Chinamma was born a Devadasi but she refused to become a prostitute. She would collect neem seeds in the forests of Raichur district in Karnataka and earn Rs 12 a day. Her life changed completely when she joined a self-help group which helped her with a loan. She makes fertilizer today from the same seeds and employs 10 women. Her sales are Rs 250,000 and profits Rs 50,000. Rising demand from businesses like hers have lifted wages three times for the 12,000 women who collect neem seeds.
There are 1.2 crore poor women like Chinamma across India who take small loans to start businesses from microfinance institutions, banks and NGOs. They buy a cow and sell milk or invest in a sewing machine and stitch clothes. They may open a vegetable shop or begin hundreds of other businesses. Many of these micro-capitalists are the landless poor. What started as NGO charity work has now become a self-sustaining business with the entry of banks and microfinance companies, who find the women have an excellent record of loan repayment. Inspired by Bangladesh, this idea first caught on in Andhra, and is spreading across India, gradually replacing the village moneylender.
Chinamma’s story teaches us two ways of conquering poverty. In the first, government gives money to the poor--free electricity, subsidised food through the PDS and rural employment guarantee schemes. In the second way, the state creates conditions for people to help themselves. It builds roads and connects people to markets; makes it easy for the poor to get titles to their land and take credit against them. It provides vocational training so they can get a job; it ensures reliable power so that factories can run; and it reduces licenses and permits so that people can easily start businesses. The first way gives people fish; the second way teaches them to fish.
Chinnama’s sensible way, however, is under attack. The Andhra government closed 50 branches of two microfinance institutions (MFIs) last year for charging high interest rates. MFIs argue that it is expensive to provide weekly service to the poor in the rural areas. Their women customers prefer MFI loans rather than cheaper, subsidized loans from the government’s MFI for which “you must either have contacts or pay a bribe and then wait 6-9 month for the loan”. In contrast a young, dynamic MFI like SKS Microfinance delivers transparent loans at their doorstep in 7 days.
The Reserve Bank agreed with the MFIs. It argued that competition was growing among micro-lenders and interest rates had begun to fall. It also observed that countries that had tried to control loan rates had killed their microfinance business. For this reason the micro-loan business is four times bigger in Morocco and Bolivia where interest rates are ot controlled versus Tunisia and Columbia where they are controlled. Chinamma’s way will always be threatened in a populist democracy like India. Micro-lenders will have to fight the political power of money lenders, survive the envy of bureaucrats who run government financial institutions, and battle unscrupulous politicians who will find votes in capping interest rates on micro-loans.
Chinamma thinks it criminal that chief minister Karunanidhi gets away by waiving loans worth Rs 7000 crores while she pays interest on her loans diligently. She wonders when voters will realize that there is more dignity in her way of life because it doesn’t depend on the false promises of politicians or the charity of NGOs. Perhaps it will happen, she muses, when the middle class begins to vote and takes a more active role in politics.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
The reek of India 6th May, 2007
There is something a little sad in my encounters with non-resident Indians. I don’t quite know why this should be. They are invariably successful. They have lovely homes and bright children who go to the best schools. Most have fitted in confidently and some have assumed positions of leadership in their adopted countries. But there is something missing at the core.
I often lecture abroad and I run into Indians in the strangest places. The more exotic the city, the more we are drawn to each other. They invite me generously to their homes where they only want to talk about India. They ply me with samosas and hungry questions about our recent economic rise. I discover that their memories are frozen, and they hide a shame of a fearful past that forced them to leave home. India has, meanwhile, moved on. Their poignant heart-weariness for their lost homeland leaves me in gloom.
I recently read the biography of Princess Sofka Dalgorouky, and it seemed to throw light on this cheerless subject. She left Russia to escape the Revolution in 1919 and lived all her life abroad in the long grief of exile. Nobokov called it ‘the animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia’. Yes, that’s the phrase that I have been seeking. The sadness of the NRI’s world is the painful yearning for the ‘reek of India’. Strong, traditional cultures like India and Russia are not easy to forget.
Princess Sofka lived in interesting times. She began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia. She played with the Tsar’s daughter. Her grandmother, like the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, did not know how to dress herself. But Lenin cut short Sofka’s childhood at 13, and she grew up abroad into a beautiful, vivacious woman. She loved parties, conversations and books. She took lovers, enjoyed herself, married and remarried. Then she did something shocking. She became a communist and a social pariah overnight in her Russian émigré circles.
Indian NRIs, alas, don’t live such lives. They are bourgeois to the core and if Sofka were to appear in their midst, they would simply dismiss her as ‘promiscuous and irresponsible’. But their nostalgia is the same as Sofka’s. It not for an abstract India but for a definite place and time, and Jhumpa Lahiri catches it nicely in her stories. Mira Nair has portrayed it with panache in her recent masterly adaptation of The Namesake. The hero says that to be an NRI ''is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden”. Even in the second generation, his son feels a sense of apartness, a detachment. Others like him-- heart weary Bengali expatriates--are oppressive.
Babubhai Katara will never comprehend the distress and guilt in The Namesake. But what about those innocent boys from Jullunder, who take such risks in escaping from India? It must be worth it, I suppose, when lives at home are even more oppressive. The prize, even of a lovelorn NRI life, must seem like liberation. There was a time I used to believe like Diogenes the Cynic that I am a citizen of the world. I used to say that a blade of grass is the same anywhere. Now I think that each blade of grass has its own spot from where it draws its strength. So is a man rooted to a land from where he draws his faith and his life. Yet, there is struggle to extricate oneself from one’s past--from family, obligations and the “curse of history”.
----
I often lecture abroad and I run into Indians in the strangest places. The more exotic the city, the more we are drawn to each other. They invite me generously to their homes where they only want to talk about India. They ply me with samosas and hungry questions about our recent economic rise. I discover that their memories are frozen, and they hide a shame of a fearful past that forced them to leave home. India has, meanwhile, moved on. Their poignant heart-weariness for their lost homeland leaves me in gloom.
I recently read the biography of Princess Sofka Dalgorouky, and it seemed to throw light on this cheerless subject. She left Russia to escape the Revolution in 1919 and lived all her life abroad in the long grief of exile. Nobokov called it ‘the animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia’. Yes, that’s the phrase that I have been seeking. The sadness of the NRI’s world is the painful yearning for the ‘reek of India’. Strong, traditional cultures like India and Russia are not easy to forget.
Princess Sofka lived in interesting times. She began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia. She played with the Tsar’s daughter. Her grandmother, like the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, did not know how to dress herself. But Lenin cut short Sofka’s childhood at 13, and she grew up abroad into a beautiful, vivacious woman. She loved parties, conversations and books. She took lovers, enjoyed herself, married and remarried. Then she did something shocking. She became a communist and a social pariah overnight in her Russian émigré circles.
Indian NRIs, alas, don’t live such lives. They are bourgeois to the core and if Sofka were to appear in their midst, they would simply dismiss her as ‘promiscuous and irresponsible’. But their nostalgia is the same as Sofka’s. It not for an abstract India but for a definite place and time, and Jhumpa Lahiri catches it nicely in her stories. Mira Nair has portrayed it with panache in her recent masterly adaptation of The Namesake. The hero says that to be an NRI ''is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden”. Even in the second generation, his son feels a sense of apartness, a detachment. Others like him-- heart weary Bengali expatriates--are oppressive.
Babubhai Katara will never comprehend the distress and guilt in The Namesake. But what about those innocent boys from Jullunder, who take such risks in escaping from India? It must be worth it, I suppose, when lives at home are even more oppressive. The prize, even of a lovelorn NRI life, must seem like liberation. There was a time I used to believe like Diogenes the Cynic that I am a citizen of the world. I used to say that a blade of grass is the same anywhere. Now I think that each blade of grass has its own spot from where it draws its strength. So is a man rooted to a land from where he draws his faith and his life. Yet, there is struggle to extricate oneself from one’s past--from family, obligations and the “curse of history”.
----
The Killing of 24 x 7 water April 22, 2007
It came as a shock to me that India’s cities have more water than most cities in the world. Delhi has 300 litres per person per day of treated water compared to Paris with 150 or London with 171. Then why do people in Paris and London get water 24 hours a day while Delhi’s residents get it only for four? Gauhati sits on the Brahmaputra River but people get water for only two hours. The poor in our cities have to depend on tankers. When the tanker is late there is a scramble and even a riot. Recently, a tanker driver fearing for his life took off at a high speed, and a child died in the chaos.
Because water comes intermittently, Indians have to store it. Storage tanks cost money and are not cleaned regularly. This brings disease. Since water pipes are not under continuous pressure, they get broken when pressure is released–it’s called the ‘hammer effect’. Vacuum also develops in the pipe, and ground and sewage water enters through the cracks, thereby contaminating drinking water. It takes 90 minutes to re-pressure, dump the contaminated water, and lots of clean water is thus wasted.
Everyone has a diagnosis. Delhi’s Jal Board says that 40% of its water is stolen. Its zonal engineers want more pipes and infrastructure. (Lucrative contracts bring prosperity to engineers.) Economists say that Paris charges properly for its water; hence Parisians don’t waste it. Delhi’s water charges are so low that there is little incentive to conserve. Besides, low tariffs help mainly the rich because the poor don’t have taps. All these facts are true but the main problem is the Delhi Jal Board. It is a fiefdom of politicians with 20,000 employees when it should have 5000. It doesn’t meter properly, encourages theft, and is not accountable to customers.
Delhi’s government, to its credit, recognised the problem and decided to fix it. It tried to insulate the Jal Board from politicians and test a plan to give water 24 hours a day in two out of its 22 zones. It offered management contracts to experts, who would motivate Jal Board employees to reduce theft, extend taps to poor areas, and be responsive to customers. It also decided to take a loan from the World Bank for this project. This is when its problems started. A well meaning but ideological NGO, Parivartan, claimed that the process of hiring consultants was manipulated. It raised the fears of privatization, mobilized public opinion, and killed the reform. With it died the prospect of 24 hour water for Delhi.
The Greeks were suspicious of democracy. They felt that people often made bad decisions that went against their interest. People could be manipulated by demagogues and vested interests. In this story, vested interests were the local politicians, bureaucrats and Jal Board employees. They manipulated Parivartan to become their demagogue. They scared Delhi’s people and a workable reform failed. Sad, indeed, for it kills 24x7 water in other Indian cities as well.
The lesson from this sad story is that it is not easy to reform in a democracy. Reformers have to win over the people when they change institutions. If Sheila Dikshit had worked as hard to “sell” this reform as she had to conceive it, she might have saved it. We are facing another summer of water and power shortages and politicians have begun to make ridiculous promises. The answer is “not to fix the pipes, but to fix the institutions that fix the pipes”.
Because water comes intermittently, Indians have to store it. Storage tanks cost money and are not cleaned regularly. This brings disease. Since water pipes are not under continuous pressure, they get broken when pressure is released–it’s called the ‘hammer effect’. Vacuum also develops in the pipe, and ground and sewage water enters through the cracks, thereby contaminating drinking water. It takes 90 minutes to re-pressure, dump the contaminated water, and lots of clean water is thus wasted.
Everyone has a diagnosis. Delhi’s Jal Board says that 40% of its water is stolen. Its zonal engineers want more pipes and infrastructure. (Lucrative contracts bring prosperity to engineers.) Economists say that Paris charges properly for its water; hence Parisians don’t waste it. Delhi’s water charges are so low that there is little incentive to conserve. Besides, low tariffs help mainly the rich because the poor don’t have taps. All these facts are true but the main problem is the Delhi Jal Board. It is a fiefdom of politicians with 20,000 employees when it should have 5000. It doesn’t meter properly, encourages theft, and is not accountable to customers.
Delhi’s government, to its credit, recognised the problem and decided to fix it. It tried to insulate the Jal Board from politicians and test a plan to give water 24 hours a day in two out of its 22 zones. It offered management contracts to experts, who would motivate Jal Board employees to reduce theft, extend taps to poor areas, and be responsive to customers. It also decided to take a loan from the World Bank for this project. This is when its problems started. A well meaning but ideological NGO, Parivartan, claimed that the process of hiring consultants was manipulated. It raised the fears of privatization, mobilized public opinion, and killed the reform. With it died the prospect of 24 hour water for Delhi.
The Greeks were suspicious of democracy. They felt that people often made bad decisions that went against their interest. People could be manipulated by demagogues and vested interests. In this story, vested interests were the local politicians, bureaucrats and Jal Board employees. They manipulated Parivartan to become their demagogue. They scared Delhi’s people and a workable reform failed. Sad, indeed, for it kills 24x7 water in other Indian cities as well.
The lesson from this sad story is that it is not easy to reform in a democracy. Reformers have to win over the people when they change institutions. If Sheila Dikshit had worked as hard to “sell” this reform as she had to conceive it, she might have saved it. We are facing another summer of water and power shortages and politicians have begun to make ridiculous promises. The answer is “not to fix the pipes, but to fix the institutions that fix the pipes”.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Bureaucracy, heal theyself, April 8, 2007
I come from a family of government servants. So it was not a surprise when an old friend of our family, a senior IAS official, dropped in the other day. He was almost in tears because he said his college going son was ashamed of him. Father and son had been discussing potential careers the night before, and when the possibility of the IAS came up, the son shot back, ‘Dad, only corrupt, inefficient, and negative people join the IAS.’
It was a devastating verdict on the nation’s premier service. The provocation was the recent scandal over Fulbright scholars. Himself a Fulbright candidate, the son was disgusted at the way our bureaucracy had summarily rejected research proposals of some US Fulbright scholars, delayed visa applications of others from 6 to 21 months, and had even asked a few to change their subject!
Many years ago my friend, Ralph Nicholas, the charming American anthropologist, had told me that foreign scholars who wanted to do research in India often faced such humiliations. Some foreign professors even went as far as tell their students, ‘Don’t bother with India-- choose another country’. The problem, in fact, goes back to the dark days of Indira Gandhi when every American was considered a CIA spy. One of her ministers, it seems, had once been denied a US visa, and he had tightened India’s visa rules to take revenge on ‘all American scholars till eternity’. It is a pity that we have forgotten how much we owe foreign scholars for India’s intellectual re-awakening in the 19th century. Academic black humour has it that Megasthenes, Hiuen Tsang, and Alberuni would all have been denied visas today!
Evidently, visas are delayed because the scholar’s file is sent to the much burdened Intelligence Bureau (IB). Since the file is not an intelligence priority, IB sits on it for months. Meanwhile, the applicant’s career goes for a six. For thirty years, no one has dared to ask why should the IB be involved? Wouldn’t it be easier for a terrorist to come in as a tourist or for a CIA agent to come as a diplomat? Why masquerade as a foreign scholar and face humiliation? As a result of the Fulbright scandal the government has now instituted a red and green channel. But the new system is not working because the inter-ministerial committee of bureaucrats is too petrified to take a decision and routinely passes the buck to the IB.
Now we cannot have our children being ashamed of our highest civil service. The son’s remark does, however, capture the irony of a rising, confident India of the young sitting alongside an insecure, oppressive India of our malfunctioning bureaucracy. This is not about foreign scholars but the attitude of Indian bureaucrats. They get away by heaping indignities daily on Indian academics, but when their visa policy cannot distinguish terrorists from scholars then their competence is an issue.
The only way to save our bureaucracy is to reform it. When our Prime Minister took office, he said that administrative reform was his top priority. Three years later he appears to have given up. Bureaucrats, we are told, have sabotaged his well-meaning efforts. We inherited our bureaucracy from Britain, but Britain has gone and completely transformed its own civil service, making it far more accountable to ordinary citizens. Australia and New Zealand have done an even better job of administrative reform. The message is clear. If Indian bureaucrats want to earn the respect of their children, they better seize the initiative and reform their rotten system.
---
It was a devastating verdict on the nation’s premier service. The provocation was the recent scandal over Fulbright scholars. Himself a Fulbright candidate, the son was disgusted at the way our bureaucracy had summarily rejected research proposals of some US Fulbright scholars, delayed visa applications of others from 6 to 21 months, and had even asked a few to change their subject!
Many years ago my friend, Ralph Nicholas, the charming American anthropologist, had told me that foreign scholars who wanted to do research in India often faced such humiliations. Some foreign professors even went as far as tell their students, ‘Don’t bother with India-- choose another country’. The problem, in fact, goes back to the dark days of Indira Gandhi when every American was considered a CIA spy. One of her ministers, it seems, had once been denied a US visa, and he had tightened India’s visa rules to take revenge on ‘all American scholars till eternity’. It is a pity that we have forgotten how much we owe foreign scholars for India’s intellectual re-awakening in the 19th century. Academic black humour has it that Megasthenes, Hiuen Tsang, and Alberuni would all have been denied visas today!
Evidently, visas are delayed because the scholar’s file is sent to the much burdened Intelligence Bureau (IB). Since the file is not an intelligence priority, IB sits on it for months. Meanwhile, the applicant’s career goes for a six. For thirty years, no one has dared to ask why should the IB be involved? Wouldn’t it be easier for a terrorist to come in as a tourist or for a CIA agent to come as a diplomat? Why masquerade as a foreign scholar and face humiliation? As a result of the Fulbright scandal the government has now instituted a red and green channel. But the new system is not working because the inter-ministerial committee of bureaucrats is too petrified to take a decision and routinely passes the buck to the IB.
