Praxeology: My Reflexions on India

In India, few days back in Chappara village of Bihar 23 children died after eating poisonous mid-day meal food in their government primary school. The Indian government launched the Mid-Day Meal scheme in 1995 ( the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE) ) and one of the stated objectives of this scheme is to, improving nutritional levels among children ! What a wonderful way of improving nutritional levels of children. Only government officials have the chutzpa to call their scheme a nutrition scheme which feeds poison to children and kills them. This incident got lot of reporting and attention simply because of the large number of deaths. Government primary schools everyday provide such stale and spoiled food to children in mid-day meals. I am myself a victim of this scheme so I know it very well (I was a Surat municipal school board student up to standard 3, and I have myself seen lizards and cockroaches in my mid-day meal). During my M.Phil. resea...

Road Accidents in India According to the available data on road accident deaths, India is on number one spot in the world . Surely this is no reason for celebration of being number one in terms of dead people on Indian roads. Every year more than 1 lakh people die on Indian roads and highways e.g., in 2011, according to the report of Ministry of Road Transport and Highway , Government of India (see here ) , there were total 4.98 lakh road accidents out of which 1.42 lakh were fatal. This surely is a huge waste of human lives; a big tragedy about which no one is talking or seriously thinking. Even the most contentious issue of Kashmir, where in two decades of freedom fight 47,000 lives were lost , pale in comparison to lakhs of annual accident deaths on public roads. Newspaper and mainstream media TV channels scream on top of their voice for non-existent threats like Bird or Swine Flu, which kills few hundred people every year, but they remain silent on the ever so pres...

Beginning with this article on the question of whether we need national armies and its national defense or not, I am going to explore the world of private alternatives of the so-called public goods like national defense, roads and highways, education, health etc., etc. Some of my readers are demanding that with the criticism of the present Statist system, I also discuss its (private) alternatives. I am already discussing the alternative system of free market capitalism in most of my posts, and with these series of small articles, I will expand the discussion to other more difficult areas. Difficult because most people have never seen a free market private sector working in these areas, and their narrow perspective and imagination holds them back from envisioning such system today. In the outset of this writing, let me tell you all, that not only the private alternatives of all the economic goods which the government provides [sic] are available, but they are, as expected, much more eff...