India says its brains saved the world from the last colosso-crisis – cough, Y2K – proving it can become self-reliant Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modhi has signalled that the nation intends to become self-reliant in as many industries as possible and other officials have already started saying that includes tech. Modhi yesterday delivered a coronavirus-related address to the nation that included a big stimulus package and plan to emerge …
The reason the Y2K crisis did not "happen" is that a very large number of us spent a long time doing things about it.
I wasn't aware that we were all in India. I certainly wasn't there, but some undoubtedly were.
We are going to get the same sort of stupid statements about Covid-19 before long - perhaps like...
"The government said that the UK would have hundreds of thousands dead. What a waste of time."
"I know someone who knows someone who met a bloke in the pub whose sister was a nurse and she said that there were only XXX cases." and
"It was just a US disease. It didn't affect most of the planet."
The health workers who are still dealing with this are like the Y2K fixers. Either you don't fix it and get blamed or you do fix it and all the stupids say that there was never a problem. The big difference is that I didn't have to wear PPE and risk my life!
If India was a big fixer, thank you. It has certainly been since that time that we have noticed you more.
The best outcome for any identified risk is that you've pre-emptively reduced its likelihood to zero. Short of that, you've pre-emptively reduced its potential consequences as far possible. Either way, the common factor is pre-emptively.
Most incidents arise from ignoring the signs until it's rather late in the day to act. But Nassim Taleb was right in saying we rationalise after the fact to explain the incident away (typically as "unprecedented").
India in the 60es and 70es, Albania until 89, North Korea, Danish looney lefties (the ones who thought the two latter countries were the ones to learn from) in the 70es. Hmm.
Singapore is very much not self-reliant, neither are EU countries or the US. Perhaps one should think again?
If you and your politicians haven't learned see-ereliance is important during the Covid-19, all of you are dumb as a door nail (US saying). Didn't UK import Covid-19 test kits from Turkey that turned out to be defective and useless?
Modi is not talking about self reliance in the way you are interpreting. Modi is saying, India needs to make the things Indians need. Reality, os India always had the brains. What it did not have is the money it takes for high-tech research and development. It is changing so the government can focus on research and building industries
Maybe not quite sitting around doing nothing ... but I got paid an awful lot of money re-certifying stuff that had been certified to be Y2K compliant some 10-20 years earlier. Same for the embedded guys & gals. By the time 2000 came around, most of the hard work was close to a decade in the past ... the re-certification was pure management bullshit, so they could be seen as doing something ... anything! ... useful during the peak of the dot-bomb bubble.
Look for similar bullshit/misdirection during the end of the first UNIX epoch in 2038 ... despite the fact that all of the important systems that would be affected either already have been, or can easily be modified, making to so-called"problem" non-existent.
As is typical of most El Reg (and in general, British) articles on India, it is heavily coloured by successive generations of prejudice about India. Rather odd coming from a country that finds new ways to screw up its own COVID response, with its head of government contriving to get himself nearly killed in the process.
Modi's reference is a signal of that the very large stimulus measure (approximately 10% of GDP) will be kept from flowing out of the country by those spending it on purchasing imported gear, through the application of import duties, and that businesses need to apply their smarts to expand their own manufacturing base to compensate. In the post-COVID world of stimulus actions, it's important for national policymaking to consider that a stimulus measure is useless if their own population is simply an agent taking the stimulus cash and handing it to a foreign entity.
The appeal to ego is just a simple construct to express the fact that the stimulus is going to be accompanied by measures to impose duties on imported items and will instead encourage local production focused on the domestic market and exports. Therefore 'you're smart - figure out how to put the money to use to build capacity to feed the domestic market and export into a crippled outside world, rather than passing the money into outside hands'.
Sounds too mercantile ? It's what everyone's going to try to do when they try to pick up the wreckage of their own economies. Getting an early mover advantage on it always helps to quickly push your way into markets when others cannot. For example, India produced no PPE gear until February (the first COVID case in India was on Jan 30). It now produces quarter of a million PPE items per day, second only to China. The paracetamol at Boots is likely to be made in India, too.
That's what the Chinese are doing too - grabbing the opportunity to saturate the world market while others have their industries shut. Modi simply wants his share of that pie while keeping the Chinese out of India.
It is rich coming from Brits, who stole everything they got from India over 200 years of slavery called colonial rule.
India, the richest thriving country in the world before British occupation made into the poorest country of the world when the occupation ended in August 14, 1947.
Take a walk through the Tower of London, visit exhibits of gold, silver and jewels in castles like the Winchester Castle then, come back tell where those exhibits came from.
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