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What are all the policies and schemes implemented by the Modi government?

Since Modi government has came into power, n number of schemes have been launched:Financial inclusion schemes:PM Jan Dhan Yojna: aims to provide basic bank account to every family with no minimum balance required. Also, to bring poor financially excluded people into banking system and to decrease corruption in govt. subsidy schemes. It also provides accidental insurance up to 1 lakh and medical Insurance cover of 30,000Social security related schemes:Pradhan Mantri Jeevan jyoti yojna: its a life Insurance scheme worth ₹ 2 lakh at just ₹ 330 per annum.Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojna: its an accidental Insurance scheme worth ₹ 2 lakh at just ₹ 12 per annum for accidental death its ₹ 2 lakh and for partial disability- 1 lakh rupeesAtal pension yojna: it guarantees a minimum pension amount at the age of 60 to subscribers depending upon their contributions per month. Amount may range from 1000 to 5000 per month. Minimum contribution period should be 20 years.Urban Reform schemes:Smart cities scheme: Smart city will b equipped with basic infrastructure to give a decent quality of life, a clean and sustainable environment throughout application of some smart solutions. Its for rise of neo middle class who wants better civic amenities.2. AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation): In this 500 cities selected to develop civic infrastructure. Few capital cities, important cities loated in hilly areas and islands and tourist areas are selected.3. HRIDAY ( Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojna): to preserve and rejuvenate the rich cultural heritage of the country. 12 heritage cities had been identified. Aim is to bring urban planning, economic growth and heritage conservation for heritage cities.4. PRASAD (National Mission on Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Augmentation Drive) : Aims to create spiritual centres for tourism development within the nation. 12 cities have been identified.5. Swadesh Darshan: Aim is to develop theme based tourist circuit. It should be insured that none of them are in same town, village or city but are not separated by a long distance too.6. Rurban Mission: seeks to develop smart village on the line of smart cities and reduce the burden of migration to the cities through adopting cluster approach.Farmer centric schemes:Deen Dyal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojna: To provide round the clock power supply in Rural areas.2. DD Kisan: India first television chanel dedicated to farmers have been launched to provide onputs new farming techniques water conservation and prganic farming .It will include quiz shows farmers , a bottoms up approach involving agriculturists .This will provide real time interaction with time and farm scientists.3. Soil health card scheme: it aims to help farmers to improve the productivity of farms by providing them basic information for use of nutrients or fertilizers .the card careies crop wise recommendations of fertilizer that are required for farm lands and it also help farmers identify health of soil and judiciously use soil nutrients4. Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojna: it is a proposed scheme by the government of India which envisages connecting the irrigation system’s three crucial components - the field application , water sources & distribution network for optimal usage. it also envisage interlinking of perennial rivers to avoid drought and flood situations.5. Pradhan mantri Fasal Bima yojna: it aims to reduce the premium rates to be paid by the farmers so as to enable more farmers avail insurance cover against crop loss on account of natural calamities.Education related shemes:DIKSHA portal: for providing digital platform to teachers to make their lifestyle more digital. This will provide online/offline training to teachers, students and teacher educatorsYUYA: it aims to connect with youth by upgrading their skill as per their competencies.JIGYASA: student-scientist connect programme. Under this programme CSIR (Council of Scientific and industrial Research ) has joined hands with Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan. The focus is on connecting schools students and scientists so as to extend student’s classroom learning with that of a very well planned research laboratory based learning. This programme will connect 1151 kendriya Vidyalayas with 38 national laboratories of CSIR and will target 10,000 students and teachers every year.SWAYAM: Its an indigenously designed massive open online course ( MOOC), it will host all the courses, taught in classrooms from 9th class till post graduation and can be accessed by anyone, anywhere at any time. It aims to bridge the digital divide for students in e-Education.SWAYAM PRABHA: it will provide high quality educational contents, developed by experts, through 32 DTH (direct to home) television channels with an aim to bring uniformity in standards of education. It will cover diverse topics of all levels of education in various languages.National Academic Depository: it will directly integrate with boards/ universities which issue certificates which will be verified, authenticated, accessed and retrieved in a digital depository for purpose of employment, higher education and loansNational Digital library: its a online library containing 6.5 million books in English and the Indian languages.Deen Dayal SPARSH Yojna: stands for Scholarship for promotion of aptitudes and research in stamps as a hobby. It is proposed to award 920 scholarships to students pursuing philately as a hobby. Amount of scholarship would be 6000 per annumEklavya schools will be established for schedule tribe students by 2022 on the lines of Navodhya schools. Though its an old scheme but the government has signalled in budget 2018 that it wants to expand the scope.RISE: Revitalising Infrastructure and Systems in Education scheme. It aims to lend low cost funds to government higher educational institutions.PMRF (Prime ministe’s Research Fellows scheme): This scheme will help tapping talent pool of country for carrying out research indigenously in cutting edge science and technology domains. Under this scheme, 1000 best students who have completed or in final year of B.tech or integrated M.tech or M. Sc in science and technology streams from IISc/ IITs/ NITs/ IISERs/IITs will be offered direct admission in PhD programme in the IITs/IISc. In this, govt. will provide fellowship of Rs. 70,000 per month fornthe first two years, Rs. 75,000 per month for 3rd year and Rs. 80,000 per month in 4th and 5th year.Beti Bachao Beti Padhao yojna: it aims at promoting gender equality and educating girl child.E-basta: created a framework to make school books accessible in digital form as e-books. Books can be read on laptops, tablets and mobiles. It will bring various publishers and schools together on one platform.Padho pradesh yojna: Its a scheme of interest subsidy on educational loan for overseas studies. It assists the students belonging to poor and minority community to acquire loan for subsidised interest rates.Flagship missions:Make In India: to make India a manufacturing hub and to create 100 million jobs and skill enhancement in 25 sectors of economy. Enhancing service sector is also covered under this mission.2. Digital India Mission: to transform the country into a digitally empowered knowledge economy. To create participative, transparent and responsive government. Digital india mission has 9 pilliars:Broadband highwaysInformation for allUniversal mobile accessPublic internet access programmeElectronics manufacturing: target net zero importsEarly harvest programmesE- kranti: electronic delivery of servicesIT for jobsE- Governance: reforming government through technology3. Swachh Bharat mission: its a massive mass movement that seeks to create a clean india by 2019. It aims atElimination of open defecationConversion of insanitary toilets to pour flush toiletsEradication of manual scavenging100 % collection and scientific processing/ disposal/reuse/recycling of municipal solid wasteA behavioral change in people regarding healthy sanitation practicesSupporting urban local bodies in designing, executing and operating waste disposal systems4. Namami Gange Project or Namami Ganga Yojana: is an ambitious Union Government project which integrates the efforts to clean and protect the Ganga river in a comprehensive manner. This will cover 8 states, 47 towns and 12 rivers. Rivers covered are: Ganga, Yamuna, Gomti, Damodar, Mahananda, Ramganga, Beehar, Chambal, Khan, Shipra, Betwa and Mandakini.Innovation and entrepreneurship schemes:Start up india: Through the Startup India initiative, Government of India promotes entrepreneurship by mentoring, nurturing and facilitating startups throughout their life cycle. Since its launch in January 2016, the initiative has successfully given a head start to numerous aspiring entrepreneurs. With a 360 degree approach to enable startups, the initiative provides a comprehensive four-week free online learning program, has set up research parks, incubators and startup centres across the country by creating a strong network of academia and industry bodies. More importantly, a ‘Fund of Funds’ has been created to help startups gain access to funding.2. Atal Innovation Mission: It is a Government of India’s endeavour to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, and it serves as a platform for promotion of world-class Innovation Hubs, Grand Challenges, start-up businesses and other self-employment activities, particularly in technology driven areas. In order to foster curiosity, creativity and imagination right at the school, AIM recently launched Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) across India. ATLs are workspaces where students can work with tools and equipment to gain hands-on training in the concepts of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) are another programme of AIM created to build innovative start-up businesses as scalable and sustainable enterprises. AICs provide world class incubation facilities with appropriate physical infrastructure in terms of capital equipment and operating facilities. These incubation centres, with a presence across India, provide access to sectoral experts, business planning support, seed capital, industry partners and trainings to encourage innovative start-ups.3. Stand Up India: to support entrepreneurship among women and SC and ST4. MUDRA - Micro Units Development and Refinance Agnecy: Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) is a scheme launched by the Hon’ble Prime Minister on April 8, 2015 for providing loans upto 10 lakh to the non-corporate, non-farm small/micro enterprises. These loans are classified as MUDRA loans under PMMY. These loans are given by Commercial Banks, RRBs, Small Finance Banks, Cooperative Banks, MFIs and NBFCs. The borrower can approach any of the lending institutions mentioned above or can apply online through this portal. Under the aegis of PMMY, MUDRA has created three products namely 'Shishu', 'Kishore' and 'Tarun' to signify the stage of growth / development and funding needs of the beneficiary micro unit / entrepreneur and also provide a reference point for the next phase of graduation / growth.Schemes under Skill India Mission :Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojna: aims to give training to rural youths for jobs. Minimum age for entry is 15 years. Its complementing PM’s Make in India campaign.PM Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY): aims to provide skills training to youth across the country. It includes class 10th and 12th drop outs.Nai Manzil scheme: to enable students of madrasas to cope up with the contemporary education system and provide them skill training so that they could earn their living once they move out of madrasahUSTTAD ( Upgrading Skill and Training in Traditional Arts/crafts for development) to conserve traditional arts/crafts and build capacity of artisans and craftsmen belonging to minority communities.Nai - roshni scheme: a leadership training program for womenManas: for upgrading entrepreneurial skills of minority youthsSeekho aur Kamao (Learn and Earn): central sector scheme for skill Development of minorities.Schemes related to women:Beti Bachao Beti Bhadao: discussed aboveSukanya samridhi yojna: Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana (SSY) is a small deposit scheme for the girl child launched as a part of the 'Beti Bachao Beti Padhao' campaign. It is currently 8.1 per cent and provides income-tax benefit.A Sukanya Samriddhi Account can be opened any time after the birth of a girl till she turns 10, with a minimum deposit of Rs 1,000. A maximum of Rs 1.5 lakh can be deposited during the ongoing financial year.The account can be opened in any post office or authorised branches of commercial banks.The account will remain operative for 21 years from the date of its opening or till the marriage of the girl after she turns 18.To meet the requirement of her higher education expenses, partial withdrawal of 50 per cent of the balance is allowed after she turns 18.3. One Stop Crisis Centre: Ministry of Women and Child Development has formulated a scheme for operationalization of minimum 100 pilot projects of One Stop Crisis Centres (OSCCs), a specialized facility for providing all necessary services for women victims/ survivors of violence, in urban areas having population of more than 5 lakh, identified by the States for implementation during the remaining years of the 12th Plan. These Centres will be attached to the District Hospitals of the State Governments.4. SWADHAR - A scheme for women in difficult circumstances: to provide primary need of shelter, food, clothing and care to the marginalised women/ girls living in difficult circumstances who are without any social and economic support. Also, to provide emotional support and counselling to such women.5. STEP - Support to Training and Employment Programme for Women:STEP was launched by the Government of India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development to train women with no access to formal skill training facilities, especially in rural India. The Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship and NITI Aayog recently redrafted the Guidelines of the 30-year-old initiative to adapt to present-day needs. The initiative reaches out to all Indian women above 16 years of age. The programme imparts skills in several sectors such as agriculture, horticulture, food processing, handlooms, traditional crafts like embroidery, travel and tourism, hospitality, computer and IT services.6. UJJAWALA scheme: to prevent trafficking of women and children for commercial sexual exploitation. It works on 4 R appoach :RescueRehabilitationReintegrationRepatriationInfrastructure related schemes:Sagarmala project: Sagar Mala project is a strategic and customer-oriented ₹8 trillion (US$120 billion or €100 billion) investment initiative of the Government of India entailing setting up of 6+ mega ports, modernization of several dozen more ports, development of 14+ Coastal Economic Zones and at least 29 Coastal Economic Units, development of mines, industrial corridors, rail, road and airport linkages with these water ports, resulting in US$110 billion export revenue growth, generation of 150,000 direct jobs and several times more indirect jobs. It aims to modernize India's Ports so that port-led development can be augmented and coastlines can be developed to contribute in India's growth. It also aims for "transforming the existing Ports into modern world class Ports and integrate the development of the Ports, the Industrial clusters and hinterland and efficient evacuation systems through road, rail, inland and coastal waterways resulting in Ports becoming the drivers of economic activity in coastal areas."Bharatmala project: is a centrally-sponsored and funded road and highways project of the Government of India. The project will build highways from Gujarat and Rajasthan, move to Punjab and then cover the entire string of Himalayan states - Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand - and then portions of borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alongside Terai, and move to West Bengal , Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and right up to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur and Mizoram. Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung border and rural areas including the tribal and backward areas.Setu Bharatam Project: It aims to make all national highways free from railway level crossing by 2019 to ensure road safety.Green highways policy 2015 - to develop eco friendly National Highways with participation of the community, farmers, NGO’s, private sector, institutions, government agencies and the forest department.Gold schemes:Gold monetisation scheme: Gold monetisation scheme is like a gold savings account. You would generally keep your gold without any security at home or store it in bank lockers by paying a maintenance fee. But instead of that, you could keep your gold in any form in a Gold Monetisation Scheme account and earn interest as the price of the precious metal goes up. Also, You do not have to pay capital gains tax on the profits made through the gold monetisation scheme. The capital gains are also exempt from wealth tax and income tax.The Gold Monetisation Scheme is a great opportunity for big Indian households to make profits from the old jewellery lying in bank lockers and at the bottom of safe deposit boxes. Companies, trusts, jewelleries and individuals who have a hoard of gold can also use this scheme to monetise their precious metal. But do not forget that your jewellery will not come back to you in the same form as you put them in – you get the returns in the form of money or gold coins and bars that you can later encash.2. Sovereign Gold Bond : SGBs are government securities denominated in grams of gold. They are substitutes for holding physical gold. Investors have to pay the issue price in cash and the bonds will be redeemed in cash on maturity. The Bond is issued by Reserve Bank on behalf of Government of India.3. Indian gold coin: • The coin will be the 1st ever National gold coin minted in India and will have the National Emblem of Ashok Chakra engraved on one side and Mahatma Gandhi on the other side .• Initially the coins will be available in denominations of 5 and 10 grams; later a 20 gram bullion will also be available through MMTC outlets.Advantages• It would provide gold coins of maximum possible purity and check the supply of counterfeit or adulterated gold sold by jewelers.• While it may not address people looking forward to buy jewellery, but people who buy gold coins for investment purposes can buy these, if they are still reluctant about the Gold bond scheme.• Physical gold coins are more liquid resource compared to gold bonds, as perceived by many people in India.Labour reform schemes:5 labour reform schemes have been launched for the youth, workers and employers to improve ease of business for enterprises while expanding government support to impart skill training for workers.A. Shram suvidha portalB. Random Inspection SchemeC. Universal Account NumberD. Apprentice Protsahan YojnaE. Revamped Rashtriya Swasthya Bima YojnaSchemes for Banking Reforms:Indradhanush plan for Revamp of Public Sector Banks: The strategy, Indradhanush (rainbow), focuses on systemic changes in state-run lenders, including a fresh look at hiring, a comprehensive plan to de-stress bloated lenders, capital infusion, accountability incentives with higher rewards including Stock Options and cleaning up governance.The 7 Elements includes:a. Appointmentsb. Bank of Board Bureauc. Capitalizationd. De-Stressing Public Sector Bankse. Empowermentf. Framework of accountabilityg.Governance Reforms2. Gyan Sangam : Gyan Sangam is the meet of various banks, financial institutions and insurance companies in order to discuss for enhancing the digitisation of the banking system in India and ways to increase the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and big data analytics in the banking & financial services industry in India.3. Bankruptcy and Insolvency Code: The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (IBC) is the bankruptcy law of India which seeks to consolidate the existing framework by creating a single law for insolvency and bankruptcy.The code could ensure quicker resolution of NPA (Non- performing Assets) problems, especially in PSU banks. In fact, the Financial Stability Report issued by RBI in 2015 indicates that corporate sector vulnerabilities and the impact of their weak balance sheets on the financial system needs closer monitoring. The time-bound insolvency resolution process would definitely help the financial services industry function better.Bankruptcy laws accept that business ventures can fail and allow entrepreneurs to make a new start. While facilitating failed firms to wind up painlessly, the code can pave the way to resurrection also.Schemes for sports:Revamped Khelo India: this marks a watershed moment in the history of Indian sports, as the programme aims at mainstreaming sport as a tool for individual development, community development and national development. Under this scheme, each selected athlete shall receive an annual scholarship worth ₹5 lakh for 8 consecutive years.National Sports Talent Search Portal: to unearth sporting talent from every nook and corner. The portal will be also available as smartphone application. Using this portal, a child or his parents, coaches or teachers can upload their biodata or video on the portal.Schemes for household:SAUBHAGYA: Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana: to ensure electrificationof all willing households in the country in rural as well as urban areas here today.National Nutrition Strategy: NITI AYOG has launched this scheme aiming at Kuposhan Mukt BharatNational Rural Drinking Water Program Continuation and Restructuring : aim is to provide every rural person with adequate safe water for drinking, cooking and other basic domestic needs on a sustainable basis, with a minimum water quality standard, which should be conveniently accessible at all times and in all situations. Though this was already under NRDWP Started in 2009, Union cabinet has accorded its approval for continuation and restructuring.KUSUM SCHEME: The scheme will work towards promoting solar power production a.k.a. solar farming up to 28,250 MW to help farmers.KEY FACTS ABOUT THE KUSUM SCHEMEKUSUM scheme will provide 1.75 million off-grid agricultural solar pumpsIt will build 10,000 MW solar plants on barren lands for solar farmingFarmers will be given a chance to earn extra income if they help produce additional