Now we cannot have our children being ashamed of our highest civil service. The son’s remark does, however, capture the irony of a rising, confident India of the young sitting alongside an insecure, oppressive India of our malfunctioning bureaucracy. This is not about foreign scholars but the attitude of Indian bureaucrats. They get away by heaping indignities daily on Indian academics, but when their visa policy cannot distinguish terrorists from scholars then their competence is an issue.
The only way to save our bureaucracy is to reform it. When our Prime Minister took office, he said that administrative reform was his top priority. Three years later he appears to have given up. Bureaucrats, we are told, have sabotaged his well-meaning efforts. We inherited our bureaucracy from Britain, but Britain has gone and completely transformed its own civil service, making it far more accountable to ordinary citizens. Australia and New Zealand have done an even better job of administrative reform. The message is clear. If Indian bureaucrats want to earn the respect of their children, they better seize the initiative and reform their rotten system.
---
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Tata buys Chrysler for $1 March 25, 2007
‘Tata buys Chrysler’ was the headline in the online daily, The Globalist, on 23 February. Its author imagines a scenario in which Ratan Tata buys the Chrysler subsidiary from DaimlerChrysler for a dollar. The famous American car company is cheap because its employees’ health care and pension liability of $20 billion has bankrupted it. The story also has a message for Indians who don’t know quite what to make of the global ambitions of their companies.
When Ratan Tata bought Corus last month, he got the entire steel industry of Britain and Holland and earned the applause of an India bent on assuming a place in the world. He paid too much but he called it ‘a moment of great fulfilment for India’. Two weeks later, Kumar Birla bought Novelis to become the world leader in rolled aluminium from which cans of Coke and Pepsi and cars are made. Once again national pride was on display. Are these purchases smart business buys? Or is it about personal egos and national honour?
After the deals the shares of both companies fell 11% on stock markets. Standard & Poor’s placed Tata Steel’s long term rating on ‘credit watch’. What would Tatas do with 30,000 expensive European workers? Others asked how Birlas would discharge Novelis’ mountain of debt. The stock markets are telling the companies that their earnings will decline in the short term even though their acquisitions may be good and strategic in the long term. What matters now is that Tatas and Birlas bring their considerable skills to Corus and Novelis and run them better.
No one could have imagined even five years ago how quickly Indian companies would burst upon the global stage. For all the hype about China, it has only a handful of truly world-class companies. By contrast, India has a much deeper and broader stable. Indian companies have also been remarkably sensible in the way they have gone about buying assets abroad. They have ventured out from a position of strength after winning victories in the domestic market. They have usually bought smaller companies to gain access to new customers or technologies or to leverage their low Indian costs. Quite unlike the Chinese electronics firm, TCL, which was so influenced by the prideful ambitions of its government (rather than business logic) that it bought parts of two famous French companies, Alcatel and Thompson. It is in trouble today as the acquisitions have drained it of cash.
The Globalist headline is a warning to Indian companies to beware of hubris. The next time they raise their mighty chests to make a big foreign acquisition, they should remember that only one out of two acquisitions succeeds and the failure rate rises with size. Only four acquisitions did well out of all those made by the 15 largest Japanese firms between 1980 and 2001. This is a sobering lesson from McKinsey’s research department. A foreign target will always appear more attractive from far away Nariman Point, and a brand is up for sale precisely because it is in trouble.
India is still an enigmatic rope trick where great companies perform magic amidst unwashed masses, corrupt politicians and negative bureaucrats. We have the largest billionaires in Asia, but the point is they are creating untold wealth for India. One of them, Mukesh Ambani and his gas discoveries could reduce our dependence on foreign energy—something that the state failed to do. Indians only need good schools, health centres, and infrastructure from the state, and they will respond with amazing prosperity for all.
When Ratan Tata bought Corus last month, he got the entire steel industry of Britain and Holland and earned the applause of an India bent on assuming a place in the world. He paid too much but he called it ‘a moment of great fulfilment for India’. Two weeks later, Kumar Birla bought Novelis to become the world leader in rolled aluminium from which cans of Coke and Pepsi and cars are made. Once again national pride was on display. Are these purchases smart business buys? Or is it about personal egos and national honour?
After the deals the shares of both companies fell 11% on stock markets. Standard & Poor’s placed Tata Steel’s long term rating on ‘credit watch’. What would Tatas do with 30,000 expensive European workers? Others asked how Birlas would discharge Novelis’ mountain of debt. The stock markets are telling the companies that their earnings will decline in the short term even though their acquisitions may be good and strategic in the long term. What matters now is that Tatas and Birlas bring their considerable skills to Corus and Novelis and run them better.
No one could have imagined even five years ago how quickly Indian companies would burst upon the global stage. For all the hype about China, it has only a handful of truly world-class companies. By contrast, India has a much deeper and broader stable. Indian companies have also been remarkably sensible in the way they have gone about buying assets abroad. They have ventured out from a position of strength after winning victories in the domestic market. They have usually bought smaller companies to gain access to new customers or technologies or to leverage their low Indian costs. Quite unlike the Chinese electronics firm, TCL, which was so influenced by the prideful ambitions of its government (rather than business logic) that it bought parts of two famous French companies, Alcatel and Thompson. It is in trouble today as the acquisitions have drained it of cash.
The Globalist headline is a warning to Indian companies to beware of hubris. The next time they raise their mighty chests to make a big foreign acquisition, they should remember that only one out of two acquisitions succeeds and the failure rate rises with size. Only four acquisitions did well out of all those made by the 15 largest Japanese firms between 1980 and 2001. This is a sobering lesson from McKinsey’s research department. A foreign target will always appear more attractive from far away Nariman Point, and a brand is up for sale precisely because it is in trouble.
India is still an enigmatic rope trick where great companies perform magic amidst unwashed masses, corrupt politicians and negative bureaucrats. We have the largest billionaires in Asia, but the point is they are creating untold wealth for India. One of them, Mukesh Ambani and his gas discoveries could reduce our dependence on foreign energy—something that the state failed to do. Indians only need good schools, health centres, and infrastructure from the state, and they will respond with amazing prosperity for all.
A tale of two numbers March 11, 2007
Our ruling Congress Party led coalition genuinely wanted to use this year’s budget to shrink the rich-poor divide. But it failed, of course. Hidden in the budget were two items that almost escaped notice. One was the provision to hire 200,000 teachers and the other was to give 100,000 scholarships to schoolchildren. In the differing stories of these two numbers lies the answer to the question why every Indian government keeps failing to help the poor.
Although India’s booming economy is doing its bit in raising the poor, the poor also need good schools and health clinics to enjoy the benefits of high growth. It is not the lack of money that prevents them from having the most basic public goods. India spends a respectable 4 percent of GDP on education and even in this 2007 budget, spending on education (and health and rural employment schemes) has increased 35%. The failure is the result of deeper disease. Surveys show that one out of four school teachers is absent in state primary schools, and of those present one out of two is not teaching. Similarly, two out of five doctors and one in three nurses is absent from government primary health centers. There are over a million primary school teachers in India’s state system, and going by surveys, it means that 670,000 teachers may not be doing their job. So, when Mr Chidambaram proposes an additional 200,000 teachers, how can one feel cheerful?
What do parents do when teachers don’t show up? As with so much about India's success story, they find their own solutions. They enroll their kids in cheap private schools which charge only Rs 70-100 a month in fees and which are spreading rapidly in slums and villages. Even though private schools pay one third the salary of the unionized government teachers, they deliver better results. Hence, 53% of urban Indian children (and 18% of rural children) are now in private schools. This is very high by world standards. Even Chile, which privatized education in 1981, has achieved only 46.5% share of private enrollment after 25 years.
For this reason, the second number—the promised 100,000 scholarships--in this year’s budget is excellent news. It will empower parents to choose schools based on merit and give state schools an incentive to improve. Merit testing will also help to assess the quality of government schools. It might even improve the “anti-merit” image of this UPA government. I wish we could give a crore instead of a lakh scholarships!
How does one explain the discrepancy between the government’s desire to spend more on elementary education and health with the reality that more and more Indians are embracing private solutions? Let’s face the fact that our politicians have captured the bureaucracy and use the system to create jobs and revenue for friends and supporters. In many states politicians sell teaching jobs for a handsome price. Teachers, who are thus appointed for life, believe they don’t need to teach. As a result, the state is so riddled with perverse incentives that accountability is gone.
But none of the solutions being debated will bring accountability unless we recognize that the government’s job is to govern rather than run everything. The state may have to finance primary services such as health and education, but the providers could be NGOs, teachers, ‘edu-preneurs’, and they would be accountable to parents and not to a bureaucratic hierarchy. This tale of two numbers teaches that the hope for decent services for the poor may lie in such public-private partnerships.
----
Although India’s booming economy is doing its bit in raising the poor, the poor also need good schools and health clinics to enjoy the benefits of high growth. It is not the lack of money that prevents them from having the most basic public goods. India spends a respectable 4 percent of GDP on education and even in this 2007 budget, spending on education (and health and rural employment schemes) has increased 35%. The failure is the result of deeper disease. Surveys show that one out of four school teachers is absent in state primary schools, and of those present one out of two is not teaching. Similarly, two out of five doctors and one in three nurses is absent from government primary health centers. There are over a million primary school teachers in India’s state system, and going by surveys, it means that 670,000 teachers may not be doing their job. So, when Mr Chidambaram proposes an additional 200,000 teachers, how can one feel cheerful?
What do parents do when teachers don’t show up? As with so much about India's success story, they find their own solutions. They enroll their kids in cheap private schools which charge only Rs 70-100 a month in fees and which are spreading rapidly in slums and villages. Even though private schools pay one third the salary of the unionized government teachers, they deliver better results. Hence, 53% of urban Indian children (and 18% of rural children) are now in private schools. This is very high by world standards. Even Chile, which privatized education in 1981, has achieved only 46.5% share of private enrollment after 25 years.
For this reason, the second number—the promised 100,000 scholarships--in this year’s budget is excellent news. It will empower parents to choose schools based on merit and give state schools an incentive to improve. Merit testing will also help to assess the quality of government schools. It might even improve the “anti-merit” image of this UPA government. I wish we could give a crore instead of a lakh scholarships!
How does one explain the discrepancy between the government’s desire to spend more on elementary education and health with the reality that more and more Indians are embracing private solutions? Let’s face the fact that our politicians have captured the bureaucracy and use the system to create jobs and revenue for friends and supporters. In many states politicians sell teaching jobs for a handsome price. Teachers, who are thus appointed for life, believe they don’t need to teach. As a result, the state is so riddled with perverse incentives that accountability is gone.
But none of the solutions being debated will bring accountability unless we recognize that the government’s job is to govern rather than run everything. The state may have to finance primary services such as health and education, but the providers could be NGOs, teachers, ‘edu-preneurs’, and they would be accountable to parents and not to a bureaucratic hierarchy. This tale of two numbers teaches that the hope for decent services for the poor may lie in such public-private partnerships.
----
Friday, February 23, 2007
Heroic Buddhadev 25 February, 2007
When you have been teaching bad ideas to people for a couple of generations, they tend to catch up with you. This is poor Buddhadev’s Bhattacharya’s dilemma, as he attempts heroically to break with his desperate past. To begin with, he has to contend with the pervasive envy of peasant societies in places like Singur and Nandigram. Peasants believe that society’s wealth is more or less fixed so that one person’s gain must be another’s loss. They view the social system as a zero sum game and it is hard to imagine that the overall pie may actually grow in a way that everyone will be unbelievably better off through mutual cooperation (by selling land, for example, to Tata’s car factory).
Furthermore, Buddhadev must deal with the communist cadres’ suspicion of the market, which is now so built into Bengali genes, and it is exceeded only by their general hatred of businessmen. In the 1980s, I used to work in Mumbai and I worried that our factory was next door to that of a famous European company that had been on strike for almost a year. Their Marxist trade union leader had the dangerous psychological make up of Duryodhana. Once he said at a gate meeting: “I don’t care if we sink this factory as long as the European manager goes down with us.” When this kind of attitude gets institutionalized in the mental make-up of a militant movement, the result is de-industrialization. This is what happened in West Bengal in the 1970s. Company after company left the state as the unions preferred to sink the economy rather than come to agreement with industry.
Like Deng in China, Buddhadeva is determined to make a break with this self-destructive past and bring prosperity to his people--despite themselves. He sees in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) his chance to bring about an industrial revolution in Bengal. He realises that SEZs will only create pockets of world class infrastructure. Ideally, he would like the whole of Bengal to have world class roads, ports, power plants, but reforming is slow business in a democracy. So, you create pockets and hope the effects spill over. But in a democracy you must also face your Nandigrams, something that Deng didn’t have to think about in China.
The significance of Nandigram is that it has brought home to everyone the unfairness of our present, inhumane system of forcibly acquiring land from farmers. As Swaminathan Aiyar has eloquently pointed out, government should not be in the business of acquiring land. It ought to be a voluntary transaction between farmers and industry. And if there is a deadlock--say if five percent of the farmers refuse to sell, then it should be put to a community vote. I do hope that this is the sort of model displacement policy that the centre is working on at the moment. Because of competition between so many SEZs, I think our farmers are going to get rich beyond their dreams in the months ahead.
We are now at a tipping point, and if we don’t seize the moment, history will not forgive us. With all their flaws, SEZs will create millions of jobs and eventually lift the poor into the middle class. Fifty years hence when India’s per capita income is $25,000 per year, historians will remember Buddhadev’s vision of a vibrant, prosperous, and forward looking India. In comparison, Mamta Banerji, V. P. Singh and Medha Patkar’s India is a perpetually victimized peasant society that belongs in the garbage dump of history
Furthermore, Buddhadev must deal with the communist cadres’ suspicion of the market, which is now so built into Bengali genes, and it is exceeded only by their general hatred of businessmen. In the 1980s, I used to work in Mumbai and I worried that our factory was next door to that of a famous European company that had been on strike for almost a year. Their Marxist trade union leader had the dangerous psychological make up of Duryodhana. Once he said at a gate meeting: “I don’t care if we sink this factory as long as the European manager goes down with us.” When this kind of attitude gets institutionalized in the mental make-up of a militant movement, the result is de-industrialization. This is what happened in West Bengal in the 1970s. Company after company left the state as the unions preferred to sink the economy rather than come to agreement with industry.
Like Deng in China, Buddhadeva is determined to make a break with this self-destructive past and bring prosperity to his people--despite themselves. He sees in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) his chance to bring about an industrial revolution in Bengal. He realises that SEZs will only create pockets of world class infrastructure. Ideally, he would like the whole of Bengal to have world class roads, ports, power plants, but reforming is slow business in a democracy. So, you create pockets and hope the effects spill over. But in a democracy you must also face your Nandigrams, something that Deng didn’t have to think about in China.
The significance of Nandigram is that it has brought home to everyone the unfairness of our present, inhumane system of forcibly acquiring land from farmers. As Swaminathan Aiyar has eloquently pointed out, government should not be in the business of acquiring land. It ought to be a voluntary transaction between farmers and industry. And if there is a deadlock--say if five percent of the farmers refuse to sell, then it should be put to a community vote. I do hope that this is the sort of model displacement policy that the centre is working on at the moment. Because of competition between so many SEZs, I think our farmers are going to get rich beyond their dreams in the months ahead.
We are now at a tipping point, and if we don’t seize the moment, history will not forgive us. With all their flaws, SEZs will create millions of jobs and eventually lift the poor into the middle class. Fifty years hence when India’s per capita income is $25,000 per year, historians will remember Buddhadev’s vision of a vibrant, prosperous, and forward looking India. In comparison, Mamta Banerji, V. P. Singh and Medha Patkar’s India is a perpetually victimized peasant society that belongs in the garbage dump of history
Check naka blues 11, February, 2007
In my last column I described a wondrous journey along a world class highway on the Golden Quadrilateral. What I didn’t write about is the continuing, unhappy plight of truckers that I saw parked on the way, waiting to pay bribes at check nakas. It is such a common sight that I didn’t notice it until a foreigner asked, “What are all those trucks lined up for?” I had to explain what an octroi post is. We walked over to an idling truck driver, who told us that he had been waiting for six hours, and it looked like the bribe was going to double this time because the Sahib’s daughter was getting married. He also has to worry about police posts, and a normal journey, which should take 24 hours, takes 44 hours. He spends half of it waiting and negotiating bribes.
So, a new irony is upon us--the speed of trucks has risen 40 to 60 percent with good four and six lane highways, but we remain mired in the old inefficiencies of bad governance. A transport system is at the heart of global competitiveness, and for a country with the second highest growth rate in the world, octroi nakas are a huge drag. They also prevent India from becoming a common market. Municipalities levy octroi in order to earn revenues, but it is an inefficient and obsolete tax that has been phased out in all modern nations.
Vijay Kelkar had held out the hope of eliminating octroi. He proposed sensibly that all indirect taxes should be merged into a single, universal Goods and Service Tax (GST). From this tax, municipalities would be compensated for the loss from octroi. Mr Chidambaram followed up by announcing that the GST would come into force in 2010. The nation took the historic step towards GST by enacting state Value Added Tax last year. Since there are huge legislative changes and negotiations required if we are to meet the 2010 deadline, the government shouldn’t lose time and it should set up an Empowered Committee on GST in the coming Budget.
Check nakas not only slow down the movement of goods across the nation, they destroy the moral character of our people. Transparency International reports that India’s trucking industry pays Rs 22,200 crores in bribes each year. This is equal roughly to what India’s truck drivers earn annually by way of salaries. If you are a truck driver, how do you explain this to your son? Is this the India in which he will grow up? Our governance failures are not only the failures of institutions--they also have a moral dimension.
