Manifesto for primary education: A change not monitored is a change not desired. Ever since the middle class decided to discard government schools for admitting their children, the quality of education has declined drastically. The salary of government school teachers is several times more than the average salary of private school teachers. It is not…
Entrepreneurial transformation: Kerala model Few states, if at all, have taken such bold steps as Kerala has undertaken in the last few years to change the landscape for promoting innovations and entrepreneurship. There has been some impact of Startup Village also in this story. key elements of this strategy has been: On Jan4, state has…
Can the mind of bureaucracy be reformatted? Recently while addressing the probationers who have just entered the civil service, I was very impressed with many ideas that they generated on the spot for redesigning services, sectors, and social context of various products we use. I have always realized that young people when they enter the…
what do we do with trees uprooted in odisha: “The high-velocity cyclone Phailin that hit Odisha about a week ago is estimated to have destroyed around 26 lakh trees in the state”. after the last super cyclone, the sp of jagatsingpur had written to us ( the letterw as published in honey bee newsletter) how…
Managing an Entrepreneurial surge: learning to replicate good ideas The national media obsessed as it is, with grand trivia and hero worship, a la Thomas Carlyle ( 1869); a series of very important policy innovations coming from south of India have been missed. I think, we need to underline their significance and create a…
Delivering public services in time to 35 million citizens? Karnataka has crated a global benchmark in terms of delivery of public services through the Sakala programme. Starting in 2012, the state has created a delivery system now covering 419 services promising a timely and satisfactory delivery of each service. Revenue, food, transport for driving license…
Towards a new social contract: police and the society Recently while talking to around 150 probationers at National Police Academy, Hyderabad, several interesting issues emerged in the context of rising expectations of society and declining autonomy of police forces. It seems that all of us want police to keep villages and city safe, but…
Who is an authentic professional: responsibility of a professional in a public project intervention Recently while debating the design, location, and erection of flyover, a leading architect who had designed the new campus of IIMA and who is also a dear friend, Bimal Patel, said, “AMC just wanted my company to design the flyover…
A paradox of modern times is that as our awareness about new knowledge is increasing, our ability to develop a feel for the problems around us is decreasing. It seems we are getting immunised by an ever expanding exposure and awareness. Thus while we develop feel for only a very small part of our daily knowledge, we take even lesser initiatives for…
‘Take the Rs2,000, keep quiet, and thank god your girl is alive’–this can not be India in which we want to live. It is obvious that whoever thought that by merely making laws we will solve these problems was not close to reality. Police needs to be trained differently and also their responses to social…