BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

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NRao
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

UlanBatori wrote:^ NRao:
rich experiences of livelihood projects from across the country which have generated 2.5 million emerging entrepreneurs,” added Vinay Vutukuru, co-Task Team Leader and Senior Agricultural Specialist.
Wow!
In 2011, the World Bank had extended a loan of $500 million. That loan was used across a few villages in 13 states - numbers are in that article. This new loan should mean that the earlier loan must have had a good effect. It also means that they have meaningful metrics
and good, healthy data. The data should provide some interesting insights.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

As they say: "Now U r using Mah Brain!" Thx. You are exactly in line with where we have been struggling to point. With one minor addition/deviation:
Think beyond present rural "occupations" and "enterprise".

Think about, say yourself or other hi-tech ppl: Why can't you do your work from a nice village spread? Your own "kulam" as swimming pool/ fishing pond in the backyard, the fresh fragrant breeze blowing through the holes in one's head (quoting sister of a Mountaineer responding on why her bro and his buddies spend their time hanging from cliffs), the sound of cows mooing and jackals and wolves howling at night...

We can get you 5G Internet and Satellite connection to Cloud Computing. We can bring high-tech telemedicine to your home: you can probably afford to acquire/rent/host a BP machine, maybe even an ECG for your neighbors' occasional use.

Your neighbor the engineering grad Abdul runs a UAV drone Service. On weekends he is busy renting out his Video Wedding bijnej, other days he gets contracts to monitor crops. But he also runs a retail delivery service, which your neighbor Nagaraja the cabbage farmer uses, to get Mobile phone/Whatasapp orders for specific cabbages in his field, and gets them delivered straight to the kitchens in the neighboring city (or wherever there are Liberal Commie Pinkos who get suckered into the Organic Farm-2-Kitchen scam). He employs the teenager Bhadrachalam Singh to run the UAV delivery bijnej on demand, rumor is that Bhadra is starting his own Startup Venture in this, in league with Abdul's daughter Ayesha.

Nagaraja's income has gone up significantly, because his cabbages keep growing until they are ready for the customer, and the customer pays a nice premium to have it plucked and delivered to the comfort of her kitchen. Rumor is that he gets 3x the price that he used to get before, when you count the spoilage, and the end-of-day cut-rate sales that he had to do when cabbages had to be trucked to the city market. Plus, he now can get customers from a wide area due to word-of-WhatsApp advertising.

Down the street is the 3D Printing Works of Subroto Dharmasena who runs that enterprise with his wife. They bid for orders for jet engine blades, designer shoes, prosthetic parts, etc etc using the Internet, and BlockChain for contract negotiations. Once they get a contract, the buyer can download specifics straight to their machines using IoT tech (no idea why), and he can get his parts ready within 24 hours, mostly to be shipped using Abdul/Bhadra's UAV Service again.

And up the street is the Suryodaya Urj Kendra run by Molykutty from Kannur. She and her hubby Ouseph are the go-to ppl if your solar PV system misbehaves, or you need your biogas generator charged with fresh go-poo. One-stop Energy Specialists for the village cluster. They have maintenance contracts with most of the villagers, so they get a regular income, which is well worth the expense for their customers. Plus they are licensed dealers and installers for the systems that they then service.

And off to the east is Deepa's Vertical Farm, the best place to buy flowers. Orchids. Again with same-day delivery to the international airport at the nearby city. Rumor is that they are famous in Riyadh and Jeddah as THE source of flowers for parties. They just bought a new Maruti Fuel Cell hydrogen car..

(more on who operates the filling station for that later). Point is, only Nagarajan is a traditional farmer. So think beyond rice-growing and "handicrafts" to vertical farming, drone delivery and orchids. You can be rich AND honest in rural India. Unless the alligator in your pond gets mad at you.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by Prasad »

Rather than thinking of villages as single units, I'd guess a cluster of villages around a more urbanised hub would be a more practical way of looking at it. Secondary level schools and primary healthcare in villages with higher secondary and undergrad/pg level, speciality hospitals level at the hub. With excellent connectivity by road/rail. High-speed internet is vastly more expensive with lower density of users. So sitting in your tharavad with a kulam with your nearest neighbour an acre plot away might sound nice but will the internet provider company make ends meet?
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by RohitH »

