perhaps not, especially if India was at war or facing a threat on its borders.

3] Tying defence expenditure to GDP would erode budgetary flexibility and might threaten the civilian control of the military. By rigidly fixing defence expenditure to GDP, the prerogative of the civilian masters in determining whether defence expenditure should be higher or lower is curtailed. Civilian control of the military, an inviolable principle of Indian democracy, is likely to be undermined.

4] Another justification put forth by the proponents of linking defence spending to GDP is the erosion of the Indian armed forces under Nehru in the years after independence. While inadequate defence expenditure did play its part, it had also to do with post-independence downsizing of the armed forces, Krishna Menon’s failure to successfully manage military morale and Nehru’s misplaced belief in Panchsheel, UN and peaceful diplomacy.

5] The defence ministry and the defence services have been unable to fully utilise the amount earmarked for them every year. Over the last four years, nearly 16,000 crore rupees have been returned unused by them. Tying defence spending to GDP throws more money at the problem but does not force the bureaucrats and the generals to find ways to streamline the acquisition procedures.

6] Pakistan spends 6 per cent of its GDP on defence while the corresponding figure for China is 4.5 per cent. Comparing the percentage of GDP spent on national defence by different countries represents a flawed analysis. The argument is that if India’s adversaries devote a higher percentage of their GDP to defence, it represents a threat to Indian security. It proves that India has to increase its defence spending to maintain a relative advantage over them. Leaving aside the fact that India is set to spend many times more on its defence than Pakistan (or many times less than China) in actual dollar terms, comparing India’s GDP to Pakistan’s or China’s GDP does not give an accurate sense of relative military capabilities.

7] The usual Guns versus Butter argument. Money spent on defence is money not spent on education, reducing fiscal deficit, infrastructure, public health and other important non-military priorities.

Defence planning is a matter of matching limited resources to achieve carefully scrutinised and prioritised objectives. Smart planning relies on requirements, tradeoffs and a thorough evaluation of threats, not GDP, to determine defence spending. Replacing sophisticated and rigorous analysis with rigid formulas severs India’s defence planning from the evolving threat environment and widens the chasm between policy, planning and execution. Retaining flexibility in defence expenditure should not be viewed as a weakness, but rather as being capable of adapting to the  rapidly changing security environment in this age of unprecedented, diverse and dangerous threats.

If the armed forces and defence ministry can make the case that the threats India faces justify larger defence budgets, then larger amounts should be allocated towards national security. Unfortunately, fixing defence spending at 3 per cent of the GDP is a lazy substitute for national vision, political will and coherent policy making at the national level. Such a step would, instead, shield the troika of inept politicians, inefficient bureaucrats and staid military brass from careful scrutiny and throttle a much needed debate on national security.

– Ambitions dimmed but not abandoned: the lead piece, which seems more optimistic than I would have expected

– Foreign policy: Craving greater influence: on India’s foreign policy, which offers nothing new for readers of the Acorn. Most readers of the FT don’t read the Acorn. They should. At least, if they’re interested in India’s foreign policy.