Neeraj Kathuria

Interested in Science, Innovations, Startups, Business, Finance AND (not OR) Spirituality

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

The economic and demographic effects of corruption.

Cost of land in our urban areas is far higher than what our GDP per capita would dictate. The ratio of land value to per capita GDP is probably higher in India than anywhere else. As an example, land prices in Chennai or Bengaluru rival that of cities like New York which has a vastly higher per capita GDP.

The key reason?

First, vast sums of political corruption money is parked in real estate. This raises real estate prices and high real estate prices affect everything downstream.

Second, corruption in building approvals and the like - the famous DTCP - raises construction costs, on top of already higher real estate costs.

Third, corruption in private school regulatory compliance enforcement raises school fees.

Fourth, corruption in private hospital regulatory compliance enforcement raises health care costs.

Fifth, household goods need sales outlets and those pay higher rents due to high real estate prices and construction costs.

So housing, education, healthcare and household goods - all of these now cost higher.

As a direct consequence, the economic burden on the average person gets worse. Young people, facing all these costs, postpone marriage, and postpone children or have fewer children.

That directly affects our demographics.

While this issue exists in many parts of India, Tamil Nadu, being the most urbanized of the bigger states, is particularly hit hard.

So corruption is becoming an existential threat to our society.

If you worry about the super-low birth rate in Tamil Nadu, way below replacement, understand that corruption raising our cost of living is one of the major causes, not the only cause, but a big one in our context.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The land of the Wootz steel (which the West could not replicate for over a millennium), the land that mastered the metallurgy of the rustless Iron Pillar of Delhi, is currently dependent on Western single-crystal superalloys to build an indigenous military aerospace engine :((

I was looking at these shocking data points: The total state & central subsidy & populist freebie bill across Indian states has crossed ₹9 Lakh Cr (~ $95B). Just 12 states have cumulatively budgeted an astonishing ₹1.68 Lakh Cr (~ 17B) solely for unconditional cash transfers. In states like Punjab, the debt to GSDP has hit a catastrophic 46%, resulting in the state allocating only 5.5 paise of every budgetary rupee toward capital investment/scientific asset creation.

A comprehensive, world-class jet engine development program requires ~ $2-3 B spread over 7-10 yrs. If we diverted just a fraction of the populist expenditure into a dedicated Sovereign Advanced Materials & Aerospace Fund, we could completely bypass the predatory tech-transfer bottlenecks imposed by Western OEMs like GE/Safran.

Also, under the current bureaucratic, red-tape heavy General Financial Rules (GFR), an Indian defense scientist/academic is treated like a clerk. If a researcher/scientist needs a specialized, high-purity Nickel-based superalloy/an electron-beam welding machine from a global vendor, they are forced into months of tedious "L1 vendor bidding" paperwork.

Our ancestors did not build the world's finest metallurgy by filling out 3 quote tender forms; they did it through state-patronized, uncompromising pursuit of Vigyan. It is high time modern India stops burning its future on short-term populist freebies & starts investing in the strategic armor of Viksit Bharat.

[Neeraj Kathuria @EnablingNew]

For these Industries, we are seeing positive trends in India on the ground:

1. Electronics
2. Defence
3. Maritime & Shipbuilding
4. Railways
5. Renewable Power & Power Ancillaries
6. Biotechnology & Healthcare
7. Digital commerce

[Ministry of Ayush @moayush]

A Proud Moment for Bharat 🇮🇳

A statue of Maharishi Sushruta has been installed at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the world's oldest surgical college and one of the most respected surgical institutions globally.

More than 2,600 years ago, Maharishi Sushruta documented advanced surgical procedures, including reconstructive techniques that laid the foundation for what is now known as plastic surgery. His work in the Sushruta Samhita remains one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of medicine.

This recognition is not just a tribute to an extraordinary physician—it is also a reminder of the rich scientific and medical heritage of ancient Bharat.

As the world continues to acknowledge these contributions, it reinforces the importance of studying, preserving, and celebrating our civilizational legacy.

From ancient wisdom to global recognition—Maharishi Sushruta's legacy continues to inspire generations.

contributions to healthcare and healing.

#MaharishiSushruta #IndianHeritage #ProudMoment #Swamimalai #RCSEd #GlobalRecognition @PMOIndia | @narendramodi | @mpprataprao | @secymoayush | @vaidyakotecha | @SuvenduWB | @wbdhfw | @lokbhavan_wb @WHO | @mdniy | @ccrhindia | @CCRAS_MoAyush | @DirectorCcryn | @AIIA_NDelhi | @nmpb1 | @NIAJaipur | @PIB_India | @PIBAYUSH | @DDNewslive | @sansad_tv | @AIRNewsHindi | @mygovindia | @MyGovHindi | @MIB_India |

[Sekar Vembu @sekar_vembu]

The real friction holding back India’s ability to develop and innovate in hardware isn’t a lack of talent or ideas. It is big government control, excessive regulations, import restrictions, and the bureaucratic red tape that together make even basic high-tech experimentation unnecessarily difficult for small teams and individuals.

