Business
The I.D. Man
There may be lots of diverse opinions on the initiative of Nandan Nilekani to create the largest biometric database the world has ever seen. Given the fact that only a small fraction of the population of India is visible to the federal government through the system of national identification, this initiative appears even more reckless and unprecedented.
While it is obvious from the article that the initiative was not universally critically acclaimed and is considered as voluntarist by some of the government and untraditional to the majority of the population, its implementation, no matter how scarce and partial, stands for the beginning of the new era for India. The main takeaway from the I.D. movement is not that it may help collect taxes or provide insurance coverage (which is hardly possible at a national scale in India due to various reasons of demographic and economic nature), but that is implementing the procedures that the government should have done decades ago. Without proper knowledge of the people it is governing, it cannot collect the taxes or address the nation in general. From this point of view, Nilekani is indeed a visionary, who is acting in favor and on behalf of the entire Indian nation.
The main risk of the initiative is its limited scope, merely because the nation-wide campaign would require much greater resources and unanimous support of the official institutions. Nilekani already had to get through considerable resistance just to get the program started, and hopefully both the government and the community will realize the significance and inevitability of the implementation of the identification campaign. From this point of view, Nilekani is a specimen for other responsible entrepreneurs to follow.
Uncle Sam Buys a Plane
There is an opinion, usually backed by solid experience, that joint compromise between two major market players is hardly possible, even for the benefit of the nation. The core principle of free market is competition, and if Boeing and Lockheed Martin joined their effort in order to provide the US military with a new airplane, it might have ended up as a cartel agreement, putting American taxpayers in a much worse situation than winning of LM over Boeing already did.
As it may be inferred from the article, although past achievements were taken into consideration while comparing the two procurement options for the planes, the necessity of budget economy prevailed over both the political momentum and the past and future advances within NASA.
The competition between two planes was not a selection of the strongest over the weakest, but a hard choice between comparably strong candidates. The JSF project might have not been entirely successful, but it was also very far from what is called a failure in the rest of the world. Regarding the Blackhawk, although the endeavor was not so widely-accepted as other aviation programs, it also played a strong and positive role in the field of national defense and security. The takeaway of this article, although it may be considered overly emotional and less fact-based that it might be, that the competition between LM and Boeing was at a very high professional level, and the victory of one candidate over the other did not necessarily stand for the defeat of the entire system of national defense. Besides that, all the know-hows that Boeing has obtained while working on the jet may and will be used in the subsequent models, which may become the face of the US battle aviation some day in the future.
