blog@Yantrajaal

Anybody who has filed a General Diary (GD) or a First Information Report (FIR) in a police station in India would know the utter futility of the “recording” process. A handwritten document with a couple of carbon (or photostat) copies is handed over by the complainant to the policeman and these get stored first in a file and then the files are placed in a sack and stored in some dark and dusty room. The only proof of the existence of this document is a number, again entered manually, in a ledger that is kept in the police station. These dark, dusty rooms spread across hundreds of police stations in India containing sacks of files that in turn contain the handwritten documents is the only source of information about crimes and incidents that happen in India. The people who are directly concerned with these GDs and FIRs may keep a copy in their personal custody and provide it to whoever asks for it but for anyone else, including the government itself, retrieving any document is almost ...

Last June, I had the good fortune to visit Pangong Lake, in Ladakh, on the Indo-Tibetan border -- shown in the movie 3 Idiots -- and spent a cold and windswept night in a tent at Spangmik. The place is awesome. A huge blue-green mass of salty water -- a remnant of the seas that got trapped between India and Tibet when the former rammed into the latter and created the Himalayan range -- is surrounded by immense snowy peaks that turn golden at sunrise. But what was even more impressive was the night sky with its hundreds of stars, that we in the cities have forgotten about. Thanks to the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Google Sky app on my smartphone, I could, for the first time in many, many years see and, more importantly, identify so many stars and constellations, including, Polaris - one of the most important stars used by ancient mariners to determine their position. Then it struck me -- in the past, stars were used to determine location but today the GPS location from my i...

India has a strange fascination for engineers and MBAs. Everybody wants to become one, or preferably both. So is the case with systems, or as they say in India, the IT sector. But this fascination is not because of any natural aptitude for these disciplines but simply because they help one to get a job in an otherwise dismal economy. This is unfortunate, because if we step back for a moment and think through  issues that haunt this country, it would seem that our salvation lies in leveraging this holy trinity to dig us out of the hole that we find ourselves in! Let us consider a few exemplary scenarios. Till the 1990s, telephones in India were a disgrace. While landline technology was readily available and widely used all across the developed world, we were still at the mercy of the corrupt and inefficient P&T department that ensured that very few of us had access to one. This changed dramatically with the arrival of cell-phones that  bypassed the constraints of th...

In the chequered history of parliamentary legislation in India, the RTI Act stands out as a significant milestone that puts activities of the government under public scrutiny. But even though the Act gives a legitimate platform for citizens to ask questions on, the process is cumbersome and answers are often given in a manner that is not easy to understand or make use of. But why must a citizen have to ask for something that is his by birthright? Why can the information not be released automatically? But then who decides what information is to be released? At what level of detail? At what frequency? The biggest challenge facing India is corruption. It is the mother of all problems because it leads to and exacerbates all other problems. If controlled, the money saved can be used to address most deficiencies in health, education and other social sectors. Misguided people wrongly believe that having a strong Lokpal will solve the problem but when bodies as powerful as the CB...

image borrowed from http://integral-options.blogspot.com The Indian judiciary in general and the judges of the Supreme Court in particular have been in the news for taking some spectacular action in certain high profile cases like Sahara / Subrata Roy, Srinivasan / IPL, 2G / CWG scams and now of late, after the Nirbhaya episode, in rape cases. However, for the vast majority of Indian citizens, the Ram, Shyam, Jadu, Madhu who sit outside numerous high courts and district courts sipping tea and waiting for their cases to be heard and disposed of, the great terror is delay ! In India, litigation never ends -- it goes on and on and on until litigants die or use money and muscle power to settle out of courts. The complex series of adjournments, non-availability of dates and legal skulduggery ensures that cases never end and the Indian judicial system must be the poster boy for the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied. All this is well known, what is not known is what can we ...

The current national outrage about the absolutely heinous and brutal rape in a Delhi bus is understandable but in our anger and frustration we are missing the wood for the trees. Well meaning ( and good looking ) participants in TV channels are asking for anything ranging from castration to capital punishment and criticising everyone from the police to the judiciary  ... but hardly anyone is interested in identifying that elusive "deeper" cause ! image from GovernanceInnovation Because if one were to pause and think, it will become clear that this rape is a symptom and not the disease. When you get a high fever, the fever is not the disease -- it is merely a symptom of malaria or dengue or something worse. Trying to cure the fever by throwing ice water would not work -- you need to drugs to kill the bacteria. And for that you need to find the cause. In fact, that cause is quite well known. From the personal rape to the nationwide CWG / 2G / Coalgate scam to localis...

By clamouring for a Lok Pal, the anti-corruption campaign is barking up the wrong tree. We have laws against corruption for citizens. We have police and the other government agencies to enforce these laws but they are corrupt as well. So we have higher agencies like the CBI and CVC but they are corrupt as well. Now we want another layer, the Lok Pal, but by recursive extension there is nothing to stop the Lok Pal from being corrupt. We can go higher and higher, Parliamentary Sub Committee, President of India …  but even if we involve the Divine Lord Krishna himself, the nation will surely find a way to make him corrupt as well! So let us look at another model -- that of the notorious American gangster, Al Capone. and read the story of how he was caught and brought to justice, not by some muscular policeman but by some very nerdy, if not wimpish, men from the IRS -- the US equivalent of our Income Tax Department. Mr Capone was too smart to be caught out on his main crimes, namely...

Once upon a time, in a banking scenario far removed from where we are today, one had to visit the specific branch of a bank for any banking transactions. To deposit and withdraw cash or to deposit and encash cheques there was no option but to travel to the branch where one had opened one’s account. Then came Core Banking Systems and the world was not the same anymore. Since all the branches were connected to a centrally located Core Banking Systems, all information about a customer was always available at any branch and the concept of Any Branch Banking become the norm. This was followed by ATM and finally Internet Banking. When it comes to voting we are still in the old, old era. Why can the Election Commission not move along the same trajectory that the banks have travelled in the past twenty years ? Let us consider the feasibility and possibility of Any Booth Voting. The Election Commission has a process in place to issue Voter ID Cards and while there could be loopholes in the va...