Quick notes: Choking India | Photo shoot...

• Babudom choking India: Earlier in the pandemic, the govt solicited bids for 162 PSA plants for on-site generation of oxygen at hospitals, but it took 8 months to award the contract, and so far only 33 of them have been installed (and not all are functional) across 15 states.
  
  Integrated Vaccine Complex: Nine years on, no production in Centre's IVC in Tamil Nadu.. "Kept idle in the interest of private companies".



• Gaurav Rai, Bihar's 'Oxygen Man': "Our oxygen bank provides cylinders free of cost. I spend Rs 20,000 of my salary and also a share of my wife's earnings for the purpose".



• Maldives photo shoots: Lack of empathy. "The cases of Covid are multiplying. Have a heart. Please don't taunt those who are suffering."



• Covaxin for US Market: Results are remarkable due to the presence of multiple variants of COVID-19 that were present during the Phase III study conducted by Bharat Biotech.



• Starship look-alike: China’s state rocket company unveils rendering of a Starship look-alike.. China has tracked SpaceX from the beginning.



• Treated wastewater for chip making: TSMC tackles a major issue in chip fabrication - the world's first industrial wastewater treatment center that could "ultimately meet nearly half of its daily need for water for chip output". Chip production requires different kinds of water — some steps require ultra-pure water, others need clean water.



• Raag Nat Kamod: Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur




• Remembering Nisargadatta Maharaj: "After reading I am That a few times, I developed a great faith in Maharaj’s state and power. I knew he was the real thing. I knew that if I went to see him I would accept any advice that he gave me. Around that time I heard reports that a couple of foreigners I knew had been to see him, and that he had advised them both to go back to their respective countries. This alarmed me a bit. I was very attached to being in Tiruvannamalai, and I definitely didn’t want to go back to the West. Something inside me knew that if Maharaj told me to go back to England, I would go. I didn’t want to leave India, so I held off going to see him for a few months". --David Godman

Quick notes: Amazon reviews | Failing to innovate...

• Fake Amazon reviews being sold in bulk: Dozens of Facebook groups found where sellers offer refunds or commissions in exchange for fake, favourable reviews.



• “Test the Boundaries of what is allowed by law”: Amazon favored big sellers on its India platform – and used them to maneuver around rules meant to protect the country's small retailers from getting crushed by e-commerce giants.



• Govt role in R&D - China vs India: "In semiconductors, the upfront investment is so massive, that you want some assurance that there is a market for what you are going to build. Because the day you build your facility, it is not going to be state-of-the-art. It will be state-of-the-art only with incremental acquisition of knowledge and expertise. China aimed very low in semiconductors, but they got an assurance that there will be a buyer for that. Their govt made sure Chinese consumption is pointed towards the production of SMIC. Indian govt has never been willing to give such an assurance".
  




• National Research Foundation: In 2018, India spent 0.69% of its GDP on research and development compared to China’s 2.1%. India had just 255 researchers per million people in 2017. Israel had 8,342 per million in the same year. The NRF will distribute 100 billion rupees annually for its first five years.



• Not everything is translatable into dollars: We have seen clear evidence that big dams are not sustainable in the Himalayas.

Hindu society has been fighting for an uninterrupted and free Ganga for more than 100 years. Listen to what Sushma Swaraj said in the Parliament when her party was in opposition. pic.twitter.com/cWovMTScbb

— Upword (@upword_) February 12, 2021




• No more engines for Jaguars: Jaguar will be EV-only from 2025; Land Rover will be 60 percent BEV.
  



• Big Tech Blinks: In Australia, Google may soon pay lump sums for news . . . . Facebook goes nuclear, banning all news posts in Australia



• Don't party yet: We handled Galwan and its fallout well. But that is not the end of the story. India has now clearly emerged in Beijing’s eyes as the one immediate adversary who will not concede to China’s political will for economic and commercial reasons. That means new contours of conflict have been drawn for the future.
  



• Taypayer funding for Abrahamics: Tamil Nadu hikes Jerusalem pilgrimage number to 1,000  



• Kundali comes to the west: New dating app for astrology lovers and skeptics alike  

Quick notes: Solar on border, Right to Clearance...

• BSF  to use solar energy for its remote out-posts, where no electrification is possible till date. 5MW solar energy plant in Gujarat.
  Solar's great advantage is that you can keep it distributed (while employing micro-inverters). A centralized plant that can be bombed makes no sense.



