Welcome to the Proposals Library of AltKuznets Advisors Pvt Ltd., Your Sustainability Nirvana !

Half-Money, Full Sustainability! Ganga Prasad Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar The media was full of news – of the wrong kind. Food colors and flavors poisoning the young yet growing their brains, muscles, and bones (Kidneys are disposable, aren’t they? Hey,…what are stem cells for!). Plastic bags choking every drain, nook and corner of our commons. Detergents with chemicals so toxic they put nuclear materials to shame. Untreated effluents and solid waste despoiling the rivers and our landscape. Industries, caught in the capitalist ‘more profit’ trap, shunning every social responsibility to fulfil the lifestyle expectations of investors abroad. There was no resolution to the problem despite much talk, reams of paper, twitters, blogs, even U-tube videos. Wasn’t anyone smart enough to find a common denominator across these seemingly disparate issues and design a strategy that addressed them together, simultaneously? Perhaps the media does affect our sensibilities, for an idealist who

Boursing My Way to Utopia ! Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar ….And Alice woke up, all blurry-eyed, not remembering a word of what she had penned while in Wonderland. After staring and blinking a few seconds, she dozed off again in to another dream, this time just as exotic. Yes, something wasvery ‘grotesque’. The entire global financial system was in disarray. Panic ruled the markets.Buffeted between fears of currency crisis, global depression, and sovereign default, the entire financial community was looking for deliverance from their Messiah. But would the Messiah deliver on their pleas? Call it the Big Lord’s design, Satan’s test of character, or cruel fate, but the Messiah was none other than a half-baked, unemployed albeit worldly-wise Economist, who, oblivious to the utter desperation in the financial community, fancied his hand at putting the world in order, and blog his resolution to the travails of the global markets. And, pray, what was his message? The Mes

Pull a punch, Will Ya? Not This Round ! Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar These days, even the guy on the street is familiar with global warming, climate change, emissions taxes and emissions credits. After decades of wrangling, it is perhaps safe now to openly support (without triggering ‘RTI hits and FOIA misses’!) the claim that fossil fuel use has induced and accelerated climate change. Economists, ever so prescient, have proposed various schemes – from per capita emission limits to tradable, bankable emissions credits. Why, and notwithstanding the currency crisis, there is even a European Carbon Credit Trading market (that is when you trade Gouda cheese and thermal power emissions for Swiss cheese and home heating emissions!). But seriously, or more aptly, to tickle your cranial nerves, here’s one that you haven’t come across yet (unless someone smoked it outta me as I showered, and posted it before I trudged my last mile to the public computer center). So, what

Public Funding of the Election Dance? Try the ‘Rao Twist’ ! Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar We may be between elections, but corruption is a perennial river - a river with many sources, one dirtier than the other, each seeking the rainbow, and, both the setting sun on the horizon and the rising moon as the serpentine merges in to the confluence of the sky and the sea. Elections, doubtless, are one of the largest of these corruption sources; the reason being that a change in government brings about changes in policy that affect large domestic business houses, VHNIs, and foreign industries, beyond impacting, in a fundamental way, the multitudes invested in stock markets and fixed assets. The consequent large shadow values attached to electoral results is the motivation behind many-a-backroom pre-election moves. Practically, every one of these moves is an underhand deal with payoffs arranged in one of the many discrete and not-so-discrete ways. So, what can we, as Anna

A 2-Part Vehicle Insurance Proposal that Enhances Road Safety and saves you a Buck (or two)! Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar Man (or, was it the ape?) invented the wheel eons ago. 4-wheeled powered transport is all of 2 centuries old. Road networks came in to existence a hundred years ago. Car insurance some 50 years back, GPS and interactive maps yesterday…..and yet, accidents continue to recur on our roads at a frequency that would shame those who conceived transport as a panacea - a means to foster equity across a large, spread out population. Every nation, whether advanced or developing, loses a not insignificant fraction of its well-heeled, even well-educated population in accidents; in fact, accidents have claimed some of our better known social personalities. No one seeks an accident so why does it happen? True, the improvement in automobile safety features and better road infrastructure have tended to cut down on fatalities if not on accident frequency, but

A Deposit-Refund Population Control Policy - Private or Public? Ganga Prasad Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar It has turned in to a quaint political ritual of its own. Procrastinate on those environmental issues for weeks, even months at a time, but back down just a bit and just in time for the World Environment Day. Yes, it is politically astute to recognize that ‘green’ too is part of the ‘VIBGYOR’ we seek! Now, population isn’t exactly ‘environment’; it is a bigger, all-encompassing issue that straddles the environment, the economy, and all future generations – in fact the future of the nation. It is a lesson in history and socio-economics that almost every populous nation continues, to this day, to be a ‘developing’ third-world nation. Population growth is ‘numero-uno’ of the various problems that bedevil social scientists. So, when it is World Population Day, our democratically-elected leaders give pause and faithfully mouth policy statements meant to assuage the voting public

Do You Have an Idling Timer? Ganga Prasad Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar I have been awaiting the UID enumerator to show up at my door if for nothing else but to wail my angst at the system that seems to have targeted, engulfed and victimized the ‘green-class’ in our society. But wait as I might, the enumerator gives the slip daily leaving me fuming from breathing diesel soot and benzene from vehicles passing by our dusty potholed street. Must I choke to death with ‘PAHcancer’ and turn a ‘statistic’ before I find a place in the Gobarnment database of Sheikh-subsidized citizens? Talking of Sheikh subsidies, the other day, my hired autorickshaw lined up at the gas station behind a SUV. And while we waited, I wondered at the incongruity of the SUV revving up and leaving us in a pall of subsidized diesel soot. Vehicles that gas the immediate neighbourhood with soot or the green orb with ‘excess’CO2 for the same mile on road in fact pay less than those other clean and efficient vehicle