A Nation on the March

g.kacha wrote:Agriculture: Secret of Modi's success - Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar

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Between 2000-01 and 2007-08 agricultural value added grew at a phenomenal 9.6% per year (despite a major drought in 2002). This is more than double India’s agricultural growth rate, and much faster than Punjab’s farm growth in the green revolution heyday. Indeed, 9.6% agricultural growth is among the fastest rates recorded anywhere in the world. That drives home the magnitude of Gujarat’s performance.

<snip>
Research shows that rural roads are the most important investment for agriculture. Gujarat has one of the best rural road networks in India, and 98.7% of villages are connected by pukka roads.

<snip>
The state has helped catalyse production, notably in water harvesting. It has worked with NGOs and companies to bring the best technology to farmers. Gujarat Agricultural University has been split into four separate universities, helping strengthen R&D.

Can this be replicated in other states? Much of it can. Jyotigram looks least likely to be replicated because it abandons the free-but-unreliable rural power that politicians regard as vote-winners in most states. Many states also prefer large irrigation projects to small water-harvesting ones, since bigger projects translate into bigger kickbacks. Yet Modi’s electoral success points to a new way of winning rural votes. Others should sit up and take notice.

Ameet · Post by **Ameet** » 20 Aug 2009 22:45

World's most powerful women - according to Forbes.

Indra Nooyi, Pepsi CEO at # 3, Sonia-ji, India's mother at #13, Chanda Kochhar, ICICI CEO at #20

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/life/the ... en-503004/

Sanjay M · Post by **Sanjay M** » 26 Aug 2009 07:59

India's Growing Mega-Cities

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8219480.stm

Vipul · Post by **Vipul** » 30 Sep 2009 22:42

India tops global newspaper list.

India has more daily newspapers than any other country, and has overtaken China in paid-for daily circulation.

Hari Seldon · Post by **Hari Seldon** » 22 Oct 2009 11:53

^ bump.

No feel goody-goody news-story recently to putp here, eh?

uddu · Post by **uddu** » 24 Oct 2009 18:34

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPN3gLVDsOY

harbans · Post by **harbans** » 24 Oct 2009 20:18

^^ Wow! Simply amazing stuff!! 5/5 video and must watch indeed!!

Also a poster on U tube put this post, if it can be of help:

Hi, I'm a sportswriter and I had interviewed this guy. He works as a labourer on construction sites and can't afford any equipment. If any of you has extra climbing ropes or shoes, you could send it to this address. Better still if you could find any company willing to sponsor him. His mobile number is
+91 9980420995 (he speaks only Hindi and Kannada)
His address is:
Jyoti Raj (Kothi Raj),
Fort, Chitradurga, Karnataka State
India

shyam · Post by **shyam** » 25 Oct 2009 12:12

The reporter says that this person watched monkeys and Spiderman

Oh Yeah... this pennyless man was watching Spiderman for ideas!

Hari Seldon · Post by **Hari Seldon** » 26 Oct 2009 20:07

Microlending in India Soars

Despite last year's global financial meltdown, the microfinance industry has continued to boom in India because of an influx of private equity and bank funding.

Microlending coupled with the mobile revolution will take our rurals places, or so moi hopes. At least let the upper half of the states jump onto this change bandwagon first. Will take time for a Bihar and Bengal to get there, perhaps.

SwamyG · Post by **SwamyG** » 28 Oct 2009 07:36

Indian Firms Shift Focus to the Poor
teaser1

ndia's many engineers, whose best-known role is to help Western companies expand or cut costs, are now turning their attention to the purchasing potential of the nation's own 1.1-billion population.

