I had the exact same reaction as d3vmax - and quoting one paywalled article about a failed builder does not make “ghost cities” a thing in India. Yes there are fraudsters who cheat people and never build anything, but India does not have the same kind of ghost cities that China does.
It used to be the largest builder in North India, but they were very close to Akilesh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party.
After BJP won the Uttar Pradesh state elections in 2017, Jaypee (which was already struggling with finances) lost a number of tenders in NOIDA, loans were called, and they along with other similar builders caused IL&FS to become insolvent.
It's very similar to the Ghost Cities you'd see in China in the 2000s
Also, India has Google Street View. Go explore OMAXE New Chandigarh, Sector 128, Kharar, etc.
Lots of half built buildings in middle India.
And this is why PMAY-U is being pushed so hard by all parties in India - it's an easy way to bail out builders without breaking financial laws.
You are very focused on the Noida scene. That's an outlier in the Indian real estate situation right now. Almost everywhere, there is a "shortage" of housing, forget about ghost cities. Also after RERA, a lot has changed. You seem very confident in your analysis but honestly you need to look up more.
The backbenchers are doing a better job than mr Rajan, growth numbers are easy to judge for all.
That's not usually what we mean by "Ghost cities". I just checked wikipedia to be sure, for both "ghost cities" and "under occupied developments in China"[1] which leads with:
Under-occupied developments in China are mostly unoccupied property developments in China, and frequently referred to as "ghost cities" or ghost towns.
Half-built structures aren't comparable to the common understanding of the term "ghost cities".
Jaypee Group's failure is not the same as ghost cities of China. Ghost cities of China were fully built but people refused to move in. India has the opposite problem. Most people want to move in to the projects but the builder defaulted and could not complete the project.
India's half built cities are more of a financial fraud problem rather than people problem.
> I did some quick math, and the 240k acres it says they own comes out to about 378 square miles, which if condensed down to a square would be 20 miles by 20 miles.
To put that in perspective though.. per Wikipedia, all of Manhattan is 22.7 square miles!
Indeed, the entire city of NY is only about 303 sq. miles (land area only), on which resides 8.5 million people.
Another stat I read said the median US plot size is 10861 sq. feet., so Gates owns very nearly 1 million times the square footage of the average property.
Whoa.. talk about disrupting the IIT-prep cottage industry!
Of course, I haven't seen the details of whether it's an effective tool or not, but as a free service that can only improve and scale over time .. should be a gamechanger.
(For those outside India who are not aware of the exam that the academy is targeted at, its for admission to a collection of premier Engineering schools in the country. The exam is taken by over 1 million students annually, with a ~ 1% acceptance rate. There is a huge cottage industry of paid 'tutorial classes' and online programs to help students succeed in the exam.)
I'm not sure "cottage" industry is the right characterisation. It's worth over 2B$ [1], and has existed for over a decade. There are behemoths like Byjus, Kota, FIITJEE, etc. and innumerable informal options.
Byjus is irrelevant in the IIT cottage industry. They are newer, and only online. And no company can convince Indian parents that online is better that 8am-8pm classroom coaching.
I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen the varied abilities of their elementary school teachers makes me think a top-flight online course could do much better than some of the actual people working at their school.
There's no question the best teachers will outperform the best online content. But what are your odds of hiring the best teachers?
> I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen...
No. Trust me. You will regret putting your child(ren) through online education. It sucks. I've tried it partially for 2 years. My friend is doing it now, preparing for JEE.
Preparing for JEE is not easy. I had hopes of getting in after getting a good score in the 1st Mains attempt, but just gave up during covid lockdown.
Social interaction is very very important.
Just trust me. I have nothing else to say. Not really interested in going through my 2 year ordeal in this comment.
Don't put your child in online edu in India. especially not JEE prep
You obviously aren't an average Indian parent (uses HN). So you might choose online for your kid. I'm just warning you.
> Maybe india needs more "premier engineering schools" if the acceptance rate is so low. Harvard and MIT have acceptance rates near 5%.
The acceptance rate is not a "real" metric in the way that, say, the acceleration due to gravity is a quantity you can measure. Harvard and MIT do not have acceptance rates near 5%. They have an admission quota. If fewer people apply, more of those people are accepted. If more people apply, fewer of those people are accepted.
The reason for high acceptance numbers is that people perceive they are not Harvard/MIT material, and act on that knowledge by not applying to Harvard/MIT. Applicants need to clear a threshold well above the 95th percentile; the selectivity number is an illusion.
Definitely agree, for a country with close to 2B population, it is absurd how their education system is divided into "a couple exceptional schools and the rest are really bad"
As an Indian who didn't make it into the IITs (and instead attended a different school)"The rest are really bad" isn't entirely accurate:
- Facilities aren't that much worse than the IITs
- Student quality varies - there's smart/motivated and dumb/demotivated/burnt-out kids - unlike the IITs that has a much higher quality bar - but you have both kinds
- Faculty is the real difference.. since faculty in India (esp Engineering) isn't geared to research the quality can really vary wildly
- Basically - if you're great at what you do - academics isn't a great track in India unlike the US
The real question is how many serious applicant to they get?
I assume there are a lot of kids who simply won't bother applying to MIT and Harvard just because they know they aren't going to be competitive. But it sounds like the IIT entrance exam is almost mandatory (and used by other colleges?).
I’ve heard it come up in an enterprise context, when there was a question about using a Google product - “they have a history of killing products, so let’s pick an alternate if possible”. This was a couple of years back, don’t remember what (could have been Google Glass).
Looking beyond the political angles, interesting analysis of the tax and financial implications of the returns. Not sure if other tax lawyers would interpret the same way, so I’m interested to hear other opinions, especially from those of you who know/understand tax law.
In the relationship graph that Linkedin builds, suggested connections could be based on a lot of things other than shared connections. Just speculating here, but it could be based on shared email address, shared IP address, shared physical address, membership in same groups, linkedin messages by you and wife to other people within 1-2 degree of either of you .. or some combination thereof for higher confidence.
IMO there's a fallacy among some that _any_ course of study from _any_ college is worth taking on debt. While education is getting commoditized - and there are no guarantees even with so-called high ROI careers - there is a real risk of falling into a debt trap if its not considered carefully. At that point, its no use blaming "college education" for choices about which college and what education to get, that didn't work out.
I wonder how much of this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, aided in part by ongoing weaponization of inter-nation trade discussions by targeting firms from China (arrests of executives, bans, etc).
Of course, I've seen it argued that China has been targeting US firms for a decade in various ways - which only makes the events this year yet another escalation of action.