“The Sanskrit Mahabharata came to be the continuing repository of crisis in the public discourse of classical India" writes the scholar, David Gitomer. Our contemporary world is also “in permanent crisis, a world whose karmic dominoes of human weakness reach into past and future horizons until bounded by creation and apocalypse”. Just as the Mahabharata had a problem with the self-destructive kshatriya social institutions of its time, we have a problem with all our governance institutions. The great insight of the science of economics is that people respond to incentives. Smart governments are able to reward the good and punish the bad behaviour of its employees. Britain, which gave us many of our institutions, has quietly transformed its governance institutions in the past 20 years. We must do the same. Reforming is never easy—it is like waging a war at Kurukshetra—but it must be done.
So, a new irony is upon us--the speed of trucks has risen 40 to 60 percent with good four and six lane highways, but we remain mired in the old inefficiencies of bad governance. A transport system is at the heart of global competitiveness, and for a country with the second highest growth rate in the world, octroi nakas are a huge drag. They also prevent India from becoming a common market. Municipalities levy octroi in order to earn revenues, but it is an inefficient and obsolete tax that has been phased out in all modern nations.
Vijay Kelkar had held out the hope of eliminating octroi. He proposed sensibly that all indirect taxes should be merged into a single, universal Goods and Service Tax (GST). From this tax, municipalities would be compensated for the loss from octroi. Mr Chidambaram followed up by announcing that the GST would come into force in 2010. The nation took the historic step towards GST by enacting state Value Added Tax last year. Since there are huge legislative changes and negotiations required if we are to meet the 2010 deadline, the government shouldn’t lose time and it should set up an Empowered Committee on GST in the coming Budget.
Check nakas not only slow down the movement of goods across the nation, they destroy the moral character of our people. Transparency International reports that India’s trucking industry pays Rs 22,200 crores in bribes each year. This is equal roughly to what India’s truck drivers earn annually by way of salaries. If you are a truck driver, how do you explain this to your son? Is this the India in which he will grow up? Our governance failures are not only the failures of institutions--they also have a moral dimension.
“The Sanskrit Mahabharata came to be the continuing repository of crisis in the public discourse of classical India" writes the scholar, David Gitomer. Our contemporary world is also “in permanent crisis, a world whose karmic dominoes of human weakness reach into past and future horizons until bounded by creation and apocalypse”. Just as the Mahabharata had a problem with the self-destructive kshatriya social institutions of its time, we have a problem with all our governance institutions. The great insight of the science of economics is that people respond to incentives. Smart governments are able to reward the good and punish the bad behaviour of its employees. Britain, which gave us many of our institutions, has quietly transformed its governance institutions in the past 20 years. We must do the same. Reforming is never easy—it is like waging a war at Kurukshetra—but it must be done.
Don’t say ‘what’, tell me ‘how’ 28 January 2007
I was driving down from Jaipur to Ajmer. But I could have been anywhere. The six lane highway was a smooth beauty and the pot-holed India of the PWD was a hazy memory. Then the wondrous colours of Rajasthan appeared and for an instant I thought I had entered a certain paradise, which seemed to unite modernity with tradition, world-class infrastructure with the ineffable loveliness of old India.
What makes the Jaipur-Kishangarh section of the golden quadrilateral special is that it is a true public-private partnership based on transparent legal contracts that might be a model for the world. Such contracts have created a new level of trust and are enabling India to access funds, skills and technologies from the best companies in the world, who will build and operate our roads, ports, bridges, airports, and container trains, and transfer them to the state in 15 to 30 years. Gajendra Haldea, an unusual economist-lawyer of integrity and conviction, drew up these model contracts at the Planning Commission. As a result he is the most hated man in Delhi’s infrastructure ministries. This dharma warrior has demolished opportunities for corruption. Soon we shall have 20,000 km of highways, hundreds of private container trains, and many private ports and airports—all in public private partnership. These quiet steps teach us that reforms are not about the ‘what’ but the ‘how’. They are less about economics and more about law.
Before 1991, we believed that infrastructure was a natural monopoly of the state. If a road had to be built, the PWD would do it. In that era of ‘high bureaucratic modernism’ private contractors were treated like scum to be bilked. So, we got roads with pot holes. The same mentality obtained in ports, telephones, and power plants. In 1991, the government was bankrupt and it turned to the private sector to build power plants, highways, and telecom. But it did not know how to manage the process. Neither did many officers and ministers have honest intentions. We lost a decade in a bungled era of licence fees, crony capitalism and sweetheart deals whose symbol is Enron. Serious infrastructure companies came and ran away.
A new era of genuine public-private partnerships began with the new telecom policy based on ‘revenue sharing’ and the excellent Electricity Act of 2003. These two landmarks showed that we had finally learned the principles of open access, free competition, transparent bidding, and a level field for all players. We also chose some good regulators, who understood that the state ought to be an enabler and an umpire and not a protector of its own monopolies. Haldea’s contracts for highways and freight trains were the next logical step. Whereas the telecom policy has released an amazing revolution, bringing untold benefits to millions, the Electricity Act sadly remains unimplemented. Aside from this one depressing sector, we seem to have found the answer for our physical infrastructure. It is time now to extend public-private partnerships to social infrastructure, and give the poor some reprieve from failed government schools and hospitals—let them choose their provider.
Indian public officials are good at talking but bad at delivering results. But even if they possessed the implementation skills of a Sreedharan at Delhi’s Metro, I would still opt for public private partnerships. The reason is that they focus the state’s attention on governance and the private sector’s on building national wealth. Moreover, it is an idea uniquely suited to our democracy where ordinary citizens can do extraordinary things if the state will let them.
What makes the Jaipur-Kishangarh section of the golden quadrilateral special is that it is a true public-private partnership based on transparent legal contracts that might be a model for the world. Such contracts have created a new level of trust and are enabling India to access funds, skills and technologies from the best companies in the world, who will build and operate our roads, ports, bridges, airports, and container trains, and transfer them to the state in 15 to 30 years. Gajendra Haldea, an unusual economist-lawyer of integrity and conviction, drew up these model contracts at the Planning Commission. As a result he is the most hated man in Delhi’s infrastructure ministries. This dharma warrior has demolished opportunities for corruption. Soon we shall have 20,000 km of highways, hundreds of private container trains, and many private ports and airports—all in public private partnership. These quiet steps teach us that reforms are not about the ‘what’ but the ‘how’. They are less about economics and more about law.
Before 1991, we believed that infrastructure was a natural monopoly of the state. If a road had to be built, the PWD would do it. In that era of ‘high bureaucratic modernism’ private contractors were treated like scum to be bilked. So, we got roads with pot holes. The same mentality obtained in ports, telephones, and power plants. In 1991, the government was bankrupt and it turned to the private sector to build power plants, highways, and telecom. But it did not know how to manage the process. Neither did many officers and ministers have honest intentions. We lost a decade in a bungled era of licence fees, crony capitalism and sweetheart deals whose symbol is Enron. Serious infrastructure companies came and ran away.
A new era of genuine public-private partnerships began with the new telecom policy based on ‘revenue sharing’ and the excellent Electricity Act of 2003. These two landmarks showed that we had finally learned the principles of open access, free competition, transparent bidding, and a level field for all players. We also chose some good regulators, who understood that the state ought to be an enabler and an umpire and not a protector of its own monopolies. Haldea’s contracts for highways and freight trains were the next logical step. Whereas the telecom policy has released an amazing revolution, bringing untold benefits to millions, the Electricity Act sadly remains unimplemented. Aside from this one depressing sector, we seem to have found the answer for our physical infrastructure. It is time now to extend public-private partnerships to social infrastructure, and give the poor some reprieve from failed government schools and hospitals—let them choose their provider.
Indian public officials are good at talking but bad at delivering results. But even if they possessed the implementation skills of a Sreedharan at Delhi’s Metro, I would still opt for public private partnerships. The reason is that they focus the state’s attention on governance and the private sector’s on building national wealth. Moreover, it is an idea uniquely suited to our democracy where ordinary citizens can do extraordinary things if the state will let them.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
If good men do nothing, January 14, 2007
Considering that the year gone by was one of our best, it is dismaying that Indians continue to be so down on politics. 2006 was the fourth successive year of unprecedented prosperity. India emerged on the global stage, and its arrival was hailed in part by the Indo-U.S. treaty, which finally de-hyphenated it from Pakistan. Justice caught up with three murderers of high status who had subverted it with rishwat and sifarish. Many states began to implement the Right to Information Act. And the new SEZ policy raised hopes for a true industrial revolution.
Yet Indians continued to believe that their politicians are mostly ugly. For good reason. 25 percent of MPs have a criminal record. In 2006, politicians hit India where it hurt the most. By introducing OBC quotas in education, they cynically continued to divide and rule us, undermining the little excellence that we possess. When they sneaked in the creamy layer, true nastiness was revealed.
It is not healthy for the world’s largest democracy to have such a poor opinion of its political class. It devalues public life. As it is, Indians are mesmerized by the figure of the Renouncer, who stands “tall and splendid, a theatrical figure in ochre robes” as Louis Dumont described the sanyasi. I know too many fine Indians who could make a difference but they refuse to join politics.
Western philosophical tradition also devalued the political life. Plato was the chief culprit. In The Republic, he describes the world of human affairs in terms of shadows and darkness, and instructs us to turn away from it and pursue the sublime life of contemplation. Aristotle, however, tried to redeem politics. The basic fact of human life, he said, is that we are not alone and must learn to live sensibly with others in society. Thus, attending to civic matters was central to his idea of the virtuous life. But Aristotle’s thinking got submerged by the contemplative spirituality of the Christian Middle Ages, until the 14th century when Petrarch found merit in politics, and this marked a transition to the active political life of the Renaissance.
In the 20th century Hannah Arendt attempted the formidable task of rescuing the worldly life from the depredations of philosophy and religion. She had also to contend with Marx, whose politics exalted ‘labour’ at the expense of an equal commitment to all members of society. Communism as practiced by Lenin and Mao did untold harm to the idea of a civic life of mutual respect among equals.
In India, the Gita and later Gandhi rescued the political life. Gita’s notion of karmayoga gave new meaning to the life of the ordinary householder, who has to make a living, look after his family, and live as a citizen in society. Gita tells him to live in this world selflessly with the renouncer’s “attitude”. It’s ideal of a “secular ascetic” was a fitting reply both to the rituals of the Brahmins and the Renouncer’s life.
We find it easier today to nostalgically admire vanished heroes of an earlier generation who had fought for freedom. But the practice of democracy continues to require the same heroic qualities. Decent Indians need to look into their hearts and take the plunge before criminals completely swamp our politics. If the best shun politics, they will leave it to the worst. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, Edmund Burke reminds us.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Yet Indians continued to believe that their politicians are mostly ugly. For good reason. 25 percent of MPs have a criminal record. In 2006, politicians hit India where it hurt the most. By introducing OBC quotas in education, they cynically continued to divide and rule us, undermining the little excellence that we possess. When they sneaked in the creamy layer, true nastiness was revealed.
It is not healthy for the world’s largest democracy to have such a poor opinion of its political class. It devalues public life. As it is, Indians are mesmerized by the figure of the Renouncer, who stands “tall and splendid, a theatrical figure in ochre robes” as Louis Dumont described the sanyasi. I know too many fine Indians who could make a difference but they refuse to join politics.
Western philosophical tradition also devalued the political life. Plato was the chief culprit. In The Republic, he describes the world of human affairs in terms of shadows and darkness, and instructs us to turn away from it and pursue the sublime life of contemplation. Aristotle, however, tried to redeem politics. The basic fact of human life, he said, is that we are not alone and must learn to live sensibly with others in society. Thus, attending to civic matters was central to his idea of the virtuous life. But Aristotle’s thinking got submerged by the contemplative spirituality of the Christian Middle Ages, until the 14th century when Petrarch found merit in politics, and this marked a transition to the active political life of the Renaissance.
In the 20th century Hannah Arendt attempted the formidable task of rescuing the worldly life from the depredations of philosophy and religion. She had also to contend with Marx, whose politics exalted ‘labour’ at the expense of an equal commitment to all members of society. Communism as practiced by Lenin and Mao did untold harm to the idea of a civic life of mutual respect among equals.
In India, the Gita and later Gandhi rescued the political life. Gita’s notion of karmayoga gave new meaning to the life of the ordinary householder, who has to make a living, look after his family, and live as a citizen in society. Gita tells him to live in this world selflessly with the renouncer’s “attitude”. It’s ideal of a “secular ascetic” was a fitting reply both to the rituals of the Brahmins and the Renouncer’s life.
We find it easier today to nostalgically admire vanished heroes of an earlier generation who had fought for freedom. But the practice of democracy continues to require the same heroic qualities. Decent Indians need to look into their hearts and take the plunge before criminals completely swamp our politics. If the best shun politics, they will leave it to the worst. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, Edmund Burke reminds us.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
An Indo-Chinese curry December 31, 2006
My son lives in Shanghai and I recently spent two weeks with him. It gave me a chance to meet and talk to ordinary Chinese people. What came through in my conversations was their passionate desire for business success. They feel that even the poor are gaining from their commercial triumphs in the global economy, and are proud that China will soon become a great, middle class nation.
I also met a local communist leader and businessman, who had recently returned from India. He asked me confidentially, “Is India’s bureaucracy as bad as all that?” He said that Chinese businessmen in India only talked about India’s red tape. He admitted Chinese officials were also corrupt, but he couldn’t fathom why Indian officials put up so many hurdles. He was amused by India’s communists as well. He joked that if you mixed Chinese and Indian communists into an Indo-Chinese curry, it would improve the Indians but it might deteriorate the Chinese.
The evening after I returned to Delhi I turned on the news on television. In two separate programs, I caught prominent leaders of the Left and the Congress talking about India’s future. What came through unfailingly was their deep and fundamental hostility to business and the middle class. Our Leftists did not give two hoots about what would make Indian companies successful. Neither did they care if our entrepreneurs failed or succeeded. Unlike the Chinese, they felt no pride that India had achieved one of the strongest economies in the world. These debates, like so many in India, had a strange 1970s air, discussing issues that were settled in the world long ago with the fall of communism. One of the reasons for our confusion is that none of our leaders has really bothered to explain to the common voter how 15 years of slow but consistent economic reform has changed the lives of our people. And how they have added up to make India one of the world’s best performing economies.
Perhaps the greatest failure of our reformers is that they have not clarified how the reforms are helping the poor. Chinese leaders do not face this problem, but we are a democracy and our leaders need to remember that much of Margaret Thatcher’s energy went not into creating reforms but into educating her constituents that reforms were good for the whole of Britain. I sometimes wonder why Manmohan Singh and his dream team of reformers don’t go on television and educate us similarly night after night. Because they fail to do so, people fall hostage to the bad ideas of the populists. It is not enough to talk of “inclusive growth” or assert that we must grow at 10 percent—you must explain how this affects ordinary lives. Only thus will you create a constituency for thorough going reform. They must also admit honestly that India’s pre-1991 controls and subsidies were the chief causes of our poverty, and there is no point in bringing them back. An honest nation must come to grips with its past.
I am glad that the prime minister finally broke his silence this week about India’s notorious red tape. He realises that the inability to implement administration reforms is the other big failure of his government. As one of the best years in our economic history draws to a close, action on these two fronts would be the PM’s finest New Year resolutions.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
I also met a local communist leader and businessman, who had recently returned from India. He asked me confidentially, “Is India’s bureaucracy as bad as all that?” He said that Chinese businessmen in India only talked about India’s red tape. He admitted Chinese officials were also corrupt, but he couldn’t fathom why Indian officials put up so many hurdles. He was amused by India’s communists as well. He joked that if you mixed Chinese and Indian communists into an Indo-Chinese curry, it would improve the Indians but it might deteriorate the Chinese.
The evening after I returned to Delhi I turned on the news on television. In two separate programs, I caught prominent leaders of the Left and the Congress talking about India’s future. What came through unfailingly was their deep and fundamental hostility to business and the middle class. Our Leftists did not give two hoots about what would make Indian companies successful. Neither did they care if our entrepreneurs failed or succeeded. Unlike the Chinese, they felt no pride that India had achieved one of the strongest economies in the world. These debates, like so many in India, had a strange 1970s air, discussing issues that were settled in the world long ago with the fall of communism. One of the reasons for our confusion is that none of our leaders has really bothered to explain to the common voter how 15 years of slow but consistent economic reform has changed the lives of our people. And how they have added up to make India one of the world’s best performing economies.
Perhaps the greatest failure of our reformers is that they have not clarified how the reforms are helping the poor. Chinese leaders do not face this problem, but we are a democracy and our leaders need to remember that much of Margaret Thatcher’s energy went not into creating reforms but into educating her constituents that reforms were good for the whole of Britain. I sometimes wonder why Manmohan Singh and his dream team of reformers don’t go on television and educate us similarly night after night. Because they fail to do so, people fall hostage to the bad ideas of the populists. It is not enough to talk of “inclusive growth” or assert that we must grow at 10 percent—you must explain how this affects ordinary lives. Only thus will you create a constituency for thorough going reform. They must also admit honestly that India’s pre-1991 controls and subsidies were the chief causes of our poverty, and there is no point in bringing them back. An honest nation must come to grips with its past.
