Too stupidly good !!
1. During the Cold War, if USA launched a nuke-loaded missile, Soviet Satellites would inform the Soviet army in 3 seconds and in less than 45 seconds Soviet counter-missiles would be on their way.
2. Recent studies commissioned by US department of Defense included one on nuclear war between India and Pakistan :
3. This was the scenario................
The Pakistan army decides to launch a nuke-missile towards India. They don't need any permission from their government, and promptly order the countdowns. Indian technology is highly advanced. In less than 8 seconds, Indian army detects the Pak countdown and decides to launch a missile in retribution.
But they need permission from the Government of India. They submit their request to the Indian President. The President forwards it to the Cabinet.
The Prime Minister calls an emergency Lok Sabha session. The LS meets, but due to several walkouts and severe protests by the opposition, it gets adjourned indefinitely.
The President asks for a quick decision.
In the mean time, the Pak missile failed to take off due to technical failure. Their attempts for a re-launch are still on.
Just then the Indian ruling party is reduced to a minority because a party that was giving outside support withdraws it. The President asks the PM to prove his majority within a week. As the ruling party fails to win the confidence vote, a caretaker government is installed.
The caretaker PM decides to permit the armed forces to launch a nuclear missile. But the Election Commission says that a caretaker government cannot take such a
decision because elections are at hand.
The Election Commission files Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court alleging misuse of power. The Supreme Court comes to the rescue of the PM, and says the acting! PM is authorized to take this decision in view of the emergency facing the
nation.
Just then one of the Pak missiles successfully took off, but it fell 367 miles away from the target, on its own government building in Islamabad at 11.00 AM. Fortunately there were no casualties as no employee had reached the office that early. In any case, the
nuclear core of the missile had detached somewhere in flight. The Pakistan army is now trying to get better technologies from China and USA .
The Indian Government, taking no chances, decides to launch a nuclear missile of its own, after convening an all-party meeting. This time all the parties agree. Its three months since the army had sought permission. But as preparations begin, "pro-humanity", "anti-nuclear" activists come out against theGovernment's decision. Human chains are formed and Rasta rokos organized. In California and Washington endless e-mails are sent to Indians condemning the government and mentioning "Please forward it to as many Indians as possible".
On the Pakistan side, the missiles kept malfunctioning. Some missiles deviate from target due to technical failures or high-speed wind blowing over Rajasthan. Many of them land in the Indian Ocean killing some fishes.
A missile (smuggled from US A) is pressed into service. Since the Pakistan army is unable to understand its software, it hits it original destination: Russia. Russians successfully intercepts the missile and in retaliation launches a nuclear missile towards Islamabad . The missile hits the target and creates havoc.
Pakistan cries for help. India expresses deep regrets for what has happened and sends in a million dollars worth of Parle-G biscuits.
Thus India never gets to launch the missile. Pakistan never gets it right. And both live happily ever after!!!!
AN ARTICLE FROM ECONOMIST--
INDIA'S POLITICS
Mar 6th 2008
Failure to reform a bloated civil service is putting the country's huge
economic achievements at risk
"THE tiger is under grave threat," India's finance minister,
Palaniappan Chidambaram, intoned at one point in his budget speech on
February 29th. He was referring to the stripy animals that prowl the
country in declining numbers. But India's tigerish economy, which has
grown by 9% a year on average over the past three years, is itself
under threat.
In many ways India counts as one of liberalisation's greatest success
stories. For years, it pottered along, weighed down by the regulations
that made up the licence raj, producing only a feeble "Hindu" rate of
growth. But over the past 15 years it has been transformed into a far
more powerful beast. Its companies have become worldbeaters. Without
India's strength, the world economy would have had far less to boast
about.
Sadly, this achievement is more fragile than it looks. Many things
restrain India's economy, from a government that depends on Communist
support to the caste system, power cuts and rigid labour laws. But an
enduring constraint is even more awkward: a state that makes a big
claim on a poor country's resources but then uses them badly.
