Passionate About India

While I am jotting down my thoughts for this week's editorial, someone thousands of kilometers away in another nation would be surfing the internet at a speed nothing less than 1 Gbit/second – the highest in the world – at a price that is affordable to 95 per cent of the population of their country. The evolving knowledge economy is perhaps the second most important economic milestone in the world after the industrial revolution. The platform of this knowledge economy is primarily based on internet and internet based applications. This economy is the most appropriate indicator of globalization and how people belonging to different nationalities, cultures and linguistics can be brought into a common domain with mutually beneficial experiences. Millions of people in India have built their careers based on internet related services and applications. Online transactions too have increased at the speed of light. The spread of knowledge, education, healthcare, banking and agriculture th...

I have very fond memories of a great patriotic politician of India (very few such men can be found amongst today’s politicians), Vasant Sathe. Apart from his very intelligent, practical and radical views on the tax structure, I remember how he always compared Korea to India to show how a small nation could surge ahead so fast while we kept cheating our countrymen. When I went to Korea recently, I couldn’t but help feel the same; I even wrote about this a few weeks ago in one of my editorials. In the week gone by, I had the opportunity to sit with a gentleman who is a consultant to a company called Electrosteel Steels Limited. He told me the most amazing story of a venture – for setting up a steel plant – by one Mr. Kejriwal near Bokaro on about 1500 acres of land. It is a steel plant being set up with a capacity of 2.2 million tonnes. Hearing the fascinating story (I’ll explain later on why I found it fascinating) of this plant made me remember Mr. Sathe again. Amongst various things, ...