We are now in an age where knowledge is paramount. What you know determines who you are and how successful you will be in the world. What matters now is not the control of muscles but rather the control of minds. Knowledge is our greatest weapon and information is the tool for crafting that weapon. Want to influence minds? Make use of the information out there to make people see the world as it actually is and not as advertised for the convenience of those in power.

Previously the government controlled the flow of information. That control has almost entirely vanished and with it the power of governments to control minds has eroded. The fact that the control is over is not fully appreciated. We need to first of all understand that with the loss of government control over the flow of information, we are at the threshold of getting our independence.

Our weapon is knowledge. Our challenge is to wield our weapon with ruthless efficiency. We have to bring out into the open all that the government has hidden from public view.

Those in power are people who have committed humongous crimes against India and Indians. Indians need to know that and understand that their greatest enemy has been — and still is — the bunch that has controlled India since 1947. India’s potential and promise has been systematically destroyed by a ruthless bunch of self-serving power hungry myopic imbeciles. The government control of the channels of information has presented a totally whitewashed, sanitized and fictional portrait of these imbeciles. The control of the education system, the control of radio and TV, the control of research institutions — all have been to one end only: brainwash the people into believing the totally false.

But all things must pass. With the loss of control over the flow of information, the apparatus that has been so successful up till now in concealing the truth is finally on its last legs. That machine is broken and with it has broken the power of the government to manipulate the masses into submission.

I want to know what were the blunders each of the major leaders committed. But first, how do I know that blunders were committed at all? I look around and see India for the disaster it really is. No amount of glossy advertising of how India Inc is a superpower can conceal the rot. India’s borders are not intact. Military blunders must have been committed. It’s education system is a crying shame. Someone is responsible for this disaster; someone who had dictated what the education system is to be. I want to know who that someone was.

India is categorized as a Third World country. It did not have to be so. Indians are not systematically stupider than any other group. India is adequately gifted with natural resources. India has not suffered any large scale natural disaster lasting decades and which destroyed its infrastructure. There is no reason for the absolutely miserable state that India is in today. Except for the policies that were adopted by some people. Bad economic policies must have been advocated and adopted by someone in power and that must be the reason for India’s economy being near the bottom of the economic pyramid.

No natural factor can be held responsible for India’s sorry state. What India is today has to be explained by man-made factors.

India is a country where around 800 million people — larger than the US and Western Europe combined — live lives of absolute destitution. Over half of India’s children below the age of five are malnourished. Their chances of ever attaining their full physical and mental potential is dead. This is India and someone must have enforced economic policies that has reduced India to be a desperately poor country.

I want to know who were the people responsible for this disaster. I want to know their names. I want to know the names of people who have committed crimes against Indians that are so immense that an almost impossible-to-believe number of Indians have lived lives of utter deprivation and died prematurely of preventable sickness. I want to know how many children die every day. Is it 10,000 children or is it only 5,000 that die of water borne diseases in India daily?

I want to know who I should hold responsible and when I do learn, I want every Indian to know who were the people that brought this nation to ruin. I want to then ruin those people by revealing to the world how horrible their crimes are. When I know their names, I am going to put up their statues in every city. I want people to come to those statues and spit on them. I want people to spit every time one of those names is mentioned. I want them to say “ach poo!” every time (just like the followers of one particular monotheistic faith say a certain phrase when they mention the name of the founder of that religion.)

Time’s up. Time’s up for those who charted India’s descent into hell. Now it is time for me to drag those unmentionables to hell.

I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.

Bardhan notes that “dignity politics” is one of the debilitating factors. He writes:

. . . even when the [lower classes and castes] come to power, the issue of basic social services gets low priority in comparison with larger symbolic issues of dignity politics (particularly in North India). A perceived slight in the speech of a higher-caste political leader resented by a lower-caste one will usually cause much more of an uproar than if the same leader’s policy neglect keeps hundreds of thousands of children severely malnourished in the same lower caste. The issue of job reservation for backward castes catches the public imagination more fervently than that of child mortality or school dropouts that afflict the majority in those communities. Thus the demand from below for those basic social services is as inarticulate as their supply from above is deficient.

About the demand and supply of basic social services — a missing market of sorts — I too have concluded that the demand arises from an awareness of what is excepted expected, which awareness depends on the basic education system. Public education — by which I mean the education of the public about matters of civic, economic and social importance — is missing. I think that the focus of the government-controlled education system is on raising the peak education level of an elite (the IITs, IIMs, IISc, etc) rather than raising the education level of the citizenry broadly. My cynical conjecture is that the political leaders do understand that they their feet will be held to the fire if the people become aware of the misgovernance.

A lot of books with rousing titles such as “Imagining India” and “India Unbounded” have become hits. Most of them studiously avoid mentioning the dysfunctional — perhaps out of concern for sales figures or perhaps from a fear of displeasing the political powers that be. What we need to do is to look at issues that most would rather sweep under the rug and pretend that they don’t exist. Corruption, for instance, is widely regarded as a problem but I would argue that it is a symptom of deeper causes which are intertwined with other deep causes which form the basis for a whole host of symptoms such as corruption, poor educational system, lack of accountability, the persistence of social conflict, etc.

Bardhan notes that India’s heterogeneity poses problems that don’t arise in more homogeneous societies:

In very recent years, there are some faint signs that good governance is being rewarded by the electorate in some areas. Collective action in demanding and ensuring good governance is, however, particularly tricky in India on account of the extreme heterogeneity of social and economic interests involved, which always makes unified movement on goal formulation, agenda setting and policy pressure difficult to achieve for diverse groups, who in anticipation of this difficulty often opt for populist handouts and clientelistic arrangements instead. As a society we are much more diverse than, say, Japan or China, and coordination on most issues is more difficult here than in those countries. Sociologists have pointed out that extreme social heterogeneity in India is also a major cause of hierarchical industrial relations with attendant mutual distrust and labour supervision problems, and relatively low labour productivity in Indian factories.

I think that the way out of this problem is for the state to be totally blind to the markers of heterogeneity. For instance, the state must not ever inquire about the personal attributes of a person that have no bearing on social services. Thus, the state must not discriminate on the basis of religion. Whether or not a citizen is eligible for economic assistance, for example, should depend on the merits of the case and not on what that person’s religious affiliation is. The moment the state privileges one group over another, it invites the social evil of group-based divisive politics and, as Bardhan puts it, “populist handouts and clientelistic arrangements.”

India’s governance is arguably bad. The party that has been almost exclusively in control of that misgovernance is the Congress party which has been the fiefdom of the Nehru-Gandhi family. The incompetence of the party and that family has been demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt. But as I have argued before, they are not there through some divine edict; they are there because the people of India find misgovernance by the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family acceptable. The fault, dear reader, lies in Indians and not in the leaders that they freely elect.

That’s a direct quote of a comment from a reader, Jitendra, on a rediff.com article, “India’s ‘real’ Poverty“. Don’t bother reading that rather pointless article — it goes into details of how the poverty line should be defined and what the level of real poverty is in India — but let’s ponder that non sequitur quoted above.

Mr Jitendra is misinformed. The British did not manage India. They colonized India and did what it took to extract and exploit India’s resources. Colonizers do that and when they have extracted and exploited as much as they can, they leave. The British left. The British did not “develop” India because it was not worth the effort and moreover, developed populations don’t docilely accept their colonial overlords.

Whatever “development” the British did was to ensure that they could effectively exploit the country. They “built” railroads so that they could move stuff (cotton to the British mills, for example) and for administering the large population they built a rudimentary telecommunications system. They “built” an education system that was just about adequate to churn out clerks that were needed for office work. They needed mid-level management (there were only so many Englishmen for the job) and so they created the Indian Civil Services.

If I was the colonizer, I would do precisely what the British did. It is rational and sensible thing to do for a colonizer.

What the British also did — and very effectively at that — is to create an education system that churns out people who have no idea of how rapacious the British were. Mr Jitendra is not alone in his misapprehension that the British were some sort of a savior for India.

Actually, compared to the Islamic overlords of India, the British were a million times more civilized. I thank the gods for this slight improvement in India’s fortunes with the arrival of the British. Otherwise the entire Indian subcontinent would have been one huge happy Islamic republic with widespread global terrorism. Imagine adding India’s over one billion to the half a billion of the two Islamic republics, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and now imagine how much more potent the terrorism would have been. Doesn’t bear imagining.

There’s one more thing that distinguishes the British colonization of India from the Islamic invasion of India. India could learn a lot from the English, and more generally from the Anglosphere. Rule of law, how to manage a large economy, modern science and technologies, the importance of institutions, etc. There was nothing that India could have learned from its Islamic invaders because in practically all aspects, the invaders were primitive relative to Indians. The invaders destroyed whatever they could — especially thousands of temples — and whatever their primitive mentality could not comprehend. India, in the words of V S Naipaul, became a wounded civilization.

India could have learned a lot from the British and other developed countries of the world. But India didn’t. More accurately, the people who took over the economy from the British did not want to make any changes that would have put India on a path of development.

Let me go into that a bit. The British raj’s goal was not development but rather to efficiently extract resources, as I mentioned above. That requires almost total control of the economy. Development, contrariwise, requires freeing the economy. Controlling is good for the people who do the controlling but not good for the economy, and certainly not at all good for the population. People who control are able to extract what economists call rent but which we call loot. The people who took control over India on India’s political independence knew a good system when they saw one. They liked the British system of control because it allowed them to continue the loot of India. Hence the Nehruvian license control quota permit raj. That impoverished India further and now the descendants of Nehru have added another twist to the game: religion and caste based reservation.

The addition of religion and caste based reservation is the last nail recently hammered into India’s coffin which was already pretty secure with the Nehruvian license control quota permit nails. What India needs is a decent burial. I wonder what new schemes the ruling junta will come up with. No doubt they will think of some scheme, having so effectively choked the life out of the economy in the past 60-odd years.

Anyhow, let’s get back to the comment I started off with. Mr Jitendra needs to understand that it is not the color of the skin of the rulers nor their nationality that determines whether the economy prospers. What matters is not who the rulers are but what the rules are. Let me repeat that: the rules matter, not who is at the top. The British adopted an open, market friendly, liberal system for Hong Kong. HK is the freest market in the world.

Private enterprise is free in HK. The people are free to produce, trade and enjoy the fruits of their labor. It is what is called a liberal capitalist market system. Whatever it is called, it is a system that allows wealth to be generated and consequently the economy to thrive and the people to prosper. The people of HK enjoyed economic freedom, a freedom that was denied to Indians. India is not a free country. The population of India is ruled as ruthlessly as it can be ruled by the most rapacious of colonial governments. The brown-skinned rulers of India are no less than the Islamic invaders or the Britishers in their greed for power and loot.

It could have been otherwise.

India could also have adopted rules similar to HK — with changes appropriate for the specifics of India such as a large illiterate extremely poor population. India could have but the leaders of India did not. We need to understand why India did not more than we need to understand what the precise level of poverty is in India. But as you can see, Indian media are not interested in the former — I have yet to read a newspaper or magazine article, or watch a TV show, or listen to a radio broadcast which addresses the question of “Why is India so desperately poor?”

Why isn’t that question asked? I believe it is because if that question were to be seriously answered and the average Indian voter actually understood the answer, the present rulers would be kicked out of power (if not actually lynched.) Land of the holy cows, India’s biggest holy cow is the trinity of Nehru, Gandhi, and the pseudo-Gandhis. Criticism is not allowed and the reaction to criticism is swift and unhealthy for the critic.

But there is one more minor matter. I think even if that question — why is India so abysmally poor — were answered, I am afraid that given the educational system of India, the average Indian would not be able to understand the answer. Only about 50 percent of India is literate and I would not put the number of educated people to be anything more than 25 percent.

Which brings me to the conclusion that I cannot avoid. The reason why the government hangs on so tenaciously to the control of the Indian education system is simple. The educational system is designed to be maximally dysfunctional so that it is impossible for Indians to become educated. Indians who do go through the system become incapable of rational thought and inquiry. A vanishingly small percent is technically competent (but only technically) and the modest achievements of this minuscule minority is the basis for the building of huge imaginary edifice which is hailed as India, Inc.

Time for a reality check, India. The rulers are raping the land and you are fast asleep. What India needs is a new set of rules, not rulers or this or that skin color.

This is what’s going on in Pakistan.

. . . the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Sufi Muhammad, has expressed his desire of implementation of a similar law over the whole world.
Expressing his hatred for people’s rule, Muhammad said Islam does not have any mention of democracy or elections.

“From the very beginning, I have viewed democracy as a system imposed on us by the infidels. Islam does not allow democracy or elections,” ‘The Daily Times’ quoted Muhammad, as saying.

He said that the continuous bloodbath in the region was due to the hesitant approach of different regimes in the country to accept the superiority of the Islamic law.

“Had the government accepted our demands in 1994, we would have not seen the violence we are seeing today,” he said.

The message is clear and very very old. The infidels by their obstinacy in not submitting to Islam have brought all the bloodbath upon their own heads. It’s not too late, however. As this National Congress party Congress party candidate, Kadir Maulana, declares in his manifesto, “Amanulla’s rule has to be brought back. Shivsena (and Hindus) have to be wiped out of this place. Allah has sent Kadir Maulana for that. To make the moon-and-star flag fly on the land of Aurang.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what a candidate of the National Congress Party Congress party, the party of MK Gandhi, proudly proclaims. No doubt the NCP Congress party approves of the subjugation and finally the annihilation of infidels. Ironically, the means to bring that about is democracy — “a system imposed on us by the infidels,” as Kadir Maulana’s fellow traveler in Pakistan, Sufi Muhammad calls representative democracy.

Clearly Pakistan is not sufficiently Islamic. Once they become fully Islamic, the violence will stop. For now, thousands die in run-of-the-mill Islamic terrorism. Mayhem & killings:

. . . Dawn highlighted statistics showing over 2, 200 persons were killed in about 275 terror attacks since 2007. The report said:

Pakistan has been hit by a wave of suicide bombings, commando-style raids and other attacks blamed on militants which have killed more than 2,200 people in about 275 attacks since July 2007. [India Today.]

When they are done with Pakistan, they will come for the infidels in India — helped no doubt by Kadir Maulanas of the NCP Congress party, led by Sonia Gandhi and her chief operating officer Mr Manmohan Singh.

Here’s the maulanan’s manifesto. Short and to the point.

This is what’s happening in India. Under the watchful eyes of the secular NCP Congress party. Vote for NCP Congress you infidels because therein lies your salvation. They will help usher in the peace that can only come from submitting to Islam and to sharia.

Correction: As shrijitp pointed out in the comments below, the celebrated “Indian” politician Kadir Maulana is/was a National Congress Party candidate, and not as I mistakenly claim in the post above from the Congress party at all. I regret the error. I stand corrected.

This summer for teaching an undergraduate course on economic development (Econ171) at Berkeley, I naturally considered the major factors that affect — and effect — economic growth and development of an economy. The major headings included growth models, energy, infrastructure, urbanization, education, agriculture, and one other topic which I will come to presently. It should come as no surprise that the government of India — being one that professes a sincere commitment to economic growth and development — actively intervenes in all of those areas. There are government departments and ministries at the central and state levels.

Digression: Ministries

Actually, it is an understatement to say that the government intervenes in the economy. One would be hard-pressed to find even a minor matter related to the economy that the government does not interfere in and control. There are ministries. Here are a few, from the Govt of India directory:

Ministry of Agriculture
Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers
Ministry of Civil Aviation
Ministry of Coal
Ministry of Commerce and Industry
Ministry of Communications and Information Technology
Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution
Ministry of Corporate Affairs
Ministry of Culture
Ministry of Defence
Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region
Ministry of Earth Sciences
Ministry of Environment and Forests
Ministry of External Affairs
Ministry of Finance
Ministry of Food Processing Industries
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises
Ministry of Home Affairs
Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation
Ministry of Human Resource Development
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting
Ministry of Labour and Employment
Ministry of Law and Justice
Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises
Ministry of Mines
Ministry of Minority Affairs
Ministry of New and Renewable Energy
Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs
Ministry of Panchayati Raj
Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs
Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions
Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas
Ministry of Power
Ministry of Railways
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways
Ministry of Rural Development
Ministry of Science and Technology
Ministry of Shipping
Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment
Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
Ministry of Steel
Ministry of Textiles
Ministry of Tourism
Ministry of Tribal Affairs
Ministry of Urban Development
Ministry of Water Resources
Ministry of Women and Child Development
Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports

There are commissions and independent offices:

Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
Central Information Commission
Central Vigilance Commission (CVC)
Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG)
Election Commission of India
National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC)
National Commission for Minorities (NCM)
National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC)
National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST)
National Commission for Women (NCW)
National Commission on Population
National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)
National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC)
Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser
Planning Commission
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)
Thirteenth Finance Commission
Union Public Service Commission (UPSC)

And more:

Directorate of Public Grievances (DPG)
Department of Atomic Energy
Department of Space

Act 2: Cars with Flashing Red Lights

Lots of union and state ministers there. Lots of commissioners. And department heads. All going around in cars with red flashing lights on the top. Traffic is controlled when these people travel on city streets, doing whatever they are supposed to be doing. And bureaucrats to support them. That means a lot more cars with red flashing lights on top. Lots of pushing of files and granting of permissions. Lots of god alone knows what in various offices scattered across Delhi and state capitals.

There is no economic activity, however trivial, that is not under some ministry, commission, or department of the government of India. In most cases, the control that government agencies exert over them is comprehensive and exhaustive. That economic growth and development has largely eluded India for decades is a well established fact. Is it possible that it is precisely because of the government control that development and growth has not happened? It could be. Lack of economic freedom is correlated with poorly functioning economies. But why? I believe that the answer is one word: corruption.

That’s one topic that I find to be at the heart of all economic development and growth. It is striking that the topic does not receive much attention. I was recommended a textbook by an Indian author on development economics. The book did not have a chapter on corruption. It’s like having a textbook on thermodynamics and neglecting to refer to entropy.

I decided against using the book. Besides, it was not particularly suited for a well-rounded understanding of the subject.

ACT 3: The Missing Ministry

But fortunately, there is a large and growing literature on corruption, much of it easily accessible on the internet. I used that for the course and spent considerable class time in discussing the role of corruption in development.

Now here’s a point I am trying to make over here: It appears that corruption is one factor that matters significantly in economic development and yet there is no ministry dedicated to controlling corruption. There are ministries by the truckloads, ranging from the important to the trivial: from infrastructure to micro enterprise to energy to earth sciences (I did not know that) to civil aviation (a vanishingly small portion of Indians can afford aviation) to culture (really!), ad infinitum.

One could cynically observe that no special ministry of corruption is necessary as corruption is a horizontal issue that runs across all the verticals, and indeed that they are all implicitly ministries for corruption.

Digression: The CVC Mystery

Actually, there is something called the “Central Vigilance Commission (CVC)” but it is not easily clear what it actually does. The website says,

Powers and Functions of CVC

* to exercise superintendence over the functioning of the Delhi Special Police Establishment (DSPE) with respect to investigation under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988; or offence under CRPC for certain categories of public servants and to give directions to the DSPE for purpose of discharging this responsibility;

* to review the progress of investigations conducted by the DSPE into offences alleged to have been committed under the PC Act;

* to undertake an inquiry or cause an inquiry or investigation to be made into any transaction in which a public servant working in any organisation, to which the executive control of the Government of India extends, is suspected or alleged to have acted for an improper purpose or in a corrupt manner;

* to tender independent and impartial advice to the disciplinary and other authorities in disciplinary cases, involving vigilance angle at different stages i.e. investigation, inquiry, appeal, review etc.;

* to exercise a general check and supervision over vigilance and anti-corruption work in Ministries or Departments of the Govt. of India and other organisations to which the executive power of the Union extends; and

* to chair the Committee for selection of Director (CBI), Director (Enforcement Directorate) and officers of the level of SP and above in DSPE.

* to undertake or cause an inquiry into complaints received under the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Informer and recommend appropriate action.

That sounds good. But going from what is reported in the popular press about anyone convicted of high-level gross corruption (not one actually reported in the last 60 years), one would have to conclude that corruption at high levels does not exist in India at all. At most one hears of the conviction of people involved in petty corruption — such as throwing a poor man who sold diluted milk in jail, or some common burglar being apprehended and successfully prosecuted.

Small fry, yes; big fish, caught and let go; great whites, you must be joking.

What’s the CVC actually done? I poked around the website for a good while and it appears they do nothing worth reporting on their site. It’s a mystery.

Act 4: Wealth Accumulation

It may be true that not all politicians in India are corrupt. Of the tens of thousands of politicians, there must be at least a handful that are not corrupt and have not accumulated immense wealth. But to use an expression favored by economists, to a first approximation all politicians are corrupt. The exceptions are not known but the exceptionally corrupt are widely recognized. Corruption is so endemic to the class of politicians that it does not evoke even mild surprise, leave alone any outrage.

Here’s an example. The late YSR Reddy was chief minister of Andhra Pradesh for the second term. He died in a helicopter accident last month. Unverified reports say that he was wealthy. How wealthy is hard to estimate. But here’s a partial list that is going around. I stress again that this is only alleged and I am not representing this as a fact.

Assets gained by YS in his 5 years as Chief Minister

• Raheja Corporation land allocation for Infrastructure ( 200 acres in first phase and 300 acres in second phase)- CM’s son gets 50 percent share

• 500 acres in the 1000 acres allocation to Gangavaram port

• Brahmani Steels investment – Rs.40,000 crore – CM’s son gets 50 percent stake

• Indu and Brahmani Infotech companies get 250 acres with 50 percent stake to CM’s son.

• Rs.3500 crore investment for a six million tones Cement factory at Kamalapuram in Kadapa district.

• Rs.6000 crore Hydro electric project -1200 MW in Sikkim – CM son gets 50 per cent stake

• 1000 acres bought in and around Bangalore – land cost Rs.Three crore per acre.

• Rs.250 crore commercial complex on Bannerghatta Road in Bangalore

• 25 acres land in Hyderabad, Kukkapally Housing Board location.

