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

An Optimally-Weighted Issue-Based Tradeable Vote-Point Election System Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar Earlier, I broached how one could bring about a self-selected and optimally-weighted voting in an election by requiring voters to pay for the privilege of voting and providing them with vote points based on their issue-knowledge demonstrated to the computer in a questionnaire. Now consider a radically different system of people's representation based on vote points and issue-based ballots. Parliamentary representatives are elected by citizens who pay voting fees and allocate their vote points across competing candidates. The winner at the polls takes his seat in the Parliament. However, unlike the democracy we have, losing candidates do not hibernate in political oblivion if and until the next election beckon them. Instead, they serve as the keepers of vote points in annual issue ballots for those who did not vote for the Parliamentary winner. In other words, l...

Vote with a Difference! Ganga Prasad G. Rao Come voting time, and I get disillusioned with the mockery of campaigning that precedes elections. I fear that governments are elected, not by knowledgeable citizens who consider the candidate record, party platforms and the good of the nation, but by the masses who go for trinklets and promises. An entire nation's future is decided by voters who are either as clueless and disillusioned as me or are 'in the cut' (you know, the informal 'deals' involving keys as the candidate's 'morcha' passes through your street). Our democracy has turned in to a jambooree that elects those who promise more, without any regard to issues, or the cost to the nation. What we have is not democracy; it is a 'deal' on our trillion dollar future divided in to a billion parts with a few sharing 90% of it. What lies ahead? A society divided in to classes in which the poor masses grow ever poorer even as they work harder and vote...

Trade my IPO Rights – A May Day Special! Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar I don't know about you, but I am a very frustrated man, what with only GAIL, NTPC and Cairn to show for my participation in 20 IPOs over the past 4 years. I have tried every trick in the book: reading the prospectus, going to the company website, applying early on the first day, adopting a 'pick and choose' strategy, applying sequentially in the hope my luck will cumulate, ....., hoping against hope, but none seems to work. Perhaps I am not 'IPO savvy'! I am so disheartened that nowadays I buy bargains elsewhere when (and if) markets go down during the IPO period. Then, this thought struck me as I was plodding through the gender equality paper. Why not issue IPO Participation (IPOP) Points to IPO investors and permit those points to be traded on the condition that those with 25 (or an 'IPO-specific cut-off' number of) points are guaranteed an assignment? Here is the ...

Capitalism, Efficiency and Equity Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar Prasad Rao? Criticizing Capitalism? It must be the end of Time! Well, may be, but even in the US, the bastion of capitalism, economists, environmentalists and social thinkers have begun to question the Capitalism as the 'panacea for all ills' (See “Is Capitalism courting long-term disaster?”). True, capitalism embodies some of our most cherished values: competition and free markets (though, not exactly), incentives, innovation, and excellence; yet, one cannot wish away its fundamental problems as has been revealed over time. First, by trading the entire future of firms on the stock market, one of its primary institutions, capitalism encourages profit bubbles and short-trading that sucks away all future rents leaving behind, on one hand, a large group of long-term investors waiting decades for the growth that must materialize for them to realize profits and, on the other, managers who must find...

Ganga Prasad Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar When young, there was a 'pata nahi kis ration ka (khana) khaya' joke – a reference to how certain boys were much healthier than others (sometimes without the appetite to show for it). Those were the days when the public distribution system (PDS) served a useful purpose of providing essentials to citizens (during war time), and guarded them from hoarding and exorbitant prices. For those of us who are 'fresh', the PDS is a government sponsored network of 'fair price shops' that are fed from Central warehouses by a fleet of contracted trucks and backed by a Ministry, bureaucrats, officials and accountants, who keep track of the meticulous task of feeding subsidized essential household items to millions across the country. Last time I checked, they sold grains, flour, sugar, kerosene and perhaps cooking oil. Citizens merely need to apply for a 'green card', and stand in line, sometimes for a few hours (good pl...

SOFTLANDING Ganga Prasad Rao http//myprofile.cos.com/gangar How often have we heard of 'softlanding' the economy? Of course, we all know what it means – to bring the economy to a sustainable rate of expansion by increasing the interest rate after a period of loose monetary policy. The risk, as perceived by policy makers, is that too much and/or too fast a rise in interest rate could crash the economy in to a recession. Indeed, Keynesian economists have made a profession of macro-economic intervention to raise growth and then seek to softland it when the economy grows unsustainably. But that's not my point. My argument concerns the nation's economy as a whole. Every emerging economy wishes to grow and grow fast. Yet, perennial growth at more than a couple percent points is 'demanding' in every sense of the word. Do we put our industry on a growth path that exhausts natural resources, inflates prices and exacerbates a million social and environmental externalities...