Consider a group of talented college students or a small startup team working on computer vision. They develop an idea that requires testing with advanced camera lenses or specialised sensors.

Instead of simply ordering the parts and starting work, they get pulled into a maze of customs documentation, product classification, import duties, and clearance procedures that can take weeks. The same friction appears even with relatively common electronic components or small mechanical parts needed for prototyping.

This burden falls heaviest on agile players such as students, independent experimenters, and small teams, who lack dedicated compliance teams or established importer networks. For them, every extra form and every delay becomes a barrier to learning and building. The result is that many capable people spend more time navigating rules than actually experimenting.

When this friction becomes insurmountable without connections or influence, talented individuals eventually look for environments where they can focus on the work instead of navigating the process.

Many leave the country and move into areas with lower regulatory interference for even basic things. Over time, this weakens the overall pool of people who have hands-on experience with real hardware development.

Even large companies eventually feel the consequences. Small agile teams inside these organisations often cannot experiment independently with new ideas, even when they have discretionary budgets. They end up depending on corporate-level resources and connections to clear bureaucratic hurdles.

At the same time, large companies still rely on a broader ecosystem of skilled engineers and researchers. When that ecosystem lacks people who have actually built and experimented at a smaller scale, the quality of available talent declines across the board.

R&D in large organisations also cannot be driven purely through top-down planning. Engineers and innovators thrive on tinkering and prototyping multiple ideas, some of which eventually lead to breakthroughs.

India does much better in software precisely because anyone can download software, including open-source tools, and experiment freely. This kind of small-scale tinkering culture is extremely important for building a broader innovation and R&D ecosystem. In hardware, however, that spark is often killed before it even begins.

The core problem is big government control and the bureaucratic red tape it inevitably creates. When the state tries to regulate and monitor even small-scale imports and experimentation, it destroys the conditions needed for deep tech and even basic R&D to flourish.

Instead of more centralised control and layers of approvals, India needs an ultra-minimal government and genuinely open and free markets. Only then will talented individuals and small teams be able to experiment freely, iterate quickly and build without constant interference from big government.

[Indian Tech & Infra @IndianTechGuide]

🚨 Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw just announced a completely revamped IRCTC website will be officially launched by July 15, 2026.

Features:

- The system eliminates tedious alphanumeric visual CAPTCHAs.
- Booking capacity will jump to over 1.5 lakh tickets/min from 32,000/min.
- Search capacity scales up from 400,000 to over 4 million queries/min.
- Passengers can expect a multilingual interface.
- Seat maps and preferences are built directly into the main booking flow.
- Users can view prices across multiple dates simultaneously to find the cheapest travel days.

[Neeraj Kathuria @EnablingNew]

@prakdadlani Checked on Amazon. Mentions use only cable provided as low voltage while other similar products say compatible with any usb charger which could be convinient. What do u think?

[Arjun Jain | Fast Code AI @Arjunjain]

August 2016. IIT Bombay. New CSE building. My office key did not work.

I had just been hired as faculty in the CSE dept. to teach Computer Vision and start a ML research group.

I went to the room I was supposed to occupy. The key the admin had given me did not turn. I walked back to the department office. The person who issued keys had left for lunch. I sat on a bench outside for forty minutes.

I sat there long enough to do the math.

The PhD students had to be recruited from scratch. The compute funding did not exist. The papers that would justify it hadn't been written. The collaborators who would co-write them didn't know me. The teaching that would buy me classroom credibility was still ahead of me.

The institution had given me a desk and a key that didn't work. That was going to be the size of what they would give me for years.

By the time the admin came back with a working key, I had decided. The institution was not going to give me a lab. I would have to build one that didn't need their permission to exist.

What I had to do, in order:

→ Teach a course so well that students wanted to work with me. CS 763, 2017. The hardest term of my life. I woke up at 4 a.m. for weeks and months to write lecture notes that thirty-eight IIT students would dismantle by Wednesday. Rishabh Dabral was my right-hand man and head TA - I could not have
run it without him. I was learning the material faster than I was teaching it.

→ Get the smartest students from that class to do projects with me - for credit, no funding, on faith. Sahil - departmental rank 1, President's Gold
Medal Awardee - was one. Many went on to PhDs at Berkeley, UCSD, EPFL, UPenn.

