The subtitle of the piece mentions, “INDIA’S famously inept organising style means a disaster is on the cards.”

“We were told the Games would help us showcase the true picture of modern India,” says Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former sports minister and senior member of the ruling Congress party.

“I must congratulate Suresh Kalmadi [a fellow Congress MP and chief Games organiser] for having successfully projected the real picture: an India of corruption and inefficiency.

Chetan Bhagat, a top-selling author, says the Games are a “loot-fest”. “The CWG 2010 is by far the biggest and most blatant exercise in corruption in independent India’s history,” he says. “Not only have they stolen public money, they’ve made a mess of the job at hand.”

Corruption and inefficiency has come to define India at home and abroad. The injury is great in terms of material welfare. What is worse is the gratuitous insulting that is going on as part of an attempt at covering up by those who are to blame. Here are a couple of examples of the insults.

Lalit Bhanot, the secretary general of the organising committee explained away the filthy games village by saying:

“According to us the room may be clean, but the foreign officials may require a certain standard of cleanliness and hygiene which may differ from our standards. So in order to bridge this gap, we have appointed people to ensure the kind of hygiene they are looking for is done.” (Hat tip: Sahir Sait).

In just a couple of sentences, Bhanot has trashed Indians. We are like that only.

A footbridge collapsed injuring 25 workers, some seriously. And Sheila Dixit, the Congress CM of New Delhi explained it away saying that it was not intended for athletes. Hence it was not a big deal. We have lots of people and we don’t really care how many die. See, we don’t even get worked up when terrorists kill us by the hundreds. What me worry?

Here’s a bit from a rediff.com column by Sheela Bhatt:

The negative publicity and whatever muck is being raised against the CWG is due to the lack of ethical political leadership in the country. . .

The CWG caught the people’s attention when the Organising Committee and its head Suresh Kalmadi were named in a damaging report by the Comptroller Auditor General. The first thing that percolated to the people was that the CWG was a massive no-holds-barred money-making exercise.
. . .
You don’t even need the CAG to tell you that CWG was synonymous with corruption. For upgradation of the JNS, Delhi, the government led by Sheila Dixit and the Jaipal Reddy-led Group of Ministers (who were overseeing the CWG planning and execution) approved spending Rs 900 crore. One understood that this was a vulgar show. Even this is not shocking news in India where corrupt people win in election after election. But inspite of huge corruption when people saw that delivery is absent, the frustration peaked.

Kalmadi became the face of what all that has gone wrong but one must mention Chief Minister Sheila Dixit who must face public scrutiny once the Games are over. . .

Before the general election of 2009, Rahul Gandhi’s popularity was ascending. He was going to home of Kalawatis and other Dalits as well as many college campuses around India. He was rediscovering India and searching for suitable issues.

Then, rediff.com had asked two senior members of the Congress Working Committee why Rahul Gandhi was not taking up the leadership of CWG . . .

The response for the two leaders was similar. They said that CWG was much behind schedule and in a mess. Kalamadi’s control over the OC was total and he was difficult to replace. The senior leaders also said that “it’s risky to jeopardise Rahul Gandhi’s prestige by providing leadership to the CWG.”

There are a bunch of lessons one can learn from the CWG disaster. First, the Gandhis (or perhaps their handlers) are as clever as the people who vote the family into power are stupid. They stay behind the scenes and do the directing. Whatever they do, most of the time ends up a failure. They then don’t even have to hunt around for a scape-goat. They have a few ready even before they get started. This time around the scape goats will probably be Kalmadi and Dixit. But the scape goats are not unwilling victims as they know full well that they are handsomely paid for taking on the job.

If there is any degree of success in some scheme (which is not often), the Gandhis take the credit. The liberalization of the Indian economy that brought it out of the disastrous “Nehru rate of growth” was the doing of one Mr PV Narasimha Rao. So what happened? His name was erased and the credit was given to dear departed Rajiv Gandhi.

Take the credit, and deflect the blame. That’s the name of the game that the Gandhis play. Nehru himself was good at it. Nehru’s socialism impoverished India and they called it “Hindu rate of growth”. Can it get any more blatant than that?

The second lesson is that corruption is congruent with the Congress party. But that’s a lesson too late for the learning. For over 60 years the Congress has been bleeding the country. Yet there is a significant segment of the population continues to vote for the Gandhi family.

I cringe when I see the failures of the Congress party referred to as India’s failure. The CWG’s will paint India in very unflattering colors, even though actually it is a failure of the Congress and its leadership. But then I have to remind myself that it is a democracy. Decade after decade, some Indians have elected these people to power, instead of discarding them in the garbage heap of history.

I hope that the CWG is such an unmitigated disaster that it wakes up the middle-class Indians. If it does, the failure of the CWG would be the greatest boon for India and Indians.

The CWG may serve to reveal to the Indian voter the cesspool that is concealed in India’s basement. But the crocodiles have to be removed before the cesspool can be drained. Time for the Indian voter to use the only weapon they have: their votes.

So in conclusion, here’s my take. If after seven years and $4 billion you still cannot organize a sporting event in the capital of your country, you may be the leaders of a Third World country.

Related Posts: You might be a third world country if …

The Chinese are significantly ahead of India both in qualitative and quantitative terms regarding railways. In 2004, China logged 363 billion passenger-kms, compared to Japan’s 396 and India’s 316 billion passenger-kms. (Source.) An item in today’s The Hindu reports:

In December, China opened what it described as the world’s fastest rail link, between Wuhan and southern Guangzhou, where a 350 kmph-speed train covers the 1,068 km journey in three hours, down from 10.5 hours. By 2012, China will have opened 42 high-speed lines, covering 13,000 km of its total railway coverage of 110,000 km. When completed, China’s will be the world’s largest high-speed railway network.

Compare China’s 350 kmph train to India’s premier Rajdhani trains which do an average of 70 kmph.

Not content with an amazing domestic rail network, China’s leaders are thinking of a 17-country transcontinental rail project.

China has finally reached agreements with several Central Asian countries and given the green signal to its ambitious pan-Asian high-speed rail link, which envisages connecting cities in China to Central Asia, Iran, Europe, Russia and Singapore.

Of course, the Chinese are not doing this for the fun of playing with railways. They are thinking ahead about energy.

When completed, the plan will give China unprecedented access to energy resources in many of these countries.

A spokesperson at the Ministry of Railways told the official Global Times newspaper on Friday that the Chinese government has initiated talks with some of the 17 countries involved in the project. China will bear the brunt of the cost of building the high-speed rail lines in many of the countries involved, but will in return get access to energy resources in a proposed “resources for technology” arrangement, the Global Times reported.

One of China’s leading railways consultant is quoted as saying:

“India is a relatively small country with a huge population. It will be too costly to build highways for India, so our high-speed rail link project will improve transportation efficiency and resources.”

Now where have I heard something similar before? Was it one of India’s railway ministers in the last 60 years? Nope. I think it was yours truly on this blog. From “The Integrated Rail Transportation System — Revisited” July 2005:

To achieve greater production and productive efficiency, an efficient transportation system is not optional but mandatory. Without one, the economy cannot achieve productive efficiency.

