India is going through another great Renaissance, as ordained by a gentleman whose own educational qualifications are shrouded in doubt and about which RTI questions will never be answered. All our learnings of the past 2,000 years have to be discarded and a new learning, as enshrined in the NEP (New Education Policy) and prescribed by the UGC, CBSE and NCERT will re-enlighten this land.
I must confess that, having already forgotten most of what I had learned in the last 70 years (which wasn't much to begin with), I am excited at the prospect of being educated again. And I have been making some progress, and as evidence of that, would like to share some of these nuggets with my long suffering readers.
Remember that phrase 'carrying coal to Newcastle' coined by John Graunt in 1661? It denoted a meaningless action, to take something to a place where it's not needed because there's plenty of the stuff already there. Well, in amrit kal, that phrase has been replaced by 'carrying coal to Godda'.
Godda is the place in Jharkhand where Mr Adani has set up a 1600 MW thermal power station which exports all its power to Bangladesh (or used to, until Hasina was given a one-way ticket to exile). Now, Jharkhand has the largest coal reserves in the world, so you would expect that the millions of tonnes of coal required for this power station would be mined in Jharkhand itself, right? Wrong.
Here is where the gaps in your education become visible — for Adani does not mine the local coal, instead, he imports it from 6,000 km away, from his Carmichael mines in Australia! And still manages to sell the power at four times the usual price to Bangladesh, thanks to getting his plant declared an SEZ by amending the rules, liberal loans from banks,........