The trend that surfaced when Tata Motors' tiny $2,200 car, the Nano, hit Indian roads in July, has resulted in a slew of new products for people with little money who aspire to a taste of a better life. Many products aren't just cheaper versions of well-established models available in the West but have taken design and manufacturing assumptions honed in the developed world and turned them on their heads.

teaser2

Such inventions represent a fundamental shift in the global order of innovation. Until recently, the West served rich consumers and then let its products and technology filter down to poorer countries. Now, with the developed world mired in a slump and the developing world still growing quickly, companies are focusing on how to innovate, and profit, by going straight to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. They are taking advantage of cheap research and development and low-cost manufacturing to innovate for a market that's grown large enough and sophisticated enough to make it worthwhile.

teaser3

What is happening today is much different than the so-called "sachet revolution" of the 1980s when Unilever and other consumer-goods companies realized they could sell hundreds of millions of dollars more of their shampoo, detergent, toothpaste and snacks just by selling them in tiny packets.

This time, Indian engineers are reinventing products to cut costs and reach the billions of people world-wide who live on less than $2 a day.

There is lot more....please read and ensoy.

brihaspati · Post by **brihaspati** » 28 Oct 2009 07:59

Was looking for a comprehensive discussion on land, land use and land reforms. There are various threads covering different aspects. Any thoughts?

K_Reddy · Post by **K_Reddy** » 30 Oct 2009 15:26

About Micro lending - I have a LOT of friends working in the sector. A lot of them are foreign Ivy League students looking to put this on their resume. They all say the same thing – Micro Finance its not magic bullet to cure all ills. And despite a very robust load quality assurance mechanism and very low NPA ratio, a lot of the money actually goes to consumption and not investment. There is no way to get around the fact that we need to spend more on social development in rural India.

Umrao Das · Post by **Umrao Das** » 31 Oct 2009 09:02

Yes land reforms is my favorite. The Urban land ceiling act area UCA of 1976 and Agricultural land ceiling act also1976.

Vipul · Post by **Vipul** » 03 Nov 2009 21:08

Why India bought IMF Gold.

It has been an incredible turnaround for India.

In 1991, New Delhi kick-started the economic reforms process owing mainly to the serious balance of payments crisis it was facing. Then, India -- just an inch away from defaulting on its loans -- had less than $2 billion in forex reserves (that would not even have taken care of three weeks' of imports) and had to pledge gold with the International Monetary Fund to get a loan to get out of the crisis.

Today, it is the IMF that has sold gold to India to 'borrow' money to loan to poor nations!

Gerard · Post by **Gerard** » 10 Nov 2009 00:51

Full circle: India buys 200 tons gold from IMF

putnanja · Post by **putnanja** » 19 Nov 2009 04:10

The India of Ideas

Hari Seldon · Post by **Hari Seldon** » 21 Nov 2009 20:55

The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery

Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa's cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery.

The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion.

His model offers insights for countries worldwide that are struggling with soaring medical costs, including the U.S. as it debates major health-care overhaul.

"Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That's what we're doing in health care," Dr. Shetty says. "What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation."

At his flagship, 1,000-bed Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, surgeons operate at a capacity virtually unheard of in the U.S., where the average hospital has 160 beds, according to the American Hospital Association.

The India model - targetting pyramid bottoms - may yet prevail. An idea whose time has come.

Hitesh · Post by **Hitesh** » 22 Nov 2009 19:20

There are a lot of technological problems before that approach can be considered as a success. There is a big reason why major hospitals don't really have 1000 beds. Do you have any idea how hard and difficult it is to coordinate healthcare and medical care for 1000 patients of even 3000 patients a day? Also the potential for mistakes are huge. Moreover, if you have many sick patients cloistered together, you run a very severe risk of spreading disease faster.

Right now, hospitals in US are suffering from a major problem and that is staph infection. It is estimated that staph infection may be responsible for 1/4 to 1/2 of infection-related hospital deaths.

I don't think 1000 bed hospitals are a good idea. You should go for smaller hospitals and build more hospitals as it is generally much easier to manage and run the smaller number hospitals and keep disease at a bay and serve a greater geographical area as opposed to fewer but larger capacity hospitals.

Hari Seldon · Post by **Hari Seldon** » 22 Nov 2009 19:45

Good points, Hitesh. But not insurmountable. 1000 bed hospitals haven't happened in the khanate, true. Need not mean they are not a good business and healthcare model. In fact, building a large number of 'small' hospitals, all clustered together within the same 'health city' makes eminent sense, seems like.