I am glad that the prime minister finally broke his silence this week about India’s notorious red tape. He realises that the inability to implement administration reforms is the other big failure of his government. As one of the best years in our economic history draws to a close, action on these two fronts would be the PM’s finest New Year resolutions.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Private virtue, public vice December 17, 2006
In 1989, a much admired and powerful lady who was raising funds for her NGO, asked me what I did for a living. I told her that I worked for a company. “Oh, but what do you really do—I mean for society?” she said. I became defensive and began to recount our philanthropic activities in the districts where our factories were located. ‘Is that all!’ thundered the eminence grise. I was hurt by her dismissive attitude, and recently remembered this incident when Sonia Gandhi reminded fawning businessmen in the same imperious tone about their corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR has become a buzz word these days, and one newspaper even has a CSR reporter. But why is it that something so worthy and high-minded leaves me uneasy? I think it is because companies have no business engaging in philanthropy and businessmen should value more what they do.
“The social responsibility of business is to make a profit,” famously said Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winner who died last month. He explained that in making a profit a company creates thousands of jobs, both directly and indirectly through suppliers, distributors and retailers. It imparts valuable skills to its employees. It pays crores in taxes. It improves the lives of millions of satisfied customers with its products and services. This is an enormous service to society. If some shareholders get rich on the way, so what? Companies should focus single-mindedly on their competence, providing goods and services better than their competitors, and not get distracted by extraneous activity. A company’s social responsibility is to make profits legally, not to harm nature, and uphold the highest standards of governance.
Yet, I intensely admire individuals who engage in philanthropy. I was deeply moved by Warren Buffet’s selfless gesture when he gave away all his wealth to Bill Gates’ foundation. I agree with Andrew Carnegie that to die rich is to die disgraced. If it is immoral to spend the company’s money, it is businessmen’s duty to spend their own money on charity (from after-tax profits). It is a theft against Reliance’s shareholders if Reliance Industries builds a hospital, but it is Mukesh Ambani’s duty to do so. Hence, Tatas do their charity work through their trusts, from dividends received from Tata companies. CSR should thus be relabelled ISR, Individual Social Responsibility, and each of us ought to feel the need to give back.
This is fine in theory, but the reality is that few Indians feel the philanthropic urge, which emerges it seems at a later stage of capitalism. In order that the few sources of present funding don’t dry up, we cannot allow corporate funding to cease. We can ensure its legitimacy if companies fix rigorous criteria for giving. Corporate philanthropy must enhance company profits, strengthening the brand or promoting goodwill in the community. For example, when Citibank funds a college to train micro-finance professionals, it enhances its brand.
Glib talk about CSR reflects our prejudice against businessmen. Adam Smith wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that he didn’t much care for those who spent their lives chasing “baubles and trinkets”, but he was “immensely grateful that such creatures abounded for the whole of civilisation, and the welfare of all societies depended on people’s desire and ability to accumulate unneeded capital and show off their wealth. Indeed, it …first prompted men to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths and to invent all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human life.”
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
“The social responsibility of business is to make a profit,” famously said Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winner who died last month. He explained that in making a profit a company creates thousands of jobs, both directly and indirectly through suppliers, distributors and retailers. It imparts valuable skills to its employees. It pays crores in taxes. It improves the lives of millions of satisfied customers with its products and services. This is an enormous service to society. If some shareholders get rich on the way, so what? Companies should focus single-mindedly on their competence, providing goods and services better than their competitors, and not get distracted by extraneous activity. A company’s social responsibility is to make profits legally, not to harm nature, and uphold the highest standards of governance.
Yet, I intensely admire individuals who engage in philanthropy. I was deeply moved by Warren Buffet’s selfless gesture when he gave away all his wealth to Bill Gates’ foundation. I agree with Andrew Carnegie that to die rich is to die disgraced. If it is immoral to spend the company’s money, it is businessmen’s duty to spend their own money on charity (from after-tax profits). It is a theft against Reliance’s shareholders if Reliance Industries builds a hospital, but it is Mukesh Ambani’s duty to do so. Hence, Tatas do their charity work through their trusts, from dividends received from Tata companies. CSR should thus be relabelled ISR, Individual Social Responsibility, and each of us ought to feel the need to give back.
This is fine in theory, but the reality is that few Indians feel the philanthropic urge, which emerges it seems at a later stage of capitalism. In order that the few sources of present funding don’t dry up, we cannot allow corporate funding to cease. We can ensure its legitimacy if companies fix rigorous criteria for giving. Corporate philanthropy must enhance company profits, strengthening the brand or promoting goodwill in the community. For example, when Citibank funds a college to train micro-finance professionals, it enhances its brand.
Glib talk about CSR reflects our prejudice against businessmen. Adam Smith wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that he didn’t much care for those who spent their lives chasing “baubles and trinkets”, but he was “immensely grateful that such creatures abounded for the whole of civilisation, and the welfare of all societies depended on people’s desire and ability to accumulate unneeded capital and show off their wealth. Indeed, it …first prompted men to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths and to invent all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human life.”
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Thali to plough December 3, 2006
Last week’s Mittal-Walmart deal is symbolic of an India which is changing quietly. Indians now consume less cereals and more milk, vegetables and fruit. In the past 20 years, per capita consumption of vegetables has trebled in villages and doubled in towns; milk and milk products have doubled in urban and rural areas. The share of high value foods has risen in India’s agricultural output from 32 to 44 percent from 1983 to 2003. Cereal consumption has declined even among those below the poverty line, according to the economist, Ashok Gulati’s analysis.
While we have been agonising over cotton farmers’ suicides, India has become silently the world’s second largest cotton producer, crossing the United States. NCDEX has become the world’s third largest agro-commodity exchange. The cotton revolution was made possible by the much reviled Bt cotton seed, which protects against bollworm, the dreaded pest which used to destroy half the crop. Misguided activists delayed its entry into India by 5 years.
The farm, meanwhile, has been shrinking. It is now 1.4 hectares--so small that it’s difficult to make a living. The only viable farming on small holdings is vegetables, poultry, and high value crops. But growing these is riskier. Hence, contract farming is a good idea. It transfers the risk from farmers to companies. Farmers lease their land; get employment; and a guaranteed return. The contracting company invests in better seeds, scientific practices, and raises productivity. Studies show that contracted farmers earn 30 to 100 percent higher. Punjab Agro, the government’s mediating company, has 160,000 acres under contract with 25,000 farmers. Some worry that marginal farmers will be left out, but curiously small holdings can be highly competitive because the family provides free labour.
In the long run, however, people will have to leave the farm. Too many Indians (57%) are trying to eke out a living from agriculture. Peasants have faced this dilemma in all societies: Is it better to starve on an unviable plot or become the urban proletariat in Marx’s words? Everywhere they have chosen the second alternative. This is why I favour the SEZs. With all their flaws, SEZs could create millions of jobs for unemployed farm youth in construction and other non-farm areas. I disagree with Sonia Gandhi--farmers should sell their unviable plots to SEZs in exchange for urban jobs. SEZs don’t need tax breaks; they need less red tape. They could be the tipping point for our industrial revolution (unless bureaucrats again kill SEZs at birth).
President Hu’s recent visit reminded us that China’s reforms began by privatising agriculture in 1978, and delivered even better results than our green revolution. Not only did agriculture boom, but their household responsibility system generated spectacular growth of labour intensive manufacturing in rural areas. Our green revolution achieved food self-sufficiency but didn’t make manufacturing linkages because of the Licence Raj. Unlike our first green revolution, the private sector will drive changes in the rural economy this time. This is the significance of the Mittal-Walmart deal. Politicians, farmers, activists don’t realise it, but Dalal Steet does. Hence, three mutual funds, primarily with rural portfolios, began in 2006. They comprehend that India could soon be feeding the Middle East.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
While we have been agonising over cotton farmers’ suicides, India has become silently the world’s second largest cotton producer, crossing the United States. NCDEX has become the world’s third largest agro-commodity exchange. The cotton revolution was made possible by the much reviled Bt cotton seed, which protects against bollworm, the dreaded pest which used to destroy half the crop. Misguided activists delayed its entry into India by 5 years.
The farm, meanwhile, has been shrinking. It is now 1.4 hectares--so small that it’s difficult to make a living. The only viable farming on small holdings is vegetables, poultry, and high value crops. But growing these is riskier. Hence, contract farming is a good idea. It transfers the risk from farmers to companies. Farmers lease their land; get employment; and a guaranteed return. The contracting company invests in better seeds, scientific practices, and raises productivity. Studies show that contracted farmers earn 30 to 100 percent higher. Punjab Agro, the government’s mediating company, has 160,000 acres under contract with 25,000 farmers. Some worry that marginal farmers will be left out, but curiously small holdings can be highly competitive because the family provides free labour.
In the long run, however, people will have to leave the farm. Too many Indians (57%) are trying to eke out a living from agriculture. Peasants have faced this dilemma in all societies: Is it better to starve on an unviable plot or become the urban proletariat in Marx’s words? Everywhere they have chosen the second alternative. This is why I favour the SEZs. With all their flaws, SEZs could create millions of jobs for unemployed farm youth in construction and other non-farm areas. I disagree with Sonia Gandhi--farmers should sell their unviable plots to SEZs in exchange for urban jobs. SEZs don’t need tax breaks; they need less red tape. They could be the tipping point for our industrial revolution (unless bureaucrats again kill SEZs at birth).
President Hu’s recent visit reminded us that China’s reforms began by privatising agriculture in 1978, and delivered even better results than our green revolution. Not only did agriculture boom, but their household responsibility system generated spectacular growth of labour intensive manufacturing in rural areas. Our green revolution achieved food self-sufficiency but didn’t make manufacturing linkages because of the Licence Raj. Unlike our first green revolution, the private sector will drive changes in the rural economy this time. This is the significance of the Mittal-Walmart deal. Politicians, farmers, activists don’t realise it, but Dalal Steet does. Hence, three mutual funds, primarily with rural portfolios, began in 2006. They comprehend that India could soon be feeding the Middle East.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Friday, November 17, 2006
The price of potatoes, November 19, 2006
I sometimes wonder why I pay Rs 10 per kilo for potatoes when the farmer receives only Rs 3. My potatoes travel some distance, I realise, from the farm to the mandi to my bania, and each person in the chain must get his cut. Still, the gap of Rs 7 seems excessive, especially when the American farmer receives Rs 4 to 5. This gap varies, of course, depending on the commodity and the season, but studies by agricultural economists show that farmers in the developed countries do get a bigger share of the consumer price because their distribution chain is shorter.
Reliance opened seven supermarkets in Hyderabad last month and my friend bought potatoes there for Rs 10 per kilo compared to Rs 18 at his bania’s shop. Another friend who works with an NGO in rural Andhra reported that farmers, who had supplied potatoes to Reliance, reported receiving higher than the mandi price. How could Reliance pay a higher price to farmers and charge a lower price to consumers? Simple--it had eliminated middlemen in the chain. Thus, we should welcome the entry of large retailers. They will bring logistics efficiencies and competition between them will lower consumer prices and raise farmers’ incomes. We shouldn’t wait too long to open this sector to foreign retailers like Walmart and Tesco lest Reliance become a monopoly.
A typical farmer harvests his crop, loads it on his bullock cart, travels30 km to the mandi, where he is forced to sell often at distress prices. Once at the mandi, he cannot return without disposing his produce. He needs the money and the trader knows it. Had he known the price before he left, he might have waited a few days. Where E chaupals have arrived farmers are happy because they get to know mandi prices via the Internet. The national commodities exchange (NCDEX) is setting up electronic tickers announcing spot and future prices in local languages at mandis and bus stands in some states. Eventually, the mobile phone will be the farmer’s best source of information. All these developments make traders unhappy.
Since his crop is perishable, the farmer needs a warehouse to enhance his staying power. NCDEX is putting up a thousand cold storages with world class grading facilities, but large retailers will also bring air-conditioned warehouses and trucks, and this will save India’s huge post harvest losses, as high as 40% for some crops. Banks ought to lend money to farmers against warehouse receipts, but the Reserve Bank refuses to allow them to hedge against future prices. This is a pity for bank loans would mitigate the farmer’s risk and improve his holding power. In fact, banks should also sell crop insurance. It is amazing that RBI should view futures trading as speculation. If the farmer knows the price of potatoes, he might plant onions instead.
Old habits of the mind die slowly. When you have been a stagnant, peasant agriculture for hundreds of years, it is difficult to grasp how Reliance, commodity exchanges, futures trading, and contract farming will quietly bring a second green revolution and liberate farmers from the clutches of the old mandi system, which is at the heart of rural political patronage. Activists oppose the entry of global retailers like Walmart on ideological grounds. Talk of farmer suicides is cheap. Politician-traders on Agricultural Marketing Committees play on these insecurities. No wonder it takes so long to reform in a democracy.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Reliance opened seven supermarkets in Hyderabad last month and my friend bought potatoes there for Rs 10 per kilo compared to Rs 18 at his bania’s shop. Another friend who works with an NGO in rural Andhra reported that farmers, who had supplied potatoes to Reliance, reported receiving higher than the mandi price. How could Reliance pay a higher price to farmers and charge a lower price to consumers? Simple--it had eliminated middlemen in the chain. Thus, we should welcome the entry of large retailers. They will bring logistics efficiencies and competition between them will lower consumer prices and raise farmers’ incomes. We shouldn’t wait too long to open this sector to foreign retailers like Walmart and Tesco lest Reliance become a monopoly.
A typical farmer harvests his crop, loads it on his bullock cart, travels30 km to the mandi, where he is forced to sell often at distress prices. Once at the mandi, he cannot return without disposing his produce. He needs the money and the trader knows it. Had he known the price before he left, he might have waited a few days. Where E chaupals have arrived farmers are happy because they get to know mandi prices via the Internet. The national commodities exchange (NCDEX) is setting up electronic tickers announcing spot and future prices in local languages at mandis and bus stands in some states. Eventually, the mobile phone will be the farmer’s best source of information. All these developments make traders unhappy.
Since his crop is perishable, the farmer needs a warehouse to enhance his staying power. NCDEX is putting up a thousand cold storages with world class grading facilities, but large retailers will also bring air-conditioned warehouses and trucks, and this will save India’s huge post harvest losses, as high as 40% for some crops. Banks ought to lend money to farmers against warehouse receipts, but the Reserve Bank refuses to allow them to hedge against future prices. This is a pity for bank loans would mitigate the farmer’s risk and improve his holding power. In fact, banks should also sell crop insurance. It is amazing that RBI should view futures trading as speculation. If the farmer knows the price of potatoes, he might plant onions instead.
Old habits of the mind die slowly. When you have been a stagnant, peasant agriculture for hundreds of years, it is difficult to grasp how Reliance, commodity exchanges, futures trading, and contract farming will quietly bring a second green revolution and liberate farmers from the clutches of the old mandi system, which is at the heart of rural political patronage. Activists oppose the entry of global retailers like Walmart on ideological grounds. Talk of farmer suicides is cheap. Politician-traders on Agricultural Marketing Committees play on these insecurities. No wonder it takes so long to reform in a democracy.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Things that matter, November 5, 2006
Lant Pritchett wakes up each morning and worries about the state of India’s government schools. Formerly an economist at Harvard and now with the World Bank, Pritchett is happy that 93 % of India’s children are now in school as the SRI survey shows. However, digging deeper into the SRI data, Pritchett finds that 53 % of all children in urban India are in private schools. In some states the ratio is much higher, but urban India overall has amongst the highest levels of private primary education in the world.
Chile privatised education in 1981, and after 25 years its private sector has achieved only 46.5 % share of enrolment. Even Holland, which has always believed in giving choice between private and public schools to its children as a matter of state policy, has only got a private school share of 68 %. This Dutch level has already been exceeded in six states of India. Whereas in Chile and Holland the government pays parents to send their children to private schools, it has happened accidentally in India because government schools have failed, and even the poor are exiting from them.
The de facto privatisation of schooling in urban India is confirmed by the government’s own District Information System for Education website, which shows that 66.9% of children in urban Maharashtra are in private schools, 66.3% in Tamilnadu, and 65.1% in U.P. to name only three of India’s largest states. This is supported by Samuel Paul’s studies on people’s satisfaction with public services. The states with the highest level of privatisation give the lowest rating to government schools. For example, only 1% of the parents in Punjab are satisfied with teachers’ behaviour in state schools.
There is nothing wrong with giving parents a choice as Holland and Chile have done. If our government were to give the money that it spends on running schools to children in the form of scholarships, competition for the scholarship money would improve many government schools. Today, the government—the centre and states together--spends on the average Rs 4000 per child per year on primary education. Headmasters confirm that a child can get a decent education for Rs 4000. Thus, money is not the problem, and we ought to test this people friendly scholarship scheme in a few cities. However, we cannot give up on a million government schools. State schools do work in other countries.
The Kremer-Murlidharan study shows that one out of four teachers is absent from our state primary schools and of those present one out of two is not teaching. Thus, the heart of the problem is teacher accountability. And this failure is even more heartbreaking given the exalted status of the teacher in our civilization for whom inspiring young minds was his dharma. Many NGOs are making heroic efforts to improve the existing system, but given powerful teachers’ unions, it is an impossible task. Hence, Lance Pritchett suggests that new teachers ought to be hired into a new professional cadre which is district based and offers incentives and promotions for good performance. It would be a Panchayati Raj institution and teachers would be accountable locally to parents instead of to bureaucrats at the state capital. The answer, thus, is not private schools alone, but to liberate government schools from the ‘anti-teacher’ grip of unions and babus. These are the things that matter in the end; thus will the poor benefit from our rising economy.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Chile privatised education in 1981, and after 25 years its private sector has achieved only 46.5 % share of enrolment. Even Holland, which has always believed in giving choice between private and public schools to its children as a matter of state policy, has only got a private school share of 68 %. This Dutch level has already been exceeded in six states of India. Whereas in Chile and Holland the government pays parents to send their children to private schools, it has happened accidentally in India because government schools have failed, and even the poor are exiting from them.