The transportation system of an economy as geographically large, as densely populated, and as resource constrained as India’s, has to have as its backbone a rail transportation system.

Roads transportation is not an option for India for a number of obvious reasons. Cars and fossil fuels are expensive. Very efficient alternative fuel cars are even more expensive. With 17 percent of the world’s population and 2 percent of the world’s land area, we cannot afford the luxury of high speed expressways the way that the US can. We have to be more fuel efficient than the US because it is not even theoretically possible to emulate the US with its automobile/airlines system. The US appropriates approximately a quarter of the world’s total energy use with only about five percent of the world’s population. To reach US standards of energy use per capita, India would have to increase its energy consumption 25-fold. (NOTE: all figures in this piece are approximate. The exact figures will not substantially alter the argument.)

To put it another way, India would have to use four times the total amount of energy currently consumed by the entire world. At present, India has to import over half of its fossil fuel needs and pays an unaffordable amount for it. India’s economy cannot be sustained on imported fuel. From here flows the case for solar energy, which we will not dwell on right now.

The same argument as above applies with even greater force when air transport is considered as the backbone of a national transportation system. Only a very insignificant percentage of Indians can afford to fly. By afford I do not merely mean individual capacity to pay. The system itself cannot accomodate it. You cannot have 75,000 daily flights serving India’s billion people, which is what you would need to match the US’s air transportation system around daily 30,000 flights serving around 0.3 billion Americans.

A bit of arithmetic is all that is needed to expose the underlying reality that we don’t have the option of having road or air as the backbone of India’s transportation system. We not only cannot afford the fuel (source constraint), but we cannot also afford the pollution (sink constraint) of 700 million cars and 20,000 airliners spewing exhaust — as would be required to match the US on a per capita basis.

Rail transportation is of particular interest to me because it is critically important for India’s development. I think that India’s leadership — which boils down to one particular family and one particular party — is really not interested in India’s development. They are more interested in hanging on to power, even if it means that India will continue to sink further into the morass that they created for India.

India is falling behind. In Feb 2007, in “Trains and the Transportation System” I wrote:

You wouldn’t believe it but it seems that in the early 1990s, India was ahead of China in route kilometer per capita and total route kilometer. In the decade starting 1992, China invested US$85 billion and jumped so far ahead of India that it is unlikely that India will ever catch up with China. India invested only US$17.3 billion in the same period. India’s route kilometer grew by ONE percent and China’s grew by 24 percent.

The sad part is that when I bring this comparison of India with China, I am told by some, “But India is a democracy.” So friggin’ what? Since when is it the rule that having a democratic system condemns a nation to be backward and poor? Why is it that well-off Indians explain away India’s appalling poverty on “democracy”?

If you have to explain away all failures of leadership of your country by saying “but we are a democracy”, you might be a third world country.

Take Saudi Arabia, for example. One law for people of the Religion of Peace and another for the rest. Or consider Pakistan. Or Bangladesh. Heck, why go so far. Consider India. Do you see the pattern? Not convinced?

How about the third world country UK? People like Maryam Namazie are fighting for One Law for All in the UK. Let’s list the names of the Maryam Namazies of India to know if we can have one law for all in India.

But until then, we must remember that if you don’t have one law for all in your country, your country might be a third world country.

* There have been four acts of mass casualty terrorism since 1981. All the four were carried out when the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi.

* There have been three instances of targeted attacks on foreigners since 1991—-two in J&K and one in Mumbai. All the three were carried out when the Congress (I) was in power.

* There have been seven acts of ISI-sponsored aircraft hijackings since 1971. Six of them were carried out when the Congress (I) and one when the BJP was in power.

* There has been one instance of an Air India plane being blown up in mid-air killing over 250 persons. This took place when the Congress (I) was in power.

* The LET was banned by the Musharraf Government as a terrorist organization through a Gazette notification on January 15, 2002. The Manmohan Singh Government has not been able to get the JUD banned by the Zardari Government through a Gazette notification even nine months after the Mumbai attack.

* Indira Gandhi was assassinated when the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated when an ally of the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi and another ally in Chennai.

* The Indian Mujahideen came into existence when the Congress (I) was in power.

* The first commando-style complex terrorist attack in Indian territory by a group of terrorists, all hailing from Pakistan, has taken place when the Congress (I) is in power.

Now it is true that B Raman in his extremely detailed piece (54 bulleted paragraphs, no less) lists instances after instances of the absolutely incomprehensible incompetency of Dr Manmohan Singh in dealing with the terrorist state of Pakistan and the terrorism that it unleashes on Indians. But as I keep saying, Dr Singh cannot be held responsible for reasons of incompetency. I believe courts routinely refuse to punish murderers if it is determined that the murderer is mentally incompetent. Dr Singh does not deserve any less.

For the record, here are items 16 and 17 from Mr Raman’s paper:

16. The inexorable result of Dr. Manmohan Singh’s failure to act: The commando-style attack by 10 Pakistani terrorists of the LET, trained, armed and equipped in Pakistan on two hotels, a Jewish religious-cum-cultural centre and other public places in Mumbai, which started on November 26, 2008, and continued till November 28, 2008.It was an army-style operation involving the use of hand-held weapons, explosives, sophisticated communication equipment and modern internet telephony facilities, which shocked the world and created feelings of anger and outrage in India.

17. The enormity of the public anger against Pakistan forced Dr. Manmohan Singh to freeze the composite dialogue process without disrupting the normal diplomatic relations between the two countries. He did so not because he was convinced that his earlier policy of appeasement of Pakistan had failed, but because he and his Congress (I) party were worried that if they did not give the impression of taking strong action against Pakistan, it might affect the party adversely in the elections of April-May, 2009, to the Lok Sabha, the lower House of the Indian Parliament. The resumption of the composite dialogue was made conditional on Pakistan acting strongly against the LET, its operatives based in Pakistan who had planned and got executed the terrorist attack in Mumbai and its terrorist infrastructure in Pakistani territory.

If you continue to support a political party that consistently screws you over decade after decade, impoverishes you, and treats you like a retard, you might be a third world country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Mr Das ends on a truly amazing note:

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

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

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

Why is everything in India named after the Gandhis? The huge national park in Borivali in north Mumbai is called the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Did not know that Sanjay was a great nationally renowned nature lover. If I had not known better, I would have figured that he must have been the John Muir of India.

Pretty much half the things around India are named after the Nehru-Gandhi family. What astonishes me most is when educational institutions are named after the family which does not have a single graduate degree among the whole lot of them. Not that they could not afford to go to college. No, they all attended colleges and attempted to get degrees but failed to get one.

On second thoughts, given the moribund state of the Indian educational system, perhaps naming educational institutions after the luminaries of the Nehru-Gandhi family has a certain aptness to it.

Update: (March 29th) — As pointed out by harjeet.undefined in the comments below, I am wrong that no one in the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has a single degree to their name. Nehru did have a degree. Mea maxima culpa. And thanks for the correction.

