Poverty and food security bill

What is the definition of poverty ? Is it that person who does not have enough money to buy food for himself & family or a house or a car ? Even if they are given money to buy these things they will not become "rich". This money will be spent on buying the basic needs and when that money is spent they will rejoin the ranks of poor. I think poverty is dearth of skills that allows a person to earn money and lead a good life and the only way to make people non-poor is to provide them with the resources & skills that help them earn money to fund basic and not-so-basic-needs of life.

Lets look at a family in a village right now and try to find the reason why they are poor. There is enough food available to remove hunger in most of the villages. I believe it more to do with the lack of healthcare and education infrastructure. They can earn enough money to feed themselves. But thats it. They spend all the money in food, clothes and other day-to-day needs. They manage to save very little and these savings are spent when somebody falls ill in the family. There are not good doctors in the villages so people are compelled to get healthcare in expensive private clinics. There are not good schools in the villages and they can either spend a fortune to send their kids to city schools or let them play all day long. This leaves a trail of poor people who are ready to migrate to cities and sleep under the over bridges. It is not as if our cities do not have enough jobs. On the contrary there is huge dearth of people with skills. However we do not have enough people with these skills because these people never managed to learn these much needed skills.

How does food security act fit into all this ? Why is government trying to feed people for almost free ? Won't it make people dependent on government and hence lazy to work ? Is it not better to tackle the problem of skills and let people earn their bread themselves?

It is not such a simple problem. Food is a very basic and immediate need. People cannot be compelled to send their children to schools when their very existence is in question. They take a shortcut to earn their living without gaining enough skills due to poverty which in turn keeps them poor for life. What availability of food is not going to do is to make people rich. However it will kill hunger and bring extremely poor people out of their misery. It will take their mind off this problem. It will make children of our country not beg for food. It would stop families from sending their children out in the cities to be servants and stop people migrating from villages to cities in such large numbers.

If combined well with NREGA, right to education and a massive upgrade in healthcare infrastructure then it would trigger people to think long term, send their children to schools & colleges and finally come out of poverty forever. I know it's a far fetched dream and given the track record of our government in past one is justified in being skeptical. Yet I am glad to know that the government is working on this problem and their is some strategic thinking and movement on the ground. I hope to see a poverty free India in next 10-20 years.

Sehwag!

Another century from Sehwag! The player who has no foot movement and who could have been almost written off by the greats of Cricket, had it not been for his aggressive run making. I believe he has been tagged as lucky batsman quite a few times by likes of Gavaskar. Sehwag is a prime example of why hard work and determination are more important than talent.

It's not about the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog!

The microfinance debate: SHG vs JLG

For last few weeks a huge debate has been brewing in the microfinance space. AP government has cracked down upon MFIs and passed an ordinance to stop them from lending to people who are part of SHGs(or self help groups), unless those SHG members obtain a NOC from their SHG.

To the uninitiated, MFI use a model called JLG (joint lending group) and government supports SHG. The basic difference between these two is the fact MFIs lend money from the banks to make loans to poor people of the JLG model. In SHG model, on the other hand, participants are encouraged to open a bank account themselves and put their joint savings into it. When they need money and SHG approves it, they get a loan. They can also get money from bank, where they have a bank account, if they need. However in most cases, such external borrowings are very little as bank doesn't reach out to them. In the end, very little money from outside the economy is pumped into the local economy.

In my opinion, SHG model doesn't work that well when it comes to poverty alleviation. Here's how I'd like to present my point:

Diwali, to many, seem like a waste of time and money. How can such a poor(?) country put up with such spend thrift traditions! In spite of all the arm-chair musings, every time it comes along, people end up spending more money than last year. In the end, it ends up circulating a lot of money from the banks and pockets of the people to the deepest & darkest(TM) corners of our country. People buy clothes, sweets, fireworks, electric lightings, earth lamps, tisi oil, shares (on diwali night) etc. Most of these goods end up pushing money from people who have it to people who need it as these goods come from the toil of the poorest of our brothers. Lets look at these goods in a little detail and look at their value chain.

Buying of clothes -> cloth shop owner -> cloth weavers -> cotton farmers
Buying of sweets -> sweet shop owner -> poor people making these sweets -> sugar seller -> sugar companies -> farmers of sugar cane etc

Had there been no diwali, any other festivals or marriages, we would end up killing our clothing industry, cotton farmers, retail cloth shops and lively hood of other millions.

Currency only makes sense if it can be spent. Similarly SHGs are not doing any good by persuading people to put most of their money in the bank. As more and more people do it, the local economy suffers from lack of liquidity.