power by setting up solar power project on their barren landThe energy produced by the farmers on their barren land will be bought by the state electricity distribution companies (DISCOMS)The scheme is likely to decrease the consumption of diesel in the agriculture sector (used in pumps)KUSUM scheme also includes the distribution of 17.5 lakh solar pumps for which 60 per cent subsidy will be given to the farmers.Scheme for Fisherman:Sagar Vani project: is an integrated information dissemination system that will serve the coastal community, especially the fisherman community with the advisories and alerts towards livelihood as well as their safety at seaHealth related schemes:Mission indradhanush and then Intensified Mission Indradhanush: “Let no child suffer from any vaccine-preventable disease". This was stated by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi as he launched the Intensified Mission Indradhanush (IMI) at Vadnagar in Gujarat, today. Through this programme, Government of India aims to reach each and every child under two years of age and all those pregnant women who have been left uncovered under the routine immunisation programme. The special drive will focus on improving immunization coverage in select districts and cities to ensure full immunization to more than 90% by December 2018. The achievement of full immunisation under Mission Indradhanush to at least 90% coverage was to be achieved by 2020 earlier. With the launch of IMI, achievement of the target has now been advancedAyushman Bharat project: The Government today announced two major initiatives in health sector , as part of Ayushman Bharat programme. The Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs, Shri Arun Jaitely while presenting the General Budget 2018-19 in Parliament here today said that this was aimed at making path breaking interventions to address health holistically, in primary, secondary and tertiary care systems, covering both prevention and health promotion.The initiatives are as follows:-(i) Health and Wellness Centre:- The National Health Policy, 2017 has envisioned Health and Wellness Centres as the foundation of India’s health system. Under this 1.5 lakh centres will bring health care system closer to the homes of people. These centres will provide comprehensive health care, including for non-communicable diseases and maternal and child health services. These centres will also provide free essential drugs and diagnostic services. The Budget has allocated Rs.1200 crore for this flagship programme. Contribution of private sector through CSR and philanthropic institutions in adopting these centres is also envisaged.(ii) National Health Protection Scheme:- The second flagship programme under Ayushman Bharat is National Health Protection Scheme, which will cover over 10 crore poor and vulnerable families (approximately 50 crore beneficiaries) providing coverage upto 5 lakh rupees per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization. This will be the world’s largest government funded health care programme. Adequate funds will be provided for smooth implementation of this programme.Other schemes:Ajeevika Grameen Express Yojna: to provide an alternative source of livelihood to members of Self Help Group (SHGs). This scheme has been launched under Deendayal Antyodaya Yojna - National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY - NRLM). This scheme will facilitate them to operate public transport services in background rural areas.PENCIL PORTAL - Platform for Effective Enforcement for No Child Labour: its an electronic platform that aims at involving Centre, State, District, Governments, civil society and general public in achieving the target of child labour free society.It encompasses various components- Child Tracking System, Complaint Corner, State Government, National Child Labour Project and Convergence. Each district will nominate District Nodal Officers (DNOs) who will receive the complaints. Within 48 hours of receiving complaints, DNOs will check genuineness of complaint and take rescue measures in coordination with police, if complaint is genuine. So far, 7 states have appointed DNOs.3. National Biopharma Mission: this is an Industry- Academia Mission to accelerate bio pharmaceutical development in India.4. VAJRA - Visiting Advanced Joint Research : this scheme enables NRIs and oversees scientific community to participate and contribute to research and development in India.5: Test and Treat Policy for HIV patients: Test-and-treat is an intervention strategy in which the population at risk is screened for HIV infection and diagnosed HIV infected individuals receive early treatment, aiming to eliminate HIV as it reduces the rate of spreading the virus to other people.6. DIGITAL POLICE PORTAL: will enable citizens to register FIRs online and the portal will initially offer seven public delivery services in all states and UTs like person and address verification e.g. of employees, tenants, nurses etc, permission for hosting Public Events, Lost and Found Articles and Vehicle theft etc.It will provide investigator the complete record history of any criminal from anywhere across the country.7. Nationwide campaign - Gaj yatra: A nationwide campaign to protect elephants on the occasion of World Elephant Day.8. SHE BOX portal: The Minister of Women & Child Development, Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi launched an online complaint management system titled Sexual Harassment electronic–Box (SHe-Box) for registering complaints related to sexual harassment at workplace in New Delhi today. The complaint management system has been developed to ensure the effective implementation of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act (the SH Act), 2013.This portal is an initiative to provide a platform to women working or visiting any office of Central Government (Central Ministries, Departments, Public Sector Undertakings, Autonomous Bodies and Institutions etc.) to file complaints related to sexual harassment at workplace under the SH Act. Those who had already filed a written complaint with the concerned Internal Complaint Committee (ICC) constituted under the SH Act are also eligible to file their complaint through this portal. The SHe-Box portal can be accessed at the link given below:http://www.wcd-sh.nic.in9. Sankalp and strive schemes:STRIVE scheme: will incentivize ITIs to improve overall performance including apprenticeship by involving SMEs (Small Scale Enterprises), business association and industry clusters. It will develop robust mechanism for delivering quality skill development training by strengthening institutions- National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), State Skill Development Missions (SSDMs), Sector Skill Councils, ITIs and National Skill Development Agency (NSDA) etc.It will support universalization of National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF) including National Quality Assurance Framework (NQAF) across skill development schemes. It will provide required push to National Skill Development Mission 2015 and its various sub missions. It is also aligned to flagship Government programs such as Make in India and Swachhta Abhiyan.SANKALP scheme : envisages setting up of Trainers and Assessors academies with self-sustainable models. Over 50 such academies are to be set up in priority sectors. It will leverage institutions for trainingtrainers in both long and short term VET thereby bringing about convergence. Additional trainer academies will also be set up.It will focus on greater decentralization in skill planning by institutional strengthening at State level which includes setting up of SSDMs and allow states to come up with State and District level Skill Development Plans (SSDPDSDP).It also aims at enhancement of inclusion of underprivileged and marginalized communities including women, Scheduled Castes (SCs)/Schedule Tribes (STs) and Persons with Disabilities (PWD). It will also develop a skilling ecosystem that will support the country’s rise in Ease of Doing Business index.10. Anti Narcotics Scheme: aims to combat illicit trafficking in drugs and psychotropic substance. The purpose is to assist state governments and UTs which are contributing in controlling the inter-state and cross border drug trafficking.11. Atal Bhujal Yojna: to tackle ever-deepening crisis of depleting groundwater level12. Gobar-Dhan yojna: the solid waste and cattle dung will be composed into useful elements such as Bio-CNG and Bio-gas.13. National Bamboo Mission: The Mission would ensure holistic development of the bamboo sector by addressing complete value chain and establishing effective linkage of producers (farmers) with industry.Beneficiaries:The scheme will benefit directly and indirectly the farmers as well as local artisans and associated personnels engaged in bamboo sector including associated industries. Since it is proposed to bring about one lakh ha area under plantation, it is expected that about one lakh farmers would be directly benefitted in terms of plantation.States/ districts covered:The Mission will focus on development of bamboo in limited States where it has social, commercial and economical advantage, particularly in the North Eastern region and States including Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.The Mission is expected to establish about 4000 treatment/ product development units and bring more than 100000 ha area under plantation.Impact:Bamboo plantation will contribute to optimizing farm productivity and income thereby enhancing livelihood opportunities of small & marginal farmers including landless and women as well as provide quality material to industry. Thus, the Mission will not only serve as a potential instrument for enhancing income of farmers but also contributing towards climate resilience and environmental benefits. The Mission will also help in creating employment generation directly or indirectly in both skilled and unskilled segments.14. Secure Himalaya project:The Union Government had launched SECURE Himalaya, a six-year project to ensure conservation of locally and globally significant biodiversity, land and forest resources in high Himalayan ecosystem spread over four states viz. Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Sikkim.Key FactsThe SECURE project aims at securing livelihoods, conservation, sustainable use and restoration of high range Himalayan ecosystems. It is meant for specific landscapes including Changthang (Jammu and Kasmir), Lahaul – Pangi and Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh), Gangotri – Govind and Darma – Byans Valley in Pithoragarh (Uttarakhand) and Kanchenjunga – Upper Teesta Valley (Sikkim).The key focus areas of the project is protection of snow leopard and other endangered species and their habitats and also securing livelihoods of people in region and enhancing enforcement to reduce wildlife crime. Under it, enhanced enforcement efforts and monitoring will be undertaken to curb illegal trade in some medicinal and aromatic plants which are among most threatened species in these landscapes.15. Operation Greens: aims to promote farmer producers organisations, agri-logistics, processing facilities and professional management. The operation aims to aid farmers and help control and limit the erratic fluctuations in the prices of onions, potatoes and tomatoes.

What are some interesting startups working in the AI space in Bangalore?

