Take SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” a bill introduced in the United States House of Representatives last October (and its counterpart bill in the US Senate, called “Protect IP Act”, PIPA.) They are supposed to protect intellectual property. But opponents to the bills argue that it will have a chilling effect on free speech, that it violates the First Amendment of the US constitution (which guarantees freedom of expression to US citizens and is the first of the Bill of Rights), and that it amounts to internet censorship.

To protest SOPA and PIPA (remember that they are bills and are not yet enacted into law), prominent groups and companies are planning on taking action. Google will have something on their main page; Wikipedia will be off-line for 24 hours on Jan 18th; reddit is going down for 12 hours to protest SOPA and PIPA. That all is going on in the US. What’s going on in India?

India is an interesting case. Like that of the US, the government of India depends on a compliant citizenry: people who do as they are told, and to shut up when they are told to STFU. Of course, this is not all that difficult since a majority of Indians have been brainwashed into the belief that the government is a benevolent agency — mai baap — which hands out goodies to favored groups and therefore has to be obeyed. The trouble is (from the government’s point of view) that some people are not very cooperative and insist on exposing the government’s lies. This simply would not do. These people write stuff and say things that could be damaging to the government’s case.

The government has a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, do something about the “demand side.” If people cannot read and write, they are unlikely to be exposed to the truth. The way is therefore to control the education sector and make it dysfunctional enough that even after more than 60 years post independence, about half a billion Indians are illiterate. Destroying the future of the people just to keep them in the dark is one of the greatest crimes that the governments of India have committed against India. The Congress party has directly and indirectly held the reins of government for around 50 years, and mass illiteracy is one of their enduring legacies.

The Indian government has censored news reports, banned books and movies, and made it illegal for people to discuss current affairs on radio. That’s what I call the “supply side” of the matter: make sure that the supply of information is limited to what the government likes. But then came the new threat: the internet and with it access to the world wide web of information.

As long as the internet was just text based, the government was not too worried. What scared them into action was that the internet became multi-media. Not just text, you could watch videos and listen to a variety of opinions, and you did not have to be literate to do so. That, as you can imagine, put a spanner in the carefully designed works of the government to keep the people uninformed through illiteracy.

So here we are. The country is being run by a bunch of crooks, headed nominally by the most despicably dishonest man, the appointed prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. His master is an Italian woman who rules her minions with an iron hand. Among her hand maidens is one Kapil Sibal, a man who is roundly despised and is perhaps a cretin. Sibal is in charge of internet censorship. He regularly tells internet firms to censor content that will damage the carefully built images of his master and her family.

The Center for Internet & Society has an informative article, “Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen” by Pranesh Prakash (dateline Dec 15, 2011.) Here’s an extended excerpt:

Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors

Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for ‘government criticism’. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.

‘Self-Regulation’: Undetectable Censorship

Mr. Sibal’s more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to ’self-regulate’ reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is ‘objectionable’ (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google’s Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to ’self-regulate’ user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about ‘transparency’ and ‘dialogue’ only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.

Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act

Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal’s latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn’t remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any ‘due process’ or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power.

So what are we going to do about it? We, if we care, should make sure that Manmohan Singh and his cohorts like Kapil Sibal, and their master the Italian Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, and her puppy are stopped from destroying the nation. Let’s vote them out.

“Isn’t China Socialist? How is it working for them then?”

A few months ago I met an author who is writing a book on China. He was being shown around by a Chinese guide during a visit to China for research. They were checking out a gated residential area where the houses cost millions of dollars. The author asked his guide how it was possible to have such expensive housing in a country committed to communism. The guide said, “In China, we do what we have to do. If it works, we call it communism and get on with doing what needs done.”

That’s good old fashioned Confucian pragmatism. Deng Xiaoping was led by that spirit when he said, “No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.”

China is working because its leaders like Deng Xiaoping have brains, guts, spine, and vision — four things that are missing in India’s leaders in general but are particularly absent in Congress leaders. The lack of brains, guts, spine and vision is epitomized in the person of Dr Manmohan Singh.

See Prof Pranab Bardhan’s quote from Authoritarianism and Democracy:

India’s experience suggests that democracy can also hinder development in a number of ways. Competitive populism– short-run pandering and handouts to win elections– may hurt long-run investment, particularly in physical infrastructure, which is the key bottleneck for Indian development. Such political arrangements make it difficult, for example, to charge user fees for roads, electricity, and irrigation, discouraging investment in these areas, unlike in China where infrastructure companies charge full commercial rates. Competitive populism also makes it difficult to carry out policy experimentation of the kind the Chinese excelled in: for example, it is harder to cut losses and retreat from a failed project in India, which, with its inevitable job losses and bail-out pressures, has electoral consequences that discourage leaders from carrying out policy experimentation in the first place. Finally, democracy’s slow decision-making processes can be costly in a world of fast-changing markets and technology.

Bardhan is a keen observer of India and China. In 2003, I had posted excerpts from an essay of his titled, “Crouching Tiger, Lumbering Elephant.” Worth re-reading.

I recommend another article by Bardhan. In the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Boston Review, he wrote, “What Makes a Miracle: Some myths about the rise of China and India“:

When I grew up in India, I used to hear leftists say that the Chinese were better socialists than us. Now I am used to hearing that the Chinese are better capitalists than us. I tell people, only half-flippantly, that the Chinese are better capitalists now because they were better socialists then!

Moving on, back to the comments. DK wrote:

It rewards a lack of merit. And since the majority would like to get something for nothing, they prefer Socialism. Of course you know this, but this point should have been brought out in your post.

This is also the reason why India remains, at its heart, a socialist nation. It is very difficult to convince someone with minimal knowledge of economics (which even our most “educated” people have) that competition and choice is good. We are hardwired to believe that there is always one single pie and more competition means that one’s own share of the pie will be reduced.

And the only way, we can challenge this is by making people (and I mean the ones who vote) very clearly understand that Govt. handouts and doles are simply a way of making them progressively and increasingly dependent on these. Again, the typical Indian would rather look at short term benefits rather than long term ones.

Thanks, DK.

Rex’s tongue-in-cheek comment was

“Socialism? But Chacha Nehru recommended socialism for India, therefore it must be good!”

No, can’t argue with that, can you? Chacha Nehru’s shit didn’t stink, if you were to go by what the followers of the Congress party say. India’s misfortune is that his followers continue to rule the land. It’s all karma, neh?

Thanks to Ketan for referring to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Agree totally.

Dinesh Darme started off his comment with

Incentives are ok. But upto a certain point. Just ask what compelled mathematicians, physicist, writers, etc to work much harder, to burn the midnight oil. It wasn’t fame/material riches/facilities. They did so because of their love for specific fields. They were in pursuit of knowlegde.

I think there is a simple misunderstanding here. The words “incentives” and “motivations” are not synonyms. We all are motivated by incentives. That is tautologically true. If the incentives are missing, we are not motivated to get things done.

Motivations can be internal or external. For a person to burn the midnight oil, regardless of the kind of work, the person has to be motivated. For some, the work is its own reward because they are internally motivated. Einstein wanted to know how the bits that make up the universe work. He was not really “working”; he was playing.

Most of us, especially in poor countries such as India (thanks to retarded leaders like our beloved Chacha Nehru), don’t have the luxury of doing things that are merely internally motivated. Most of us have to work, not play. But I do think that in the not too distant future, more people would have the opportunity to play. See my article, “The End of Work: An Essay on the Dawning of the Post-work World”, for a wild-eyed speculation of that future.

What sort of incentives work depends on what you need to get done. For motivating people to blow themselves up and kill infidels in the bargain, brainwash them with visions of virgins and rivers of wine. This will not work for anyone who is not brought up to believe in fantastically stupid ideologies.

For someone who has a few billion dollars of wealth, the incentive to make another million will not work. But an entrepreneur will work ceaselessly to make her first couple of million bucks.

Love, fame, money, affection: all these are powerful motivators but what works for one may leave the other cold. Still, like all living beings, we are motivated by “rewards” whether internal or external. Remove the reward, and you can be sure that the action will not take place.

Any system which neglects to take into account this fundamental truth falters and fails. The carcass of communism is proof that disregarding the fact that incentives matter is fatal.

Finally, Kaffir asks

Atanu, and what are your incentives (in the sense you used the word in your post) that keep you writing this blog?

Good question. I have mentioned this before but I am too lazy to dig up the references. So here it is in a nutshell.

I am a student of economics because I want to understand why India is poor. It bothers me that India is poor because I find the sight of poverty truly distressing. I feel sick to my stomach. Why? Because I empathize with the poor and I vicariously feel the pain. Why? Because I love comfort, I like good food and drinks, I love music and reading and visiting places — all of which I would not have had had I been poor.

I am primarily motivated by internal motivations. I strongly identify with Bertrand Russell’s motivation:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

[See this.]

Money does matter to me but not too much. I don’t have too much of it, and neither do I have too little. I have just the right amount. I have no personal ambitions.

I write this blog because it is play, not work.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

I have arrived at a generalization: Americans are extremely efficient in production and (perhaps as a consequence) are extremely inefficient in consumption. They can afford to be wasteful because they are rich. Conversely, I believe that people that are inefficient in production (in other words, poor) are forced to be efficient in consumption.

Running the Numbers: An American Self-portrait is a site by Chris Jordan which illuminates that general idea. (Hat tip: Suhit Anantula).

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Here are some of the statistics that Jordan’s pictures illustrate:

• Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.
• Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.
• Depicts 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.
• Depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.
• Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.
• Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.
• Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.
• Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.
• Depicts 410,000 paper cups, equal to the number of disposable hot-beverage paper cups used in the US every fifteen minutes.
• Depicts 65,000 cigarettes, equal to the number of American teenagers under age eighteen who become addicted to cigarettes every month.
• Depicts nine million wooden ABC blocks, equal to the number of American children with no health insurance coverage in 2007.
• Depicts 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali, equal to six weeks of sales of that model SUV in 2004.
• Depicts 213,000 Vicodin pills, equal to the number of emergency room visits yearly in the US related to misuse or abuse of prescription pain killers.
• Depicts 29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004.
• Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.
• Depicts 30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, equal to the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes.
• Depicts 3.6 million tire valve caps, one for each new SUV sold in the US in 2004.
• Depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq.
• Depicts 170,000 disposable Energizer batteries, equal to fifteen minutes of Energizer battery production.
• If 170,000 batteries were depicted at their real size, the print would need to be 26×43 feet, as shown here. To depict one year of Energizer disposable battery production (six billion batteries) would require a print 26 feet high by 146 miles long.
• Depicts 38,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every twelve hours.