Prasad wrote:Rather than thinking of villages as single units, I'd guess a cluster of villages around a more urbanised hub would be a more practical way of looking at it. Secondary level schools and primary healthcare in villages with higher secondary and undergrad/pg level, speciality hospitals level at the hub. With excellent connectivity by road/rail. High-speed internet is vastly more expensive with lower density of users. So sitting in your tharavad with a kulam with your nearest neighbour an acre plot away might sound nice but will the internet provider company make ends meet?
How will SpaceX investors make money ?
They are aiming to provide internet access at global scale.
https://www.wraltechwire.com/2019/05/28 ... -starlink/
Any plans by ISRO to achieve the same feat for all indian villages?
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

True, true.
BUT.. Internet cost is around $40 per mo with Mongolian Telephone and Telegraph (MT&T), which comes to INR 2800. That brings very high speed, enough for streaming cricket and XXX movies in HD / 1080p on 72-inch screens (which is why ppl will get it: not to browse BRF, sorree onlee). Density around these parts is at most 2 houses (meaning 2 paying customers) every 3 acres. That would be pretty rural in desh. OK, once hooked on basic, most will splurge on the really lucrative packages, but that is not different in India.

And does MTT make money on this? Let me put it this way. On Elecshun Rejult din, I was watching News18 and chatting on BRF, until the Projection crossed BeeJayPee 275, when I yawned and looked up - and the Internet Box was dead. When I woke up again, I called the computer at MTT, who sent a live technician out (would have scheduled it in 2 hours, but I chose 8 hours). Came on time, looked at box and heard my diagnosis, said: "It's dead" and went out to her van and installed a new box for me, and ran tests until I was happy. No charge. I suspect that yes, they do make money.

I think I know some residential customers in desh who pay on that order for Asianet Cable Internet, and another huge amount for phones (teenagers at home). If you have a few commercial customers such as the 3D printing shop, a telemedicine center, maybe a movie theatre and a few restaurants, I think high-speed Internet may be surprisingly viable.
But it is true that initially people will prefer to move out to nice suburbs, not the utter boonies unless they have a tie to the boonies.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

UlanBatori wrote:As they say: "Now U r using Mah Brain!" Thx. You are exactly in line with where we have been struggling to point. With one minor addition/deviation:
Think beyond present rural "occupations" and "enterprise".

Think about, say yourself or other hi-tech ppl: Why can't you do your work from a nice village spread? Your own "kulam" as swimming pool/ fishing pond in the backyard, the fresh fragrant breeze blowing through the holes in one's head (quoting sister of a Mountaineer responding on why her bro and his buddies spend their time hanging from cliffs), the sound of cows mooing and jackals and wolves howling at night...

..........................................................
UB,

No matter what people suggest/do, they need to make sure that the suggestions or implementations contain full-cycle solutions. Every step needs creation + admin + recycling. Clean-up after is a *must*.

No use improving eco and finding we have to spend even more to clean up.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

UB's wish is GoI's command.

Hmmmmmm.................. That does not sound right ....................... Foreign influence? But ...............

May 29, 2019 :: Digital health, financial services for villagers soon
The government will soon start providing health and financial services, skill development programmes and education to villagers across the country through its ‘Digital Village’ initiative that would utilise broadband connectivity provided through BharatNet, a senior official said.
1) Health services ........ check
2) Financial services ........check
3) Digital village ................. check?
4) Broadband connectivity ............... check

IITM gathering under assault.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Cool! We will declare victory when it happens and claim 400% credit for it. Let see:
1882: Swami Vivekananda: "Arise, Awake, And Stop Not Till Da Goal Is Reached!" Go out into the villages and educate people, teach them skills"
1930s MKGandhiji: "My appeal to City Dwellers: Please Go Out Into The Villages And Teach Them On Their Own Terms, Through Skills That Will Bring Them Income and Self-Reliance. Swadeshi!!"
1976: Indira Gandhi: "GARIBI HATAO!!!!!"
I thought it was a done deal then.
2000s: "PURA 1" by Pres. Abdul Kalam under NDA. Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas. Done.
2005s Chidambaram PURA-2 (disses PURA 1, shows How V Will Do It Right) under UPA: Govt to provide all amenities via 90% rake-out by Chid's beta
2018: Govt to provide Cooking Gas FREE to every family! (Except they have no money or will to go refill said cylinders after 1 month)
2019 (Now that elections are over..) 100% of villages ELECTRIFIED!!!! (except that there is no power XX hours and 59 minutes each day)
We are by no means saying tht Govt is not TRYING.
2019 (Post election, PM NaMo: "We want to end the days of India being described as a Poor Countree Onlee!"
Which is exactly what we are seeing how to do: In fact, go to "India is the Most Comfortably Well-Off Countree Onlee!"

Meanwhile, we have WG4:
Why are grand visions and great research not leading to great implementation?
BTW I hear that IIT hostels are closed, all students and staff sent away: No water.

