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A moral act must be our own act; must spring from our own will. If we act mechanically, there is no moral content in our act. Such action would be moral, if we think it proper to act like a machine and do so. For, in doing so, we use our discrimination. We should bear in mind the distinction between acting mechanically and acting intentionally. It may be moral of a king to pardon a culprit. But the messenger carrying out the order of pardon plays only a mechanical part in the king's moral act. But if the messenger were to carry out the king's order considering it to be his duty, his action would be a moral one. How can a man understand morality who does not use his own intelligence and power of thought, but lets himself be swept along like a log of wood by a current? Sometimes a man defies convention and acts on his own with a view to absolute good.

Education, without a doubt, has an important functional, instrumental and utilitarian dimension. This is revealed when one asks questions such as 'what is the purpose of education ?'. The answers, too often, are 'to acquire qualifications for employment/upward mobility', 'wider/higher (in terms of income) opportunities', and 'to meet the needs for trained human power in diverse fields for national development'. But in its deepest sense education is not instrumentalist. That is to say, it is not to be justified, outside of itself because it leads to the acquisition of formal skills or of certain desired psychological – social attributes. It must be respected in itself. Education is thus not a commodity to be acquired or possessed and then used, but a process of inestimable importance to individuals and society, although it can and does have enormous use-value. Education then, is a process of expansion and conversion, not in the sense of converting or turning students into doctors or engineers, but the widening and turning out of the mind — the creation, sustenance and development of self-critical awareness and independence of thought. It is an inner process of moral – intellectual development.

For fourteen and a half months I lived in my little cell or room in the Dehradun jail, and I began to feel as if I was almost a part of it. I was familiar with every bit of it, I knew every mark and dent on the whitewashed walls and on the uneven floor and the ceiling with its moth-eaten rafters. In the little yard outside I greeted little tufts of grass and odd bits of stone as old friends. I was not alone in my cell, for several colonies of wasp and hornets lived there, and many lizards found a home behind the rafters, emerging in the evenings in search of prey.

The law in many parts of the world increasingly restricts the discharge of agricultural slurry into watercourses. The simplest and often the most economically sound practice returns the material to the land as semisolid manure or as sprayed slurry. This dilutes its concentration in the environment to what might have occurred in a more primitive and sustainable type of agriculture and converts pollutant into fertilizer. Soil microorganisms decompose the organic components of sewage and slurry and most of the mineral nutrients become available to be absorbed again by the vegetation.

The excess input of nutrients, both nitrogen and phosphorus – based, from agricultural runoff (and human sewage) has caused many ‘healthy’ oligotrophic lakes (low nutrient concentrations, low plant productivity with abundant water weeds, and clear water) to change to eutrophic condition where high nutrient inputs lead to high phytoplankton productivity (sometimes dominated by bloom-forming toxic species). This makes the water turbid, eliminates large plants and, in the worst situations, leads to anoxia and fish kills; so called cultural eutrophication. Thus, important ecosystem services are lost, including the provisioning service of wild-caught fish and the cultural services associated with recreation.

The process of cultural eutrophication of lakes has been understood for some time. But only recently did scientists notice huge ‘dead zones’ in the oceans near river outlets, particularly those draining large catchment areas such as the Mississippi in North America and the Yangtze in China. The nutrient-enriched water flows through streams, rivers and lakes, and eventually to the estuary and ocean where the ecological impact may be huge, killing virtually all invertebrates and fish in areas up to 70,000 km² in extent. More than 150 sea areas worldwide are now regularly starved of oxygen as a result of decomposition of algal blooms, fuelled particularly by nitrogen from agricultural runoff of fertilizers and sewage from large cities. Oceanic dead zones are typically associated with industrialized nations and usually lie off countries that subsidize their agriculture, encouraging farmers to increase productivity and use more fertilizer.

Net profits are only 2·2% of their total assets for central public sector undertakings, lower than for the private corporate sector. While the public sector or the State-led entrepreneurship played an important role in triggering India’s industrialization, our evolving development needs, comparatively less-than-satisfactory performance of the public sector enterprises, the maturing of our private sector, a much larger social base now available for expanding entrepreneurship and the growing institutional capabilities to enforce competition policies would suggest that the time has come to review the role of public sector.

What should the portfolio composition of the government be? It should not remain static all times. The airline industry works well as a purely private affair. At the opposite end, rural roads, whose sparse traffic makes tolling unviable, have to be on the balance-sheet of the State. If the government did not own rural roads, they would not exist. Similarly, public health capital in our towns and cities will need to come from the public sector. Equally, preservation and improvement of forest cover will have to be a new priority for the public sector assets.

Take the example of steel. With near-zero tariffs, India is a globally competitive market for the metal. Indian firms export steel into the global market, which demonstrates there is no gap in technology. Indian companies are buying up global steel companies, which shows there is no gap in capital availability. Under these conditions, private ownership works best.

Private ownership is clearly desirable in regulated industries, ranging from finance to infrastructure, where a government agency performs the function of regulation and multiple competing firms are located in the private sector. Here, the simple and clean solution — government as the umpire and the private sector as the players is what works best. In many of these industries, we have a legacy of government ownership, where productivity tends to be lower, fear of bankruptcy is absent, and the risk of asking for money from the tax payer is ever present. There is also the conflict of interest between government as an owner and as the regulator. The formulation and implementation of competition policy will be more vigorous and fair if government companies are out of action.

In front of us was walking a bare-headed old man in tattered clothes. He was driving his beasts. They were all laden with heavy loads of clay from the hills and looked tired. The man carried a long whip which perhaps he himself had made. As he walked down the road he stopped now and then to eat the wild berries that grew on bushes along the uneven road. When he threw away the seeds, the bold birds would fly to peck at them. Sometimes a stray dog watched the procession philosophically and then began to bark. When this happened, my two little sons would stand still holding my hands firmly. A dog can sometimes be dangerous indeed.

The poverty line is quite unsatisfactory when it comes to grasping the extent of poverty in India. It is not only because of its extremely narrow definition of ‘who is poor’ and the debatable methodology used to count the poor, but also because of a more fundamental assumption underlying it. It exclusively relies on the notion of poverty as insufficient income or insufficient purchasing power. One can better categorize it by calling it income poverty. If poverty is ultimately about deprivations affecting human well-being, then income poverty is only one aspect of it. Poverty of a life, in our view, lies not merely in the impoverished state in which the person actually lives, but also in the lack of real opportunity given by social constraints as well as personal circumstances—to choose other types of living. Even the relevance of low incomes, meagre possessions, and other aspects of what are standardly seen as economic poverty relate ultimately to their role in curtailing capabilities, i.e., their role in severely restricting the choices people have to lead variable and valued lives.