Lemme post some more excerpts that throw light on why moi heart dances with hope on this one....

Narayana's 42 cardiac surgeons performed 3,174 cardiac bypass surgeries in 2008, more than double the 1,367 the Cleveland Clinic, a U.S. leader, did in the same year. His surgeons operated on 2,777 pediatric patients, more than double the 1,026 surgeries performed at Children's Hospital Boston.

Next door to Narayana, Dr. Shetty built a 1,400-bed cancer hospital and a 300-bed eye hospital, which share the same laboratories and blood bank as the heart institute.{Ekhanomies of scope and scale all marshalled into one grand enterprise.... heck, given enough scale, he'll soon build his own power plant to energize the health city, seems like} His family-owned business group, Narayana Hrudayalaya Private Ltd., reports a 7.7% profit after taxes, or slightly above the 6.9% average for a U.S. hospital, according to American Hospital Association data.

OK, profit % slightly above a high-cost US setup isn't a big deal. Fact that its net positive is very much a big positive though.

The group is fueling its expansion plans through private equity, having raised $90 million last year. The money is funding four more "health cities" under construction around India. Over the next five years, Dr. Shetty's company plans to take the number of total hospital beds to 30,000 from about 3,000, which would make it by far the largest private-hospital group in India.

{May the lard bless you, noble sir! Jiyo and jeene do.}

At that volume, he says, he would be able to cut costs significantly more by bypassing medical equipment sellers and buying directly from suppliers.

Then comes the problem Sri hitesh alludes to above. One Dr Varma is quoted in the article spewing FUD on Dr Shetty's 'deliverance delivered' model. But but but...turns out the figs bear the Varma guy wrong.

But Jack Lewin, chief executive of the American College of Cardiology, who visited Dr. Shetty's hospital earlier this year as a guest lecturer, says Dr. Shetty has done just the opposite -- used high volumes to improve quality. For one thing, some studies show quality rises at hospitals that perform more surgeries for the simple reason that doctors are getting more experience. And at Narayana, says Dr. Lewin, the large number of patients allows individual doctors to focus on one or two specific types of cardiac surgeries.
...
Dr. Shetty's success rates appear to be as good as those of many hospitals abroad. Narayana Hrudayalaya reports a 1.4% mortality rate within 30 days of coronary artery bypass graft surgery, one of the most common procedures, compared with an average of 1.9% in the U.S. in 2008, according to data gathered by the Chicago-based Society of Thoracic Surgeons.

It isn't possible truly to compare the mortality rates, says Dr. Shetty, because he doesn't adjust his mortality rate to reflect patients' ages and other illnesses, in what is known as a risk-adjusted mortality rate. India's National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers asks hospitals to provide their mortality rates for surgery, without risk adjustment.

Dr. Lewin believes Dr. Shetty's success rates would look even better if he adjusted for risk, because his patients often lack access to even basic health care and suffer from more advanced cardiac disease when they finally come in for surgery.

OK. Care may not be 5star but the option for Dr Shetty's target clientele is a heart op or none at all. And its not just this case, but TN based Arvind eye hospital that has successfully pioneered the very large scale integration (VLSI) in hospital mgmt.

On the bottom-of-the-pyramid opprtunity in India and how the high value consumer subsidizing the low income ones all leveraged using scale is an excellent example of "it happens only in Yindia". TN based Arvind Eye Hospital also famously follows the same model.

Would be great is some Northern states like HP or Uttaranchal get their act together and offer these kind of hospitals land on favorable terms. Such health cities should be there in all 4 zones of the country, at least.

rachel · Post by **rachel** » 22 Nov 2009 20:13

Yes, as has been mentionned ... perhaps instead of a massive 1000-bed monster, five 200-bed hospitals right next to each other, all sharing some infrastructure, lowering costs thru joint bulk buying of equipment etc etc

It's really sad for the US that malpractice lawyers would take the tiny failure rate of a hospital like that, and argue (perhaps successfully) that their patient died because of the overcrowding etc. Ignoring the 99.5 percent of others who do just fine.

