I am not good at watching or listening to news. But if you ask me whether I am interested in what is happening around me the answer will be a very emphatic "yes". So I am interested in what is happening around me but I do not watch / listen to news. I think that my basic problem is that I am interested in issues rather than individual pieces of news. I want someone to help me make the connection between news and issues. So the following is my message to this friend who has just established infonary.com.
Not everything in the news is important. Not everything important is in the news. All news relates to one or more issues. I want news to be told to me as it relates to issues. I don't want to have to make the connection between news and issues. The hierarchy I wish to establish is
- News
- Issues
- Network of issues
such that all news belongs to one or more issues and all issues affect each other so I recognize that there is a network of issues of which all issues are nodes.
I want someone (not me) to
- Connect all news to issues
- Establish a network of issues
- Show me this network of issues and allow me to query for fine grained information if I wish to.
The reason I want this is because I am interested in the bigger picture in spite of the fact that I am not capable of painting one for myself. The reason I am interested in the bigger picture is that I am interested in solutions rather than the issues per se. You should try this some time. Give a mathematician a problem and see how they attack it. They follow the following steps approximately.
- Restate the problem in general terms.
- Recognize the class to which the problem belongs.
- Use the well established solution for the class of problems to solve your specific problem.
It may not be obvious to you that they are doing so but they are. Why are they able to follow the above procedure more or less always? It is because whenever mathematicians have been faced with a problem they have not only found the solution to that problem but also established a solution for all problems of the same type. Mathematicians have always been interested in solving general rather than specific problems. The result is that they have ready made solutions to lots of classes of problems which can be applied to a huge number of specific problems. Lazy bastards!
For a problem to be solved, it has to be clearly stated. When news are connected to issues and issues are connected to a network of issues, a crystallization will take place. A clear bigger picture will emerge. In this picture, any problems that are there will be clearly stated for all to see.
We all know what news is, but what do I mean by "issues"? A shop being robbed is news but the issue it connects to is crime. A road accident is news which belongs to the issue of traffic control. Other issues are education and health care. Education is a very good example of an issue which is important but almost never in the news.
An example. Let us say that we have an issue called negligence and another one called achievement. Now news comes in of a newly built bridge collapsing. It immediately gets tagged as negligence. Another news comes in of the police having caught a criminal. It gets tagged as achievement (and crime). News of, say, the tenth robbery of exactly the same pattern gets tagged as negligence. Similarly with bank frauds, river pollution levels, deforestation, wild life killing and so on. Another imaginary scenario; let us say a tiger is shot dead (negligence) and then it is discovered that the forest officer of the forest to which the tiger belonged has assets beyond his obvious income. The second news should be tagged as corruption. After a while of tagging news like this you will have lots of news items tagged as negligence and lots tagged as corruption. Now when you start to establish your network of issues you will find all the news items which are tagged as both negligence and corruption. Just start looking for common links between these news items. Ask, in how many cases there is a link between negligence and corruption. If there is a link then the negligence is not simple, it is criminal negligence. This connection may seem obvious but when you do this for lots of news items, connections which you could not have imagined will emerge. Such is the power of networks.
Illiteracy in a state should be news (belonging to the issue of education). Changes in the levels of illiteracy should be news. Actions government is taking to tackle illiteracy should be news. If the government is not taking any action be tackle illiteracy, that should definitely be news. Number of deaths in a state due to infectious diseases should be news. There are lots of issues without which the network of issues will remain incomplete and the bigger picture fails to emerge. As a consequence problems go unrecognised and unacknowledged. What I am asking for is issue driven reporting in addition to news driven reporting. Let us say you start this month by saying that there were so many deaths due to infectious diseases in this state in the month of January. Even if the number has not changed significantly, I still want you to report the number of deaths in the month of February and March and so on. This is what I mean by issue driven reporting. All issues should be reported upon at regular intervals (regardless of whether there is news related to them or not) so that people interested in the bigger picture can get it. Crime figures should be reported regularly. Usually only bad things are in the news. Issue based reporting will bring good things in the news too. This will have the positive side effect of people and organizations responsible for the good things getting some well deserved recognition. It might turn out that crime figures drop wherever a particular police officer gets posted.
