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24 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Free vaccines for all means no prioritization of recipients. This policy makes sense only when vaccines are widely available (which takes at least a few more months). Until then, it will be a stupid policy that is a recipe to corruption and nepotism (the glories of Congress era).
What the central government did is the right choice: strongly controlled vaccination in the early stages to enable vaccination of people most at risk. A low but non-zero pricing to penalize wastage.

When the vaccines are released for all, they must be subject to higher pricing.
The success of any policy must be measured on the rate of vaccination achieved. If the vaccination rates are not high, it will not be because of higher pricing, but because of FUD about vaccines spread by you-know-who.
Also, heads up, “free vaccination for all” is something that our judiciary geniuses might insist in their next adventure of judicial overreach.

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More from @vakibs

vakibs Profile picture
25 Apr
In this thread, I will discuss the colonial invention of the religion called "Buddhism". I will summarize some arguments from S.N. Balagangadhara's book "Do all roads lead to Jerusalem?"

I will quote some old colonial literature in parallel. Image
Most people don't know that the understanding that Buddhism is a *different religion* from the paganism of Asia (also called as "Hindooism") was a very late one. The early colonial literature doesn't mention it. "Buddhism" as a separate religion was invented in early 1800s.
So the discovery of "Buddhism" as a religion is tied up to the formulation of "Hindooism" as a religion. Balagangadhara argues that both of these efforts are inherently trapped into a intellectual prism, of how Christianity sees itself as a religion, in a peculiar self image.
Read 74 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
25 Apr
Most of this increase in doctor numbers must happen through medical training in Indian languages. It is absurd beyond belief that medical education is forced into English, which is spoken by how many, not even 10% of the patients!
The argument that medical sciences should be translated into Indian languages was advanced as early as the early 1800s by the British surgeon Edward Balfour. He campaigned for medical education to be given in Indian languages. Unfortunately didn't succeed.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Ba…
Edward Balfour wrote a fascinating "Cyclopaedia of India" that spans botany, zoology, anthropology and all things about India, as seen by a 19th century British scholar.

This book is a great trove of material for systematic analysis of colonial attitudes.
play.google.com/books/reader?i…
Read 4 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
24 Apr
One aspect I am seriously worried about during this pandemic is data security of sensitive health data of individuals. Many people are posting public messages with the name, age and hospital details of patients needing urgent support. This is a serious problem. (mini thread)
These posts are public and will be read by massive AIs who will crawl this data and compile datasets. Especially when identifiable person specific information is present, then this will be used by adversaries for whichever calculation: about financial solvency, health etc.
Even when direct person specific information is not present, please be aware that it can be guessed: by location, network connections, post content, and various types of meta data. This will be most certainly used in this fashion by nefarious AIs.
Read 12 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
24 Apr
Honestly, the only sensible options are:

1) Make Delhi as the national capital territory, managed directly by the federal government.

2) Make Delhi a full state. But move the capital out of Delhi.

Which one would you vote for? I vote for 2. Move capital to central India!
I am tired of seeing all types of nonsense being inflicted on our capital region: Riots, pandemics, pollution, utter incompetence..

Is this really what we want to show for India as a country? This is our capital region, for goodness sake. Imagine China allowing this in Beijing!
Delhi is no longer the correct choice for the capital, because the Indo-Gangetic plain is no longer together as a single country. We lost vast sections in the partition. The population centre as well as the geographic centre has now moved south, the capital must do so as well.
Read 4 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
22 Apr
This blog from Politico.eu has not translated the German conversation accurately. The video is here:


The mention about India is in the context of how Europe needs to be thinking of the global interconnections and how isolationism is bad.
First, Merkel mentions that Europe cannot defend itself by itself,but needs the NATO. Similarly, she says, that Europe must be part of the global supply chains of production. There are problems, like with the current Covid pandemic, where supplies of pharmaceuticals have stopped.
In this context, she mentions India. She says that India became a global pharmaceutical giant, and Europe "let it be" (werden lassen) also from the European point of view, with specific commitments about supplies etc. This is not as bad as "allowed it to" in the translation.
Read 17 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
22 Apr
We cannot have it both ways. There were liberals who wrote opinion pieces about how the pandemic is being used as an erosion of democracy. Would you have supported the centre confiscating health as a subject when India had low Covid cases ? That was when we could have acted.
The fact is this: federalism is bad in pandemics. This had been proved in every place. USA could have avoided so many deaths if it had centralized directives. Europe is still reeling from Covid due to lack of EU level policies for stopping Covid. India’s suffering now is similar.
Even right now, when the situation had become too large to control, the *correct* procedure is to have the centre confiscate the power of the states and enact national level policy on Covid. This will be more effective in fighting the disease. But will we support it?
Read 9 tweets

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