No sooner do I arrive in Edison, NJ that the NY Times calls it a place where Indians (now New Jerseyans) thrive. [Hat tip: Maria]

Oak Tree Road [in Edison, NJ], which runs through this sprawling town of 100,000 people and into neighboring Woodbridge Township, may be America’s liveliest Little India, with 400 Indian businesses that attract Indian immigrants from across the region. But the impact is more than just commercial. Indians make up from 20 to 25 percent of the population, and they have spearheaded the transformation of Edison — an overwhelmingly blue-collar and middle-class white community a generation ago — into a town with a decidedly Asian flavor.

Edison is next door to New Brunswick where my old alma mater Rutgers is located. On Saturday afternoon I drove briefly through Rutgers. Those were the days my friend, we thought would never end . . .

The weather is cold and rainy.

So that’s the story. I am alive though not totally well. I got a bad stomach ailment and was laid up most of Sunday and today. I hope to get well enough to travel to Chicago tomorrow. More later.

The real driving force of the world economy is a new and incredibly powerful economic unit: the mega-region.

Extending far beyond a single core city and its surrounding suburbs, a mega-region is an area that hosts business and economic activity on a massive scale, generating a large share of the world’s economic activity and an even larger share of its scientific discoveries and technological innovations.

While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world’s population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation.

The author, Richard Florida, notes that “The problem is that much of our public policy not only ignores the rise of the mega-regions, it actually works against them. If we want to bolster economic competitiveness and ensure long-run prosperity, we must pursue policies that take mega-regions into account.”

. . . it’s time to stop transferring wealth from our most productive mega-regions to lagging places. In the U.S., the past 50 years have seen a massive transfer of tax money from innovative and prosperous mega-regions on the East and West coasts to the South. While this transfer may be a boon to local politicians and developers, such misguided policy has diverted economic resources away from the core mega-regions where they can be used most productively.

This transfer of wealth from the most productive to the least productive is seen most starkly in Mumbai’s case. Mumbai is starved for resources even though it is one of the most productive regions in India. As I have been arguing for a while, cities are the engines of growth and if one wants to help the people of rural India, India has to move them to where they will be most productive. And that means that India has to build cities that are livable and which will be the target of the inevitable rural to urban migration.

India’s development requires that the rural population is urbanized since urbanization is a cause (and also a consequence) of development.

Though the article is written in the US context but much of it applies to India also. I have been arguing about fast rail connectivity between India’s metros. The WSJ article says:

. . . our urban policy should not be aimed only at improving schools, creating affordable housing and redistributing income. Urban policy must also start to address economic competitiveness. It must strengthen mega-regions by improving fast-rail transit between their nodes, modernizing airports, and achieving greater cross-border flows of goods and people.

I think it is time that India starts to seriously re-think its fetish with villages. One of Gandhi’s fetishes (and he had a few strange ones such nude sleepovers with teenage girls) was villages, and Gandhi is an Indian fetish. So this strange fascination with villages is really fetish-squared.

Related links:

(1) I have a 10-part series which begins with this post: Ancient Cities, Modern Slums.

(2) An Integrated Rail Transportation System (IRTS). And a follow up to it: IRTS Revisited.

He states the standard view explaining the rapid growth of the two countries:

What explains this strikingly rapid growth? The answer that continues to dominate public discussion in the United States runs along the following lines: decades of socialist controls and regulations stifled enterprise in India and China and led them to a dead end. A mix of market reforms and global integration finally unleashed their entrepreneurial energies. As these giants shook off their “socialist slumber,” they entered the “flattened” playing field of global capitalism. The result has been high economic growth in both countries and correspondingly large declines in poverty.

Then he proceeds to demonstrate why that explanation is incomplete at best and provides a more nuanced and comprehensive explanation which touches on matters that are often neglected in the narrative explaining the growth miracles. For instance:

Start with the claim that global integration and associated market reforms resulted in high growth, which in turn produced dramatic declines in extreme poverty. Applied to China, the timing simply does not fit. China has indeed made large strides in foreign trade and investment since the 1990s, but well before then, say between 1978 and 1993, the country had already achieved an average annual growth rate of about nine percent—even higher than the impressive seven percent growth rate in East Asia between 1960 and 1980.

It is a very well-reasoned article and must be read in full. Let me close with the concluding paragraph of the piece.

Chinese and Indian economic performance has been far better in the last quarter-century than in the previous two hundred years—and this is one of the striking events in the recent history of the international economy. Other countries must adjust to this reality, and learn to treat the partial restoration of the earlier global importance of these two countries as an opportunity for trade, investment, and exchange of ideas, not as a threat. (We also need to work in tandem with them on the environment.) But we must remember that the story of their rise is more complicated and nuanced than standard accounts make out. That more complex story includes the positive legacy of China and India’s earlier statist periods, which offers general lessons for the process of development much too often ignored.

(Hat tip: Jan Manik)

Seriously though, the US is showing signs of serious trouble. Huckabee is raving lunatic, as Pharyngula reports.

PS: My favorite bit in that satire bit is “… and Mexicans continue to occur.” ROTFL with the idea of Mexicans occurring like some periodic drought or infestation.

Informed choice is not a matter that can be delegated to people who are not only not informed but for the most part cannot be informed even if you wanted to because the basic channels for information transmission are denied to them. Most of the electorate is illiterate to begin with and to add insult to injury, meaningful debate concerning the issues is entirely non-existent in the mass media. In the absence of substantial policy choices, it all boils down to names and faces. In every nook and cranny of the country, one comes face to face with huge billboards with the faces of people with names—never mind what they represent or what their accomplishments are.

This is bound to sound terrifically elitist. That is a pity, really. If the mere recognition of the distinction between illiterates and literates is perceived as elitist, things have come to a very sorry pass indeed. The fact is that in India the majority of the people would not be able to reason out whom to vote for and for which reasons. The majority are only capable of recognizing a face if it is associated with a name. It is a Pavlovian response to the stimulus of the Gandhi name in a significant percentage of the population. Which is why grown men and women with real world experience line up behind any Tom (Antonia), Dick (Raul), or Harry (figure this one out yourself) who have as much familiarity with governance as I have of the intimate personal habits of the Ming emperors of China.

The name matters over all else. And not just in India. All around India. A military dictator gets bumped off in one of those run of the mill coups, and his widow becomes the new ruler. She then gets bumped off, and her son gets to be the new boss. Bangladesh—check. Sri Lanka—check. India—check. Pakistan—check.

I do suppose you know where I am heading, don’t you? Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfi, gets hanged by a military dictator. Dictator gets bumped off (airplane crash) and Benazir gets to be the boss for a bit. She steals and mismanages and is replaced by sundry other corrupt politicians. In due course, dictator X takes over. Some more mismanagement and it is time for an election. Name brand enters the race. Bumped off before too long. Faster and heavier action than you see in a one-day cricket match. Scramble to get a new face with the same name. OK, here’s this guy. Name: Bilawal, son of Benazir Bhutto. OK, he’s the new leader of the party that wants to rule the state of Pakistan.

Now, let’s be clear. Pakistan is a third world desperately poor failed state whose hand to mouth existence depends on handouts from the US, China and charity from a gang of Islamic despots with pots of oil wealth. But come on. A 19-year old guy? Surely you are kidding. He has barely mastered the technique of jerking off to girlie magazines and knows as much about matters of state as he does about quantum mechanics.

But then, it is par for the course around here neck of the woods. Au pairs, airline pilots, retarded bureaucrats, rural illiterate housewives, movie actors, gangsters, crooks, scamsters—they all get to play the boss. So what is so astonishing about a 19-year old Oxford undergrad becoming the leader of a party that aims to rule Pakistan? Nothing remarkable at all. The cargo will surely arrive from the US, China, and those fine Arabic states—as long as the right incantations are made about democracy.

One cannot escape the fact that the US is the world’s reigning hegemon. Nothing much of any significance happens around the world is not in some way affected by what the US does. No large nation or a confederation of nations is immune from US influence to some extent, whether it be India, China, or the EU. But when it comes to small impoverished dependent nations, the US is the ultimate dispenser of their destinies. Pakistan is what the US wants it to be, and Pakistan does what the US wants it to do.

For most of its existence as a nation, Pakistan has been a dictatorship. It could not be a democracy because India is a democracy (for whatever it is worth.) Here’s what I mean. India is a large country and for historical and cultural reasons, it took the path of being a democracy. Large democracies are hard for foreign powers to control — unless of course foreign powers are somehow able to install their own agents at the highest levels of political power. Although there have been reports of some Indian leaders being CIA agents, for the large part the Indian leaders are homegrown and are not traitors. Indian leaders may be misguided and ignorant but they are not traitors. Exhibit A in this context is Mr Jawahar Lal Nehru.

Nehru’s ignorance and misapprehension of the world actually plays a very significant role in the story that I am telling. At the time of India’s political independence from colonial rule, Nehru decided that India must be non-aligned. That was a silly idea to begin with but in an amazing display of doublethink aligned India with the USSR. The USSR was militarily powerful but was a socialist state doomed to fail as socialism eventually does. The US was clearly miffed that India was not going to be its client state and being a democracy could not be directly controlled. Pakistan provided the required indirect control that the US sought over India. Not just the US, but China also recognized the utility of Pakistan as an instrument for torturing India.

It is interesting to imagine how it would have turned out if Nehru had not being mesmerized by socialism and non-alignment, and had instead aligned India with the Western powers and market economics. Perhaps India could have been a developed economy. But let’s leave that counterfactual aside for the moment.

Even a small democratic country is hard to control — whether externally or internally — because the democratic political process is sluggish and sticky. Dictatorships, in contrast, are quick in their ability to implement dictates from up on high. Pakistan therefore had to be a dictatorship. As it happened, the military was clearly able and willing to step up to the plate and dictate. The circumstances were right. Culturally, Pakistan was (and still is) a feudal society. The top brass in the military have feudal backgrounds and took easily to the role of controlling the serfs. As long as the military was powerful, the country was under control. Now, it does not require a very powerful military to control a very poor population. Western control could still be imposed through a cooperative dictator with a military armed with rifles and bazookas. What was really needed though was a military powerful enough to pose a challenge to India’s military.