It is of course true that
What UBCN predicts today, GOI claims to be planning to do tomorrow.
Look at election, hain? 355 seats predicted. 354+ 3 happened.

Seriously, we KNOW that India is going to accelerate, and fast.. Question is how to set the rails straight.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

To expand on this, Here are some numbers. Pardon me (esp. apologies to Rahul Mehtaji for stealing his line), I get a bit angry thinking about this: so should you.
600,000 villages, 884million villagers. Just over 1000 people per village, roughly 250 homes.
Suppose GOI decided to bring ONE 240W PV system with a 4-hour battery enough for a few LED lights and a fan. (village evening school).
We have proved that it can be done for under 27000 INR each INCLUDING training villagers as installers (not fully qualified solar tech!)
One family-sized 10kg biogas system with tub, tubes, burner: INR 23000.
So how much does it cost to install 1 PV + 1 biogas per village? INR 50K. 600K villages = 3000 million or 300 crores INR. I bet only 300K villages actually need these if that many, so it comes down to 150 crores.
150 crores? that's not even enough to make it to Page 3 of the Yindoo as a scam these days.
Let's scale that up: Even ignoring efficiencies of scale which are massive (you don't need to scale up the battery, if you use the power during the day):

1.2kW + 5 biogas per village (5 to 10 homes + school have solar PV + biogas), all 600K villages: 1500 crores INR.

12 kW + 50 biogas per village (20 to 100 homes + school+biogas): 15,000 crores INR.

30 kW + 125 biogas per village (50 to 250 homes): 37,500 crores INR. At that point, pretty-much every home has standalone power + biogas kitchen waste disposal + enough cooking gas.

Go to the MIL FORUM threads for the cost of military systems, or the Econ Forum thread for the size of scams: Is 37,500 crores hard for India, hain? To bring essentially 100% energy security + cooking gas to every home in rural India?

So the problem has NEVER been lack of money. It has ALWAYS been *&^&*( APATHY. Lots of yadayadayada, very little action. And when there is action, 50% theft, 45% incompetence. Due again to APATHY. Criminal.

Look at the Babus and Manstris strutting around in their BMWs with the flag fluttering front and the red flashers. Each 1 crore plus upkeep. Look at the bill for all those bozos traveling to phoren on taxpayer paisa. Enough to make you a Naxalite, isn't it?

Instead what I am doing is to channel my anger. Try to get at least ONE PV system + biogas to every single village, so that the little kids can see how they can become self-sufficient, and develop technical vocabulary in their own language. If you want to try out your Natural Language Processing/ AI, translate a simple PV / Biogas Manual from Angreji to every Indian language for the teachers and kids, instead of training the Acharyas to say "Mah Name is Mike".
Then in 15 years India can become independent as they take over.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Moving ahead, ppl. Hajaar thanks for ur help, please keep it coming. Scrambling to get WG2 report to a state where I can upload it for ur :rotfl:
Meanwhile, looks like organizers have conned some really good names into the program.

ZOOM registration (and human-presence registration are now open at both the Takshashila Institute website (US etc) and at the IITM website (see above for both).
Full-time students register for human-presence at the ZOOM electronic rate ($100 US, or INR 1000 IITM site). I know both are working. IITM site works by asking ppl to make the regn. payment to the Canara Bank acct shown at the site, and put in the confirmation code at the registration site so that they can associate registrants with payment.

ZOOM user ID will come later from organizers, so pls be sure to put in your halal e-pata at the registration site.

Any chance of getting Chennai area colleges/universities to send students with posters? Great chance to meet some experts and learn/convey their ideas. Organizers tried emailing all the info to the Deans/ VCs etc etc with as much effect as yelling across the Yellow Sea.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by Anoop »

Registered for ZOOM participation. Looking forward to it. Thank you
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Oh, cool. Please stay in touch on how that works. You can help us get it done right. As i said above, this is the first step towards that Holographic Conferencing capability where people wear 3D Gorilla Glasses and feel that others are standing right there in the room before them when they are actually 10,000 miles away.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

A stunning thing happened. One of the organizations that have been funding the Single Teacher Schools initiative, made a generous grant towards the conference. What an endorsement - they see the investment as being worthwhile, for the same causes as they fund usually. That puts a responsibility on the organizers' back, that is indescribable: the money was enough to have funded advancements in several villages today instead. Now the long-term (3-5year) 100-fold or 1000-fold payback has to be achieved.
See above, why I say that a small change in attitude of more desis towards the plight of the rural areas, can transform India faster than anyone imagines. We need to provide the direction and thinking to do it right.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by ramana »

Just a note.