• 90 acres in benami bought in IT corridor area of Gacchibowli .

• 151 acres of granite mining lands in Prakasam district, Cheemakurthi ( world famous for its black and gold granite stone ) in benami company ( Gimpex ).

• Mauritius shell companies 2 I Capital , Flury Emerging Capital purchase 125 crore worth shares in Sandur Power Ltd –

• Benami subsidiaries : Bhagavat Sannidhi, Carmel Asia Holdings, Harish Infra, Classic Realty, Janani Infra,Marvel Infra ,Silicon Builders, Capstain Infra, Shalome Infra, Inspire Hotels

• Purchase of Assigned lands -1000 acres in Kandur village and 500 acres in Chitwel village of Kadapa district.

I quoted only a bit of a fairly long list that is available at the Shadow Warrior blog. I am sure that YSR Reddy is not exceptional; similar lists must be available for other ministers, past and present. No one particularly cares that corruption is part of the DNA of this society.

Digression: Public versus Private Corruption

Allow me to introduce you to “Atanu’s First Lemma of Private Corruption“: Public corruption establishes the upper bound to private corruption.

It is my natural modesty that prevents me from calling it a law. And besides, a lemma is a stepping stone to a larger theorem or thesis that I wish to establish one of these days.

But seriously, we have to examine the problem of corruption in India. After considerable thought I have concluded that the basic problem of India’s underdevelopment rests on corruption. By focusing on corruption we can understand the entire system. Once we understand the system, we can propose what is to be done about improving it. First, however, we have to give corruption the undivided attention that it deserves.

A ready response whenever the topic of corruption is raised is, “Corruption happens everywhere. It is not only in India. Heard of Enron? And a thousand other instances of corruption in developed and underdeveloped countries?”

Yes, corruption is not unique to India. Indians are not unique. They are humans and share all human characteristics with the rest of humanity. The point to note is that the impulse to be corrupt occurs in all people. The difference lies in the opportunity that the environment presents for the expression of that basic instinct. In India, for reasons that we could go into later on, the environment provides the most fertile ground for corruption to flourish. The genes are the same; the environment allows differences in their expression.

The upper limit to private corruption, as I said before, is established by public corruption. Which implies that the lower bound to public corruption can be estimated by the revealed private corruption. Let’s take a recent example. Satyam, a large private sector technology firm head quartered in the above mentioned state of Andhra Pradesh, was recently in the news. Its boss, one Mr Ramalinga Raju, fiddled with the books to the tune of a few billion dollars for a number of years. I conjecture that he did it because he was fairly confident that he would get away with it. Could it have been possible that this assurance came from knowing that the political powers were even more corrupt? Does public sector corruption provide the cover that private sector operators depend on for protection? Whatever be the details of the Satyam case, it can be reasonably asserted that without the involvement of the government of the state, Mr Raju could not have been all he was.

Andhra is not the only state where there is public corruption. It is a fraternity, a sacred brotherhood even. Regardless of which political party or ideological persuasion, they are all in it. Which is why you don’t see party A (in power) prosecute party B (not in power) for corruption that the latter indulged in when in power. Party A now has the opportunity to rake in the spoils of their reign. After all, the party fought tooth and nail mostly so that it could have the opportunity to make a killing. They would be insane to forego the primary benefit of being in power — make money. This means no political party has an incentive to do anything that limits their opportunity to gain from corruption. This means religiously avoiding throwing stones since they are living in very fragile glass houses.

If the level of public corruption cannot (in the ordinary course of events) come down, then the ceiling for private corruption keeps rising. I conjecture that in the past, the amount of public corruption was lower (and so was private corruption) and that it has been monotonically increasing with time.

Act 5: The Big Picture

Now it is time for the First Law of Corruption: Corruption at any specific level provides the upper bound for the degree and extent of corruption at the next lower level.

Here’s what that implies:

1. If the boss is honest, he will not tolerate dishonest business under him.

2. If the boss is dishonest, the people under him have his permission to be dishonest.

3. If the boss is dishonest, the people under him are safe being dishonest — he couldn’t fire them because they could rat on him.

4. If the boss is dishonest, he will not tolerate honest people working for him — he cannot have a hold on them and they could rat on him.

5. If the boss is dishonest, he will eventually convert those work for him to be dishonest.

Basically, in any hierarchical organization, the degree of corruption increases with the level in the organization. If the lowly clerk at the government office is corrupt, it means that the whole structure is corrupt and the most corrupt are at the top of the organization. Public sector organizations — such as the list of ministries listed above — draw their inspiration from the top. The government is a collection of such organizations. The people who form the top level of the government can therefore be expected to be the most corrupt.

The corruption of the captains of the private sector is bounded by the corruption of the top level operators of the government. If you hear of the corruption of a mega super corporate head honcho, be assured that he (and to a first approximation they are all males) has the support of the top level of the government.

Final Act: Why?

Corruption is seriously like a cancer for an economy. It eventually kills it. Like a cancer, corruption has something to do with the DNA at the cellular level of the organism. Damage to the DNA leads to cancer. Somehow at some time, corruption enters the economic system. It then keeps growing. Like a cancer, it can start off in one localized spot and then it metastasizes. The best response to cancer is to catch it early and excise completely the tissue that is cancerous. It is too late when the cancer has spread to other vital organs.

I have concluded that monopoly power allows corruption to take hold. Healthy competition is not consistent with corruption. The market mechanism largely kills institutions and firms that are corrupt. The government, however, has monopoly power in many sectors, and therein lies the possibility of corruption. It is not guaranteed that all governments will be corrupt. Only some, and only those which are based on flawed constitutions. But that is a different story for another day.

Government monopoly power gives the leaders of the government the power to be corrupt. Then if these leaders do become corrupt, the corruption trickles down the organizational structure. And then it spreads side ways: the private sector is becomes part of the game. Sometimes they are forced to join the game. The rules say that the government has the right to allow or prohibit the establishing of certain businesses. Those who are willing and able to pay the government for the licences, are allowed in.

Given enough time, basic human nature will ensure that corruption will monotonically increase with time in a license-permit-quota control raj. The socialist government of India, created by the Congress, for the Congress and of the Congress was bound to degenerate to this state of affairs.

India is poor because it is corrupt. No other factor can adequately and fully explain its horrifying poverty.

That whole day, the man considered his wealth and made big plans about all the things he would buy and how happy he would be. His imagination ran wild. He was rich. Richer than everyone he ever knew. But then suddenly he remembered the monk at the edge of the village. The monk had given him the diamond without the slightest hesitation. The man ran back to the monk outside village, fell to his knees and said, “Sir, tell me how can I get the inner wealth and contentment compared to which all external wealth is worthless?”

End of my retelling of the story that I got in an email. The email said that the story was from HinduismToday.org.

I cannot access that site from India. (My ISP is TataIndicom Broadband.) I suppose the “secular” government of India does not allow it. Sites preaching jihadi hate meet the exacting standards of the Indian government’s stamp of secularism. But kafir ideology is prohibited. So if you have the misfortune of living under the dispensation of the “secular” Indian government, you could use this online anonymous proxy server and type in http://www.hinduismtoday.org/ in the address bar.

BTW, do drop a note to Mr Manmohan Singh telling him how much you appreciate his government’s efforts at not allowing the corruption of Indian minds by blocking the HinduismToday site.

[This post filed under the categories "Freedom of Expression," "Ruled by Monkeys," "Stupid Monkeys" and "Corruption."]

Postscript: I have heard from several people across the country saying that they are able to access the HinduismToday site. I still cannot access it unless I go through an anonymous server. Therefore it could be that Tata Indicom may be involved in this instance of censorship.

“Tell me more,” says I. “You were talking to someone on the phone just now and you said ‘890′. What was that about?” I asked.

“That’s the price that I was negotiating for transporting one metric tonne of goods between Mumbai and Raipur,” replied RL.

I had no idea of how this truck transportation business works. For no particular reason I inquired further.

“So how many metric tons does a truck normally carry?” I asked.

“About 35 tons,” RL said. “But that’s above the allowed limit. The limit for the average two-axle truck is only 16 tons. But if you stick to that, the numbers don’t work out.”

“So you mean to say that the trucks are overloaded?” I said.

“Of course. At the allowed 16 tons max, it would cost 1200 rupees per ton to move material. So we just pile on whatever to break even. It’s a competitive market,” said RL.

“But then aren’t there checkpoints along the route? Don’t they figure out that the trucks are overloaded? Are there weighing stations where the trucks are weighed to see that they are within the limits?” I asked.

“Yes of course. There are many RTO checkpoints. The deal is simple. Every month, for each truck, there’s a schedule of payments. Say between Mumbai and Raipur, the rate is Rs 20,000. Once you pay that for a truck, you are free to load the truck to whatever the truck will bear, never mind the legal limit,” RL said.

“And how many trips does that cover?”

“About 5 round trips a month. On an average it takes three days each way. Works out to about Rs 2,000 per transit. But it allows you to keep the costs down and therefore it works out for all concerned,” says RL. “It’s routine stuff. Once you pay the 20,000 rupees, there are not more hassles. You only pay at one central location and the money is divvied up among the various stakeholder along the way,” replied RL.

“And who are the stakeholders?” I ask.

“You know, everyone. All the way up to the concerned state and central government ministers. There is a regular schedule.”

“Wow! That’s really neatly done. So even the top politician must be getting his cut,” I said.

“Naturally. It would not happen otherwise. Everyone has to have his share, otherwise this could not happen,” said RL.

“What’s the deal?”

“Let me give you the short version,” RL said. “The truckers have to carry more than the legally mandated load. Otherwise it would be too costly per ton. To get around the legal limit, you have to bribe the RTO — the road transportation officials. There are many check points along the route. It helps that the bribe is collected at one point and that too for the entire month. Otherwise it would take too long. Anyway, the collections are passed on to various people, all the way to the top. Government ministers and other bureaucrats, you know. But this scheme works only because there are other interests tied to it.”

“Like what?”

“Consider the truck manufacturing companies. They make more money because they sell more trucks which are rated at a lower carrying capacity. So they are not interested in raising the legal load limit. But the overloading of trucks is good for the RTO. They make money in bribes. That’s not all. The government builds roads. Right? OK, so they get contractors to build roads that are rated to carry say 16 tons per truck. Naturally with trucks carrying 32 or even 45 tons, the roads get f**ked. The contractors make money from repaving the roads frequently. The kickbacks from the contractors for road repairs ends up in may pockets, mainly the politicians. It’s huge. Road repair is huge business,” RL said.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“No, there’s more. It’s a dirty business but then what do I know. I have been in this business for a couple of decades and that is why I know the ins and outs of this one. What do I know about what goes on in say the tire business. Or the container shipping business. You don’t know about the trucking business but I do. But then we are equally ignorant about all the rest. It looks as if this sort of corruption cuts across every aspect of business in India. I have to play the same game because otherwise I could not survive in business.”

“Surely you could refuse to pay the bribes and refuse to ply overloaded trucks,” I said.

“No I cannot. I cannot refuse to play this game because no one can survive in business if one refuses the deal. Never mind me, you cannot survive in politics if you refuse to play along. A fellow got elected as the MP for a constituency close to where I live. He’s not a career politician. It just so happened that family was owed some favor and he got a ticket from this party and he won. Quite a decent fellow, actually. But totally naive about how things work.

“He didn’t know what he was expected to do and how much he was supposed to charge for the deals that he was supposed to help with as a member of parliament. Anyhow, the people who needed to get their interests taken care of had to help the MP learn the ropes. They put people in his office who would tell him which document to sign and how much he was to be paid for each of his signatures. Like I told you, the guy is a decent fellow. He does not know now but in a year he will know the game. And he has to participate in it. Or else,” said RL.

“Or else what?” I asked.

“Else he won’t get elected. If he refuses to take bribes, the work will not get done. More importantly, the political party that he is part of will not make the money that they need to fight the next elections. If he is clean, he would be throwing a spanner in the works. He will be replaced by someone who doesn’t have scruples. He either plays the game or he is out. In a year he will be as corrupt as the rest of the bunch. OK, so he may have got the job of an MP when he was naive and stupid but by the middle of his term, he would have learned what he needs to learn to survive. Why on earth do you expect otherwise? If the guy giving you orders, your boss, is corrupt, just to keep your job you have to be corrupt. Else you don’t play. You don’t get a ticket. You are a spoiler. You wreck the whole deal. You are not a part of the team. They will find a more complaint person.”

I had heard enough. We moved on to less trivial matters. But I continued to worry about the issues raised in that conversation.

It is collectively rational for people to not be corrupt but it is individually rational to be corrupt in a corrupt system. Corruption does not work bottom-up. It works top-down. If the guy at the top is corrupt, you are forced to be corrupt. Why forced? Because you don’t get to make the rules. You only get to decide whether you want to play the game based on the rules that have been dictated by the guys on the top.

The guys on the top make the rules. And if they are corrupt, that’s just the way it is.

I spent this summer talking about matters that lead to economic development. I was teaching a course on economic development at Berkeley. Corruption and its corrosive effects on economic development was a major theme. I tried to get the idea across that poor countries are poor because the system they have in place makes it impossible for non-corrupt actors to play a role. More depressing is the realization that corruption itself causes the poverty that makes the corrupt make the rules. I put it this way in the course — “The corrupt gain power and the absolutely corrupt gain absolute power.”

It is perhaps naivety that makes the so-called leaders like say APL Abdul “Dr” Kalam lecture school students about the moral incorrectness of bribery. Or perhaps it is just plain obtuseness. But I think it is more likely that it is plain pragmatism that motivates people in high places to emphasize corruption at the mundane level while turning a blind eye to corruption at the top — at the level of central government ministers and bureaucrats — because the guys at the top owe their exalted position because they are corrupt. Absent moral turpitude, they would not have reached the top.

Corruption at the lower levels is a survival mechanism. The small-time businessman like my friend RL is just a pawn in the game. He does not have any more influence on how the system is defined any more than he can dictate the laws of physics. The guys at the top, the guys who make the laws, they are the guys who define how the great economic game is to be played. And eventually this great economic game determines how much stuff is produced. Because of the rules of the game, the amount of stuff produced is lower than what is potentially achievable. Dividing up the production is the next innings. There too they have a good racket. Instead of figuring out ways to increase the amount produced, they are busy figuring out who should get how much of the limited stuff. And the division is made strictly upon the calculus of who is going to vote which way.

India is famously touted as the largest democracy in the world. What that means is that the people decide who is going to make the laws. That the system throws up the most corrupt as the framers of the rules that define the economic game is not surprisingly a dire consequence of the choices that the people make. It is not a comforting thought that over the decades of India’s existence as a politically free nation, the people have consistently voted into positions of power those who are arguably the most venal of the lot. But then, is it reasonable to expect something else? Can a people who are almost absolutely ignorant of what the system really is be expected to know what is in their interest? A majority of us are not even literate — and even those of us who are literate, are woefully ignorant of how the system works. I readily confess that I don’t know what the great big machinery of the government of this huge nation is up to. How can I expect that the person who cannot even read the railroad timetable be able to decide which public policy is good and which is not?

So if this is not to be a counsel of despair, I should at least hint at what I consider to be the solution. I think that we — the ones who are have the ability and means to engage in this conversation — have to get out priorities straight. I get asked to support this or that organization which is trying to feed poor school children a mid-day meal. I get impatient at those kind of meaningless and ultimately futile gestures. They perhaps believe that by feeding a bunch of kids meals is going to fix the problem. I don’t deny that it is not important to feed kids. After all, the kids have not committed any crime that they should starve. What I don’t understand is why people don’t take a step back and see that the problem is that there is not enough stuff to go around, and the reason for that is that too much effort goes into extracting rents and too little in figuring out how to make more stuff.

There isn’t sufficient stuff to go around because there are no roads. That’s just an example of what’s missing. No roads is just an example. But the lack of roads is only an instance of what happens when corruption is the name of the game and the rules are made by the abjectly corrupt. I think that it should be the headlines on the newspapers. Instead what occupies the national attention has to do with how made how many runs in some cricket match. Or why someone should not have twittered the words “cattle class” — that matters and not the unspeakable fact that half of India’s children below five a chronically malnourished.

Deva, deva!

I hope you will take the time to listen to this video (there’s really nothing much to see), and if you would please help raise public consciousness about the topic. As Sam Harris says, “how we criticize, or fail to criticize, the religious beliefs of other human beings at this moment has an extraordinary significance for the maintenance of civilization. It could well be the most significant variable that is in our power to influence.” Please do take some time to listen to Harris.

India is likely to face some very major stress — centered most likely on resource scarcity such as water, food, or energy — in the not too distant future. When that happens, the split will be along religious lines. The government is etching even more deeply the religious divisions within society. It should keep us awake at night at the thought of the deaths of innocents by the millions that could easily be the result of the inevitable division caused by the cynically manipulative actions of the government. Then there’s another thought: didn’t these people themselves choose all these Congress governments which over the decades has been creating the conditions for the slaughter to come.

It’s all karma, neh?

Related Post: The Problem with Atheism. (Jan 2008)

In our everyday lives we constantly make trade-offs between fidelity and convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something. At a rock concert, for instance, it’s not just the quality of the sound—which often isn’t as good as listening to music on a good stereo—but everything else, too, such as the show’s ambience and the bragging rights that come with having seen the band live. Convenience is how easy or hard it is to get what you want. That includes whether it’s readily available, whether it’s easy to do or use, and how much it costs. If something is less expensive, it’s naturally more convenient because it’s easier for more people to get it.

Further on he writes:

Once in a while, a market gets completely out of balance. Forces conspire to prevent either a high-fidelity or high-convenience player from emerging. All the offerings crowd around one end or the other. Eventually, someone nails a disruptive approach. Customers and competitors rush in and the marketplace wonders why that great idea didn’t come sooner.

The higher education market is a lot like that. For centuries the university model dominated because nothing else worked. No technology existed that might deliver an interactive, engaging educational experience without gathering students and teachers in the same physical space. In the past century, a powerful social bias set in: Only accredited universities were allowed to grant degrees, and most professional jobs required an accredited degree. Even though technologies emerged that might foster new models of higher education, the neat accreditation ecosystem locked out innovative competitors.

These days broadband Internet, video games, social networks, and other developments could combine to create an online, inexpensive, super-convenient model for higher education. You wouldn’t get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you’d end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it.

I agree with the above viewpoint. The broad picture of economic development reveals that all complex activities, that involve numerous tasks which fall in different domains, tend to get horizontally segmented and the subtasks are performed by specialized firms, thus allowing economies of scale. I have written about the process previously. (See “The Future of Education and Technology — Part 2“. April 2009.)

To recap, consider the task of automobile manufacturing. At the nascent stage of the auto industry, an automobile firm would do everything in-house — basically make a car out of scratch, where scratch stands for “steel, glass, rubber, etc.” As the industry matured, and more cars began having sophisticated subsystems, the tasks were hived off to specialist firms: a few firms made wind shields and supplied to all auto firms; a few firms made the instruments, some made shock absorbers, some mufflers, some even specialized in engines.

The same process can be expected to happen in the education domain. Teaching will be horizontally segmented from testing, certification and evaluation. Some firms will specialize in teaching and some other firms will evaluate how effective the learning has been and to what extent. Companies are really interested in knowing whether an employee can do the job, not whether the employee has attended a specific course or a school. Regardless of how a person came to have a certain skill, the testing agency will certify the competency of the person in that skill.

Horizontal segmentation, as opposed to “vertical integration,” opens up the possibility of innovation and competition ensures that innovation happens. Wherever horizontal segmentation is not prohibited, it naturally happens because it lowers costs through scale economies. Education is in dire need of innovation. Some countries will allow these much needed innovations and they will prosper. Others will continue to languish because their policy makers will not allow change. India needs to think and behave differently — especially in the education sector.

India needs to move from just having a very small number of “high fidelity” schools (such as the IITs, IIMs etc) to having a very large number of “high convenience” schools — where there are no capacity constraints, and where anyone wanting to learn can do so without facing any credit constraints. From all indications, the entrepreneurs are waiting in the wings to bring that change about. They have to be allowed on to the stage.

[Thanks to Raja Sekhar Malapati for the BW link.]

A burning hot afternoon. Diogenes is sitting as usual beneath the tree, sweating, scooping pasty gruel from a weathered bowl. At a distance, the court philosopher is being carried home in a palanquin for his lunch and afternoon siesta. He lifts the curtain. “Who is that beneath the tree?” the richly robed philosopher asks his bearers. “No one of any consequence, Sir,” they answer. “A fellow called Diogenes. A waster. All he does all day is sit under that tree, and yap with whoever comes along.”

“Take me to him” the philosopher directs.

He is lowered. He addresses Diogenes: “What are you doing, Diogenes?”

“Why, I am eating this gruel” Diogenes answers.

“You fool. If only you would learn to get along with the King, you wouldn’t have to spend the rest of your life eating that miserable gruel.”

“My dear Sir,” answers Diogenes, “If only you would learn to eat this gruel, you wouldn’t have to spend the rest of your life trying to get along with the King.”

Shourie writes, “We must learn to eat that gruel. We must have no price. And everyone must know that we have no price.”

Perhaps eating gruel is something that cannot be learnt. Either you are born with the ability to do so or you are not. Most people don’t have the stomach.

But I am certain that the story is inaccurate. First, Diogenes would have been sitting in a tub in the town square, not under any old tree. Second, everyone and his brother knew who Diogenes was, the court philosopher included.

Here’s another story about Diogenes (from this blog in Oct 2004):

During a sea voyage in his old age, he was captured by pirates and brought to a market in Crete to be sold. When asked for what he was capable of, he answered, “I can govern men; so sell me to someone who wants a master.” Xeniades, a rich man of Corinth, heard this and bought Diogenes and gave him his freedom. Diogenes was in Corinth when Alexander the Great sent word through a messenger asking Diogenes to come see him in Macedonia.

Read the rest of the story. Renews one’s faith in humanity, however cynical one may tend to become.

