Rahul gives unsolicited advice

From todays edition  of Matt Levines' Bloomberg Opinion column Congress passed legislation intended to make life better for people allergic to sesame seeds. Instead, it made things worse.  The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.  In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it. People with sesame allergies say the result is fewer sesame-free food options, as well as new and unexpected risks from sesame in foods they used to eat without worry.  What do you think is the lesson here? In one of my earlier blogposts , I outlined the "8 things a government can do" framework of thinking about public policy. Regulating an industry to place allergen labels feels like "Drastically change in...

In December 2022, I was on the All Things Policy podcast to talk about  An Open Tech Strategy for India  with Bharath. Bharath is the Programme Manager of the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (GCPP), Technology and Policy programme at Takshashila. at the Takshashila Institution. You can listen to the podcast at the link above. I was a nervous wreck before the podcast but it was a lot of fun. We recorded the podcast right as I was finishing the GCPP Tech & Policy programme and I tried using as much of what I had learnt in the course in crafting what an Open Tech policy would look like. You might have noticed from my recent blogposts that I'm getting involved in Tech Policy circles. Over the next year or two, I hope to get enough exposure to decide whether or not I can do this for the rest of my life, maybe even in a professional capacity.

In a previous post , I wrote about 8 things a government can do about FOSS where I talked about categorizing the governments actions in 8 distinct ways. From what I've been reading online, it looks like the Indian Government is already trying to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) FOSS. To recap, DIY-ing is the very last option in the "8 things" and it's risky. Especially in the case of FOSS, DIY is risky. Given the scale of government operations, any DIY solution that the government comes up with gain widespread usage, which can then lead to inertia. Remember that DIY-ing requires not just building expertise in FOSS but also continually maintaining it. If the Indian government doesn't maintain the necessary expertise, it risks the FOSS project falling behind the curve. Let's look at the Samarth eGov project as an example of the Indian government DIY-ing FOSS. Samarth project aims at creating an Open Source, Open Standard enabled Robust, Secure, Scalable and Evolutionary Pr...

According to the 2011 Census of India, the population of India is 1,21,08,54,977 (121 Crore or 1.2 Billion) . In 2021, the US government Census website estimates the population of India to be 1.4 B (140 Crore). For simplicity, let's work with that number for the rest of this article. In the Indian Governments' Ministry of External Affairs' Annual Report 2021-2022 , more than 39.5 lakh (around 4 Million) Overseas Citizen of India cards have been issued since August 2005. (See "Consular, Passport and Visa services"). If we round that up to 40 lakhs, we're looking at roughly 0.3% of the total Indian population. Around 3 Indians in 1000 have an OCI card. In the report 2020-2021, 1.91 lakh (191,000) OCI cards were issued (See "Consular, Passport and Visa services"). In the same section of report, we also see that the Government of India issued more than 57.94 lakh passports (around 5.8 Million) and the Indian Missions/Posts abroad issued 9.94 lakh passp...

The Takshashila Institution taught us last weekend that the various types of government action can be roughly split into 8 categories. Let's look at the categories in the context of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Do Nothing The government can choose to do nothing about FOSS and leave it up to the various public and private entities to decide what each of them want to do with FOSS i.e. whether or not they want to integrate FOSS into their IT systems, how deeply integrated FOSS is in their IT systems, etc. For example, most big public and private players have Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software as part of their IT operations. And when deciding an ERP software to use, they can either choose to go with a provider like Oracle ERP , which isn't FOSS, or they can choose to go with a provider like ERPNext , which is FOSS and home-grown in India. It might sound like doing nothing would mean the government doesn't incur any costs. Alas, that isn't really the case....

"Software hub"s are emerging in most countries. For example Bengaluru is widely considered to be the software hub of India. Hyderebad is a close runner up for the top spot. The number of people that recognize what "Silicon Valley" stands for grows every day. The concentration of human capital in these cities and regions is mind boggling. According to the 2011 census of India, the Bengaluru City population stood at 84,43,675 (8.4 million) . For comparison, this is higher than 15 States and Union Territories in India and higher than the 10 least populous States and Union Territories combined ! Similarly, the Hyderebad Urban population in 2011 was 39,43,323 (3.9 million) , higher than 14 States and Union Territories in India and higher than the 7 least populous States and Union Territories combined. And the cities have only gotten bigger in the past decade. Such concentration of human capital seems to have had a positive effect on the overall economic output of the cou...