We had a mini get together in Milpitas as a side bar to NaMo Again celebrations.
Attendees were Prem, Haridas, Shyam, Vinayak, and self.
All recent events since February were discussed bone dry.
Will.meet after 100 days to discuss implementation. Plan a bigger group.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Hope these kind ppl and many others register at least via ZOOM.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by suryag »

UB sir can you please provide the various WGs that are in existence we all can choose to enroll in the ones that interest us based on our competency
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

They are listed on the website onlee.
1) Rural Energy Self-Sufficiency and Enterprise Growth
2) Renewing Mother Earth (everything to basically re-forest India, clean up the water (rivers, ponds, groundwater), clean the air (stop uncontrolled burning, reduce city traffic pollution.... End the Flood-Drought Curse by fine-scale water grid etc. Build disaster-resilient villages. Shift to more controlled-environment agriculture (vertical farms, greenhouses), Drip irrigation and piped water conduits...
3) Reaching New Resources: Exotic technologies all the way from Space to nano. Plus reversing Global Warming.
4) Bridging Implementation to Research (and Education..) AI use in Justice system and land management, e-governance, quality & standards enforcement..
5) Global Alliance For Wellness and Healthcare: Telemedicine + Diagnostic Medicine + Ayurveda + innovative cost control while reaching every Indian anywhere.

Contribute gyan, don't hold back. All ideas are welcome and stolen liberally.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Calling Experts: Need help on designing the format for these documents, to look UN-quality. Documents are ~ 100 pages or more, with about 100+ references, Index, a few figures, several Chapters and sections, some tables maybe. For printing I expect to use double-sided.
Also need some cool cover designs. What I am looking for is a LaTEX template that makes the things look as sharp as the gibberish reports put out by UN.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

ramana
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by ramana »

Please spread the tweet and try to attend rhe meet if already in Chennai.

https://twitter.com/ramana_brf/status/1 ... 24837?s=19
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Drought in Chennai has become of extreme interest: IITM hostels closed, students sent home. There seems to be some hope: "Drenching" showers forecast for June 17 on. As I recall, it used to rain at night in July back in the epoch before Global Warming. No experience of June there. May is "AVOID", I know. Temps are only around 100F, that's mild for Chennai, isn't it?

How do they plan to avoid a repeat next year I wonder. Desalination plants? Better than carting in water by train and tanker truck as done now, hain? Separate supplies of partly desalinated sea water by flex/ PVC pipe, and purer drinking water?

Wonder if military has a capability to install "portable" desalination plants to get them working in the short term. All that sunshine means that at least solar PV power can't be that difficult to get going.

I don't think I want to be a TN Babu right now, enough said. :shock: This is about as "anthropogenic" as natural disasters get.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by Vadivel »

Fee:
Registration and Payment in India:
http://nccrd.in/module/Content/Content.php

The above link is not working in that page.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Informed, should change momentarily. Good to contact you. Has it started raining?
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by Vadivel »

UlanBatori wrote:Informed, should change momentarily. Good to contact you. Has it started raining?
Nope, dry as sahara.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

They changed the link at this late date!

New one is
http://nccrd.in/iitm/1stAKC/IndexAKC.php
NCCRD | National Centre for Combustion Research and Development, Chennai

May be a few hours b4 they make the old link non-404.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Rain in Chennai!
Six days of rain expected in this series. Hope rainwater harvesting works well. Very long way to go for the reservoirs and ground-water.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Thx. The big question is how to make controlled-environment farming viable. Which means small-footprint land area, leaving 80% of the farmland free to plant fruit trees and get the World Bank to pay for the Carbon Sequestration. Greenhouses are not terribly smart in places where temp does not go below freezing, but they can keep moisture controlled. Bigger impact is from vertical farming done inside a climate-controlled enclosure. Even sunlight may have to be piped in - or just converted to electricity to use LEDs, which may be cheaper than light pipes etc. I have seen some presentations on these from startups: humidity control turned out to be more important than temperature control in one case. It may be easier to keep these places pest-free so food can be grown without much toxins. Advantage is that small delays in monsoon or most droughts need not have any impact. Also water demand could be reduced by maybe 80%. Grain cultivation indoors has not been shown to be viable AFAIK: too little yield per unit area, and needs lots of sunlight. But Basmati is said to use huge amount of water: I wonder why, since what comes up is the same amount of hydrocarbon. So most of the water can be recaptured.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

Very complex situations and questions.

