The quest for relevance Talent without capital Countries without land
The MegaSpheres initiative of the IITac has come to the most unexpected of conclusions after 60 elapse months and maybe 60,000 man years of intense analysis by the iit alumni community.
Let’s look at the five main conclusions:
1. Communities can define countries without needing land.
2. The role of nation states is down to managing land and currency. Both are losing relevance far more rapidly than was thought originally.
3. Technological supremacy is the primary weapon for accelerated socio economic progress. Manufacturing capacity is not.
4. Education and careers have to be made ai resilient. The Global North has no chance at reskilling lawyers or burger flippers.
5. The monopoly of governments at doing good or handling social ventures as a monopoly are over. Their ability to collect tax going forward is very suspect. Domiciles of companies and people will move to the most tax efficient geographies.
When you absorb the above, you will understand why President Trump is so hyper. He is one really smart guy (though I personally think our man is smarter). He knows time is running out. His ability to collect tax is going to diminish and his defence goods business is not going to be relevant. America is not going to save the world. It has a tough enough task at hand to try saving itself.
The Indian govt is trying very hard. One should wish it all success because the intent is good. I am not too optimistic about the outcome though. It is welcome because it will help highlight what should not be done which is a great help to narrow down to what will work. Let me share some examples.
The govt blew up Rs 50,000 crores on electrifying intra city buses. It was a scam. All kinds of players got onto the gravy train selling junk at Rs 80 lacs per bus subsidy (when you can buy a perfectly good cng powered electric bus for rs 40 lacs). The already bankrupt state transport corporations are in deeper shit than ever before. And the poor commuter is reaching late to work but in air conditioned comfort. He is also falling sick because the non circulating air makes the bus in polluted delhi to be a gas chamber. You may get fried if the battery catches fire but that is another issue. The good news is that all kinds of new players learnt to make a bus and the inter city buses are shifting to electric without a paisa of subsidy. So it was not all lost.
Take another flawed experiment. Ethanol for petrol blending. Converting grain to alcohol was stupid. But subsidy rich. Then we had ethanol 2.0 which is converting cellulosic ethanol waste to alcohol. Another disaster. But then we realised that good old gobar gas was probably the best biofuel and now we have the worlds largest ecosystem for biomethanation of anything from biomass to sewage to coal. We have a national grid for gas distribution and piped cooking gas is replacing imported lpg. CNG is the prefered fuel for serial hybrid vehicles