Hmmm... My arguement remains the same... May be you don't know much about India or have seen or known enough about it - reson why you make such sweeping statements like Look where it has gotten India. They have high technology and good schools in the areas where they are willing to interact with the world (computing, engineering) but still have trouble keeping the lights on and the trains running. - Or probably it is a question of culture and worldview:-)
I remember my economy eacher telling us why coffee was badly seen as a morning drink in china. Because if only 1/2 of your population takes one cup coffee in the day, it amounts to 50 tons a day in purely imports...
And this would be a bad thing? Isolated economies do not perform well, it is only when you open up to the world market that you can really take off. Not having many imports may look good for your economy on paper, but in reality it is a major obstacle to development. It means your population either has to go without or has to reinvent the wheel. This video codec is an example of the former (what if these guys were instead working on something new that they could sell to the world), and coffee is the second (a nation that is forced to do without is a poor nation).
Yes that would be a bad thing - specially for some country like India - Your arguement is the usual trickle down philosophy... A country like India with a huge population (and fairly independent views on the world events) cannot usually afford to attach itself too tightly to other economies. This has proved itself to be an excellent strategy time and again in the case of India - specially during times of repeated long trade sanctions against it.
Simple. Indian eletions are conducted in stages (the whole country will not go to polls on the same day). Often elections are spread across several weeks.Overall results are announced when everything is complete (so that results don't influence votting pattern in places where election is yet to take place).
If the government can't teach the masses, and then they charge a ridiculous amount of money to get a ID card for an election, they're essentially telling the poorer (and likely less intelligent people) that they can't vote.
You are ignorant about the system - individual voters won't have to pay anything from their pockets - I got my Indian Voter's ID card sometime back - I know this (you can always argue that ultimately this comes from Taxes - but then those from the low income group will be outside the Tax system anyway)
Parent posting is considered "Insightful" - how odd ! Tells a lot about the quality of modeation.
Get out of your small world, with preconceived ideas - India is a higly complex society - if you are from some country like US and never directly experienced or exposed to the Indian socity you will possibly NEVER know how complex things are there (I have lived in India, US and other countries for long periods of time to know this).
* Earlier, results for each voting center would be individually known. This would lead to goons beating up people of those villages that voted against them. AFAIK this doesn't happen in the current system because the EVMs are centrally processed and only constituency-wise results are known.
Hmmm... Are you still in India ?:-) These procedural defects of the conventional voting system were rectified quite sometime back. At lesat for the pat 20 years or so - they mix votes from a large number of polling booths first before they even start counting, so that no one will be able to guess and punish people from a particular booth or village for voting againgst some group.
India's conventional voting system is humongous and highly efficient (considering how huge the whole operation is) - I would say that those who conducted the last US elections should be sent to India for re-education:-)
One more clarification - these are individual voting machines - there is no computer network (at least right now) etc. which reduces that chance of hacking .
A lot of companies/traders in US are interested only in the local US market - just because they have a website accessible to the outside (outside US) world doesn't mean that those ground rules have changed. Internet will not be of much help for sending goods outsided USA, coping with strange trade/customs laws of far away lands (far away from USA), strange restrictive trade practices and embargos by US government,... I know this from my experience in talking to traders dealing in Amateur Radio equipment. A lot of them don't consider the risks involved in exporting stuff to outside US, worth taking.
1. India does not have the technology to even send a 2-tonne satellite into geo-stationary orbit. Obviously you have not been following the progress of Indian Space programme Compare the first Indian satellite launches (SLV...) with the current series (GSLV...)
2. India does not have the money that countries such as US, Japan, China or ESA has to spend on such a mission. True - in part. Again go through the Indian SPace and Aeronautical programmes - product maturity is achived with much smaller number of test launches (compared to US, or ESA nations - just compare how long the programmes have been existence and at what level they started), R&D costs are much less in India (same results with much less money)
3 Indian high-tech programmes tend to heavily depend on off-the-shelf components procured from abroad. The US can easily cut the flow anytime they wish. Misleading - any Technology research programme anywhere (US, Europe, China,...) depends on a lot of off the shelf components. No one can sustain a space program just by using them alone (If that was the case it would have been possible for ANY country to have the level of technological competence that India has.) India had highly successful tech programmes when US tech embargo was in full blast - I dont think it can get any worse - they always find a workaround...