So here’s the story. The US could not have India as an allay because Nehru decided the USSR was the one to follow. The US therefore could not allow India to become developed and powerful. So it needed Pakistan to be the instrument to use against India. Therefore Pakistan had to be dictatorship. The Pakistani military obliged and for its rewards, not only does it rule the country, but it also gets to play with very powerful weapons that the US gives away as aid. Every time Pakistani army is at the brink of defeat in one of its declared 1000-year jihads against India, the US quickly intervenes and saves the Pakistani military butt. Since Sept 11, 2001, the US has given $10 billion or so as aid (all but one billion of which was for weapons.) All that military aid is clearly not meant for use against the Taliban (which are all Pakistan’s children raised through US aid in the first place.) India is the only logical target of the weapons that the Pakistani military acquires.

Based on that model, let me see what I believe is going to happen. Musharraf seems to be losing control. Will he leave? Yes, if the US can find a replacement for him; no, otherwise. The US is thinking. Here’s the NY Times (Nov 15th):

In meetings on Wednesday, officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon huddled to decide what message Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte would deliver to General Musharraf — and perhaps more important, to Pakistan’s generals — when he arrives in Islamabad on Friday.

Administration officials say they still hope that Mr. Negroponte can salvage the fractured arranged marriage between General Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. But in Pakistan, foreign diplomats and aides to both leaders said the chances of a deal between the leaders were evaporating 11 days after General Musharraf declared de facto martial law.

If Negroponte finds a nice pliant military general to replace Musharraf, Musharraf is out. There are other combinations too. If Bhutto and Musharraf as a team are willing to take orders from the US (as Musharraf has done so far, and presumably Bhutto and Sharif did during their tenure), then Musharraf will continue as president till the sham elections in January. Currently he has signaled to his US bosses that he is willing to continue to dance to their tunes by claiming that he will step down as the military chief by December.

The problem is that Musharraf is no longer the one powerful person he was earlier. It is always good to have to deal with one dictator. It gets messy when you have to deal with a coalition of less powerful persons. Still, what is the US to do? It can club together a team consisting of Musharraf, a politician (Bhutto), and one general and see that they are all on the same page in their oath of allegiance to the US. To the common people of Pakistan, there are three A’s that matter: America, Army, and Allah. To the rulers of Pakistan, only one A matters.

America matters to Pakistan because the very existence of Pakistan has been entirely dependent on America. Without the billions in military aid, Pakistan would never have dared to go on its military misadventures against India. Its internal strife would have torn it into smaller states by now. Without the US’s tacit acquiescence, Pakistan would have never been able to acquire nuclear bomb-making technology. Pakistan is the dog that barks courageously at the shackled elephant. It cannot continue its proxy way against India in Kashmir without US support. If the US wanted, it could over a 3-minute call from Washington DC to Islamabad end Pakistan’s involvement in Kashmir. But that is not what the US wants. The US wants that India continue to spend obscene amounts on weapons. It ensure that by arming Pakistan for free. (See my piece “Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.”)

I am a pacifist. I don’t like violence and dislike all ideologies that are violent and that promote their ideology through death and destruction. Power that flows out of the barrel of a gun is awesome to behold but it is contemptible and inhuman. The more military power the US projects around the world, the more reasonable people hold it in contempt. My love for the US is only second to my love for India. But I have intense dislike for its foreign policies and what that foreign policy does to the poor and the wretched of the world.

I have written before about what the world owes to the US. The US can really be the greatest force for good in the world. But it isn’t. I think it isn’t because it is controlled by the logic of war and the military-industrial complex that controls power in the US. It could invent great things that could make humanity prosper and live decent lives all across the world. But instead, it spends $2 trillion (a number beyond mortal conception) on a needless war in Iraq. Just see this graph — the Cost of War — for getting a perspective on how much that is and what it spends on other things.

In the end, what happens in Pakistan is of vital interest to India. It will never become so destabilized so as to entirely collapse as a state; but it will never actually be anything other than a dictatorship constantly being propped up by the US because that is what the US wants it to be. The names of the generals will change but not the tune to which they dance.

[See also: The Dollar Auction Continues.]

Economic growth in a sense, and to a much larger extent economic development, is more akin to a game of golf than a game of chess. In golf, the opponent’s moves matter very little; you may as well play by yourself and later compare scores if needed. In chess, your move depends on how your opponent has moved and how he is likely to respond to your move. In other words, chess is a strategic game while golf is not. All this is very broadly speaking, naturally. I don’t mean to imply that there are no dependencies among economies as they grow; what I mean is that, especially for a large economy like India, how much it produces and how determines how materially prosperous it is and is independent of how other economies are growing. For strictly benchmarking purposes, one can glance over at the neighbors. And if one is smart, one can learn from the experiences of those neighbors. Still, when it comes to economic growth, it is largely the case that you are playing against yourself.

Here I want to glance at India’s large northern neighbor and recently a strategic competitor in the fiercely competitive game for control of scarce resources. China has been moving mountains — quite literally as you will soon note — for quite a few years for growing its economy. From an Indian perspective, it is a chilling reminder that there are no shortcuts to economic growth and that it takes something special in terms of will and perseverance to overcome the ill-effects of flawed economic policies and failed leadership. It is also a story of hope and the indomitable human spirit, a story of almost superhuman striving by mere mortals.

Words, not Numbers

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that rarely do I have charts, graphs, and tables of statistics in my posts. It is not that I mistrust those devices as they do illuminate the subject. But I leave the numbers to sources that do rely on them for making their points. Honestly speaking, I am fairly suspicious of numbers that have pretenses to a degree of precision that is not even theoretically possible. In one report I had read (from some global consulting firm), I had seen figures which made my head hurt. It said something like, “By July of 2010, the US would have outsourced 10,573,425 jobs to India.” I wondered if they meant July 1st or July 31st; and whether it was by 10 AM of a particular date or was it by 10:30 AM. How did they know that the number in the units’ place was 5 rather than 6 or 4?

I am convinced that you, gentle reader, have seen a lot of numbers projecting what is going to happen to India by such and such a date. One report that I recently glanced at was from KcKinsey which Sramana Mitra has blogged about recently on the growth of India’s middle class. Makes fascinating reading, I am sure, for MBA-types. But I digress. I will get back to that McKinsey report in a different post shortly.

For now, I would like to point you to a National Geographic feature titled “China’s Boomtowns” from June 2007 (Hat tip: Abhishek Sarda.) It is well worth the 10-odd minutes it takes to read it. No charts and graphs there. But it tells a story that makes you admire the spirit of the Chinese. There are lessons in that story that underline some of my obsessions that have to do with the prerequisites of economic growth in the modern world. Without any charts or graphs, the story is replete with lessons that we should have learnt and perhaps we still can if only our benighted leaders were to pay attention.

Similar Pasts

For much of the recent past, China and India were similar in many respects. Very large populations, very deep and widespread poverty, largely agricultural, and saddled with brain-dead economic policies rammed down the throats of the powerless populations by ignorant policymakers. Then the Chinese people got lucky: they got a dictator who was smart. This dictator was different from the other dictator who had propelled China into a “Great Leap Forward” which left tens of millions dead. India matches the first part of China’s story — it got a dictator who wanted to personally control India’s climb into “The Commanding Heights” but succeeded in digging a very deep hole for most of the 350 million living around 1950 that even 60 years later, the number of deep-hole dwellers is variously estimated to be between 500 and 800 million. Thanks awfully, Mr Jawaharlal Nehru.

The new path that the dictator of China took around 1970 propelled economic growth and lifted hundreds of millions out of the hole that had been dug for them by communism. India, by contrast, continued along the path blazed by Nehru, and the path was solidified into an 8-lane superhighway by his daughter. (She was another ignorant autocrat — and appeared to be fairly convinced that ignorance was better than knowledge since she saw no need for the education of the masses. Though she had all the opportunity in the world, she herself never got any formal education and I believe was kicked out of Shantiniketan, a school where you would have to work hard to get kicked out of. The irony that numerous educational institutions are named after her would not be tolerated but for the ignorance of the Indian population.)

India went careening down this superhighway of socialism until it was wrecked through a collision with the barrier of a balance of payment crisis. Headless chickens have been known to display more foresight than the architects of India’s economy.

But I digress once again. Let me get back to what China did: it became the world’s manufacturer. Manufacturing is capital intensive but if you do enough of it, you do require lots of people. Lots of people churning out stuff means that there is more to go around. So labor is attracted into the sector and the laborers get paid wages. Those wages may be low compared to advanced industrialized economy standards but are far superior to the alternative of starving on a farm in the rural interior of China.

Manufacturing

Where did all the wealth that exists in the world today come from? (Wealth is stuff — not money. Stuff that we eat, stuff that shelters us, stuff that transports us, etc.) It is largely manufactured. There is more stuff relative to people today than existed any time in our history because manufacturing stuff requires less labor per unit of output. The fact though is that manufacturing has what economists call “economies of scale”: the cost of production per unit goes down as the volume of production goes up. So large manufacturing units produce stuff more efficiently. And large manufacturing units require lots of people and large amounts of supporting activities which in turn require even more people. In other words, a population living in a bunch of villages is not as productive as the same population living in a city and helping with manufacturing. Cities are the engines of growth because manufacturing has scale economies.

Cities, not Villages

Indian policy makers have an obsession with villages. Villages were Gandhi’s fetish; and Gandhi is an Indian fetish. So I think that the policy maker’s obsession derives from the fetish**2 (the fetish of a fetish) that Indians indulge in. I am not against fetishes, mind you. My own obsession with the primacy of individual freedom compels me to approve of all personal fetishes. Whatever floats your boat, is what I say. But when fetishes intrude into sensible policy making, I draw the line.

So the point that I am attempting to make is this. Build cities. That will require a great deal of manufactured stuff. So you need lots of manufacturing. And forget the crumbling mega-slums we currently pretend are cities, and forget the tiny impoverished settlements we call villages. Build livable cities and build factories that will produce the stuff that the poor currently don’t have because it is not produced. Manufacturing so much stuff will require lots of people. And we have people coming out the wazoo — they are currently stuck in a declining agricultural sector.