I pondered the naming of things once more in Feb 2008 and concluded that it was political advertising:

Naming things is easy in India. “Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal, Indira, Rajiv, and Sanjay” are the choices for the first bit, as in “Jawaharlal Nehru University,” or “Indira Gandhi International.” It won’t be too long before we have “Sonia, Priyanka, Rahul, Spotty” added to the list. (Spotty is just a place holder as I am not sure what the name of the Gandhi family dog actually is.)

I know that other nations also identify their important landmarks with the names of their historical political leaders. The US honors Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy, and so on. However, there is a great deal of diversity in their naming of things that they value. They name their scientific projects after scientists, for instance. Remember Hubble, Fermi, etc. Indeed, the Americans even named one of their space telescopes after an Indian: Chandra. I somehow doubt that would happen in India.

But no where other than in India have I noticed only one family monopolizing the naming of things. It is as if India never had any heroes until the birth of Jawaharlal Nehru and after that all the seats were taken by his progeny for eternity. I think there is a simple reason. The naming of things is a way of political advertising. An “Indira Gandhi Seva Yojna” publicly funded though it may be will ultimately drive home the message that the Gandhi family is the giver of gifts and ensure that the thumb impression of the voter lands on the Congress candidate come election time.

It is a sort of a vicious circle. First, name every institution and program with the Nehru-Gandhi name. Brand name recognition ensures that as long as the Congress has someone leading it with that brand name, it will get the millions of thumb impressions. Then if you can promote the name even more by labeling even more things with the name, you get to share some of the goodies political power provides.

It seems that one Mr Surya Prakash has also noticed this rather obscure trend and has petitioned the Election Commission and “requested him to immediately issue directions to the Union government and to all the governments in the states and direct them to remove the names of individuals, who are seen by the people as icons of specific political parties, from all government programmes and schemes funded by the exchequer and to immediately give these programmes politically neutral names.”

Here is an extended quote from an article in the Indian Express of 25th March written by Surya Prakash titled, “Why Nehru, Indira, Rajiv Everywhere” (Hat tip: Rajeev Mantri for the link.)

In a systematic effort to gain an unfair advantage over others, the Congress party has named all major government programmes, projects and institutions in the country after three members of the Nehru-Gandhi family “Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru” who are its icons, and disturbed the level playing field in the electoral arena.

Over the last 18 years, on a rough estimate about 450 central and state government programmes, projects and national and state level institutions involving public expenditure of hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees have been named after these three individuals.

. . .

Among the big ticket programmes named after members of this family by the Union government to extract unjust electoral mileage is the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (rural electrification programme), which involves an outgo of Rs 28,000 crore during the Eleventh Plan period (Rs 5,500 crore in fiscal 2008-09). The drinking water mission, with an allocation of Rs 21,000 crore over three years (Rs 7,300 crore in 2008-09 and Rs 7,400 crore in 2009-10) is called the Rajiv Gandhi Drinking Water Mission. Other schemes that bear his name are the Rajiv Gandhi National Crèche Scheme for Children of Working Mothers; Rajiv Gandhi Shramik Kalyan Yojana and the Rajiv Gandhi Shilpi Swasthya Bima Yojana (both insurance schemes).

Likewise, many mega programmes are named after Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.. The budgetary allocation for the Indira Awas Yojana to house the poor is Rs 7,919 crore in 2008-09 and Rs 7,914.70 crore in 2009-10. Also named after her is the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme (Rs 3,443 cr in 2008- 09). Programmes named after Jawaharlal Nehru over the last two decades are the Jahawarlal Nehru Rojgar Yojana and the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission.

The Union government proposes to spend Rs 50,000 crore over seven years on the latter mission.

This trend is even more apparent in the states, which have vied with each other to name programmes after these three members of the family whenever the Congress was in power. Here is a sample: Rajiv Gandhi Breakfast Scheme, Puducherry; Rajiv Ratna Awas Yojana, Delhi; Rajiv Arogyasri Health Insurance scheme, Andhra Pradesh; Rajiv Gandhi Computer Literacy Mission, Assam; Rajiv Gandhi Bridges and Roads Infrastructure Development Programme, Haryana; Rajiv Gandhi Vidyarthi Suraksha Yojana, Maharastra; Rajiv Gandhi Tourism Development Mission, Rajasthan; Indira Gandhi Niradhar Yojana and Indira Gandhi Landless Agriculture Labour Scheme, Maharashtra; Indira Gandhi Priyadarshini Vivah Shagun Yojana, Haryana; Indira Gandhi Calf-Rearing Scheme, Andhra Pradesh.

Obviously, the plan is to ensure maximum recall of Brand Congress among voters at every stage in life. Indira Gandhi comes in when the poor want a house subsidised and you think of Nehru when urban renewal comes into play. The Congress has taken its obsession with this family to such an extent that even calf-rearing schemes are named after them.

The list of 450 government programmes, schemes, institutions, etc, named after these three members of the family broadly fall into the following categories: Central government (12), state government (52), universities and educational institutions (98), ports and airports (6), awards, scholarships and fellowships (66), sports tournaments, trophies and stadia (47), national parks and sanctuaries (15), hospitals and medical institutions (39), national scientific and research institutions, chairs and festivals (37), roads, buildings and places (74).

Apart from violating the electoral law, the naming spree has crossed all limits of decency. Every major sports tournament has been named after the Nehru-Gandhis, as if nobody else matters, not even the greats in Indian sports. Such is the obsession of Congress governments with this family that they name India’s biggest open university after Indira Gandhi and name fellowships granted there after Rajiv Gandhi. For long years we have been familiar with the Fullbright scholarships. Now it is known as the Fullbright-Jawaharl al Nehru Scholarship.

We are unlikely to see anything so gross even in dictatorships such as North Korea.

This blatant attempt to package and market government programmes run on public money as munificent offerings from a single family to the people has made a mockery of the Model Code of Conduct drawn up by the Election Commission for observance by all political parties.

If you have to futz around naming everything after three people in a blatantly corrupt attempt at winning elections then you might be a third world country.

Since 2002, the major impacts of these campaigns have been on criminalization of politics, and transparency in candidate and political party assets. Leaders of both the BJP and the Indian National Congress have made public statements that they would not field candidates with criminal records even if they were likely to win in the coming Lok Sabha elections . . .

Interesting, isn’t it? I added the emphasis above because it is worth noting. That phrase is a recognition of the fact that criminals routinely contest and win elections. Let me understand that a bit more. That criminals contest elections is a choice that the criminals make. The laws of the land, for whatever they are worth, permit criminals to contest elections. That they win elections is the more remarkable fact. Contesting the elections is within the control of the criminals; winning elections is not. People — the much celebrated wise Indian voters — are the ones who vote criminals into power.

They at ADR could conference the whole day long till the cows come home, but I am afraid that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not with the criminals but with the people who vote for them.

If in your generally free and fair elections, you elect criminals as your political leaders, you might be a third world country. (Or in the case of the US, you might be aspiring to become a third world country.)

