SEBI as a regulator

Very enlightening discussion with SEBI Chairman CB Bhave on how the Global meltdown, Satyam, Pyramid saimira and others were handled. The highlight to me was how well the financial regulators and ministries work together to tackle crises, while the other arms of the govt (especially the ones handling homeland security) compete to bring the each other down. Why is this?

Frugal Innovation

Nano was hailed as being the worlds cheapest car. Tata engineers had to use frugal Innovation to ensure they made a car which could cost less. India as a culture had frugal built into it. Mostly because of the fight for resources given the density of population. One such area India is pioneering frugal innovation is healthcare.

The public sector has been overwhelmed, which is not surprising considering how little India’s government spends on health as a share of national income. Accordingly, nearly four-fifths of all health services are supplied by private firms and charities—a higher share than in any other big country

Some examples from this very interesting article in the Economist

“beating heart” surgery causes little pain and does not require general anaesthesia or blood thinners, patients are back on their feet much faster than usual. This approach, pioneered by Wockhardt, an Indian hospital chain, has proved so safe and successful that medical tourists come to Bangalore from all over the world.

Most of the new, expensive imaging machines are only a little better than older models. Meanwhile, vast markets for poorer patients go unserved. “We got out of this arms race a few years ago,” he says. Fortis now promises only that its scanners are “world class”, not the newest

International experts vouch that the care is good, not least because Aravind’s doctors perform so many more operations than they would in the West that they become expert. Furthermore, the staff are rotated to deal with both paying and non-paying patients so there is no difference in quality. Monitor’s new report argues that Aravind’s model does not just depend on pricing, scale, technology or process, but on a clever combination of all of them.

Financial Chicken Soup

Isnt allowing the companies to go bust a better way of handling the sinking ships than pumping in money in the form of intervention? Why convert zombie institutions into living zombies? Are the bailouts a temporary Keynesian itch or a permanent move to socialism?

Speaking of which, will the Satyam episode lead to better bankruptcy laws and restructuring procedures in India? What we did with Satyam needs to be codified and more options for liquidation introduced.

Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, says Capitalism without bankruptcy is like christianity without hell. Take a listen.

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Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
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Transformation of a city

Bangalore has been thru exponential growth in the past three decades. It has mostly been driven by the IT/ITES industry. Most of this development has been uncontrolled. There were no plans that administrators worked towards. There was no vision of how they wanted the city to grow. They reacted mostly. The growth of automobiles have outgrown the capacity of the city to support them. Humans have lost out to automobiles. Partly because the administrators were decades behind the demands both in capability and capacity and were unprepared for this growth. Now they are so behind they only have time to catch up and firefight the troubles.

Not too many people believe this can be turned around. Like Prof T G Sitharam, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, IISc, told Indian Express: “We do not want to touch Bagalore right now. The city is in a mess and there is not much scope of development.".

But it cant be all that bad. How do we turn the city around? Are there any examples in other countries we can borrow? The video tries to explain how some cities have refocussed their priorities and have emerged more citizen friendly. Can this work for Bangalore?