Yeah, move a few mountains. They do that in China. India can imitate that bit at least.

Now you can virtually attend many of the lectures and events at UC Berkeley. I will miss Berkeley a little less because of this.

Here’s a video on “Energy Self-sufficiency in the 21st Century.” A bunch of Nobel Prize winning guys discussing that issue.

During my visit to the campuses of the Thomas Jefferson Institute school at Queretaro and Mexico city, I was asked to address the students. Talk? Me? Of course, I can talk to classes. Been doing that for a while and I must say that I miss teaching. So I am given a pretty hectic schedule of 15 classes. They said that it was up to me how much time I actually spent in each class. I guessed I would talk to them for about 20 minutes or so. As it happened, in each class I took the entire 50 minutes.

I must admit that I have not had so much fun in a long time. Over the two and a half days, it was a learning experience for me. Each session I started off with a short introduction about me and then the rest was all dependent on what the kids wanted to talk about. We covered a lot of ground. In all of them, I would ask them if they knew what an economist was. Not surprisingly, most did not know. Some guessed that an economist was someone who did stuff with money.

My line was: “Well, yes, economists deal with money. But only indirectly. Basically, economists study the economy (lots of smiles) — but what is an “economy”? — whatever it is, an economy has people — because you could have everything in a place — mountains rivers forests fields animals fish whatever — but if there were no people, there would be no economy. Now people do things. They make things, produce things, and they use things, consume things, and finally they exchange things. So they produce, and consume, and most importantly they exchange stuff. And what is the mechanism they use to help with the exchange of stuff?” At this point, many would guess “money”. And so we would get started on our topic.

In one class, I ended up talking about the Prisoner’s Dilemma and game theory. In another, we started discussing the size of the earth, and the age of the universe. Discussions and questions were varied. But there was one common thing: they wanted to know where all I had been, which countries I had visited. And they wanted to know whether I liked Mexico.

I could honestly answer that I liked Mexico. But then, what defines a place is people. People matter not just in the case of the economy, but even more so when it comes to whether one likes or dislikes a place. The people I met in Mexico were without exception kind, warm, hospitable, and sweet. So naturally I have a very positive impression of Mexico. Ricardo and Jeanene, my hosts and the couple who are responsible for the Thomas Jefferson Schools, are two of the nicest people I have had the good fortune to know.

Anyway, I had a good time talking to the kids and I believe that they enjoyed the time I spent with them as well. By the end of the class, we would become acquainted enough that picture time would see them with genuine smiles. I took a picture of each class. I uploaded them on to my picasa album. Just click on the picture above to see them or click here.

Yesterday I spent time visiting the school Instituto Thomas Jefferson’s Queretaro campus and a little tour of the city center during the day. Later in the evening, I spoke at a meeting with parents, teachers, and some government officials. The title of my talk was “Education in a Digital Age.” (Will upload the presentation later over here.) The talk was live-cast to the other two campuses of the school in Mexico city and Guadalajara. As half the audience did not follow English, the talk was simultaneously interpreted into Spanish. Pictures of Queretaro and ITJ are here. (Note the announcement poster on the first picture? )

Talking of flying, I wonder when will they stop giving instructions on how to fasten the seat belt. It is as useful as giving instructions to people how to use the loo.

Actually, I spent more time sitting in the stationary plane than actually flying. Mumbai’s airport is congested. It cannot handle the traffic, just like Mumbai roads. We pushed back on time and then sat around for an hour burning fuel before we took off. The pilot informed us of the delay up front. Said that we were sixth in position to take off. Which basically meant that on average around that time, one plane was taking off every 10 minutes. Wow! The Chattrapati Shivaji International Airport is perhaps designed to handle the air traffic around Shivaji’s time.

Talking of which, have you ever wondered why virtually all Indian institutions and major landmarks are named after rulers? They don’t use the names of, say, scientists, writers, thinkers, philosophers, musicians, artists, technologists, sages, gods and goddesses (India has tons of very beautifully named ones). They only use the names of rulers — present day the rulers are called politicians, of course. I arrived at the Biju Patnaik (politician) Airport at Bhubaneswar. I have a theory about this naming of parts.

We Indians are an illiterate lot and have a long history of feudalism and quite a history of being ruled by invaders and then by the British. So Indians know the names of the ones they are ruled by and not much else. If we were collectively scientifically literate, we would hold great scientists in high regard and name things after them, for instance. What we call our cities, towns, roads, schools, universities, stations, airports–the whole lot–speaks to who we are. “Aurangzeb Road” in New Delhi, for instance. A major road in the capital of India named after a tyrant who killed a fair number of Indians. This really puzzles me. Why do they continue to glorily the names of invaders and tyrants? Is it just plain ignorance of history or is it something even worse, such as inferiority complex that makes the collective afraid of acknowledging that sordid past when they were slaves.

Anyway, I am off to attend the conference. I will post something about it the next time. Bye for now.

“In light of terrorist threats by Al Qaeda in India, a concrete threat now exists specifically for the Indian state of Goa, which hosts many tourists, among them Israelis, during late December and over the civil New Year,” the National Security Council Counter Terrorism Headquarters has said.

Now that sort of a warning adds something to one’s travels. After over a decade, I found myself in Goa once again this week. The last time I was there, I spent an amazing week hanging out at the Colva beach. And on another occasion, I spent a luxurious four days at the Taj Resort at Fort Aguada. But this was the first time that I was in Panjim (Panaji, as the locals call it.)

The first impression I got of Goa this time was on the 35 km ride from Dabolim airport to Panjim. The roads were unbelievable. They were beautifully made and did not have potholes. I must have traveled around 200 kms during my stay and found fewer potholes and imperfections than I would find in a half-kilometer stretch of Pune roads. I could not stop being amazed by the quality of not just the roads but also the city streets. They were the kind that I would find in any developed nation. And to top it all, there was no trash on the streets. All that gave me a strange feeling when I heard the locals talking in Hindi or Marathi. I felt as if I were outside India and it was disorienting to hear them speak an Indian language.

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      Click to Learn English in Goa.

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My stay was a short three days and I didn’t get used to the good roads and the sparse traffic. Good for me as I have to live in Pune with its potholed roads and incredibly dense traffic.

I stayed at a place called Panjim Inn. The website for the small tourist hotel was inviting. But I would not recommend the place. It was a huge disappointment. On top of that, the management has attitude. I suppose there is sufficient demand that they can afford to have an attitude. This I suppose Goa shares with the rest of India. India is incredibly expensive when it comes to hotels. For the price I paid in Goa, I would have had a hugely better hotel in the Silicon Valley. Some friends of mine who recently visited India cut short their visit because they were shocked at the hotel rates in Mumbai.

High prices can be due to high demand or low supply or both. In the case of Indian hotels, it is definitely due to low supply. I read somewhere that the city of Shanghai has more hotel rooms than India has. No wonder Indian hotels are miserable.

So I suppose there is an opportunity for a chain of low priced hotels. For that you need to bring down the costs. That is not trivial because hotel costs are dictated partly by the cost of real estate. In Mumbai, real estate costs account for a major part of the total costs. I think the answer lies in creating large hotels on the outskirts of the large cities and bussing the people in every day in the morning into the city in luxury coaches. Can’t think of anything else. Ideas?

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There are lessons by the score that one can learn from the Singapore experiment; lessons that could be arrived at through simple logical reasoning in the abstract but made all the more compelling to see it actually work out in practice. The fundamental lesson to my mind is this: policies — well thought out, rigorously implemented, and single-mindedly enforced — have the power to transform.

Where can these well thought out policies come from? From at least two sources at the opposite ends of a spectrum: the mind of a single intelligent person, or the collective wisdom of an enlightened majority of the population. The latter is possible in theory of course just as it is possible that all the atoms of your body will simultaneously jump two feet vertically in unison (physics does not disallow this) so that you spontaneously levitate momentarily but it is so unlikely as to be dismissed unconditionally. An enlightened majority is in the realm of the possible but not in the realm of the probable.

The other extreme — a single person or a small set of people evolving rational policy — is imaginable. Even given the short history of civilization, some examples of this type exist. The founding fathers of the United States, a small group of people, wrote a constitution that lays the foundation for enlightened policy. More recently, it was one person who formulated rational policies and implemented them with single-minded dictatorial vigor. His name is Lee Kuan Yew.

Lee Kuan Yew is one of the most intelligent leaders in contemporary history. The man is a practical genius. The people of Singapore got lucky when in the random draw from which dictators are drawn, they drew Lee Kuan Yew. India, I cannot but note with sadness and grief, drew from the same random draw and came up with Jawaharlal Nehru. Both dictatorial but one a practical genius and the other . . . well, the less said the better.

There are deep contrasts between India and Singapore. Take for instance the degree of corruption that permeates both public and private sectors. According to Transparency International, India ranks 90th (in the company of such nations as Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Russia, and Tanzania) while Singapore ranks 5th (led by Finland, New Zealand, Demark, and Iceland) least corrupt country.

The corrosive impact of corruption on economic development and growth is not a mystery, nor was it unknown fifty years ago. Lee Kuan Yew decided on a zero-tolerance policy on corruption. Corruption at all levels of society had to go. The task was to re-invent the whole culture so that corruption had no place in it. That was the first bit: deciding that corruption was history. The next bit is implementation and enforcement.

To root out corruption you can use all sorts of means. You can lecture school children to take an oath to eschew corruption (as in here), you can prosecute a poor milkman for diluting milk (as in here) — that is, basically you can start at the bottom and implement an idiotic policy of targeting marginal players while shielding the really corrupt. Or you can do it by catching the big fish and handing out exemplary punishments and — this is the important point — publicizing it so that anyone who is even minimally aware understands that corruption is not tolerated by the society no matter how powerful the person is.

This is what I heard. A certain minister, very close to Lee Kuan Yew, in charge of housing (or some such) was involved in some kick-backs. The word went around that the guy will surely get off easy since he was in the inside circle. Lee asked the minister to see him. The meeting was brief. Two days later the minister blew his brains out. The message was clear: zero tolerance.

In India we hear of some high-level bureaucrat or politician robbing the public purse blind with sickening regularity. But we have never heard of even one high-ranking corrupt public official or politician ever being punished for his misdeeds. We have a free press of sorts and people get to know about how the most corrupt get away with murder. The notion that it is OK to be corrupt is internalized and soon enough we justify our own petty corruption by referring it back to those high and mighty whose corruption is legendary and who are never punished. We grow cynical and the society suffers as a whole. Our culture erodes and standards of probity and justice fall until we are a nation of petty thieves ruled by mega-robbers.

