Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Pranay Kotasthane’s starts off with a deliberately provocative statement after the forced resignation of the Union Education Minister recently. “Let me propose an idea that sounds radical but isn’t: India does not need a Union Education Ministry.”   He elaborates why. How did the constitution originally envision education? “General education was a State List subject, meaning that states had exclusive legislative power over schools and colleges.” But yes, the center had control over central universities (AMU, BHU), certain technical institutions it considered as being of national importance and a few other areas. All central ministry ideas on school education were advisory, and states could reject or accept them as they wished.   Like so many things, all that changed during the Emergency. The 42 nd amendment added “education, including technical education, medical education and universities” to the Concurrent (center) List. And with that: “The Union gained le...

Why does the Center have so much power in India? Why doesn’t the country have a more federal (more power to the states) structure? Nilakantan RS goes into that question in South vs North . If you expect all blame to fall on the two most powerful PM’s of India – Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi – you will be disappointed. But if you want to understand a complex topic, read on.   The idea of more power to the Center comes from our colonial masters, the British. After all, they wanted to extract maximum benefit from the unit called India – they weren’t trying to administer each region best. Back then, when Bengal was given maximum powers as the Center, the states like Madras Presidency and Bombay Presidency protested. To little avail.   Ok, but why didn’t we change that at the time of independence? As independence approached, states did ask for greater power. Jinnah was one of its supporters – he was hedging his bets. If a separate country would not be created for the Musl...

In her book on the Entrepreneurial State , Mariana Mazzucato says that even Apple, the company we associate with creativity (at least while Steve Jobs was in charge) didn’t really come up with new technologies. Rather, as Steve Jobs himself said about creativity: “Creativity is just connecting things… (Creative people) were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”   Mazzucato says the iPhone is the perfect example of “just connecting things”, each of which was created by the State, not the private sector. These include semiconductor devices, ranging from the CPU to dynamic RAM (DRAM) to hard-disk drives (HDD). LCD’s (Liquid Crystal Display) too originated from government funded labs. So too did those tiny enough to fit in a phone Lithium-ion batteries. The entire field of DSP (Digital Signal Processing) was based on advancements to the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Then there’s the Internet itself which was created by the US military. HTTP and HTML ...