4. Indian high-tech programmes tend to take a long time to materialise. (Look at the LCA programme, it took over two decades to come to a flying prototype level, and that too using a US engine). Not true always - through LCA they are trying to reestablish basic homegrown aeronautical design, industry infrastructure (from design to production) which was lost when some of the successful earlier projects (like HF24...) were ababdoned... It is just not about making a fighter plane like LCA alone.
5. As far as the military stuff (Agni whatever) spin-offs from these projects,...
I would say that there is much less likelyhood of a major war breaking out due to the "balance of terror" between (China-Pakistan-India).
Tracing human migratin through gene/DNA studies of widely separated human populations has revealed a lot of new information in recent years. This discovery confirms a lot that is already known. There is an interesting (and very readable) book called Mapping Human History. Recommended to anyone interested in human history, evolution,... and you will know how wrong all those race supremist theories, racial conflicts,... are.
Try to get one of those old 600dpi HP laserprinters like the HP LaserJet 4. These are often available used for $70 or less (often with 12000 or less total pages printed in the lifespan). These printers are ultra reliable. Toner cartridges are inexpensive (Good refilled ones can be bought for $20). These printers should work with almost any OS.
They always find some other cause to blame for the loss of fish populations - in Japan, they blame it on whale protection laws; in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they blamed it on environmental policies. In no case did they accept overfishing as responsible, until it was too late.
Not always. Probably those trends are a reflection of the societies themselves. In this specific case huge commercial fishing industries influncing the decision making of local govermnents. (on the same note - may be slightly off-topic - can anyone in US imagine even the remote possibility of anyone preventing the local industrial groups from shifting and outsourcing operations to outside USA ? No !)
I come from a state in India where the local fishermen campaigned and successfully prevented (by law) commercial overfishing for a number of months every year. This has successfully preventted the local fishing communities from collapsing due to commercial overfishing. (But ours may not be a typical society - we have around the same Phisical Quality of Life Index as USA with around 1/70th of the income !)
Hmmm... This perhaps leads us to the ooold problem - what is the driving force/reason behind historical events ?
The state of the development of society/ideas/sciences/technology/philosophy/art/... at that point or some individual who is LABELLED as proponent of an idea/philosophy/movement/... ? In most of the cases (if you study history/inventions/...) one will see the same/similar idea/technology/literary work/... being produced by totally unrelated individuals/societies/...around the same period of time (or sometimes even widely separated periods of time), even though the popular culture has a tendency to LABEL an individual/nation/society/... as the cause/origin of the event/idea/... (that is the reason why you hear statements like, "'insert your favourite bad guy here' did this", "If he was not there it would have been better",... )
This will be much more clear (although often at a smaller scale) if one monitors the scientific/research community (in almost any field) and monitor the emergence of new ideas and concepts.
Ofcourse there are exceptions, there are always exceptions for anything related to animals/humans/societies...
The essay takes rather simplistic approach I think.
Let's assume that we are going to have working Psychohistory at least at a basic level (as a true Science) using the existing analytical tools (mathematics, logic,...). Compare the situation with some of the existing problems that we are trying to solve.
For example: Weather modelling - perhaps this is THE problem that we are trying to solve right now which can be at least compared to Psychohistory - in terms of complexity. In weather models we have huge amouts of data (now - mostly reliable, long term,...) - usually they involve a huge number of (compared to modellling of other problems in Physics) variables. Some of the most powerful computers/clusters are used for research on weather modelling problems.
Compare this with Psychohistory - a much more complex problem, we don't have any reliable data (In fact probably we don't know what kind of data will be relevant and we don't know how to collect them in a scientific way), perhaps we don't have a reliable/acceptable definition of the problem itself yet:-)
Most of the US manufacturing base is already lost to China and various other countries (try any shopping mall in US - it will be really hard to find anything manufactured in US) - Reason ? - it is much less expensive to do those operations outside US.
Something similar is happening now in the case of tech workers. Even though the tech jobmarket in US is really bad now - in India and other countries to which US tech companies are shifting their work/operations the IT job market is thriving right now. In fact I know a number of permanent residents (US) of Indian origin accepting more attractive positions in India in recently.
H1B workers are not really an issue right now (very few are coming to US as H1B tech workers) - the main loss of US tech jobs is due to US companies moving their operations offshore to other countries. Since no one (in US) was able to prevent (or cared to prevent) loss of manufacturing industries to other countries, it looks highly unlikely that the present tech industry trend will also be reversed - sad.
