As the new chairman of Prasar Bharati, A Surya Prakash has a lot on his mind. From the `13,556 crore losses in 2011-12 to stiff competition from private channels, the organisation is struggling to find its feet. In a freewheeling interview with Ankita Lahiri, he clears the air on some of these issues and discusses his plans to revamp Prasar Bharati. Excerpts:
How do you strike a balance between the environmental needs and economic and industrial growth? Environment-related compliances are important and non-negotiable, but development cannot be forsaken. Hence, there is a need to adopt a sustainable approach. Rajasthan falls in arid and semi-arid agro-climate zone, deficit in water resources. The state board has stress
Ruskin Bond is perhaps the only Indian author of English language to have created a vast wealth of children’s literature. Despite being famous, Bond is quite unassuming and does not believe in public relations and does not even have an email id! He has been awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan for his writings. He won John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial
What is ‘Digital India’ and how will it benefit the common man? It will make the common man more empowered. It will bridge the gap between digital haves and digital have-nots. We need Digital India more for the poor and under-privileged people. For example, if a rickshaw puller from Bihar comes to Delhi then all his documents like BPL card, birth cert
The man responsible for driving urban development in Madhya Pradesh is also well versed with the ICT and has played a key role in shaping the growth of IT industry in the state. In an interaction with Governance Now, he talks about the smart city plans of the government. How do you define a smart city? Which cities in Madhya Pradesh you plan to develop under the
Union chemicals and fertilizers minister Ananth Kumar is a veteran politician. He served as a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. In his home state Karnataka, he has always been a force to reckon with in the BJP, at times evoking extreme reactions within the Sangh Parivar. Kumar’s induction into the Narendra Modi cabinet was a logical conclusion to his long innings in politic
Digital literacy is necessary to keep millions of Indians well informed and connected. Debjani Ghosh, vice president, sales and marketing group and managing director for South Asia at Intel Corporation explains how the company is helping the nation in its journey towards digital literacy in an email interview with Praggya Guptaa. How is Intel sup
As a co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the internet, Cerf is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications. In an email interaction with Governance Now, he talks about the next phase of evolution of the internet and how India should go about connecting its billion plus people. How do you see the global digi
The former head of transport department of the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi tells Governance Now why public transport gets the short shrift How did public transport become such an ignored area? Up till the early 1980s, urban transport was an irrelevant subject for any government. Three-fourths of India lived in villages. The urban vote
What are the trends in information management and data storage infrastructure? The world is moving towards the flat file system or unstructured data and to address this requirement we have specific file and content solution that helps store massive amount of such data. This is what we call the content layer. Along with this we have the converged storage infrastru
So many people unemployed, yet an estimated driver shortage of 20 lakh. What explains this? India is full of such paradoxes. There are several reasons for this, but I’d like to point out a couple. One, there is no connect between academia and industry. Mostly, people go through an education for the sake of a degree. It is non-specific and does not prepare t
The emeritus professor at IIT-Delhi’s centre for biomedical engineering, Prof Dinesh Mohan was formerly the coordinator of transportation research and injury prevention programme. He tells Sopan Joshi about the state of knowledge on road safety and the politics of public transport: How does India perform on road safety parameters?
Why is fuel economy so crucial in India’s automobile market? We are a price conscious society. Till about 50 years ago, we were a deprived society. We have not yet become a conspicuous consuming society like some developed countries. Traditionally, the Indian society has not been a mindless consumer, we have always been mindful consumers. Wasting is looked
An IAS officer of the 1978 batch of Jharkhand cadre, RS Sharma was the director general of UIDAI before joining DeitY. He is the main driving force behind the ambitious Digital India programme. Talking to Pratap Vikram Singh and Praggya Guptaa, Sharma explains the role of his department in providing services and localised content to the rural population over th
How does the BJP propose to build its base in Tamil Nadu? For the past four to five years the BJP has been consistently working in Tamil Nadu. And our mobilisation capacity has got demonstrated in the near past. It has increased exponentially. We have been taking up issues which are core to the state. For instance, the Tamil Nadu fishermen issue. We worked to mob
Nayana Kathpalia has been fighting to save Mumbai’s open spaces. As the founder trustee of NAGAR, she has been working on solid waste management, improvement in air quality, preserving beaches, mangroves, heritage places, efficient road space management and water conservation. She is also a trustee of the OVAL Trust that has been instrumental in restoring and maintaining Mumbai’s ic
Do you feel that discrimination and violence against people from the northeast is more prominent in Delhi as compared to other metro cities? After visiting several metro cities, the committee observed that the number of people from the northeast living in Delhi was much higher. This can be a reason for larger number of such incidents taking place in Delhi. Peopl
A founder member of Penguin India, David Davidar spent 25 years with the publishing giant in various capacities before moving back to India to start his own publishing venture Aleph Book Company in partnership with Rupa Publications. He is also an acclaimed author of three novels. He spoke to Shreerupa Mitra-Jha about the new anthology of Indian short stories he has edited, and
It’s been more than a year since Prof Ashish Nanda took over as director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). An IIT-Delhi and IIM-A alumnus and former Robert Braucher professor of practice at Harvard Law School, Nanda, 54, is a man on a mission. At IIM-A he has brought in changes in the selection of students and introduced deferred admission system. In an interview w
Stephen Alter’s latest non-fiction, ‘Becoming a Mountain—In Search of the Sacred and the Sublime’, was recently released in the capital. The American author was born and raised in the foothills of the Himalayas in Mussoorie. He talks to Shreerupa Mitra about his latest book, the need for good translation in Indian regional writing and his brush with Bollywood.