The de facto privatisation of schooling in urban India is confirmed by the government’s own District Information System for Education website, which shows that 66.9% of children in urban Maharashtra are in private schools, 66.3% in Tamilnadu, and 65.1% in U.P. to name only three of India’s largest states. This is supported by Samuel Paul’s studies on people’s satisfaction with public services. The states with the highest level of privatisation give the lowest rating to government schools. For example, only 1% of the parents in Punjab are satisfied with teachers’ behaviour in state schools.
There is nothing wrong with giving parents a choice as Holland and Chile have done. If our government were to give the money that it spends on running schools to children in the form of scholarships, competition for the scholarship money would improve many government schools. Today, the government—the centre and states together--spends on the average Rs 4000 per child per year on primary education. Headmasters confirm that a child can get a decent education for Rs 4000. Thus, money is not the problem, and we ought to test this people friendly scholarship scheme in a few cities. However, we cannot give up on a million government schools. State schools do work in other countries.
The Kremer-Murlidharan study shows that one out of four teachers is absent from our state primary schools and of those present one out of two is not teaching. Thus, the heart of the problem is teacher accountability. And this failure is even more heartbreaking given the exalted status of the teacher in our civilization for whom inspiring young minds was his dharma. Many NGOs are making heroic efforts to improve the existing system, but given powerful teachers’ unions, it is an impossible task. Hence, Lance Pritchett suggests that new teachers ought to be hired into a new professional cadre which is district based and offers incentives and promotions for good performance. It would be a Panchayati Raj institution and teachers would be accountable locally to parents instead of to bureaucrats at the state capital. The answer, thus, is not private schools alone, but to liberate government schools from the ‘anti-teacher’ grip of unions and babus. These are the things that matter in the end; thus will the poor benefit from our rising economy.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Friday, October 27, 2006
Saaf Aangan Dreams October 22, 2006
In the late seventies I lived with my family in Mexico City, where I noticed that our neighbours would wash the foot path outside their house every day. But we, being good Indians, swept our home, washed our driveway but left the pavement to the municipality. As a result, the walkway outside our neighbours’ homes sparkled proudly while ours remained dirty and sad. It didn’t take long before we felt ashamed and followed the good ways of our neighbours.
While we were learning civic virtue in Mexico, a flight lieutenant in the Indian Air Force, Madhu Sawant, had the same idea. He asked himself, what if each Indian took care of the little space outside his home, office or shop? So, when he retired he set up an NGO called “I Clean Bombay”. Redefining the charming, wistful Hindi word, aangan, to mean the space between one’s boundary wall and the middle of the street, he created the “Saaf Aangan Scheme”, which was formally adopted in 2002 by Mumbai’s municipality. The scheme allows an individual to lease the footpath outside his home from the municipality for Rs 3 per year, and makes him officially responsible for keeping it free of garbage, hawkers, and squatters.
In 2005, the NGO Council of Mumbai persuaded the municipality to convert Saaf Aangan into enforceable Rules, which provide a fine for littering of Rs 1000 on citizens and Rs 100 for house owners, and also encouraged home owners to keep litter bins on footpaths. In August 2006, the municipality decided to upgrade Saaf Aangan rules into Bye-Laws to cover hawkers, who are also responsible for keeping the surrounding space around them clean. There are 300 Nuisance Detectors to enforce the fines. “Even a paanwala can apply to the municipal ward office to lease the area around his stall,” says Sawant.
Like many Indians I despair over the filth in our public spaces. But I am embarrassed to complain as there are so many ills more pressing. In Saaf Aangan, however, we may have the makings of a big idea for our grimy towns. Its attraction is that it doesn’t depend on the state but on individual initiative. It also feeds on self-interest rather than altruism because one wants to return home to a clean doorstep. Any group of individuals in any town in India can make it happen. It helps to rope in a sensitive municipal commissioner, but that is not necessary. Before BMC got involved, 500 municipal schools and 83 police colonies were practicing Saaf Aangan. So were citizen in neighbourhoods like N. Dutta Marg in Andheri (west), which is now lined with trees and has flower beds along the boundary walls of all its 35 residential complexes. Once a few get going it doesn’t take long for neighbours to emulate as we learned in Mexico City.
Saaf Aangan should be easier to implement in smaller towns where the word spreads faster, enforcement is easier, and there is greater sense of belonging. Tanya Mahajan, a volunteer with Karmayog.org says, “Belonging and ownership are an intrinsic part of this concept, and schools are a good place to start”. So tomorrow, when you sweep your house, why not absent-mindedly sweep the pavement in front of your door. You might create a revolution. But remember, man is the only creature on this planet who is truly dirty. And when we haven’t taken civic responsibility for two thousand years, it won’t happen overnight.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
While we were learning civic virtue in Mexico, a flight lieutenant in the Indian Air Force, Madhu Sawant, had the same idea. He asked himself, what if each Indian took care of the little space outside his home, office or shop? So, when he retired he set up an NGO called “I Clean Bombay”. Redefining the charming, wistful Hindi word, aangan, to mean the space between one’s boundary wall and the middle of the street, he created the “Saaf Aangan Scheme”, which was formally adopted in 2002 by Mumbai’s municipality. The scheme allows an individual to lease the footpath outside his home from the municipality for Rs 3 per year, and makes him officially responsible for keeping it free of garbage, hawkers, and squatters.
In 2005, the NGO Council of Mumbai persuaded the municipality to convert Saaf Aangan into enforceable Rules, which provide a fine for littering of Rs 1000 on citizens and Rs 100 for house owners, and also encouraged home owners to keep litter bins on footpaths. In August 2006, the municipality decided to upgrade Saaf Aangan rules into Bye-Laws to cover hawkers, who are also responsible for keeping the surrounding space around them clean. There are 300 Nuisance Detectors to enforce the fines. “Even a paanwala can apply to the municipal ward office to lease the area around his stall,” says Sawant.
Like many Indians I despair over the filth in our public spaces. But I am embarrassed to complain as there are so many ills more pressing. In Saaf Aangan, however, we may have the makings of a big idea for our grimy towns. Its attraction is that it doesn’t depend on the state but on individual initiative. It also feeds on self-interest rather than altruism because one wants to return home to a clean doorstep. Any group of individuals in any town in India can make it happen. It helps to rope in a sensitive municipal commissioner, but that is not necessary. Before BMC got involved, 500 municipal schools and 83 police colonies were practicing Saaf Aangan. So were citizen in neighbourhoods like N. Dutta Marg in Andheri (west), which is now lined with trees and has flower beds along the boundary walls of all its 35 residential complexes. Once a few get going it doesn’t take long for neighbours to emulate as we learned in Mexico City.
Saaf Aangan should be easier to implement in smaller towns where the word spreads faster, enforcement is easier, and there is greater sense of belonging. Tanya Mahajan, a volunteer with Karmayog.org says, “Belonging and ownership are an intrinsic part of this concept, and schools are a good place to start”. So tomorrow, when you sweep your house, why not absent-mindedly sweep the pavement in front of your door. You might create a revolution. But remember, man is the only creature on this planet who is truly dirty. And when we haven’t taken civic responsibility for two thousand years, it won’t happen overnight.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
India’s mystifying rise, October 8, 2006
There were many smiling Indian faces last week. Our economy again beat forecasts and grew 8.9% in the April-June quarter. India’s economic rise bewilders Indians. No one quite understands why this noisy and chaotic democracy of a billion people has become one of the world’s fastest growing economies. This is the fourth year we are looking at around 8% growth, and this follows 22 years of very respectable 6% annual growth. With 25 years of high growth per capita income gains have been huge: from $1,178 in 1980 to $3,051 in 2005 (in ppp).
What puzzles everyone is that India is not following any of the proven paths to success. Compared to the classic Asian strategy—exporting labour-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West—India’s economy is driven more by consumption than investment, domestic markets more than exports, services more than industry, and high-tech more than low-skilled manufacturing.
With consumption accounting for two thirds of GDP, ours is a people friendly model; hence, inequality has grown much less. Our Gini index is 33, compared to 41 for the United States, 45 for China, and 59 for Brazil. (In a perfectly equal society Gini is zero.) Our domestic orientation has meant that our economy is far more insulated from global downturns, and is less volatile. More importantly, thirty to forty percent of our GDP growth is due to rising productivity rather than mere increases in capital and labour. Ironically, while high end, capital intensive manufacturing is succeeding, we have failed to create a broad based industrial revolution based on low end, labour intensive manufacturing. Hence, we are not creating enough jobs. This is a real worry--how will we move our vast army of people from the rural to urban areas?
Even more perplexing is that rather than rising with the help of the state, India appears to be rising despite the state. The entrepreneur is clearly at the centre of our success story. We have highly competitive private companies now, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector. Competitiveness runs deep. More than hundred companies have a market cap of over a billion dollars. Foreign institutions have invested in over 1000 Indian companies via the stock market. Of 500 Fortune companies 125 now have R and D bases in India, and 380 have outsourced software development to India.
Our economy may baffle us but we are agreed on one thing. India is succeeding because the state is gradually stepping out of the way. The pace of reform is frustratingly slow, but incredible as it seems, every succeeding government after 1991 has persisted in reforming. And even slow reforms add up. Yet, the state has not lived to its side of the 1991 bargain. It hasn’t built enough roads; nor given us uninterrupted power and water. Government schools and health centres are rotten. The police are corrupt. In short, we don’t get the services that citizens in other countries take for granted. The Indian state is so riddled with perverse incentives that accountability is impossible. The tragedy is that there are so many in this government, supported by Left allies, who want to bring back state control and kill our growth. One of them is RBI which is itching to raise interest rates. I sympathise with Chidambaram’s poignant plea to these growth killers—“give us some political space to reform” so that the UPA might take some minimal credit for this great achievement.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
What puzzles everyone is that India is not following any of the proven paths to success. Compared to the classic Asian strategy—exporting labour-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West—India’s economy is driven more by consumption than investment, domestic markets more than exports, services more than industry, and high-tech more than low-skilled manufacturing.
With consumption accounting for two thirds of GDP, ours is a people friendly model; hence, inequality has grown much less. Our Gini index is 33, compared to 41 for the United States, 45 for China, and 59 for Brazil. (In a perfectly equal society Gini is zero.) Our domestic orientation has meant that our economy is far more insulated from global downturns, and is less volatile. More importantly, thirty to forty percent of our GDP growth is due to rising productivity rather than mere increases in capital and labour. Ironically, while high end, capital intensive manufacturing is succeeding, we have failed to create a broad based industrial revolution based on low end, labour intensive manufacturing. Hence, we are not creating enough jobs. This is a real worry--how will we move our vast army of people from the rural to urban areas?
Even more perplexing is that rather than rising with the help of the state, India appears to be rising despite the state. The entrepreneur is clearly at the centre of our success story. We have highly competitive private companies now, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector. Competitiveness runs deep. More than hundred companies have a market cap of over a billion dollars. Foreign institutions have invested in over 1000 Indian companies via the stock market. Of 500 Fortune companies 125 now have R and D bases in India, and 380 have outsourced software development to India.
Our economy may baffle us but we are agreed on one thing. India is succeeding because the state is gradually stepping out of the way. The pace of reform is frustratingly slow, but incredible as it seems, every succeeding government after 1991 has persisted in reforming. And even slow reforms add up. Yet, the state has not lived to its side of the 1991 bargain. It hasn’t built enough roads; nor given us uninterrupted power and water. Government schools and health centres are rotten. The police are corrupt. In short, we don’t get the services that citizens in other countries take for granted. The Indian state is so riddled with perverse incentives that accountability is impossible. The tragedy is that there are so many in this government, supported by Left allies, who want to bring back state control and kill our growth. One of them is RBI which is itching to raise interest rates. I sympathise with Chidambaram’s poignant plea to these growth killers—“give us some political space to reform” so that the UPA might take some minimal credit for this great achievement.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Lalu is our Ronald Reagan, September 24, 2006
Train journeys have increasingly become a part of my life. My ancient mother had been ailing in an ashram on the banks of the Beas River in Punjab, and I would try to visit her as often as I could. But she was 91 and age finally caught up with her. She passed away one night after living a life that I expect was better than that of most of my countrymen.
Visiting her meant lots of journeys and before I knew it I was addicted to the railway. I can now make a reservation sitting at home on my computer, pay with a credit card, and print my own e-ticket. If I don’t have a printer they deliver it in 24 hours. It is quite wonderful when something outstanding emerges from our public sector. Soon, I will be able to track my train’s progress at home or on a screen at the railway station via a satellite system.
In the early days of the Internet I predicted that computers would only take off in India when computer prices dropped to Rs 10,000 and when you could buy a railway ticket on the Net. Well, both have happened! And so, a revolution is underway and it is likely to be more profound than the mobile phone. The minister of HRD is, of course, oblivious of this because he is too busy dividing Indians. He doesn’t realise that India’s real divide is not caste but the English language and computers. Instead of trying to bridge these he is on his own casteist power trip.
The electronic ticket has left an army of reservation clerks unhappy. My South Indian friends used to complain that they couldn’t get a ticket on the Tamil Nadu Express during holidays without a bribe. This explains why the Railway unions have opposed e-tickets for years. But e-tickets are only a small part of a genuine renaissance in the Indian Railways. The bigger story is freight. In the past no one wanted to ship goods by rail because rail freight was expensive, inefficient and corrupt. Now a modern managerial mindset has set in and all sorts of innovative public-private partnerships are underway. The private sector is investing in wagons, container trains, new railway lines, and freight terminals. Meanwhile, a booming economy, competitive freight rates, and productivity gains have transformed profitability of the Railways.
Do we give the minister, Lalu Prasad, credit for this revival? He took over when the Railways were tottering financially, and if they had sunk we would have blamed him for “Biharing the railways”. Yes, he should get credit. Lalu’s success is not in what he has done, but in what he has not. He has surrounded himself with good people—Sudhir Kumar is one of them—and he has left them alone to run the show. This was also Ronald Reagan’s secret of success. Great managers have often led from the back.
The Indian Railways sell 4.8 billion tickets a year. This works out to 4.4 journeys per Indian. We are thus a nation on the move. When we are unhappy, we just pack up and go. Caste ties loosen when people travel and this is why Bihari migrants have united and are making a bid for power in the Punjab. Internal migration is our great safety valve against regional inequality, and because of it even Bihar will catch up one day.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Visiting her meant lots of journeys and before I knew it I was addicted to the railway. I can now make a reservation sitting at home on my computer, pay with a credit card, and print my own e-ticket. If I don’t have a printer they deliver it in 24 hours. It is quite wonderful when something outstanding emerges from our public sector. Soon, I will be able to track my train’s progress at home or on a screen at the railway station via a satellite system.
In the early days of the Internet I predicted that computers would only take off in India when computer prices dropped to Rs 10,000 and when you could buy a railway ticket on the Net. Well, both have happened! And so, a revolution is underway and it is likely to be more profound than the mobile phone. The minister of HRD is, of course, oblivious of this because he is too busy dividing Indians. He doesn’t realise that India’s real divide is not caste but the English language and computers. Instead of trying to bridge these he is on his own casteist power trip.
The electronic ticket has left an army of reservation clerks unhappy. My South Indian friends used to complain that they couldn’t get a ticket on the Tamil Nadu Express during holidays without a bribe. This explains why the Railway unions have opposed e-tickets for years. But e-tickets are only a small part of a genuine renaissance in the Indian Railways. The bigger story is freight. In the past no one wanted to ship goods by rail because rail freight was expensive, inefficient and corrupt. Now a modern managerial mindset has set in and all sorts of innovative public-private partnerships are underway. The private sector is investing in wagons, container trains, new railway lines, and freight terminals. Meanwhile, a booming economy, competitive freight rates, and productivity gains have transformed profitability of the Railways.
Do we give the minister, Lalu Prasad, credit for this revival? He took over when the Railways were tottering financially, and if they had sunk we would have blamed him for “Biharing the railways”. Yes, he should get credit. Lalu’s success is not in what he has done, but in what he has not. He has surrounded himself with good people—Sudhir Kumar is one of them—and he has left them alone to run the show. This was also Ronald Reagan’s secret of success. Great managers have often led from the back.
The Indian Railways sell 4.8 billion tickets a year. This works out to 4.4 journeys per Indian. We are thus a nation on the move. When we are unhappy, we just pack up and go. Caste ties loosen when people travel and this is why Bihari migrants have united and are making a bid for power in the Punjab. Internal migration is our great safety valve against regional inequality, and because of it even Bihar will catch up one day.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Don’t despair over integrity September 10, 2006
One ought to read a great book twice, at least. When I first read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace I was too young. I was only interested in the plot and the relationships between Natasha, Andrei, and Pierre. When I read it again in my forties, I was deeply moved by its moral concerns. I realised that the novel is really about the way we deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how we’re deeply unjust in our day to day lives. Most of this moral blindness seems man-made and avoidable. It makes one wonder if this is an intractable human condition, or can we change it?