The litigation/ medical malpractice industry in the US has to be reined in or brought under control befoe any meaningful health care reform can happen.

Hari Seldon · Post by **Hari Seldon** » 23 Nov 2009 08:21

More feel-good nation on the march stories from the WSJ.

Rural India embraces the cellphone

MUMBAI—In the furthest reaches of India's rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn't deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.

Despite its rapid modernization, many of India's 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators. So in villages that don't receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's largest cell company by subscribers, has a special service that calls hundreds of thousands of farmers every day with recorded messages of weather reports and advice about crops.

Tata Teleservices has a service which lets farmers use their cellphones to control the pumps that water their crops. For the religiously devout, Bharti Airtel is starting a service where users can hear live prayers and chants from popular temples, mosques and shrines.

"Our religious offerings work the best," says Raghunath Mandava, chief marketing officer at Bharti Airtel. "There is nothing like getting the original prayer from the place of worship."

Charges for the services vary: Some are free for now, others cost more than the price of a regular call. Dial-up radio, for example, costs about one rupee, or 2 U.S. cents, a minute. Reliance customers can get cricket reports via text messages three times a day on the day of the match for 5 rupees per day, or take a service for 49 rupees a month to listen to live commentary during matches.

So far these types of services make up only about 10% of cellular companies' revenues, analysts say. But in the next five years the portion of revenue generated by these services could rise to as much as 25%, they estimate.

10% is pretty neat, IMHO. Had no clue about these types of value-added services. Moi also hears that the ARPU measure (Avg rev per user) has long stagnated in the urban areas coz of falling tariffs and stiff competition but rural ARPU remains not-that-bad only.

The mobile extends reach and info access, makes a direct impact to the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen (where to sell crop/catch and at what prices, weather alerts), craftspeople (tailors, weavers and the like by locating demand) and the like.

Hopefully, telemedicine and emergency-response can be improved significantly down the line too. Entirely new biz models - like selling space on trucks and vehicles going half-empty from place A to B, can now become possible. I for one, shall watch this space with a lot of interest.

They are another example of how Indian companies are innovating to reach a new market: consumers in rural India who may have little to spend but have been relatively insulated from the global recession and are keen to gain access to some of the services enjoyed by India's urbanites.

The mobile value-added service business, which also includes standard nonvoice services like texting, will rise close to 70% in the next year to 165 billion rupees ($3.6 billion), according estimates by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.
...
With the more than $200 million in revenues phone company executives expect this year, the radio via phone business already makes almost as much as consultants at KPMG estimate all the regular FM stations in India will make.

"The nonvoice business is becoming very, very important for any operator today to concentrate upon," says Madhusudan Gupta, a Singapore-based senior research analyst at Gartner, a consultancy. "That is the reason that a lot of experiments are now happening."

Stan_Savljevic · Post by **Stan_Savljevic** » 23 Nov 2009 08:57

Since you mentioned it, here we go...
Aravind Eye Care System conferred ‘Pride of South Tamil Nadu’ Award
http://www.hindu.com/2009/11/23/stories ... 380500.htm

.... the beauty of Aravind model was that it charges only for 30 to 35 per cent of patients and the remaining get treatment almost free of cost. “The hospital owes its success to its legendary founder G. Venkatasamy who evolved a model where low cost does not mean the standards were compromised,” he said. “Dr.Venkatasamy’s dream was to eradicate treatable blindness and hence came out with a low cost health delivery model and that too not at the cost of excellence in treatment,” Mr. Murali said.

vera_k · Post by **vera_k** » 23 Nov 2009 09:03

Hari Seldon wrote:Would be great is some Northern states like HP or Uttaranchal get their act together and offer these kind of hospitals land on favorable terms.

Land and incentives is not the problem. Prevalent law and order issues tends to be the sticking point in attracting investment Northwards.

Avinash R · Post by **Avinash R** » 24 Nov 2009 11:39

Indian doctors use iPhone to screen infants

negi · Post by **negi** » 24 Nov 2009 21:02

Something which should make us proud.