NiramaiCo-Founders, NiramaiThis Bengaluru-based deep tech startup provides breast cancer screening solution using AI. It is a non-contact, non-invasive, radiation-free method of detecting early stage breast cancer in women of all age groups. The core technology by the company called Thermalytix is a fusion of sophisticated ML algorithms over thermal images. The patented algorithms automate the process of analysing the 400,000 temperature values measured per person. Unique thermal patterns and image characteristics that are typically used by medical professionals while detecting cancer in other modalities like XRay or Ultrasound are also used to make the report accurate as well as understandable by the radiologist.The Founding Team: It was founded by Geetha Manjunatha (CEO) and Nidhi Mathur (COO), after they saw their loved ones suffering with cancer in their family and felt deeply about solving this problem. This led to the creation of NIRAMAI, which in Sanskrit means being without diseases. It also expands to “Non-Invasive Risk Assessment through Machine Intelligence”.They build fully automated website chatbots, mobile chat applications and RPA( Robotic process automation) tools for internal business processess for clients across e-commerce, travel, media and fintech. Flipkart, ESPN and MSIG insurance are some of their clients.Supertext AICo-Founders, Supertext AIAt Supertext, they believe that communicating with a business or service can be and should be as easy as chatting with a friend — personalised, contextual and fun. Therefore they primarily focus to offer their clients the ability to integrate and add conversational intelligence to answer queries and build persona based virtual agents for Internal business processs automation and Automated front desk customer engagement . The chatbots are designed and developed on their custom AI platform with real-time data analytics, where they have the ability to create and pass tickets via ITSM to support team, have full visibility on bot responses, NLP (natural language processing) training and user interaction historThe Founding Team: It was founded in December 2015 by Avinash Hegde (director), Mathew J Padayatty (director) and Kamalkamman J. The founders realised that though local vendors were building entire businesses by merely chatting with their potential customers over WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger but struggled to scale as they were unable to continue servicing them or build required internal business processes. They wanted to try and solve this by automating business processes at a scale using forward-leaning technologies like Natural language processing and ML. They raised an angel funding from investors in Bengaluru and Singapore.Netradyne co-founder Avneesh Agrawal. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint.Netradyne, Bengaluru and San Diego, USInvestment: Raised $16 million (around Rs102.8 crore) from Reliance Industries Ltd in June 2016.The team: Founded by Avneesh Agrawal, a former Qualcomm Inc. president for India and South Asia, and David Julian, a former principal engineer at the US-based chip-maker.Intelligence factor: Netradyne’s Driveri, a powerful camera that analyses driving patterns and can help determine the cause of an accident. The soap-bar-sized device is attached to a vehicle’s rear-view mirror and rests on the inside of the windscreen, pointing towards the road.In July 2015, Agrawal, along with his long-time friend and colleague Julian, set up Netradyne, wanting to tackle that intractable problem of the modern world—road accidents.Netradyne’s main product is Driveri, which packs in four high-definition cameras generating 360-degree footage of the vehicle’s path (transmitted on a real-time LTE network), has a global positioning system, gyroscope sensors and accelerometer, and a Nvidia processor, the same one that is used in the iPhone 5. The unit captures visuals of the car’s surroundings, analyses driving patterns and stores the data on a cloud platform.It uses machine learning and deep-learning systems to analyse the entire scene in front of the car: traffic lights, stop signs, objects in its course, distance to every other vehicle, relative speeds and direction.The data generated enables the platform to determine whether the driver is overspeeding or driving rashly, adhering to traffic rules, is potentially drowsy or drunk, or taking multiple halts along the route. In the event of an accident, it also sends real-time alerts to the fleet operator.According to Agrawal, similar technology is used to power autonomous car projects across the world, such as those being developed by Google (Alphabet Inc.), Uber Inc., Robert Bosch GmbH and large car-makers like Toyota, Volkswagen Group and Daimler AG.After testing the product for over 750,000 miles (around 1.2 million kilometres), Netradyne launched Driveri in the US market in March and plans to launch it in India by June-July. It recently signed its first US client, Load One, a mid-sized cargo company that operates a fleet of 350 trucks. The solution is also useful for retail customers like parents of first-time teenage drivers.Agrawal says Netradyne’s main focus currently is to ensure driver safety. The product is being marketed to commercial fleet operators to enable them to monitor drivers and enhance the safety of cargo.“Using the solution, fleet managers can train drivers on safe driving practices, besides maintaining a close check on valuable cargo.... They can also create a scorecard for drivers and incentivize them on safe driving,” says Agrawal.Agrawal, whose company employs around 60 people, expects Driveri customers to see a significant reduction in the number of traffic violations and accidents; in turn, safer driving would result in greater fuel efficiency and lower maintenance costs.The other big market is insurance.“What we are essentially doing is quantifying risk,” Agrawal says. His plan is to bring Driveri to every car in the world with insurance partners who agree to use its data for investigating accidents and deciding on a more accurate premium amountEmbibe founder Aditi AvasthiEmbibe, BengaluruInvestment: $9 million from venture capital investors such as Kalaari Capital and Lightbox.The team: Founded by Aditi Avasthi, a former Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Barclays executive.Intelligence factor: In a country where the overall quality of education consistently lags behind those in developed nations, Embibe’s core AI product can be a game changer.In the book (and movie) Moneyball, a baseball coach and an economics graduate from Harvard use an analytics engine to ditch decades of baseball practice and identify a world-class team that ends up breaking numerous Major League Baseball records. Major teams end up adopting the model.Embibe is hoping to create a similar impact in the world of education.Its learning platform is being used by thousands of students and the start-up is in talks to ally with educational training centres. Embibe, which runs a website and a mobile app, collects data from students, charging only for advanced analysis and personalized learning recommendations. Students can actually improve test scores by fixing basic mistakes using its AI platform.For instance, Embibe’s First Look Accuracy metric trains students to maximize scores in a given test by first answering the questions they can attempt confidently and then moving on to the tougher ones.Another metric, “‘Time Spent On Questions Not Answered’, indicates no confidence, an inability to know what you know yourself. You’re unsure of your ability. This value is actually 41 minutes for Indian kids for the IIT exams out of 180 minutes—in an exam where 1 mark is almost equivalent to 10,000 ranks. So, think about it—if you’re able to bring this value down by 50%, the scores automatically trend up,” explains Avasthi.The company says it has identified 27 parameters that can, for instance, predict scores in an IIT entrance exam with 93% accuracy.To get the bulk of data that its core cloud-based platform crunches, the start-up bought 100Marks, another ed-tech start-up, in 2015.Embibe uses advanced-level analytics besides its core AI engine, including self-learning algorithms, machine learning and cognitive computing akin to IBM’s Watson. It started out as an analytics company in 2012 and began using AI and machine learning tools in 2014 in an effort to create personalized solutions for individual students.Embibe started with a 40-member team that was primarily responsible for content creation; now it’s down to just three. The cost of creating content is down “from the high hundreds to Rs20 per unit of content through automation,” says Avasthi, who has hired three machine learning and AI experts from top companies, including IBM.Tricog Health Services co-founder Charit Bhograj.Tricog Health Services PVT. LTD, BengaluruInvestment: $2 million from Inventus Capital Partners, Blume Ventures and angel investors.The team: Charit Bhograj, a cardiologist; Zainul Charbiwala, who worked at IBM India and Qualcomm; Udayan Dasgupta, who worked at Texas Instruments; and Abhinav Gujjar, who worked at Thomson Reuters and Microsoft.Intelligence factor: What can take up to 6 hours before treatment starts, Tricog accomplishes in a few minutes.Nearly 7.5 million people die every year of heart disease. Around 1.5-3 million of them are in India; half of them can be saved by early diagnosis, according to Bhograj.“Yet almost 70% of the general physicians do not have an ECG (electrocardiography) machine,” he adds.ECG—a heart health test—is conducted through a machine which records the heart’s electrical movement. These machines are not widely available in India, nor are there enough cardiologists to interpret ECG data. And it can take up to 6 hours before a patient is diagnosed and sent for treatment, says Bhograj.So Tricog set out to help doctors make instant diagnoses of heart attacks and ensure treatment is not delayed.While Tricog sources ECG machines from General Electric Healthcare, it has built its own sensory device and fits it on the machines. It gives these devices to general physicians, clinics and nursing homes on a subscription basis. Through the Internet, this device sends the ECG or recorded heart movement to a set of algorithms, which then generates a report. Before the report is sent, a specialist doctor verifies it.In 2016, Tricog processed the ECG reports of 200,000 patients; about 11,000 of them were diagnosed with a heart attack. The company claims it has never reported false results.Yet, given the stakes, Bhograj reasons that “no matter how accurate the algorithm gets, there will always be a specialist (cardiologist) to verify the report churned out by it.”Founded in 2011, the company spent close to four years putting the technology together and launched the product in February 2015. As of April, Tricog had 600 clients (general physicians, clinics and nursing homes) across 178 cities and towns, and 20 specialist doctors, including clinical cardiologists, who study the reports. In the next five years, Tricog aims to be present in 100,000 locations—it claims that though such a scale would ordinarily require around 700 doctors, it would be able to deliver comparable service with only 50 doctors.Tricog Health Services co-founder Charit Bhograj.Tricog Health Services PVT. LTD, BengaluruInvestment: $2 million from Inventus Capital Partners, Blume Ventures and angel investors.The team: Charit Bhograj, a cardiologist; Zainul Charbiwala, who worked at IBM India and Qualcomm; Udayan Dasgupta, who worked at Texas Instruments; and Abhinav Gujjar, who worked at Thomson Reuters and Microsoft.Intelligence factor: What can take up to 6 hours before treatment starts, Tricog accomplishes in a few minutes.Nearly 7.5 million people die every year of heart disease. Around 1.5-3 million of them are in India; half of them can be saved by early diagnosis, according to Bhograj.