• Telangana cuts red-tape: The Right to Clearance will involve a provision to impose a fine of Rs.1,000 on officials for each day of delay in granting clearance to a project, besides allowing businesses to know the exact reason why a proposal is stuck.



• Make-in-India: Mahindra bags multi-million dollar aerospace deal with Airbus



• Who needs drones from Amazon? Smartphones and Motorcycles Fuel Hyperlocal E-Commerce in India.



• No more a Garden city: B'luru air 200 pc more polluted than national quality standard.



• Ayurvedic lead poisoning: Some preparations which use “bhasma” or ash may contain heavy metals such as lead, arsenic or mercury. ... So many quacks claim to be Ayurvedic experts.



• Preventing transmission of dengue fever: A group at Monash University has infected mosquitoes with bacteria that prevent the dengue viruses from taking up residence in the mosquito.



• Can China Be Contained?  Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China 



• Yogi Naeem:

Missed opportunities for national development

1) Roads: We have mastered the art of making "perfect roads"; great on paper and absolutely pathetic in execution. Technically, the cost of road construction (where prices are dictated by the lowest tender) are as:

a) Cost of land acquistion by the Government; usually palming off the peasants by intimidation, below market cost and illegal detentions.

b) The public money used to award contracts and tenders inclusive of the cost of kickbacks feeding from the lowly peon to the corporator and the "party funds".

c) Finally, the "inferior quality material" used by "engineers and contractors" and exploitation of the poor labor.

2) Railways: Huge behemoth. Multiple proliferating unions feeding on like leeches to the public funds. In 50 plus years has not been able to channelize the freight and passenger fares. The maximum speed (in certain stretches) is 160 kmph (for India's fastest trains) and is near bankruptcy because it has been allowed to slowly rot away under populism.

3) Refer to point number 1 for why railways are allowed to bleed dry. The Government has come up with an ingenious way of "Build Operate and Transfer model" where a private contractor is allowed to "collect toll" till 30+ years (by the time, the old files would have rotted away). There is double taxation; what you have paid in your road taxes and other "infrastructure cess" on petrol/diesel, you pay again while passing through these toll barriers. Brilliant.

4) No waterways: What could have been used to interlink the national rivers of India to develop indigenous waterways has been allowed to squander away. By creating a huge bogus claim of an "environmental disaster". No one knows the impact because it has not been allowed to develop. Now precious funds are being withered away to import Oil and pay the masters for their opulent life styles in Saudi and Middle East.

Is it even surprising that all of this spawns from the "Nehruvian model of development"? Or the huge socialist structures that have been unleashed on us by ensuring perpetual slavery to the Government of India?

Of course, no one argues about it because it has become our way of life here.

goldman sachs: ten things for india to achieve its 2050 potential

jun 20th, 2008

http://www.livemint.com/2008/06/16235741/CB9BCB3C-5825-4AD6-9604-042202BBC985ArtVPF.pdf

i'd add an 11th commandment:

11. get rid of manmohan "i must have the nuke deal or else i'll resign" singh, palaniappan "mr. 11%" chidambaram, sonia "numbered swiss account" nehru

most appropriate, now that these worthies have managed to get inflation up to (an admitted) 11%, although in reality it is closer to 25%

India demands answers on Gorshkov

Why indeed the inordinate delay? This deal has been heard of since the early 1990's. With defence procurement completely mucked up by cussed bureaucracy and Tehelka type obstructionism, merely deciding on a weapons platform and negotiating a contract takes an average of 15 years. The Yanks cannot be trusted/won't sell us anything worthwhile, Karat & Yechury raise hell over any dealing with Israel and the Russians, apparently are still stuck in Soviet era inefficiency.

The public sector R&D establishment as well, unfortunately has a culture of endemic delays, typical of the Nehruvian state. The dhimmi adherents of the "guns vs butter" syndrome like Prafool Bidwai and Sandeep Pandey, of course would be happy to have DRDO manufacturing coffee machines and refrigerators..... Actually, cancel the refrigerators - those would be defined as "luxury items" by the Stalinists, only members of the Kaangress/CPI(M) politburo would be eligible to own one if they had their way!!!

At any rate, the Indian Navy is likely be left without an aircraft carrier for an extended period of time when the Chinese encirclement of India is assuming menacing proportions......