Indian advances in space technology is even more remarkable since (apart from occasional reverse engineering...) it is mostly homegrown (with some help from USSR/Russia)- unlike US space efforts after WWII which was mostly guided by scientists/technologists/material "captured" from WWII Germany. I had/worked on or had friends who worked on several of these types of projects (in India - advanced materials, electronics, aerospace,...). Is it not ironic that US ("democracy" ?) has always tried to slowdown/destroy (often due to commercial interests) research/technology efforts in India ("democracy" ?) by putting export/other restrictions on several crucial technologies (often during stages of these projects when these techologies were needed most) - where as USSR/Russia ("dictatorship/democracy" ?) often tried to help India.
It's not Malayalam Hmmm... Malayalam contains a huge number of words from Sanskrit (or words derived from Sanskrit - also from a lot of other langages Arabic, English,...). In fact it is very easy to understand spoken Sanskrit if one can understand Malayalam. The word as used in the Free Software group petition is Malayalam (the petition was written by Malayalies - or people who speak Malyalam:-)
Cellphones are probably not the best solution for some place lke India (In addition to this something with the capabilities of Simputer will be way too costly) - the infrastructure costs will be too high. Simputer will be mainly for community ownership in rural India I guess (In india you can find even Community owned TVs, Radios where people from a village gather to watch / listen. Probably this will be difficult to imagine in a society like US). Typical uses will be accounting, education,... and will probably be rented/lended out to individuals from some place like a vlillage library.
BTW the statement most Indians (not all but most) are Hindu is almost like saying "most people in Europe are Europeans" ! India is a VERY complex cultural mosaic.
a 1.1MW/150kW wave energey plant ...
on
Tidal Power a Reality
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Though not Tidal Energy. There is a (1990 - used to be ?) a working 1.1MW/150kW oscillating water column power plant using Wave Energy near my home town in India. There seems to be some details here. It was a research project done by IIT, Madras. A lot of details, pictures etc. can be found here.
The whole thing about "people can lean Linux only if you teach them because the bandwidth is so poor..." etc. etc. is all a bunch of crap. The IITs (in this case IIT Kanpur) never had great badwidth (at least untill a few years ago). See details of ERNET connection setup at IITK. That was more pathetic than any dialup connection available in most of the places in India now. I remember downloading all my stuff through FTPmail around 1994. The regular connection used to be so poor that it was often virtually unusable. Still may of us had working linux systems with regular updates through this poor connection.
India has an advanced tech R&D and maufacturing infrastructure (Looks like you have seen only indian software personall working...) limited only by the amout of funding availabe for such activities. I don't see any scientific / tech activity in India, which can be killed by US or anyone outside by putting restrictions (of course unless Indians themselves choose to do so - which I doubt.). This has origins in the early days of Indian republic, when they invested heavily on establishing a scientific/tech research infrastructure, and supporting industries (mostly government controlled). In recent years a lot of similar stuff has come in the private sector also. These industries reange from chip maufacturing / design to biotech,aerospace, pharmaceutical / drug-design,...
If I remember correctly - in the AutoShow GM was projecting this as some kind of "designer car" line where the end user can change the style and featues of the car by changing the top plugin part (passenger compartment etc) all by him/her self. Much like the changing of face plates of watches, PDAs, cellphones, etc with a different design. Same basic framework can be used to create an SUV/an office car/ other... just by changing the "designer top"...
Hmmm... Perhaps u should go through history again... India was never under a central authority (as it is now). Always portions of Indian subcontinet was ruled by independent kingdoms (this was the case during British, Asoka, Aurengazeb,... periods ) - specially large parts of south and north-east/east... If the "definition of India" excludes these portions it is fine:-)
Ture, FORTRAN has features suitable for use by scientific/engineering/mathematics community. There is a HUGE base of proven/reliable libraries, modules, packages,...available as FORTRAN source (often free...) Due to these often there is no reason at all for coding in something othern than FORTRAN for numerical/mathematical/engineering computation.
