Arvind's Newsletter

1.India has started to get positive press from many foreign media on some dimensions of its progress even though challenges in certain other areas remain. This is an opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria of Washington Post, which has in the past been very critical of India. Zakaria writes that he came back from a recent trip bullish about India (again !) He also mentions that this is a movie he has seen before but he hopeful that this time it would be different.

“While that mid-2000s enthusiasm did not fully translate, the country did continue to make progress. It has been the second-fastest-growing large economy (behind China) for about 20 years. In recent years, however, it has been able to accelerate growth because of a series of revolutions.

The first revolution was a government initiative called Aadhaar, which gives every Indian a unique 12-digit ID number verifiable by fingerprints or an iris scan. It sounds simple, but it is, in Nobel laureate Paul Romer’s words, “the most sophisticated ID program in the world.” Today, 99.9 percent of adult Indians have a digital ID that can be used to verify instantly who they are and thus set up a bank account in minutes (literally, I have seen this done!), or to transfer government payments to recipients directly and with little skimming and corruption.

Aadhaar enrollment is open to all and free, but its most distinctive feature is that it is publicly owned and operated, unlike in the West, where digital platforms such as Google and Facebook are private monopolies that can share your data to make a profit. Entrepreneurs can even build businesses on Aadhaar. And when you use the platform to send money or take out a loan, you don’t pay those persistent fees so ubiquitous in the West.

The second is the Jio revolution. Mukesh Ambani, India’s biggest and most ambitious business leader, made a staggering $46 billion bet that by offering very cheap phones and data packages through his telecom service Jio, he could get most Indians on the internet. It worked. With most using smartphones as their computers, more than 700 million Indians now use the internet. In 2015, India was ranked 122nd for per capita mobile data consumption. Last year, it was first, exceeding the consumption of China and the United States combined.

The third is an infrastructure revolution, which is readily apparent to anyone visiting India. Spending on roads, airports, train stations and other projects has exploded. Government capital spending has risen fivefold since fiscal 2014, and the average construction of national highways has roughly doubled, as have seaport capacity and the number of airports. Mumbai is finally building an extensive set of bridges, roads, tunnels and metro lines that could truly connect all parts of India’s leading economic center.

These three revolutions could, this time, truly transform India.But they can best do so by helping in the country’s greatest challenge — bringing in the hundreds of millions of Indians who are still on the margins, economically, socially and politically. As of 2019, about 45 percent of Indians — more than 600 million people — live on less than $3.65 a day.

The even larger challenge of inclusivity involves India’s women, who are still pressured in various ways not to work outside the home. Female labor force participation in India is low and, stunningly, has fallen over the past two decades from around 30 percent to 23 percent. Of the Group of 20 countries, not even Saudi Arabia’s level is lower. Bloomberg Economics estimates that closing the gap between women’s and men’s participation would increase India’s gross domestic product by more than 30 percent over the next three decades.

A focus on inclusivity would also ease India’s religious tensions, bringing into the fold the nation’s Muslims (roughly 200 million people, one-seventh of the country), who face persistent persecution. It would also be in character for a country that is an open, pluralistic democracy with a Hindu majority, a religion almost defined by its pluralism and tolerance.

India has the potential to be admired for not just the quantity of its growth but also the quality of its values. And that would truly be an incredible India.

2. A British spy in Iran: Who doesn’t like a Spy story, especially if its is true story?

   He was a senior official in Iran, a trusted keeper of its defense secrets — and a British spy. A New York Times investigation shows how information shared by the official, Alireza Akbari, upended the world’s view of Iran’s nuclear program and led to his execution in January.

   Akbari, who was a senior military commander of the Revolutionary Guards, had open access to Iran’s inner circles of power and advised on key state policies. He also spied for Britain for nearly 16 years, according to Western intelligence officials. Intelligence sources told my colleagues Ronen Bergman and Farnaz Fassihi that Akbari revealed, among other things, the existence of Fordo, a uranium enrichment site hidden near Tehran.