Yes sir or madam, that is what Amravati chiefly needs–an international airport. That is if by “chiefly needs” one means something like “a fish chiefly needs a bicycle.” From the almost infinite list of things that Amravati lacks, Patil’s fatwa, or patwa, was that it needs an international airport. Why international, you ask? That’s because of the new patwa.

The new patwa is that Amravati needs an IIT. Yup, an Indian Institute of Technology. But wait there’s more. The IIT is “Indira Institute of Technology.” Why, you ask, does “India” get transformed into “Indira.” Well, as they say in Hindi, Patil has done a lot of roti baylna for the family Family and she got to be El Presidente and now more rotis are being baylow-ed. Besides, she recalls that “indira is india” and “india is indira.” So, IIT stands both for Indira as well as Indian institutes of technology. Or is it now “Institute of Indira Technology”?

Anyway, the new IIT is going to be only for women. Only women, you ask? What is with this gender discrimination? Is she the president of Saooodi Arabia, as The Acorn suspects? Will she require that women go about clad in black tents while studying at IIT in Amravati? And what about the international airport? Will the flights be between Saoodi Arabia and Amravati?

Don’t know. Let’s just hope that the Family sticks to pizza delivered from Italy so that they can dispense with the roti baylna of Patil and we are all spared the patwas.

[Background information: Pratibha Patil wants an IIT in her constituency.]

In Mumbai, the trend is that everything gets renamed after Shivaji. And in the broader context of India, everything gets named after Nehru and his clan. Naming things is easy in India. “Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal, Indira, Rajiv, and Sanjay” are the choices for the first bit, as in “Jawaharlal Nehru University,” or “Indira Gandhi International.” It won’t be too long before we have “Sonia, Priyanka, Rahul, Spotty” added to the list. (Spotty is just a place holder as I am not sure what the name of the Gandhi family dog actually is.)

I know that other nations also identify their important landmarks with the names of their historical political leaders. The US honors Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy, and so on. However, there is a great deal of diversity in their naming of things that they value. They name their scientific projects after scientists, for instance. Remember Hubble, Fermi, etc. Indeed, the Americans even named one of their space telescopes after an Indian: Chandra. I somehow doubt that would happen in India.

But no where other than in India have I noticed only one family monopolizing the naming of things. It is as if India never had any heroes until the birth of Jawaharlal Nehru and after that all the seats were taken by his progeny for eternity. I think there is a simple reason. The naming of things is a way of political advertising. An “Indira Gandhi Seva Yojna” publicly funded though it may be will ultimately drive home the message that the Gandhi family is the giver of gifts and ensure that the thumb impression of the voter lands on the Congress candidate come election time.

It is a sort of a vicious circle. First, name every institution and program with the Nehru-Gandhi name. Brand name recognition ensures that as long as the Congress has someone leading it with that brand name, it will get the millions of thumb impressions. Then if you can promote the name even more by labeling even more things with the name, you get to share some of the goodies political power provides.

There is an interesting contrast to that political naming convention. There is a total lack of names associated with ownership and responsibility. Let me start with an example very close to me. The notices that are posted in the building that I live in never has a name or a number associated with it. It is hard to hold an anonymous person responsible. It appears as if there are people in authority out there somewhere and their dictates have to be followed unquestioningly. You don’t need to ask for explanations or justification.

What we need is an ownership society.

Credit Robert Zoellick for knowing how to put the best face on a profound embarrassment. On Friday, the World Bank president announced in a press release that the bank had “joined forces” with the government of India to “fight fraud and corruption” in that country’s health sector. This is happening at the same time that Mr. Zoellick’s colleagues are hounding bank anticorruption chief Suzanne Rich Folsom, the person primarily responsible for bringing the scandals to light.

Joining forces with the government of India to fight corruption is reminiscent of joining forces with General Musharraf to fight terrorism. One bank managing directed is reported as saying that she is “encouraged by the Indian government’s “strong resolve” to deal with corruption.” Exactly like the strong resolve of the fox in guarding the hen house. We can now all sleep soundly since the Indian government has resolved to . . . whatever.

If your corrupt government is strongly resolved to deal with corruption, you might be a third world country.

PS: Let’s remember that all the stolen money is a WB loan to India. That means, we, the tax-payers in India, have to ultimately pay back all the embezzled funds.

India is a vast country. From the beginning of history, innumerable people ended up in this cul de sac. Some have visited and then left, others have stayed, sending their roots firmly down. India has always warmly embraced every stranger, people of different colours, languages, religions, ethnicity and opinions. The door was ever open to an outsider. With hundreds of languages and cultures, India is unique in its generosity to the stranger. So why is there no place for me?

I’ve never asked for political asylum from India. All I want is to be able to live here. I might breathe in a distant land somewhere, but my heart is in Bengal. So why is my appeal to live here dealt with politically? Some argue that if India were to grant me citizenship, then her relationship with Bangladesh would worsen. As if I were a common criminal wanted back home that India is harbouring! Fact is, Bangladesh doesn’t want me.So if India gives me a home, why should it concern Bangladesh at all? When I stay in Europe and America, does it worsen their relationship with Bangladesh? Instead, I imagine Bangladesh heaving a sigh of relief if India grants me shelter, like going to an aunt after fighting with your mother.

I can’t help recalling those days when authors from the West joined together to save me. They not only put pressure on their own governments but also prevailed on the European Union to save a writer from oblivion. It was thanks to their efforts that governments in the West were compelled to save me from being hanged. Then followed a kind of tug-of-war between various countries. Norway, Sweden, Germany, everyone wanted me to live with them. Granting me residency or even citizenship was a prestige issue for them: it would ensure them fame.

I don’t know who decides whether or not I stay in West Bengal. Some say the government wants to please the Muslims. Some say it’s the intellectuals who’re afraid, or jealous. Did West Bengal ever love me? Yes, she did. Annadasankar Roy, a famous free thinker, once said affectionately that “Bangladesh is Taslima’s mother and West Bengal her aunt”. When I talked of women’s rights, I got a hard kick from Bangladesh and a kiss from West Bengal. Actually it’s not the country which kicks or kisses, but the people. I have noticed that the number of secular and rational people here is far more than in Bangladesh.

And just as I love East Bengal, return again and again at its door even when I’ve been thrown out, just so do I love and return here to West Bengal.

I have written earlier about the stupidity of changing the name “Indian Airlines” to the even more generic “Indian,” repainting a few dozen airplanes spending tens of millions of dollars, knowing full well that in a matter of months the whole exercise will be repeated when the name is changed yet once more. Time to revisit that piece.

Like I say, India is not poor for nothing. It takes concerted cumulative stupidity over decades to bring a large economy to its knees. Behold the bureaucrats and marvel at their madness.

I don’t see what business the state has to be in the commercial airline business. But then, what do I know. I don’t understand what it means for the politicians to have their own private airlines. I don’t comprehend the thrill that comes from spending tax-payer money on a whim. Such as changing the name from Indian Airlines to Indian and then repainting the entire fleet of 70 or so planes for tens of crores of rupees just before they merge it and have to repaint the whole fleet a few months down the line.