There are examples of using FORTRAN for non-scientific use also.I have heard that the ticket reservation program used by Indian Railways (they have reservation terminals distributed all over india) was implenented using FORTRAN (may be during 1970s/early 80s) because it was the fastest option available at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... My arguement remains the same ... May be you don't know much about India or have seen or known enough about it - reson why you make such sweeping statements like Look where it has gotten India. They have high technology and good schools in the areas where they are willing to interact with the world (computing, engineering) but still have trouble keeping the lights on and the trains running. - Or probably it is a question of culture and worldview :-)
I remember my economy eacher telling us why coffee was badly seen as a morning drink in china. Because if only 1/2 of your population takes one cup coffee in the day, it amounts to 50 tons a day in purely imports...
... A country like India with a huge population (and fairly independent views on the world events) cannot usually afford to attach itself too tightly to other economies. This has proved itself to be an excellent strategy time and again in the case of India - specially during times of repeated long trade sanctions against it.
And this would be a bad thing? Isolated economies do not perform well, it is only when you open up to the world market that you can really take off. Not having many imports may look good for your economy on paper, but in reality it is a major obstacle to development. It means your population either has to go without or has to reinvent the wheel. This video codec is an example of the former (what if these guys were instead working on something new that they could sell to the world), and coffee is the second (a nation that is forced to do without is a poor nation).
Yes that would be a bad thing - specially for some country like India - Your arguement is the usual trickle down philosophy
Simple. Indian eletions are conducted in stages (the whole country will not go to polls on the same day). Often elections are spread across several weeks.Overall results are announced when everything is complete (so that results don't influence votting pattern in places where election is yet to take place).
If the government can't teach the masses, and then they charge a ridiculous amount of money to get a ID card for an election, they're essentially telling the poorer (and likely less intelligent people) that they can't vote.
You are ignorant about the system - individual voters won't have to pay anything from their pockets - I got my Indian Voter's ID card sometime back - I know this (you can always argue that ultimately this comes from Taxes - but then those from the low income group will be outside the Tax system anyway)
Parent posting is considered "Insightful" - how odd ! Tells a lot about the quality of modeation.
Get out of your small world, with preconceived ideas - India is a higly complex society - if you are from some country like US and never directly experienced or exposed to the Indian socity you will possibly NEVER know how complex things are there (I have lived in India, US and other countries for long periods of time to know this).
* Earlier, results for each voting center would be individually known. This would lead to goons beating up people of those villages that voted against them. AFAIK this doesn't happen in the current system because the EVMs are centrally processed and only constituency-wise results are known.
... Are you still in India ? :-) These procedural defects of the conventional voting system were rectified quite sometime back. At lesat for the pat 20 years or so - they mix votes from a large number of polling booths first before they even start counting, so that no one will be able to guess and punish people from a particular booth or village for voting againgst some group.
:-)
Hmmm
India's conventional voting system is humongous and highly efficient (considering how huge the whole operation is) - I would say that those who conducted the last US elections should be sent to India for re-education
One more clarification - these are individual voting machines - there is no computer network (at least right now) etc. which reduces that chance of hacking .
A lot of companies/traders in US are interested only in the local US market - just because they have a website accessible to the outside (outside US) world doesn't mean that those ground rules have changed. Internet will not be of much help for sending goods outsided USA, coping with strange trade/customs laws of far away lands (far away from USA), strange restrictive trade practices and embargos by US government, ... I know this from my experience in talking to traders dealing in Amateur Radio equipment. A lot of them don't consider the risks involved in exporting stuff to outside US, worth taking.
1. India does not have the technology to even send a 2-tonne satellite into geo-stationary orbit. ...) with the current series (GSLV ...)
...) depends on a lot of off the shelf components. No one can sustain a space program just by using them alone (If that was the case it would have been possible for ANY country to have the level of technological competence that India has.) India had highly successful tech programmes when US tech embargo was in full blast - I dont think it can get any worse - they always find a workaround ...
...) were ababdoned ... It is just not about making a fighter plane like LCA alone.
...
Obviously you have not been following the progress of Indian Space programme Compare the first Indian satellite launches (SLV
2. India does not have the money that countries such as US, Japan, China or ESA has to spend on such a mission.
True - in part. Again go through the Indian SPace and Aeronautical programmes - product maturity is achived with much smaller number of test launches (compared to US, or ESA nations - just compare how long the programmes have been existence and at what level they started), R&D costs are much less in India (same results with much less money)
3 Indian high-tech programmes tend to heavily depend on off-the-shelf components procured from abroad. The US can easily cut the flow anytime they wish.
Misleading - any Technology research programme anywhere (US, Europe, China,
4. Indian high-tech programmes tend to take a long time to materialise. (Look at the LCA programme, it took over two decades to come to a flying prototype level, and that too using a US engine).
