Solutions to Change

The growing debate around liquor consumption in Kerala following the delay in issuing the Abkari policy statement in 2014 provides suitable grounds to discuss several important issues surrounding liquor production and consumption in India. A discussion is essential as liquor is going to last for a long time and a complete prohibition should not be expected in the near-term whatever be the stance of the individual state governments. But it is crucial that we understand what we are talking about before taking one or the other side on drafting a tighter liquor policy. The four southern states of India are special because they are not only the states where the state government directly involve themselves in various aspects of production and distribution, but also the states where consumption has remained relatively high compared to the rest of India. This points towards the fact that state control need not necessarily mean control over consumption of liquor, although that is the mo...

A Model for helping India’s Sports Sector   Introduction International events come and go but India has never been able to pose significant competition to sportsmen and women from across the globe. We have had a competitive hockey team which consistently won Olympic medals until the late 1970s but thenceforth things changed. In Olympics India’s recent successes has been well appreciated. These came in events including tennis, badminton, boxing, wrestling, shooting and so on. Now many of these sporting activities like boxing or wrestling or shooting are not commonly seen at least in Kerala. We don’t hear much about clubs which encourage boxing, or wrestling we don’t have many shooting ranges and so on. But why? People don’t even feel the necessity of taking these sports up for the sake of recreation due to a certain amount of prejudice, a bit of lagging encouragement, and due to a large amount of no knowledge about these events. There are no local competitions, no adverti...

Big-data and the Market Mechanism     Introduction Big-data could be the game changer in future. Data and big-data are conceptually similar but the later differs technically due to the enormity in volume and the corresponding difficulty in storage. Big-data would imply information that is collected in microseconds from any or all activities that can be captured through recent and path breaking technologies. And of course its use is wide ranging, spreading across a spectrum from simple identification of technical snags (traffic jams, flight delays or power failures) to possible prediction of life expectancies of an individual from signal collected over a period from his eating, search behaviour online and so on. Until this point it is fine; but the big question is how do we comprehend big-data? What do we expect in future? I am not going to go into the tricky affair of the morality of collecting such data from individuals. A better way to put it is how many of us k...