→ Raise compute funding outside the institution. The GPUs the research needed cost $100,000. The institution had no line item for them. The first $100,000 came from Volker, Partha, and Praveen. Praveen and Partha came to IIT Bombay with me. They believed in the work before anyone else. I owe them the lab.

→ Hire PhD students who would commit before the lab existed. Two said yes - Rishabh Dabral and Rahul Mitra. Rishabh is Research Group Leader at MPII. Rahul is Staff Research Engineer at Qualcomm. Rishabh stayed in academia. I left to start a company. He's doing what I left behind. That is the point.

→ Co-author papers with all of them. Submit to top venues. The publications spoke louder than the missing funding line.

→ Use the publications to justify the lab. Two years in, the lab existed because there were too many papers coming out of it to pretend it didn't.

The institution gave me a desk and a key that didn't work. The lab existed because we built something it could no longer pretend wasn't there.

If you are inside a company / university / agency trying to start a new thing and the institution hasn't given you the resources yet - stop asking for them. Build something the institution cannot ignore. The resources will always arrive after the proof.

The order matters.

[Miran🇮🇳 @Miran7g]

#Mizoram | Students and teachers of Serchhip Shalom Special School (Vohbik School) expressed deep sadness as 14 Assam Rifles Commandant Col. Archit Goswami was transferred to another posting.

Known for his care and support towards the special school and its students, Col. Goswami was given an emotional farewell by the school community, who appreciated his contributions to the welfare and development of the institution.
#AssamRifles #ArchitGoswami #ShalomSpecialSchool

@ajaykraina @LtGenDPPandey

[Neeraj Kathuria @EnablingNew]

@Fintech03 n j j😙🥰E HvbnjY3hKihhniও nj nn.bjr.h44ne 8wee🥯🏺🍺🏺🍟🍟🥯🫓🥒🍹🍻🥒🍋‍🟩🫐k.m8nb

[Parimal @Fintech03]

How a watchmaker's lathe & a burger-joint's logic blind-sided a $200 medical monopoly. Dr. V was so severely afflicted with Rheumatoid Arthritis that his fingers were permanently gnarled & twisted. He could not even hold a pen properly. Yet, this man, who could barely use his own hands, designed a system that gave millions of people their hands back by restoring their sight. He was a doc who could not hold a magnifying glass, so he built a machine that let the whole world see through it.

The world's giants claimed that Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), the clear plastic used for lenses was a secret medical grade material that justified a $200 price tag. PMMA is the same material used in plexiglass & aircraft windows.

Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (Dr.V)'s team at Aurolab realized that the purity was the only thing that mattered. They sourced high-purity monomer & developed their own polymerization & cast-molding process in Madurai. Instead of buying expensive western lense-making machines, they repurposed precision diamond-turning lathes used in high end watchmaking & optics.

They realized that a lens does not care if it was made in a medical factory/a watch factory, as long as the refractive index & surface smoothness were perfect. A lens has tiny legs called haptics that hold it in place inside the eye. Traditional lenses had haptics glued/fused on, which were points of failure.

Aurolab perfected the Single Piece Lens design. They carved the entire lens, body & legs from a single disc of PMMA. This removed the risk of the legs snapping off inside the eye. It was simpler, safer, & most importantly cheaper (< $5-10) to manufacture at scale.

Dr. V famously visited the Hamburger University at McDonald's. He was not there for the food; he was observing the Standardization of Motion. In the West, 1 surgeon did everything from prepping the patient to the final stitch. This was artisan work, slow & expensive.

Dr. V designed a OT with 2 operating tables side by side. As the surgeon finished the critical internal step on Patient A, they would literally pivot their stool to Patient B, who was already prepped & draped by a team of highly trained paramedics.

This is the part Harvard Business School obsessively studies. Dr. V also created a self-sustaining Robin Hood model that required zero govt grants. ~30% of patients pay a market rate. 70% pay nothing/a very nominal fee.

Because their assembly line efficiency made the cost of surgery so low (~$25 total), the profit from 1 paying patient could fund the surgeries of 4 poor patients.

Today, Aravind is 1 of the most profitable hospitals in the world/sq. foot, despite giving away the majority of its services for free. Aurolab's quality is so high that they supply 10% of the world’s total demand. They have helped restore sight to 55M+ people. The cheap plastic from Madurai ended up being the gold standard for the World Health Organization (WHO).

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

I studied the life and work of Lee Kuan Yew, the Founder-Prime Minister of Singapore intensely during my early 20s. Immense respect for him.