To re-iterate once again (as they say in the Department of Redundancy Department), you have to have intelligent policy, rigorous implementation and no-exception enforcement to bring about a radical change. Most policies in India don’t meet the intelligence criterion, and those that do suffer from indifferent implementation and half-hearted enforcement.

Crimes other than corruption are also a brake on economic growth. Singapore controls these without a too visible police force. I only saw a couple of cops during my three-day visit. One of the most impressive people I met while in Singapore (who is an alien in Singapore but runs a very successful business) told me of his informal theory about how they keep crime low. He said that he imagines that in the police headquarters they have a huge wall chart where each crime has a schedule of enforcement. So, for instance, “vandalism” may be scheduled for the week of 15th of August. That week they go out and catch a vandal, prosecute him to the utmost, and plaster his picture on the papers and in the write-up use the word “shame” a dozen times.

Prospective vandals, however irregular they may be in keeping up with current affairs, get to learn about the punishment and decide to curb their impulses. But public memory fades with time. So after a suitable span of time, the police will once again catch a vandal and make an example of him. They repeat this same formula with other routine crimes.

The important bit is that you don’t have to have zillions of cops watching every corner for vandal all round the year. You just catch the one every now and then to put the fear of god into the others and thus prevent vandalism from happening in the first place.

Lee Kuan Yew (I like using his full name because there is a certain something, a rhythm to it) must be a remarkable man. My meeting with him did not happen. I am kidding you, of course. But he is someone I would have liked to meet him and bow deep as a sign of my respect for what he did for Singapore.

Apparently little things, things that one may not consider very important or significant in the grand scheme of things, they too have a transformational impact on the society. Litter and garbage on the streets depresses the spirit and instills a sense of hopelessness and helplessness in the society. Lee Kuan Yew fined people who littered so vigorously that Singapore became clean but earned the reputation of being a “Fine City.”

Of course, the litterbug loses significant freedom in the society. He cannot litter to his heart’s content. But if there is a negative externality of following your heart’s dictates, then you have to be made to stop. Not just littering, but religion as well. They have what I call the “Freedom to use, but not the freedom to abuse.”

Freedom of religion is guaranteed in Singapore but freedom to proselytize is not. Proselytizing essentially says that my religion is better than your religion and that if you don’t accept my god as the One True Savior(TM), you will rot in hell that my god has specially prepared for you. This sows seeds of discord in society and soon the newly converted start asking for special treatment and handouts and in the limiting case, when the bunch grows sufficiently large, ask for a separate state of their own because they cannot bear to live with the other people who are destined to go to hell.

So Singapore is strict about proselytizing. In keeping with their policy of discouraging that anti-social behavior, they caught a meek little Catholic lady who was going door to door peddling her religion and threw her into jail after she was found guilty by the courts. Then they publicized the event. This sent the message to all religious bigots who follow the dictates of their own hearts that bigotry is not ok.

They took care of the mullahs as well. Got them together and told them that if they even make a peep in their weekly religious sermons promoting killing and terrorism, they will have their butts in the sling. Live and let live was the message they got and as rational humans, the mullahs got in line. The last time they had communal unrest was sometime in the late 1960s.

No such luck in India, of course. We have Christian missionaries from all over the world having a grand old time converting heathens and soon enough you have the neo-converts pissing on Ganesh idols to show their new-found faith. News gets around and finally out of desperation and plain old brutality, a few missionaries get roasted and this gives the country an ill-deserved reputation of being intolerant. Madrassas funded by Saudi money flourish by the thousands where apparently the mullahs teach the young that killing kuffars is a pretty practical way of arranging society.

In reaction to this ocassionally, a few of the normally tolerant Hindus band together and retaliate. This hits the international press and India is tarred as a society full of murdering morons.

As I was saying, Singapore does not have those problems because they have the enlightened policy of making proselytizing a crime and then enforce it. Lacking the essential bit that leads to religious disharmony, they avoid the entire series of unwelcome consequences.

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The essential important faculty that gives rise to good policy — which our leaders lack — is imagination.

Humans, I imagine, are different cognitively from other things in the universe in their capacity to imagine. We can ask “What if” and think through the consequences of a set of actions that are not yet set into motion. We have to be able to foresee the consequence of our present actions to reach a desired future state. Or by backward induction, we can start at a future desired state and work our way back to what we should be doing today to obtain the future state.

Every chronic persistent shortage you see around you in India is the result of a failure of imagination. (I think that this statement should be elevated to the status of a principle. Here is the one of the first axioms, then.)

In Pune, we have power cuts for about 4 hours a day on average. Pune is a city with a population the size of New Zealand’s population — four million people. It is certainly not an obscure little village in the middle of some god-forsaken forest. Power is not a new-fangled fad whose demand could not be foreseen. The growth of the size of the city and the consequent demand for power could have been easily foreseen and actions taken. Power generation is not an esoteric undertaking which the private sector is incapable of doing. Yet there is a shortage and the economy suffers because some idiot in charge did not have the imagination to realize that more power is needed.

Not so the Singaporeans under Lee Kuan Yew. They learnt to use their imagination. They build capacity before they hit shortage. I hear that they have started building the third terminal at the airport even though the second one is not even up to full capacity.

Compare that to India. First a road gets choked with 10 times the number of vehicles than it was designed to handle. Then the realization dawns on people that the capacity has to be increased. On an already congested road, they start making some changes — for instance a bridge. This take about four years to complete (whereas the same work in a different place would have taken four months). By the time the capacity is in place, the traffic has also increased so that once again it is 10 times what the road can handle.

This reminds me of my email inbox. For the last year or so, I am constantly falling behind — the number of messages sitting there increases monotonically. I am forever trying to catch up.

But enough of my woes. I was going on about how smart Lee Kuan Yew was. He has the best imagination of them all, I guess. Take for example his insistence on air-conditioning. Singapore is a hot and extremely humid place around the year. Without AC, you are bound to be less productive than with it. Air-conditioning makes sense if the cost is lower than the increased income from a more productive workforce. He saw the benefits of AC and implemented it.

I don’t know why but some people just draw good cards from the random draw that is life. Singaporeans are lucky. I am sure there are those who will immediately retort that the Singaporeans don’t have the freedoms that are normally associated with a liberal democracy. And I am also sure that the person making that statement is sitting comfortably well-fed in his nice office or home accessing the world wide web for knowledge and entertainment. For the average schmuck in a third world country, he would any day trade in his imaginary freedoms for a decent shot at a full stomach, a roof over his head, and a chance to get his children educated. After the average schmuck has achieved those basic necessities, he would ask for all sorts of goodies that a liberal democracy provides. And that is when the society should become a liberal democracy.

The sequence is important.

{More about Mr Lee Kuan Yew here.}

Close to the Worli Seaface in Mumbai around 10 am today. The rain has been coming down since midnight last night. The wind is pretty high, as you can see below.

The high tide today was not as high as it was last Tuesday. The Haji Ali mosque seen from my friend’s 13th floor apartment.

Justice was served and how! The police registered a case of robbery against both of them. The passersby not only beat up the child, but they beat up an adult they suspected was an accomplice. They beat up the suspected accomplice so mercilessly that the man is unconscious and his identity is unknown.

Swift merciless justice was meted out by a bunch of average citizens of Mumbai for a petty crime. Was the man really guilty and if so, of what? Does a 10-year old child deserve mercy and compassion? I don’t suppose the upright citizens of Mumbai who beat up the child had time to ponder these questions.

They beat up a child, a 10 year old child, for snatching a purse. Then they handed the child over to the police. Did the police register a case of deadly assault against those passersby who beat up the child? No. The police registered a case of robbery.

The people who beat up the child are powerless. They had to find someone weaker than themselves to vent their rage upon. They would not be able to lift a finger against others who are more powerful but who steal not Rs 20 but millions of times more. The bigger criminals go about with red lights flashing on top of their speeding cars. Those “alert Mumbaikars”, as the MidDay reporter calls them, would shit in their pants if asked to mete out justice to the real criminals.

They beat up that little innocent child and handed him over to the police. The police threw the child in a children’s remand home — for attempting to steal a few rupees. In the meanwhile, Telgi, the criminal who stole hundreds of millions of rupees, is being given extra-ordinary medical care in prison because apparently he suffers from depression which, according to a Times of India report, is due to “too much thinking.”

They beat up a child because they cannot beat up the crooked politicians. Career criminals–some of them charged with murder, rape, and abduction–call the legislative bodies of India their home. Reports surface every now and then about how a significant number of the members of Parliament have criminal cases pending against them.

A bunch of adults ganged up against a child, who for some unknown reason snatched a purse with small change in it, and beat up a little child. Ganging up against an adult is bad enough but to beat up a child is unforgivable. The lack of humanity is stunning. Where is the outrage at this criminal act? Should the police officer who registered a case of robbery be charged with dereliction of duty for not charging the people who beat up the child?

They beat up the child because they don’t value children. They don’t value children because there are too many of them. You cannot stop at a traffic light in Mumbai without being faced with children begging for a few rupees. To those who beat up the child, these are mere nuisances and not human beings. Beating up a child is just another aspect of the dehumanization that results in neglected, uneducated, under-nourished, unwanted children.

I read a lot of press about how India is a fast developing (and according to some how India is already a developed) economy. Projections of how many cell phones and how many computers per capita India will have by such and such a year fill glossy magazines and engage scores of management gurus. I know a little secret: cell phones and computers will not make caring humans out of mindless morons.

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay.” Thus wrote Oliver Goldsmith.

Now if you will excuse me, I would like to go and throw up from the disgust I feel at the zero degrees of humanity displayed by the “alert Mumbaikars.”

From the archives: India’s Real Criminals.

I have been wandering around the world for the past couple of weeks. Which partly explains why I have been neglecting this blog. Then there is the acute case of writer’s block that I am suffering from. It is with some trepidation that I am pushing against that block. So here goes nothing.

