Importance of Financial Education in India.

                           Importance of Financial Education in India.

India has evolved to be a business capital in recent times. The business industry is the largest growing industry in recent time. India has the potential in this sector in the coming future; however, only a few businesses grow despite the potential. Not only about this sector, our youths, adults everybody find it difficult to manage their money. The real question is why it is so?
Half of the population in India is still illiterate, however,  much more are financially uneducated. To understand this let us understand what financial education is all about. Financial literacy is all about managing our expenses with proper planning and investing in sources so that we can get maximum profit with minimum risks. However, it deals with a much wider concept.
The Indian education system may be good, but it lacks in teaching students the importance of money management skills. Even at home, this topic is quite necleted. People think that children should not be discussed with money matters, however, it is totally wrong. The world is changing and so should we. Money management skill is a necessary skill in today's life and must to thought to each of us, not only to the students pursuing this subject. At least at the basic level so that we can take our small decisions effectively.
Children should be taught about the importance of financial independence and money management so that they can be benefitted from it. For example, many people simply invest their salary for their desires despite making a note on other important expenditures. Hence they find themselves in trouble, on the other hand, if a person knows the importance of this, he/she will surely make a list of their necessities and then invest in their desire. This is what we lag, we don't know what and where to invest Also, a big gap could be seen in terms of female and male financial literacy. Females are still seen as homemakers, hence they have highly disregarded these terms. Even parents are seen to be biased, they expect their sons to contribute more than daughters creating a mind that females are born to be financially dependent. However this situation is changing over time, still only few women have their own account and are financially independent, and know-how and where to invest their money. What will give them profit in the future or what companies share they should invest in and more? This gap is not only present in India, but all around the world. Thus, to bridge this gap we need to teach our youth the importance of financial literacy and give them practical knowledge about it. "We need to literate ourselves not only grammatically, but monetarily too."

Are we really developed?

                                                     Are we really developed?

Our first home is our mother Earth. True, but what about our duties towards it. No doubt we are fully relied on it. No matter how much we earn to live a healthy life, we need healthy surroundings for being healthy. Today we have become so greedy, that we are limitlessly showing this to our mother earth. The one which has given us the shelter to live, we exploit its resources to the extreme. We are killing flora and faunas both land and aquatic, recklessly utilizing nature's bounty.
However, the question is how can we protect it? As the children of this earth, we have certain duties, which we should abide by no matter what. It's not only the duty of an environmentalist to protect the environment, but all of us. And to perform this we don't really need to launch big campaigns, instead, take few simple solution-oriented steps. Like we can try minimizing our plastic wastes. Try to plant small plants  and trees. Also as we are heading towards technological development, we can reduce our paper dependency and use cloud memory to save our notes. This will not only save paper but will be convenient to manage. We can try to make reservoirs for untreated water from factories and then process it further into clean water, which can again be used in some industrial work, rather than saving a little money to discharge it, untreated in any water body. We may not realize but it is our mistakes only whose after-effects we face. These all solutions might be ages old, but the real question is are we actually trying to follow them? Problems may be many but solutions are also within our reach, we just need a static mind, heart to take an oath to solve these rather than blaming each other. We need to understand that as long as we are destroying our environment, the earth ,we cannot call ourselves developed . Thus, trying to take few steps by each one of us can really be a boon for all of us. We have to question ourselves the solution before creating a problem that will affect each of us.

Data- The biggest wealth.

                         Data-The biggest wealth.

We are living in the  21st century where everything is internet-based. In such a time when we are using it for almost everything, we need to ask a question that what is the biggest wealth for us? Perhaps gold and diamond are tangible, but what about intangible resources. We agree or not, the biggest wealth of our time is our data. Yes, raw information of facts and figures is our biggest wealth. But why?   To answer this question we need to ask another question. What exactly we can do with this?
MNC pays millions of dollars to protect its customer's data, but why? 
Nowadays as we all know all our things are digitally connected with each other. It is not even a minute deal to get sensitive information about one from their phone number. We can trace the exact location of a person, know where the number is used, and can try to hack one. Even today most people are not aware of these frauds and hence it becomes easy for hackers to perform social engineering-type crimes. They can see one's personal photos, videos or can even trigger you to open a link that can directly give them access to your personal credit, debit card details. They can read your WhatsApp messages. All these from only a phone number. 
We have a thousand other sources to gain some information. From a single IP address, we can get tons of information like country, city, place of a person. Open ports from where we can get access inside its system to gain other sensitive information. Most of us do online transactions but how many of us know how it works. No matter how popular a site is, there is always a potential for it to be exploited. Thus we need to understand what access we are giving them in our phone, is that secure, in how many ways that chunk of information can be used to gain some severe information, and so on. Normal people don't know the severity of cyberattacks and how important their data is and often fall prey to cybercrimes. Data is a source we can give attackers access to your bank. Not only this, they can use it to blackmail you for some sensitive information like MMS leaks or some personal messages. However, there are government helpline numbers to complain about these scams, many times it leads to serious issues. Thus we, as active citizens need to create awareness for cyber threats, their impact, and the importance of our smallest chunk of data.  India is still a developing country with many of its citizens lacking internet skills. In this situation it becomes easy for attackers to target you no matter who you are an ordinary citizen or an extraordinary person, the potential risk to get scammed is always the same. Thus, creating the importance of our data, how the system works can really help us.

Hope for a better India.

                                  Hope for a better India.

With the ongoing pandemic of covid-19, all the countries around are facing a major challenge, however, the developing countries like India are more into trouble. We are no doubt developing each day but illiteracy, poverty, and corruption are still our top challenges.
On one hand, the digital market has. shown a boost, on the other hand, the lockdown has proved to be a prison for poors. They are dying of hunger. Many factories have faced losses and hence have to be shut resulting in unemployment. The daily wage earners are not having any medium to earn. The government, NGOs, and peoples are undoubtedly trying to help them, but at some point, they fail. People are not aware of all the schemes. Hence, the worst hit of this pandemic is these people.

However, on the one hand, corruption is still a major problem for all, some people, communities have actually tried to help the public with what they can. People are not only suffering monetarily but physically, emotionally, mentally too.
However, despite all other odds we have to learn and follow some principles to make India a better India.
Poverty has always been a major challenge for India; however, we need to start from the root cause to reduce this. We need to educate people. Not only the book education but the real education to deal with the practical world. We need to promote its infrastructural development and show our transitions to the world and prove that our culture is still there. We can help people to get vocational training so that they can be self-reliant at these times. We need to promote other stuff too besides education so that children can choose their career besides studies, if not interested in it. India is a huge market, however mainly occupied by foreign companies.  India needs to promote startups at the root level so that even a  village person can open his own place. If a minimum factory or small company can give employment to at least 10 people, the underemployment, poverty ratio will decline thoroughly.
No doubt, the internet has opened a lot of business opportunities for us, however, it has proved to be a negative sign for some. Many peoples have lost their jobs due to the boycott of manual work in their workplaces. We need to find solutions for all these, need to generate employment, promote skill development and try to make our students financially independent after a certain age, so that they themselves can pay their fees and be independent. This will not only decrease their burden on their families but will also boost their confidence.
To end with, India is an agrarian economy, so we need to train our farmers to cope with the upcoming trends. We need to develop new technologies to have healthy harvests.
All the above things might seem to be a challenge for India, however accepting these challenges we can challenge the world with a better India which will be self-reliant.