“Yet almost 70% of the general physicians do not have an ECG (electrocardiography) machine,” he adds.ECG—a heart health test—is conducted through a machine which records the heart’s electrical movement. These machines are not widely available in India, nor are there enough cardiologists to interpret ECG data. And it can take up to 6 hours before a patient is diagnosed and sent for treatment, says Bhograj.So Tricog set out to help doctors make instant diagnoses of heart attacks and ensure treatment is not delayed.While Tricog sources ECG machines from General Electric Healthcare, it has built its own sensory device and fits it on the machines. It gives these devices to general physicians, clinics and nursing homes on a subscription basis. Through the Internet, this device sends the ECG or recorded heart movement to a set of algorithms, which then generates a report. Before the report is sent, a specialist doctor verifies it.In 2016, Tricog processed the ECG reports of 200,000 patients; about 11,000 of them were diagnosed with a heart attack. The company claims it has never reported false results.Yet, given the stakes, Bhograj reasons that “no matter how accurate the algorithm gets, there will always be a specialist (cardiologist) to verify the report churned out by it.”Founded in 2011, the company spent close to four years putting the technology together and launched the product in February 2015. As of April, Tricog had 600 clients (general physicians, clinics and nursing homes) across 178 cities and towns, and 20 specialist doctors, including clinical cardiologists, who study the reports. In the next five years, Tricog aims to be present in 100,000 locations—it claims that though such a scale would ordinarily require around 700 doctors, it would be able to deliver comparable service with only 50 doctors.Logistics Planning, Automation, Optimization and Management’s founders Geet Garg (left) and Nishith Rastogi. Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintLogistics Planning, Automation, Optimization and Management (Mara Labs INC.), Bengaluru and USInvestment: At least $2.75 million from Exfinity Venture Partners, Blume Ventures, BeeNext and others.The team: Nishith Rastogi, who has worked with Amazon and eBay; and Geet Garg, who was with Amazon. The two had co-founded PinChat, a location-based conversational platform, in August 2014.Intelligence factor: Locus has developed route-planning algorithms so companies can chart the best possible route to deliver an order and allow a salesperson to cover the maximum number of points in the shortest time possible.Locus aims to automate all the human decisions involved in sending a package. With clients such as Hindustan Unilever, Quikr, Urban Ladder and Lenskart, it has a lot on its hands.The company, which says it has more than 25 clients, has developed a route-planning engine, its core business, apart from a 3D packing engine that provides configurations for loading cargo into containers. Locus also offers companies a weekly schedule of the most efficient routes and outlets for their sales teams.Rastogi says each schedule planned by their routing engine takes 5-10 minutes, whereas a skilled human being would take 1-4 hours to process the same data. The company says it helps its clients reduce their logistics costs by at least 25%.Locus offers solutions for both intracity and intercity operations. It estimates the domestic freight industry is around $100 billion; a bulk of this is intercity logistics.Planning the best possible route is not as easy as it sounds. “In many cases, we will have a landmark and street name with a wrong pin code. We have to convert this information into latitude and longitude. For this, our systems need to understand and interpret the English language and build natural language processing systems,” says Rastogi.“Let us say you have to deliver a package before hitting the gym at 6pm. But if you reach the gym 5 minutes late, that is also fine. How do I make the system understand that it is better to reach the gym by 6.05pm instead of not delivering the package at all? In the real world, if a truck is full, the driver can keep one package next to his seat. It is important in the real world to understand what that soft threshold is. It is important for the system to understand this world fuzziness,” explains Rastogi.Companies provide Locus the origin of the package, destination and expected time of delivery. Locus sources all the possible routes from Google Maps or sifts through data on past deliveries. This data is then processed, factoring in weather information, traffic, historical data on time taken to cover the distance, etc. to arrive at a few best routes. If the client is new, logistics solutions take about three months.Are the companies willing to wait? “We haven’t lost a single client yet,” says RastogiNiki - India's Own Chatbot For Online Transactions | Making It As Simple As Talking To A Friend’s founders (from left) Sachin Jaiswal, Nitin Babel, Keshav Prawasi and Shishir Modi. Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintNiki - India's Own Chatbot For Online Transactions | Making It As Simple As Talking To A Friend (Techbins Solutions PVT. LTD), BengaluruInvestment: Niki - India's Own Chatbot For Online Transactions | Making It As Simple As Talking To A Friend raised undisclosed seed investments from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures, Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and Haresh Chawla of True North between October 2015 and December 2016. Niki - India's Own Chatbot For Online Transactions | Making It As Simple As Talking To A Friend declined to disclose the quantum of funds raised.The team: Founded by four Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, alumni. Before starting the venture, Sachin Jaiswal, chief executive officer at Niki - India's Own Chatbot For Online Transactions | Making It As Simple As Talking To A Friend, had co-founded InnovAccer Inc., a healthcare analytics company in the US. Technology head Keshav Prawasi was a software engineer at Amazon; Nitin Babel, who looks after support and marketing, worked for Ipsos, a global market and opinion research firm; and business head Shishir Modi came from a stint at a multinational energy distribution company.Intelligence factor: Niki is used for over 20 services, including hotel, cab and movie ticket bookings, ordering food and paying bills. If you’re rude, it will reprimand you and can even block you.Chatbots—like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Allo—are essentially computer programs that make human-like conversation with users.Banks, retailers and others use chatbots to answer basic customer queries and help users navigate their websites.Niki, one of the early chatbots developed in India, is designed to serve as a virtual shopkeeper that assists in the purchase of products and services. It can help you book a cab, order food from the nearest restaurant, book tickets for movies and events, and pay general utility bills. Flight bookings, payments for insurance and courier services will be introduced soon.Niki was conceived in early 2015 and rolled out to customers in October that year.It works on a series of sophisticated algorithms that understand human language by breaking it down into structured queries that the machine can understand. Another set of codes then generates a response relevant to the query, and this goes on till the task is accomplished.The core of the platform rests on language-recognition systems. “We started with off-the-shelf solutions like Stanford CoreNLP and went on to develop our own custom models,” says Babel.These were developed by studying the interactions on Niki and constantly tweaking algorithms to accurately determine what the user is looking for.Currently, Niki has over 300,000 users; 50-60% of them are in the age group of 24-35, 20-30% in the 18-24 age group, and about 10% are over 35.“We have been collecting the conversational commerce data for Indian customers for the last two years. Close to 50 million interactions have happened on Niki and have been used to improve the accuracy from 50-60% to 90%,” says Babel.He says the company earns revenue by charging a commission on each service or product purchased on Niki.Earlier this year, the company launched a software development kit that allows other sites and apps to integrate Niki with their platforms. It is available on HDFC Bank’s OnChat, the Oxigen Wallet app and the operating system of Intex smartphones (as the LFTY feature). The company will launch 20 more partnerships soonhttp://Active.ai’s co-founder Ravi Shankar. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Minthttp://Active.ai (Active Intelligence PTE LTD), Bengaluru and SingaporeInvestment: $3.5 million (around Rs22.5 crore) from Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures India.The team: Ravi Shankar, chief executive officer and co-founder, has worked with banks such as HDFC Bank, ABN AMRO and YES Bank; Shankar Narayanan, the chief operating officer, founded the start-ups Fastacash and Cazh and co-founded Tagit; Parikshit Paspulati, chief technology officer, founded Finoculus and co-founded Tagit. Narayanan and Paspulati are Singapore-based, where the company is headquartered; more than half the workforce is based in Bengaluru.Intelligence factor: Let’s say, you need to know your account balance and don’t really have the time to walk into an ATM or even look into the bank’s app. Send a message to the bank through Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp and you will get the reply. Chances are high that your bank is using http://Active.ai platform, an intelligent interface that allows banks and consumers to connect over chat.Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintShankar, Narayanan and Paspulati have all worked with banks and fintech start-ups. Perhaps naturally then, http://Active.ai wants to improve customer engagement for banks and insurance companies.“Say you type, I lost my wallet. What will the bank understand? There is no transaction for ‘lost my wallet’. The system will understand that it means all the cards are gone. The bank will say I will block your card,” says Shankar. “Now, let’s say you are at an airport. The bank will say, ‘Looks like you are at an airport and travelling. Can we help you with a (travel) insurance policy?’ The ability to hold this conversation is what we bring to banks.”According to Shankar, http://Active.ai will help banks almost halve their customer engagement costs.http://Active.ai essentially offers a platform that has chatbots through which banks can interact with customers.The more customers interact, the more the Artificial Intelligence behind http://Active.ai’s platform will learn about them and the better it will be able to offer personalized advice and service, increasing customer engagement and loyalty.Usage for consumers can range from opening an account and getting balance information, to transferring money to other accounts or paying bills. Banks, on the other hand, can push relevant products and services, drawing on the data available on customer history.The bot can be integrated via various channels, including WeChat, LINE, Kakao Talk, Facebook Messenger, Amazon Echo and Siri. Largely, the company sources data from banks and other partner financial institutions, apart from Envestnet | Yodlee, a data aggregation and analytics platform.http://Active.ai has developed algorithms that can convert unstructured messages, i.e. input by consumers, into structured instructions for banks using natural language processing and machine learning.“Say you are typing on Facebook. This is unstructured messaging. We convert that into entities and intent. For instance, you type, ‘I want to know what is happening in my account.’ Here, entity is the account and intent is ‘I want to know’. Our algorithm captures this and it then figures out the context. That is the third component. So the system will think this guy has an account and wants to know what is happening there, I should get his balance,” explains Shankar.In India, the company counts Axis Bank as a client; deals with several others are in the pipeline. It says it has already signed up with banks in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Discussions with banks in North America are under way, says Shankar.“Apart from reducing the costs of customer engagement, banks can cross-sell or upsell. It helps them retain customers with higher engagement and client service levels. It also helps banks reach out to new consumers, especially the youth, via chat,” he adds.Having started with the banking sector, http://Active.ai now plans to work with insurance companies to boost customer engagement.SigTuple’s founding team (from left) Tathagato Rai Dastidar, Rohit Kumar Pandey and Apurv Anand. Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintSigtuple, BengaluruInvestment: $6.4 million, from investors such as Accel Partners, Axilor Ventures, IDG Ventures, pi Ventures, Endiya Partners, VH Capital and Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal.The team: Started by former American Express executives Rohit Kumar Pandey, Tathagato Rai Dastidar and Apurv Anand.Intelligence factor: SigTuple is helping hospitals and healthcare centres improve the speed and accuracy of blood reports.Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintIn medicine and healthcare, accuracy and time are important factors. A delay of even half an hour can result in loss of life; and a wrong diagnosis could prove tragic. SigTuple is looking to address both these issues through its AI-powered Manthana platform, which can, among other things, analyse blood samples and generate medical reports in less than 10 minutes—and with complete accuracy, according to Pandey, who is also the chief executive officer.“From the moment someone reaches the labs and provides a blood sample, the total time taken for the generation of a report and review by a pathologist is less than 10 minutes,” says Pandey.Manthana is being used by a number of mid- to large-sized hospitals, diagnostics labs, and eyecare and healthcare chains. Among their prominent clients is Anand Diagnostic Labs, one of Bengaluru’s biggest chains, which uses one of SigTuple’s digitization tools to analyse blood samples.Now the team is working towards making Manthana available for a complete diagnosis.Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintAt present, Manthana can analyse blood, semen and urine samples—Pandey says the platform is capable of generating complete blood reports, which typically analyse 21 different parameters, including red and white blood cell count and platelets. For example, SigTuple has used the AI-powered platform to analyse a blood sample to catch a malarial parasite, says Pandey.Accuracy is another area that the team hopes to improve on—currently, SigTuple’s accuracy rates differ for different solutions. For instance, accuracy rates for urine samples stand at around 85-88%.For SigTuple, evolving from traditional analytics to machine learning was a crucial pivot, since it wanted to create tools that could analyse medical cases, just like a doctor would.“Earlier, the algorithms that were being used, as soon as they saw new data, the results used to get skewed. With the advancement of AI, as more and more new data keeps coming in, the machine continues to learn—like humans. And it starts generating solutions, which was not possible with traditional algorithms,” says Pandey.The limitations of traditional algorithms were addressed by machine learning, where a machine is trained to mimic a human brain—somewhat like IBM’s Watson.For example, a hospital chain which wants to open a lab in a tier-II or tier-III city usually has to spend hundreds of crores of rupees on hardware, equipment and medical experts.With SigTuple’s platforms such as Manthana, hospitals can scale up in smaller cities and towns. Since it also eliminates the need for labs to ship blood samples to different locations, it helps diagnostic chains save on logistical costs and, more crucially, time.“There is no need for a manual review by a pathologist by putting a slide under a microscope. Second, remote diagnosis is made possible, because the pathologist need not be sitting next to the microscope or blood slide. No shipping is required—the pathologist can be anywhere,” says Pandey.SigTuple gets most of its data from the labs and hospitals that it works with. Over the next year, a top priority for the company is to gather more data through more such partnerships to improve the accuracy of Manthana.

Is the Kerala Model efficient and sustainable?

Instead of trying to push my personal opinions down your throat, I will give you a detailed description regarding the success of the “Kerala Model” of development and you can then make an informed decision regarding the same.This is sourced completely from an amazing yale review article I read recently.Growth and Success in KeralaIntroduction to KeralaKerala stands out among the states of India, not only for its relative poverty, but for the truly remarkable array of basic health benefits which it manages to provide to its citizens. Despite having a per-capita GNP of only $298 in 1991, Kerala boasted a nearly one hundred percent literacy rate, and had one of the lowest incidences of child malnutrition in all of India. By contrast, the GNP in the rest of the country was $330, and the adult literacy rate only 52% (Franke and Chasin 1994). The robustness of health of Kerala’s citizens also shows through in a variety of other metrics, and the extraordinary success of Kerala’s ambitious program to settle entrenched historical inequities and promote truly exceptional widespread health demands an explanation. In fact, the phenomenon of the state’s development has been so well studied that the “Kerala Model” is frequently referred to by economists, anthropologists, and policy-makers alike.However, looking simply at the health metrics in Kerala is not sufficient. To fully understand its current situation, one must take a biosocial approach. This means recognizing that “measurable biological and clinical processes are inflected by society, political economy, belief, desire, to a similar extent as other aspects of social life” (Farmer, et al). For Kerala, this entails looking not just at the failures or successes of currently implemented policy, but also at the historical circumstances which informed it and the social structures which surround and shape it. Only by looking at the Kerala model more deeply, analyzing it through a variety of disciplines, can we hope to find meaningful answers about the causes of its successes and failures, and its applicability and meaning in a broader world context.One aspect that contributes to the uniqueness of Kerala is the strong civil activity and organization of its citizens. This history of mobilization started centuries ago under the oppressive and demeaning caste system, pressing vital reforms through entrenched local and national interests to result in the current notable health statistics. Though the benefits of these reforms are experienced both biologically and socially, they come as the result of deliberate moves of policy and advocacy which organized the disadvantaged to fight for their own rights. With that opportunity, the people of Kerala have managed to structure and enforce specific reforms which have direct, beneficial effects on the way they live.Kerala is often dismissed as a special case, a perfect storm of ecological, historical, and individual circumstances. However, the characteristics of Kerala which enabled its success are not strictly limited by setting, and the approach it took toward advocacy, policy, and reform can apply in broader contexts, and has. The idea of education as mobilization addresses one of the main problems in development today – the fact that that it often enhances inequality even as it promotes GNP-level growth – by working to combat “structural violence” at its roots (Farmer). Kerala challenges the assumption that countries have to experience economic growth on the national level to be lifted out of poverty by showing that meaningful education reform and the nurturing of an engaged active citizenry can create a better standard of life without succeeding on any traditional monetary growth metrics. The state’s uniqueness is not then a testament to the Kerala Model’s ineffectiveness or irreplicability, as some allege, but to the deep entrenchment of the economic growth model and the interests which support it.History of KeralaKerala’s successes are the result of a long history of division and struggle. Up through the 1900s, people in that area were bound by a rigidly inflexible caste system. Subtleties of dress and speech “ensured that a person’s place in society could be recognized at a glance” (Jeffrey 1992). These highly visible classifications in turn determined how wealth was distributed and how different social groups interacted. Higher-caste groups were considered pure; they owned the land or were priests, while lower castes were relegated to the most menial labor and considered contaminated or polluted. Though this system was in place throughout India, it was both particularly elaborate and exceedingly strict in Kerala. In the nineteenth century, Indian reformer Swami Vivekananda called the region “a madhouse of caste” (Franke and Chasin 1994). Chief among the restrictions imposed on the lowest castes were their inability to own land, interact with higher-caste individuals, or enter Hindu temples, but other instances of structural violence against lower-caste Keralites were innumerable and utterly pervasive. These inequalities were doubly entrenched in tradition and religion in India, making them especially intractable. However, as described later, education for critical consciousness works to counteract the systemized violence of the caste hierarchy by teaching people to question the system rather than just adapt to it.The caste system epitomizes traditional authority, which social theorist Max Weber described as “resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them” (1964). Traditional authority differs from bureaucratic, or rational-legal authority in that it is historically derived. Because of this, policies are determined by custom, or the whims of whoever custom selects to rule. The utter lack of meritocracy in such a static caste society meant that edicts from the ruling class could only be enforced as long as the tradition on which they were grounded continued to prevail. As challenges to the traditional system came in the form of the caste liberation movement, they also inspired challenges against the idea of top-down authority at all. When the caste system finally fell, those who had been most disadvantaged by it had also learned that social and governmental structures were not infallible – that they could be agitated against.Education played an important part in Kerala’s tremendous transition from a rigidly caste-divided society into one of India’s most egalitarian states. Though the region historically had strong literacy rates, it was the early-1900s expansion of the education system into the countryside which paved the way for the mass mobilization and active citizenry which today define Kerala. However, this early emphasis on vernacular schools (schools which taught in the native language, Malayalam) was actually implemented with much the opposite intention. A Maharaja of Travancore explained the pro-education policies by saying, “a government which has to deal with an educated population is by far stronger than one which has to control ignorant and disorderly masses. Hence education is a twice-blessed thing – it benefits those who give it and those who receive it” (Jeffrey 1992). Though advocating for education, he and other elites believed it would lead to a less barbarous, easier to control populace. In this case, limited knowledge about the effects of literacy and education, led decision-makers to implement policies with results almost diametrically opposite of what they intended, a phenomenon Robert Merton called “the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action” (1936). Ironically, the very education reforms structured to make the populace easier to govern would help inform the radical movements which later swept Kerala. This gap between expectations and results shows most clearly in the selection of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery as a required text. While educational authorities applauded “Washington’s emphasis on deference and slow, peaceful change,” low-caste Hindus read it as a manual for how to go about challenging their oppressive situation. In this case, the maharajas were simply unable to fully understand the impact that the texts they selected would make, and because of this they never anticipated the revolutionary seeds their own purportedly placating school system would sow.The school system in Kerala directly challenged the traditions of the past. It mixed the castes, even as it heightened awareness of ethnic identities by using them for scholarship distribution and other such organizational purposes. These hardened social identities challenged traditional modes of hierarchy and deference in Kerala, giving rise to a much larger movement. Schools became a testing ground for little acts of rebellion, and as Gandhi’s nationalist non-cooperation movement swept the country, it found many student