   The revelations, which Britain shared with Israel and other Western intelligence agencies, shocked even those who closely monitored Iran. Fordo’s discovery proved critical in eliminating any doubt that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons and redrew the West’s military and cyber plans for countering the program. It also proved critical in persuading the world to impose sweeping sanctions against Iran.

   Akbari was an unlikely spy. He displayed a fanatical allegiance to the ideals of the Islamic Republic and an unwavering support of Iran’s leaders, according to interviews with people who knew him.

   Akbari ascended the ranks, rising to deputy defense minister and holding advisory positions on the Supreme National Security Council and other government bodies.

   Iran also said he disclosed the identities of over 100 officials, most significantly Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the chief nuclear scientist whom Israel assassinated in 2020.

3The Kingdom Of Bhutan Has Been Quietly Mining Bitcoin For Years

Beneath the Himalayas, rivers fed by ancient glaciers supply the tiny kingdom of Bhutan with immense stores of hydroelectricity. The renewable resource has become an economic engine, accounting for 30% of the country’s gross domestic product, and fueling the homes of nearly all of its 800,000 residents. But for the past few years, Bhutan’s royal government has been quietly devising a new use for these reserves: powering its very own bitcoin mine.
Sources familiar with Bhutan’s efforts to develop sovereign mining operations told Forbes that discussions have been occurring since 2020, though until this week its government had never disclosed its plans.

4. Semantic Decoder of Brain. Researchers have revealed a new artificial intelligence system capable of translating a person's brain activity into a continuous stream of text in a noninvasive way for the first time. New Research from the University of Texas at Austin shows the brain-computer interface can generate word sequences that recover the meaning of perceived speech, imagined speech, and brain responses while watching silent videos.

   
   Unlike previous language-decoding systems, the new decoder doesn't rely on surgical implants. The study focused on three participants whose brain activity was measured using an fMRI scanner, which utilises changes in blood flow to produce brain scans, as they listened to podcasts, thought about stories, and watched short silent films.

    

   A large language model, similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard, then matched patterns in the participants' brains to words and phrases they heard and translated the brain's response to hearing new words into corresponding text. The decoded text is not a word-for-word transcript but rather a gist of a person's thoughts.

5.Germany looks to immigration reform to arrest worsening skills shortage reports the Financial Times. Labour minister says legislation aims to ease entry for foreign workers, combat ‘desperate’ need for staff and tackle demographic decline. Excerpts from the report are as below:

Germany will create one of “Europe’s most modern immigration regimes” to address a worsening skills shortage that risks becoming a “real brake on economic growth”, the nation’s labour minister has said.

Hubertus Heil said the immigration reform was part of a broader campaign by the government of Olaf Scholz to attract global talent to Germany, arrest its demographic decline and resolve a dearth of skilled workers that is becoming the number one concern of some of its biggest companies.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Heil said many industries were “desperate” for staff, a situation that would “only get worse” as baby-boomers retired.

“Germany will lack 7mn workers by 2035 if we don’t do something,” the labour minister said. “And that could end up being a real brake on our economic growth.”

The reform legislation, expected to be passed by parliament in the coming weeks, will make it much easier for foreign workers to take up a job in Germany, removing many of the regulatory obstacles to immigration.

The shortage of workers is limiting output at 42 per cent of Germany’s services companies, 34 per cent of its industrial groups and 30 per cent of construction companies, according to the latest quarterly survey by the European Commission.

The problem could be getting worse. A study by the German Economic Institute found the number of open positions in Germany for which no qualified unemployed person could be found reached a record 630,000 in 2022 — up 280,000 from 2021.

Experts think the skills shortage has also contributed to the recent wave of strikes that has paralysed Germany’s rail network and shut down some of its biggest airports

The government’s new immigration law would allow people to go to Germany for work even without a German professional qualification, Heil said.

Another bill soon to be submitted to the Bundestag would make it much easier for foreigners to acquire German citizenship and allow them to retain other passports apart from a German one

Since the FT report is behind a paywall I am enclosing another report from a German newspaper DW for further study.