Deccan Herald | Private sector push for India’s open-source challenge

Zerodha’s recent announcement to commit $1 million for open-source software is a shot in the arm for researchers. But India’s private sector needs to do more.

By Arindam Goswami and Lokendra Sharma

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News18 | ‘Catching’ Innovation: What India Can Learn From SpaceX’s Latest Triumph

Embrace risk, support long-term thinking, and create ecosystems that turn ambitious dreams into reality.

What would an Indian SpaceX look like? Perhaps it’s not in space at all, but in renewable energy, biotechnology, or quantum computing. The key is that ambitious innovators need an environment where they can take big risks, fail fast, and keep pushing boundaries. This means rethinking everything, from our bankruptcy laws to our education system. We need to transform India’s innovation ecosystem from a permission-based system to a performance-based one, and move away from subjective approvals to objective criteria, much like how SpaceX operates under clear FAA guidelines rather than case-by-case permissions.

By Arindam Goswami and Ashwin Prasad

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Moneycontrol | Reservation For Locals: Whither jobs, economic freedoms, and economic unity?

It is both easy and tempting to dismiss the entire saga of the reservation of jobs for the locals in Haryana as one of misplaced policy action duly corrected by the judiciary. It could even be tempting to celebrate the strength of the checks and balances present in the Indian Republic. Briefly, to set the context, the Haryana government, acting on the election promise of the current Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala, passed the Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Act, which came into effect in January 2022. The law mandates that all private employers in the state must reserve three-fourth of jobs paying less than Rs 30,000 a month for local residents. Read the full article here.

India can fight COVID-19, but only if the private sector is allowed to step in quickly

It is important to say this because thus far, the task of addressing the COVID-19 has been delegated exclusively to the government. Almost all activities, from airlifting Indian nationals, screening arrivals at airports, testing samples, quarantining and treatment are carried out by the government. While this will be effective if the number of cases remains in the current order of magnitude, the government’s facilities alone will not be sufficient if the number of cases rises 100 times or more.The good news is that India has a private healthcare sector and R&D capability that can be used in the fight. The bad news is that we’re not letting them.If we even have a few lakh suspected cases, the government’s resources will fall short of what is required. The right time to think about the capacity required to handle such a massive crisis is now. The single most important thing for India to have a national response — as opposed to a government response — is to enable the private healthcare ecosystem to play an appropriate role to complement the government’s efforts wherever possible.Read more