followers. Rebellion was literally taught in class – teachers were paid little and irregularly, and they objected, noisily. “From the mid-1930s, vigorous teachers’ unions spread new ideas and forms of protest into distant corners” (Jeffrey 1992). This idea of dissent, of critically examining one’s situation and working to change it, strikes at the heart of structural violence, which perpetuates its injustice by being unnoticed. For this reason, the very first movements of the educationally engaged Kerala citizens were to combat these systemic injustices, mostly through land reforms.The various modes of dissent against structural violence became part of the social landscape of Kerala, incorporated through years of organized activism like temple entry marches, which sought to gain access to segregated temples, and “interdining,” which publically broke taboos by showing high- and low-caste Indians eating together (Franke and Chasin 1994). As the former students became teachers, this method of mass organization as communication became an integral part of Kerala’s culture, a process which Berger and Luckman refer to as “the social construction of reality” (1967). However, while Berger and Luckman tend to use the term to describe the institutionalization of authoritative social realities as seemingly objective and binding laws, it means something rather different here. It still refers to the process by which a socially-constructed understanding becomes an opaque, concrete reality of life, but in Kerala that fact of life is not a monolithic structure, but a movement of people. The reality which has been socially constructed through years of protest is that of an organized populace, effective at representing their viewpoints. Literacy is widespread in Kerala, information-seeking and active citizenry encouraged, protest expected. Though these are all social facts, constructed by the activism of Kerala’s people, they also became objectified over time as a concrete reality, influencing policy and lives by the ever-present threat of mass mobilization.In fact, it was this reality of this active peasantry that allowed for the passage of many of the most revolutionary reforms in Kerala. Education itself, though originally instituted by benevolently misguided maharajas, relied on the activism of the lower castes as well. They instituted reading and writing circles, which had a strong Marxist component and ensured that “the right to literacy in Kerala was transformed from a purely government-sponsored policy to a popular mass movement” (Franke and Chasin 1994). These sorts of grassroots movements, such as the 1990 Total Literacy Programme, helped Kerala to achieve 100% literacy by 1991, while the overall literacy of India was just 52% (Franke and Chasin 1994). However, key to understanding the literacy movement is an emphasis on what was being taught, that people were learning to think critically about themselves and their situations. This in turn led to a more active and engaged citizenry which was better able to protect its own interests throughout various forms of government. Paulo Freire described the prerequisite for participating in meaningful social change as “a form of education enabling the people to reflect on themselves, their responsibilities, and their role in the new cultural climate,” and though he wrote about Brazil, his words are equally resonant when trying to describe what distinguishes the political consciousness of Kerala (2008). Though education began the reform movements in Kerala, those movements soon became the basis for education through the efforts of a class that prioritized and fought for empowering Keralites through meaningful, thought-provoking literacy campaigns.However, education was not the people of Kerala’s only priority, nor even their first. Access to land had also been historically highly restricted, and as the class consciousness of the peasants grew, they found the traditional system of tenancy increasingly exploitative and insufferable. Radical associations began as early as 1915, when activists formed the Malabar Tenancy Association, and they continued to gain steam all the way through 1957, when Kerala elected a Communist Party of India majority to the state legislature (Franke and Chasin 1994). The first priority of this administration was to implement significant land reform, which they did on November 9, 1957, through the announcement of the Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill (KARB). Immediately, the bill faced strong opposition from the landed interests, including a member of the Praja Socialist Party, a misleadingly-named organization which had in fact often been called “the party of the past” in India (Fickett 1973). In the debate, a prominent PSP member named Joseph Chazhikkadan “compared the KARB to Pandora’s Box, the revenue minister in charge of the Bill to Pandora, and the provisions of the Bill to leprosy, tuberculosis, rabies, a scorpion, snake, wolf, and so on” (Radhakrishnan 1989). In the face of this virulent opposition, however, there was widespread peasant mobilization to support the bill. Throughout the debate, radical groups mustered support for the KARB, including rallies, conferences, meetings, and other demonstrations. When the central government of India launched a joint steering committee to remove the elected radicals with “the declared aim of saving the state from communist attacks and establishing peace, democracy, and democratic government,” supporters of the communist ministry took to the streets for 50 days, picketing government institutions and schools (Radhakrishnan 1989). Though Kerala’s communist government was indeed dismissed by the ruling Congress party in India at the end of that period, the replacement ministry still had to deal with these activists. Despite a variety of adjustments made which eliminated many of the protections for tenants, the revised legislation passed in 1960 as the Kerala Agrarian Relations Act retained most of the provisions of the KARB, and still “provided major economic relief to tenants” (Franke and Chasin 1994). However, subsequent protests by wealthy landowners and appeals to the central government succeeded in substantially watering down the already diluted KARA.Legislative disappointments aside, radicals in Kerala certainly gained more from the brief communist ministry than they lost. In addition to the precedent set by the passage of a substantial land reform act, there were also benefits which, though less immediately tangible would have even greater ramifications for the future. By the time the seven party United Front, led by the Communist Party of India – Marxist, was elected to power in 1967, many of the most substantial impediments to land reform had been removed. This revival of the leftists’ prior agenda was enabled by a variety of factors, such as the breakup of the anti-communist alliance which previously thwarted the KARB, the splintering and dissolution of the Congress party, and the increased mobilization of the peasantry which had resulted from the alliance of formerly anti-communist groups with the left to work for mass interests. Though the passage of the Kerala Land Reforms (Amendment) Act in 1969 was itself relatively uneventful, – by this point, popular pressure had driven most political leaders to support the bill – the KLRAA still had a massive impact on the division of resources in society, turning 1.5 million tenants in small land owners. However, it is important to emphasize that this reform was not just the result of a quiet vote or secluded legislative debate. “Quite the contrary, it was the outcome of decades of organizing, petition signing, marching, meetings, strikes, battles with police and landlord goon squads, election campaigns, and parliamentary debates” (Franke and Chasin 1994). Importantly, all this mobilization was initiated by a critically educated citizenry which was prepared to fight for its convictions.Kerala’s transition in the early twentieth century from a rigid, caste-defined society to the implementer, in large part by a mobilized peasantry, of one of the most thorough land reforms in South Asia depended ultimately on early efforts to educate the entirety of its citizenry. Though that educational movement was started with much the opposite intention, the skills and material taught enabled everyone in Kerala to look critically at their situation and to fight for improvements, in both education system itself and in the exploitative distribution of property and the outmoded laws which protected established interests. Key to understanding the increased mobilization of popular resources was the institutionalization of radicalism as a mode of learning and of protest in Kerala. Through successes like the land reform acts, the great mass of the previously disadvantaged came to understand themselves as having a role in crafting of the policies which affect them, and over time this understanding solidified itself as a society in which even the most wealthy and elite were forced to reconcile their aims with those of the least privileged.Health Outcomes in KeralaTracing the history of Kerala shows how the disenfranchised took back crucial elements of their own governance through education and mobilization. However, the effects of that newfound government remain to be demonstrated. Though Kerala did not experience the economic boom that is often conceived as marking development in poor countries, the various metrics of quality of life have improved significantly, a phenomenon Srikumar Chattopadhyay and Richard Franke referred to as “accomplishing more with less” (Freund 2009). On its most basic level, this can be shown as a comparison between Gross National Product and life expectancy. Under traditional understandings of development, an increased GNP corresponds with more wealth and a higher individual standard of living. However, Kerala is an exception to this rule. Despite having a per capita GNP of only $298 in 1991, as compared to India’s overall GNP of $330, Kerala had an average life expectancy of between 69 and 72 years. India’s average life expectancy was 60 years, and the life expectancy of other countries as economically destitute as Kerala was only 55 years. In fact, Kerala’s life expectancy was only 4 to 7 years shorter than that of the United States of America, despite the latter having an approximately 75 times greater per capita GNP (Franke and Chasin, 1994). Clearly, the state is outperforming classical expectations of development based on economic growth.However, simply comparing GNP and life expectancy does not tell the whole story of a population’s health. Fortunately for Kerala, nearly all the other metrics are equally favorable.By the end of 1991, Kerala had achieved 100% literacy, while the rest of India lagged behind at only 52 percent. In keeping with Kerala’s tradition of citizen-led movements, the 1989 Total Literacy Campaign which enabled Kerala to reach this goal was run in large part by the Kerala People’s Science Movement, a 70,000 member volunteer organization (Franke and Chasin 1994). Though literacy had regressed in Kerala by 1994, it retained the unique characteristic of being relatively equitably distributed between men and women. While the male literacy rate was 93.6%, female literacy was still 86.3%, which was 35 points higher than general literacy in the rest of the country. In contrast to this seven point literacy gap in Kerala, the difference across India was 25 percentage points – male literacy was 64%, and female literacy only 39% (Parayil 2000). Additionally, there is evidence that literacy in Kerala is not just learned as routine, but is put to active use. Despite their poverty, Kerala’s citizens have the highest newspaper consumption in all of India, supporting the assertion that “literacy in a progressive and mobilized political environment also enhances political awareness” (Franke and Chasin 1994). Kerala’s remarkable literacy rates are certainly an achievement in and of themselves; they speak to a remarkably far-reaching and engaging educational system. Even more important, however, is the fact that literacy in Kerala has a greater connotation, that it signals a well-informed populace, able to participate actively as citizens.Literacy is only one metric of development, and it speaks little to the physical health of the population. However, it is not the only improvement in the lives of impoverished Keralites which was implemented by the radical regimes of the 