[Thanks to The Acorn for the link to Shourie's article.]

Related Post: Whoring, Amir Khan Style. (Mar 2008)

And the result? There’s talk of disciplinary action against Tharoor. India Congress Committee spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan:

Asked whether Tharoor’s selection as a minister was a wrong decision, Natarajan said: “It is the prerogative of the prime minister and I will talk only about his (Tharoor) statement.”

To a question whether disciplinary action will be taken against him or any clarification will be sought, she said it is for the high command to decide. “I am only commenting on his statement. It is absolutely insensible,” she said.

It’s a joke, you silly unmentionables. Getting worked up about it is epitomizes ass-backwardness that permeates Indian policy making.

Here’s what I mean.

A minister of the Congress government announces a few million dollar reward for the murder of Danish cartoonists. Not a big deal.

Public figures routinely suspected of scams to the tune of millions (or billions) of dollars. Not a big deal.

Prominent elected leaders suspected of serious crimes. Not a big deal.

A minister cracking a harmless joke on twitter. Questions being raised about disciplinary action and whether it was a mistake to appoint him as a minister. That’s priceless.

Come to think of it, Tharoor should now realize that a person is known by the company he keeps. He cannot wallow in pig-shit and not expect to stink up to the high heavens.

Related post: The Banality of Corruption. (Dec 2007)

While I am happy to fund the library (which means we do not need any financial assistance), we do need help to increase awareness about the unique services HELP offers, so that more people will make use of our services. We do not have a marketing budget; and are having a difficult time marketing HELP.

He is asking for ideas on how to promote the use of HELP. All suggestions welcome. Also, if you blog, perhaps you would consider linking to his post on HELP.

This public service announcement made possible by a generous grant from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous — and by contributions from readers like you. Thank you for your support!

Related Post: Irreversible Decisions. (June 2004)

Karnataka High Court Chief Justice PD Dinakaran’s assets are under scrutiny and the Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan has asked him to respond to allegations that he has amassed assets disproportionate to his income.

From the Mumbai Mirror —

Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who inaugurated the refurbished Congress office at Azad Maidan on Monday, stands to lose the moral high ground she likes to take. It may unnerve her to learn that the office is neither legal nor austere.

The mind rebels on reading the phrase “the moral high ground” and the name of a politician in the same sentence. Yet Indians willingly vote into office politicians that no one doubts are corrupt and worse complicit in murder, rape, extortion and other generally nasty things. It is quite certain that these voters would shun any of their acquaintances if the latter were accused of major crimes but for some peculiar reason find it totally acceptable that the people whom they are electing to make laws are themselves criminals.

Recently, the chief minister of AP died in a crash. It appears to be common knowledge that his rise to power was associated with major violence — not unlike other politician’s rise. Yet they were falling all over themselves with grief at his demise.

Why is this so? Do Indians lose their moral compass when it comes to leaders?

Reading the news today brought to mind the truth of what that great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (d. 1895) had written over a century ago. “Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them … . The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” A wide-angled view of India reveals that Indians are willing participants in their own oppression.

Or maybe I should be more charitable. Perhaps Indians are not so much willing as unable to do anything about it. Their powerlessness comes from their inability to reason, which could be because they are uneducated. Perhaps keeping the masses of India uneducated is deliberate. It keeps the people from revolting against those who are in power.

The wikipedia informs us about Frederick Douglass:

When Douglass was about twelve, Hugh Auld’s wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet. She was breaking the law against teaching slaves to read. When Hugh Auld discovered this, he strongly disapproved, saying that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom.

I think that the people who grabbed power when the British left have seen to it through the policies that they implement that most Indians should not even become literate, leave alone become educated. I am sure that widespread literacy may awaken the Indians, leading them to demand freedom.

The slaves of America, led by people like Douglass (who was called “The Lion of Anacostia”), freed themselves. I wonder if Indians will ever become free from the tyranny that they endure. There are no lions in India.

The government on Monday announced that it will introduce grading system in all Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools and make Class X board exams optional from coming academic year (2010-11).

Union Human Resource Development minister Kapil Sibal, during a press conference in New Delhi, said: “Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) supports making Class X examination optional in CBSE system.”

I don’t know what it means to make an exam optional and replace it with a “grading system”. The grading system is “an aptitude exam, which schools can use to test Class X students on their level of understanding in each subject.” What’s the distinction and what difference will that distinction make? I suppose a spade is different from a handy gardening tool with a triangular metal blade and a short wooden handle.

I seem to vaguely recall that the class 10th board exam came under scrutiny because it was a major cause of stress to students and their families. Why the stress? Because the results of that exam critically decided where one ended up. Why was it such a make or break deal? Because the demand for further schooling far exceeded the supply and the 10th exam results essentially did the rationing required.

The problem is that those in control of the entire mess (the education system) are apparently totally incapable of coherent thought or analysis. They cannot distinguish between causes and symptoms, and furiously attempt to suppress the symptoms instead of inquiring into the causes and addressing them.

I find it curious that the permanent link to the rediff item ends in “govt-makes-strong-pitch-for-educ-reforms.htm”. See what I mean? It is as if the government is wise and beneficial and is only interested in fixing a bad system which it has had no role in creating. This attitude is not limited to the educational system: the entire structure of the economy suffers from it. The government creates the dysfunctional economy through its mindless control, and then talks loudly of “reforms” and “liberalization”. Then it mostly comes up with more muddled rules and congratulates itself for all the great changes it has made.

Liberalization is a curious concept when it is promoted by those who do the imprisoning of the system. Only extreme schizophrenia mixed with hyper hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance can explain this attitude.

Liberalization if it means anything at all means freeing the system from some harmful control. One cannot proclaim that one stands for freedom while simultaneously making no moves to relinquishing control and only ordering new controls. Take the latest move: the Right to Education. By instituting that right, the government has awarded itself the right to further tax the people and thus have more control over the education system by controlling a massive purse. As Mr Sibal points out, “that Rs 1,50,000 crore would be required for implementing the RTE in the country and it is perceived that there will be a shortfall of Rs.60,000 crore, as it would be a massive exercise.” We already bear an “education cess” on every transaction — now let’s get ready for more.

The Congress has ruled India for about 90 percent of the time since 1947. The Indian educational system we have today was designed by the British to serve their purposes as colonialists. Seen in that context, the system had to be controlled by the British government and the control yielded the results they wanted. The Congress inherited the educational system (just as it did all the other colonial systems) and found no reason to change the colonial control of it. That control serves (note the present continuous form of the verb) the Congress as well as it did the British. Instead of gora sahibs lording over the natives, it was the brown sahibs. But color is only skin deep. Whitewashing the building does not change its structural elements.

Any improvement of the system must start with meaningful reforms. The most meaningful reform has to be that the government relinquish its control of the system. Otherwise it is a lot of busy work that gives the illusion of reform but ends up making a bad system worse.

{Thanks to Sudipta for the link.}

The August 2009 issue of Pragati is out. I have a contribution in there. My perspective is that the Indian government must stop subsidizing Muslims who go on haj, and the more general case that the government must stop meddling in private religious affairs of the citizens. The text of my article is below the fold, for the record.

Stop Subsidising Pilgrimages
The Haj should be financed from private charity

In theory, according to its Constitution, the Indian state is secular; in practice, unfortunately, it is far from it. Indian governments routinely meddle in religious affairs and do not treat all its citizens as equal in matters of religion. They involve themselves in matters such as temple administration, fund management of temple donations, and subsiding pilgrimages. The most blatant example of such gratuitous meddling is the subsidy given to Muslims for going for haj to Saudi Arabia. In 2008, Indian taxpayers paid around Rs 700 crores (US$140 million) for Muslims to travel to Saudi Arabia.

Is that a reasonable thing for the government of India to do? No: it is bad in principle, economically inefficient and morally wrong. The government of a secular state must not concern itself with religious matters. India would do well to consider the example of the United States.

The first item of the US Bill of Rights, authored principally by James Madison and adopted in 1791, begins with the injunction that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .” The absence of sectarian strife in the US is at least in part attributable to that amendment which, in the words of James Madison establishes a wall of “total separation of the church from the state.”

Something like the first amendment is vitally important and must be among the core set of rules of all civilized states. It traces its origins to the ideas of John Locke who held that each individual is free and equal, and that the job of the government of a civilized society is to protect the property rights of its citizens. The US strictly maintains that separation, as it should since it claims to be a secular state. It contrasts sharply with what goes on in India.

The rationale behind the Indian government’s Haj subsidy goes against any notion of social justice, fairness, and economic reasoning. Firstly, religion is a purely private affair and the government of a purportedly secular state should not get into the business of promoting any religion. Subsidizing the Haj is discriminatory and tantamount to endorsement of Islam. No other country on earth – including Islamic states – subsidizes haj.

Second, the subsidy is unfair. Fairness is the cornerstone of justice. It is unfair — and therefore unjust — for the government to force non-Muslims to subsidize the Haj because ultimately it is the taxpayers’ money that the government hands out. For an Islamic state to tax its non-Muslim subjects is understandable since Islam dictates that non-Muslims pay jizya — “a poll-tax levied from those who did not accept Islam, but were willing to live under the protection of Islam, and were thus tacitly willing to submit to the laws enforced by the Muslim State.” The Indian government is not Islamic and therefore must not impose jizya on its citizens.

Third, the haj subsidy politicizes a purely religious matter. Political parties attempt to woo Muslim votes by increasing the subsidy. They are in effect robbing non-Muslims to pay Muslim, thus attempting to gain the endorsement of Muslims. This is totally unconscionable.

From an economic point of view, subsidies and taxes are sometimes justified. For instance, revenues required for the provision of public goods have to be raised in some way and taxes are one way of doing so. Subsidies are justified in cases where markets fail to provide the socially optimal quantities of public goods. Even then, from an economic efficiency point of view, the taxes required for balancing the subsidies should be paid by the beneficiaries of the public good in question.

A case can even be made for the tax-funded public provisioning of some non-public goods and services, as when very high transaction costs are involved. Collective provisioning through taxes of a private good is justified when it is too expensive to determine individual quantity consumed for apportioning costs among a very large number of users.

The haj subsidy paid for from general tax revenues cannot be justified on the economic grounds mentioned above. The Haj is a not a public good; there is no market failure in its supply; the apportioning of costs is simple and efficient.

Can the Haj subsidy be justified on the grounds that it is charity? It is said that charity begins at home. And that is where it should stay. As a general principle, governments must not appropriate for itself the purely personal decision of its citizens on the matter of which charitable activity to support and to what extent. It is a matter of property rights: one has a right to spend one’s income as one sees fit. Using tax money to support discretionary spending is tantamount to extortion under the threat of violence, since one can be imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes.

Finally, there is the pernicious endowment effect: once an unearned benefit is granted, it is very difficult to remove it without incurring the wrath of the beneficiaries. No government would like to run the risk of removing the subsidy and antagonizing a large voting constituency.

The problem has a straightforward solution: move the funding of the haj subsidy from the public domain to the private domain. Constitute a non-governmental body whose task is to raise funds from private citizens. It is possible to do so in this day and age of low transactions costs due to the internet and mobile telephony. When people voluntarily contribute to fund the subsidy, it moves from the realm of coercion and becomes truly charitable.

This also takes the politics out of the whole matter and reduces the temptation that politicians have in robbing one group to gain the support of another group. By making this entirely voluntary, it removes the deep resentment many non-Muslims feel regarding the matter.

But there is a larger point which goes to the heart of what the job of a government is. Protecting the lives and property of its citizens is the primary reason for its existence. Everything else is secondary. Citizens should be on guard and prevent the government from usurping the freedoms that rightfully belong to them. When the government intrudes into such personal matters as whether or not to support the religious activities of some specific group, the state moves a little bit closer to fascism.

India needs to become a truly secular state since it is multi-religious. Its government has to be constitutionally directed to maintain a strict distinction between matters of religion and matters of state. If this requires a constitutional amendment, then it is time to introduce such a bill. The Indian government has to stop riding roughshod over the basic inalienable rights of its citizens – that of the rights to personal property and equality before the law. India needs the equivalent of the first amendment to the constitution of the United States of America.

BBC News reports that, “In one of the recent attacks in Melbourne, a student was critically injured by a screwdriver.” Wonders of this modern world, don’t you know. Automatic self-willed screwdrivers on a rampage. The student was injured by a screwdriver, and not “A student was attacked by someone with a screwdriver.”

BBC continues with

There have been more than 70 assaults in the past year, with at least four in the past fortnight.

Police have denied any racial motivation, saying the students were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yes of course. Be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you get attacked by screwdrivers. It’s your fault, not the self-propelled screwdrivers’.

But the students and Indian officials have demanded action, including more police at train stations and other problem areas.

You see, it’s the students’ fault in the first place. And yet they demand action. How bloody unreasonable. It’s their fault but they demand action. The BBC and ASSes — advanced self-propelled screwdrivers.

The protest was described as largely peaceful, although the Melbourne Age website showed photos of damage to a main train station after some protesters reportedly threw missiles.

No ASSes at the protest. And this time BBC reports that protesters threw missiles; they were not self-propelled missiles. Yes, this time a human agency is identified. But as my friend Nitin over at The Acorn pointed out to me, “Not a SINGLE word to suggest that there were attackers behind the ‘attacks’.”

The BBC is biased, as I have noted here a couple of years ago. I just did a search on “BBC is biased” on Google and got 7,400 hits. See, for instance, biased-bbc.blogspot.com. Saudi funding can do wonders.

Also see, “We are biased, admit the stars of BBC News“.

About 350,000 foreign students study in Australia. India gets 8,000.

Adjusted for population size, relative to Australia, India gets 133 foreign students. That is not a typo. Let me spell it out: it is a hundred and thirty-three, not one hundred and thirty-three thousand. Australia get around three thousand times the number of students per capita compared to India. (India is approximately 60 times Australia’s population.)

How much do Indians spend in studying abroad? Estimates range from a conservative $5 billion to a generous $10 billion per year. That a humongous sum. Why do Indians go abroad to study? Because they are forced to. India does not have the colleges and universities for them. Why? Because the government does not allow free entry into the education system. It’s the Congress party with its Nehruvian licence-quota-permit-control raj. It makes them money. It helps them get votes by restricting supply and then doling out the limited supply to favored vote banks based on religion and caste. They — the people of the Congress party — make money while the country suffers huge losses.

What sort of losses? First, there are the obvious financial losses of the order of billions of dollars. And that too the expense is in foreign exchange. A sh*tload of stuff has to be exported out of India to earn the dollars that go to pay for the education abroad. Then there is the loss of human capital. Many students who study abroad — especially the most competent and talented — end up migrating to the developed countries such as the US and Australia. The estimated loss has to be in the tens of billions of dollars a year. Add to that the personal costs that students have to bear in xenophobic societies that they are forced to live in.

What are the root causes of all these losses? It is government policy. Who made the policy that has reduced India to this horribly dire straits? The party that has ruled India for practically all its existence as an independent country — the Congress party led by the Nehru-Gandhi family.

How can we be sure that it is the policy that is to blame and not some inherent characteristic of Indians that make it impossible for Indians to create and run educational institutions that will serve the needs of the citizens? I don’t know. It appears to me that Indians are fairly average as far as human standards go. They do well when they are given the opportunity. They can become artists and engineers, scientists and philosophers, dancers and carpenters as easily as anyone elsewhere in the world. They do well in practically all spheres of human endeavor anywhere they are in the world — except in India. So there’s something special about being in India that makes Indians end up in the bottom of the barrel.

Let’s get back to education. Do Indians have the money to pay for education? Certainly. See they privately spend billions of dollars in India and abroad to get an education. Even very poor people spend a significant amount on education. A recent study revealed that middle class families spend as much as a third of their household income on education. The demand is undeniably huge. And the supply is also undeniably meager. Just to get into those average (by international standards) engineering schools called the IITs, superhuman effort is required. Families spend years of income and undergo years of stress and worry for the 2 percent chance that the kid will get admission to an IIT.

So the ability and the willingness is there among Indians for education. One side of the market exists without a doubt. The other side of the market, the supply side, would have been there naturally but it is artificially constrained from operating. That is what policy does. That, we must never forget, is the policy that the Congress party has instituted from Nehru onwards to the most recent prime minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh.

The bottom line is that India lacks a decent education system because the government has seen to it that the education system is as pathetic as it can possibly be. The system guarantees India’s backwardness and makes it pathetically poor but it enriches the people who run the government. The money extracted through the pathetic government-controlled education system ends up in foreign banks, and must account for at least a part of the reported $1.5 trillion stashed away in Swiss and other off-shore banks.

Manmohan Singh is an economist. He of all people should know the value of human resources and therefore education. That he fails in his job despite being an economist is the most blatant indication of his incompetence and general spinelessness. And talking of Manmohan Singh, the next time I read how decent he is, I am going to throw up. The man is as lacking in ethics and morality as the moon lacks oceans and forests. His is a barren landscape littered with sterile craters devoid of any humanity. That’s Dr Manmohan Singh for you.

And the next time I read that he was the architect of any economic reforms, I am going to blow a friggin’ fuse. It was his boss, Mr Narasimha Rao who gave the orders. Dr MM Singh follows orders. His present boss is not so smart as Mr Rao.

Do you know what the unspeakably pathetic specimen of the human species did about the attacks on the Indian students in Australia?

The attacks have been the discussion of talks at the highest levels of government. The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed concern in a phone conversation with the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd late on Friday.

Expressed concern? EXPRESSED CONCERN? How about covering your head in shame, you pathetic loser! I suppose you cannot lose sleep over this matter — losing sleep appears to be the limit of your abilities to do something about something — since that is already done for the families of Islamic terrorists.

But let’s be clear about one thing. Where is the outrage? I am not talking about the outrage on the matter of Australian attacks on Indian students. I am talking about the outrage that the population should feel about the disastrous condition of the education system that the Congress governments have brought about. Should the people not be literally dragging the unspeakable bunch of immoral greedy lousy cretins that rule the country on to the streets and flogging them to an inch of their lives?

Forget the outrage, the people actually go and elect them to run the country.

It’s all karma, neh?

He does offer a few practical suggestions: Suspend politicians facing criminal charges, as civil servants are suspended pending trial. Establish a fast-track court just for government officials so that cases are resolved expeditiously. Persuade judges to make an example of a few political wrongdoers as a public flogging for the rest. [Emphasis added.]

Public flogging as a deterrent, eh? How quaint. Now where have I read that before? Ah yes, over here! In October 2005, in a post titled “The Ownership Society” I wrote:

Imagine for a moment the following rules. The CEO of the state electricity board is given the ownership of that entity. The job description: “provide power now and build capacity so that there is sufficient capacity for the next 5 years” (assuming that it takes 5 years to build capacity.) If the CEO fails to do that, the entire salary paid to the CEO will have to be repaid and the person—who may have left the job by the time the shortfall is detected—will be publicly flogged in the town square.

Now this rule should be made fully clear to the prospective candidates and anyone who takes up the job must know the consequences of failure. It is because people know up front that they are shielded from the consequences of their failures that they fail in the first place.

I really don’t care whether the power I use in Pune is provided by a public firm or a private firm. As long as I know that if I suffer, those who are responsible for my suffering also suffer, I would be quite content. More importantly, I believe that if the penalties are made sufficiently appropriate, these failures will not happen very frequently.

I don’t really care if there is a Ministry for Power in India or not. What I would care about is that if there is one, the man or woman who wants to have the power and the glory of being the minister, would also be flogged publicly for any problems that arise as a result of their tenure.

I don’t really care whether the railways are run by the government or not. But if there is a train accident, the rule should be that the railway minister will be flogged publicly and given as many lashes as there are deaths due to that accident.

Public flogging of public officials is the answer to the problem of public officials not taking their charges seriously. Not just corporations. Take politicians. Any election promises they make about how they will change the economy must be taken seriously. And then if they fail to deliver, hold their feet to the fire. Candidate A claims that he will make something happen, then as elected leader A, he becomes the owner of that something. If he does not deliver—you guessed it—public flogging.

Want to be the prime minister of India? No problem. Take ownership of the country and set goals that you say you will achieve. If the goals are not achieved as promised by you, public flogging over an extended period of time. What this will do is to bring the right sort of people into public life. People who know what they are capable of doing and who will not mess with the fate of millions knowing that their behinds —literally— will be on the line.

Flogging is a simple enough measure to implement. It does not require high tech equipment. What it does require is a judiciary that can impose the punishment and carry it out.

Corruption in an organization? Here is my solution which will fix it pretty fast. Suppose Mr A has been involved in corruption. Don’t just flog Mr A, get his boss (Mr B) and his boss’s boss (Mr C) and flog them as well. Why so? Because Mr C will be extra vigilant and keep on Mr B’s case and tell him to be on the lookout that no one under him is into corruption.

What this multi-level flogging does is this. It makes managers liable for corruption in institutions that they control. That is, it gives the managers ownership of the organization they control. Irrespective of how deep the organization is, if a person at a certain level is corrupt, include the two higher levels and flog those two individuals as well.

You may think that I am not really serious. But I am. I am dead serious about this. You want to make India the least corrupt economy on earth, get serious about dealing with the problem for just a few years. After a few dozen high level officials have been publicly flogged, corruption will be a thing of the past which children will read about in their history books.

You may say that instead of flogging, why not just impose a fine on them. That would not hit where it hurts. Merely fining someone who has lots of money is not pain enough. The penalty has to have a sting. Here is what I mean. In Finland, the penalty for a moving traffic violation such as speeding is monetary but it is indexed on the income of the person. A dotcom millionaire was fined $93,000 for speeding.

So flogging should do very well in India. Those in high positions value their pride. They depend on their image. If they penalty is public flogging, they would cease and desist from doing what exacts that penalty.

Public flogging of public officials is a proposal which can transform Indian society more than all this talk about empowering the citizens that we are getting dizzy from reading in the newspapers. Everyone and his brother is advancing all sorts of wooly ideas about how to transform India. Here is an idea that will not see the light of the day of course, but it has the real power to transform.

