How a group of 20 people from diverse backgrounds created an affordable, world-class ventilator during the lockdown: from The Hindu. “It was late March 2020, and WHO had just declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. India needed ventilators — reliable and affordable. In the midst of the lockdown, a group of 20 people came together over Zoom and WhatsApp — young techies and seasoned medical professionals, entrepreneurs and academics — and pulled off the unimaginable: in just 90 days, the Nocca Robotics team (a start-up incubated at IIT Kanpur) created a world-class, cost-effective, life-saving ventilator, complete with clinical validation. In their book, The Ventilator Project, authors Srikant Sastri, mentor to start-ups and incubators across the country, and Amitabha Bandyopadhyay, professor in charge of the technology business incubator at IIT Kanpur, chronicle this story of collaboration that catalysed an engineering feat.”
Restoring India’s political middle ground: by Swati and Ramesh Ramanathan. “India’s political debate is stuck between a liberal anti-Modi network, which enjoys global intellectual power, and the Modi regime’s supporters, who enjoy domestic electoral power. Nuance and complexity are lost…India faces complex challenges on a variety of fronts. Each of these needs equally complex solutions that can only emerge from substantive, nuanced debates. These exchanges can be intense, even bare-knuckled, pitting one set of ideas against another. But this can only happen when India has a large and vibrant political middle.”
James Otteson: “The fact that a proposed course of action would lead to a good result is necessary but not by itself sufficient to justify doing it. We must show not only that the proposed course of action would lead to a good result but in addition that it would lead to a better result than the other available alternatives.” [via CafeHayek]