THE STATE'S CAGE
It is not unusual for a country's bureaucrats and politicians to be
less efficient than its businesspeople; and the Indian civil servant,
with his forms in triplicate, has been a caricature for so long that it
is easy to forget the impossibility of many of the jobs involved (see
article[1]). But India's 10m-strong civil service is the size of a
small country, and its unreformed public sector is a huge barrier to
two things a growing population needs. The first is a faster rate of
sustainable growth: the government's debts and its infrastructure
failings set a lower-than-necessary speed-limit for the economy. The
second is to spread the fruits of a growing economy to India's poor. By
the government's own admission, most development spending fails to
reach its intended recipients. This is bound to stir up resentment--and
risks causing a backlash against business.
Like his prime minister, Manmohan Singh, Mr Chidambaram is by instinct
a liberal and a reformer. He is remembered for his "dream budget" of
1997, which cut both taxes and tariffs--and helped spur today's boom.
The new budget is his government's final one before it calls a fresh
election, probably later this year. He gave an assured performance,
doling out money freely and leaving voters appeased, opposition parties
stumped and bondholders unruffled (see article[3]). But the budget also
confirmed several sad truths about how little reform the government has
made during the good years.
Take the public finances. The government is predicting a budget deficit
of 3.1% for the current fiscal year and 2.5% next. But these numbers
are artificially low. They omit the states' deficits and also most of
the cost of fertiliser and fuel subsidies (which all told add another
3.5% of GDP). Other big emerging markets have been less complacent,
leaving India in the worst fiscal shape of the lot.
If growth slows, so will tax collection--and India's vigour may be
ebbing already. Growth of 9% now looks more like a cyclical peak than a
permanent achievement: bottlenecks throughout the economy mean it
cannot go faster without setting off inflation. The effects of
overheating became clear in an inflationary scare early last year.
Growth has since slowed a tad, to 8.4% in the year to the fourth
quarter, thanks partly to the intervention of a nervous central bank.
India cannot absorb a lot more foreign capital without worrying about
stockmarket turbulence or the strength of the rupee. Much of the
foreign money it has attracted has gone into inflating share prices or
just accumulated unproductively in foreign reserves.
The government's other boast is to have fostered "inclusive growth". In
his budget, Mr Chidambaram duly handed out extra money to a long list
of worthy schemes, from school meals to rural road-building. But as he
himself conceded, outlays and outcomes are not the same thing. Standing
between the two is an administrative machine corroded by apathy and
corruption. The government's subsidies fail to reach the poor, its
schools fail to teach them and its rural clinics fail to treat them.
Mr Singh made administrative reform a priority when he took office in
2004, and he duly set up a commission to look into it. But even the
finance minister admits that most of its deliberations have been
academic. The civil service is expected shortly to be awarded a huge
pay rise, which will be swiftly embraced, along with tougher
performance standards, which will be studiously ignored. One indication
of officials' resistance to change is Mr Chidambaram's new proposal to
erase the debts of 30m small farmers. This loan waiver may be costly
(over 1% of GDP) and crude, but it has one big virtue: it transfers
money to relatively poor people at the stroke of a pen, bypassing the
cumbersome machinery of the state.
UNLEASH PEEPUL POWER
Reform has not completely petered out. The government has called for
more independent scrutiny of public programmes and better monitoring of
the money it hands out to some 1,000 schemes. It also plans to
experiment with "smart cards" for the poor that could cut out
bureaucratic middlemen. But administrative reform needs to go deeper
than this--if only to prevent the public sector throttling economic
growth.
The government's debt burden leaves it short of money for
infrastructure. It is reluctant to free banks, pension funds and
insurers to serve the market better, because it needs them to buy its
bonds. The miserable record of its social spending deprives firms of
well-nourished, well-schooled workers, and saps the political will for
reform. State governments are left scrabbling to appease rural
disgruntlement rather than investing in efforts to lift the
productivity of land and labour.
The tiger may be the animal most Indians associate with their private
sector; but a more apt symbol is the peepul (sacred fig) tree. Revered
by many Indians, the peepul has a habit of making room for itself,
poking up through roads, sometimes smothering its rivals. India's
dynamic private sector has shown a similar skill. But if the next
government again flunks reform, it could be the peepul itself that is
smothered.
-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=10804248
[2] http://www.economist.com/economist:doc-id=20080308/R68CJU0
[3] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=10809412
See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10808493&fsrc=nwlbtwfree
Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.
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