JLG model on the other hand *pumps* money in the local economy, which spurs *real* growth. People buy more, work more to earn more and this increased economic activity in turn empowers a lot many other people in the local economy to contribute effectively and feed their families. At the end of the day when these people have enough money they will turn to banks to save it. Pressurizing them to use SHGs exclusively is just going to make more people poor. In my view government is sticking to a model which is pre 1991 and doesn't make much sense in a globalized, connected economy.

Note: This post is about my thoughts & ideas and not of my employer's.

The Milk Network

India is going through a major bout of malnutrition. The government has been trying to fight this with schemes like mid day meals etc. They have been partly successful with these schemes. Still, there is a lot of poverty and malnutrition. Come 2013-14, we will have food security act providing 35 kg of wheat, rice and millet to almost 75% households in the country at Rs 1-3. This is a very good scheme to remove hunger. I believe this may remove a lot of hunger from this nation.

However, we cannot build a great nation just by removing hunger. We need to feed our young brigade with good nutrient food which should catalyze their growth as an individual, empower their minds to take us to the top. It is important for us to realize that feeding and educating the young India is like investing in the future. These kids today will make us a real superpower tomorrow. We need to feed kids with nutrients which makes their minds sharp such as vitamins, calcium, protein, sodium and potassium etc. Milk has all of these in very generous quantities. India is also a biggest producer of buffalo milk in the whole world with yearly production of 59 million tonnes.

How do we make sure all the kids of India have regular access to milk ?
I believe we need to build a milk network. A network of people who provide kids in India with free milk. 250 ml of a day to each and every kid in India. There are about 35 crore children in India below 15 years of age. This may exclude those who do not need free milk. This leaves us with about 15 crore such children (assuming a 40-50% poverty). Bottom line is, how much it is going to cost us ? 15 crore children, 250 ml each, at Rs. 3/packet for 300 days is 900 * 15 = 13500 crore/year or $3 billion/yr.

How big or small is this number ?
It is small if you consider that defense budget of India is about $32 bn/year. or that the NREGA this year was 39000 crore or about $9 bn or that Mr. Mukesh ambani's new home costs about $2bn! At the end of the day if we can get 10000 companies to donate an average of 50 lakh and 10 lakh rich Indians (in India and world wide) to donate an average of Rs. 50,000/year, we can surely make it work. We should also be able to get some grants and funding from big donor agencies. Govt. funding this is also a reality. However, this is a massive effort.

Or

we can look at a completely distributed and volunteer based model in which people(or housing complexes) start donating milk to few kids in the neighbourhood. This way may be a little fragile to start with but could be more sustainable and empowering. To integrate this to the milk network we can build an online space where people running this leaf of the network can feed data back to the network, ask for monetary help & guidance and share experiences & data. I believe it would be important for this network to monitor statistics such as weight of kids, school attendance etc to make a strong case that such a network really works in uplifting the society and get funding. I also believe that kids who will benefit from this scheme would later in their life would be more compassionate and able citizens of our country. It goes without saying that these kids would surely feed the network when they become able.

For now I have started giving milk to my dhobi's 2 kids and plan to put 3-4 more such kids in the roaster! I plan to pursue this idea if I get like minded people so please ping me if you are interested.

Ruby: Convert numbers to Indian currency format using regex

10000.to_s.gsub(/(\d+?)(?=(\d\d)+(\d)(?!\d))(\.\d+)?/, "\\1,")

Works on decimals too

I fear the future

Where robots drive the cars and do house chores, individual privacy would be non-existent, poor & unskilled will not have a place in the world, medical care would be super expensive, everybody would drive a car, media will be powerful enough to topple a government if the government doesn't favour the media and study of history, languages, cultures etc would be deemed unnecessary.

Humanity as we know it would cease to exist. I fear this future!

Google building self driving cars!

The latest funny/frightening news from Google: Building self driven cars. Toyota prius running with help from cameras, radars, GPS and Google's massive data centers. How does it fit into the whole "organize the world's information" thingy ?

Even if you stretch it a mile it won't.

I think Google has distracted itself from it's original path of being everything information. It shows in things like this and efforts to sell phones. The problem with that is that the world's information is still not organized. Not even close. They have not made search any better than it was (sorry instant doesn't count). Won't it be better if they could answer simple questions directly ? or do better job at image search or catalog searching etc ? In fact the google maps itself is not fool proof which these cars depend on!

How to find all the checkbox which are checked using Jquery and xpath

$("input[type=checkbox]:checked")

Why Times of India is going after CWG

http://churumuri.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/the-times-of-india-and-commonwealth-games/

This is what they were complaining about ?

CWG village: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt5jvgafHPI