Politics & the Nation

• Is TRAI right in demanding more money from the telecom operators for the spectrum they are allotted?
• It looks like the country has slipped into a kind of understanding that more money should be made out of the spectrum allocations.  This kind of thinking is very shortsighted and sees spectrum as a scarce resource from which maximum amount of money needs to be made.  This is plain wrong and absurd.  The emphasis should be on optimum utilisation of spectrum.  There is no point in having some bands which are not at all used or less used while having some other bands which are overused / congested.  Electromagnetic waves are just waves.  Period.  Whether you want to send voice through them or some others things like images, video, or plain text is up to you.  The kind of compartmentalisation that has gone into the spectrum allocations appears unnecessary.  Your data should find necessary carrier on the fly.  That's it.  There is no point in anybody being given a dedicated band in which they can send their data.  It is time for a dedicated national spectrum exchange.  
• Do we need another scam -- a much larger one than the current 2G scam -- to propel us into thinking on these lines?

• An excellent topic in face-off column
• It is about the recent SC judgement about members of banned outfits.  Worth a read.  Do so here.

• Some interesting stats about our judicial system
• The total number of judicial officials, including the 31 judges of the Supreme Court, is a little more than 17,600, which means that India has less than 18 judges per million people. This compares badly with 51 judges per million Britons or Canada’s 75 judges per million citizens. Unsurprisingly, all courts have a long queue waiting for judgement: over 30 million cases await a verdict, with 52,000 lawsuits pending in the Supreme Court and over 4 million in the high courts.
• Over 3,000 judicial posts are vacant, mainly in the lower courts.
• The goal of having 50 judges per million Indians, stated nearly nine years ago, still looks distant.