Continuing the chain of thought from my previous post , I got thinking as to whether the changes in the Indian economy since 1990's have been top down and visionary or merely reactionary and ad-hoc. The conclusion which I have reached has been that they are a combination, but above all - they are based on a Groundswell from the masses. While multiple sectors - IT, Retail, Financial Services and even manufacturing - have contributed to rise of the Indian Tiger; to illustrate my point, I would concentrate on the Financial Sector [ related post ]. Pre-liberalization, there were many shackles, like license raj, on the Indian financial services sector. But more gruesome were the factors of immature or absent regulatory supervision and resulting power of large investors to manipulate the free markets. The Banking sector meanwhile was dominated by PSU banks which were slow, bureaucratic and customer unfriendly. Starting the 90s there were many top down reforms starting like Dematerializ...

I have previously pointed a lot of links [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]to Atanu Dey's blog, also praising his RISC model for development of Indian rural/semi-urban areas. However, this comment on his blog (by someone with an alias Human Blasphemy ) sets out some very pertinent doubts on this model - reproducing it here: Dear Atanu, I heard you during your session on RISC at XIMB. One of the members asked you a question whether Rural Infrastructure can be developed through people’s participation and through microfinance. Which according to you is not possible, because large infrastructure projects have to be completed at one go. But the problem is that why will any private company invest in rural infrastructure? You only said that i dont know how it will be possible. I believe you will agree that in future Microfinance will not remain microfinance it will become SM-finance [Small and medium finance. We have already seen the examples of increased limits of credit in Andhra Pradesh, where Mf loans ...

I was reading this GigaOm piece on augmented reality when I realized that we may be very near towards making the Zipcode (or Pincode as we know it in India) completely redundant in the next 10-15 years. The article talks about how location aware application - Layar delivers ATM locations, restaurant information and available jobs on the phone’s screen as users point the camera at their surroundings. This innovation is a combination of 3 technologies coming together - GPS (location awareness), persistent connection (ability to extract information on the move) and image recognition (point the camera and the phone knows where you are). The latter is probably a complicated and expensive technology to build everywhere, but the former two are now almost ubiquitous. As I have written earlier , mapping services are improving every day in India - already maps to smallest detail are available for most Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities in India. With ISRO's project Bhuvan , imaging information should ...

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