I once again argued for public flogging in Mar 2006 in a piece titled “Terrorism, the way out” and wrote,

Dr Manmohan Singh and the leader of the Government of India, Ms Sonia Gandhi, would never feel the pain of terrorism. A thousand – or even a million – Indians could perish at the hands of terrorists without having the least effect on those leaders. At most their security will be strengthened a bit more, more public funds will be spent on getting them more black commandoes as bodyguards, more road and air traffic disrupted when they travel, more citizens will be inconvenienced to protect the leaders from terrorists. The leaders will never be inconvenienced to protect the people, however.

Is there a way out? An economist would respond, “Yes, get the incentives right.” My proposal is to create the mechanism which would transmit the pain of terrorism to the leaders. In a sense, I advance the creation of a nervous system that carries the pain signals to the brain. The incentive mechanism I propose involves public flogging but is not limited to that.

After every terrorist attack, the Prime Minister, the head of the government (if not the same as the PM), the Home Minister (who is in charge of security), the police chief in whose jurisdiction the incident occurs, and the Defense Minister should be publicly flogged, with the number of lashes equal to the number of deaths, within two weeks of the incident. So for the Varanasi terrorist attack, Dr Singh, Ms Sonia Gandhi and the others listed above (I don’t know their identities) should be flogged by 21st of March in the courtyard of the Rastrapati Bhavan.

Aside from the public flogging, the other measure would be to fine them 1 percent of their wealth for every 100 deaths. This means, after 10,000 deaths under their watch, they will have all their wealth confiscated.

What would this accomplish? Firstly, it would put the fear of the lash into them. They would have the incentive to actually reduce the chances of terrorists succeeding. For instance, right now they would for political reasons molly-coddle Islamic preachers sermonizing the slaughter of infidels. Or they may be considering increasing the number of buses and trains between India and Pakistan. Or they may be advocating more porous borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. When they know that these measures will increase the incidence of fatal terrorists attacks, they will not be so careless with the lives the citizens.

Second, the fines will help with the compensation to the families of the victims of terror attacks. Indian leaders have enormous wealth – from foreign gun deals, from cattle feed, from handing out licenses and permits, and from dipping extremely sticky fingers into the public till. Some of that wealth could be given back to the people.

Insult to their dignity and their behinds combined with injury to their pockets will work wonders.

Now let’s be realistic. Public flogging of the criminals occupying the highest levels of the government will happen a little after hell freezes over or a certain blue-turbaned man grows a spine, whichever comes later. Criminals don’t have an incentive to create incentives that deter criminals. We do have criminals in government, don’t we? A public watchdog organization reports that the new parliament of 543 members will have 143 MPs who have criminal cases pending against them. Of these, 71 have serious criminal charges such as murder. Being charged is not the same as being guilty, of course. But guilt can be established pretty efficiently and quickly, if the system was designed properly. But why on earth would criminals be interested in putting that system in place which would condemn them?

Let’s repeat what TSR wrote (quoted right at the top), “Since no part of the Establishment has an interest in punishing corruption, trying for a more sweeping solution quickly leads into the realm of blind hope.”

Deva, deva!

Just as an aside I recall that the US elected George W Bush in 2000. He gave plenty of indications during his first term that he was not good for the US (and by extension for the world.) The American voter disregarded it all, and going against all reason and sanity, voted once again for George W Bush. In the eight years that Bush ruled, he wrecked the US economy. No empire lasts forever and the US’s preeminent position was not guaranteed forever. Bush Jr hastened the day when the US loses its position. The American voter cannot escape responsibility that it, through its mindless support to a criminal (recall invasion of a country and the use of torture) retard (can barely express a coherent thought, leave alone have one), is complicit in the downfall of the US.

Indians have been electing the Congress for decades. India is a third-world country, a country that is listed together with sub-saharan African countries such as Burundi, Uganda, and Burkina Faso. Congress brought that about by following insane economic policies. The tragedy is that even if the party wakes up and realizes that the policies are absolutely mindless and wrong, they still cannot follow other policies — for it would then have to admit that the worthies who made these policies were retards like George W Bush. But those worthies have to be worshiped because the Indian population will vote for any progeny — regardless of any merit — of the worthies.

That is what nails India to a cross: the Indian voter will vote for the Nehru/Gandhi family, and the resulting government can never change any of the disastrous policies that Nehru set in place. India is caught between a rock and a very hard place. India’s future is bleak because good people can never head the government and make rational policy. India suffers ignominy in international forums because India is too poor. India’s poverty is the direct consequence of the insane policies made by the governments of India — and did I mention that practically of of those have involved the Congress?

Sorry for the digression but let me come back to the point that I was making on education. The system is a disaster. Let me put it this way. If you want to know if something is good or is a p o s, just look at the demand for it. If a lot of people go for it, it is good; if the demand is low, it is a p o s.

Let’s consider one measure: number of foreign students in the Indian education system. Why is this measure reasonable? Because foreign students have a choice in which education system to enroll in — unlike the majority of Indian students who cannot just up and leave for a foreign education (because India is a poor country, and that poverty is the result of Congress governments . . . you get the picture). So here’s a number that will not come as a surprise to you if you have been paying attention: About 350,000 foreign students study in Australia. India gets 8,000.

Adjusted for population size, relative to Australia, India gets 133 foreign students. That is not a typo. Let me spell it out: it is a hundred and thirty-three, not one hundred and thirty-three thousand. Australia get around three thousand times the number of students per capita compared to India. (India is approximately 60 times Australia’s population.)

You can do the same for other developed countries. And how is China doing? In 2005, it had around 140,000 foreign students and probably has around 200,000 by now. Compared to India, China attracts 25 times as many students as India does. And you know what’s the worst part? The numbers for India are shrinking.

There is practically no demand for education in India by foreign students. Ergo, it is a p o s. QED.

I got those numbers from Arun Shourie. He gave a Foundation Day Lecture in Sept 2006 to the IIT Kharagpur Alumni Association Delhi. (Hat tip: Akshar Prabhudesai.) You should click over there to read the article but for the record, I am reproducing it here in full.

Just remember: those policies that have prevented the Indian education system from developing (much like the policies that have prevented India from developing) have been brought to you (to paraphrase them programs on PBS) by the generosity of your fine Congress governments, and by voters just like you!

Enjoy! Or should I say, weep for India?

About 8,000 foreign students are studying in India. In Australia, on the other hand, there are about 350,000 — and remember, we add to our numbers every year more than the total population of Australia. Nor is it just that foreign students studying in India are less than a fortieth of those studying in Australia. The number of students who come to India has actually been going down: according to government figures, in 1990/91, there were over 12,765; last year there were 7,745! (By contrast, the increase in 2004 in the number of foreign students studying in China was three times the total number of foreign students that came to India: China hosted 141,087 foreign students in 2005.) We could be educators to the world — just as we could be surgeons to the world. But here is another opportunity missed: while Dubai, Singapore, Australia, to say nothing of distant US, etc. are positioning themselves as education hubs, we remain mired in that bog — the HRD Ministry.

It isn’t just that we are missing an opportunity. We are paying a huge cost every year. One estimate puts the amount that is spent on Indian students studying abroad at a figure that would be sufficient to set up 30-40 IIMs or 15-20 IITs every year. And going abroad to study is just the first step. Having studied in that country, having got familiar with the place and people, most decide to take up work there. Soon enough, they settle down there. Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, reports that of Indian students who received doctorates in Science and Engineering between 2000 and 2003, close to 90 per cent said they planned to stay on in the US; two-thirds had firmed up “definite plans to stay.” The proportions were the same in one critical discipline after another: 91% and 62% in biological and agricultural sciences; 92% and 72% in mathematics and computer sciences; 90% and 70% in engineering…(Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, Appendix tables, A2-96 to 100.)

The fault is by no means that of the youngsters. And there is no doubt that those who have stayed on in the US, etc. have also done much for India — they have, among other things, helped change the world’s perception of India, and, thereby, India’s perception of itself. But imagine how much our country would have gained in actual productive potential if we had educational institutions of such quality that these youngsters did not have to go abroad. Imagine how much our country would have gained if they worked here, that is if the work environment here had been such that they had felt confident they could develop to their fullest potential, and reap rewards commensurate with their capabilities and with the effort they put in.

And if we persist in the obscurantist policies and practices that mar our educational sector, this drain will only increase in the coming years. Countries are straining to develop themselves as the more attractive destinations — for students, for investors, for firms. Nor is the matter confined to choice, there is a compulsion too, a compulsion of which these leading countries are well aware and to counter which they are taking focused steps. In regard to the US, for instance, National Science Foundation data reveal that in 2003, 85 per cent of those holding Science and Engineering doctorates and working were above 55 years of age; 76 per cent were above 60 years; 20 per cent were 70 and above. The proportions for those holding Master’s degrees were equally significant: they were 85%, 65%, and 16% respectively. (Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, Appendix tables, A3-43.) And this is just one among many reasons on account of which these countries will continue to aggressively court researchers and skilled workers from India and elsewhere.

Indeed, the threat now is not just that individuals will be wooed away. Countries — from Singapore to South Korea to Taiwan to China to the EU-25 — are making even greater efforts to woo entire firms away, in particular R&D firms. Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan have already become significant research-hubs. But the suction for entire R&D firms can come from farther a-field too. We think of the US as a high-cost economy, as one that is now compelled to outsource R&D efforts to a country like India. But that is just one side of the picture, and that is true only for one end of research. In 2002, US firms spent around $ 21 billion doing research in foreign countries. As against this, foreign firms spent close to $ 26 billion doing research in the US. (Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, Volume I, 0-4, 0-5, 18.) And that stands to reason: researchers are less costly in countries like India, but today a great deal of research, and almost all of frontier research, involves such high-technology infrastructure that it is best executed in countries like the US.

Things to do

The first thing to do is to stop counter-positioning primary, universal education against higher education. We need both. We can afford both. Second, we must see both — the threat as well as the opportunity: the threat that we may lose our best minds at an even faster rate than the rate at which we have been losing them in the past decades; on the other side, the opportunity that we can be educators to the world.

Third, to ward off the threat and to tap into the opportunity, we require the same sort of measures. To arrest and reverse the alarming deterioration of standards in most of our institutions of higher learning. To ensure that in regard to both – students as well as faculty – merit, performance here and now, alone counts. To ensure that rewards are strictly commensurate with performance.

And resources. A large proportion of these will have to come from the government – for instance, private entrepreneurs just do not have the long horizons that basic research requires. Equally, government alone will just not have enough resources for this sector. Thus, one service that finance ministers can do is to give the most generous incentives and tax-breaks for industry to invest in education and in R&D. For every trifling misuse, a Manipal will come up.
And the resources have to be defrayed not just on equipment – that is what is done ever so often: and by the time the underpaid, under-motivated faculty learn to exploit the equipment to its full potential, the equipment is obsolete. A good proportion of the resources have to be set apart for making salaries and allowances of faculty and researchers and their work-environment attractive enough for them to forego careers in private industry and to choose instead to be in universities and research institutions.

It is obvious that we cannot do any of this so long as higher education and research is dominated by governmental institutions. China, for instance, has launched an aggressive drive to bring back the very best Chinese faculty who are working in universities in the US, Europe and the like. To attract them back, China is giving them remuneration and allowances and work facilities that are better than what they have in universities where they are working. This is being done irrespective of what existing faculty get in the Chinese establishments in which these returnees will be lodged. Can such a thing be done in a governmental organisation in India – what with its scales and unions; what with the fact that the salary of a professor cannot be higher than that of the vice chancellor, and the salary of a vice chancellor cannot be higher than that of secretary, HRD…? I am, therefore, wholly against the current rush for affiliation, etc. We should encourage institutions to de-affiliate, from existing universities and the like. Colleges and research departments and institutions will come to be known by the work they do, by the standards to which they adhere. Along with this movement to de-affiliate we should develop first-rate, wholly objective and reliable methods to rank institutions.

But the gaps are so vast that mere resources will not do. We need to adopt unconventional methods to scale up this sector. The remarkable success that F C Kohli, one of the fathers of IT in India, has achieved with the “total-immersion” method in making absolutely illiterate persons literate enough to read a newspaper within 8 to 10 weeks; his analysis of “gaps” between the best engineering college in Maharashtra and other colleges in the state, and how these can be bridged by using modern IT and communications technologies – these are the sorts of measures we need to put in place. And, instead of stuffing IITs and IIMs with mediocrities just because they were born to one set of parents than another, we should induce them to multiply faculty, and to upgrade existing faculty in other institutions.

Two prerequisites

But for any of these measures to be executed we need two prerequisites. The first is to outgrow clichés. “Do not make a commodity of education,” our politicians shout every time there is the slightest effort to make educational institutions self-sustaining. “Do not sell ma-Saraswati,” they shout every time there is an effort to induce industry to take up education. All such shouting ensures is that existing scarcities continue, and the existing education-czars rate off the lolly. All it accomplishes is to enable a dental college here, near Delhi itself, to pocket a “donation” of Rs 28 lakh from every entrant…Is the way to deal with the fact that 150,000 students have just applied to the IIM, Ahmedabad, for 250 seats in its two-year course, to force it to take in 27 per cent additional students — that is, sixty two more students — on the basis of birth? Or is it to give incentives to industry to set up 62 institutions of comparable worth?

And then there is the even more urgent task — to reverse the recent trend in regard to the few islands of excellence that remain: the recent trend of interfering in the IITs and IIMs. The recent edicts regarding reservations are just one — though by itself fatal enough — lance of such interference. Appointments of directors; hauling them up before Commissions because some congenitally disgruntled employee keeps writing letters to high-ups; the insistence of a legislative Committee that they switch to Hindi as the medium of instruction…There is an all-round assault to breach their autonomy.

To ward off such senselessness, three things are required. First, do not temporise: do not think that the way to meet the assault is to concede a bit – those concessions will not assuage the grabbers; on the contrary, they will become the reasons for the political and bureaucratic class to grab all: “See, the director himself is saying that they are ready to abide by our order – all he is asking is that he be given a little time to do so…” Second, as those who are working in these institutions are in a sense under the thumb of government — and I have been struck dumb by fear to which faculty themselves testify in open meetings — outsiders, in particular the alumni of these institutions, have an important duty: they must constitute themselves as firewalls around these institutions.

But the assault on such institutions is but an instance of the general assault on excellence in India today: from legislatures to civil service to educational establishments, mediocrity is being asserted as norm, vulgarity as right, intimidation as argument, assault as proof. Two classes today stand in counter-position to this assault on standards – entrepreneurs and the professional middle class. Accordingly, the pan-Indian organisations of professionals should get together to contain, roll-back and eventually eliminate this assault.

I quote the article below the break, for the record.

Dear UPA Government: Get Us Involved and Lets Get Going
by Rajesh Jain

The verdict is in. A new United Progressive Alliance government is expected to take charge of India next month.With it comes the promise of a change for the better. The new government has the opportunity – and the challenge – to outline a bold vision for India, a vision that fires up the imagination of its people and the vitality of its entrepreneurs.

The new government has to credibly signal its commitment to addressing the major challenges facing India and enlist the support of the private sector in creating innovations for achieving goals that are big, visionary and bold. In the past, whenever allowed the freedom to do so, the Indian corporate sector has risen to the occasion and helped India’s development. It is time once again for the Indian government to present corporate India with a set of truly transformational challenges.

Here is a small set of inter-related broad areas where change is urgently needed and which, with proper government support, Indian entrepreneurs and corporations will eagerly participate in.

–Education: India needs a radically different education system as the current one is dysfunctional and largely irrelevant in the modern context. In a world of rapid and accelerating change, the foundational skill is to learn how to learn. The education system has to produce life-long learners, which the current setup does not permit. Fortunately, a radical re-engineering is possible through the use of powerful tools presented by the revolution in information and communications technologies. To achieve this, institutional reform of the type that encourages private sector participation in education is necessary.

–Energy: Any economic activity, like all processes in the universe, depends on energy. Today’s developed nations achieved their level of prosperity on cheap fossil fuels, an opportunity not available to India’s 1.2 billion people. Fortunately, India is large enough to be able to leapfrog the fossil fuel stage by investing in the development and use of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. The required investment cannot be raised without leadership which convincingly articulates the vision.

–Urbanization: India’s economic future depends on India’s success at urbanizing its immense rural population. No economy has achieved even middle-income status without being mostly urban. What India needs is to make its agriculture more productive. The labor released from agriculture has to be provided training and opportunities in manufacturing and services sectors. It is important to distinguish between the development of rural areas and that of rural populations. The former is neither necessary nor sufficient for development; the latter is indispensible and can be achieved most effectively by urbanizing them. This challenge is the creation of new, livable cities that would lead the urbanization of the population needed for India’s transition to an industrialized economy.

–Transportation: India is a large country with a large population. For the economy to prosper, people and goods have to be efficiently moved over large distances. India is approximately ten times as densely populated as the US. It therefore cannot afford the solution that works for the US for transporting people, namely, air travel. What India needs is a land-based system and more specifically a rail-based transportation system, both for goods and people. The technology exists for super-efficient, super-fast rail systems. India has to seriously invest in that and replace the century-old current railway system. Furthermore, within cities, India needs to have an efficient public transit system and not take the unsustainable, car-centered approach.

–Digital Infrastructure: Although India has one of the world’s cheapest and extensive mobile networks for voice communications, its data networks are quite inadequate. India needs to make serious and large investments to upgrade its digital wireline and wireless networks to create a high-speed, ubiquitous envelope of data connectivity across the nation. This is what will spur the creation of the next-generation of entrepreneurial outfits creating world-leading applications and services for the domestic market.

–Governance: India has to make judicious use of its financial capital. The problem is that the current leaky system does not allow the most effective and efficient use of those resources. What is needed is to leverage technology in better governance though citizen participation. Technology can enable citizen oversight of public spending and enforce accountability. Innovations such as smart national ID cards and eVoting can increase participation in democratic processes.

India has a limited window of opportunity for getting its policies right so it can participate successfully in a globally very competitive world. It missed many previous opportunities but cannot afford to miss this one. The time has come for government and corporate India to come together to Think Big and drive the disruptive innovations that India so urgently needs to move rapidly up the development ladder.

Good luck, India. You desperately need it.

Yes, I still expect a first-rate government even through reason says that it will inevitably be a third-rate government because the people desire it to be so.

That’s unreasonable but all progress gets its start from unreasonable expectations.

Why do they do that? That’s the biggest puzzle, perhaps second only to the puzzle in the Mahabharata.

(In the Mahabharata, someone asks, “Of all the wonders of the universe, which is the most wondrous of all?” It is one of those occasional geniuses who replies, “Man sees death and mortality all around him all his life. But he is never quite fully persuaded of his own mortality.”)

* * *

The Bofors gun kickback story is as well known as it is old. To refresh your memory, see Seema Mustafa’s short piece of May 6th in ExpressBuzz titled “It’s the Bofor’s ghost again.”

Bofors is a story that will just not go away. It cannot for reasons that Congress president Sonia Gandhi cannot fathom. And the reasons are many. It was the first case where kickbacks in a defence deal were confirmed. It was the first case that the Indian media pursued in great detail, and with tremendous enthusiasm.

It was the first case that actually established a trail between middlemen, high flying ‘foreign’ connections and the Nehru- Gandhi First Family of India. It was the first case that brought down a government, that astounded not just the middle class but also the villagers, and that assumed a dynamics of its own that is still able to generate heat during an Indian election.

It is a story where the middlemen might be dead but the Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, a close friend of Sonia Gandhi, is alive and kicking. During his days in Delhi he told this columnist on more than one occasion that he was not really such a good friend of Sonia Gandhi, at a time when his was one of the few names to have been cleared for free entry into then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s residence. Quattrocchi has subsequently changed his tune, and now when he is actually not such a good friend of Sonia Gandhi, he makes it clear to any reporter who manages to meet him abroad that they are great friends, and know each other extremely well. Obviously, in saying so the wily Italian businessman has managed to make it clear that he knows a lot more than he is saying, and that if the Indian government does manage to get his head into the noose, he will talk. And talk happily.

. . .
The result is that in the intervening years the CBI was unable to collect evidence, although it is available in plenty, to pin Quattrocchi down in courts abroad; he himself evaded the law and the supposedly vigilant Indian machinery to get back to Italy; his accounts in London that had been frozen as these could establish the trail to the kickbacks were released as the Indian government sat back and deliberately let the reminders lapse; the money was withdrawn by him almost immediately; and then when he was arrested by Argentina under an Interpol notice issued at the time of the Bofors case, the government ensured that the case was completely botched up and Quattrocchi was able to walk out a free man.

And now to complete the circle, on the eve of the elections the CBI, under instructions, has withdrawn the Interpol notice against him and the Italian friend of Sonia Gandhi is a free man. This has been done during the elections, after it has become increasingly clear that the Congress might not be able to form the government.

And everyone knows that in case a government here is able to get Mr Q to justice he will squeal. And that could be worrisome for some.

The BJP has made some valiant noises on the deal but has not been able to explain why it did not pursue the case with the same vigour as the V P Singh government had. The Congress has been defending the decision on the record, but privately Congressmen tell critical reporters, “what do you expect us to do, we have to defend this or we will lose our job”. Of course Priyanka Vadra and Rahul Gandhi do not see what the fuss is about, but obviously they know the answer for if there is no need to fuss, there was no need to prime the CBI to save the Italian businessman. It has been a shameful deed, a gross violation of the law, and while there is sufficient information to damn the CBI, the fingers are now pointing very directly at those who are in power and in control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is amongst those responsible. He makes a penchant of honesty; this is the time for him to explain these murky developments.

Clearly there are problems, and Bofors will not go away from media memory just because the Nehru-Gandhi family wishes it so. They should also realise that by misusing the official machinery to save Quattrocchi from the long arm of the law, over and over again, guilt and not innocence has been established. And in the public perception this is enough to keep the Bofors ghost alive. And the favourite pastime of ghosts, as we know, is to haunt.

