Name: Restart
ISBN: 9788184005714

Restart

"In Restart, Mihir S. Sharma shows what can and must change in India's policies, its administration and even its attitudes. The answers he provides are not obvious, and require courage. Nor are they all comforting or conventional. Yet they could, in less time than you can imagine, unleash the creativity of a billion hopeful Indians." -- Publisher's description.

What Hacker News says

signal11Jul 2020

> Was there no scam at all?

Mihir Sharma’s book Restart (2014) has a good chapter on this. The answer it seems was, no.

It’s not in the national interest to charge maximal prices for natural resources, and this is followed by many countries even today — China and the US included — and such rights are given away for a nominal or modest price, and always with a view to ensuring wide market participation.

Even European spectrum auctions have a clear aim of ensuring a sustainable market of 4 or more effective competitors.

This has been historic practice in India also. For instance, the British colonial government gave India’s other big industrial group — the Tatas — rights to coal and iron mining in the late 1800s for free to set up India’s first steel plant. Even the BJP’s own Vajpayee government did this.

The CAG’s “notional loss theory”, he argues, is rubbish. And looking at the events in India’s once vibrant Mobile Telecom industry, which has has now been reduced to an effective duopoly, one can argue Sharma was right.

thread

devnonymousMay 2017

Edit: I don't care about karma on HN but if you're downvoting please explain yourself.

  > The Indian ID drive has ensured that benefits make it to the people who need
  > them without 80% of it being skimmed by corrupt bureaucrats.

Citation ? (not about the corruption happening, that has been well established, but about aadhaar allegedly solving this problem).

  > Having a real identification gives very poor individuals the identification
  > necessary to open bank accounts and interact with the financial sector.

There already are a pletora of identification methods in India, including the PAN, ration card, BPL Card, Voter ID etc. In the end the problems that keep it from being 'unique' are in the implementation at the grass roots. How is Aadhaar going to change this ? There already are a lot of reports of duplication of Aadhaar.

  > It's the first really reliable census data for a lot of areas.

Reliable ? Oh really ? According to the goverment's own addmission :

http://aadhaarcarduid.org/uidai-cancelled-3-8-lakh-fake-aadh...

  > It's disgusting that Mozilla sits there and pontificates about stopping
  > programs which solve problems _they don't have_. In 50 years, when a couple
  > hundred million Indians aren't having trouble getting enough to eat because
  > their government subsidies were stolen, then maybe it's worth having this
  > conversation. Until then, shut up and and let India solve its own problems,
  > and don't help people starve to death on account of your pompous moral
  > litmus tests.

Firstly, the Indian goverment is not even interested in debating or engaing people who have a different viewpoint than them, including the Superme Court of India. So, tell me again, which is this India you speak about that is allegedly soloving its problems ? I feel like Indians like me are lesser Indians than thos that toe the Goverment line.

I often think about this when it comes to Indians reacting to critizims about India:

Except from the book "Restart"[1]

  > Then the denial, the one form of intellectual argument we have mastered.
  > India has no problem; if it has a problem, it is nobody else’s business;
  > everybody else also has this problem; everybody else has other problems, why
  > don’t you talk about those instead; why are you saying this is a problem, it is
  > a part of our 5000-year- old culture; we knew the answers to all problems in
  > the Vedic era; even if we have this problem, it is not our fault; even if we
  > have this problem, we cannot accept any of the solutions that have been shown
  > to work elsewhere; even if we have this problem, it is much better than it was;
  > perhaps we have this problem, but it is none of your business.

...and this book is not even about sociology or politics, it is about economics.

http://www.amazon.in/Restart-Last-Chance-Indian-Economy/dp/8...

thread