Big Bang test puts Indian scientists on global map

The mettle of Indian scientists was such that CERN, otherwise a closed European scientific association with taxing entry standards, granted India "observer" status, a laurel that China hasn't got so far.

Indian scientists had been collaborating with CERN for the LHC experiment since 1991 and over the years, they proved their worth so much so that all precision-made jacks on which the entire machine rests were made in India.

In a sense, the jacks, which can be adjusted to 10-20 micron level, form the very foundation of the collider. Amit Roy, director of the Inter University Accelerator Centre, said the experiments have certainly proved the calibre of the Indian scientific community which is already part of the very best in nuclear physics.

Besides the jacks, nearly 2,000 corrector magnets and circuit breakers were made in India in association with CERN scientists. "Our cost was much less and the money is now being used for the visits of our scientists," Roy said. The Delhi-based IUAC is one of the four Indian institutions that has an accelerator installed, although it is tiny compared to the 27-km-long LHC. The other three are in Mumbai, Kolkata and Indore.

Besides contributing 100 scientists to the effort, India's involvement in the project has put the country in the big league. The development of machines gave the Indian scientists to work on technologies of the highest level, validating the country's capabilities.

Work on LHC's sequel, the 33-km-long International Linear Collider, amply indicates the high value Indian scientists now command. The global design team for the electron-positron collider, which should be ready for experiment by 2016, wants full-fledged participation of India at all stages.

AnimeshP · Post by **AnimeshP** » 07 Dec 2009 05:38

Shashi Tharoor speaking in TEDIndia about Indian soft power .... Great speech

http://www.ted.com/talks/shashi_tharoor.html

Prasanth · Post by **Prasanth** » 07 Dec 2009 18:21

wrong thread, warning added for regular OT posting.

and wrong conclusion as well, PRC isn't a part of LHC. you can get the actual list from LHC website itself.
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/Organization.htm

what observer status means (you claimed china isn't an observer it's a full member !

)

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Abo ... al-en.html

Some states (or international organizations) for which membership is either not possible or not yet feasible are Observers. ‘Observer’ status allows non-Member States to attend Council meetings and to receive Council documents, without taking part in the decision-making procedures of the Organization.

Observer States and Organizations currently involved in CERN programmes are: the European Commission, India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, UNESCO and the USA.

Hari Seldon · Post by **Hari Seldon** » 08 Dec 2009 16:04

People's war on garbage

Kolkata’s citizens decide not to wait for the government and do it themselves.

Great spirit, good show. Read it all. A choice excerpt:

So one morning in early October, the spot saw a rather unusual gathering: about 50-odd individuals of various age, two dozen uniformed “green police volunteers”, and a fair collection of hoes and shovels. Backing them up on the road were three garbage trucks, a towing truck for vehicles, and a posse of policemen with benign expressions and a wireless van, come to cast a watchful and protective eye. In two hours, most of the garbage and the shells of the two cars were gone and those assembled left feeling elated. They had actually liberated 600 sq ft of public space from garbage. The best thing happened the next morning — pictures in a couple of papers and a longish story in one of them on the initiative. The group was galvanized to do more.

They discovered another easy target — a low jungle on top of piled-up compacted garbage, hiding a stinking public toilet, next to a water hyacinth-covered waterbody, again in as central a Kolkata location as you can get — the part of the Maidan at the crossing of Chowringhee and Park Street. Then began a minor saga of action by citizens, with help from within officialdom via individual initiative and growing corporate involvement. In close to two months, 50,000 sq ft of the Maidan has been fairly cleaned up, a 70,000 sq ft waterbody rid of its water hyacinth, 40 tonnes of garbage removed and, most importantly, work actively afoot to clean up and level out an adjoining 100,000 sq ft in order to convert it into a four-cricket pitches square and surrounding outfield.