In this video clip, he advises a young woman pursuing a PhD not to neglect marriage and kids. I recently gave very similar advice.

Elon Musk would say much the same thing.

We have to orient our culture, society and the economy so that smart ambitious women do want to have children (and sadly, this needs to be said today: men cannot have children). If we fail at this, humanity will lose.

Now let the attacks begin! 🤓

[Neeraj Kathuria @EnablingNew]

https://t.co/TRlYhm8C9j

[The Better India @thebetterindia]

Every evening, as Mohali slows down, one 70-year-old chooses to show up with warmth.

Near Sectors 54–55, on the road towards Franco Road, he quietly serves free chai to anyone passing by his home. No banner, no announcement. Just a simple act of seva that has continued for over a year.

Winters bring steaming cups of tea. Summers bring both chai and cold drinks. But what truly stays constant is the feeling he offers, that someone cares enough to pause for you.

In a world chasing bigger things, he reminds us that sometimes, the smallest gestures leave the deepest impact.

Credits : harsimar_daily_vlogs on IG

#GoodNewsIndia #Kindness #Inspiring #Punjab

[Mohali, Punjab, Kindness, Inspiring India, Good News, Positive News]

[Frontalforce 🇮🇳 @FrontalForce]

This guy shud be teaching in a school or college but here he is working in a factory.

This is bad luck of our nation..

[Parimal @Fintech03]

Next in who after the Ramanujan series? A mathematician whose work is so deep that it borders on the spiritual, yet who remains a total mystery to the public, we must look at Professor Mahan Mj (also known as Mahan Maharaj/Swami Vidyanathananda).

In the world of logic, he is a ghost; in the world of geometry, he is a king.

Mahan Mj is arguably the only person on Earth who is a Saffron-clad Monk of the Ramakrishna Order & a top-tier global mathematician simultaneously. He is a Prof of Mathematics at TIFR, Mumbai. He lives in a simple monk's cell, owns almost nothing, & wears only his saffron robes, yet he solves problems that baffle the minds at Harvard & Oxford.

Most people think science & religion are at war. Mahan Mj proves they are 2 sides of the same coin. He treats a complex geometric proof as a form of meditation. When he won the Infosys Prize (₹65 Lakhs), he donated the entire amount to a trust for the education of underprivileged children.

His landmark work resolved key aspects of the long-standing Cannon–Thurston Maps conjecture in hyperbolic geometry & geometric group theory, a problem connected to Bill Thurston’s program that had remained open for decades. This work was so significant that he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2018, the absolute Olympics of math.

Like many geniuses, his path was not linear. He ranked AIR 67 in IIT-JEE & joined the EE program at IIT Kanpur. Halfway through, he realized that circuits were too noisy for his quiet mind. He fought the system to switch to Mathematics. He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley under Andrew Casson. He could have stayed in the US & lived a life of luxury as a superstar professor. Instead, he returned to India, joined a monastery, & continued his research from a room with a bed & a bookshelf.

[Abhishek Murarka 💹🐂 @abhymurarka]

The Chole in Chole Bhature stands for Cholestrol.

[Sann @san_x_m]

His name is Phanindra Sama.

He grew up in a small town in Andhra Pradesh.

His father was a government school teacher.

In 2005 he missed a bus home for Diwali because he could not get a ticket in time.

That frustration became a company.

He founded redBus. India’s first online bus ticketing platform.

Nobody believed bus ticketing could be done online in India in 2005.

No digital payments infrastructure. No smartphone penetration. No trust.

He built it anyway.

In 2013 Naspers acquired redBus for Rs 600 crore.

He was 32 years old.

He later co-founded Fortune500 Ventures to fund other first generation entrepreneurs.

A missed bus ticket. Rs 600 crore.

Problems you live are businesses you build.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Sadio Mane, a Senegalese soccer star, earns approximately $10.2 million annually. He gave the world a rude awakenng after some fans were flabbergasted when they saw him carrying a cracked iPhone 11. His response was awesome:

"Why would I want ten Ferraris, 20 diamond watches, and two jet planes? I starved, I worked in the fields, played brefoot, and I didn't go to school. Now I can help people. I prefer to build schools and give poor people food or clothing. I have built schools and a stadium, provide clothes, shoes, and food for people in extreme poverty. In addition, I give 70 euros per month to all people from a very poor Senegalese region in order to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips, and even planes. I prefer that my people receive some of what life has given me.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Doctors are manually operating ventilators in order to keep babies alive in Cuba.

The U.S. is laying siege cruelly cut off all fuel, power is out, leaving hospitals without electricity. Dialysis patients, babies in NICU, and others will die. This’s a crime against humanity.