Union finance minister P. Chidambaram has called for convergence among political parties on economic issues in the interest of overall development. "We can have all the politicking on other issues like caste, religion etc., but when it comes to economic issues there must be a convergence," he said here on Wednesday.

Delivering his first ever public lecture in the city, at an interactive session hosted by the Lokmat Group of Newspapers, the finance minister said, " I am concerned about the hardening of interest rates. I feel that there should be a balance between the interest rate that you earn on your savings, and the rate at which the investors borrow from the banks," he said. In an interesting reference to Mr Vijay Darda, Rajya Sabha member and chairman and managing director of the Lokmat Group of newspapers, that sent ripples of laughter in the audience, Mr Chidambaram quipped, "Wise men like me save and wiser men like Vijay borrow." In equally simple terms, he explained that foreign direct investments (FDIs) are in fact a result of tapping into the savings of other countries. "When I explain it in this way, it sounds simple, but when I call it FDI, then some people get uneasy," he observed.

The Union finance minister said that India is the only country that would reap the demographic dividend over the next 25 years as its working population would grow at a higher rate. "I would call upon the youth of the country to pick up this challenge," he said.

The year 2007 is likely to be the year of the Wireless Sensor Network. What’s a WSN? It is a network made up of numerous small independent sensor nodes. The sensor nodes, typically the size of a 35 mm film canister, are self-contained units consisting of a battery, radio, sensors, and a minimal amount of on-board computing power. The fun part of a WSN is that the nodes self-organise their networks, rather than having a pre-programmed network topology.

So, why is next year going to be the year when WSN get traction. The problem right now is that there are multiple standards and technologies, which arel vying for supremacy, and that fragmentation slows market growth.

Many WSN devices use IEEE 802.15.4 chips. At the networking level, the ZigBee protocol competes with Zensys’ Z-Wave and SmartLabs’ INSTEON for residential WSN use.

WSN will find uses across a range of locations and contexts, where it will enable control of everything from home lighting to factory automation.

A few products are now available, for example some based on Zensys’s "Z-Wave". But for the most part, products are still in development, says ABI Research. WSN will play roles in residential, commercial and industrial settings. Residential products are first in the market: applications are simpler, lead-times shorter, testing and reliability demands less stringent.Commercial and industrial solutions will follow, it says.

The research firm says that market dynamics will change as the industry grows. Today many WSN chips-really systems-on-a-chip (SoC)-are packaged in modules that may include added circuitry, stack networking layer software and antennas. OEMs can use these drop-in components to WSN-enable their products without having to know a lot about RF engineering or having to do extensive testing.

"In this early market, we see a place for these module makers to help OEMs," it says.

"But over time, as volumes increase and cost becomes an issue, we think that OEMs will begin to forego the modules, since they add a variable cost. They will develop products based directly on the SoC; their costs are fixed and spread over a greater number of units. Once unit numbers exceed a certain threshold, which differs from vendor to vendor, it makes more sense for OEMs to do some of this integration work themselves."

However, there is a place for modules to continue to thrive: in certain commercial segments and in industrial plant monitoring. "Volumes will be low enough for OEMs to forego expensive in-house development of RF expertise and use the module.