The emeritus professor at IIT-Delhi’s centre for biomedical engineering, Prof Dinesh Mohan was formerly the coordinator of transportation research and injury prevention programme. He tells Sopan Joshi about the state of knowledge on road safety and the politics of public transport: How does India perform on road safety parameters?
Why is fuel economy so crucial in India’s automobile market? We are a price conscious society. Till about 50 years ago, we were a deprived society. We have not yet become a conspicuous consuming society like some developed countries. Traditionally, the Indian society has not been a mindless consumer, we have always been mindful consumers. Wasting is looked
As far as WhatsApp jokes go, this one’s the best for me so far. A caller from US asks an Indian what was this talk of ‘monkey bath’ that US president Barack Obama was supposed to have with prime minister Narendra Modi during the former’s visit to India. Puzzled, the Indian realised it was ‘Mann ki Baat’ that his brother-from-another-mother was
As the curtains come down of one of the best Republic Days ceremonials in 65 years, focus shifts to the way forwards. Prime minister Modi’s promises of large scale reforms to make ‘doing business’ in India simple alongside making governance transparent & predictable have been welcomed by Obama and the America Inc. contingent, being wooed by Modi to buy-in into the ‘M
An IAS officer of the 1978 batch of Jharkhand cadre, RS Sharma was the director general of UIDAI before joining DeitY. He is the main driving force behind the ambitious Digital India programme. Talking to Pratap Vikram Singh and Praggya Guptaa, Sharma explains the role of his department in providing services and localised content to the rural population over th
For the sixth time in a row, Centre for Civil Society (CCS) features among the top think tanks in the world ranking 50th among the top think tanks. This was revealed by the annual study conducted by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Programme at the University of Pennsylvania. This ranking is a result of the comprehensive study of 6,681 think tanks from every region of the wor
How does the BJP propose to build its base in Tamil Nadu? For the past four to five years the BJP has been consistently working in Tamil Nadu. And our mobilisation capacity has got demonstrated in the near past. It has increased exponentially. We have been taking up issues which are core to the state. For instance, the Tamil Nadu fishermen issue. We worked to mob
In less than 15 months Delhi is going to vote again. During the last elections in December 2013, the national capital hogged all the limelight of the world as it was a different battle. The battle fought on rules set by one man and a party, fresh off the people’s imagination. Arvind Kejriwal, an outsider, a non-politician, someone representing civil society and crusader aga
Nayana Kathpalia has been fighting to save Mumbai’s open spaces. As the founder trustee of NAGAR, she has been working on solid waste management, improvement in air quality, preserving beaches, mangroves, heritage places, efficient road space management and water conservation. She is also a trustee of the OVAL Trust that has been instrumental in restoring and maintaining Mumbai’s ic
Do you feel that discrimination and violence against people from the northeast is more prominent in Delhi as compared to other metro cities? After visiting several metro cities, the committee observed that the number of people from the northeast living in Delhi was much higher. This can be a reason for larger number of such incidents taking place in Delhi. Peopl
Cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer and respiratory diseases and other non-communicable diseases (diseases which are not infectious) caused by these and other factors lead to more deaths than other causes of death in the world. In its report on non communicable diseases (NCD), the World Health Organisation (WHO) mentioned that in the south-east Asia region, nearly 8.
The internet today is used by 3 billion people, or roughly 40 percent of the world’s population. While it was used by less than 1 percent of the world’s population in 1995, the first billion was reached in 2005, the second in 2010, and the third billion in 2014. And it has been growing consistently at 8-10 percent over the last two years. Many countries have understoo
Damaged public health infrastructures, severe shortage of health care workers, cultural beliefs and behavioural practices and community resistance are some of the factors that contributed to undetected spread of Ebola virus and helped it stay hidden. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has released a 14-chapter report ‘One year into Ebola epidemic’ on January 15.
The scrapping of the 65 year old planning commission is an astute political recognition of the impatience of half the population, which is also below 25 years of age, with frameworks, policies and politics that have long lost their relevance. The failure of ‘planning’, as we defined it, is apparent even to a non-economist. China has raised per capita incomes to three
The tenth annual status of education report (ASER), 2014, says while the elementary education has grown over the last few years, the learning is still in crisis. Only a small improvement is seen in reading and the overall situation with basic reading continues to be disheartening. The report was released on Tuesday (January 13). The Pratham team covered over 5.6 lakh children fro
The government of India is a closed shop; its bureaucracy is recruited in its youth and rises in the hierarchy in order of seniority. One exception to this rule is the chief economic advisor, who is sometimes a professional economist who has made his name outside. Arun Jaitley has recently recruited Arvind Subramaniam from Peterson Institute in Washington. This is laudable both because Arvind i
A founder member of Penguin India, David Davidar spent 25 years with the publishing giant in various capacities before moving back to India to start his own publishing venture Aleph Book Company in partnership with Rupa Publications. He is also an acclaimed author of three novels. He spoke to Shreerupa Mitra-Jha about the new anthology of Indian short stories he has edited, and
When 24 out of the 45 Bharat Ratnas awarded till date belong to a single community (read brahmins), it indicates a problem. It indicates how in a country where diversity is such that the language changes every 20 kilometres, it is only a single community capable of producing more than 50 percent of the worthy Indians. The problem thus becomes two-pronged. Is it that in a highly d
It’s been more than a year since Prof Ashish Nanda took over as director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). An IIT-Delhi and IIM-A alumnus and former Robert Braucher professor of practice at Harvard Law School, Nanda, 54, is a man on a mission. At IIM-A he has brought in changes in the selection of students and introduced deferred admission system. In an interview w
A few months ago, prime minister Narendra Modi declared in his Independence Day speech the new government’s intentions to replace the existing commission with one more in sync with the socio-economic realities of the country. This declaration only served to formalise what a chain of events had been working up to: earlier this year, for the first time since it was set up in 1950, the commi