Not true always - through LCA they are trying to reestablish basic homegrown aeronautical design, industry infrastructure (from design to production) which was lost when some of the successful earlier projects (like HF24
5. As far as the military stuff (Agni whatever) spin-offs from these projects,
I would say that there is much less likelyhood of a major war breaking out due to the "balance of terror" between (China-Pakistan-India).
Tracing human migratin through gene/DNA studies of widely separated human populations has revealed a lot of new information in recent years. This discovery confirms a lot that is already known. There is an interesting (and very readable) book called Mapping Human History. Recommended to anyone interested in human history, evolution, ... and you will know how wrong all those race supremist theories, racial conflicts, ... are.
How about a princess with glass slippers ?
Try to get one of those old 600dpi HP laserprinters like the HP LaserJet 4. These are often available used for $70 or less (often with 12000 or less total pages printed in the lifespan). These printers are ultra reliable. Toner cartridges are inexpensive (Good refilled ones can be bought for $20). These printers should work with almost any OS.
They always find some other cause to blame for the loss of fish populations - in Japan, they blame it on whale protection laws; in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they blamed it on environmental policies. In no case did they accept overfishing as responsible, until it was too late.
Not always. Probably those trends are a reflection of the societies themselves. In this specific case huge commercial fishing industries influncing the decision making of local govermnents. (on the same note - may be slightly off-topic - can anyone in US imagine even the remote possibility of anyone preventing the local industrial groups from shifting and outsourcing operations to outside USA ? No !)
I come from a state in India where the local fishermen campaigned and successfully prevented (by law) commercial overfishing for a number of months every year. This has successfully preventted the local fishing communities from collapsing due to commercial overfishing. (But ours may not be a typical society - we have around the same Phisical Quality of Life Index as USA with around 1/70th of the income !)
Hmmm... This perhaps leads us to the ooold problem - what is the driving force/reason behind historical events ?
. .. at that point or some individual who is LABELLED as proponent of an idea/philosophy/movement/ ... ? In most of the cases (if you study history/inventions/ ...) one will see the same/similar idea/technology/literary work/... being produced by totally unrelated individuals/societies/...around the same period of time (or sometimes even widely separated periods of time), even though the popular culture has a tendency to LABEL an individual/nation/society/... as the cause/origin of the event/idea/... (that is the reason why you hear statements like, "'insert your favourite bad guy here' did this", "If he was not there it would have been better", ... )
The state of the development of society/ideas/sciences/technology/philosophy/art/
This will be much more clear (although often at a smaller scale) if one monitors the scientific/research community (in almost any field) and monitor the emergence of new ideas and concepts.
Ofcourse there are exceptions, there are always exceptions for anything related to animals/humans/societies...
The essay takes rather simplistic approach I think.
...). Compare the situation with some of the existing problems that we are trying to solve.
...) - usually they involve a huge number of (compared to modellling of other problems in Physics) variables. Some of the most powerful computers/clusters are used for research on weather modelling problems.
:-)
Let's assume that we are going to have working Psychohistory at least at a basic level (as a true Science) using the existing analytical tools (mathematics, logic,
For example: Weather modelling - perhaps this is THE problem that we are trying to solve right now which can be at least compared to Psychohistory - in terms of complexity. In weather models we have huge amouts of data (now - mostly reliable, long term,
Compare this with Psychohistory - a much more complex problem, we don't have any reliable data (In fact probably we don't know what kind of data will be relevant and we don't know how to collect them in a scientific way), perhaps we don't have a reliable/acceptable definition of the problem itself yet
Most of the US manufacturing base is already lost to China and various other countries (try any shopping mall in US - it will be really hard to find anything manufactured in US) - Reason ? - it is much less expensive to do those operations outside US.
Something similar is happening now in the case of tech workers. Even though the tech jobmarket in US is really bad now - in India and other countries to which US tech companies are shifting their work/operations the IT job market is thriving right now. In fact I know a number of permanent residents (US) of Indian origin accepting more attractive positions in India in recently.
H1B workers are not really an issue right now (very few are coming to US as H1B tech workers) - the main loss of US tech jobs is due to US companies moving their operations offshore to other countries. Since no one (in US) was able to prevent (or cared to prevent) loss of manufacturing industries to other countries, it looks highly unlikely that the present tech industry trend will also be reversed - sad.