PM Manmohan Singh is a dishonest man and is a disgrace to the proud and noble Sikhs, a disgrace to India, a disgrace to the worthy economics profession. He lacks pride in his own self. He’s a toady — one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors. A sycophant. He is what we call in Hindi भाड़े का टट्टू, a horse for hire. Granted that he is basically a civil servant and is trained to follow orders. But surely, he could have been his own man after being appointed the prime minister. Or perhaps he was appointed precisely because of his flexible morality and his ability to follow orders.

Talking of criminals brings me back to the question which I asked right at the top: what will the UPA government not do to protect the criminally corrupt? Quattrocchi is one famous case. Another case involves one Mr Hassan Ali Khan, a sometime resident of — of all places — Pune, the city where I unpack my bags.

You may be familiar with Mr Khan and his reported around $8 billion in some foreign bank. In case you want the relevant facts, please read Mr Arun Shourie’s press statement of May 12th, “The Predictable Scandal.”

That this [UPA] Government, the Government that has let Ottavio Quattrochi take away the money that had been frozen on orders of the courts; this Government which then used the CBI to let the man off the hook completely; this Government in which corruption has reached levels that were unheard of till now; this Government which has been consistently soft on terror, that this Government should now have stooped so low as to help an operator like Hassan Ali Khan by sending forged documents to a foreign Government is entirely in character.

Based on what they have been told by officials of intelligence agencies as well as of the Enforcement Directorate, the media have reported that Hassan Ali Khan

• Has been known to be connected to Dawood Ibrahim
• Has been known to have been channeling very large amounts from unknown sources into the Indian stock market
• Has had 8 to 9 billion dollars in the UBS and other banks of Switzerland
• Has been responsible for hawala transactions of over Rs. 35,000 crore through Swiss banks.

Go read it all.

The most basic rule of the social contract between the government and the people is that the government is not willfully criminal in intent and action. That contract has been repeatedly and severely violated. That the government did so and still continues to expect support from the people speaks to how enormous its contempt for the people is.

Here’s Shourie once again:

Once again, the country is being held up to ridicule – once again, the world is being shown how the Government of India will bend our laws and institutions to help the worst sorts of criminals and their associates, exactly as banana republics do.

The biggest puzzle for me is whether the people of India deserve the contempt that the Congress government holds them in. That puzzle will be solved within the week — if the UPA comes back to continue its rape of India, the people would have demonstrated that they deserve the contempt that the Congress party has for them.

PS: You may have guessed from this rant that I am very very upset. That happens. You may wish to read “Of Kakistocracies, Principals, and Agents” to understand where I am coming from.

It seems to me that the biggest barrier to moving ahead is the complacency that comes from having convinced oneself that one has already arrived. Indian leaders talk glibly of India being this or that superpower; they talk of “second fastest” this or “second largest” that. They talk glowingly of the “demographic dividend.” I can understand why they do that. If they were to admit that the population has grown beyond what is good for the country (and more importantly for its people), then they will have to admit that they screwed up — just as their hallowed leaders such as Nehru and Gandhi did.

They figure that the best thing to do is to twist this unpalatable fact and make it into something desirable. The easiest way to avoid having to fix is vice is to pretend that it is a virtue. (When people screwup in software design, they label bugs as features.)

Mr Das quotes his mother approvingly at the start of the article.

She had asked, what is the difference between China growing at a rate of 10% and India at 8%? I replied that the difference was, indeed, very significant. If we were to grow at 10% we could save twenty years. This is almost a generation. We could lift a whole generation into the middle class twenty years sooner. She thought for a while and then said gently, “We have waited 3,000 years for this moment. Why don’t we wait another twenty and do it the Indian way?”

I think that the next time I see a starving person on the street, I will quote her. I am sure that the children on the railway station would be quite content with a bit of wait. What’s a lifetime of hunger, pain, deprivation, and misery when in just a few generations, in a matter of decades, India will be better than China? I am sure that the hundreds of millions of below-five malnourished children would be quite satisfied with this explanation and not bother us for food.

What strikes me speechless is the idiocy that people are willing to sprout just to camouflage their feeling of guilt and inadequacy. Better be branded an idiot than a heartless person.

Mr Das points out the Tiannmen Square massacre and says that in India this sort of thing would not happen. I am afraid that Mr Das is not familiar with the massacre of Sikhs that the Congress party of India engineered and in which thousands of innocent Sikhs were murdered in cold blood. After more than a quarter century, the criminals are still roaming free on the streets of India. Someone should clue him in.

What I really don’t like is the cherry-picking of evidence in support of dubious claims. Sure China has problems — no country is governed by enlightened bodhisattavs and buddhas. But even to imperfect humans is granted the ability to make rational economic policies. It is does not require superhuman skills. Lots of countries around the world have got their economic policies right, and have created the institutions that enable the society to function as well as can be done given the constraints. The matter that Indians need to keep confronting is why is India so desperately poor. Because by pretending that in some mythical future India would be better than China is all very fine in the debating halls of Oxford or Cambridge but that does not move us one inch towards solving the urgent problems India faces in the here and now.

Here’s as fine a bit of denial as you are ever likely to come across in print:

Because the Indian state is inefficient, millions of entrepreneurs have stepped into the vacuum. When government schools fail, people start private schools in the slums, and the result is millions of ’slumdog millionaires’. You cannot do this in China. Our free society forces us to solve our own problems, making us self-reliant. Hence, the Indian way is likely to be more enduring because the people have scripted India’s success while China’s state has crafted its success.

The state fails and that failure is a feather in the cap of India? Wow!

We are self-reliant while the Chinese depend on the state! How is that supposed to comfort the 700 million or so Indians who have to subsist on less than $2 a day?

And then Mr Das ends on a truly amazing note:

This worries China’s leaders who ask, if India can become the world’s second fastest economy despite the state, what will happen when the Indian state begins to perform? India’s path may be slower but it is surer, and the Indian way of life is also more likely to survive. This is why when I am reborn I would prefer it to be in India.

Unlike Mr Das, I am not privy to the private worries of the Chinese leadership. I can only guess that the Chinese leaders are more concerned about how to grow their $3,000 per capita annual income to $30,000, and what they need to do to challenge the US for world superpower status. I am not so sure that India with its $1,000 per capita annual income (and the “second fastest” growth rate) is something that they lose much sleep over. I somehow think that they would not waste time debating the proposition whether the future will belong to China or to India. I believe that they know (and so does Mr Das) that China has beat India fair and square here and now, and that is what matters.

If you have to rationalize your failures by pretending that the future is going to be different, you might be a third world country.

Mr. Kumar had come to Lucknow from a small village eight days before, leaving his wife and four children behind. He hadn’t found work yet. He tried lowering his daily price from 100 rupees to 80 and then 60, without luck. Like many of the workers around him, he was sleeping on the ground by the temple.

One could safely assume that Mr Kumar’s parents were not well-off and further that he has half-a-dozen siblings. Since he did not get any education, the best he can do is provide unskilled labor. The aggregate supply of such unskilled labor relative to aggregate demand depresses the price of labor to subsistence (or below) levels. Mr Kumar, in his turn, continues the tradition of parenting the next generation of unskilled labor by producing not a couple but four children. This is great for depressing the price of labor and naturally for the upper socio-economic strata which the policymakers inhabit. What literally kills the poor is great for the non-poor. The poor apparently very willingly participate in their own destitution through their fecundity.

These poor then go and vote for the likes of Mayawati. She controls the public purse strings and as the article notes,

Urvashi Sharma, a local activist, says the Uttar Pradesh state government has allocated huge sums on projects of limited social value, including a $90 million monument being built to honor political leaders near the Gomti River. It involves a massive domed monolith and public meeting area stretching over several city blocks, with a statue of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kumari Mayawati across the street and a gallery of giant stone elephants, her political party’s symbol. Navneet Sehgal, the state’s secretary of urban development, says the project is an economic stimulus and has created jobs.

Navneet Sehgal is an idiot but understandably so because most likely he has no clue about what causes what. However, Mayawati is not an idiot. She fits the pattern of Indian political leadership which has, since independence starting with Jawaharlal Nehru (after whom the great Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal project is named), been of parasites with the morality of pond scum.

But Mr Sehgal and Mr Kumar probably support Mayawati at the polls. It is hard to feel sorry for people who work hard at inviting the disasters that they suffer. What bothers me is that this cycle of stupidity and misery is hard to break through reason and rationality and will eventually only be broken by nature’s vicious intervention.

Coming back to the title of the WSJ piece: megacities are not choking India; people are choking India.

Gurumurthy concludes with

Manmohan Singh today does what Sonia wants like Narasimha Rao did then what she wanted. Yet, there is a difference between how the two obliged her. Rao felt shy to do what she wanted. So he did it stealthily. Singh does what she wants openly and shamelessly. Even, a Sonia family retainer like H R Bharadwaj feels shy to own up the shameless withdrawal of the Red Corner Notice on Q; but the PM owns it proudly. Singh is shameless about what Rao used to feel shy. Why? Unlike Rao, Singh is not an elected prime minister but a nominated one; he is not chosen by democratic process, but selected by the dynasty; he is not backed by the people, but backed by the family. So the shift from shyness to shamelessness, from Rao to Singh .

Fortunately, Mr Singh is a Sikh and does not have to shave. He does not have to face himself. But one does wonder how he shows his face in public, though. Perhaps he minimizes his public expose. That could explain why he never contests elections. At some level, the sadness one feels for him is mixed in with heaps of contempt and pity.

Still I find it hard to believe that people actually vote for a party which has him as a member. What does it say about those voters? Some things are best not delved into too deeply.

Post script: Please do read “A Self-confessed Slave” — a post about Mr Manmohan Singh.

If the Indian Army advanced within 60 miles of Islamabad, you can bet Pakistan’s army would be fully mobilized and defending the country in pitched battles. Yet when the Taliban got that close to the capital on Friday, pushing into the key district of Buner, Pakistani authorities sent only several hundred poorly equipped and underpaid constabulary forces.

Well duh! The Indian Army and the Taliban are not exactly cats of the same breed, are they? The former is a foreign army (of a kafir state, at that) and the latter is an Islamic army — the purest of the pure — fully nourished and cared for by the Islamic state of Pakistan. The Taliban represents the best of the Islamic tradition, a tradition that Pakistan fully, unconditionally, proudly, and strenuously adheres to. Naturally then the Pakistani state’s response to the Taliban would be different from how it would have reacted to a foreign army. Why the editorial writer finds it remarkable is a bit of a mystery.

The editorial continues with

Pakistanis don’t have to look far to see what life would be like under Taliban rule. Since an army-backed peace deal ceded the Swat Valley to the militants, the Taliban have fomented class revolt and terrorized the region by punishing “un-Islamic” activities like dancing and girls’ attending school.

OK, here’s a clue: dancing and girls attending school are prohibited by Islam. It’s a fact. It is un-Islamic. There is no need to put scare-quotes around un-Islamic as if it were not really so but merely mistakenly alleged to be so.

Just by the way, I find it interesting that on the one hand, some people are vehement in their insistence that Islam is a “religion of peace” and on the other hand they are scared shitless when the “religion of peace” is actually followed as advertised. Cognitive dissonance or just plain hypocrisy? Both are troublesome. I lean towards the hypocrisy explanation.

The Taliban is the love child of the sordid affair involving the US and Pakistan. It was not a virgin birth because Pakistan was no immaculately conceived. The US participated the creation of the Taliban vigorously and with pleasure. For the pleasure, the US paid hard cash and trained a generation of jihadists. The jihadists loved the training, the Islamic manuals, the guns and the ammo. After they were done with the Russians, the jihadists turned their sights on other matters, such as flying planes into tall buildings. The chickens, as the saying goes, eventually come home to roost.

The editorial again:

And — most frightening of all — if the army cannot or will not defend its own territory against the militants, how can anyone be sure it will protect Pakistan’s 60 or so nuclear weapons?

Still pretending, are we? Pretending to be stupid? Or is it not pretense at all? It is high time the world understood that Pakistan is an integrated ideological deal. It is not as if the Taliban are strangers in a strange land. They are sons of the soil and are the most committed to the ideology that motivates Pakistan. Expecting Pakistan to do anything other than follow where the Taliban is leading them is retarded. We all know about the military-industrial complex. Pakistan does not have the industrial bit. It has the military-america-mulla-allah complex (the “Mama” complex.)

The writer is frightened. Finally. What took you so long? Did you really think that the $12 billion the US gave to Pakistan in just the last few years as aid was meant for the Amish community in Pakistan?

Anyway, the US still has not learned the lesson. As the editorial notes, “Congress is mulling two different bills increasing aid to Pakistan.” The generous explanation is that the US is being idiotic. The more accurate explanation is that the US knows that the weapons that Pakistan buys with the aid will be used to kill Indians and does it deliberately. That is what is scary.

This public service message brought to you courtesy of an anonymous reader of this blog and in the interests of the on-going general elections in India.

Pakistan has long proved to be adept at diplomatically levering its weakness into strength. Now it is using the threat of its possible implosion to rake in record-level bilateral and multilateral aid.

Bountiful aid has been pouring in without any requirement that Pakistan address the root cause of its emergence as the epicentre of global terrorism — a state-instilled jihad culture and military-created terrorist outfits and militias. Even though the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad, rewards are being showered on the procreators of terrorism.

The Pakistani-scripted Mumbai terrorist attacks, far from putting Islamabad in the international doghouse, have paradoxically helped open the floodgates of international aid, even if involuntarily. Between 1952 and 2008, Islamabad received over $73bn as foreign aid, according to Pakistan’s Economic Survey. But in the period since the Mumbai strikes, the amount of aid pledged or delivered to Pakistan has totalled a staggering $23.3bn. This figure excludes China’s unpublicised contributions but includes the IMF’s $7.6bn bailout package, released after the Mumbai attacks.

Just last week, Islamabad secured some $5.2bn in new aid at a donors conference — the first of its kind for Pakistan. At that conference, host Japan and America pledged $1bn each, while the EU promised $640 million, Saudi Arabia $700 million, and Iran and the UAE $300 million each. [Emphasis added.]

Chellaney says, “put simply, Islamabad is being allowed to reap a terrorist windfall.” I would make a stronger assertion: that Pakistan is being rewarded precisely because it promotes terrorism against India.

But the global jihadi terrorism of the type that Pakistan promotes is a more recent phenomenon than the pouring of aid into Pakistan. The explanation of why Pakistan gets enormous amounts of aid is clearly to keep India engaged in a bloody dollar auction game. Of course, Islamic terrorism against India is another arrow in Pakistan’s quiver and it makes Pakistan a lot more lethal to India. Which is why every act of Pakistani Islamic jihadi terrorism against India is rewarded by the US and its allies (which, in this context, included China).

Go read the chilling article by Chellaney. He concludes with

The reason Pakistan can harvest tens of billions of dollars by playing the failing-state card is no different from what endeared it to US policy since the 1950s or made it an “all-weather ally” of China. Pakistan remains too useful a pawn for external powers involved in this region. These powers thus are unlikely to let it fail, even as they play up the threat of implosion to bolster the Pakistani state. It’s no wonder Pakistan seems determined as ever to pursue its “war of a thousand cuts” to turn India — with its aging, toothless leadership — into a failed state.

If you have been following the story of aid to Pakistan from a set of nations called “The Friends of Pakistan”, you know the drill. In a Sept 2008 post, “Why Pakistan is Useful Just the Way it is“, we have a bit more:

The “Friends of Pakistan are “Britain, France, Germany, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Turkey, Australia and Italy plus the United Nations and the European Union.” Among these are nations — US, China, the Arab states, France, Britain — that give aid to Pakistan. The military component of the aid is what Pakistan uses to initiate and fight bloody wars with India. India, a desperately poor country, cannot afford these costly wars but it has to fight them because the Friends of Pakistan want that India bleeds. Pakistan is the instrument.

I can see the reason why the economic meltdown of Pakistan is certainly not in the interests of the Friends of Pakistan. The biggest dagger stuck in India’s rib would be pulled out and with it will disappear the prospects of selling arms to India, of keeping India engaged in 1,000-year jihads which Pakistan regularly declares against India. The Friends of Pakistan more certainly do not want Pakistan to fail. You too would get worried if the pit bull you have trained for years to attack suddenly is in danger of dropping dead.

The Friends of Pakistan have an interest in keeping the conflict between India and Pakistan alive. Why do I say that? I use the revealed preference argument. Basically it says that by freely choosing something, you reveal what you prefer. If you have the power to choose a “Pakistan Friendly to India” but instead choose a “Pakistan as a Sworn Moral Enemy of India”, you have revealed that you prefer that. I take it is obvious that the Friends of Pakistan could have easily enough told Pakistan that it should stop its belligerence towards India and concentrate on economic development. But they do not and that is why I believe that they have an interest in keeping Pakistan dependent on their money because Pakistan does their bidding.

Please take a look at that post. For your convenience, here’s a bit from it:

Absent the conflict, the Indian subcontinent will develop differently and could in fact become economically prosperous and consequently exert an independent influence on the world. That independent influence could potentially alter the current power structure. As it is, controlling China is out of the question. They have had to make space for China. But they will be damned if India also becomes powerful.

Here’s how I imagine the Friends of Pakistan reasoning:

“Sure, there is a lot of talk in India about India becoming a ’super power.’ (snigger, snigger.) We are fine with India deluding itself into thinking that it is an economic superpower just because it has a lot of software coolies and call center operators. Good for them. It keeps them distracted.

“But let’s not forget that without Pakistan as a mill around India’s neck, India could have a decent shot at actually developing. We cannot afford the disintegration of Pakistan. To keep Pakistan in business is not such a costly affair, in any case. We’re rich enough to chip in a few billion dollars and they will do what we want them to do. The generals are not very expensive anyway. If we had to keep the civilian population happy, it would have been more expensive. But this is much cleaner. We buy the generals and give them shiny new fighter planes and even help with getting them a few nukes to jerk off over. In turn, the generals have the politicians eating out of their hands, and rule the starving population with an iron fist.

“Now let’s just pull together, shall we? The last thing we need is Pakistan disintegrating. We are not always on the same side of the table. But on this one we are as one. Even China needs to be — has to be — on our side. China especially sees the need for containing India. For the greater good, we all, we the Friends of Pakistan, have to make sure that we give just enough to keep the pit bull alive. It should be kept hungry. That dependence on us keeps it obedient to us and savage against India. Remember, not too much though. It should be hungry and mean, not fat and lazy.

“We have plied Pakistan with lots of military hardware. The economic collapse of Pakistan would be disastrous because the same hardware in the hands of the factions within Pakistan would be totally useless against India. It bloody defeats the bloody purpose. That cannot be allowed to happen.”

To be fair, my modeling of a long-lasting global conflict as a dollar auction is just a hypothesis. The model makes predictions and unfortunately all the evidence is consistent with the model’s prediction. This adds confidence in the model’s accuracy.

For more, please see a September 2001 (right after 9/11) post titled “The Looking Glass War” for the beginning of this line of reasoning.

Related posts:

“The Dollar Auction Continues” — Dec 2006.

“Quo Vadis, Pakistan” — Nov 2007.

“The War and the Circus” — Apr 2009.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

That quote has appeared before on this blog. Two years ago in April 2007, I wrote in the context of India’s urbanization that India should “Make no little Plans.” Nearly four years ago in July 2005, the same quote appeared in the post where I revisited the “Integrated Rail Transport System (IRTS)” proposal that I promote. India needs a modern — efficient and fast — rail transportation system. I concluded that post with

. . . India always uses outdated ancient technology. For once, India should aim to use the best. And using the best — even if initially imported — will help us learn how to make the best. We need to have the humility to say that we need to import stuff that we can’t make today. We need to have the pride which makes us want to take the imported stuff and improve upon it so that others will look to us when it comes to the technology. We need to have the courage to make big plans.

We need to move beyond the myopia of the politicians and the idiocy of the generals wanting to arm themselves with nuclear subs and missiles and the greed of the peddlers weapons of mass destruction.

We need vision more than we need resources.

What brought this to mind is a recent editorial in the Indian Express titled — surprise, surprise — “Make No Little Plans” (Hat tip: Pranav Vasistha.) It talks about the US plan to spend $13 billion on a set of high-speed rail links. The US was never in the business of making little plans, anyway. But the US has not displayed the most exemplary of visions when it comes to rail transportation. Thankfully, reality is creeping up on them and they will figure it out eventually. Better late than never, I say. Now the high and mighty are quoting Burnham and saying “make no little plans” about rail transportation.

India should wake up and instead of making little plans must think big. Then I will stop having to say, “I told you so.”

A few excerpts from Kanchan’s article:

[Dr Singh] remained blissfully ignorant about the CBI giving a clean chit to those accused of leading murderous mobs during the ghastly slaughter of Sikhs in 1984 till a national outcry forced him out of his slumber, should do a reality check before he indulges in further chest-thumping. Ever since he was nominated as Prime Minister in the summer of 2004, Mr Singh has presided over a Government whose actions have encouraged terrorists aided, abetted and armed by Pakistan to strike remorselessly and repeatedly. . .

Tough guys don’t cry, Mr Singh says, but he forgets to add that when Mohammed Haneef was detained by the police in Australia for possible links with Islamist bombers of Indian origin in Britain, he, by his own admission, spent sleepless nights, agonising over the plight of the terror suspect and his parents. In the last five years, Mr Singh is not known to have spent a few moments, forget spending sleepless nights, worrying about the victims of terrorism in India — the children who have been orphaned, the women who have been widowed, the parents who grieve for their sons and daughters, the families which have lost their sole bread-earners. If he has expressed any concern, it is for the families of terrorists killed in encounters with security forces and offered them financial compensation. . .

