RTE bill - historic!

The union cabinet passed the Right to Education Bill and this sure is historic. I don't want to jinx it with premature celebration when the bill hasn't been introduced in the parliament yet but the thought of it getting passed there too is amazing. This is the kind of empowerment i wrote about in my earlier blog. This bill will mean that every kid in the age range between 6 and 14 is entitled for education and also the teacher vacancy will be lesser than 10%.

This will bring down the illiteracy rate, provide better opportunities, increase social awareness and welfare, and slowly bridge the gap between the poor and rich. One of the beneficial side effects of this will be better government at both the state and the center. A better educated society knows its rights, necessities and importance of a good government. This means politicians will have to serve and keep their promises, unlike now, else they will be voted out. People will not fall for the gimmicks such as religious agendas, of political parties

Although this will cost the government close to a 1000 crore pa it is important to make this investment as the ROI will be higher. Where the government shouldn't falter is in bringing this bill to effect. If the education provided remains noncompetitive, infrastructure bad and teachers poor then the bill will have no effect in making the changes we expect!

Cleanse the sytem

The current financial in US is of historic proportion. The last such dip in market confidence, index, creditability, credit availability was way back in 1934. So might its be its once in your life that you will come across such a financial crisis. Also, this is not localized to just one country - the disadvantages of globalization, similar cascading effects of both development and crisis.

Without getting into how dumb were both the lenders and borrowers when they were sub-priming to glory or how dumb were investor bankers who collateralized those bad mortgages or how dumb were investors who bought those CDOs lets think of whats the solution. Actually there is no solution and it is evident with the market continuing to crash even after the bailout plan. The bailout plan of 700 billion not working shows that there is something fundamentally wrong. We should let the market correct itself; its similar to vomiting - a defense mechanism of the system to eject the bad content and cleanse itself. The process will help pick out the bad apples (such as AIG executives who spent a 400 thousand on a retreat after they were bailed out)

The current presidential is one of the keys to solving of this problem. I am not sure if either candidates can do anything different than whats already being done to save the market. But a change in the regime (Democrats winning it) might bring in the required freshness, and the confidence might go up at Wall St.

Now moving to our worries with Indian market. Our fundamentals are stilling strong but what is scary is we are moving away from our conservative nature of saving! The very reason Indian companies have their processes streamlined, their expenses kept to minimum and Indian managers being preferred over other managers is because of our conservative nature. But if we become too liberal with our liberal market and try and take capitalism to its next we will surely end up where many of the developed nations currently are! So dear Indians please tighten your purse strings and go back to being conservative.