Sep 07, 2005 02:33 AM
2726 Views
(Updated Sep 07, 2005 05:28 PM)
“The integrated method that will bring prosperity to rural India is called PURA or Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas. This envisages four connectivities: physical connectivity through quality roads and transport; electronic connectivity through telecom with high bandwidth fibre optic cables; knowledge connectivity through education, skill training for farmers, artisans and craftsmen and entrepreneurship programmes.”
“As a Bangalorean, I remember feeling mighty proud of Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s revealing statement that he would like to develop Kuala Lumpur as Malaysia’s Bangalore! Today, it is just the reverse: KL is a city of the future that has left Bangalore far behind.”
- Kiran Mazaumdar-Shaw; CMD, Biocon
I don’t expect kids to become a Nehru or Gandhi but I want them to know their country. The thought should be: give them what they want at the right stage. Every story has one theme: triumph of good over evil. It might be Jesus saying it or Prophet Mohammad or The Incredibles.
Few things galvanise a nation as much as sport does. In that theatre of human emotions, only unscripted drama rules. Look how excited we are about Sania Mirza who has 50 other girls better than her at the moment. We are excited because an Indian is competing with the world.
Yes, this is just a snap shot of what you can find at Indiaempowered.com. This website contains a new series being run by the Express Group. This series is an impeccable collection of articles by some of the most prominent public figures in the contemporary India.
The series began on the Independence Day August 15th with an inspiring and highly intellectual article from The President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Following the President were Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and leader of the Opposition Mr. L. K. Advani. Let me clarify. The articles contain anything but jingoistic political rhetoric. They are very high on academic content and trust me; they are devoid of nauseating partisan talk.
I agree majority authors are political figures and Shahrukh Khan is only one of the few exceptions; but don’t you think a series, which talks of empowering the Nation, has to be weighed highly by those who actually have maximum influence in shaping future of the coming generations! Whether we like it or not, each and every decision made by the policy makers in national and state capitals affects our lives directly and/or indirectly.
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What forms the Nation? It’s citizens. And empowerment of nation is nothing but empowerment of its people. The stories being published in the second section deal with empowerment of people. Second part of the website contains articles published in Page 1 Anchor Section of The Indian Express.
The successes stories of aam admi have been promoted. And here aam admi includes us junta, from farmers to middle class IT engineers. Those who have managed to achieve something extraordinary in life with sheer hard work have been given much deserved space. Here is a snap shot…
~With no one to guide or help him, Muzakkir used the knowledge he had gained from his reading to painstakingly fabricate the aircraft. Metal pipes from a junkyard formed the chassis, tin drums were beaten into shape to create the fuselage, the wooden propeller was carved out of a Cassia tree at the farm and the engine of his father’s old scooter was salvaged to power the aircraft.
~In 2003, Arvind Thiagarajan invented ABO (Adoptive Binary Optimisation) to reduce the sizes of images and documents more effectively than anything that existed then.
~Though the golden-brown fields in his village are barren and the ponds are fast drying up, Kirta Ram is confident that his village will not have to ‘‘beg in front of the government’’ for relief and survival this year.
~India’s first space observatory for multiwavelength scientific explorations of the invisible universe—Astrosat, launch 2008—will carry a payload of five major instruments being designed and built hands on in labs nationwide with some foreign collaborations.
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Better yet, we – the common man can join the debate too. Each of us probably has a dream for our nation. And definition of nation’s empowerment can be different for each of us. Seldom do we get an opportunity to vent our thoughts in such a manner. Agreed, Mouthshut is an exemplary forum; however, political topics are deliberately discouraged here.
So, pick up that pen and ink your own idea what India Empowered means to you and email it to myidea@expressindia.com. A selection of articles will be published in the group’s flagship newspapers The Indian Express and The Financial Express. And all the contribution and letters will be published on this website.