We could go on and on and cite example after example of how Mr Singh is responsible for the collapse of internal security. But that would be of no consequence to him and his admirers. But since he has raked up the issue of conceding the demands of terrorists, it would be in order to remind him that a Government of which he was the Finance Minister had ensured safe passage for terrorists who had taken over Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine. And, till such time they were holed up inside the shrine, the Government had fed them biryani and oranges. But they would have blown up the mosque if we had not done so, Mr Singh will argue. Sure. Just as the hijackers of IC 814 would have blown up the plane with the hostages had the NDA Government not released three terrorists. Mr Singh, representing the Congress in discussions with the Government, would repeatedly assert one point: Do whatever it takes to ensure the safety of hostages — something which he forgets today. Strong men have strong memories, Prime Minister.

Every nation on earth is involved in this insanity, directly or indirectly. The desperately poor third-world nations starve their own people to buy ever more expensive weapons from the advanced industrialized countries. By keeping these nations fighting amongst themselves, the advanced industrialized countries achieve two goals. First, income.

The desperately poor third-world nations pay the advanced industrialized countries for weapons they cannot afford. If one side of a particular conflict involving two desperately poor third-world countries is unable to afford the weapons, the advanced industrialized countries give out “aid” to prop it up so that it does not lose and thereby end the conflict. The other side, to maintain balance, then has to become a paying customer and buy an equivalent set. This is a source of income for the advanced industrialized countries, and more damagingly, a transfer of wealth from the desperately poor to the amazingly prosperous.

The second goal of the advanced industrialized countries (AIC) is the disposal of obsolete weapons. Weapons age and become useless to the original developers. Instead of scrapping them, they are sold to the desperately poor third-world countries. (As the saying in Hindi goes, “आम के आम, गुत्लियो के दाम!”) This provides them the space and the funds required to develop the next round of more expensive weapons — which when the time comes, will similarly be sold to the desperately poor third-world nations.

In effect, to a large extent the poor of the desperately poor third-world countries fund each round of successive advanced weapons development. Of course, the poor of the DPTWC (shortened now since I have repeated “desperately poor third-world countries” enough times to get the idea across) often cheer when their leaders buy these weapons. Their jubilance at what grinds them into further poverty arises out of the same attitude that dragged them into poverty in the first place: an astounding stupidity that is matched only by the immorality of the venal bastards in power.

I should note here that the venal bastards in power are not men of any specific skin or eye color. The VBiP occur in all nations — whether in DPTWCs like India and Pakistan or in AICs like the US and Russia. All these VBiP have their incentives aligned and act accordingly. They are the politicians, the generals, captains of the military-industrial complex, and weapons dealers. They are found in Washington, DC, New Delhi, Moscow, Islamabad, Beijing, and other such fine places that the poor of the DPTWC do not inhabit. The names of the politicians are all over the newspapers and their faces on TVs and magazines: Bush, Clinton, Putin, Manmohan Singh, Sharif, Mugabe, . . . The generals, CEOs of the military-industrial complex, and weapons dealers are not usually household names but they are there from all parts of the world, rich or poor.

Talk of poverty, inequality, development, and such have been all the rage for the past so many years. There are those who are convinced that entrepreneurship and innovation will solve these pressing problems. Some lean heavily on hi-tech gizmos and declare that One Laptop Per Child is the obvious answer to poverty; some others flog the horse of micro-finance mercilessly convinced that it will pull the poor out of poverty; some high-mindedly declare that taxing the rich and re-distributing the proceeds to the poor will be best (whilst all the while handling the money with very sticky fingers); some others believe that the only way out of any problem is killing sufficient numbers of bystanders through suicide bombing in accordance with their religious beliefs; the nuttiest argue that globalization, capitalism, and the market are the real villains and the best way out of poverty is to prevent any sort of industrialization, and so on. The notion that perhaps the poverty of the poor in the DPTWCs is related to the weapons (that the AIC build, operate and sell, and which the powerful in the poor countries so eagerly buy) is not advanced frequently, if at all.

I am conflicted when I consider this issue. Is it the stupidity of the poor, or is it the greed of the rich and powerful that is the primary source of this state of affairs? Perhaps it is a tango and both have to be involved for the dance to happen. Whatever it is, though, it is all karma. Or as they say, you makes your bed, you perforce has to lie in it.

Anyhow, now that I am done with the preface, here are some items (in no particular order) which may be relevant in the context.

Item: The Acorn ponders “the absurdity of giving Predator drones to Pakistan.” Ostensible reason: for Pakistan to fight the Al-Qaeda and Taliban. Yeah right! Pakistan gave birth to them and nourishes them. Why would it want to kill its own babies? Real reason that the US continues to gift weapons to Pakistan has to do with what I wrote above.

I reproduce below the comment I made at The Acorn:

The absurdity of the situation is resolved if you consider that the military-industrial complex of the US is involved in a simple dollar auction.

Briefly, the US gives Pakistan drones under some pretext. Since Pakistan is broke, it cannot pay for them. So the US gives military assistance to Pakistan to buy the drones with. Which basically means that the US pays its weapons manufacturers for supplying the Pakistanis. That’s the first-order effect of military aid to Pakistan: US weapons manufacturers continue to be in business.

The second-order effect follows predictably. India now has to match Pakistan’s weapons. India pays the US to buy drones. This means more business for US weapons manufacturers.

The war on terror has to continue because that’s what allows the machinery of the military-industrial complex humming away. The US is a military superpower and any day of the week it actually wants to, it can totally wipe off global Islamic terrorism. That it chooses not to do so is simple: its weapons industry will hurt like hell. Sure the US exports a lot of stuff other than weapons. But the politicians who make the policies are in the pockets of the weapons manufacturers.

Allow me to quote from an essay I wrote many years ago, “Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.”

In a recent op-ed piece, “Stopping America’s Most Lethal Export,” in the New York Times, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize Oscar Arias wrote: “While the arms industry profits, people throughout the world suffer… the true weapons of mass destruction are the jet fighters, tanks, machine guns and other military exports that the United States ships to non- democratic countries–a record $8.3 billion worth in the 1997 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available.” Aside from anything else, the incontrovertible fact is that war is costly for all except for weapons manufacturers.

Moving on, let’s consider another example of DPTWCs buying useless junk from AICs.

Item: In January 2004, India signed a deal to buy the antique and obsolete 1980s-design Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov. Originally the deal was for $1.5 billion but the Russians later said that the retrofitting will take an additional $2 billion. The heap of prettied-up scrap will be delivered to India sometime in 2012, and it will be accessorized with 16 matching MiG-29Ks. The deal was made by the Congress-led UPA government. Pranab Mukherjee and lots of other people got lots of foreign trips out of the deal. The Indian navy big bosses must be looking forward to having another floating deck to strut about on.

Meanwhile, however, aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. Gary Brecher writes, “THIS IS HOW THE CARRIERS WILL DIE”

I’ve been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating targets, and that they were doomed.

But now I can tell you exactly how they’re going to die. I’ve just read one of the most shocking stories in years. It comes from the US Naval Institute, not exactly an alarmist or anti-Navy source. And what it says is that the US carrier group is scrap metal.

The Chinese military has developed a ballistic missile, Dong Feng 21, specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers: “Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.” That’s the US Naval Institute talking, remember. They’re understating the case when they say that, with speed, satellite guidance and maneuverability like that, “the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased.” [1]

I believe that a large part of the answer to the persistent and pervasive poverty of the DPTWCs lies in the insanity of modern war. And the answer is that until the people realize what is going on, they are unlikely to move a finger to change the system. But then that requires an understanding of what is going on, an understanding that in our case we don’t have given the dismal state of our educational system. Indeed, one could cynically argue that the educational system is deliberately not allowed to function because otherwise the people may become smart and stop feeding the machine. Cynical but perhaps closer to the truth than what those in power want you to believe.

Meanwhile, the poor will continue to be distracted from the real issues by the routinely staged three-ring circus called “democratic elections.” Let the circus begin. Because the least one can give them in exchange for their blood, sweat and tears is some entertainment.

NOTES:

[1]. You should go read that article for more but I cannot resist quoting a bit more from it because I like the way he puts it:

The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. Hell, they even look the same. Take that Wagoner ass who just got the boot from GM and put him in a tailored uniform and he could walk on as an admiral in any officer’s club from Guam to Diego Garcia. You have to stop thinking somebody up there is looking out for you.

Remember that one sentence, get it branded onto your arm: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.” What does that tell you about the distinguished gentlemen with all the ribbons on their chest who’ve been standing up on carrier bridges looking like they know what they’re doing for the past 50 years? They’re either stupid or so sleazy they’re willing to make a career commanding ships they know, goddamn well know, are floating coffins for thousands of ranks and dozens of the most expensive goldplated airplanes in the history of the world. You call that patriotic? I’d hang them all.

[Return.]

In the general elections of 2004 the irrepressible and sometimes irresponsible Lalu Prasad Yadav used to tow around a maulvi when in campaign mode. Nothing particularly wrong with that. Politicians have this tendency to turn mullahs into best friends at election time.

What was the particular competence of this maulvi that attracted Lalu Yadav? Was he a great aalim, or scholar, erudite in the finer points of Sharia? Was he a fine economist with specialised knowledge in the intricate problems of rural Bihar?

The reason was less subtle. He was a lookalike of Osama bin Laden. He even handed out autographs signed “Osama”.

Lalu Yadav sent out two unmissable signals with his thoughtless pandering. He told non-Muslims that the true role model of all Bihar Muslims, irrespective of what they said in their politically-correct avatar, was a person whose name had become synonymous with terrorism. And he told Muslims, particularly their impressionable young, that Osama was a legitimate role model.

Did Mrs Sonia Gandhi, an ally of Lalu Yadav, question him or even raise the subject? Not a word. Votes were more important, even if they came in the name of Osama bin Laden. Did the subject arise when Mrs Gandhi offered Lalu Yadav a prominent place in Dr Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet? No.

To be fair to Lalu, this travelling Osama was not by his side in the Assembly elections that soon followed the general elections. He had switched over – or, to be more precise, had been purchased by – Ram Vilas Paswan. Did the Congress ask questions this time around? Not a chance. Votes, votes, votes: that was the only morality. It was all dismissed as a joke, and the laughter was doubtless very hearty in the comfortable drawing rooms of Lutyens’ Delhi.The joke has soured on the killing fields of Malegaon, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and a roster of cities that could enter the list of dread. The dead do not laugh even when there is a comedian as rich in range as Lalu Yadav.

The innocents have been killed and maimed by terrorists who have Osama bin Laden as their inspiration. I could produce a spread of direct and indirect evidence, from the manifesto of Indian Mujahideen to the taped speeches of Mohammad Masood Azhar (released by the BJP during the bargain over the hijacked Indian Airlines) to the honorifics used by “commanders” of the terror groups. A little will suffice. A certain television evangelist based in Mumbai, who has a devoted following among the terror groups, glorifies Osama as the ultimate Islamic hero.

On a different level, Maulana Sufiyan Patanigia, once head of the Lal Masjid seminary in Ahmedabad, and now on a revenge mission after the Gujarat carnage of 2002, is known as the Indian Mullah Omar, while his deputy Suhail Khan delights in the nickname “Chota Osama”. The hate literature spawned by the Indian terrorist groups are full of the anti-Hindu venom that is encouraged by organisations like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, with its haven in Pakistan.

Common sense would suggest that those Indian politicians who claim to have some sympathy for Indian Muslims would seek, in their speeches, to create a distance between this deadly extreme fringe and the broad mass of the community, not only because this was wise but primarily because this was true. Instead, such of their ilk who are in the present government in Delhi have indulged in a curious, and inexplicable, dichotomy. On the one side, the Lalu Yadavs tout an Osama to fuel the worst kind of sentiment. And, on the other, there is what amounts to a complete denial that is inconsistent with facts. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, seems to subsist on comfort food, perhaps because the truth is politically indigestible.

The most serious instance of comfort food was the formulation he offered to his good friend George W. Bush during the latter’s official visit to India. He said that no Indian Muslim was involved in terrorism, and offered as evidence that you could not find any Indian Muslim in Osama’s Al Qaeda. President Bush, in his wisdom, picked this up as proof of his theory that democracy was a panacea for all ills. Not only did democracies never go to war against one another, but they also managed to secure Indian Muslims from the temptations of terrorism.

Dr Singh had clearly not consulted his intelligence agencies when he came to such a conclusion. Even a check with the Mumbai courts might have persuaded him otherwise. Indian nationals have been involved in terrorist conspiracies at least since 1993, after the trauma of the demolition of the Babri mosque and the Congress government’s startling indifference to both its loss and the communal havoc that ensued. It is possible that Dr Singh meant well.

But self-delusion is not diagnosis. It is perhaps such a frame of mind that takes the government towards a soft view of the guilt of Afzal Guru. Afzal Guru has been convicted for possibly the most outrageous attack on the Indian state. His conviction has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. There are no more legal avenues to traverse.

Look at this situation from the point of view of the veteran or the prospective terrorist. To start with, he knows that in India there is a lot of crime and very little punishment. If the guilty do get caught, it is often fortuitously. For lesser crimes, corruption is the sanctioned solution. For unforgivable crimes like terrorism, there is a pattern. An incident occurs, and lights flare in media. Worthy dignitaries visit the site and trot off to hospital.

The Home Minister of India repeats the same inane things he has been saying for four years. And then everyone retreats into the default mode of complacency. What is there to worry about? And when an Afzal Guru is caught and convicted, the state dithers. Perhaps this is why the Indian Mujahideen had the belligerence to taunt the government, through an email (sent before the timers wreaked their damage) that they were Indians and that there was little use in explaining this away with alibis.

The most interesting characteristic about homegrown terrorism is the degree of sophistication it has acquired. The Ahmedabad bombings began with an automobile theft in Navi Mumbai; the cars travelled to Surat and Vadodara to pick up their arsenals before reaching Ahmedabad.

The detonators were timed to inflict maximum damage on innocents, with a first, second and third tier of victims. This is a large operation from mastermind to foot soldiers, with a foreign connection but an Indian network. If our police cannot fold in a net, then policing has lost all meaning.

The battle is in India. India is being poisoned with a cancer. And all the government has as an answer is Band Aid.

[This article was previously posted in "Paging Dr "BT" Singh".]

One evening last week in Mumbai, a friend said that it was remarkable that the financial crisis was the work of a handful of extremely greedy and immoral people. These people personally gained enormously but the cost that they imposed on the rest of the world was many magnitudes higher. The negative externalities, as economists would say, amount to trillions of dollars. These handful of people were white men.

To me, all this talk of white men causing all the trouble in the world feels a bit like the “man bites dog” situation. I have nothing against white men (and hastily add that some of my friends are white males.) Indeed, I have nothing against any group — white, brown, men, women, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jews, whatever — because to me, individuals matter not groups.

The global financial crisis in the US and the resulting on-going global economic crisis can be laid at the feet of a few white men. The operative word is few because it is always a few that are responsible. Look around you and you will notice that everything we enjoy or suffer has been brought about by a few. The modern world we inhabit is manifestly created by the genius (both for good as well as for the bad) and the actions of a few. More often than not, the modern world is influenced overwhelmingly by white males — most of them dead. Dead white males did it.

I think that when pointing fingers at a few white men (with or without blue eyes) for all that is wrong with the world, we should spare a thought for the other few white men who did a lot of good things. The science and technology, not to mention the institutions, which defines the modern world is for the most part the work of a few people — mostly men and mostly white. I cannot go into why this is so but it is an empirically verifiable fact. Mr da Silva has not met a black banker. But neither has he met a black person who has invented anything we so routinely use and take for granted.

We are prone to a special myopia when it comes to pointing fingers at others, particularly at those who are more successful than us. Perhaps it arises out of envy and jealousy. But at its root must lie basic ignorance. Not just people, entire systems are considered worthless and totally flawed when viewed with blinkered ignorance.

The global economic system is slowing down. The cry goes out, “Globalization has failed. The market system is bad. Capitalism is evil.” Yes, the market system is not perfect. After all, it is man made, not handed down from on high by an omniscient being. It has its faults just like any other human artifact. It does not always function well — but compared to what? Certainly the market system performs magnificently compared to socialist or communist command and control systems. The market system only appears to be bad when you compare its occasional failures relative to its long-run successes.

If we take the long view of it all, we cannot fail to notice that for most of human history, the world barely changed over hundreds of years. With the invention of markets and capitalism came the astonishing rate of change, most of it for the better. States that failed to recognize the power of markets and capitalism, stagnated and lost ground. The US, to take an example, rapidly developed in the 20th century and increased its per capita income seven-fold in a matter of a generation and a half. The US evokes envy among economies that made the wrong choices — but the fault lies not with the US but with the envious others. Even now it is not too late for some economies to take a long hard look at reality and recognize that karma — actions — matter and it is no good pointing fingers at others for their own failures.

Globalization has its discontents. But that is not sufficient reason to blame globalization. Perhaps the fault lies with the discontented and not with globalization. After all, one can refuse to be part of the global economy. India under Nehruvian socialist dispensation did precisely that, and ended up not surprisingly underdeveloped and abjectly poor.

India can still go back to its autarkic post-independence stance and get back to its dismal 2-3 percent Nehruvian rate of economic growth. No one is forcing India to become a developed economy. It can continue to keep the majority of its people imprisoned in small villages, barely scratching out a subsistence living. It can continue to keep its archaic labor laws and insane industrial policies that guarantee low productivity and low production. It has the liberty to do that and its people are free to vote for such policies. And most likely they will shortly.

It’s strange how it is fashionably PC to point fingers at white men over there but damnably un-PC to point fingers at brown sahibs on our own side. These brown bosses — few of them in this case as well — have dug us a hole from which we the unwashed masses may never ever climb out of. Thank god for the dead white men, for without them, we would have never even known that another way of living was even possible.

NOTES:
[1] President da Silva said:

“This is a crisis that was caused by people, white with blue eyes. And before the crisis they looked as if they knew everything about economics. Once again the great part of the poor in the world that were still not yet [getting] their share of development that was caused by globalisation, they were the first ones to suffer.

“Since I am not acquainted with any black bankers, I can only say that this part of humanity that is the major victim of the world crisis, these people should pay for the crisis? I cannot accept that. If the G20 becomes a meeting just to set another meeting, we’ll be discredited and the crisis can deepen.”

[Return.]

“Not all the time, but I do read the occasional newspaper. Besides, it’s a good reminder that the masses are complete idiots,” said CJ.

Sounds bad but I would take arrogance over stupidity any day. “Newspapers do chronicle to the minutest details what happens in a world which is of the stupid, by the stupid, and for the stupid,” CJ continued.

“So what do you think about the Indian elections? I hope that this election returns a government that is able to implement some good policies,” I said.

“What do I think of the Indian elections? I think it is the same dog and pony show it has always been. It’s what you would expect in a world which is of the stupid, by the stupid . . .”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time around. But what does by the stupid mean?”

“You perhaps know that the elected bunch are not the smartest people in the country. Nor are they pillars of moral rectitude. They are not known for their intelligence or their wisdom. Now lay those facts next to the fact that India is a representative democracy. The elected are representative of the people who do the electing. Surely you see the connection between the two,” said CJ.

“That’s a facile dismissal of a very valuable institution. Democracy is a great idea, and an idea that is as often associated with India as is its largeness. Democracy is a great idea, India is the greatest democracy, and therefore India is great. Indians vote and therefore Indians are great and India is going to be a superpower.”

“Nicely put. Quite off the mark but nice. But like I said, it is a dog and pony show. There is a man behind the curtain. The people feel that they are in control because they get to pull the voting machine lever. A nice illusion. The fact that it goes on year after year for decades on end must reveal something. What it means is that the illusion works,” CJ said.

“CJ, you cannot simultaneously claim that representative government is representative of the general characteristics of the population, and then also say that the act of choosing the representatives is a farce and an illusion. If the former is true, voting must establish a real connection between the ruled and the rulers. What is it then?”

“Let me see if I can draw the distinction between the politicians and the government. The politicians get elected and they are representative of the population that does the electing. So the attributes of the electorate is aggregated in some sense and reflected in the attributes of the elected. Broadly speaking, an electorate of wise and honest people can hardly elect myopic and immoral leaders. That is what representative democracy is. Don’t like it, get some other system.

“But politicians alone are not the government. The government is also a very large bureaucracy. That bureaucracy is the man behind the curtain. You don’t see them but they are there. They know. They have institutional memory. Politicians come and go. Bureaucrats remain. It’s interesting to watch the antics of the dogs and ponies but they are dancing for their meals. You think that if you don’t like their show, you would replace them. Sure you will. But all the lever pulling you do at the election booth is only your feeble control over the dogs and ponies — not the man behind the curtain.

“The bureaucrats are the real rulers of the country. And remember that you don’t elect them. They are appointed. By whom? By the bureaucracy. Isn’t that a cozy deal?” CJ said.

“But politicians are the masters and the bureaucracy is meant only as an institution to carry out the orders from the political superiors. So the control that the people have over the politicians is in effect a control over the bureaucracy,” I said.

“All this indirect control thing is true in principle but a lot of horse doodoo in fact. The politicians don’t really know anything about the ministries they are supposed to direct. The bureaucrats do. Do you really believe a guy who has absolutely no knowledge of aviation at all can run the aviation ministry? Or some country bumpkin run the massive Indian railways?” CJ said.

“So you claim that the bureaucrats are not accountable to the people. They are unelected. But why do we have this system at all? Isn’t this a bit of a sham if the elected are not really in control?” I said.

“History. The British colonial government put the bureaucracy in place so that it would execute the objectives of a colonial government. What objectives? To extract resources from the economy. How? By controlling every aspect of the economy. When they left in 1947, they handed over the bureaucracy — lock, stock, and barrel — to the new political masters. The white guys left and the brown guys took over.

“The brown guys saw the bureaucracy and realized it was one of the most effective ways of controlling the economy and the people. They loved it as much as the British. Every institution that the British had created was not just maintained, they were strengthened.”

“Be that as it may, change is on the way. The people are fairly fed up with the current crop of politicians and they will get better governance,” I said.

“Not really. Change is not something that arises out of random chance. If the underlying factors that motivate the electorate don’t change, the outcome will be the same. If party A promoted a certain set of policies as a result of a set of constraints, another party B will have to also adopt the same or a very similar set of policies as well. Why? Because the underlying reality is the same.