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My journey began on the 16th of February when I left Mumbai for New Delhi. After a bunch of notable meetings, I headed south to Nagpur, my home town. A few days there and then I went to Bangalore. It had been donkey’s years since I had last been there. Things had changed. It was the center of India’s information technology storm. The city appeared to have hit puberty and grown big overnight and was too big for its boots. I had been warned about the vehicular exhaust pollution but it was still a shock to be actually immersed in it in the city center. In any event, I had a bunch of good meetings and visited with my friends. I arrived back in Mumbai on the evening of the 28th.

This one is turning out to be a real web log: an account of where I have been. Boring stuff but I think this will get me out of the fear of writing.

Anyway, the next day, March 1st, I had a bit of bureaucracy to take care of. I had overstayed my 180-day visitor’s visa by a few days and it appeared that I will not be allowed to leave India without having my visa extended. So off I went to the Foreigner Registration section at the Mumbai Police Commissioner’s office. It took about 3 hours to pay a penalty of $30 and get a piece of paper that extended by visa by a few days.

It had been a long time since my last encounter with the Indian government bureaucracy. I had to fill in a few forms, wait for a long time to meet with the appropriate official and witness first-hand antiquated processes which appeared to serve no apparent purpose other than to employ people and fill numerous registers with handwritten notes. The main official I met was courteous and helpful. Why had I overstayed? Circumstances I could not avoid, I replied. He filled in a few forms, walked over to various parts of the office where he pulled out other various registers and wrote in them. Then he went to another part of the office and brought with him a rubber stamp and stamped one of the registers. Went back to put away the rubber stamp and then moved the register to another part of the office.

After about 15 minutes of this, he finally declared that I will have to pay a penalty of $30. I reached for my wallet. No, he said. I had to go to another section and pay the fine and then I have to bring him back a receipt and we will continue with the process. So off I went and waited for about 20 minutes at the other section. When my turn came, the man filled in three different registers with the same details that had already been entered several times in various registers earlier: name, date of birth, father’s name, passport number, etc. In each case he would carefully pick up carbon papers, carefully insert them in to the registers, then enter things in triplicate. Another 15 minutes and I was all done with paying my fine and getting a receipt. Back to the other guy. He now gave me a piece of paper which extended my stay till March 2nd. And then he got up and went to another part of his office, found a rubber stamp, and stamped my passport with it. I was about to thank him profusely when he said, “Please collect your passport after 6 PM.”

He explained that they only take in the cases between 10 AM and 2 PM, and after processing, returned the passport in the evening. Could I please have my case expedited? Well, since you are leaving in less than a day, perhaps an exception could be made, he said. He handed me the passport and I left.

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Information technology tools are great for handling information. Computers are useful things for pretty much any application which deal with information processing, storage, and retrieval. At that Foreign Registration office, I am sure that a bit of IT hardware and software would not be out of place. But it would of little utility unless the processes that run in that office are rationalized. The need for rational processes is greater than the need for hardware. Buying hardware is easy; rationalizing processes is hard.

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Later that night (early morning of 2nd March, actually), I took an Air France flight from Mumbai to New York’s JFK via Paris. Same awful Air France food. Why do they serve icy-cold hard rolls with the food? In any event, I met my friend Courtenay in Paris during my 5 hour layover and had lunch with her. It was snowing and cold in Paris, the coldest March they have had in 30 years.

OK, writer’s block cleared. I guess from now on, I will be writing regularly. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

My days in Mumbai are numbered. Strictly speaking, all the days of our lives are numbered. I will soon be saying goodbye to the city that has epitomized to me all that is wrong with India. I know there are people who swear by the city. I think that they are in a minority. But then, one might say that even minorities in Mumbai are pretty large numbers.

Numbers. That is reason number one for my discomfort with the city. Metropolitan Mumbai has about 12 million to call its own. There are European countries with fewer people than Mumbai. Indeed, about 60 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in an estimated 37,000 slums. That is, 7.5 million people live in Mumbai slums, about one and a half times the population of Finland. Finland, a country that I have a very soft corner for, has around 5 million people living in about 384,000 square kilometers. Mumbai’s 7.5 million people are not as fortunate; Slum dwellers occupy only 14 percent of the residential land in Mumbai, which I estimate amounts to about 140 sq. km. Imagine that: a piece of land about 12 kilometer square and then pack one and a half times the population of Finland into it.

I find it absolutely unbelievable. There are more people living in slums in Mumbai than there are people in Finland. A rough calculation leads me to figure that the population density of Mumbai slums is about 500 30,000 times that of Finland. And the income of a Finn is perhaps about 100 times that of a Mumbai slum dweller.

Mumbai is an astonishing metropolitan city where the so-called first, second, and third world co-exist. I call it The Triple Point of the World at Zero Degrees Humanity. You see affluence co-exist on top of the most degrading poverty. I wish I could erase from my memory all the awful sights of very little children — some as small as toddlers — begging on the streets and on local train stations. It is said that living in California makes you soft because living is so easy there. I guess I had grown soft with my over two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. I hope that the year and a half in Mumbai has not hardened me. I want to retain the humanity that makes me flinch at the sight of suffering.

I feel for the unfortunates in Mumbai. I don’t mean to imply that I alone feel that empathy nor that my empathy is worth particularly much. I have a visceral hatred for the system that creates so much misery so thoughtlessly. I wish those who created, sustained, and continue to control this sorry place did not have the intelligence of scum and the ethical and moral sensitivity of cold tar.

About 10 days ago, they bulldozed 3,000 hutments and reclaimed 8 acres of slum-land, leaving 12,000 people homeless. In the last two months, 120 acres have been reclaimed after 67,000 dwellings were destroyed. [Source: BBC News] I suppose that means about a quarter of a million people who had homes — however modest — do not have a home now. The powers that be have stated that they will remove the slums from 375 acres of government land. In all, I expect that will make about a million people homeless in Mumbai.

A million additional homeless people in Mumbai. About the same number as the total population of Helsinki, Finland.

I grant you that enchroachment is a problem and needs to be dealt with. But why is it that the powers have to wake up so late in the day. Could they not have prevented the problem years ago? How do they justify turning people out of their homes after they have lived there for years, built up their lives around their abjectly modest dwellings, bred children, found employment and built human associations?

There is a lot of breast-beating and wailing and moaning when a natural disaster like the tsunami leaves people homeless. But why the absolute silence when a million people are similarly uprooted by government decree? Losing one’s home to a bulldozer is no different from losing one’s home to a wave, is there?

Why do I feel so strongly about this? Perhaps it is because I am myself a “homeless” person since I don’t have a permanent home and every now and then when I move, I get a feeling of rootlessness and insecurity. But it is more than that. I see this problem as merely a symptom of a larger problem that pervades India. That is the problem of over-crowding arising out of over-population.

A person living in a Mumbai slum finds, at the margin, that living in a crowded slum is preferable to living elsewhere in India. So, unless people systematically err in deciding where they live, for the people living in Mumbai slums, the pain of living elsewhere must be at least as much because there are no barriers to migration in India in the long term. The implication is that the dire situation in Mumbai slums is a good indication of how desperate the situation is around the country. It is that realization that makes me despair about the situation in India.

The existence of slums is a sympton of a deeper problem. Merely addressing the symptom can never solve the problem. One can clear the slums every so often and maybe even build decent low cost housing. But there are more people where the present slum dwellers came from. No sooner than you have moved the present millions of people into decent housing, the slums will reappear as soon as the land is cleared. Indeed, building decent housing for slum dwellers would encourage more to migrate to Mumbai and only worsen an already intolerable situation.

The fact is that slums are just an effect of the unsustainably large population of India and unless we wake up to that problem, we will continue to treat people worse than animals. I think that the powers that be need to live in over-crowded slums for a bit to really appreciate what the population problem is all about.

If Islam killed the state of Bengal, it was the communists who, having ruled WB for decades, drove the nails into the coffin and finally buried it. I do not mean to imply that the job is done. Both Islam and communism are still very busy with the death and final destruction of Bengal. But for the grace of god (to use an expression), if my recent ancestors had not moved out of Bengal, I would probably have been a rickshaw puller in Kolkata, or even worse a Bengali Muslim wearing a skull cap and an Arabic beard with a few Arabic-named wives covered head to toe in portable black tents with 14 children living in a slum who went to madrassas where all they did is memorized the Koran in Arabic and bowed in prayer towards Saudi Arabia five times a day and having had no education end up dirt poor and blame the kuffars (non-believers) for their misery.

One wonders what it is in the Bengali psyche that they are so easy prey to such ideological idiocies. Did the poverty come first and then the Islam and communism, or did Islam and communism come first and only then poverty took root? Or is it that they co-evolved? Are they both cause and consequence or did one precede the other? Will West Bengal go the way of Bangladesh (formerly known as East Bengal, and later as East Pakistan) and if so, will it gradually evolve into a Bangladesh in about 20 years or will the transformation happen in a relatively short time, say 5 years? Whatever be the case, the sad inescapable fact appears to be that what Bangladesh is today, West Bengal will be tomorrow. Unless of course, the Bengalis wake up and smell the stink that emanates from every nook and cranny of their pathetic state, and do something about it.

Every year around late October, a magical transformation of Kolkata happens for about a week. We call it Puja. The occasion is the annual visit of a certain daughter to her parents’ abode. Devi Durga comes home with her brood to visit briefly and the people of Bengal lay out the red carpet like nobody’s business. To Bengalis, Durga is the divine Mother. Let me give you a brief background on who she is. In Hinduism, the universal force has two components. The male principle is represented by Shiva, and the female principle is Shakti. Parvati, the wife of Shiva, is the personification of Shakti. Parvati has many incarnations. As the Mahadevi (maha=great, devi=goddess), she is Durga and represents strength. Her other notable forms are Mahalakshmi (lakshmi=goddess of wealth) and Mahasaraswati (saraswati=goddess of learning and knowledge). So Durga represents strength, wisdom, and prosperity.

In Bengali popular iconography, Durga is shown with her children. The daughters are Lakshmi (prosperity) and Saraswati (knowledge), and the sons are Ganesh (learning), and Kartik (I am not sure what he is about but I am guessing he stands for courage.) Durga’s vehicle is a lion; Lakshmi’s mount is an owl, Saraswati’s mount is a swan, Ganesh’s mount is a mouse (nice irony there — an elephant riding a mouse), and Kartik’s choice of wheels a peacock. Durga is represented with ten arms symbolizing multi-dimensional power and she wields an impressive assortment of weapons to fight evil. She is shown riding her lion and in the act of destroying a demon. The idols are made of clay and lavishly decorated. Thousands of installations of Durga spring up in neighborhoods in Kolkata and for five days it is festival time and people pull out all the plugs. On the final day, Bijoya Dashami, the idols are taken and immersed in rivers and lakes. Clay returned to where it came from. The Bengalis wave a tearful goobye to Mother Durga for one year.

