Yups, am back in Gurgaon and it is winter again ... or something approaching winter. It gets very cold in India - but these days its still hovering around 20 degrees. So pretty nice weather.
I opened my first paper today in India after 2 1/2 months (this is ofcourse not counting the online journals). There was a good article on tackling corruption and another one on the poor state of education in India today. A very good article was by a UN operative who talked about how the effects of the global crisis should not erode the progress made by development in South Asia and South East Asia. She had some pretty interesting statistics to share.
Going one by one, the first article dealt with corruption. Dec 9 being anti-corruption day, the article talked about how everything had been identified - the roots and causes of corruptions along with the modus. However, not enough was being done to counter it. I agree with this, but I also think that political will to tackle corruption will be weak in the present state. It is only when a suitable mechanism is put in place and good incentives given to career officers can corruption be dealt with effectively.
IITs, IIMs and IISc - but apart from these very few have emerged as quality institutions in India. The reasons range from poor funding for institutions to poorly paid teachers which then translates to poor institutions. The solutions.... need a lot of consideration. Buying a degree has become easy and unfortunately this aspect has not received much of its due.
Regarding the effect of the financial crisis, there has been a fall all around the board. Economic growth in Asia is expected to slow down to 6.1% from last year's 7%. Japan and Singapore are in recession. Equity markets have fallen by 35% in India and in China it fell by 21%. Excessive currency fluctuation has seen the value of the Indian rupee fall 13%.
The author, Noeleen Heyzer talked about how the 1997 crisis had taught countries to hedge their risks by the setting up of institutions such as the Asian Bond Fund, through which the central banks of countries have set aside some reserves in a pool to invest in bonds of Asian governments. The ASEAN+3's Chiang Mai initiative is a network of bilateral swap agreements which provides forex reserves support thorugh a system of bilateral currency swaps.
Despite these in place, more needs to be done to shelter ourselves from the current economic crisis being faced by Europe and the US. I'll be reading and writing more on what I think are possible solutions, but first one really needs to understand how this whole mess occurred in the first place. That is taking some time.
Now for my next topic - and that of walking. It is important to walk at least 45 minutes a day and I encourage everyone to go for that walk. I read a very good quote one day which said that the 45 mins you don't exercise will end up being the 45 mins you spend waiting outside the doctor's office. In economics, we say that everything has an opportunity cost. Well, not exercising will cost you bad health. It's as simple as that. So do take out those 45 mins and go for a walk!!
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