The article tries to set the analogy between US and India with respect to the economic crisis and ascertains the need for stimulus package for the recovery and other growth promoting efforts.
Barack Obama’s revised package of $787b (originally $900b) saw hard way with opposition from Republicans about certain untargeted and untimed expenditures. However, the demand of the situation, financial crisis and large scale unemployment (3.6 million since Dec ‘07) vindicated Obama’s call for such stimulus. Obama’s belief about socially conscious policies on infrastructure, health, education and renewable energy for fundamental structural economic changes is reflected in the stimulus. Declared as worst crisis in the post-war era by IMF, only time will tell if the current stimulus is good enough or not.
For India, the problems are pretty much the same and the stimulus provided by the govt is yet to show its desired effects. Inflation (4.39%) is very low, with an apprehension to go to deflationary path, but interest rates have to be lowered to encourage credit flow to consumers. With 7.1% growth, India has been one of the best performing markets in the world (China – 6.8%). However, IMF says that 2009-10 won’t be consolatory. India needs to prove it wrong.
Go Ogle Earth
The author strongly criticizes the attempt by Mumbai High Court and governments of several nations including US, China, Sudan, Iran and UK to prevent Google from showing high resolution satellite images on its Google Earth software that was reportedly used in recent Mumbai terror attacks. He argues that prohibiting technology is not a solution to terrorism.
Author believes that just because somebody has misused the technology, doesn’t mean that we should ban the technology itself. For that matter terrorists also used Satellite phones, mobiles, walky-talkies, GPS systems, Wi-Fi laptops, blackberry etc. So do we ban these equipments also? Certainly not. In the case of Google, the satellite imagery technology is moving further as ISRO is currently working on Bhuvan, an online mapping system that is 10 times more precise then Google Earth. In fact Google Earth itself is so much comprehensive with details at street level for some of the cities and also a flight simulator that can help a person simulate a flight path before actually going to a destination. Can we stop all these developments?
Stopping all these means we admitted defeat against ill forces. Society develops because of good uses of technology which overweighs the bad. And certainly we all know that prohibition never works. We have to find new ways of existence in newer times. As we did in the past, we ought to overcome this problem as well.
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