Looking into the horizon

For those who moan over the annual food inflation at 14.55 percent , comes salt for the wound. India! hailed as the second largest country in rice production will be importing rice after 21 years. How and why are two serious questions that everyone wants to look into. Rice being the backbone of India with high percentage of consumers in its eastern and southern parts, measuring the impact of this rice import in common man's (Indian citizen) life is crucial. How and why it happened? We all know India's agricultural sector depends greatly on the monsoons. This year the monsoon has failed. Government reports 23% below normal monsoon. This also is rated as the worst in 37 years . So the impact is evident and justified. The state cannot be held responsible for failed monsoon. We have to accept the decision with gumption. This year's poor monsoon has raised doubts about the output of summer-sown crops popularly called as kharif crops. The estimated shortage of production is...

Recently, there was some resource reallocation in our company. Ours was a team of twelve members. The schedule and technology demanded more. I had a one-on-one session with our mentor and brought up the issue. He said he cannot allocate more resource to our team. The decision is not a big surprise given the engineering strength we have but the reason is. Precisely, what I wanted was to put forward details of the resource requirement not an actual resource allocation. Our mentor mentioned that my current manager can handle only 'this much'. I thanked god he didn't mention 'this bunch'. That would turn the pointers on us. To be frank, I consider our team as a group of self motivated and disciplined individuals (blah! that includes me too). Till I read this Seth Godin article on Dunbar's number , I thought managing a team like ours is not a real big deal. Though he talks about building tribes, I got what I wanted. In his book "Good to Great" Jim Collins q...

Union Minister for Human Resource Development Mr. Kapil Sibal's this statement , has cropped issues related to schooling in India. Yielding to the pressure, Mr. Sibal overturned and said that the issue will be left to the hands of the IIT Council. Not only the premier IITs, the next graded NITs have also taken up the issue of raising the qualification marks. The issue brought out the grip of muffling coaching centers in the school education. Some IIT aspirants even quit school and join the coaching centers. They can privately prepare for their board examinations which demands only 60 percent marks. I recollect the hay days of my school education. I am from south Tamil Nadu. I should say that education system was rather bad. Teachers in the school often run their own tuition centers. They won't complete the syllabus in the school. The inclusion of the laboratory internal marks had a real stranglehold on the students. Teachers urge the students to join the tuition centers run by ...