If your politicians need their own private airline to keep themselves entertained, you might be a Third World country.

Why the government interferes in every aspect of the economy is an interesting study in itself and I will not go into it right now. Also, I will not rigorously argue my case that it is government involvement in actitivities that it should not be involved in is enormously harmful. Anecdotal evidence, though not conclusive, is suggestive of the general soundness of an argument. For instance, take the case of the telecommunications revolution in India. As long as the government was the sole provider of this service, the telecom system was one of the world’s worst. When the sector was unshackled from the clutches of the government, it boomed with an echo that is being heard round the world.

Talking of which, Shashi Tharoor wrote a very articulate piece on the matter in the Hindu called Mobile Miracle. (Hat tip: Vivek Sellappan.)

Bureaucratic statism committed a long list of sins against the Indian people, but communications was high up on the list; the woeful state of India’s telephones right up to the 1990s, with only eight million connections and a further 20 million on waiting lists, would have been a joke if it wasn’t also a tragedy — and a man-made one at that. We had possibly the worst telephone penetration rates in the world. The government’s indifferent attitude to the need to improve India’s communications infrastructure was epitomised by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Communications Minister, C.M. Stephen, who declared in Parliament, in response to questions decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, that telephones were a luxury, not a right, and that any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone — since there was an eight-year waiting list of people seeking this supposedly inadequate product.

Mr. Stephen’s statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong about the government’s attitude. It was ignorant (he clearly had no idea of the colossal socio-economic losses caused by poor communications), wrong-headed (he saw a practical problem only as an opportunity to score a political point), unconstructive (responding to complaints by seeking a solution apparently did not occur to him), self-righteous (the socialist cant about telephones being a luxury, not a right), complacent (taking pride in a waiting-list the existence of which should have been a source of shame, since it pointed to the poor performance of his own Ministry in putting up telephone lines and manufacturing equipment), unresponsive (feeling no obligation to provide a service in return for the patience, and the fees, of the country’s telephone subscribers) and insulting (asking long-suffering telephone subscribers to return their instruments instead of doing anything about their complaints). It was altogether typical of an approach to governance in the economic arena which assumed that the government knew what was good for the country, felt no obligation to prove it by actual performance and didn’t, in any case, care what anyone else thought.

Telecommunications is a critical infrastructure, of course. But it is not half as critical as education. It is absolutely imperative that the government get out of education. If the government does not, the education sector will continue to be as dysfunctional as the telecommunications infrastructure was during the days of government monopoly. That is something we cannot afford. India needs to have a vibrant educational system and the only way we will have it is if the government were to let go of the stranglehold that it has on education.

The more general point that I want to argue is that the government should get out of the business of dictating to people how they should behave, what they will read, what they will eat, who they will employ, who they will give charity to, etc. One of my greatest complaint against the government of India is that it should get out of the business of taking my money and funding charities. Charity is when I freely give of my resources to causes that I believe in. When the government does it, it is robbery, not charity.

That is why I believe that if your government is run along the lines of Cafe Baghdadi, you might be living in a Third World country.

Public service announcement: The government of Maharashtra has decreed that you will not consume alcohol on five specific dates between Jan 25th and Feb 3rd. For your own good of course. Because you cannot be trusted to behave yourself. So there.

If there is one thing that makes me see red, it is senseless discrimination in general and unfair treatment of people. But when it comes to discrimination based on a person’s religion, I abhor it with every fiber of my being. It disgusts me and I feel nothing but contempt for people who discriminate based on religion (or lack of religion, in some cases.) One of the distinguishing features of a civilized society is that it does not treat people differently based on their belief systems. Those societies that do discriminate based on belief systems are retrograde, regressive, backward, ignorant, bigoted, intellectually bankrupt, and generally deserve the derogatory label “third world country.”

Indian polity discriminating among its citizens based on belief places India squarely among a tribe of nations that has no place in a modern civilized world. India, with all its cell phones and back offices, belongs to 7th century Arabia.

It was in the 7th century Arabia that the best and the most enduring example of discrimination based on belief was created. Its founder, Mohammed, declared that the world is divided eternally on the basis of belief: those who believe in his prophet-hood and the one true moon god he called Allah are the good, and those who do not are bad. And it is the holy obligation of the good to make an offer to the bad which simply says, “Believe as we do and you don’t have to pay a tax; if you don’t convert to our belief, and also refuse to pay the tax, you will be killed.”

That 7th century creed was simple and direct. You are either with us in our belief or against us. Convert, or pay the tax, or die. Mind you, there was no compulsion – you are free to choose.

When I first learnt of that principle of Islam, I was disgusted and revolted. Its violent intolerance of any other belief system is insanely inhuman and goes against every humanist and rationalist tradition that has ever been developed by humankind. That intolerant faith has migrated around the world with devastating consequence. Hard to believe, but when you are forced to dump your half-ounce tube of toothpaste into the garbage bin at the security check at the airport, you are suffering the consequence of that insane xenophobia – “hate those who don’t believe in the exact same supernatural being and don’t obey our wishes” – given voice 14 centuries ago.

I don’t find anything even remotely useful in Islamic theology or philosophy. At best it is childish and ignorant. But what I find abhorrent and distasteful is its insistence that based on a person’s non-belief in Islam, the person can be killed. I must stress this point so as to remove all chances of misunderstanding. I don’t want the pseudo-seculars calling for a fatwa on my head. I have no problem with any useless, childish, ignorant ideology; my concern is only that I am against any ideology which actively discriminates against people who do not subscribe to that ideology. So it is not Islam’s moronic theology that bothers me; it is Islam’s discrimination against what they call the “infidels” that I find sickening and revolting.

I have used Islam merely to epitomize what I consider to be a cardinal sin (if you pardon the expression) of discriminating against people based on beliefs. In a civilized society, there is no justification for belief-based policy. Any country that discriminates against people based on their belief is a theocratic dictatorship that its citizens should be ashamed of. India, to my extreme shame and utter disgust, is a third world country that discriminates based on a person’s beliefs.

The prime minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, is calling for discrimination based on a person’s belief system. Basically, the argument goes thus:

(1) Overall, x percentage of people in the nation profess X belief
(2) But in organization A, only y percentage (less than x) of X believers are present
(3) So, to increase y to x, active measures need to be taken

In the above, “A” is every school, college, place of employment (both public and private), army, judiciary, police, and so on.

Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Or is it? Let’s reason for a bit.

Why, one wonders, is it important that every institution, profession, or organization should have proportionate representation of various faith systems? I can understand it if it were a “parliament of religions” or something. But why is faith important when it comes to say a car factory or an institution of higher education? I know that it is one of the basic principles of pseudo-seculars but we non-pseudo-seculars have a right to know what the reasoning is behind this basic assumption. What bearing does the profession of a particular belief have on the nature and functioning of the institution or the organization that all faiths have to be proportionately represented?

Here is a thought experiment for Dr Manmohan Singh. (I realize that my writings will never reach the good Dr Singh, but perhaps someone in the main stream media would like to bring this point up one of these days.)

