Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Financial Inclusion, Universal Mobility and NREGS

Irrespective of all its short comings and corrupt practices, NREGS achieved reasonable amount of success in providing gainful employment to rural farm laborers. To make this program a real success, and to achieve its end objective, corruption has to be rooted out from this program. Corruption is mainly happening at distributing wages and deciding minimum wages. This can be completely avoided if the government opened bank accounts for all the beneficiaries and directly credit their wages to respective accounts. The main bottleneck is the poor penetration of banks in rural areas; which effectively prevents branch based banking for this purpose. The best solution for this problem is providing a mobile phone to all benificiaries and maintains their bank accounts via mobile banking. The balance amount, credit and debit information can be provided as alerts to the rural population. To overcome the problem of illiteracy the same alerts can be provided as audio visual instead of plain text. Through the same channel other financial products such as insurance and ULIPS also can be distributed. It is high time that NREGS implementation agencies has to re-look at the implementation strategies to eradicate corruption and take the program to next level by achieving bigger goals beyond day to day survival for the beneficiaries.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

A call for innovation in Government Services

NREGS is making lots of noises in media as well as in the country side. If reports are to be believed NREGS is having some positive side effects such as an increase in the minimum wage level in many states. But large scale corruption and lack of any permanent asset creation is making several people question the wisdom and sustainability of the much touted program. One reason why the Babus and local netas are getting away with corruption is the ignorance of unskilled laborers. Being illiteracy is a major problem for our nation and a root cause for corruption, especially in the villages, why can't the Government use NREGS for a literacy mission; just pay the laborers for attending literacy classes. May be 30 day classes per year for three years will be sufficient for majority of the illiterate laborers to attain functional literacy. Responsibility for taking the classes can be given to NGOs whoa re already working with these populations. If the example from Kerala has to be believed such a large scale literacy mission will be a success if it has necessary funds, large scale participation of people and support from government. Any way NREGS is not about creating long term infrastructure for nation, since the restriction on material cost severely affect the capability of NREGS to create any kind of long lasting infrastructure, so why don’t we use it to create a real, long lasting, high impact asset for the nation like literacy for its teeming millions?

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Some spine atlast

Looks like congress men are finally rediscovering one long forgotten organ of their body "The Spine". After performing mind-boggling aerobics according to the tunes of Chinese Party Of India for four long years, the grand old party is finally finding that the aerobics makes its stock nose diving faster than Sensex among the Indian populace who still have some self respect and want to see they are being ruled by a strong government. It will be a defining moment in India's history if the government is able to approach the IAEA for safe guard agreement on the nuclear deal. The left may continue to sulk, may withdraw their support also, but as everybody know, as an outfit which is highly depend on the ideological (and financial who knows?) help extended from across the border, left cannot support an agreement which is going to strengthen democratic India against Communist China. A whole new generation of Indians who are already thankful to Mr. Manmohan Singh for ushering a new era of prosperity by liberalization of economy during the 90s. Apart from minority of communist and communal fanatics, entire India will thank him once more for freeing Indian foreign policy from the cold war cobwebs and reclaiming the status of our great democratic, secular, liberal nation in the global power order. Not to forget the relief in traveling electric powered trains at cheaper fares and driving around the city on cars which run on cheap electricity.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

What happened to the wall clock

During a routine conversation among my friends we suddenly thought about the wall clock. The proud wall clock which used to have a principal place in the older house holds is now nowhere near its prime time importance. During my school days clock used to be an integral part of our life. It was one of the first equipment my dad has baught for our household. Right from my dad's office timings to my sister's school timings; everything has been decided by his majestic bells.

May be this is one industry which was not able to keep pace with change in market place. A re-branding or changed product placing might have helped the wall clock industry. Same way some simple innovations like having some instant glue for keeping the clock on the wall instead of the old fashioned keyholes might have gone long way in addressing concern about ruining the wall in many modern houses and flats. Looking at the way how titan was successful in placing the watch as an aspiration and luxury item, it wouldn’t have been difficult to place the clock also along those lines.