Ravi Karumanchiri · Post by **Ravi Karumanchiri** » 09 Dec 2009 12:55

Video of a very good speach delivered by Shashi Tharoor at the recent TED Conference

http://www.ted.com/talks/shashi_tharoor.html

About this Speach
India is fast becoming a superpower, says Shashi Tharoor -- not just through trade and politics, but through "soft" power, its ability to share its culture with the world through food, music, technology, Bollywood. He argues that in the long run it's not the size of the army that matters as much as a country's ability to influence the world's hearts and minds.

vipins · Post by **vipins** » 09 Dec 2009 21:17

X-posting

India decodes human genome

Indian researchers have achieved a major feat: they have sequenced the entire genome of a human being, a 52-year-old Indian male.

Only five other countries - the United States, Britain, Canada, China and Korea - have so far done so.

It took scientists at the Delhi-based Institute for Genomics and Integrative Biology, affiliated to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, six weeks, several supercomputers and funds of around $ 30,000 (Rs 13.5 lakh) to achieve the breakthrough.

The decoding of the human genome is a giant step forward towards predictive treatment of diseases. The genome of the man chosen, for instance, shows him susceptible to cancer and heart disease — which would not have been known otherwise.

The achievement comes six years after a team of scientists drawn from several countries completed the first human genome sequencing in 2003. That project took 13 years and over a billion dollars.

“We have bridged the gap between India and countries that have already decoded the genome,” said Prithviraj Chavan, minister of state for science and technology, making the announcement on Tuesday. Chavan compared genome sequencing to “man’s first landing on the moon”.

“It opens new possibilities for diagnostics and low cost treatment of Indian citizens,” said Samir Brahmachari, director general of CSIR.

The human genome contains 3.1 billion base pairs, which describe every bodily function.

Amber G. · Post by **Amber G.** » 10 Dec 2009 01:28

Noble prize winner "autographing the back of chair"

If you want to see the Noble lecture - " Decoding the Genetic Message" by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

check out:http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1208

rachel · Post by **rachel** » 10 Dec 2009 02:41

AnimeshP wrote:Shashi Tharoor speaking in TEDIndia about Indian soft power .... Great speech

http://www.ted.com/talks/shashi_tharoor.html

Very bad speech. Very stupid reasoning IMHO.

Shashi is good looking, articulate and a great speaker. BUT the content of his speech is retarded.

Listen carefully. He thinks that people like and respect India because:

Afghans enjoy Bollywood music;
Brits eat Indian food; and
Westerners like yoga and meditation.

I know a guy who is a former member of Canada's Heritage Front, a white supremacist group. He is really into yoga and TM, a big fan of the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

When I asked him how he could have such disrespect for Hindus even tho TM was derived from HIndu concepts, he explained that he has no problem acknowledging thta Hinduism has some good aspects, but overall he feels the religion is ridiculous and demeaning.

In his words 'the bad massively outnumbers the good'.

In America, many whites respect and admire Deepak Chopra. Deepak has a well known sneering hatred against Hinduism, even tho everything he teaches and makes millions from is derived from the religion. Look up Deepak's interview with Larry King CNN during last years Mumbai attack.

Listen, just because millions of white suburban kids love dancing to hip hop music doesnt mean they are not racist against blacks.

This 'soft power' is such BS. Totally useless without hard power to back it up. AMerica surely has Hollywood, but they also have 12 aircraft carriers to back it up.

RamaY · Post by **RamaY** » 10 Dec 2009 03:54

rachel wrote:This 'soft power' is such BS. Totally useless without hard power to back it up. AMerica surely has Hollywood, but they also have 12 aircraft carriers to back it up.

Well said Rachel.

andy B · Post by **andy B** » 10 Dec 2009 05:20

RamaY wrote:
rachel wrote:This 'soft power' is such BS. Totally useless without hard power to back it up. AMerica surely has Hollywood, but they also have 12 aircraft carriers to back it up.
Well said Rachel.

Completely agree...there has been too much hooha lately about the so called "soft power".

Tharoor's speech is quite amusing not much of any real consequence IMHO.

Hard Force is always understood and respected a lot more than sof power...overall there is a need to upgrade not only the country's image but the individual's as well.....