It seems to me that ordinary human lives should not have to be so cruel and humiliating. Is it not possible to be more honest, fair, and kind in our relationships? Some of our misery is the result of the way the state treats us. Can we not reduce at least some of the grief that public officials inflict on us? It is in pursuit of these questions that I began to write this column more than ten years ago. The same questions sent me to the Mahabharata, and I tried to find answers in the epic’s elusive concept of dharma. I have concluded that we can reform our institutions, and this can change the morals and character of our people and deliver greater happiness to our society.
We are hopelessly addicted to the belief that corruption in India is caused by the crookedness of Indians. This is just not true. The truth is that India has far more red tape than other countries; red tape leads to corruption and distorts a people’s character. According to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” database, it takes 89 days to start a small business in India while it takes two days in Australia or Canada. There are more entry procedures in India; each procedure is a point of contact with an official; each contact is an opportunity to extract a bribe. Empirical studies show that burdensome entry regulations do not improve the quality of products, make work safer, or reduce pollution. They only hold back investment or force people into the informal economy. Hence, the Copenhagen Consensus of expert economists concluded in 2004 that easing start-up rules is more important for development than investing in infrastructure or health care.
In India it also takes longer to register a property, enforce a contract, and close a business. Indian managers spend more time on regulatory issues than managers in other countries. Thus, India ranks low among the 145 countries studied by the World Bank in the ease of doing business. Fortunately, reforms can quickly change country rankings. In 2005, 58 out of 145 countries cut red tape and simplified their regulations in some way. India was one of these—it improved its credit markets. Although it has been moving up since 1991, India remains a hostile business environment.
Civilized societies are less corrupt not because their character is superior but because their institutions are better at aligning the incentives of their citizens. There is nothing wrong in the character of Indians. The same Indians behave differently when they cross the immigration line at Heathrow airport. So, let us not despair about our integrity. Let’s focus on reforming our institutions, cutting red tape, and become a good place to do business. Our moral character will follow quickly. And yes, do read War and Peace, again.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
It seems to me that ordinary human lives should not have to be so cruel and humiliating. Is it not possible to be more honest, fair, and kind in our relationships? Some of our misery is the result of the way the state treats us. Can we not reduce at least some of the grief that public officials inflict on us? It is in pursuit of these questions that I began to write this column more than ten years ago. The same questions sent me to the Mahabharata, and I tried to find answers in the epic’s elusive concept of dharma. I have concluded that we can reform our institutions, and this can change the morals and character of our people and deliver greater happiness to our society.
We are hopelessly addicted to the belief that corruption in India is caused by the crookedness of Indians. This is just not true. The truth is that India has far more red tape than other countries; red tape leads to corruption and distorts a people’s character. According to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” database, it takes 89 days to start a small business in India while it takes two days in Australia or Canada. There are more entry procedures in India; each procedure is a point of contact with an official; each contact is an opportunity to extract a bribe. Empirical studies show that burdensome entry regulations do not improve the quality of products, make work safer, or reduce pollution. They only hold back investment or force people into the informal economy. Hence, the Copenhagen Consensus of expert economists concluded in 2004 that easing start-up rules is more important for development than investing in infrastructure or health care.
In India it also takes longer to register a property, enforce a contract, and close a business. Indian managers spend more time on regulatory issues than managers in other countries. Thus, India ranks low among the 145 countries studied by the World Bank in the ease of doing business. Fortunately, reforms can quickly change country rankings. In 2005, 58 out of 145 countries cut red tape and simplified their regulations in some way. India was one of these—it improved its credit markets. Although it has been moving up since 1991, India remains a hostile business environment.
Civilized societies are less corrupt not because their character is superior but because their institutions are better at aligning the incentives of their citizens. There is nothing wrong in the character of Indians. The same Indians behave differently when they cross the immigration line at Heathrow airport. So, let us not despair about our integrity. Let’s focus on reforming our institutions, cutting red tape, and become a good place to do business. Our moral character will follow quickly. And yes, do read War and Peace, again.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Thursday, August 24, 2006
What about my mother tongue? August 27, 2006
My column on ‘Inglish’ last month brought a lot of mail. Much of it was favourable, but a few criticised me for advocating the “bizarre” idea that we should think of English as an Indian language and exploit it unabashedly to “conquer the world”. Since my critics are serious academics I don’t want to dismiss their concerns lightly. The nation’s 59th birthday has also just passed—so it is a good time to dwell on our linguistic future.
Anthropologists tell us that language is a carrier of culture and one’s first language carries one’s culture. Gauri Vishwanathan writes in the Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India that the English language came to us as an "imperial mission" of educating and civilising colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England. English speaking Indians thus became “alienated from their roots, their character degraded, and their minds colonized and incapable of innovation”. English also became an instrument of social exclusion against the low caste. Hence, many critics want English banned from our primary schools.
True, it came here on an imperial mission and got left behind by accident, but English is now a part of our history, as much as Gandhi and Nehru. Millions of Indians have been speaking English for generations and they don’t show imminent signs of losing their Indian-ness. Besides, young middle class Indians today are more confident and relaxed, and their minds are finally decolonised. They think of English as an empowering skill, like Windows, and are comfortable mixing it with their mother tongue. They “live in their own skin" as the great French-Algerian writer, Frantz Fanon, would have put it.
Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, says that no one 'owns' English anymore. It is the global language and a quarter of the world's population uses it. Three-quarters of the world's people are naturally bilingual, he adds. This means that people are capable of maintaining a balance between their language of empowerment and their language of identity. Hence, major languages, like Marathi and Kannada, are in no danger of extinction (although our tribal languages are). Vernacular chauvinists, in Karnataka and elsewhere, are wrong to go against parents’ wishes who want their children to learn English in primary schools. Linguistic experts say that a person has a huge advantage if he learns a language before the age of ten. This is one of the reasons why 98 out of 100 candidates for call centre jobs get rejected. Over the next ten years 3.5 million jobs are expected to be outsourced globally, and they are likely to be lost by India because BPO experts say that India is losing its “English” advantage to other countries. China has realised that outsourcing is capable of wiping out the disease of “educated unemployment” and it has made teaching English from KG a national goal.
What is truly “bizarre” is that India, whose success in the global economy derives from its facility with English, should remain hostage to the deep insecurities of its vernacular chauvinists. They worry about borrowing English words. Imagine if Shakespeare had written his plays in pure Anglo Saxon and hadn’t borrowed wildly from Latin, Germanic and French roots! We can either be like the French or the Chinese. The French whine over globalization while the confident Chinese go out to play and win the game. I’d rather follow the Chinese. Let’s think of English as an Indian language and go and win the world.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Anthropologists tell us that language is a carrier of culture and one’s first language carries one’s culture. Gauri Vishwanathan writes in the Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India that the English language came to us as an "imperial mission" of educating and civilising colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England. English speaking Indians thus became “alienated from their roots, their character degraded, and their minds colonized and incapable of innovation”. English also became an instrument of social exclusion against the low caste. Hence, many critics want English banned from our primary schools.
True, it came here on an imperial mission and got left behind by accident, but English is now a part of our history, as much as Gandhi and Nehru. Millions of Indians have been speaking English for generations and they don’t show imminent signs of losing their Indian-ness. Besides, young middle class Indians today are more confident and relaxed, and their minds are finally decolonised. They think of English as an empowering skill, like Windows, and are comfortable mixing it with their mother tongue. They “live in their own skin" as the great French-Algerian writer, Frantz Fanon, would have put it.
Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, says that no one 'owns' English anymore. It is the global language and a quarter of the world's population uses it. Three-quarters of the world's people are naturally bilingual, he adds. This means that people are capable of maintaining a balance between their language of empowerment and their language of identity. Hence, major languages, like Marathi and Kannada, are in no danger of extinction (although our tribal languages are). Vernacular chauvinists, in Karnataka and elsewhere, are wrong to go against parents’ wishes who want their children to learn English in primary schools. Linguistic experts say that a person has a huge advantage if he learns a language before the age of ten. This is one of the reasons why 98 out of 100 candidates for call centre jobs get rejected. Over the next ten years 3.5 million jobs are expected to be outsourced globally, and they are likely to be lost by India because BPO experts say that India is losing its “English” advantage to other countries. China has realised that outsourcing is capable of wiping out the disease of “educated unemployment” and it has made teaching English from KG a national goal.
What is truly “bizarre” is that India, whose success in the global economy derives from its facility with English, should remain hostage to the deep insecurities of its vernacular chauvinists. They worry about borrowing English words. Imagine if Shakespeare had written his plays in pure Anglo Saxon and hadn’t borrowed wildly from Latin, Germanic and French roots! We can either be like the French or the Chinese. The French whine over globalization while the confident Chinese go out to play and win the game. I’d rather follow the Chinese. Let’s think of English as an Indian language and go and win the world.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Let our cities reflect the spirit of a new age, Outlook Magazine, August 13,2006
When I heard two weeks ago that one Sanjay Singal, chairman of Bhushan Power and Steel, had bought a one acre plot on 4 Amrita Shergill Marg in New Delhi for Rs 137 crores, I wanted to rush up to him and say to him, ‘Now that you have one of India’s most prized properties, do select a great architect to build your home. For god’s sake, let’s not have another cut-and-paste job. Your building ought to symbolise the rise of a new age in India after the reforms, and millions will remember you for having captured a great moment in our history.’ For good architecture has the amazing ability to represent the life of the times in our imagination.
This issue of Outlook is about the way “the world looks at India”, and one of the most potent ones is visual memory. A great nation or city is defined by its buildings. We remember Paris not only by the Eiffel Tower, but by the wonderful boulevard buildings of Baron Haussmann. We think of New York by the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings (although my favourite is Mies’ Seagrams building). Sydney has its exciting Opera House. Although Seattle’s signature is the Space Needle, etched in my memory is Rem Koolhaas’ public library. There is even a city which was ‘created’ by a building— Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum is rightly called the ‘miracle of Bilbao’, which put this unknown city in northeast Spain on the world map. These visuals symbols are not just symbols of man’s quest for beauty, they also reflect the spirit of an age.
It is fifteen years since the golden summer of 1991 when we lost our innocence and with it our fear of the global economy, and began our affair with the free market. It has been a remarkable period which has spawned world class companies and made us one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Time, the Economist, and Foreign Affairs recently did cover issues on this ‘rise of India’. Yet if you think about it, we don’t have a single visual image which celebrates this new age with its spirit of economic freedom and the unshackling of the energies of the Indian people, and in parenthesis, the slow decline of the old bureaucratic state.
Certainly, we do have some powerful visual reminders of our great cities. When you think of Mumbai, you think of the Gateway of India (although VT station is what I think of). Delhi has Qutub Minar, Humayun’s Tomb, India Gate, and a host of visual symbols. But these are images of our colonial and pre-colonial past. The first and last visual moment of post-Independence India was in the mid-1950s when Jawaharlal Nehru, with plenty of vision and courage, commissioned Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh. Swadeshi voices were raised even then—‘why can’t an Indian architect do it? But Nehru had little patience for petty minds with their petty complexes, and he stood firm. He may have been the victim of bad economic ideas like ‘import substitution’ but his mind was as open as Rabindranath Tagore’s when it came to the world.
The civilized merchant prince, Vikram Sarabhai, supported Nehru’s bold approach and he invited Corbusier to design a house for his family in Ahmedabad. During this fertile period in Ahmedabad, the great Louis Kahn built the campus of the Indian Institute of Management and Ray and Charles Eames were associated with the National School of Design. Thus, two geographies of contemporary India entered the history of world architecture, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. Corbusier went on to inspire a generation of great architects—B.V. Doshi, Charles Correa, and many others.
Chandigarh is by now the memory of an age gone by. The city captured our utopian, post-Independence dreams of socialism, secularism and democracy, and more importantly our faith in the state’s ability to do good. By the seventies, however, Indira Gandhi had perverted these ideals and socialism had turned into a statist Licence Raj and democracy was almost extinguished by the Emergency. Our mood of despair finally lifted with the announcement of sweeping liberalisation in July 1991. It was as though our second independence had arrived: we were going to be free from a rapacious and domineering state. A new stage in our history had begun with a decisive shift in country’s energy to the private sector.
So now, when Infosys, Wipro or TCS puts up a new building, it should ask itself, if what goes on inside is world class, shouldn’t the outside reflect this achievement? The same responsibility devolves upon our other globally competitive companies like Bharti, Bharat Forge, Jet Airways, ICICI Bank. Come to think of it, if Sir Norman Foster could design the Hong Kong airport and Renzo Piano the Kansia airport in Osaka, why don’t we have great architects design our new airports in Delhi and Mumbai? The responsibility for ‘dreaming Chandigarhs’ has now fallen on the business class, particularly on builders like DLF, Mittals and Rahejas.
Just before Sanjay Singal bought his acre in Lutyens Delhi, Navin Jindal had paid Rs 165 crores to buy 3.8 acres on Mansingh Road. At these prices one can now afford to bring in a Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier or even I.M. Pei. A good place to start looking for a great architect is among the 27 recipients of the annual Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, but there are many more to choose from.
It is time we took our cities seriously. They have unbelievable energy; they are crowded; but they can be beautiful. The word ‘city’ is related to ‘civic’ and ‘civilization’, and the city is a place of civilization. Some Indians have a prejudice against urban towers, which is understandable for a typical glass and steel tower is aggressive, arrogant and black, and it is trying to say, ‘I am more powerful than you’. But when someone like Renzo Piano thinks of urban towers, he thinks of San Gemignano, and a ‘desire to go up, to breathe fresh air, to disappear into the sky…it is not a bad idea to go up in dense cities.’
A hundred years from now the world will remember the first quarter of the 21st century not for 9/11 as many Americans believe, but for the rise of China and India. It is as important a moment in world history as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Kenneth Clarke reminds us: ‘A great historical episode can exist in our imagination almost entirely in the form of architecture. Very few of us have read the texts of early Egyptian literature. Yet we feel we know those infinitely remote people almost as well as our immediate ancestors, chiefly because of their sculpture and architecture.’ So, let’s return the compliment to liberalization by putting up some great buildings and make something out of our cities that will live after us.------Gurcharan Das is the author of India Unbound and other books. He was formerly CEO of Procter and Gamble India.
This issue of Outlook is about the way “the world looks at India”, and one of the most potent ones is visual memory. A great nation or city is defined by its buildings. We remember Paris not only by the Eiffel Tower, but by the wonderful boulevard buildings of Baron Haussmann. We think of New York by the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings (although my favourite is Mies’ Seagrams building). Sydney has its exciting Opera House. Although Seattle’s signature is the Space Needle, etched in my memory is Rem Koolhaas’ public library. There is even a city which was ‘created’ by a building— Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum is rightly called the ‘miracle of Bilbao’, which put this unknown city in northeast Spain on the world map. These visuals symbols are not just symbols of man’s quest for beauty, they also reflect the spirit of an age.
It is fifteen years since the golden summer of 1991 when we lost our innocence and with it our fear of the global economy, and began our affair with the free market. It has been a remarkable period which has spawned world class companies and made us one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Time, the Economist, and Foreign Affairs recently did cover issues on this ‘rise of India’. Yet if you think about it, we don’t have a single visual image which celebrates this new age with its spirit of economic freedom and the unshackling of the energies of the Indian people, and in parenthesis, the slow decline of the old bureaucratic state.
Certainly, we do have some powerful visual reminders of our great cities. When you think of Mumbai, you think of the Gateway of India (although VT station is what I think of). Delhi has Qutub Minar, Humayun’s Tomb, India Gate, and a host of visual symbols. But these are images of our colonial and pre-colonial past. The first and last visual moment of post-Independence India was in the mid-1950s when Jawaharlal Nehru, with plenty of vision and courage, commissioned Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh. Swadeshi voices were raised even then—‘why can’t an Indian architect do it? But Nehru had little patience for petty minds with their petty complexes, and he stood firm. He may have been the victim of bad economic ideas like ‘import substitution’ but his mind was as open as Rabindranath Tagore’s when it came to the world.
The civilized merchant prince, Vikram Sarabhai, supported Nehru’s bold approach and he invited Corbusier to design a house for his family in Ahmedabad. During this fertile period in Ahmedabad, the great Louis Kahn built the campus of the Indian Institute of Management and Ray and Charles Eames were associated with the National School of Design. Thus, two geographies of contemporary India entered the history of world architecture, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. Corbusier went on to inspire a generation of great architects—B.V. Doshi, Charles Correa, and many others.
Chandigarh is by now the memory of an age gone by. The city captured our utopian, post-Independence dreams of socialism, secularism and democracy, and more importantly our faith in the state’s ability to do good. By the seventies, however, Indira Gandhi had perverted these ideals and socialism had turned into a statist Licence Raj and democracy was almost extinguished by the Emergency. Our mood of despair finally lifted with the announcement of sweeping liberalisation in July 1991. It was as though our second independence had arrived: we were going to be free from a rapacious and domineering state. A new stage in our history had begun with a decisive shift in country’s energy to the private sector.
So now, when Infosys, Wipro or TCS puts up a new building, it should ask itself, if what goes on inside is world class, shouldn’t the outside reflect this achievement? The same responsibility devolves upon our other globally competitive companies like Bharti, Bharat Forge, Jet Airways, ICICI Bank. Come to think of it, if Sir Norman Foster could design the Hong Kong airport and Renzo Piano the Kansia airport in Osaka, why don’t we have great architects design our new airports in Delhi and Mumbai? The responsibility for ‘dreaming Chandigarhs’ has now fallen on the business class, particularly on builders like DLF, Mittals and Rahejas.