“When the BJP came to power, they did exactly what the previous government had done. The details differ in some but inconsequential ways. Then when the BJP went out and the Congress came back, they did what the BJP had done.

“The unfortunate fact is that India is trapped in what we should call a low-level equilibrium. India has the governance it has because that was what was handed down to India. Of the three freedoms — economic, personal, and political — that matter to people, some in India got some degree of political freedom with the departure of the British. It is not even very clear whether political freedom in the absence of personal and economic freedom has any meaning. If I cannot live my personal life without being dictated to by others, and if I am at the verge of chronic starvation, I don’t know what political freedom really means in this context, or what good it can do.

“By keeping the people economically imprisoned, but allowing them the right to vote, there is an illusion of change. That the jailers are different does not alter the fact that one is still in prison. Sure now you can shout a little louder and complain a bit more vociferously about the abysmal conditions of the jail — but you are still jailed and now you are a little hoarse and tired from all the shouting and the banging of your tin plates against the bars of your cell,” said CJ.

“You are dismissing the power of elections that people have in a democratic setup,” I said.

“No, no. In a truly democratic system, the people do have power to influence change and in the direction they want. But in India’s case, I think it is like the fake steering wheel for the 4-year old in the car. It is merely mounted on the dashboard and not really connected to the steering mechanism of the car. It gives the kid a feeling of control, while the real control is in the hands of the guy in the driving seat. Without the fake wheel bought from Toys-R-Us, the kid will be a nuisance. He will be demanding and cranky wondering if he was having fun yet and if we are there yet and where are we really going. Fake steering wheel in hand, the kid is pacified and the driver can concentrate on where he wants to go.

“It’s the illusion that keeps the game in play. If India were not so fascinated by the dog and pony show, if India were not distracted by fake symbolism, it would have seen through the sham.

“The power of illusions is under appreciated. It is not without a reason that people cling so tenaciously to religion — it gives them an illusion of control over things in a universe beyond their comprehension. The religion of democracy that the people so fervently believe in is as real as the other religions.

“India is once again preparing for the ritual of elections sacred to that religion of democracy. The results will be the same as before. As the American folk wisdom says, if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got. You cannot expect the outcome to be different this time around merely because you fervently hope so. Is there anything different this time around compared to the other times before?” said CJ.

[To be continued in part 2.]

NOTES:

[1] He held the view best expressed by Delos Wilcox who in 1900 wrote: But we must deplore and, so far as possible, overcome the evils of habitual newspaper reading. These evils are, chiefly, three: first, the waste of much time and mental energy in reading unimportant news and opinions, and premature, untrue, or imperfect accounts of important matters; second, the awakening of prejudices and the enkindling of passions through the partisan bias or commercial greed of newspaper managers; third, the loading of the mind with cheap literature and the development of an aversion for books and sustained thought. [Return]

Technological hubris is sometimes the result of infantile solipsism commonly encountered among those who are – paradoxically – at the two opposite ends of a spectrum of technical competence: those who are understand technology very intimately and those who have a very feeble grasp of what technology is. The former see the world and its concerns as merely a collection of technical problems just waiting to be solved by the available large collection of expensive technical wizardry; the latter are ignorant of technology but have a magical belief in the awe inspiring power of technology to solve all problems, technological or not.

The two groups sometimes come together and enter an unholy alliance to steer public policy with devastating impact on the wellbeing of the rest of the world. The alliance of political parties (the collection of technological ignoramuses) and some IT industry insiders (the collection with hammers who cannot imagine that every problem is not a nail) is a case in point.

Got a terrible educational system? Well, what we need is a laptop for every child. Lousy, apathetic governance? Give a smart card for every citizen. Distressing social problems due to extreme poverty? What we need is 2 mbps broadband connectivity for every household, however remote and inaccessible. Lack of clean drinking water, primary health care, malnutrition? A smart phone for every poverty stricken household is the answer.

That sort of policy is the unpalatable result of a combination of old-fashioned greed and blinkered pig ignorance. Public policy choice – especially in a democratic setup (however cargo-cultish {May 2004}) – requires public support. That is available by the truckloads, unfortunately.

Silly Public Policies

Harebrained schemes hit the headlines with tiresome regularity. Occasionally, out of sheer frustration at the mindlessness of the proposal, one is moved to throw caution out the window and express one’s distress. “Listen,” one says, “don’t you see that this idea is really a crock of bovine excrement? Not only is this a bad idea, it is going to cost an arm and a leg. Problem is that we are quadriplegics here and the last thing we can afford is an arm and a leg.”

And the public responds with, “No, that is a brilliant scheme. It will benefit the poor. You are a heartless free-market capitalist selfish rich ivory-tower intellectual bean counter who is not interested in the welfare of the country. You will never understand that this scheme will lead to benefits. So why the hell are you against this scheme, which even if it fails to achieve 99% of the goals, will at least have 1% benefit? Are you so bloody selfish that you will deny the poor the 1% benefit? Are you saying that zero benefit (if this scheme is not implemented) is better than whatever little benefits that will surely arise if the scheme is undertaken?”

There is a sufficiently large constituency of people who will actually advance that argument. I am not making this up. Read the popular press, and even blogs and mailing lists, and see what I mean. Read and then weep.

You should weep because this is the group that, although apparently literate and numerate, never got educated, despite all the massive spending in education. You have heard this before from me: dig deep enough into what are the ultimate causes for poverty in the modern world, one cause you will zero in on is a dysfunctional education system. The failure of the education system produces – among other ills – a large number of people incapable of basic logic. Most sadly, this group votes and thus influences policy – policies that sufficiently frequently adopted over an extended period guarantee poverty.

Pascal’s Wager

Whenever I hear the argument that a particular policy (despite its obvious faults and questionable merits) should be tried since there will be some (however negligibly small) benefits, I am reminded of Pascal’s wager and how people too stupid to handle basic logic fall for it.

Briefly, Pascal argued that believing in God is reasonable since even in the absence of any proof for the existence of God, it makes sense to believe than not to believe. If God does not exist, then you have lost nothing by your mistaken belief. However, if God does exist, disbelief could cost you infinitely (you would be tormented in hell for eternity), and belief would guarantee you infinite happiness (you would spend eternity in heaven. Even a very small probability of God’s existence, multiplied by the infinite potential gain or loss yields a non-zero result.

The trouble with that argument is easy to see. The argument is approximately true only if there was one true God. What if you end up believing in the wrong god? The Christian god would punish you with hell if you end up believing in the Islamic god, and vice versa.

The general principle is that by doing A, you end up foregoing the benefits of doing B, one of many choices which are excluded by A. If all you could ever do is A or nothing, then clearly the benefits of doing A is all that matters. But in a world where there are choices one can make, merely focusing on the expected benefits of A is misguided and cannot be evaluated without reference to the expected benefits of the other choices which A precludes.

Belief in monotheism rests on a large collection of logical fallacies (and other assorted stupidities humans are prone to) such as Pascal’s wager. But as a system that misapprehends reality through cognitive failures, monotheism has hardly cornered the market. Communism and socialism draw their life-fluids from the same poisoned well of illogic and ignorance.

The fact that spending $2 billion on laptops for 10 million students will yield some benefits is not in doubt. The question is how do those benefits stack up against the benefits of, say, spending the same amount on making 100 million literate and numerate using some other technology.

Here ends this rant. What I rant about is that too often too many are content with partial analysis when what is required is a general (or full) analysis. Don’t just palpate the animal and say that it is like a snake; continue to walk around it and then tell me if that is an elephant or not. What our education system has to do is to teach the kids that you have to think critically, and question assumptions and motives. The system produces too many gullible people who are dazzled by lofty speeches and shiny gadgets.

Previously in this series on a rational IT policy (provoked by the BJP’s “IT for All” policy announcement), I had written the preamble. This is the foreword to the upcoming IT policy. When, you may ask, is the IT policy going to be introduced. Patience, my dear gentle readers. By the time I am done with the laying out the foundations of a good IT policy, I think the policy will write itself.

I am pleased to note that the BJP believes in the use of technology for development. The BJP recognizes that IT enhances productivity and increases production. Their press release on the IT vision document is unequivocal and clearly lays out the components of the policy. It should be required reading for pundits and lay persons alike. Their policy declaration “IT for All” is bold, visionary, timel and ambitious. It is also fatally flawed and wrong-headed.

BJP’s pledge: IT for All

Shri LK Advani said, “A future NDA Government, if elected to office in the coming parliamentary elections, would give high priority to the realisation of this vision, which would help India overcome the current economic crisis; create productive employment opportunities on a large scale; accelerate human development through vastly improved and expanded education and healthcare services; check corruption; and make India’s national security more robust.”

Exciting though the vision and the specific proposals are, I have a few points that I would like to get a better understanding of. I am not a policy pundit. So my take on the matter is based mainly on simple arithmetic. (The text in blockquotes is from the press release of the IT policy linked above.)

• Multipurpose National Identity Card (MNIC) with unique Citizen Identification Number (CIN) for every Indian citizen in 3 years; to replace all other identification systems.

Perhaps MNIC is a great idea. I imagine that it will be used for a large number of transactions, although what they would be I cannot tell.

Given the context, it will not be a paper card. The US social security number is just a plain piece of paper. But I am guessing that in India it will be a smart card with an embedded chip carrying information about the citizen.

But let’s do the arithmetic. India has around 1,200,000,000 citizens. Assuming a conservative Rs 200 (around $4) per card, that works out to be Rs 240,000,000,000 or around Rs 24 thousand crores. That is the cost of the cards only.

The administrative mechanism and the manpower, the computer systems that would be required to handle the data, the process to authenticate the identity of the person before issuing the card, handling the security of the card and the transactions done with it, etc., will be extra. Let’s assume that these involve a one-time cost of Rs 1,000 per citizen and an annual cost of Rs 100.

Adding it up for those numbers, the first year cost of the program will be Rs 24 thousand crores (cards), Rs 120 thousand crores for the getting the system deployed and the fixed costs, and Rs 12 thousand crores for the first year’s operation. That is a sum of approximately Rs 156 thousand crores (or around $30 billion.)

Designing such a massive system and rolling it out will be a challenge. One assumes that the required human capital is readily available in India for such a task. I have no idea how many people and how many years this will take but I am sure that the BJP has worked it out already. The benefits of a Rs 156 thousand crore investment must have also been done by the BJP.

• 1.2 crore (12 million) new IT-enabled jobs in rural areas.

The goal is most impressive. I wonder if the government will provide the jobs because it is unlikely that the private sector will find much use for starting up business in rural areas considering the following facts: lack of trained people, lack of basic infrastructure (most importantly electrical power), lack of demand for IT-enabled services, etc.

• 1 crore (10 million) students to get laptop computers at Rs 10,000. Interest-free loan for anyone unable to afford it.

I assume that there are more than 10 million students in India who are unable to afford laptop computers. So they will have to be given a loan. I presume that the loan repayment will take a few years – time for the student to graduate and earn. So for at least 5 years, the total loan will be an expenditure for the government.

Cost of 10 million laptops (assuming that there are laptops available for Rs 10,000 – which is not so anyway) is Rs 10 thousand crores.

• National Digital Highway Development Project to create India’s Internet backbone, and Pradhan Mantri Digital Gram Sadak Yojana for last-mile access even in the remotest of villages.

There are 600,000 villages in India, some of them really remote. Assuming a conservative Rs 10 lakhs on average per village for providing last-mile access, the total cost is Rs 60 thousand crores.

• Broadband Internet (2 Mbps) in every town and village, at cable TV prices (less than Rs 200/month).

The prices of internet access currently in cities are over Rs 4,000 per month for 2 Mbps service. It is cheaper to provide access in cities, as compared to towns and villages (low density habitations.) Costs dictate prices and therefore to provide this service at Rs 200 per month, the subsidy will have to be around Rs 4,000 per month or around Rs 50,000 per year.

Assuming that there are 10 million internet-enabled households who will get the service, the annual subsidy will cost Rs 50 thousand crores.

• All schools and colleges to have Internet-enabled education.

There are around 1 million schools in India. Assuming making education “internet enabled” in each on average costs Rs 10 lakhs per year, that would cost Rs 100 thousand crores per year.

• 100% financial inclusion through bank accounts, with e-Banking facilities, for all Indian citizens. Direct transfer of welfare funds, preferably to the woman of the house.

Good goal. Assuming that this costs Rs 100 only per citizen per year, it would cost Rs 12 thousand crores per year.

• Every BPL family to be given a free smart mobile phone, which can be used by even illiterate users for accessing their bank accounts.

BPL families suffer malnutrition, are illiterate, don’t have access to clean drinking water, don’t have money to educate their children, cannot afford medical care, most live in slums in cities and in the most desperate conditions in rural areas. Their first priority is unlikely to be smart phones. The best thing that they can do with a free smart phone would be to sell it to someone who can use the phone and then use the money for food, etc.

But even then, let’s calculate the cost. A smart phone costs at least Rs 10,000. Assuming 20 million BPL families, the cost of this program is Rs 20 thousand crores.

Adding up the numbers so far

Just adding up the numbers so far, we have Rs 408 thousand crores, and we are just in the beginning of the wish-list. That is a large number even when I have actually taken lower-bound figures for the expenditure involved.

How large is that? Rs 4,080,000,000,000. That is 4 trillion rupees. That works out to be over $80 billion. (Just for ease of arithmetic, let’s use $ instead of crores of rupees.)

India’s population is around 1.2 billion. Of this, around 800 million survive on less than $2 per capita a day, and the remaining 400 million (I assume) on $ 5 per capita a day.

Governments don’t generate wealth. They transfer wealth from one segment of the population to another. The $80 billion for the government programs listed above will come from the top 400 million. Basic arithmetic alone shows that to transfer $10 to each of the 800 million (to get the $80 billion), it would require $20 per capita from the 400 million, or about $100 per family, in addition to the current taxes they pay.

This massive transfer would require a massive governmental administrative mechanism. The more money public servants handle, the more there are opportunities for corruption. This opens additional channels for corruption in a system already beset with massive corruption. If the goal is to reduce corruption as Mr Advani states, then increasing governmental interference and control of the economy is certainly not the way to go about it.

Conclusion

Reading the document so far is exhausting enough and so I will leave the rest of the press release for later. I have yet to muster up the courage to read the 40-page pdf of the IT vision.

IT is important and definitely holds a major promise of enabling India’s growth. But the items above are neither necessary nor sufficient to do so. And most importantly of all, there is not even the slightest indication of whether the massive spending will result in any benefits to the poor who need help.

One of the most important lessons one learns from the centuries of human development experience is that people do achieve economic growth provided they have economic freedom. Economic freedom coupled with even modest levels of human capital is sufficient for economic development and growth.

The currently developed countries did not have IT tools during their development. What they had was human capital (quite modest by today’s standards) and economic freedom. Human capital and economic freedom enabled them to develop the IT required for further increase in human capital and therefore economic development.

The lesson is that IT is not necessary and certainly not sufficient for economic growth

Technology – and more specifically information and communications technology – multiplies the capabilities of a system. If the system is itself dysfunctional, IT enlarges the dysfunction; if the system itself is good, IT enlarges the good. The key is therefore to make the system good before empowering it with IT.

Related posts:

Formula for Milking the Digital Divide.

I think that similar to market failures, there are democracy failures which arise when the conditions that are necessary for democracy do not obtain. For instance, what if there are information asymmetries or monopoly power? Democracy cannot grind out the socially optimal result in such cases. What if there isn’t freedom of expression? These matters are worth considering, now that the elections are around the corner.

Related posts: See Thoughts on Freedom of Expression and The Ownership Society.

As an urban Indian, I will vote for a party that promotes the values that matter to my country, my family, and me. I address this open letter to the political parties who seek my vote in the upcoming elections. Drop me a line if you can credibly demonstrate that you share the concerns and values that we have.

Here are my concerns.

1. Economic freedom.

• I want a government which generally leaves us alone. I don’t want a government that interferes in every aspect of our economic lives.

• I want a government that does not excessively tax my hard-earned money to fund wasteful expenditures.
• By chaining the economy, the government controls it to profit from it at the expense of the citizens. I want the government to liberalize the economy.

2. Personal freedom.

• I want a government that respects me as a citizen and not as a member of some religious, caste, linguistic, or vote bank group. I want to be treated equally and not discriminated against for whatever reasons.

• I want a government that does not dictate to me how I should live my life.

3. Education matters.

• I want my children to be educated. Government control of the education sector has crippled the system to the point that only the extremely wealthy can afford decent schooling. I want the government to get out of the education sector.

• I want a good education for my children because it is the only guarantee of success in an intensely competitive globalized world of today and the future.

4. Good governance.

• I see unimaginable corruption at all levels of government. Criminals routinely contest and win elections. I am not going to tolerate corruption any more. I will reject all parties that put up criminals as their candidates.

• I want the government to stick to the core functions and do them well. Primarily, I want the government to be responsible for internal security and I will hold the government accountable for the any lapses in security.

That’s all. I am not interested in GDP growth projections, on how by 2014 or whenever what is going to happen or not. I am not interested in empty promises about how India will become this or that superpower. I am quite capable of working hard and creating my own destiny.

I just want that the government do its job and I will do my bit. But I will not vote for any party that does not share my values and my concerns.

Does makes sense, doesn’t it? Motivating the task is the real job of the leader, not messing around with petty details.

Somehow, Indian leadership has consistently failed in that primary job. Setting the goal and articulating the motivation for why the goal is worth achieving is what leaders should do, and leave all the details to those experts who have professional expertise in the various areas.

Let’s say that the leader wants the educational system to be improved. He or she then should just explain why it needs to be done and get the best minds in the country (or wherever) to figure out how it should be done. The leader should not go into details because it is not possible that he or she is the expert in that domain.

Being unable to acknowledge that one does not have expertize in everything is basically hubris born of a failure of imagination. I see this failure fairly widespread among Indian leaders. Gandhi believed that he had everything figured out: religion, economics, development, history, conflict resolution, etc. Perhaps he could have specialized in conflict resolution and left the economics to those who knew the subject, and left the development to others who had some experience in it. But no! He had to dictate everything.

Same goes for Nehru. Idiot savants are generally phenomenally good at one specific thing and are abysmally below average in most other areas. But if one thinks that one is phenomenally good in every area, then one is merely an idiot without the redeeming savant bit.

A leader figures out which mountain is worth climbing and why, and leaves the actual logistics of the climbing to professional mountaineers, so to speak.

All this is preamble to my critique of Mr LK Advani’s recent address to the Federation of the Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). At the start he points out that the stock market is down. Fair enough. He correctly characterizes a stock market bubble as “notional prosperity” and laments “greed-driven” financial instruments. “Such undependable devices of the free market economy cannot be the basis for building a truly prosperous nation.” True but I don’t know of anyone who has seriously advanced that thesis that financial shenanigans can be the basis for anything useful.

But more disturbing is Advani’s claim that “unfettered capitalism” is at fault for the distress that the mango man (aam aadmi) is suffering. As far as I can tell, India does not have unfettered capitalism. The financial system is controlled by the government. So are all the organized sectors. Industries have to follow the law of the land which places serious restrictions on what they can produce, how much they can produce, who they must or must not employ, who they can fire and when — the list goes on. India is a socialist economy in theory and in practice.

It is a government of the poor, for the poor, by the poor. The poor outnumber the rich by an order of magnitude. And in a country with universal adult franchise, that means that the governments are elected by the poor. It is definitely government by the poor. Every political party of whatever color (red, green or saffron) is loud in its proclamation that its primary concern is the welfare of the poor. That’s government for the poor.

Surely, after all these years, the cancerous effects of capitalism must have been eradicated from India. But apparently not. There is still some lingering capitalism that needs to be urgently dealt with.

Advani is not happy about “unbridled capitalism”.

We believe that the new as well as the entrenched developmental challenges before India cannot be met by carrying the influence of either free-for-all capitalism or freedom-killing communism. What India needs is a robust, self-confident Swadeshi (nationally-oriented) model of development, which is rooted in the ideals of democracy, equality, justice and integral human progress.

“Swadeshi” is a nice word much beloved of MK Gandhi. It means “self-sufficient.” It is closely related to a word that I love, autarky. I like the sound of the word, not what it represents and its effects. “An autarky is an economy that is self-sufficient and does not take part in international trade, or severely limits trade with the outside world. Likewise the term refers to an ecosystem not affected by influences from the outside, which relies entirely on its own resources. In the economic meaning, it is also referred to as a closed economy.”

Autarky is not a nice thing, nice sounding though the word is to me. Swadeshi too sounds nice but its effects are damaging. Gandhi liked the sound of that word and loved what it did, I presume. So anyway, Advani wants to dress up swadeshi in nicer clothes so that it does not look as bad.

The “Swadeshi re-interpreted creatively” goes this way.

Swadeshi means that national priorities must override policies that have benefited only a minority and largely excluded the majority in the nation’s progress. In other words, just as the centre of gravity of the world economy is shifted from the West to Asia, the centre of gravity of our national economy must shift from “India” to “Bharat” ― to agriculture, revitalization of our villages, small and medium enterprises, and unorganized and informal sector of the economy. . .

Similarly, it sees no conflict between the public sector and private sector. There is no place for dogmatism in favour of or against either, since both have to be strengthened. In view of the recent global experience, the public sector needs to be further strengthened in the financial system and in core sectors like energy.

Swadeshi is not antithetical to cooperation with the international community, just as the concept of Swaraj was not. Nevertheless, its cornerstone is national pride and the belief that the India of our dreams has to be built only by our own genius, with our own efforts, and principally with our own natural and capital resources. India’s problems need Indian solutions.

Swadeshi wholeheartedly embraces the knowledge and products of modern science and technology. It holds, however, that our country should revive its own rich and diverse knowledge traditions and emerge as a major contributor to global scientific and technological progress, instead of remaining mere consumers of outside knowledge.