I spent the last week visiting Kolkata. Seeing Puja in Kolkata was on my “50 Things I Must Do in 2004″. Be in Kolkata during Puja: Check.

While there, I had a brief meeting with West Bengal Government Minister in charge of Information Technology, and the Secretary for IT. Here is my letter to the Secretary Dr. G. D. Gautama, for the record:

Dear Dr. Gautama:

Thank you for taking the time to meet with me and please convey my appreciation to the Minister for his willingness to engage in debate on the matter of how best ICT can be used for the rural population.

ICT for development and growth is an admirable objective. But I am afraid that powerful vested interests are hijacking the noble goal of development for narrow commercial gains at the expense of poor people. Computers are well and good for a very wide variety of purposes — from laser surgery to engineering design to cost accounting to learning and entertainment. But PCs are complex entities which require a deep infrastructure for them to be effective. The infrastructure required is not just the physical ones such as power and supply channels for all the bits and pieces that go into their operation, but also human infrastructural resources such as a trained manpower to use them and maintain them. Placing PCs in an environment where these things are missing (for whatever reasons) is counterproductive. PCs are expensive playthings that the very rich can afford to misuse and underutilize but a poor economy like India has to be very careful in spending limited resources on buying PCs which end up as expensive doorstops.

The boogey of a “digital divide” is meant to scare people witless so that they can buy the next half a million PCs and enrich the already rich who sell PCs. There are alternative inexpensive technologies which are more appropriate in the Indian context but they get short shrift because the lobbies don’t exist to push them.

I am afraid that West Bengal is not immune to the seductive theory that if only every villager had a PC, WB will magically become a developed state. PCs are neither necessary nor sufficient for development. Going down that route will not only bring financial ruin, it will also delay any hope of development which currently exists.

I will follow the development of WB with great interest as it is a test case for how development should not be done. There are very interesting lessons to be learnt from pathological cases as well.

Best wishes,

Atanu

Mumbai, however, is not showing any real monsoon activities. Indeed, a couple of days of dry weather was the reason that it took me about 2 hours to get from Kandivali (the northern Mumbai suburb where I live) to Lower Parel where I go to work six days a week. Most of Kandivali is in the second world while most of Lower Parel is in the third world. I had noted in this journal the distinction between upper and lower Mumbai where I wrote:

Mumbai is a fascinating place. It is place where the rich and the poor live cheek to jowl, where the so-called first world, the second world and the third world co-exist in the same geographical space. In a manner, it is a microcosm which reflects the global economic condition.

The co-existence of the first world and the third world in Mumbai is made possible by a stratification in the vertical dimension. The boundary is approximately around 20 feet off the ground level. About 20 feet above ground level, you have the first world. Below 20 feet above ground level, the second and the third world live, with the second world occupying the higher floors below the 20 feet mark.

Mumbai is what I would call the Triple Point of the World and indicate it as Zero Degrees Human. If you had been paying attention when you were being taught elementary physics in school, you would immediately get my point. For the scatter-brained, here is what I mean. The triple point of water is zero degree celcius and is so called because H2O exists in all its incarnations — solid, liquid, and vapor — at zero degrees celcius. In Mumbai, you have the fabulously rich, a middle-class, and a huge abjectly poor population all co-existing at Zero Degrees Humanity, as I will explain in a little bit.

But I digress. I was going on about how a dry spell was what led to my excellent two-hour journey from my apartment to my work place, a distance of about 16 miles. It was Friday morning when I woke up a bit too late and decided to start off at 9 am. The first bit of my journey is always an autorickshaw to the Kandivali local station about a mile and a half away. It took me an hour because of congestion. The so-called Western Express highway was crawling along. The fumes rising up from the collective exhausts of hundreds of vehicles packed bumper to bumper could have caused the upper respiratory tract infection I am suffering from now.

So we finally get off the “highway” and loop around to go underneath it. At that point, it took about a half hour to move about 100 yards. Here is why. The roads, never great exemplars of their set, had deteriorated due to the rains and sections of it are best described as torture-tracks for vehicles. Craters the size of wash-basins dot the stretch under the highway. Because it had been dry for a couple of days, they who are incharge of “maintaining” the roads decided that it would be a good time to fix the craters. What better time, they must have thought, than 9 AM on a Friday morning to do so. So they parked a truck full of baseball sized rocks right in the middle of a 20-foot wide road and were busy dumping those rocks into those craters by hand.

We are a poor country. Why? Because we don’t have stuff. Why? Because we don’t produce too much stuff and we have a large population. Why doesn’t the large population produce stuff? Because it takes forever to get things done around here. Why? Because we don’t think. We don’t think that perhaps 2 AM in the morning would be a better time to dump rocks on to a road. Silly idea to begin with, but it gets worse when it also adds thousands of hours to the already unbearable commutes. Little things like that add up and we end up being a nation with the lowest productivity in the world. (It is a silly idea to dump rocks in to those craters because after the dumping is done, traffic will rearrange the rocks so that the rocks move to the edges of the road and the craters are back to where they were and now the rocks just add to the friction on that road. But hey, who cares. The Mumbai road people have spent a few thousand rupees fixing the road and that is that.)

As I had pointed out elswhere, there is the objects gap: not having too much stuff to produce more stuff with; and there is the ideas gap: not having enough brains to make efficient use of the limited amount of stuff one has to work with. Not having expensive road-repairing machines is the objects gap. Not having the brains to fix the roads (for whatever it is worth) at a time which would be least disruptive to traffic is the ideas gap. If you have an ideas gap, it wastes resources. There is no point in trying to make the roads “electronic intelligent roads” when the people so are astoundingly dumb.

All things must pass, as the wise remark. So we too passed through that bottleneck and I ended up at platform number 2 of the renowned Kandivali station. It was 10 AM. Trains arriving on this platform originate from Borivali, the neighboring station. For most of the day (about 16 hours), the congestion is so high that the trains are bursting at the seams when they leave Borivali. Around 10 AM, getting on a train in Kandivali is an adventure, to put it mildly. I have a First Class pass. About a sixth of each train is “first class” meaning the seats have vinyl coverings instead of the uncovered wooden seats in second class. Also, first class costs about fives times as much as second class. The crowding in second class is of course several times worse than in first class.

People who write great works such as Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy or Salman Rushdie (never read the guy but I had to put in an Indian) could perhaps describe in words what one experiences on the Mumbai locals. I certainly cannot. I can only gasp in disbelief, and that too in retrospection because you cannot gasp when you are jammed into a compartment which is meant to accomodate 50 people has about 250 in it. Sardine cans have been put to shame when they are compared to Mumbai locals. Those trains are designed to carry about a thousand people. They routinely transport about five thousand people instead. And most of these five thousand make it to their respective destinations.

I say most of these make it home because a very small insignificant percentage don’t survive the journey. Over 10 people die during the journey on a Mumbai local every day. That is, about 330 people die very month while traveling on Mumbai locals. Every year, about 4,000 people leave home, catch a Mumbai local, and end up dead in an hour. It is like with clockwork regularity, every month a 747 crashes and kills all 330 people on board. And everyone takes that as normal and carries on with business as usual. I chose my words carefully when I wrote insignificant because 4,000 people a year in a place which has 18,000,000 to spare is not a big freaking deal. Due to the astonishing surplus, the people are disposable. There is more where they came from.

Their deaths are unremarkable events. Newspapers which routinely report the latest shenanigans of Hollywood sleaze-bags on their front page don’t even mention the passing of 4,000 humans as they struggle to survive. Once in a while a particularly gruesome death is reported in the third page of a rag such as Midday. For instance, a few weeks ago, that paper reported that a 16-year old fell off of a local and his limbs were severed. He lay there by the side of the tracks for half an hour in agony. Police finally picked him up, put the limbs in a plastic bag and took him to a hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. His mother later said that he was in so much of a hurry to get to his school that he forgot to take his lunch with him that morning.

In the half-hour that he lay bleeding on the tracks, about 10 trains must have passed the scene. Thousands must have seen the boy lying there crying for help. They did not do anything. They could not do anything. Surely the trains could not stop. Because if they did, local train transportation would come to a halt. If you delay a train by an hour everytime someone dies on the tracks, then about 11 trains would have to be stopped for an hour every day. That will cause all following trains to back up and that is that. There is no slack in the system and that is what happens when congestion is the norm. Any minor disruption and the tipping point is reached and the system collapses.

India is a crowded country and in the resulting congestion, everyday humanity is lost. Recently reported, a man gets on a train and is randomly picked on by a bunch of people and severely beaten for no rhyme or reason. People lose their humanity when the pressures reach a breaking point. India has arrived at the triple point of of the world which is zero degrees humanity.

We cannot afford the sort of luxury that I learnt about last July in Sydney Australia. My brother’s friend, JV, is a local train driver in Sydney. I stayed with him and his family for a few days. He was on “disability” and was seeing a psychiatrist. A few months ago, someone died on the tracks when he was driving. As a result of the trauma he experienced, they gave him a couple of months’ leave and was being given counseling and medication to help him sleep at night. When one person dies in a train accident, it is a tragedy; when 4,000 die every year, it is a statistic (as the man said).

At zero degrees humanity, we see children carrying babies and begging and we turn away. We are so inured to seeing the thousands of abjectly poor people we come across every day that we don’t even bother to sit and consider for a moment some way out of this horror. We don’t even want to investigate the causes of this horror, leave alone doing something about it. We are a sick and a dying civilization. A hundred million malnourished children is a statistic that does not keep us awake at nights. We are not civilized by the standards that Bertrand Russell set when he wrote that the mark of a truly civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.