Just before Sanjay Singal bought his acre in Lutyens Delhi, Navin Jindal had paid Rs 165 crores to buy 3.8 acres on Mansingh Road. At these prices one can now afford to bring in a Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier or even I.M. Pei. A good place to start looking for a great architect is among the 27 recipients of the annual Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, but there are many more to choose from.
It is time we took our cities seriously. They have unbelievable energy; they are crowded; but they can be beautiful. The word ‘city’ is related to ‘civic’ and ‘civilization’, and the city is a place of civilization. Some Indians have a prejudice against urban towers, which is understandable for a typical glass and steel tower is aggressive, arrogant and black, and it is trying to say, ‘I am more powerful than you’. But when someone like Renzo Piano thinks of urban towers, he thinks of San Gemignano, and a ‘desire to go up, to breathe fresh air, to disappear into the sky…it is not a bad idea to go up in dense cities.’
A hundred years from now the world will remember the first quarter of the 21st century not for 9/11 as many Americans believe, but for the rise of China and India. It is as important a moment in world history as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Kenneth Clarke reminds us: ‘A great historical episode can exist in our imagination almost entirely in the form of architecture. Very few of us have read the texts of early Egyptian literature. Yet we feel we know those infinitely remote people almost as well as our immediate ancestors, chiefly because of their sculpture and architecture.’ So, let’s return the compliment to liberalization by putting up some great buildings and make something out of our cities that will live after us.------Gurcharan Das is the author of India Unbound and other books. He was formerly CEO of Procter and Gamble India.
Monday, August 21, 2006
How to score a self-goal!, August 13, 2006
Truly, we are a wondrous land! In a country where two thirds of the children are undernourished, where 70 percent of the people cannot access safe sanitation and 65 infants die out of a thousand born, we are seriously debating the pesticide levels in a product that is probably the safest in the world from a pesticide perspective. Sadly, the controversy has created a scare in a nation which has among the lowest pesticide residues in its food chain. Indian diets contain roughly 18 percent of acceptable daily intake levels of pesticide versus Western diets which have 40 to 50 percent, according to international experts. The reason is that our diets are extensively vegetarian; and meat inherently has higher pesticide levels via the grains ingested by animals in the food chain.
If we are seriously concerned with pesticides in Indian diets, we ought to begin with tea. According to European norms (EU), tea contains 187,300 times the pesticide than water used in colas. If hypothetically our colas had exceeded allowable levels by thirty times, I could still drink 6200 glasses of cola and I would have less pesticide in my body than a cup of tea. The same goes for other foods. EU norms allow apples to have 154,120 times the pesticide than water; bananas to have 95,220 times; milk 7140 times. So, soft drinks are among the safest products we consume from the pesticide perspective. This doesn’t mean that our other foods are not safe. Nor is our food chain polluted—an unfortunate impression created by the media. It means that we do not live in an ideal world free of pests and pesticides.
I am generally a critic of our government, but in this case I give it credit. It has fixed water standards which are equal to the highest norms in the world. Since water in soft drinks conforms to these norms, it is probably safer to drink a Pepsi in Kerala than in Kentucky. The government is also now working on sugar norms and testing a protocol for finished soft drinks. In the end, governments understand that multinational companies have to maintain high standards because they have too much to lose. News travels quickly and a disaster in one country can harm a company’s image and sales around the world. Hence, the Indian government wants to do its own tests. The last time around government data showed six times lower pesticide levels than CSE’s tests.
Our state politicians have fallen into a trap. They think that by banning colas they have won cheap votes. People, however, will soon realise that they have been taken for a ride. Already the people of Kerala are questioning, how can you ban colas and allow the sale of liquor and cigarettes? Eventually, everyone has lost in this silly business. Our nation has been unfairly smeared for high pesticide in our food chain. Our exports of food products will lose the trust of international customers. Tourists will say, “If I can’t drink a safe cola, how can I eat anything in India?” Foreign investors will be reluctant to invest in a country which does not observe the rule of law in closing factories. All NGOs have got a bad name by these smear tactics. The environmental movement has been hurt. This is sad because we need a strong civil society to take on the real problems of India. Finally, media has been tarnished by its lack of application. We have truly scored a self-goal!
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
If we are seriously concerned with pesticides in Indian diets, we ought to begin with tea. According to European norms (EU), tea contains 187,300 times the pesticide than water used in colas. If hypothetically our colas had exceeded allowable levels by thirty times, I could still drink 6200 glasses of cola and I would have less pesticide in my body than a cup of tea. The same goes for other foods. EU norms allow apples to have 154,120 times the pesticide than water; bananas to have 95,220 times; milk 7140 times. So, soft drinks are among the safest products we consume from the pesticide perspective. This doesn’t mean that our other foods are not safe. Nor is our food chain polluted—an unfortunate impression created by the media. It means that we do not live in an ideal world free of pests and pesticides.
I am generally a critic of our government, but in this case I give it credit. It has fixed water standards which are equal to the highest norms in the world. Since water in soft drinks conforms to these norms, it is probably safer to drink a Pepsi in Kerala than in Kentucky. The government is also now working on sugar norms and testing a protocol for finished soft drinks. In the end, governments understand that multinational companies have to maintain high standards because they have too much to lose. News travels quickly and a disaster in one country can harm a company’s image and sales around the world. Hence, the Indian government wants to do its own tests. The last time around government data showed six times lower pesticide levels than CSE’s tests.
Our state politicians have fallen into a trap. They think that by banning colas they have won cheap votes. People, however, will soon realise that they have been taken for a ride. Already the people of Kerala are questioning, how can you ban colas and allow the sale of liquor and cigarettes? Eventually, everyone has lost in this silly business. Our nation has been unfairly smeared for high pesticide in our food chain. Our exports of food products will lose the trust of international customers. Tourists will say, “If I can’t drink a safe cola, how can I eat anything in India?” Foreign investors will be reluctant to invest in a country which does not observe the rule of law in closing factories. All NGOs have got a bad name by these smear tactics. The environmental movement has been hurt. This is sad because we need a strong civil society to take on the real problems of India. Finally, media has been tarnished by its lack of application. We have truly scored a self-goal!
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Monday, August 07, 2006
The difficulty of being good July 30, 2006
There is a green playing field near my house where children can usually be found playing cricket. Over the past two months, however, they have quietly switched to football. Since I love football, I stop and linger and watch, hoping to see someone score a goal. But my neighbour says he misses the cricket, and blames this change on “insidious globalization”. He is referring, of course, to last month’s World Cup, which should have been a dazzling climax to Zinedine Zidane’s glorious career, but instead it left the memory of an angry moment and exposed the tragic flaw in a hero who carried the burden of a divided nation on his shoulders. Like a tragic hero, he went not to his coronation but to his disgrace.
Zidane symbolized peace and reconciliation in a troubled France where riots had erupted last year in dozens of cities. A shy, level-headed, family man, he was proof to millions of immigrant children in France that you could be brown and Muslim and African, and still be a success in the 21st century. Like Karna in the Mahabharata, Zidane had a “mystical talent”. He had the ability to accurately control the ball with any part of his boot, to make the ball hover between his ankles, which meant that it was impossible for his opponent to read where he was going to kick the ball.
The parallel with Karna doesn’t end there. It was Zidane’s last game as it was Karna’s last battle. The French assembled their team around Zidane; the Kauravas built their strategy around Karna. Zidane changed the tournament by defeating Brazil; Karna was capable of changing the course of the Kurukshetra war. The penalty shoot-out loomed before Zidane; the fight with Arjuna hung over Karna. Just as Materazzi tried to demoralize Zidane psychologically, so did Salya, Karna’s charioteer. (Yudhishthira had extracted a promise from Salya that instead of raising Karna’s morale, like a good charioteer, he would destroy it.) Zidane had a low flash point and the Italians knew it. So, they began to wind him up from the start of the match. And he threw it all away when he turned, walked back to Materazzi, and with all that unstoppable venom, hit him.
Most of us don’t swear at strangers on the street. So, why should sportsmen behave in this disgraceful way? Australian cricketers have turned sledging into an art form. The truth is that psychological warfare is an old ploy going back to the days of the Mahabharata. A professional must learn to deal with it. When Shane Warne tried this on Brian Lara, the latter scored 275. In reacting to Materazzi, Zidane broke a golden rule of a professional. He put his feelings ahead of his team. Terry Venables, the former English coach, used to tell his players, “If they spit on your face, turn around and walk away.” Gandhi taught the same to Satyagrahis during the Quit India Movement.
When you are so admired you begin to believe you are a god. It is as though the legend becomes too much for the man. Hubris takes over, and you are ready for a fall. It is one of one of life’s cruelties that the best must also fail. Yudhishthira too had to tell a lie. The Mahabharata teaches us how difficult it is to be good in this world, which I suppose, is an apt sub-title not only for the epic but also for our life on this earth.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Zidane symbolized peace and reconciliation in a troubled France where riots had erupted last year in dozens of cities. A shy, level-headed, family man, he was proof to millions of immigrant children in France that you could be brown and Muslim and African, and still be a success in the 21st century. Like Karna in the Mahabharata, Zidane had a “mystical talent”. He had the ability to accurately control the ball with any part of his boot, to make the ball hover between his ankles, which meant that it was impossible for his opponent to read where he was going to kick the ball.
The parallel with Karna doesn’t end there. It was Zidane’s last game as it was Karna’s last battle. The French assembled their team around Zidane; the Kauravas built their strategy around Karna. Zidane changed the tournament by defeating Brazil; Karna was capable of changing the course of the Kurukshetra war. The penalty shoot-out loomed before Zidane; the fight with Arjuna hung over Karna. Just as Materazzi tried to demoralize Zidane psychologically, so did Salya, Karna’s charioteer. (Yudhishthira had extracted a promise from Salya that instead of raising Karna’s morale, like a good charioteer, he would destroy it.) Zidane had a low flash point and the Italians knew it. So, they began to wind him up from the start of the match. And he threw it all away when he turned, walked back to Materazzi, and with all that unstoppable venom, hit him.
Most of us don’t swear at strangers on the street. So, why should sportsmen behave in this disgraceful way? Australian cricketers have turned sledging into an art form. The truth is that psychological warfare is an old ploy going back to the days of the Mahabharata. A professional must learn to deal with it. When Shane Warne tried this on Brian Lara, the latter scored 275. In reacting to Materazzi, Zidane broke a golden rule of a professional. He put his feelings ahead of his team. Terry Venables, the former English coach, used to tell his players, “If they spit on your face, turn around and walk away.” Gandhi taught the same to Satyagrahis during the Quit India Movement.
When you are so admired you begin to believe you are a god. It is as though the legend becomes too much for the man. Hubris takes over, and you are ready for a fall. It is one of one of life’s cruelties that the best must also fail. Yudhishthira too had to tell a lie. The Mahabharata teaches us how difficult it is to be good in this world, which I suppose, is an apt sub-title not only for the epic but also for our life on this earth.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Inglish, it’s cool! July 16, 2006
A few years ago TV viewers in Tamil Nadu were entertained by pictures of irate children and grandchildren of Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi, scolding the police in chaste English while apologetic policemen grovelled in Tamil. The scene was not remarkable except that the amused viewers had been victims of incessant sermons by the mighty minister on the evils of English, and the irony did not escape them.
Last year I wrote a long essay about two trends that are likely to determine our linguistic future. One is the rapid spread of English across India; the second is the unprecedented popularity of Hindi. The collision of the two we call Hinglish, but should, in fact, be called Inglish because it is increasingly pan-India’s street language and borrows from all vernaculars. Mixing English with our mother tongues has been going on for generations, but what is different this time around is that Inglish is both the aspirational language of the lower classes and the fashionable idiom of upper class drawing rooms. Inglish is the stylish language of Bollywood, FM radio and national advertising. Advertisers, in particular, have been surprised by the terrific resonance to slogans such as, ‘Life ho to aise’, ‘Josh machine’ and ‘Dil mange more’.
What exactly is Inglish is not easy to define, and needs more research. Is its base English or vernacular bhasha? For the upwardly mobile, I think, it is bhasha, such as what my newsboy speaks: ‘Aaj main busy hoon, kal bill milega, definitely’. Or my bania’s helper: ‘voh, mujhe avoid karti hai!’ For the classes, on the other hand, the base is definitely English, as in: ‘Hungry, kya?’ or ‘Careful yaar, voh dangerous hai!’ Zee News’ evening bulletin is more even handed with an equal number of English and Hindi words: ‘Aaj Middle East mein peace ho gai!’
In Inglish, perhaps for the first time we may have found a unifying language of the masses and the classes, acceptable to the South and the North. Its rise has parallels with Urdu, which became a naturalised subcontinental language mainly after the decline of Muslim rule. Originally the camp argot of the country’s Muslim conquerors, Urdu was forged from a combination of the conqueror’s imported Farsi and local bhasha. Just as soldiers transported it to the Deccan, so is Inglish riding the coat-tails of Outsourcing and Bollywood. It is appropriate that this should be happening to English for it is a bastard and has borrowed promiscuously from all languages. It sprang up in late 14th century England among common people when the Norman aristocracy spoke French and the clergy Latin. The first efforts to translate the Bible into English led to burnings at the stake, but in a hundred years it had produced Shakespeare. Inglish too might do the same in the 21st century!
So, is Inglish our ‘conquest of English’ to paraphrase Salman Rushdie? Or is it our journey to ‘conquer the world’ in the words of Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, who predicts that Indian English will soon become the most widely spoken variant of English as a result of India’s economic rise and the sheer size of its population. ‘When 300 hundred million Indians pronounce an English word in a certain way’, he says, ‘it will be the only way to pronounce it.’ Raghuvir Sahay sums it up well: “The English taught us English to turn us into subjects/ Now we teach ourselves English to turn into masters”.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Last year I wrote a long essay about two trends that are likely to determine our linguistic future. One is the rapid spread of English across India; the second is the unprecedented popularity of Hindi. The collision of the two we call Hinglish, but should, in fact, be called Inglish because it is increasingly pan-India’s street language and borrows from all vernaculars. Mixing English with our mother tongues has been going on for generations, but what is different this time around is that Inglish is both the aspirational language of the lower classes and the fashionable idiom of upper class drawing rooms. Inglish is the stylish language of Bollywood, FM radio and national advertising. Advertisers, in particular, have been surprised by the terrific resonance to slogans such as, ‘Life ho to aise’, ‘Josh machine’ and ‘Dil mange more’.
What exactly is Inglish is not easy to define, and needs more research. Is its base English or vernacular bhasha? For the upwardly mobile, I think, it is bhasha, such as what my newsboy speaks: ‘Aaj main busy hoon, kal bill milega, definitely’. Or my bania’s helper: ‘voh, mujhe avoid karti hai!’ For the classes, on the other hand, the base is definitely English, as in: ‘Hungry, kya?’ or ‘Careful yaar, voh dangerous hai!’ Zee News’ evening bulletin is more even handed with an equal number of English and Hindi words: ‘Aaj Middle East mein peace ho gai!’
In Inglish, perhaps for the first time we may have found a unifying language of the masses and the classes, acceptable to the South and the North. Its rise has parallels with Urdu, which became a naturalised subcontinental language mainly after the decline of Muslim rule. Originally the camp argot of the country’s Muslim conquerors, Urdu was forged from a combination of the conqueror’s imported Farsi and local bhasha. Just as soldiers transported it to the Deccan, so is Inglish riding the coat-tails of Outsourcing and Bollywood. It is appropriate that this should be happening to English for it is a bastard and has borrowed promiscuously from all languages. It sprang up in late 14th century England among common people when the Norman aristocracy spoke French and the clergy Latin. The first efforts to translate the Bible into English led to burnings at the stake, but in a hundred years it had produced Shakespeare. Inglish too might do the same in the 21st century!
So, is Inglish our ‘conquest of English’ to paraphrase Salman Rushdie? Or is it our journey to ‘conquer the world’ in the words of Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, who predicts that Indian English will soon become the most widely spoken variant of English as a result of India’s economic rise and the sheer size of its population. ‘When 300 hundred million Indians pronounce an English word in a certain way’, he says, ‘it will be the only way to pronounce it.’ Raghuvir Sahay sums it up well: “The English taught us English to turn us into subjects/ Now we teach ourselves English to turn into masters”.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Curse of seniority July 2, 2006
Two weeks ago I was invited to a glamorous event in Manhattan celebrating the launch of a special issue of the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine titled The Rise of India to which I had also contributed. A knowledgeable and well heeled audience heard our moderator begin with Jim Rogers’ famous line that he wouldn’t invest in India because “it had the worst bureaucracy in the world”. An odd note to begin an event honouring India’s rise! It soon became apparent, however, that we must be celebrating the rise of a “private” India. A worrisome question hung over the whole evening--is India rising economically despite the state?
During our socialist days we worried about economic growth but we were proud of our world class judiciary, bureaucracy and the police. Now we are ashamed of these very institutions while we take growth for granted. The brightest human beings on the earth reside in India’s public services, but their fibre has been destroyed by the system’s inability to nurture the good and punish the bad. This is, in part, due to the insidious seniority system run by small and safe men. When a person is promoted regardless of performance he loses his will to excel. And so, what was once called the best civil service in the world has been “dumbed down”. In 1938, 81 civil servants ran the central government and a thousand ICS officers ruled undivided India of 300 million people far more efficiently because they had not succumbed to the disease of seniority.