Build It Right: Determining Greenhouse Design by Climate

I think we need India specific research, by Indians in India. Not just technologies, but need to evaluate things like how comfortable are farmers to some of these suggestions/recommendations. After all, to the farmers, all this is a risk.
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

That is exactly right. No sane farmer is going to be "comfortable" with these. Telling farmers to put a high percentage of their resources of time, effort and capital, into new-fangled technologies, is a recipe for disaster. This has happened where farmers switched to "cash crops du jour" and then found that everyone was doing the same, so the extreme prices of these crops crashed along with their business model. Hence, any switch to such things must be done with extreme care, making sure that they are hedging their risks. Just risk-sharing by co-signing loans is another disaster: they may jump ship at the first sign of difficulty instead of making it work. But if all new ideas are rejected as "risky" we will continue our present state of total dependence on monsoons etc. Agricultural universities are great places to do these experiments, and I believe they do many of them. The tech transfer may not be happening so well. Model villages such as NaMograms may be good places to do them, with dedicated people to oversee the projects until they catch on (10+ years to catch a spectrum of monsoon, pests and drought).
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by suryag »

UB sir one nonsensical idea is to sell water to city dwellers, need to understand the regulations behind this, of course making this sustainable is key, need hydrology maps, some land around these good zones to recharge and associated catchment water routing
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

Some numbers on this: (from media/Mantris, where else?)
1) Population of Chennai: 8.24 million (8.25E6)
2) DAILY water demand: 840 MILLION Liters. (that works out to over 100 liters per person, hain?) Makes sense.
3) Present "normal" supply by City/Guvrmand: 525 million
4) Present ACTUAL (drought) supply: <80 million.

So let's see about supplying from outside: Keralastan CM offered to send 2m liters daily. I thought that is measly until I thought about it: 2million liters daily is 2 MILLION KILOGRAMS, i.e., 2000 TONS!! How many tanker car loads is that? Oh, well.. One tanker car can hold like 30,000 gallons, or 120,000 kilograms. 120 tons. So this is about 15 to 20 rail cars full every day. Maybe 200 cars once every 2 weeks?
This is not a "drop in the bucket" but it's only around 4% of Chennai's needs.

But.. if village clusters can contribute enough to fill one rail car, they can probably make some money off it, assuming that they can pay for the rail freight. It will obviously have to come from far away, because, how is a drought-striken village going to sell water? In fact, all the attention is on Chennai etc. Are people even surviving in the villages of TN? How?

The star comment in this whole mess came from the Honnorabal CM of TN a couple of days back:
We were busy with the election but now we are paying attention to the water problem
(because there ain't no water to wash our asses and make them kissable again)
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

So the predictions are that all manufacturing and craftsmanship will be replaced by DOOs programming machines made in China or Germany, and some ppl hired to feed the machines and sweep around them. This is not good for employing 700 million Demographic Dividend (DD) workers. What is the counter-strategy to this?
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by NRao »

A Machine May Not Take Your Job, but One Could Become Your Boss
The goal of automation has always been efficiency. What if artificial intelligence sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized?
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

4 of the 5 Draft Reports are up on the web. Discussions may be very useful to the Panelists. Also, if you see some BRFi type author names, there is a reason for it. The authors pls email the organizers to get their full names there.

http://www.stratcepts.com/1AKC2019/
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Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by UlanBatori »

1st Abdul Kalam Conference & BRF Chai-Biscoot wins recognition from IUSSTF (Indo-US Science & Technology Forum) which is a bilateral guvrmand set up to fund top-notch academic Workshops. Plus maybe a few paise, but point is that it got selected in tough beer review.

While it was initiated as a 400% peaceful chai-biscoot and Walk In The Park to consider Roadmap to 2030 etc, it now finds itself in a different situation.
(a) Climate Change has hit in full force in Chennai
(b) New data show that MANY Indian cities (Chennai, B'luru, Delhi, Jodhpur, Gandhinagar...) all are heading to run out of groundwater by next year. No one is even daring to talk about the situation in the rural areas surrounding these cities when the cities suck the groundwater dry to 200/300 meters depth.
So were are **NOT** any more strolling towards 2030. Question becomes what to do **NOW* as in heading off disaster by next year.
Avtar Singh
BRFite
Posts: 196
Joined: 22 Jan 2017 02:07

Re: BRF get-together IITM July 11-14?

Post by Avtar Singh »

Just want to confirm there will be some BRF people at this event....
before I splash out on hotel in the coming days.
Attending more for social aspect than conference,
cannot see someone of my limited abilities being able to change much in India!!! :-? :-?
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