Biometric cards a waste? Facial yoga

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Will ID cards work when ration cards are used to steal $14.5 billion?

The biometric id cards being issued to Indians has been promoted as a cheap and easy protection for the poor in India - from preventing small landowners from losing their land to landlords and money lenders to providing protection from corrupt politicians, police, bureaucrats and so on.

The $3.6 billion, and likely more, to be spent on providing the new cards to Indians is money that should have been spent on other more productive uses, including improving early childhood education facilities. The poor in India already have an id system in the form of ration cards that in theory enable them to buy food at very cheap prices due to government subsidies.


The ration card system, which has been around for decades, has been used to steal billions of dollars. Bloomberg in a story titled "Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food" notes that, by gaming the ration card system,the "food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade" in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone.

The UP politicians used dummy names to buy food grains at very cheap prices and meant for rationing to the poor. For instance rice to be rationed at a subsidized price of 3.6 cents a kg was bought by the politicians and then sold on the open market for 10 times the price."A state police force beholden to corrupt lawmakers, an underfunded federal anti-graft agency and a sluggish court system have resulted in five overlapping investigations over seven years -- and zero convictions."

What is to prevent the new biometric id cards being similarly used to steal from the poor and those who have no political connections? A card by itself is a meaningless document unless it is backed by a political and judicial system that enforces the rights that a card holder is entitled to.

For more on the Bloomberg story, by Mehul Srivastava and Andrew MacAskill, see: 


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/poor-in-india-starve-as-politicians-steal-14-5-billion-of-food.html

In other Stories this week: 

Teesta Setalvad's persistence helps convict 32 in deaths of muslims in 2002 Gujarat riots

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3836929.ece

 

Jayant Patel,62, Indian born American surgeon, faces new charges in patient deaths in Australia

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/the-next-patel-saga-an-ordeal-revisited-20120902-257zi.html

 

Pankaj Mishra's "From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia" review in the London Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/19/from-ruins-empire-pankaj-mishra-review

 

Debashis Chatterjee advises managers to apply lessons from the Bhagavat Gita

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article3785097.ece

 

Ranjana Khan teaches facial yoga techniques to stay youthful looking at New York studio

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577605560431270568.html

 

Hyde Park Corner: An Open Forum

Indians should press Harvard and other top US universities to abolish 20% Asian quota

Good education is very important to Indian parents since a degree from a good college, preferably a professional one, largely determines income and perhaps even eligibility for a good "catch", as in marriage. But Indians and other Asians are finding their avenues for success limited by the Asian ceiling - unstated quota limiting total Asian admissions to a maximum 20% as apparently is the case at Harvard and other elite Universities in the US. According to article below, while Asian students at the University of California Berkeley has risen to 40% that at Harvard has stayed stagnant around 18% for the past decade.

So Indians in the US, especially those donating money and holding influential posts, should voice opposition and team up with other Asians to press elite universities to abolish the Asian ceiling.

"Admissions officers deny capping the number of Asian-American students at schools, but a 2009 book called No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal posited that Asian Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores to gain entrance to a top private university ........".

Ivy League Discrimination? Harvard's Asian student admissions static around 17% while Asians at UC Berkeley have risen to 40%

Khan Academy: effective and free online education help 

How to do better at an exam or just improve your knowledge? 

Thanks to Salman Khan, you have free access to learning methods that Microsoft founder, mega billionaire and major philanthropist Bill Gates uses to teach his own kids. 

"With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we're on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.
A free world-class education for anyone anywhere."
 www.khanacademy.org/

edX, backed by Harvard and MIT and headed by Anant Agarwal, is the Future of Online Education - For anyone, anywhere, anytime

EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of set up by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed for study via the web. Anant Agarwal, former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serves as the first president of edX. Along with offering online courses, the institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can transform learning—both on-campus and worldwide.The University of California, Berkeley also joined edX. There is a rival set up as a for profit entity, which has the backing of Stanford, Duke and some other universities.

https://www.edx.org/

  

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