It is also democracy’s fault. It creates the illusion that if we are equal in one respect we must be equal in every way. As citizens we are equal before the law with equal rights, but this sensible idea is subverted into a belief that if we are equal legally then we must be equal in other ways. Thus, we are shy to reward talented persons and punish non-performers. When institutions stop nurturing talent then one falls into a sick world of “rishwat and sifarish” where lakhs of cases remain pending in the courts, where drinking water doesn’t reach the poor, where electricity board engineers connive to steal power and universities promote unsuitable professors.
Great nations are built by talented persons. Anyone who has run an institution or a business knows the 80:20 rule—80 percent of the results are delivered by 20 percent of the people. Hence, smart managers reward the talented without de-motivating the rest. Talent is, of course, widely dispersed--it exists among dalits, brahmins and OBCs--and successful nations are able to spot and nurture it. Just as one wouldn’t select a World Cup football team based on reservations, so one must never bend the rules of entry into any institution. Doing so sends a wrong signal to the young, telling them, “chalta hai”. If the entry exam doesn’t evaluate talent properly then we should change the exam but not sacrifice the principle of merit.
Indian companies are becoming world class because they respect this principle. Veerappa Moily, who is now picking up the pieces after Arjun Singh, could similarly give birth to world class private universities in India if he got rid of the Licence Raj in education. What a wonderful way to expand seats! And if Manmohan Singh is serious about governance, he should attack the accursed principle of seniority. Great nations somehow manage to strike the right balance between the claims of talent and equity. Others are cursed to be mediocre.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
During our socialist days we worried about economic growth but we were proud of our world class judiciary, bureaucracy and the police. Now we are ashamed of these very institutions while we take growth for granted. The brightest human beings on the earth reside in India’s public services, but their fibre has been destroyed by the system’s inability to nurture the good and punish the bad. This is, in part, due to the insidious seniority system run by small and safe men. When a person is promoted regardless of performance he loses his will to excel. And so, what was once called the best civil service in the world has been “dumbed down”. In 1938, 81 civil servants ran the central government and a thousand ICS officers ruled undivided India of 300 million people far more efficiently because they had not succumbed to the disease of seniority.
It is also democracy’s fault. It creates the illusion that if we are equal in one respect we must be equal in every way. As citizens we are equal before the law with equal rights, but this sensible idea is subverted into a belief that if we are equal legally then we must be equal in other ways. Thus, we are shy to reward talented persons and punish non-performers. When institutions stop nurturing talent then one falls into a sick world of “rishwat and sifarish” where lakhs of cases remain pending in the courts, where drinking water doesn’t reach the poor, where electricity board engineers connive to steal power and universities promote unsuitable professors.
Great nations are built by talented persons. Anyone who has run an institution or a business knows the 80:20 rule—80 percent of the results are delivered by 20 percent of the people. Hence, smart managers reward the talented without de-motivating the rest. Talent is, of course, widely dispersed--it exists among dalits, brahmins and OBCs--and successful nations are able to spot and nurture it. Just as one wouldn’t select a World Cup football team based on reservations, so one must never bend the rules of entry into any institution. Doing so sends a wrong signal to the young, telling them, “chalta hai”. If the entry exam doesn’t evaluate talent properly then we should change the exam but not sacrifice the principle of merit.
Indian companies are becoming world class because they respect this principle. Veerappa Moily, who is now picking up the pieces after Arjun Singh, could similarly give birth to world class private universities in India if he got rid of the Licence Raj in education. What a wonderful way to expand seats! And if Manmohan Singh is serious about governance, he should attack the accursed principle of seniority. Great nations somehow manage to strike the right balance between the claims of talent and equity. Others are cursed to be mediocre.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
A highway called India June 18, 2006
Homi Bhabha, the distinguished professor of English at Harvard, recently described India as a multi-lane highway. This is a happy metaphor, I think, because it captures nicely our diverse multilingual, multicultural, open society in which all are moving forward, albeit at different speeds. At the same forum Amartya Sen added that India had experienced huge gains from the economic reforms and everyone seemed to be rising. The only question is if those in the slow lane are gaining enough from the reforms. He went on to remind us about the English philosopher, David Hume’s astonishing thought--market expansion makes us aware of others’ lives and thus expands our ethical horizon.
Thanks to talented persons in the fast lane, India is now on the verge of becoming a world beater, even a champion, and this is happening after a thousand years. We ought to ensure now that those in the slow lane also get an equal start on the highway so that they too accelerate and change lanes at the right moment. Hence, I had proposed here a scholarship scheme on May 7th with a choice of any private or public school for all disadvantaged schoolchildren in India. This would promote equity without compromising merit, and it would do more for OBCs than reservations. It turns out that it will also cost exactly the same as the cabinet’s decision to recklessly expand capacity in higher education.
Arjun Singh’s proposal, however, seeks to artificially push persons from the slower to the faster lanes. This will cause accidents on the road and all the lanes will slow down. When high performers observe persons with lower marks stealing ahead by unfair means, they are bound to lose heart. Some of their competitive spirit will die. The notion of fair competition develops early in human beings. Studies by the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, show that even three year olds get offended when one child gets a bigger piece of the cake. This is why every judgment by the American Supreme Court has opposed quotas even though it was sympathetic to affirmative action.
The cabinet’s compromise to rapidly expand seats will further diminish the already low standards in most colleges. India will not be able to compete in a world that has no place for mediocrity. Since 1991, we have tried to build a world class India by focusing on growth, believing that expansion was the best tonic for lifting the poor. Suddenly, in the past two years, we are no longer interested in growing India but only in dividing it. No wonder Arjun Singh appears in a web poll among the “villains who divided India” along with Jinnah, Godse, V.P. Singh and Narendra Modi. I am not one of Midnight’s children--I was born in the silence before the storm that overtook the lives of my family during the partition. I have a sickening premonition that we are facing another division of India. Arjun Singh might sleep well, but I wake up in the night with this terrible casteist nightmare.
At the same event in Delhi, Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard University, claimed that history will remember our age by the rise of China and India. The importance of this event to world history, he said, is equal to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. If the cabinet proposal on reservations goes through then history will only remember the rise of China. India, it will record, was too busy cutting itself up.
Thanks to talented persons in the fast lane, India is now on the verge of becoming a world beater, even a champion, and this is happening after a thousand years. We ought to ensure now that those in the slow lane also get an equal start on the highway so that they too accelerate and change lanes at the right moment. Hence, I had proposed here a scholarship scheme on May 7th with a choice of any private or public school for all disadvantaged schoolchildren in India. This would promote equity without compromising merit, and it would do more for OBCs than reservations. It turns out that it will also cost exactly the same as the cabinet’s decision to recklessly expand capacity in higher education.
Arjun Singh’s proposal, however, seeks to artificially push persons from the slower to the faster lanes. This will cause accidents on the road and all the lanes will slow down. When high performers observe persons with lower marks stealing ahead by unfair means, they are bound to lose heart. Some of their competitive spirit will die. The notion of fair competition develops early in human beings. Studies by the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, show that even three year olds get offended when one child gets a bigger piece of the cake. This is why every judgment by the American Supreme Court has opposed quotas even though it was sympathetic to affirmative action.
The cabinet’s compromise to rapidly expand seats will further diminish the already low standards in most colleges. India will not be able to compete in a world that has no place for mediocrity. Since 1991, we have tried to build a world class India by focusing on growth, believing that expansion was the best tonic for lifting the poor. Suddenly, in the past two years, we are no longer interested in growing India but only in dividing it. No wonder Arjun Singh appears in a web poll among the “villains who divided India” along with Jinnah, Godse, V.P. Singh and Narendra Modi. I am not one of Midnight’s children--I was born in the silence before the storm that overtook the lives of my family during the partition. I have a sickening premonition that we are facing another division of India. Arjun Singh might sleep well, but I wake up in the night with this terrible casteist nightmare.
At the same event in Delhi, Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard University, claimed that history will remember our age by the rise of China and India. The importance of this event to world history, he said, is equal to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. If the cabinet proposal on reservations goes through then history will only remember the rise of China. India, it will record, was too busy cutting itself up.
A question of merit 4 June 2006
In the recent debate on reservations we have heard much talk about merit. Ever since the decision by the cabinet to extend reservations to the OBC, I have been deluged by anguished email whose common refrain goes like this: Just when things were going well for India, just when we were building a competitive nation based on merit, why did this tragedy have to fall on us?
These unhappy letters, I find, have been using “merit” as though it were a fixed and absolute thing. Amartya Sen, in a book, Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, edited by Kenneth Arrow and others, points out that merit is a dependent idea and its meaning depends on how a society defines a desirable act. An act of merit in one society may not be the same in another. When Arjuna pierced the target, he performed an act of merit and was suitably rewarded at Draupadi’s svayamvara in the Mahabharata. In our contemporary society Draupadi is more likely to choose a high performer on the CAT exam who gets into IIT. Any well-functioning society rewards talented persons whose actions further their idea of a good society.
In the private sector it is relatively easier to spot merit and reward it. If an individual’s actions consistently improve the company’s profit, she gets promoted and her fellow employees think it fair. Similarly, citizens of a nation prefer to reward those who promote the common good. The reservations debate has this silver lining--it is forcing us to think about our idea of the common good. For the philosopher John Rawls, a good action is related in some way to lifting the worst off in society. For Amartya Sen, it would lessen inequality, and hence he has consistently supported reservations for Dalits. The key point is that there is no natural order of “merit” that is independent of our value system.
Before getting agitated about reservations let us reexamine our notion of a good society. On the face of it, rewarding those who combine intelligence with effort and score in CAT exams doesn’t seem unfair. For these individuals are the ones that will go on to build competitive companies, which will create thousands of jobs and help our nation compete in the world. But Lani Guinier, the famous law professor at Harvard, questions if exams like CAT are the best selectors of talent. If she is correct, then we ought to re-look at our selection exams (including civil service exams) and ensure that they not only remove a bias against the low caste but are good predictors of future performance. Since we are becoming a service economy, our exams should also select those with a bias for serving others.
One of the great achievements of independent India is that we widely condemn discrimination of any kind. We even accept compensatory measures to lift Dalits. But we also believe that great nations are built by talent; hence, we don’t envy our software millionaires--they have risen through ability and hard work. This social contract of equity and excellence does not stretch, however, to extending reservations to the OBCs. Most of them are not the oppressed. Hence, we oppose and condemn this cabinet proposal. It discriminates against the talented and will lead to a decline in standards. Although Amartya Sen and John Rawls’ ideas may be seductive, we cannot forget the nightmare we have lived from 1950 to 1990 when we tried to socially engineer our society through such Utopian ideals.
These unhappy letters, I find, have been using “merit” as though it were a fixed and absolute thing. Amartya Sen, in a book, Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, edited by Kenneth Arrow and others, points out that merit is a dependent idea and its meaning depends on how a society defines a desirable act. An act of merit in one society may not be the same in another. When Arjuna pierced the target, he performed an act of merit and was suitably rewarded at Draupadi’s svayamvara in the Mahabharata. In our contemporary society Draupadi is more likely to choose a high performer on the CAT exam who gets into IIT. Any well-functioning society rewards talented persons whose actions further their idea of a good society.
In the private sector it is relatively easier to spot merit and reward it. If an individual’s actions consistently improve the company’s profit, she gets promoted and her fellow employees think it fair. Similarly, citizens of a nation prefer to reward those who promote the common good. The reservations debate has this silver lining--it is forcing us to think about our idea of the common good. For the philosopher John Rawls, a good action is related in some way to lifting the worst off in society. For Amartya Sen, it would lessen inequality, and hence he has consistently supported reservations for Dalits. The key point is that there is no natural order of “merit” that is independent of our value system.
Before getting agitated about reservations let us reexamine our notion of a good society. On the face of it, rewarding those who combine intelligence with effort and score in CAT exams doesn’t seem unfair. For these individuals are the ones that will go on to build competitive companies, which will create thousands of jobs and help our nation compete in the world. But Lani Guinier, the famous law professor at Harvard, questions if exams like CAT are the best selectors of talent. If she is correct, then we ought to re-look at our selection exams (including civil service exams) and ensure that they not only remove a bias against the low caste but are good predictors of future performance. Since we are becoming a service economy, our exams should also select those with a bias for serving others.
One of the great achievements of independent India is that we widely condemn discrimination of any kind. We even accept compensatory measures to lift Dalits. But we also believe that great nations are built by talent; hence, we don’t envy our software millionaires--they have risen through ability and hard work. This social contract of equity and excellence does not stretch, however, to extending reservations to the OBCs. Most of them are not the oppressed. Hence, we oppose and condemn this cabinet proposal. It discriminates against the talented and will lead to a decline in standards. Although Amartya Sen and John Rawls’ ideas may be seductive, we cannot forget the nightmare we have lived from 1950 to 1990 when we tried to socially engineer our society through such Utopian ideals.
A hot summer of envy 21 May, 2006
Ever since the state election results, there has been more than the usual talk about “soaking the greedy middle class” by the emboldened Left. As it is, this government has been obsessed with redistributing poverty, and has done too little to create prosperity, which will only come through genuine reforms. Meanwhile, Arjun Singh, smelling an opportunity to become a Left immortal, has trumped his OBC coalition partners and declared a caste war. It promises to be a long hot summer of envy.
S. Narayan, the former finance secretary and economic advisor to the PM, writes that the real motive behind Arjun Singh’s move to extend reservations is envy. Having failed to improve government institutions, our babus and netas now want to control private ones. It will give them the clout to “visit, examine, ask questions and be feted by” the elite. He has a point. There are 265 universities in India, almost all of them under government control. Only about 25 of these are any good. The rest seldom produce an employable graduate. If government would focus on improving the quality of the 240 bad institutions, it would do more for the millions of OBCs than to throw them a few crumbs in the IITs and IIMs. If we rapidly increased the supply of good institutions there would be no need for reservations. But this would mean doing hard work, and it’s a lot easier to redistribute poverty.
If greed is the vice of capitalism, envy is the flaw of socialism. “From each according to ability and to each according to his need” was the rallying cry of Marxism as it set out to create a classless, egalitarian society. Socialist societies, however, turned out to be the most envious in history. “The searing heartburn of envy causes a choking feeling in the throat, squeezes the eyes out of their sockets”, says a character in Y. Olesha’s 1929 novella set in the Soviet Union, where turning in your neighbour for his perceived advantage became a way of life. Envy is felt more strongly between near equals than those widely separated in fortune. It doesn’t make sense to envy the Queen of England, does it? Envy is different from jealousy--one is jealous about what one has, but envious about what others have. The philosopher, John Rawls wrote: “A person who envies another is prepared to make both persons worse off to reduce the gap between them”. Envy was a major factor behind the killing of Pramod Mahajan.
That wonderful character in the Mahabharata, Karna, struck a great blow against the caste system when he refused to switch sides. He stood up courageously to his mother. He told her that his “real” parents were his low caste family who had brought him up and not the royal one into which he had been born. Thus, he rejected society’s claim that status arises from birth. Although Karna was against the caste system, he was not envious. He was born with great talent, which was nurtured by private sector rishis rather than CPM’s unionised time-servers. He would have supported merit and vehemently opposed reservations. He would have embraced the affirmative action proposal I made in my last column, which would promote excellence and equity. Manmohan Singh, the economist, will quickly appreciate the lesson from Karna’s story--we must expand India’s talent pool without lowering standards. Thus, he would be wiser if he listens to Karna rather his envy inspired populist colleagues.
S. Narayan, the former finance secretary and economic advisor to the PM, writes that the real motive behind Arjun Singh’s move to extend reservations is envy. Having failed to improve government institutions, our babus and netas now want to control private ones. It will give them the clout to “visit, examine, ask questions and be feted by” the elite. He has a point. There are 265 universities in India, almost all of them under government control. Only about 25 of these are any good. The rest seldom produce an employable graduate. If government would focus on improving the quality of the 240 bad institutions, it would do more for the millions of OBCs than to throw them a few crumbs in the IITs and IIMs. If we rapidly increased the supply of good institutions there would be no need for reservations. But this would mean doing hard work, and it’s a lot easier to redistribute poverty.
If greed is the vice of capitalism, envy is the flaw of socialism. “From each according to ability and to each according to his need” was the rallying cry of Marxism as it set out to create a classless, egalitarian society. Socialist societies, however, turned out to be the most envious in history. “The searing heartburn of envy causes a choking feeling in the throat, squeezes the eyes out of their sockets”, says a character in Y. Olesha’s 1929 novella set in the Soviet Union, where turning in your neighbour for his perceived advantage became a way of life. Envy is felt more strongly between near equals than those widely separated in fortune. It doesn’t make sense to envy the Queen of England, does it? Envy is different from jealousy--one is jealous about what one has, but envious about what others have. The philosopher, John Rawls wrote: “A person who envies another is prepared to make both persons worse off to reduce the gap between them”. Envy was a major factor behind the killing of Pramod Mahajan.
That wonderful character in the Mahabharata, Karna, struck a great blow against the caste system when he refused to switch sides. He stood up courageously to his mother. He told her that his “real” parents were his low caste family who had brought him up and not the royal one into which he had been born. Thus, he rejected society’s claim that status arises from birth. Although Karna was against the caste system, he was not envious. He was born with great talent, which was nurtured by private sector rishis rather than CPM’s unionised time-servers. He would have supported merit and vehemently opposed reservations. He would have embraced the affirmative action proposal I made in my last column, which would promote excellence and equity. Manmohan Singh, the economist, will quickly appreciate the lesson from Karna’s story--we must expand India’s talent pool without lowering standards. Thus, he would be wiser if he listens to Karna rather his envy inspired populist colleagues.
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