Each of our national resources should be an issue and reported upon at suitable intervals. Look at forest cover. Do we know the rate of deforestation in India? Or even whether our forest cover is growing or diminishing? Why is there so much deforestation going on? What causes people to take up this activity as a career even when it is illegal? Do they have viable alternatives? If not, whose job is it to think of them and create them?
I can also imagine a discussion, involving people from law enforcement, inland revenue, professors of law, psychiatrists, psychologists and social scientists about why a lot of (but not all) Indian politicians have the tendency to amass lots of illegal wealth. Case by case, dig into their backgrounds starting right from their childhoods and families to the education they got. Is there a correlation between childhood poverty and being corrupt? Is there a correlation between education and corruptness? After proper analysis you could state on your website that there is a clear connection between education level and corruptness of politicians and that people should avoid voting for politicians with poor education and should mount pressure on the government to improve access to education at all levels.
Issue of population. We know at what rate it is growing. Is the rate of growth slowing down? By how much in each state? Which states have the highest population growth rates? What is it that they are not doing which the states with the lower population growth rates are doing? Is the lower growth rate due to planning or, is it due to high infant mortality or lower life expectancy?
Education: What number and percentage are illiterate in each state of India? How accessible is primary and secondary school education to children. The worst states. The best states.
I think that our growth and development are very unbalanced. We are getting more and more roads but poorer and poorer road safety. We are getting more and more universities and institutions but poorer school education. Cell phones are getting cheaper but good primary education is getting more difficult to find and expensive. More multi-storey housing and an increasing population in our slums. Why can't we see these obvious anomalies? Why can't we do something about them? I think the reason for both is that nobody is giving us the bigger picture of India.
Another thing I would like to see is quantification. If you want to improve something or monitor the progress you are making, you have to come up with a measure for it. We should use news to measure the progress (positive or negative) we are making on issues. Come up with lots of indices. Like we have the sensex for the stock exchange we could have a crime index, a health index, a housing index, a transport index, an education index and so on. We believe what we want to believe. If you stand in shopping mall in India and ask a 100 people whether they are proud of India they will almost all say yes. Two days later you change the question to "Would you be proud of a country where most poor children have no access to primary education?", almost all will say no. And we are talking of the same country. What I am trying to say is that the India we are all proud of is what we want it to be, not what it really is. I want you to tell Indians what it really is and challenge them to make it the India they want to be proud of. Give the people of India some figures so that they can set themselves targets to achieve. You may even suggest targets. Something like "20 percent population of state X cannot read or write while only 1 percent population of state Y cannot read or write".
We are envious of the developed countries but reluctant to follow in their foot steps to get where they are today. These countries work hard to constantly improve. They do not sit idle boasting of their past achievements. They are constantly scrutinizing their actions and circumstances to foresee problems and take action to deal with those problems before they get too big. Why can't we do the same? I see two things here. One is the detection and acknowledgement that we have a problem. The other is acting to do something about any identified problem. I would like you to help in convincing us that we as a country (like all other countries) have problems. Not only that, I would like you to somehow quantify the problem (e.g. number of children not going to school on any given day in a state).
I believe that there are lots of people in India who want to do things for their country. They just don't know what to do, what to aim for. A lot of people do not realize the impact of their actions on the country. If you ask a village school teacher who does not go to school regularly whether he loves his country he will say, "yes". And he will not be lying. We need to convince him that his action of not teaching the students regularly is damaging the very country he loves. We need to show him the illiteracy figures in his state and tell him that he is contributing towards them.
If an illegal logger comes across a foreign terrorist in the forest where he is logging I am sure he will risk his life to get the terrorist caught. So the logger does love his country but the same logger is spending his lifetime destroying the forest wealth of the very country he loves. Why? Because he does not think. He has not been taught how to think or he does not want to think or he is incapable of thinking. Whatever the reason, I want people to think. I want people to think about the consequences of their actions or inaction. And the first step is to show them the results of their actions / inactions. Show them India as it really is and which they have built by their actions. It is not just people is small jobs. We need to show the education ministers of states that their inactions are resulting in a large population being illiterate. We need to show the bureaucrats that their inactions or inappropriate actions result in children dying of infectious diseases. I want for every citizen of India to be able to challenge every other citizen of India to show by their actions that they love their country. I think an issues based news website can provide the basis for these challenges.
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