India : The Epicentre of Innovation

To many people , India is a very crowded country. But to some, it is a huge untapped market. We are more than a billion and with it we have more than a billion needs and aspirations. Now, we are living in an era where we have reached saturation in higher end of the market with a large number of active business and marketing forces. Now almost all business players in our country are concentrating on the huge untapped markets at the bottom of the pyramid or, simply on Indian Middle and Lower Classes (economically). This gives a mammoth opportunity to all of us young aspiring engineers, technocrats and entrepreneurs to think,innovate and expand towards the direction of developing low cost, low margins but high quality products and services. When such businesses expand, people thrive and grow.
Take for example, the TATA NANO , it has broken the cost barriers in the automobile sector.Now, all the best automobile companies are working in the directions of manufacturing low cost cars. It has again proved that 'impossible is nothing'. It will provide a clean , and safe mobility solution to millions of people, not only in India but to the world. Or let us talk about the Indian drug manufacturers.....they are one of the largest generic drug producers in the world and hence provide low cost medicines to patients across the globe.
The companies like SKS Microfinance (whose CEO Vikram Akula was in the list of 100 most influential people of the world in TIME magazine) are providing direct microfinance loans to poor people. One construction company in Pune is developing a new RCC technique that will hugely reduce housing costs. The ITC's e-choupal programme is helping farmers in the rural areas to sell their produce to far off markets at a better price via internet.
There are a large number of other such successful innovative business stories in India. All these are changing lives of millions of Indians. But we need more such stories. We need more engineers, technocrats, scientists, entrepreneurs etc. who can think, innovate, act and lead differently. The profit margins are huge, and if it helps in changing lives of our people, it is more of a welcome.

Rising Oil Prices - a Boon in form of a Crisis

EVERYONE loves a booming market, and most booms happen on the back of technological change. The world’s venture capitalists, having fed on the computing boom of the 1980s, the internet boom of the 1990s and the biotech and nanotech boomlets of the early 2000s, are now looking around for the next one. They think they have found it: Energy.

Many past booms have been energy-fed: coal-fired steam power, oil-fired internal-combustion engines, the rise of electricity, even the mass tourism of the jet era. But the past few decades have been quiet on that front. Coal has been cheap. Natural gas has been cheap. The 1970s aside, oil has been cheap. But for many years, the prices of oil have been artificially kept low (and hence favouring high demand) by various nations in form of oil subsidies. The one real novelty, nuclear power, went spectacularly off the rails. The pressure to innovate has been minimal.

In the space of a couple of years, all that has changed. Oil is no longer cheap; indeed, it has never been more expensive. Moreover, there is growing concern that the supply of oil may soon peak as consumption continues to grow, known supplies run out and new reserves become harder to find.

The idea of growing what you put in the tank of your car, rather than sucking it out of a hole in the ground, no longer looks like economic madness. Nor does the idea of throwing away the tank and plugging your car into an electric socket instead. The price of natural gas, too, has risen in sympathy with oil. That is putting up the cost of electricity. Wind- and solar-powered alternatives no longer look so costly by comparison. It is true that coal remains cheap, and is the favoured fuel for power stations in industrialising Asia. But coal is also non renewable, and it a great emitter of greenhouse gases.That has opened up a capacity gap and an opportunity for wind and sunlight. The future price of these resources—zero—is known. That certainty has economic value as a hedge, even if the capital cost of wind and solar power stations is, at the moment, higher than that of coal-fired ones.
The reasons for the boom, then, are tangled, and the way they are perceived may change. Global warming, a long-range phenomenon, may not be uppermost in people’s minds during an economic downturn. High fuel prices may fall as new sources of supply are exploited to fill rising demand from Asia.

The market for energy is huge. At present, the world’s population consumes about 15 terawatts of power. (A terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts, and a gigawatt is the capacity of the largest sort of coal-fired power station.) That translates into a business worth $6 trillion a year—about a tenth of the world’s economic output. And by 2050, power consumption is likely to have risen to 30 terawatts.

Any transition from an economy based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable, alternative, green energy—call it what you will—is likely to be slow, as similar changes have been in the past . On the other hand, the scale of the market provides opportunities for alternatives to prove themselves at the margin and then move into the mainstream, as is happening with wind power at the moment. And some energy technologies do have the potential to be disruptive. Plug-in cars, for example, could be fuelled with electricity at a low price . That could shake up the oil, carmaking and electricity industries all in one go.

Now, Energy has become supercool. Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal, has developed a battery-powered sports car. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, have started an outfit called Google.org that is searching for a way to make renewable energy truly cheaper than coalThis renewed interest in energy is bringing forth a raft of ideas, some bright, some weird.Brazil, meanwhile, has the world’s second-largest (just behind America) and most economically honest biofuel industry, which already provides 40% of the fuel consumed by its cars and should soon supply 15% of its electricity, too (through the burning of sugarcane waste).

There are lots of terawatts, gigawatts to play for. And if the earth is going to be saved in the way, it is all welcome.