In the spring of 1905, a young man began the journey from obscurity to scientific stardom. Within a decade, he would be hailed as a genius who towered over his contemporaries, even in an era that had no dearth of brilliant minds in science.
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Soon the comparisons would begin to transcend his century, and he would take his place alongside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. In that magical year, the 26-year-old Albert Einstein, without a formal academic position and sustained by employment in the Swiss Federal Patent Office, was to publish four epochal papers within the space of seven months in the German journal Annalen der Physik, one of the pre-eminent scientific journals of his time.
Physics would no longer be the same after 1905. The comforting link between mundane sensory experience and the fundamental laws of nature that had existed in Newtonian physics even after the Copernican revolution would now be lost forever.
What did Einstein accomplish in those four papers of 1905?
Three days after his 26th birthday, on March 17, Einstein completed the first of this remarkable series. Published on June 9, the paper was titled “On a heuristic point of view concerning the generation and conversion of light”. This paper was the first shot in the quantum revolution.
In this paper Einstein framed, unambiguously, the hypothesis that light in its interaction with matter behaves like a particle with a discrete amount, or ‘quantum’, of energy proportional to its frequency. Over the next two decades the hypothesis was to be verified experimentally, leading to his Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.
The second paper, published in the issue of July 18, concerned itself with the explanation of Brownian motion, the phenomenon of random motion executed by particles suspended in a fluid. The work was an immediate outgrowth of his doctoral thesis. This paper, as Einstein cheerfully noted in a letter to a friend, once and for all settled the question of the reality of atoms. It also developed methods that lie at the root of modern statistical physics, particularly in the study of systems out of equilibrium.
Some time in mid-May, Einstein had that definite moment of discovery that opened the road to the formulation of the special theory of relativity. The result was the third paper, published on September 26, titled “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”. It abolished the notion that electromagnetic radiation required some kind of medium, the ‘ether’ as it was known, for its transmission. Einstein also postulated that the velocity of light was always constant, independent of the velocity of the emitter.
In the resulting unification of space and time, Einstein advanced decisively beyond Newtonian mechanics, a process that he was to complete with the general theory of relativity in 1915. The mathematician Hermann Minkowski, one of the few teachers from his university days that Einstein respected, noted in an influential review of the theory of relativity in 1908: “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
In the fourth paper, published on November 21, Einstein announced the result that energy is proportional to mass, as a consequence of the special theory of relativity. The constant of proportionality is the square of the speed of light.
Within months of the publication of these four papers, Einstein had arrived in the academic world of his time. By 1906, he was in correspondence with leading physicists of his day like Max Planck, who was to describe Einstein some years later as a “modern Copernicus”. Three years later Einstein was to leave the patent office to enter the academic world, but the legend of the unknown patent clerk, the lonely genius, who effected a complete revolution in science was born.
In 1915, he succeeded in extending the theory of relativity to matter in acceleration, resulting in a new theory of gravitation, where mass was identified as the curvature of space-time. But this was hard won success, and the final work was built on a succession of earlier papers, some of them in collaboration with Marcel Grossman, his friend from his university days. The confirmation of this theory came from the solar eclipse expedition of 1919, data from which revealed the bending of light from the stars by the sun, which had been predicted by Einstein’s new theory of gravity.
Subsequently, Einstein’s scientific journey was to become more complex and difficult. He never reconciled himself to the eventual form that quantum mechanics took in the hands of Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrodinger and Max Born, under the influence of Niels Bohr.
While he was gradually convinced that quantum mechanics was not inconsistent, he nevertheless believed that it was incomplete. Einstein liked even less the application of the methods of quantum mechanics to electromagnetic fields. The man who initiated the quantum revolution remained unhappy with what became of it in the hands of its Jacobins.
Thus began an isolation from the mainstream that was to intensify in his years at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton in the United States, where he settled after leaving Nazi Germany in 1933. His attempts in his Princeton years to formulate a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism did not make much progress and was considered a fruitless project by many of his contemporaries.
Twentieth-century science pushed forward far more relentlessly than the science of the 17th or even the 19th century, and the manner in which scientific developments outran Einstein in his later years was not a fate that befell a Newton or a Maxwell in their lifetime.
But Einstein’s larger vision undoubtedly set the agenda, if only in part, for subsequent developments that came much later. The search for a unified theory of all fundamental forces has now become an integral part of the paradigm of fundamental physics. And in partial vindication of Einstein, the integration of quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity on the basis of some fundamental principles remains a challenge despite evidence of some progress in recent decades.
After the spectacular affirmation of Einstein’s theory of gravity by the solar eclipse expedition of 1919, a world wearied by the First World War greeted Einstein as a new popular hero. There was intense interest worldwide in Einstein and his work. In India, it resulted in the publication of the first-ever English translation of the papers of Einstein and Minkowski by Satyendranath Bose and Meghnad Saha, with a foreword by P.C. Mahalanobis.
Even prior to his rise to fame, Einstein had begun to step out into the world of public affairs, signing a manifesto against German militarism in 1917. Einstein was to be a pacifist all his life, except for the period that the Nazis were in power, and was drawn naturally to the ideals of Gandhi.
Though he signed the letter urging the U.S. President to develop the atomic bomb, he was horrified by its use. He was unwaveringly opposed to nuclear weapons and it was a cause that occupied him until the end of his days.
Einstein was one of the few intellectuals in the U.S. to speak up against the anti-communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. In 1949, he wrote a short note titled “Why Socialism?” for the inaugural issue of the communist journal Monthly Review. For several years the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept him under surveillance. Einstein, though, remained an undaunted champion of civil liberties.
Einstein, born in an irreligious Jewish family, had no great attraction for religion through most of his life. But he was a firm supporter first of Zionism and then the state of Israel and lent his name to several other Jewish causes through the years. Shocked by the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of several of his relatives including two cousins, he shunned all contact with Germany, the land of his birth, except for a few close friends.
What was the origin of Einstein’s willingness to support causes that went against the mainstream and were certainly unpopular with those in positions of power? Perhaps it was an extension of his scientific spirit to the realm of human affairs, as Niels Bohr noted in his obituary on Einstein: “The gifts of Einstein are in no way confined to the sphere of science. Indeed, his recognition of hitherto unheeded assumptions in even our most elementary and accustomed assumptions means to all people a new encouragement in tracing and combating the deep-rooted prejudices and complacencies inherent in every national culture.”
Yet to Einstein himself, despite his considerable involvement in matters other than science, especially in his later years, his scientific work was always to be at the core of his being, the very definition of his persona. His scientific writings number more than 300, a large output even by contemporary standards. In his last days at Princeton, he continued to be held in awe by his scientific colleagues, even if they did not follow what he said. He lived quietly, walking every day between his office at the Institute of Advanced Study and his home, where he was ministered to by his faithful secretary Helen Dukas. To the men, women and children of that little town, the grandfatherly figure was a gentle and benevolent presence.
Einstein died on April 19, 1955, at the age of 75, after a brief stay in hospital following a ruptured aneurysm.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.