1950s and 60s. In a 1981 census which measured the percentage of villages which had access to specific vital resources, Kerala ranked first among Indian states in nearly every category, ranging from schools, to food ration shops, to post offices and hospitals. A similar survey found that while India as a whole had only 263 hospital beds per 100,000 people living in urban areas, Kerala had nearly twice that, at 458. The difference was even more marked in rural areas, where for 100,000 people India averaged 12 beds and Kerala averaged 107, despite being significantly poorer (Franke and Chasin 1994). Though the region was still extremely impoverished, even compared to other Indian states, the resources which it did have were distributed more equitably, resulting in a higher basic standard of living and better access to healthcare.This speaks to the prevalence of the institutions of care, but a still more biological analysis of population health is also necessary. In addition to Kerala’s high life expectancy, it also had by 1991 an infant mortality rate of 17 per 1,000 live births, as opposed to the all-India rate of 85. Infant mortality per thousand in comparably low-income countries was 91, while in the USA it was 9 (Franke and Chasin 1994). Whereas between 1990 and 1996, only 34% of births in India were attended by trained health personnel, in Kerala 94% of births were attended, a fact which no doubt contributes to Kerala’s relatively low infant mortality (Parayil 2000). Kerala also has a relatively low birth rate; at 20 per 1,000, it’s much closer to the USA’s 16 than India’s 31 or other low-income countries’ 38 (Franke and Chasin 1994). These indicators – high life expectancy, low infant mortality, and low birth rate – all correspond with increased access to effective medical care, which is especially remarkable given the overall dearth of wealth in Kerala. These strong health metrics epitomize the central paradox of Kerala, that of accomplishing more with less.However, the area of public health in which that trope of accomplishing more with less shows through most strongly is nutrition. Since the Indian food shortages of 1964, Kerala has used ration shops to provide nutrition for the most destitute. As a result of rationing and similar food provision programs, like free school and nursery lunches “nutrition in Kerala is equal or superior to that of other parts of India” (Franke and Chasin 1994). It is certainly true that Kerala suffers from less widespread malnutrition than the rest of India. Between 1988 and 1990, the percentage of children in Kerala who suffered from severe undernourishment was only 1.6% or 2.4% for boy and girls respectively, compared to the all-India rate of 9% (Parayil 2000). However, it is likely that this is not actually the result of a significantly increased per capita caloric intake (Indians averaged about 2100 calories per day in the early 80s, while estimates for Kerla ranged from 1600-2300), but rather from a mode of distribution which assures even the most indigent of their basic requirements, as well as from better access to primary healthcare centers, which can treat the effects of improper nutrition if necessary. The public food distribution system in Kerala is widely considered the most effective in the state, and 90% of individuals hold ration cards (Ramachandran 2000). However, it is important to note that these food reforms were not simply handed down from the administration, rather “it was primarily the outcome of decades of struggle by workers and tenant farmers to control the landlords and other elite forces exploiting them” (Franke and Chasin 1994). In this way, Kerala’s history of mass movements plays out on even the smallest scale, the individual bodies of its citizens.The mobilization of Kerala’s citizens does not just change policy; it affects their health on the level of both a single individual and the entire population. The ability to effectively represent their own needs, enabled by a critical education, allowed the people of Kerala to pass redistributive reforms, in particular regarding land, food, and education, which in turn have a direct beneficial effect on their health as measured by any number of indicators. There are problems with this radical approach. One of the most common critiques is that the sort of social safety net in place in Kerala creates a welfare state, where people have no real motivation to work. And at first glance, troubling economic statistics like Kerala’s 25% unemployment rate seem to support this view. However, unemployment is a much deeper historical problem in Kerala; it existed long before the communist ministries. Additionally the unemployment crisis in Kerala is most severe in agriculture, where male laborers averaged only 147 working days per year in 1983-84 (Franke and Chasin 1994). Both these factors ought to be taken into account when looking for the cause of Kerala’s unemployment.Because unemployment is a historic trend in Kerala, its cause must also be historic. The most likely candidate is Kerala’s extremely high population density; at 786 people per square kilometer, it is nearly three times that of the rest of India (Parayil 2000). This explains both the longstanding nature of Kerala’s underemployment and the fact that there are simply too many people to work the land every day. As more underlying causes of unemployment are fleshed out, the welfare state argument loses traction, and it becomes clear that the effect of the redistributive reforms in Kerala is not to discourage work, but to create a backup system for those who cannot find it. These reforms were designed and militantly put in place by the advocacy of the least advantaged members of society, in order to protect their most basic needs, like land and food. The citizens in question are both unreservedly motivated and extremely effective because of their high level of education, and their advocacy leads to a state with a standard of living much more advanced than its economic growth metrics suggest is possible.Kerala in a Broader ContextKerala is a large state, but it is still only a tiny fraction of a much larger developing world. However, its role as an alternative model of development makes Kerala of huge importance in the question of whether a similarly radical set of reforms would have the same effect in other places. The argument put forth in Franke and Chasin’s book is that the success of Kerala was locally defined, enabled by the specific conditions of Kerala’s ecology, history, and people’s movements (1994). However, to say that the specificity of the conditions which preceded Kerala’s transformation preclude similar reforms in other regions is disingenuous. Though Kerala’s evenly dispersed resources (and therefore evenly dispersed population) may have made it easier to develop a comprehensive education system, the prevalence of similarly literate societies in regions as dissimilar as Azerbaijan, Cuba, and Equatorial Guinea makes shows that this primary goal of universal education can be accomplished in diverse settings if prioritized (UN Statistics Division 2011). From this understanding, the emphasis placed on the specific people and history of Kerala can be reexamined as just part of the impact of early educational reforms. Through education, the citizens of Kerala were able to bring about for themselves the reforms they needed most, and though there are certainly extraordinary challenges associated with instituting full literacy to the point of critical consciousness, they are not categorically prohibitive in the rest of the developing world. Nor are the beneficial effects of early education only evident in that particular state – a 1991 study with compared the differences in development between four Scandinavian countries and four comparably-sized Latin American ones identified the two critical components of the relative advancement of the Scandinavian countries as education and early land reform, a trend supported centuries later and half a world away in Kerala (Thorp 1993). Kerala, though a current and compelling model, is not the only evidence that a policy of radical reform and redistribution, informed by the advocacy of the people most affected, produces significantly better health and development outcomes than pursuing a never-ending policy of economic growth.Why then, does the trope of economic growth as the premiere mode for human development persist? Despite being outmoded and possibly even counterproductive, that particular holdover from colonial ideology retains its power in the same way that the caste system endured for so long – by being a traditional authority, institutionalized over centuries. Throughout the colonial ages, it was simply the goal to get more, to grow straight through the edges of the map. Over time, this idea of expansion as the only possible method of development solidified and the colonial process which brought it into being became opaque. It existed as its own reality, a law of development. Kerala (and increasingly more and more research on similar phenomena) challenges this traditional understanding that development means economic growth because this growth comes at the expense of increased inequality and often does nothing to advance the interests of the vast majority of society. It shows that traditional models of growth fail to take into account the potential of a consciously educated and mobilized population, that such populations can and have instituted radical reforms policies through mass advocacy which end up drastically raising the quality of life for all citizens.The problem which Kerala highlights in global health, is the persistence of traditional modes of examining development, of building more more instead of accomplishing more with less. The solution is then being willing to use seemingly radical techniques and reforms to accomplish development on a human scale, as opposed to on the economic scale it is measured on now. Put simply, it is the difference between raising life expectancy and raising GNP. However, the implementation of these reforms cannot be put equally simply, for the fundamental reason that the radical changes in society have to come from the advocacy of the population which they purport to affect. As such, education, not just for routine literacy, but for critical consciousness, is a vital first step. It teaches citizens to integrate meaningfully with the world around them, to define it rather than just adapt to it (Freire 2008). The definitions of how to achieve human health and developmental success which countries struggling to survive in the Darwinian world of global economic development could come to are unknown, but Kerala shows that critically examining one’s context and making, by mass protest if necessary, the appropriate adjustments leads to a radically more healthy, egalitarian, and meaningfully informed society.ReferencesBardhan, Pranab. 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Print.Freund, Peter. “Accomplishing More with Less.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 20.2 (2009): 126-29. Print.Heller, P. “Moving the State: The Politics of Democratic Decentralization in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre.” Politics & Society 29.1 (2001): 131-63.Jeffrey, Robin. Politics, Women, and Well-being: How Kerala Became “a Model” New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.Merton, Robert K. “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.” American Sociologial Review 1 (1936): 894-904.Minkler, Meredith. Community Organizing and Community Building for Health. New Brunswick [u.a.: Rutgers Univ., 1997. Print.Parayil, Govindan, ed. Kerala: the Development Experience. London: Zed, 2000. Print.Radhakrishnan, P. ,. Peasant Struggles, Land Reforms, and Social Change: Malabar, 1836-1982. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1989. Print.Thorp, Rosenary. “Review of Magnus Blomstrom and Patricio Meller, Eds, Diverging Paths: Comparing a Century of Scandinavian and Latin American Economic Development.” In Economic Journal 103 (1993): 420.United Nations Statistics Division. (2011). Retrieved from http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind/literacy.htmWeber, Max. On Bureaucracy. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. 1946 New York: Oxford University Press.Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Ed. Talcott Parsons. London: Free of Glencoe, 1964. Print.

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