Imagine, Dr Singh, that everyone in India magically by the grace of Allah embraces Islam at the stroke of midnight Nov 3rd 2006 (my birthday, as it happens). Nothing else changes: on Nov 4th, all people go to the same job as before, attend the same school, have the same income, live in the same houses as before, etc. Every economic parameter remains the same. Clearly, then Muslims will be 100 percent in every organization and institution (private, public, or otherwise) and no belief-based reservations can be implemented. Note however, that the poor among the population will continue to be poor, those who did not have access to jobs or to education will continue to have no access to jobs or to education.

The number of people who are poor and deprived will be no different on Nov 4th from Nov 3rd. Those, who for whatever reasons, were poor and illiterate will still be poor and illiterate. Moreover, not just their present stations, their future prospects will be no different also: if they were unable to secure a job before, they will continue to be unable to secure a job. Do you see that the personal religious belief of a person does not matter and should not be the basis for national policy? If public policy had to be made, it would have to be made based on some criterion other than religion. Do you see, Dr Singh, that then you will have to address the actual problem which has nothing to do with a person’s religion? I will not abuse your intelligence by pointing out that those policy instruments are available to you now — even before 100 percent conversion — and there is no reason that you should not promote those policies now.

Dr Singh, if you are paying attention, you may have figured out that what I am getting at is this: it is not the faith of a person that should concern the government of a nation that puts on airs about being a superpower, but rather about the economic status of a person. And if you are really concerned about improving the economic status of a person, then you should try to give the person an equal opportunity to the person to succeed. I stress equal opportunity because I wish to distinguish it from equal outcome. The government can at most ensure equality of opportunity but cannot — and should not — ensure equality of outcome. You must understand the distinction and I am going to attempt to do precisely that.

Equality of opportunity matters.

Another thought experiment. Suppose group A (group defined under any criterion, religious or otherwise) children have the same opportunity to become pilots as the members of group B, but refuse to do so. So the outcome is that among the airlines, you find that qualified people from group B are pilots and none from group A. The outcome is clearly different although the opportunity is the same. And a follow up question: would you, Dr Manmohan Singh, fly on a plane that is flown by a pilot from group A who was hired for government mandated proportionate representation reasons and who does not know how to fly a plane?

I know, policy makers are exempt from the ill-effects of the policy they make. You, for instance, will only fly in planes flown by qualified pilots, irrespective of how many caste-based reservations you introduce into the nation’s commercial airlines; and you will be treated by the most qualified doctors, without regard to their caste or their religion. But still, it is an interesting question you may wish to contemplate when you have a free moment. Think equal opportunity, not equal outcome.

Dr Singh, it is conceivable that despite equal opportunity, the outcome is different for reasons that range from personal preferences to innate abilities. Enforcing equality of outcome is silly and misguided. My parents cared for their children and provided equal opportunity to us. We ended up at quite different stations in life, however. I see nothing wrong in the outcome as long as I recognize that we all had the same opportunities. I imagine it would have been silly of my parents to insist that all their children should weigh the same, or even end up earning the same income.

Anyway, getting back to what I call your “minority equality” policy: why should the government deny a person an opportunity based on the person’s faith? I do suppose you realize that positively promoting Peter based on his faith is the same as discriminating against Paul for his different faith? Here is a thought experiment: assume that I, an infidel, should get the job but the employer is forced to hire Mohammed Islam because of your government mandated minority hiring policy. Do you note that I am being denied a job based on my religion? Do you see shades of 7th century Arabia policy?

What if I am desperate enough – my aging parents are depending on my getting that job – would I be better off converting to that “minority” religion? So what your policy is doing is in effect taxing me for being a non-Muslim in one sense, and in another sense, is giving an incentive for me to convert to Islam.

Dr Singh, I am sorry but I have to ask you this: why is the government of India in the business of promoting what you call a “minority” religion? I have a great deal of respect and regard for educated people. I expect educated people to be decent and thoughtful. People who have attended the best institutions of learning around the world, like you have, must be intelligent and decent. Unlike most other generally untutored politicians, you have a PhD in economics – a subject I know to be not for the intellectually challenged. So it pains me to see you stoop so low, even more than it pains me to see mullahs calling for the murder of innocents. At least the mullahs are blood-thirsty brainwashed ignoramuses and have not had a decent thought in their heads ever. What is your reason for this abject divorce from reason and fairness?

I am not done. I have attempted to show that your policy is morally repugnant. The next time it will be my unfortunate job to explain why the policy of “equal minority representation” is economically stupid.

I can just hear the derision in that question. That is what Shivam Vij was told by Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, which is the organization which is authorized to issue orders to ISPs. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) of the Government of India asked that certain domains be blocked (but does not reveal exactly which though it is clear that the list includes *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/* .)

Like the imperial rulers they are, they did not bother to explain why this attempt at censorship. I write “attempt” because on the internet, you really cannot censor anything. The net treats it like it were the failure of a link and routes traffic around the failed link, as anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the internet knows.

It is remarkable that even so late in the day the clueless retards that dictate policy have not figured out that India is a so-called democracy and that the first pre-requisite of giving people a vote is that they be competent and if they are competent enough to vote, then they should be competent enough to exercise their freedom of expression. The schizophrenic attitude — treating citizens as if they are incompetent idiots on the one hand, while handing them the “vote” — is inexplicable at first glance.

Then one realizes that it makes sense in the context of Indian democracy. The voters are uninformed and their uninformed vote is what keeps the retards in power. If the voters were to ever become informed, they would vote the retards (sorry for repeating that word, but it is the most appropriate) out of power.

What else can I say except that if your government decides what you are allowed to read and what you are allowed to say, then you might be a Third World country.

While opening a pack of Haldiram’s Bikaneri bhujia last evening, I noticed the packet proclaimed “Export Quality!” I suppose they meant “Best Quality” or “First Quality” because it could not have meant “Basically Inferior Stuff”. The label implied very clearly that this stuff was good enough to be exported. That implication arose from a shared assumption that is very disturbing if one thinks about it.

The shared assumption essentially was that the domestic market is not discriminating enough and can be sold sub-standard stuff; that export markets demand and deserve quality better than the domestic market. Was the assumption justified? If so, is the Indian consumer inherently incapable of recognizing quality? Or is the Indian consumer not “deserving” of quality? Or is it that the Indian consumer cannot afford quality? What are the reasons why the market delivers poor quality shoddy goods and services in India?

It is undeniable that the Indian market does deliver very poor quality goods and services in general. The explanation for that is really very simple: it is a sellers’ market. The essential characteristics of sellers’ market are that there is insufficient competition on the supply side, and the supply is severely constrained which leads to intense competition for goods on the demand side. The sellers don’t have to compete for customers, while the buyers have to compete for the goods.

Why the supply constraint? In some cases it is due to public sector monopoly, such as the railways (and until recently, telecommunications.) In some other cases, license restrictions on the private sector coupled with import restrictions. I recall a time when being able to get a two-wheeler was an achievement because the waiting time was of the order of a few years.

