Home Page of Dr. Saumitra Mohan

Demystifying Racism in India                                              *Dr. Saumitra Mohan                 It has been more than 67 years since we became independent and it is presumed that the state-nation called India should have by now become a nation-state. But the fact remains that things are far from hunky dory. The fissiparous tendencies fanned by the revisionist forces a la extremists, naxalites, separatists and terrorists continue to work at their prime agendum of balkanizing our beloved country. But much to the chagrin of all the Cassandras and prophets of doom like Selig S Harrison, India as a country has held its ground. While Harrison had declared in the wake of our independence that India would soon fall apart in multiple states (read countries), Pakistan has often vowed to bleed India through tho...

Smart Vs Decent Cities: Some Reflections                                                               Dr. Saumitra Mohan The latest Union budget has promised building 100 smart cities across the country for the neo middle class. The term ‘Smart City’ encompasses a vision of an urban lebensraum which is ecologically friendly, technologically integrated and meticulously planned. Such a city relies more on the use of information technology to improve overall efficiency.  The smart cities are supposed to leverage data gathered from smart sensors through a smart grid to create a city which is livable, workable and sustainable. All the data collected from sensors - electricity, gas, water, traffic and other government analytics – are to be carefully compiled and integrated into a smart grid and then fed into computers w...

Teleportation Could Soon Be A Reality Saumitra Mohan As a kid, I always enjoyed watching those TV Sci-fi serials ‘Star Trek’, ‘Doctor Who’ or ‘The Fly’ where the characters would travel millions of miles in a jiffy via teleportation. And today, when I ruminate over the various mundane problems, teleportation can just do the trick. Those traffic snarls, road rages, vehicular pollution or even the human desire to work from his/her home or visiting all the beautiful and exciting places in the world, I think teleportation does hold a key to many of our problems.             And Lady Luck really seems to be smiling on us as scientists across the world are busy trying to make it a reality. Teleportation may be just as easy as scanning our body down to the subatomic level, annihilating all our favourite parts at point A and then transmitting all the scanned data to point B, where an intelligent machine reassembles us in a fraction ...

NREGA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE NREGA Saumitra Mohan The Union Ministry of Rural Development Minister is said to be working on a proposal to bring about some far-reaching changes into the flagship rural employment scheme namely Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). One of the proposals aims to tilt the ratio of expenditure in favour of materials, which, as alleged by some, will likely result in contactors coming in through the backdoor. Increasing the material component of funds from 40 per cent to 49 per cent and decreasing the wage component accordingly, as proposed, would mean reliance on ‘ghost conractors’ with resultant corruption. Another fall-out of this development would be that the more vulnerable unskilled workers would lose out to the skilled ones in a contactor-based system.  As things stand now, the contractors and use of machineries have been consciously barred in NREGS to keep it focused on its basic purpose of providing rural employme...

             Lateral Entry into Civil Service: A Timely Move Saumitra Mohan The federal democratic system in India since our independence has been governed by the elected Executive popularly known as the Council of Minister headed by the Prime Minister as primus inter pares. This elected Executive changes every quinquennium depending which political party gets first past the post at the hustings. The winner is bestowed the responsibility to run the country as per the arrangements specified in the Constitution of India. However, to ensure systemic continuity there remains in place an impersonal, permanent Executive aka the complex hierarchical bureaucratic structure, the famed steel-frame of India.             Notwithstanding the eventful vicissitudes of fortune as Indian democracy has experienced over the years, if the country has seen peaceful transitions from one government to another, th...

NREGS: NEED FOR REINVIGORATION Dr. Saumitra Mohan With the change of guard at the Centre, lots of initiatives are being conceived. Newer schemes and programmes are being contemplated to bring about a positive turn-around in the socio-economic life of a common India. Many extant programmes are also being given a makeover.  The new enthusiasm and fresh thinking are definitely laudable and so far have been contagious given the positive vibes generated among the hoi polloi. All these initiatives, however, are yet to be tested for their efficacy in terms of practical implementation. In the interim, one particular national programme is definitely gasping for breath and that is National Rural Employment Guarrantee Scheme (NREGS). NREGS was launched in the year 2005 pursuant to passage of the National Rural Employment Guarrantee Act (NREGA) in the parliament the same year during the first UPA (United Progressive Alliance) Government. The scheme was also launched to honour the Const...

National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme: How Effective? Dr. Saumitra Mohan A liberal welfare state tries to ensure equitable distribution of the development pie by resorting to myriad ways of redistributive allocation of values among its citizens. One of such measures include employment guarantee schemes for the toiling masses to ensure them work for minimum number of days on pre-decided subsistence wages. It is with this objective that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) was launched in all the districts of this country. This follows on the back of various employment generation and food for work programmes including Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), Community Development Programme (CDP) and Swarnajayanti  Jawahar Rojgar Yozna (SJRY). NREGS is actually predicated on the experiences and knowledge gained during implementation of all these previous schemes. Since then, many observers have come up with suggestions and proposals for further f...