Indian advances in space technology is even more remarkable since (apart from occasional reverse engineering ...) it is mostly homegrown (with some help from USSR/Russia)- unlike US space efforts after WWII which was mostly guided by scientists/technologists/material "captured" from WWII Germany. I had/worked on or had friends who worked on several of these types of projects (in India - advanced materials, electronics, aerospace, ...). Is it not ironic that US ("democracy" ?) has always tried to slowdown/destroy (often due to commercial interests) research/technology efforts in India ("democracy" ?) by putting export/other restrictions on several crucial technologies (often during stages of these projects when these techologies were needed most) - where as USSR/Russia ("dictatorship/democracy" ?) often tried to help India.
It's not Malayalam ... Malayalam contains a huge number of words from Sanskrit (or words derived from Sanskrit - also from a lot of other langages Arabic, English, ...). In fact it is very easy to understand spoken Sanskrit if one can understand Malayalam. The word as used in the Free Software group petition is Malayalam (the petition was written by Malayalies - or people who speak Malyalam :-)
Hmmm
Cellphones are probably not the best solution for some place lke India (In addition to this something with the capabilities of Simputer will be way too costly) - the infrastructure costs will be too high. Simputer will be mainly for community ownership in rural India I guess (In india you can find even Community owned TVs, Radios where people from a village gather to watch / listen. Probably this will be difficult to imagine in a society like US). Typical uses will be accounting, education, ... and will probably be rented/lended out to individuals from some place like a vlillage library.
BTW the statement most Indians (not all but most) are Hindu is almost like saying "most people in Europe are Europeans" ! India is a VERY complex cultural mosaic.
Though not Tidal Energy. There is a (1990 - used to be ?) a working 1.1MW/150kW oscillating water column power plant using Wave Energy near my home town in India. There seems to be some details here. It was a research project done by IIT, Madras. A lot of details, pictures etc. can be found here.
Looks similar to the Grid Computing project from India, announced sometime back ...
The whole thing about "people can lean Linux only if you teach them because the bandwidth is so poor ..." etc. etc. is all a bunch of crap. The IITs (in this case IIT Kanpur) never had great badwidth (at least untill a few years ago). See details of ERNET connection setup at IITK. That was more pathetic than any dialup connection available in most of the places in India now. I remember downloading all my stuff through FTPmail around 1994. The regular connection used to be so poor that it was often virtually unusable. Still may of us had working linux systems with regular updates through this poor connection.
"Traditional Western scientific endeavors ..." ?
...) limited only by the amout of funding availabe for such activities. I don't see any scientific / tech activity in India, which can be killed by US or anyone outside by putting restrictions (of course unless Indians themselves choose to do so - which I doubt.). This has origins in the early days of Indian republic, when they invested heavily on establishing a scientific/tech research infrastructure, and supporting industries (mostly government controlled). In recent years a lot of similar stuff has come in the private sector also. These industries reange from chip maufacturing / design to biotech,aerospace, pharmaceutical / drug-design, ...
You are completely out of touch with reality.
India has an advanced tech R&D and maufacturing infrastructure (Looks like you have seen only indian software personall working
If I remember correctly - in the AutoShow GM was projecting this as some kind of "designer car" line where the end user can change the style and featues of the car by changing the top plugin part (passenger compartment etc) all by him/her self. Much like the changing of face plates of watches, PDAs, cellphones, etc with a different design. Same basic framework can be used to create an SUV/an office car/ other ... just by changing the "designer top" ...
Hmmm ... Perhaps u should go through history again ... India was never under a central authority (as it is now). Always portions of Indian subcontinet was ruled by independent kingdoms (this was the case during British, Asoka, Aurengazeb, ... periods ) - specially large parts of south and north-east/east ... If the "definition of India" excludes these portions it is fine :-)
Ture, FORTRAN has features suitable for use by scientific/engineering/mathematics community. There is a HUGE base of proven/reliable libraries, modules, packages, ...available as FORTRAN source (often free ...) Due to these often there is no reason at all for coding in something othern than FORTRAN for numerical/mathematical/engineering computation.
There are examples of using FORTRAN for non-scientific use also.I have heard that the ticket reservation program used by Indian Railways (they have reservation terminals distributed all over india) was implenented using FORTRAN (may be during 1970s/early 80s) because it was the fastest option available at that time.