16.04.2007

• Highway e-toll plazas
• A number of e-toll plazas are being planned on the national highways with state of the art know-how for cashless money transfer.
• India is gearing up to increase the average distance covered by vehicles per day from 250 km at present to about 400 km, bringing it nearer to the average of 500 km prevailing in developed countries.
• Good criticism about the Percy Mistry report on making Mumbai an international financial centre
• All of you know that for quite some time we have been noting about the Percy Mistry committee report. I have seen only positive press so far about the report. But in today’s centre page article, I find a good critique of the report. Take a look at the entire piece at least once. It’s worth a read. Let’s excerpt something from this below.
• Expert committee reports are usually of two kinds. Short, workman-like and doable, near-term, which is really the only time these reports get acted upon as each government has its own priorities. Or bulky and overly ambitious, with the result that they read like motherhood and apple pie statements that no one disagrees with but don’t get acted on either.
• The close to 250 page document has a broad-spectrum wish list that is so breathtakingly ambitious – fiscal to financial to legal to governance reform – that it ends up more like an exercise in wishful thinking than like a plan that can be acted upon without much ado.
• At 209 among 215 world metros in terms of quality of life, according to a Mercer study rank and 39 among global financial centres in terms of competitiveness, Mumbai has a long way to go before it can hope to compete with the likes of even Dubai, let alone London.
• Granting full freedom to foreign banks to open branches in India is fine as a theoretical concept except that all countries are circumspect in allowing entry of foreign banks. Similarly allowing entry of hedge funds at a time when developed markets with more experienced regulators are grappling with how to regulate such funds would be premature.
• There is no harm in dreaming big. But we have a problem when we allow our dreams to cloud our vision.
• Jeffrey D Sachs on the need for a regular scientific process to present the world with the evidence on species abundance and extinction.
• The Convention on Biodiversity, agreed at Rio Earth Summit, established that “biological diversity is a common concern of humanity.”
• Two notorious examples of how we kill other species not because we must, but because we are too negligent to do otherwise are:
• Bottom trawling: Countries such as New Zealand, Spain, Portugal, Australia that have fishing fleets engage in this practice. Bottom trawlers drag heavy nets over ocean bottom, destroying magnificent, unexplored, and endangered marine species in the process.
• Clearing of tropical rainforests: for pasture and food crops. This results in massive loss of habitat and destruction of species, yielding a tiny economic benefit at a huge social cost.
• Rebuilding the Internet
• Today’s article that appeared with this title, is a must read for the geeks. Let’s look at some of the latest abbreviations from this.
• GENI: Global Environment for Network Innovations
• FIND: Future Internet Network Design
• FIRE: Future Internet Research and Experimentation
• These some of the experiments that are going on about the creation of a new Internet from scratch.
• UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of test data between two machines on September 2, 1969. This is widely considered as the time of the birth of the Internet, as we know it today.