Monopolies, public and private, do not fear competition and behave exactly as the textbooks say: high prices, shoddy quality, and super-normal profits (economic rents.) Also, as any economics textbook analysis would demonstrate, deadweight social losses.

Somewhat similar outcomes obtain from putting license restrictions on private sector suppliers of anything from two-wheelers to cement. By limiting the number of firms allowed to operate within a certain sector, the policy makers essentially limit competition within the market. With limited competition in the market comes supra-normal profits (economic rents) and this rent can be captured by the policy makers. How? By handing out licenses to those firms which are willing to pay the most to service the market. Essentially, the competition for the market replaces competition in the market. Sometimes the licenses are auctioned off publicly (as in the case for telecom firms), and sometimes it is pure and simple corruption. It is well-known that Indian government officials and politicians in charge of various commodities such as cement, steel, etc., make hundreds of millions of dollars (which they stash away in Swiss banks) from handing out licenses. In either case, supply is limited, competition is curbed, prices are high, quality is poor, and leads to deadweight losses.

Add a few thousand billion rupees of deadweight loss here and a few thousand billion rupees of dwl there, and soon you will be talking real poverty. The combined effect of these losses aggregated over many years and you have the prescription for an emaciated impoverished economy. The Nehruvian socialistic system of controlling the economy to extract as much rent as possible is at the root of India’s eye-popping poverty.

When we say India is poor, we mean that the people of India are poor. The poor have little and therefore they ask for more, never mind the quality; the rich have a lot and demand better. The poor are willing to take what they can get their hands on to, by hook or by crook. The rich have the luxury of rejecting stuff that don’t meet their standards. You can get “Export Rejects” in shops in India and these are sold as better stuff than the stuff available for the domestic markets.

Export quality for a poor nation means it is better than the stuff that domestic consumers can get or even afford. Export quality for rich nations could mean something entirely different. The US, for instance, sometimes exports stuff that it considers below par (such as food and military equipment to third world countries). In some cases, it exports stuff that they are legally barred from consuming in the domestic market because of health and safety issues.

So back to the question of whether the Indian consumer “deserves” quality? Well everyone deserves good stuff as much as the next guy. But Indian consumers cannot afford quality because the quantity is restricted. Quantity limitation is a comparative characteristic, not an absolute characteristic. It is only in comparison to some quantity is it meaningful to talk of another quantity being limited. In the Indian context, the quantity restriction arise primarily in comparison between the quantity of goods and services produced to the quantity of people.

India has over a 1,000,000,000 people and every year about 20,000,000 are added remorselessly. Does not matter what you goods or services you produce, someone is there to take it, sub-standard or not because there are few alternatives. Beggars cannot be choosers and Nehruvian socialism has reduced the majority of us to beggary.

The relationship between quantity supplied and demanded, and quality is absolutely clear and rigid. High demand and relatively inelastic supply invariably results in poor quality in goods and services. This means for the domestic market to produce high quality, the supply has to increase, which implies increased competition. We have already seen it in various sectors, such as telecommunications, air travel, passenger cars, etc.

Coming back to Haldiram’s. In the snack and sweets market in India, it is a buyers’ market mostly. Haldiram’s competed in that market with higher quality. They brought in world-class packaging and marketing. This allowed Haldiram’s to expand its operations outside India as well.

The lesson is really very clear. For India to produce world class goods, firms in the domestic market have to be exposed to competition at home. Firms then grow up and learn how to produce quality. Then they can take on enter global markets. By limiting competition at home, the Nehruvian socialist policies crippled Indian industry and guaranteed dismal economic performance of about 2 to 3 percent annual GDP growth which we shall call the “Nehruvian Growth Rate.”

In my considered opinion, the worst effect of Nehruvian policies have been in the education sector. That is what I will turn my attention to the next time. Until then, enjoy the dismal quality if you are in India and raise a glass to the one responsible for it.

The IIT-Joint Entrance Exam may soon be easier to crack. The Union HRD [Human Resource Development] ministry feels the examination is too tough, causes immense stress to candidates, and needs to be toned down immediately.

The ministry has formed a committee … to modify the IIT-JEE pattern.

Clever, isn’t it? In related news, another ministry has expressed concern about the fact that hunger is a problem to some few hundred million people and something needs to be done immediately about it. So a committee is being formed which will revise the daily caloric requirement from the current approximately 2000 Kcals per day to about 1000 Kcals. This would reduce the number of hungry people by about 80 percent.

News of these developments did not go unnoticed among those in charge of Mumbai’s local trains. The local trains are severely overcrowded, with compartments designed to accommodate 50 commuters routinely carrying 300 during rush hours (which is pretty much most of the day.) So they are forming a committee of bureaucrats which will examine the proposal to re-label the compartments to say “To accommodate 100 passengers” instead of the current label which says “To accommodate 50 passengers”. This, it is felt, will reduce the overcrowding in Mumbai locals by increasing the carrying capacity of the locals.

The President Mr APJ Kalam, it should be recalled, had some time ago expressed his dissatisfaction with India being called a developing nation and had recommended that India should consider itself a developed economy.

I personally take heart from all this. I am not fabulously rich, but it is about time that I was. So I have formed a committee of my closest friends who are considering the proposal to declare me filthy rich. I hope they get their act together soon and make the declaration already because I want to be filthy rich now.

Just the other day I was taken to task for not high-lighting the successes of Indians and instead focusing on problems that we need to solve to be a real nation of some consequence. I was told to focus on the amazing achievements of Indians across the globe and told about the kid from UP who topped “international exam held by NASA for discovering top scientists”. I would have to get up pretty early in the morning to fully debunk the sheer idiocy of that bit. Do scientists exist in remote unexplored territories that they have to be “discovered” like some exotic new species by enterprising biologists and anthropologists? And why is it that Indians have a fixation with NASA that they have to invoke it whenever they want to impress upon the gullible that someone has any merit? Is it because they have a “rocket scientist” as the president? This is what I call the “Space Cadet Fixation”. Want to indicate that someone has arrived in the world of science and technology? OK, make that person a NASA scientist. Case in point: the movie Swades.

As it happened, someone finally did some homework and figured out that NASA has no record of having conducted any exam in which any UP boy has topped. But that was not soon enough for the gullible in high places. The President of the country met with the boy and his family. I don’t know what transpired in that meeting but I wonder if the matter of the President having ranked 7th in the same fictitious test some years ago ever came up. Perhaps in all the excitement of the moment, that inconvenient fact was lost.

Wait, there’s more. NDTV.com reports:

To help the boy with his studies, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav had announced an award of Rs five lakh. [This is roughly US$ 11,000]

The UP legislative council had also promised the boy a month’s basic salary of its 100 members. [I estimate that to be around US$ 20,000 for the whole lot.]

Feeding frenzy of the gullible with lots of egg on the face to show.

I have noticed a curious fact. The more outrageous the claim of scientific and technological breakthrough made by an Indian, the more shrill is the press in reporting it and more eagerly do the gullible lap it all up. Herbal petrol is one previous case in point. It was reported that some chap in India has made an astonishing invention/discovery which involved dipping some sticks in boiling water and magically the water would turn into petroleum. Absolutely incredible, but to the so-called scientists and engineers of some institutions, it was totally credible.