Swadeshi affirms that business and economy should serve as a means and not an end in themselves, and the higher possibilities of human progress should not be sacrificed at the altar of acquisitiveness, consumerism and environmental destruction.

I will concentrate on the above extended quote in the next post in this series.

In the meanwhile, you may wish to take a peek at my thoughts on Gandhian self-sufficiency.

And for real substance, check out the series on “The Fake PM’s Speech to the CII” from June 2007.

As the photoshopped image in my first post on this matter previously states, “I see stupid people . . . they don’t even know that they are dumb.” And now we note the furious back-peddling. I had noted in the followup post that the claim is that it was a typo. It seems that India’s Minister of State for Higher Education D Purandeswari’s claim that a $10 laptop was a reality was based on a simple typo, a dropped “0″. (H/t: Sudipta)

A fine invention — the missing zero — from the land which lays claim to have invented the zero.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of India’s governance that the minister of state for — hold on for this — “higher education” is so ignorant so as to be unable to reason and uncritically announces a near impossibility. Should anyone be even the least bit surprised at the sorry state of India’s education sector if its policy makers are so astonishingly disconnected with reason and reality?

I can imagine an illiterate person who has never seen an electronic device in his or her life being unable to estimate the cost (or the price) of a computer. He or she would have no basis for estimating the cost — it could be anything between Rs 1,000 or Rs 100,000 or more. But even the average high school student in India — who probably knows roughly the prices of cell phones, mp3 players, various electronic toys and gaming machines — would easily enough reject the notion that a laptop could cost as little as Rs 500.

You don’t need to have the smarts of a professor of quantum physics to know that some things are too improbable. For instance, most of us really don’t know how much a commercial airliner costs. For all we know it could be $50 million or it could be $500 million. We have no way of telling for sure. But if someone claims that they have recently built one for the astonishing $100,000, we would tell him to get a brain cell or two. We can do this because we know that a car costs around $20,000 and a commercial airliner is tens of times bigger and more complicated than a car.

I will not dwell anymore on this shameful display of ignorance. Let me review a bit of economics to take off the bad taste in my mouth left by having dropped my jaw too often lately.

The first fun fact is that most of the manufactured stuff available out there is produced by private firms in competitive markets. That implies that they have to make profits. How do they make profits? By reducing their costs. Because in competitive markets, if your costs are below what the prevailing price for your widget is, then you make a profit. But since all firms are simultaneously trying to cut costs, the price itself drops because firms reduce their own prices as much as they can while still making a profit so that they can sell more to the market. This leads to the situation that in competitive markets, prices track costs closely.

If you are getting a laptop for around $700 a pop (give or take a couple of hundred bucks), then you can be sure that the costs are around that. The margins are super thin. Laptops are almost commodities and there isn’t much room for super-normal profits.

The second fun fact is that manufacturing has “scale economies.” The more units of something you manufacture, the lower is your per unit cost. So what happens is that firms specialize in the manufacture of components.

Example: Intel makes processors. They make them by the millions. They spend billions of dollars in the design of a chip (that’s the fixed cost) but then manufacture tens of millions of those babies. That distributes the high fixed costs and so the average fixed cost is a few dollars per chip. The scale economies arise from the combination of high fixed costs and low variable costs (these are the costs of the silicon wafer and the fabrication of each individual chip.)

Then Intel sells these chips to others. These processors are intermediate goods, as opposed to final goods such as laptops. Much international trade is trade in intermediate goods. You see container ships carrying components from one country to another. The globalized world we hear so much about is held together by links that are essentially component manufacturing.

There are tons of intermediate goods. Just look around. The LCD display: made by a few large manufacturers like Samsung. Same goes for the hard drives in your computer. But let’s not restrict ourselves to computers alone. The windshield in your car is made by one of a handful of windshield makers, regardless of whether you drive a Suzuki or a Honda.

Every subsystem of a complex machine is actually produced by some firm specializing in the manufacture of that bit. The end product that you buy is an assembly.

What does this specialization imply? Obviously that you get stuff at prices that would have been impossible without it. The firms do the best they can, spending truck loads of money in research and development to figure out how to make their stuff cheaply. Over decades of this sort of learning and doing, the ones that manage to survive are the best of the breed. It is not easy to dislodge these firms. So if I have dreams of starting up a company which will knock Intel out of the ring, I should wake up and smell the coffee.

The bottom line is this: a computer is a complex bit of manufactured stuff, each subsystem of which is manufactured by firms at the lowest possible costs given the present state of the art, and it takes billions of dollars worth of investment to keep improving the technology and advancing the state of the art.

You can bet your bottom dollar that although things get cheaper over the years, there are no quantum leaps. (Here, I use the term quantum in the original sense of the word — a discrete step — and not in the sense that is generally misused as a synonym for “massive” or “big.”)

Things improve gradually. They evolve. Not just evolve, they co-evolve. To make something, it takes an ecosystem of firms all competing and all trying their hardest to cut costs and improve efficiencies. Last month I paid $100 for a 250 GB external (USB) hard drive. Two years ago, I had paid $130 for a 80 GB hard drive. Next year, I will perhaps pay $100 for a one-terabyte drive. But I will not be paying $2 for a 250 GB drive next year. That will not happen.

Why? Because there is a simple rule. There is a minimum cost dictated by the amount of stuff in a device. It is easy to arrive at that minimum cost. Just weigh it and then multiply the weight with the per kilo cost of the matter that went into it. By this device you can immediately put a floor on the cost (and therefor the price) of a car (weight multiplied by the cost of steel, say), or the floor on the cost of a bus. The latter minimum will be more than the former.

But note that this is a minimum. It says nothing of a maximum. A Porche sports car can cost a lot more than an average bus.

Also note that in many cases, the smaller the thing, the more expensive it can be. The Macbook Air costs a lot more than the average laptop.

The point is that one can reject the idea that a computer, however minimalistic in its design, can cost $10. It takes eye-popping ignorance to do otherwise. (Here we are not talking of a price. The price can be arbitrarily set by the government.)

Well, that is it for now. Got to go. Perhaps I will write more later.

A collaborative team between the Indian governments ministry of science and ministry of technology will unveil a super-low-cost computer on February 3rd, as part of the country’s $10 laptop project. Specifications of the notebook – which is intended for education use – are unconfirmed, but unofficial sources suggest it will have 2GB of memory, both ethernet and WiFi connectivity, the ability to expand the storage and low power requirements of just 2W, all in a small, portable package. [Slashgear]

Here’s what I feel like.

(“I see dead people” is one of my all-time favorite line from a movie.)

Like Milton Friedman saw money supply factors behind every economic disaster (which provoked Robert Solow to remark “Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers”), I see the failure of the Indian education system behind every episode of public stupidity.

I am quite willing to recognize that government officials are not the sharpest knives in the drawer — one secretary for higher education said, “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down” — but how does the press go about reporting their statements as if they make even the least bit of sense? How on earth is one be able to compose syntactically correct sentences and publish them in blogs without having the ability to reason worth a damn, like this item in The Better India illustrates?

The writer states that poor people cannot afford laptops for education now but this “is poised to change in the near future with the advent of a new Rs. 500 laptop (currently in prototype phase).” Why? Is it plain gullibility? He read somewhere that the government has claimed it to be so and uncritically accepts it as something that is even remotely possible. Besides that, what he fails to do is basic arithmetic.

I think that the Indian education system fails dramatically when it comes to teaching basic arithmetic. Of course they do teach 2 plus 2 is 4 and that sort of thing. But it does not teach how to reason after doing the sums. It is not just how to add that matters but what and why of addition that matter more.

So what’s wrong with a $10 laptop? What’s wrong is that it flies in the face of all reasonable expectations about the world. It is disconnected with reality. The reality is that Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC project tried desperately to build a $100 laptop and despite having access to considerable talent and expertise, the best it could do was a machine that costs around $200. What this tells us is that hardware costs, though they have fallen dramatically over time, are still high enough that it is virtually impossible to produce a laptop for around $100. If it were possible, they would have done it.

One has to either ignore — or be totally ignorant of — physical, commercial, and technological limitations to make an outlandish claim that the Rs 500 laptop will consume 2 watts of power. Even a small phone consumes more than that, and any laptop is a lot more complex than a cell phone.

The most compelling reason for totally rejecting this claim of a Rs 500 laptops is this: if the government, together with “students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras” could pull-off a near-impossible technological miracle, does it not imply that the entire global computer industry is either totally incompetent or else it is a huge big scam which actually produces stuff at very little cost and then sells them at exorbitant prices.

As far as I know, the global IT industry is viciously competitive and therefore cannot price their goods — especially consumer hardware — at prices too far above costs. So if the price of some display is $200, one can be reasonably sure that that is pretty much very close to cost. Furthermore one can be confident that each manufacturer is trying its best to reduce the cost as much as possible — because that is how they make their profits. That’s called competition in the market.

So if one were to believe that some entity is capable of producing some sort of laptop at a cost of Rs 500, then one has to believe that that entity can overturn the entire global IT industry by producing it cheaply and undercutting every other vendor in the world. If the laptop costs Rs 500, presumably each major component of it must cost less than Rs 50, assuming that it has at least 10 major components. Since these components each actually cost Rs 500 at least (and most cost in the thousands), if the government can produce them at a tenth of those costs, clearly the government of India should be in the hardware manufacturing business. Clearly the Intels, HPs, Dells, Samsungs, IBM, etc should be worried.

But wait! It is not that the cost is Rs 500 but the price will be Rs 500. Perhaps that’s what the government means. The government will sell it for Rs 500. And you and I will foot the bill. Votes. Votes bought at our expense. Good thinking, dear UPA.

The first and foremost reason is that that the BJP is not the Congress party. The Congress party is responsible for what India is today — a desperately poor country of 1.2 billion people. For most of its history since its political independence from colonial rule, India has been ruled by the Congress party. For decades since 1947, it had a near absolute control of the country. All the promise and potential that was India was squandered recklessly though decades of misgovernance. It essentially reduced India to a kakistocracy — government by the most corrupt and the least principled.

The Congress party appears to have one aim: to be in power. Its insatiable appetite for power drives it to adopt the most heinous of politics. It divided the country along caste, creed, and religious lines. It fractures civil society, it destroys institutions. The most despicable act has been its wanton destruction of the education system — which, mind you, wasn’t much to write home about anyway. Its policies are calculated to keep the population poor, uneducated and dependent on the government. It does whatever it can to restrict freedom — individual, political, and economic. The license-quota-permit-control raj is the monstrous bastard-child of the Congress party.

In my considered opinion, supporting the Congress party in any of its incarnation is an act of treason, if not an act of senseless ignorance. Those who vote for the Congress after what the party has done to them are either ignorant (like the masses who only need the “Gandhi” name to vote for the party) or are pathologically self-serving who would ride any train that would get them to power, never mind that it is anti-national, anti-development, anti-growth, anti-anything good and reasonable.

The second reason I support the BJP is because it is not wedded to a dynasty. Dynastic rule is worse than democracy because it does not allow competent leaders to emerge. I feel that the Congress party would like nothing better than to have the system that North Korea has. North Korea, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, is a necrocracy (government by the dead). There they have as the titular head of the state Kim Il-sung who died in 1994 but still rules. He rules though his son, Kim Jong Il.

Nehru died a few decades ago, and so did his daughter, and so did her son. But though they are dead, they live on as rulers.

I traveled from the Rajiv Gandhi International airport to the Indira Gandhi International airport to be at an event of the Indira Gandhi Open National University and took the Sanjay Gandhi flyover to spend the afternoon at the Nehru park before going to the Jawaharlal Nehru University for a discussion on the Sanjay Gandhi Yojna . . . Actually, I cannot separate the names of all the places and institutions I had to visit in the last week or so but that is understandable because all were either Nehru or Gandhi.

Rule by a dynasty is a nasty idea, whether in North Korea or in India.

In states that are not ruled by dynasties, at least there is a reasonable chance that policy will be dictated by competence, and not by people whose only qualification is how sincerely they sing the praises of the dynasty. Lest you think that I am making this up, just take a look at Dr Manmohan Singh. He declared that the NREGS is a gift from his dear leader Sonia Gandhi to the nation. It seems that he believes that the thousands of crores of rupees came out of the personal checking account of the Gandhi family and not the taxes of citizens. That’s loyalty. Loyalty to the dear leader’s family matters. Here’s a bit from a blog post from April 2004:

India’s democracy is at best a cargo cult democracy. Here is a brief news item from today’s The Times of India page 3. The Maharashtra Congress Committee vice-president Anant Gadgil plans to switch to the Shiv Sena because he did not get a ticket for contesting the elections. He wrote to the chief Sonia Gandhi and said:

Our family is known for its loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family, and to the Congress since independence. We always remember the recognition given by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi to my father for his utmost loyalty. Please let me know whether loyalty has no meaning left in the Congress party.

If those words don’t epitomize what Indian democracy is all about, I don’t know what does. Here is a person who wants to represent the will of the people, his constituency. And all he has to show for his qualifications for that task is his loyalty to a particular family. He does not plead that he has served the people of his constituency competently, he does not point out that he is capable of helping his society do better, he does not say that he understands the problems that his people face and that he has solutions, etc. Most likely he has not done any service nor is he capable of doing anything for the people. In keeping with the prevailing customs of the political parties in India — especially that of the Congress Party — all that he has to show is that he and his father have always been loyal lap-dogs of the of the ruling family.

Mr. Anant Gadgil may be an ignorant wanna-be. But he is not alone. His sentiments are shared by practically all “leaders” of the Congress party, from Messers Manmohan Singh and Narasimha Rao to the lowliest party worker. All they have to demonstrate is unquestioned loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family and they will get the nod. As self-interested rational individuals their stance cannot be faulted. The tens of millions of ignorant illiterate voters will vote for the Congress party simply because they recognize the Gandhi name. Therefore all Gadgils and the Singhs and Raos have to do is to plead their loyalty and they will get a ticket and therefore get elected.

The third reason is related to the previous one: I believe that the BJP is capable of building institutions. Institutions matter, not personalities.

Institutions matter because they are rule based. They are not dependent on subjective arbitrariness — the whimes and fancies — of personalities. Institutions persist and outlast individuals and therefore have a longer memory. They are also less likely to be hijacked by narrow personal interests and can pursue socially beneficial objectives.

When institutions are hijacked by personalities, they decay. The Indian National Congress was a worthy institution until the Nehru-Gandhi family made it into their personal fiefdom. The tranformation was tragic and it will continue to be a dysfunctional political party as long as it persists in elevating personalities over the institutional character of the party.

One can conjecture that it is the legacy of our feudal social system that is the cause of our dysfunctional emphasis on personalities rather than on institutions. After all, the raja ruled at his pleasure and did not bother with constitutions. The serfs realized that the law was basically whatever the raja said it was. Survival in this sort of a system depended on unquestioning loyalty to a person.

A modern highly complex economic system requires the rule of law, rather than the rule of men (or women). Arbitrary decisions based on personal prejudices cannot in general lead to socially beneficial outcomes. One can imagine an enlightened benevolent dictatorship but they are rare and rarer still is the possibility of a long succession of benevolent dictators. The odd raja may be good personally but his successors are likely to be rapacious murderers.

Sadly, rajas continue to exist in India. They go about in cars with led lights flashing. They consider themselves above the law (just another institution). They hand out or withhold favors depending on whether they personally gain from the deal. The license-permit-quota-subsidy raj is the only institution that these rajas find worthwhile.

I cannot guarantee that the BJP will build institutions but of this I am sure that the Congress party has destroyed institutions and is incapable of building institutions because it is personality based.

All things considered, I am supporting the BJP in Elections 2009. Though I will not be voting (never voted in India), I will make sure that my family and friends understand why they should support the BJP. I hope to do my little part in seeing that India develops a bit. The first step is to remove the biggest hurdle to India’s growth and development: end the dynastic necrocracy of the Congress party.

Spencer warned that “the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” That observation holds with special force in the context of the misgovernment of India. If the policy makers (the bureaucrats and politicians) are shielded from the ill-effects of their policies, they have little incentive to act prudently. Eventually, as the stock of bad policies keep building up, the country ends up in ruin. We have to remember that in the main, the success or failure of an economy is solely determined by the quality of its public policies.

Allow me a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean.

First, the state of Indian roads. They are generally really shoddily constructed, very poorly maintained, and unimaginably congested. Corruption in the public works department ensures that it could not be otherwise. The residents of the cities suffer and have been doing so for so long that it is taken as normal. That’s just how it is, the person on the street says, and struggles on. The policymakers, in sharp contrast, don’t suffer bad roads and traffic congestion. The roads are cleared of traffic when the top politicians have to use them. Often times, entire stretches of roads are repaired and paved over urgently within a few days in anticipation of a visit by some politician. High level officials (such as judges) and bureaucrats travel around in cars with red flashing lights and traffic yields to them — as if they were imperial rulers riding rough shod over the plebs.

What if the politicians had to use the Indian roads regularly? What if they had to ride the local trains in Mumbai to get to work?

Second, electrical power. The chronic shortage of power is entirely man-made in the sense that is a direct consequence of bad policies. Those who made these bad policies don’t ever suffer a shortage of power, however. In the areas where they live, power is always available by decree. What if power to their residences and offices were turned off first? What if they had to suffer the summer heat without electrical fans and airconditioners?

Ubiquitous bad road and chronic electrical power shortages are just two examples of scores of other ills that arise from the bad policies that are made by people who are insulated from the consequences. One of the most disturbing aspects of current Indian reality is Islamic terrorism. In my view, Indians are suffering because the policymakers don’t suffer Islamic terrorism.

According to the Home Ministry figures, over 7,000 Indians have been killed, mostly but not exclusively by Islamic, terrorism. Average people going about their daily grind end up as terrorist targets, as do the ill-equipped cops and other professionals in charge of public safety. The politicians and high level bureaucrats never die. In fact, every terrorist attack only leads to increased security for them. Thousands of special commandos are deputed round the clock to protect them. So what incentive do they have in actually preventing terrorism?

I think that one of the first steps that needed to be taken is to bring the effects of terrorism on the policy makers. For every act of terrorism, the security of the politicians should be reduced. I do believe that if this were done, they would do their best to see that the police and other law enforcement people are successful in removing terrorism by its roots.

Related posts:

March 2006.Terrorism, the way out.

The people whose business it is to do their utmost to ensure security fail to do their job and the people suffer as a consequence of that ineptitude. All they do after a terrorist attack is to make a bunch of ineffectual and inane statements, and don’t feel motivated to prevent future attacks with any vigor nor make the terrorist pay. Why? Because they don’t feel the pain.

Pain matters. If due to some neurological injury, you were to stop feeling pain, you could be in dire danger. Pain signals that the body is injured and that steps need to be taken to mitigate the threat and to take appropriate action to heal the already damaged part.

Terrorism threatens the body of the society and damages it. It is when the pain of the terrorism inflicted wound does not reach what constitutes the “brain” of the society – the policy makers who control the mechanisms that can prevent terrorist acts and can respond appropriately when they do happen – that society is in danger. The solution is therefore simple: the brain has to know that it will feel the pain if and when injury occurs to the body. Only then will the brain be motivated to seek appropriate mechanisms for stopping terrorists, and be prepared to deal forcefully with terrorists if it does occur.

NOTES:

1. Spencer is one of the greatest of the dead white men that I admire. Why? Read his essay “The Right to Ignore the State” (1884) to know why. [Return]

The evolving story about Satyam and its chairman Mr Ramalinga Raju is more interesting from a human interest point of view than merely from its commercial implications. Lots of very earnest analysis already occupies the minds of an army of commentators, editorial writers, bloggers and talking heads. Much of it is shock that Raju was so bold as to believe that he could get away with it. There is some puzzlement on why the auditors did not catch such a blatant cooking of books.

In all the handwringing, one detects more than a little schadenfreude, no doubt arising out of envy. After all, Raju had a meteoritic rise and watching him fall so fast cannot but give some secret joy to many. One of the chief joys of heaven (as conceived by the Christians) is watching the torture of the damned, as Tertullian conjectured.

I think I look at this whole sordid affair a bit more sympathetically than most others. I have the same capacity of behaving immorally and unethically, just like every human being. And while I admit that I have used that capacity at least a few times, I think the same is true of every one of us — present company not excepted. We are all flawed; the only difference is a matter of degree. The narrator in Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” puts it thusly about the condemned murderer who was to hang:

So with curious eyes and sick surmise
          We watched him day by day,
        And wondered if each one of us
          Would end the self-same way,
        For none can tell to what red Hell
          His sightless soul may stray.

I think it is fear more than sanctimony or financial loss that motivates the anger against Mr Raju. Of course there will be sanctimonious posturing and most of it will come from precisely those who are greater criminals. The most unpalatable of this will come from the greedy politicians — and more specifically of the communist variety. They cannot let this golden opportunity of pointing out the evils of big private businesses go untapped.

The amounts that politicians routinely steal from the public dwarfs the amount that Mr Raju cooked his company’s books with. The politicians regularly get away with it. But Mr Raju will not get away. His actions have directly hurt his colleagues through the negative fallout on the whole IT industry. He will be made an example of because it must become clear to all that he is an exception and not the rule in corporate India.

Politicians get away with corruption primarily because of two reasons. First, the harm that they cause is diffuse. Even if the theft is $10 billion, it is just $10 per capita. The average voter has gotten used to theft and cannot afford to get worked up about it. Second, the corrupt politicians’ colleagues dare not get worked up because they are in precisely the same boat.

I feel for Mr Raju. He did create wealth by founding a company which had a significant impact on the economy. A lot has been lost as a result of his actions. They probably arose as a fatal combination of greed and poor judgement. To varying degrees we are all prone to the same human frailties. In his case, in keeping with his considerable accomplishments and his past successes, his failure is public. There but for the grace of my own modest position go I.

PS: I admit that the title of this post is not the most clever. Every Indian knows that “satyam” means truth. But I wonder whether the Raju family thought it was very clever to name their other concerns “Maytas” — ’satyam’ spelt backwards. Does it not hint at falsehood, the opposite of truth?