Russell encapsulated a lot of meaning in that one statement. If you were to be physically injured, you hurt. Direct injury every type of animal reacts to, including humans. But humans with even rudimentary degrees of empathy feel psychologically distressed when they perceive someone else in front of them in pain. Then there is the next level: where you don’t see the suffering of another sentient being but are told about it by someone else. You hear that your friend’s brother’s father-in-law is dying from cancer and you feel empathy for your friend’s brother’s father-in-law. Our ability to read gives us a very wide window to the world, and often what we learn about the world through that window causes us sorrow. I am sure that you felt some pain when you imagined what it must have been like for that 16-year old who died on the train tracks. It was words, symbols that we have learnt to derive meaning out of, and your empathy that caused you to feel that pain. Abstractions can be painful for one sufficiently trained in symbol manipulation and who have basic humanity within. Numbers are even more abstract than words. It is a far remove from actually being physically hurt to being hurt just by reading a column of numbers.

We should be weeping when we learn that so many millions lead lives of grinding poverty. We don’t because that is the first step to a very long and hard road. If we did, we would be forced to give up our cherished notions of how it will all work out. We will have to admit that, for instance, IT (information technology) may not have the answer to our persistent poverty and the root cause is somewhere else. We may have to let go of our ignorance which says that we can grow ourselves out of this trap — if we only get the right amount of subsidy to the poor, we will have solved the poverty problem. Or if we had sufficient number of job reservations, we would all be fine. Or if we were sufficiently socialistic or communistic or whatever, we would have solved the problems.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we have arrived at Zero Degrees Humanity. How did we get here? By being ignorant of, or even deliberately ignoring, one simple little truth taught in Econ101: the law of supply and demand.

Goodbye, good night, and may your god go with you.

The co-existence of the first world and the third world in Mumbai is made possible by a stratification in the vertical dimension. The boundary is approximately around 20 feet off the ground level. Above that, you have the first world; below, the second and the third world live, with the third world spilling on to the streets.

Around where I live, you will find enormous high-rises. A couple of dozen 20-storey buildings dot the landscape. Here live the residents of the first world, people who have air-conditioned cozy living rooms and bedrooms, fat cars, massive bank balances, all sorts of gadgets and gizmos fill their huge apartments, have expensive parties and go on foreign vacations. They live above the invisible 20-foot divide. Below that live the struggling unwashed masses. They are literally unwashed because they have little access to basic utilities such as running water and toilets. About 50 percent of Mumbai lives in slums. They are the laboring class and their labor is valued very low because of the iron law of supply and demand: the supply is so plentiful that the market price for their labor is astonishingly low. This fact works very favorably for the first world residents of the high-rises which basically means that all labor intensive activities is not expensive in Mumbai.

Lower Mumbai (below the 20-foot vertical divide) has the same relationship to Uppper Mumbai (above the 20-foot vertical divide) as India or other over-populated third world country has to the developed first world countries. Lower Mumbai supplies cheap labor to Upper Mumbai. Third world countries supply labor to first world countries by exporting labor intensive goods and tradeable services. Upper Mumbai enjoys the fruits of the over-population of Lower Mumbai as much as the first world enjoys the fruits of the over-population of third world countries.

This far the story is simple but uninteresting. Now we come to the interesting part: when the rich descend below the 20-foot vertical divide. They find they are in the third world. This descent is necessitated by the need to move from one part of the first world to another part of the first world. The roads and the entire transportation system is in Lower Mumbai. That explains the sorry state of the transportation system. Not just the transportation system, the sewage and garbage system as well.

Around where I live, the roads are … well, they are not really roads. They are more or less narrow open tracts of dusty land paved over haphazardly which serve a million purposes for the residents of Lower Mumbai. The sewage system consists of open gutters and canals with stinking black masses of stagnant sludge carrying god alone knows what from where. Their primary purpose as far as I can tell is to serve as a breeding ground for disease bearing insects.

Lower Mumbai is where Upper Mumbai dumps its garbage. (Again, the same story as the one where the rich countries export their toxic waste to poor countries and get all dirty manufacturing done in poor countries.) The residents of LM sort through that garbage and use what they can and leave the rest to be where it landed. The garbage piles up in the creeks and open canals which occassionally I suspect flow into the sea during the monsoons.

I think it is instructive to inquire into the nature and causes of this division between lower and upper Mumbai, into the nature of public and private goods, into externalities, into what is clearly an instance of the tragedy of the commons. This I will take up the next time.

The collective leadership that is fueling china’s growth today will have to go away in the future. Communism is not going to last long enough for china to become a developed nation. Once communism collapses and democracy begins to form in china, there will be a prolonged period of little or zero growth in the country’s economy.

That is when India will overtake china.

It is very likely wishful thinking combined with admirable patriotism that motivates Anand above. The engine of communism has been decoupled from the Chinese train long ago and it is the engine of capitalism that is driving that one. As Pranab Bardhan had observed, the Chinese were better socialists than Indians, and now the Chinese are proving to be better capitalists than Indians.

The Chinese are collectively smarter than Indians. That proposition can be rather simply defended by causal empiricism. China is an economic power to be reckoned with; India has promise but all too often we are unable to realize that promise. The Chinese are better at solving problems that require collective action, Bardhan has argued.

And what about democracy? The virtues of democracy are notably absent in practise while theory never seems to lack it. Envisioning democracy in an environment of full information, morally and intellectually powerful leaders, full literacy, an empowered population, etc, immediately compels one to the position that democracy is the best way to order society. Democracy in all levels of society is certainly the first best recommendation in a first best world.

But if you care to note, it is not a first best world. The system has too many distortions. For instance, half the people are illiterate; only single-digit percentages are somewhat educated; information gaps you could pass an oil-tanker through exist; leaders whose moral fibre is as weak as their feeble intellects stand out; politicians whose only compelling interest appears to be personal aggrandizement and enrichment are the only choices one faces during elections. It is definitely a second best world.

It has always been a second best world. Recognizing that, we must defend against advocating first best solutions. Democracy as it exists in reality in India is a mill-stone that has kept India poor. No where in the world has democracy worked at a stage of development that India is in. Democracy has not even been tried in any country with India’s characteristics.

The Chinese are not stupid. They will get democracy when they are good and ready, when the conditions are such that democracy will help rather than hinder.

Have you ever noticed that the most powerful ‘democracy’ in the world does not ever support democratic action internationally? The US is so dead set against democracy in international settings that you would think that they were raised on Genghis Khan’s mother’s milk.

The US talks loudly about democracy but is not stupid enough to actually practise democracy abroad; at home, they do have the regular circus act of choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You may recall that Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a fight. So also, the Democrats and the Republicans agree to have a fight every four years. They are pretty much indistinguishable when it comes to matters of substance, such as how much to spend on weapons of mass destruction, how much to subsidize their rich farmers (thus starving poor farmers in poor countries), how much to protect their trade barriers, etc. Sure they differ on matters such as school prayers, abortion rights, school vouchers and other relatively trivial issues.

No sir, even at home they have a form of shadow democracy. And abroad they drop even that pretense and subscribe to the only sensible policy that the rich and the powerful have: dictatorial.

Coming back to the point, China is way ahead of India in terms of economic might and momentum. India will have to play the game of catch up for a very long time. To shorten the time, we will have to use the power of ideas. Unless we act totally rationally, our chances of becoming a developed nation are far slimmer than China’s.

By most criteria of standard economic measurements of levels of living and their growth, China has clearly won the race.

To support his conclusion, he notes

Over the last three decades official data suggest that the average annual rate of growth of per capita income was about 7 per cent in China1 and 2.5 per cent in India. Productivity per hectare in agriculture (say, in rice) has been much higher in China for centuries, but the relative progress in manufacturing in recent decades has been phenomenal. In the early fifties the total GDP in manufacturing in India was slightly below that in China , in the late nineties it was less than a quarter of that in China. In 1999 the manufacturing share of GDP was 38 per cent in China, while it was 16 per cent in India. Indian labour productivity in manufacturing was about 71 per cent of that in China in 1952; in 1995 it was 37 percent2. Compared to India, total electricity use per capita is twice as high in China and teledensity (the number of telephones per thousand people) is several times higher. In 1999 the share of world trade (exports plus imports) in goods was 3.3 per cent for China, 0.7 per cent for India; in services the corresponding percentages were 2.1 and 1.2. The total amount (in dollars) of foreign direct investment in China was 18 times that in India in 1999. In the same year gross domestic saving as a proportion of GDP was exactly twice as high in China as that in India.

… The social or human development indicators all indicate the superior performance of China. The life expectation at birth is about 70 years in China, to India’s 63. Under 5 child mortality (per thousand live births) was 37 in China and 90 in India in 1999. Female illiteracy for above age 15 was 25 in China and 56 in India in 1999.

Dismal reading if you are an Indian wondering what went wrong. Bardhan’s thesis is that China has been better able to resolve collective action problems.

I have been convinced for many years that both at the macroeconomic level of political economy and the micro level of management of public space in general and of common property resources in particular , one of the most serious problems that Indian society faces is that of collective action. At the macroeconomic level collective action is necessary in formulating cohesive developmental goals with clear priorities and avoiding prisoner’s dilemma-type deadlocks in the pursuit of commonly agreed upon goals.

He had analysed India’s fiscal crises and development gridlock as an ‘intricate collective action problem in an implicit framework of non-cooperative Nash equilibria’ nearly two decades ago. In his judgement, Indian reform would lumber along, clumsily and haltingly. It is a despiriting conclusion reached by one who knows something about India and economics.

What interests me particularly in the paper is his identification of China’s township and village enterprises (TVE’s) as an important institutional innovation that has changed China’s fortunes. These are non-state industrial enterprises under local government (and sometimes semi-private) control.

Take the TVE’s which formed the leading sector in the industrial economy in the last two decades. I believe that the clue to their dramatic success particularly in coastal China lay in three major elements of this unique institutional experiment: (1) there was intense competition among the TVE’s run by different local governments; (2) this competition had teeth (unlike , say, in the case of the competition of public sector banks in India) in the sense that there was a “hard budget constraint” imposed on them, so that by and large a failing TVE could not expect a bailout by the provincial or central government (although there was some cross-subsidisation between enterprises within the same township or village); and (3) when the TVE made money, the local authority was largely allowed to keep most of it (residual claimancy without private ownership was the novel institutional feature).

Institutional innovation is what India chiefly needs. Like China’s TVE’s, we too have to find our innovation that would transform India’s economy. Since rural India is demographically larger, we need to focus on rural India seriously. Some of us are convinced that something like the RISC model is the appropriate innovation that needs to be implemented.