From demonetisation to ethanol blending to the sudden national lockdown, why do we conduct such large scale experiments on the public without properly understanding the consequences?
Why can’t we first focus on the basic needs of people that are crying out for urgent attention?
Does being a policymaker give us the right to run experiments on citizens, especially when most of our population is poor and vulnerable?
What Does South Korea Feed Its Kids?
Yesterday Telangana CM Revanth Reddy gave a passionate speech about South Korea winning 32 Golds at the Olympics while Indian students aren’t doing anything.
South Korea won 13 Gold, not 32. 13 gold, 9 silver, and 10 bronze medals - total 32.
Anyway! For athletes, nutrition dictates about 60 to 70% of physical potential.
Found this video on SM which shows what food is being given to school students there.
Anchovy rice balls, janchi noodles, beef meat pancakes, gyoza dumplings, stir-fried square fish cakes, cabbage kimchi, fruit mini cupcakes. This was the menu at one of the schools when this video was shot. Each school has an in-house nutritionist.
While our school lunches are roti with salt, water sambar with worm infested rice, lizard dal!
Infrastructure is another important aspect. The only expenditure in Telangana in the last two years for sports was building a special football ground for Honourable CM’s personal use at his camp office with Rs 5 crore.
Bringing Messi didn’t do zilch for a normal sports student in Telangana. If you were really interested in developing sports - the amount spent on one hour Messi visit would have been good to hire Indian sportsmen like Bhaichung Bhutia or Mary Kom to train our kids for a year or two.
But all we want is some speech, PR, photographs, reels and political grandstanding.
#JustSaying
#AndhraPradesh
₹118 per litre petrol, the highest in the country.
Among the highest electricity charges, yet people are suffering through repeated power cuts. Nearly 10 outages and around 10 hours without power in a single day.
Is this what you call governance, @naralokesh, @ncbn, @PawanKalyan?
TDP's governance was far better when it stood on its own. Ever since aligning with BJP, it has only gone from bad to worse. People are paying more, getting less, and being asked to celebrate it as "development."
Dear @PetroleumMin , @nitin_gadkari, @HardeepSPuri
If the ARAI report is truly so "confidential," then what exactly are you hiding from the public? If E20 ethanol-blended fuel is as safe and beneficial as you claim, release the report and let citizens see the evidence for themselves.
Why refuse transparency while forcing 26 crore vehicle owners to use ethanol-adualtered fuel? What are you afraid the public will discover? Stop hiding behind confidentiality clauses and put the facts on the table.
The people paying for the fuel, the vehicles, and the repairs deserve answers, not secrecy.
India is interesting country.
> We have petrol pump with E85 petrol - but not a single car which runs on it
> We have millions of vehicles running on E5, E10 petrol - but there is not a single petrol pump with these fuels.
Pollution certificate for private vehicles feels like one of the biggest legal scams.
Never seen a single car fail the test.
Never heard of any vehicle getting permanently banned for excess pollution.
Yet lakhs of certificates are issued every month and crores collected.
For the government, pollution seems less important than collection.
The air stays dirty, but state coffers become cleaner every year.
India is basically a Schrodinger's Economy: everything is banned. But, everything is unbanned.
Example: Cryptos.
There is no clarity-- only confusion.
It is not banned. But, feels banned.
We can all have our opinions on betting, alcohol, derivatives.
But, once you start banning things in the name of morality/risk--- there is no end to "expanding" this circle.
- Today it is betting/gambling;
- Tomorrow it would be entire social media;
- Day After it could be banning public gatherings.
Justification can be built about anything.
We either have a free market or we don't.
There is no middle path here.
India's GST has doubled in 5 years.
FY21: ₹11.37L crore
FY25: ₹22.08L crore (+94%)
Income of the average Indian grew roughly 35% in the same period. Taxes grew 3x faster than incomes.
The government got richer twice as fast as the people paying it. This is not a growth story. It's an extraction story. @FinMinIndia
Total Chaos in Indian Auto Sector
⛽ Diesel: Soon to be discontinued
🍭 Petrol: Ruined by ethanol
🔋 EVs: No proper infra to rely on
🛢️ CNG: Same issue as petrol
No option left for buyers or OEMs.
The rupee was ₹17 per dollar when India liberalised in 1991. It's ₹95 now.
That's 34 years of 4.5% annual depreciation on average.
If your salary grew 8% a year in rupees but the rupee lost 4.5%, your real dollar purchasing power grew just 3.5%.
Now subtract:
→ 30% income tax
→ 18% GST on services
→ Inflation at 5.4%
Your "growing income" in India is barely treading water.
In real purchasing power terms, you may be poorer than you think.
Starting tomorrow, Supreme court of India is on a six-week summer vacation and will be operating at just 19% of its capacity. There are 53 million cases pending in Indian courts - 93,143 of them are pending in the Supreme Court.
A judge can go on a vacation, a judiciary cannot.
#Hyderabad: Fuel prices
Petrol- Rs 115.43 p/l
Diesel- Rs 103. 58 p/l
Telangana imposes state VAT of 34%
While AP imposes- 38 %
Telugu states VAT charges are among the highest in the country.
Truly a burden on consumers.
₹34–40 lakh crore, that’s how much BJP allegedly extracted from Indians between 2014 and 2026 through massive fuel taxation while denying people the benefit of low crude oil prices. And now they cry like babies over absorbing ₹30,000 crore? What a shame. Indians were made to pay the price for years.
Scientists mapped a piece of brain the size of half a grain of rice.
One-millionth the size of the human brain.
It took them a year and over 1.4 million gigabytes to scan it.
They found over 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, and even some new structures they didn't know existed.
Mapping the entire human brain in this level of detail would require all the data storage generated on Earth in a year + a 140-acre data center.
But the human brain itself can hold up to ~2.5 million gigabytes of information - enough for ~3 million hours of HD video or 342 years of continuous viewing.
It can process roughly 10 quadrillion calculations per second - enough processing power to run over 4,000 high-end gaming PCs all operating at peak ability.
And it only runs on the amount of power needed for a single dim light bulb.
No technology even comes close to doing what the brain can do.
The more we learn about biology, the more complex it becomes.
This is God's Glory on display.