Why do we do this? Why do we fall so easily for these scams repeatedly? What sort of basic insecurity drives this will to believe in stories that make one feel good but are patently untrue from the get go? Why this need for magical thinking?

When I am insecure or depressed, or am not feeling too well, I am prone to wishful magical thinking. Is collective wishful magical thinking a symptom of collective insecurity and sense of inferiority?

Perhaps there are people who have amazing powers of recollection and recall, Perhaps there are people who can memorize random sets of 8-digit phone numbers which they can recall in moments of stress and urgency. I am not one of them. I can at most keep one phone number in my head to be used in the rare occassion that I need urgent help. I would not be surprised, if confronted with an urgent need for help, I dial “911″. That is the number you can call from anywhere in the US if you need help. It is standardized, easy to remember, even a five-year old child can be expected to know that number.

Why, oh, why can’t we think? It does not require a rocket-scientist to figure out that there should be one small easily recallable emergency number. You dial that number irrespective of what sort of emergency you have. Then when you get connected, you say “Fire” or “Oxygen” or whatever is your need. The operator then appropriately directs your call.

OK, granted it may require some brains to think of that simple arrangement. But in this case it is not a closely guarded secret. Many parts of the world have that system. Could we not just imitate them? Could someone in Mumbai not realize that perhaps we could copy their system? We do ape them in every crappy thing, don’t we?

They have Hollywood; we must have Bollywood. We are not smart enough to come up with our own name. They have Burger King. We have Jumbo King (sells vada-pao.) They have idiotic synchronized hip-gyrating dancing in their trashy music videos, we have idiotic synchronized hip-gyrating dancing in our movies coming out the wazoo. Aping the US seems to be de rigeur in Mumbai, and the rest of India. They go so far as to watch the same crappy American sitcoms and worst of all, they even watch the insane American wrestling shows.

Aping the Americans, unfortunately, appears to be epitomize the “modern” Indian. Not surprising at all. What is mystefying is that among all this aping, there is not one bit that is aped that is good. I would probably have a heart attack if I ever saw Indians adopt a good idea, however small, from the US. Take for example, the way Indians write phone numbers. Here is a phone number written the Indian way: 7460137498. No spaces, no breaks. Just thenumbersallsquished. Will we ape the Americans (746-137-7498) or the French (74.60.13.74.98)? Not on your life.

The US has “911″ as the number for emergencies and “411″ for directory assistance. We could have a similar standardized system. We didn’t invent the idea of standardization of important numbers, but would it be so terrible if we copied that idea? The first degree of stupidity is not having the brains to come up with a good idea. The second degree of stupidity is not adopting a good idea when it comes up and bites you in the behind.

If you just ape the trashy bits of rich countries and never ever copy the good ideas, you might be a third world country.

Another thing that bugs me no end is the differential pricing scheme that they have for entry into tourist places in India. For instance, at the Golconda Fort, an Indian is charged Rs 5 (about $0.10) as entry fee but for foreigners it is Rs 100 (about $2.) It makes you wonder. Are the people who make up these schemes stupid or are they xenophobic or are they racist or all of the above? Surely, ripping foreigners off cannot amount to welcoming them.

Besides, how do they enforce this sort of blatant discrimination? Technically I am a foreigner because I don’t have an Indian passport anymore. So unless they ask people to produce passports, the only way for them to suspect that one is a foreigner is by the color of their skin. Basically it boils down to this: if you don’t look Indian, you are required to pony up 20 times what an Indian-looking person would pay to have the same privilege.

It is morally repugnant to discriminate against people, even if the discrimination is against those who are presumed rich. Not just that, it is commercially short-sighted because people notice this sort of blatant double-standards and it affects the overall tourist traffic into the country.

If you think that ripping off tourists by charging them very steep entry fees for visiting your ruins is a cool idea, you might be a third-world country.

Comment:

Followup Feb 2006: They have decided to change the policy. See part 2 of this post.

Venkat Ramanan writes:

Well said! The differential pricing by itself reflects the parochial mentality of Human Beings born in India. India is truly a Third World country if Tourism Minister boasts of burgeoning domestic travellers. In an interview which appeared in the BBC Televisions, Tourism Minister said “Last year there were 309 million domestic travellers in India which was much higher when compared to many other developed countries”.

If you think that an unemployed youth who travels from one rural area to Mumbai or Chennai in search of work as a domestic traveller, or a family who moves from one place to another to attend the funeral of a family relative or a friend as domestic travellers, you are truly a Third rate, or for that matter nth rate country. Sick Babus, Sick Bureaucrats! Keep writing… Atleast let us be reminded of the fact that we have a lots to improve!

Walker Duhon writes:

Speaking as a two-time white tourist to India, I don’t mind getting ripped off, though I understand your point in principle. When I have gone to India I also usually follow American tipping conventions as well. The dollar just goes so far, it really doesn’t matter to me as much. India is just such a tremendous bargain.

Charging different rates to foreigners for landmarks seems pretty standard as well — I saw it in Sri Lanka too (by the way Sri Lanka is surprisingly pricy compared to India). It makes sense to me — if you are willing to pay $1000 for the ticket you should be willing to hand over $2 to see Golconda Fort.

As it turned out, a few thousand other people also decided to take the detour and we ended up stuck at an intersection which was gridlocked. Trucks, cars, two-wheelers, buses, people, auto-rickshaws, people — everyone — was at an almost standstill because at that 4-way intersection, vehicles had moved in and there was no way for anyone to move an inch in any direction. After a while I lost my patience and got out of the car and walked to the intersection. Along with a few other people, I ended up spending about an hour trying to sort out the mess. It was hot, dirty, exhausting, exhaust pollution-laden work. How I wished that Indians had figured out the utility of STOP signs.

I have traveled a bit around the world and one thing you find in pretty much most of the world are those octagonal red stop signs. They are passive devices that regulate traffic. They are not high-tech. They don’t require electricity to operate nor high-technology to manufacture. I have seen them in lots of places. Except in India. India does not have STOP signs.

Consider this. Indians do use cars — from cheapo 800-cc tinpots to huge SUVs to Mercedes Benzes. But Indian roads don’t have STOP signs. It is a mystery till one realizes that STOP signs are not private goods while cars are. Because of missing public goods — and stop signs are just one of the many missing public goods — private goods are less usable in India. It is worth exploring the welfare loss arising from the lack of public goods in an economy. For now, let’s estimate the cost which could have been avoided if they had a bunch of stop signs at that intersection and if the users had had the sense to keep the intersection clear.

I estimate that a thousand vehicles and four thousand people idled for about 2 hours. About a thousand litres of fuel and eight thousand man-hours were lost. Valuing a man-hour at $2 and a liter of fuel at $1 and adding something for the increased pollution, around $20,000 were lost. Ours was not the only traffic jam in the country that day. All across India, thousands of avoidable traffic jams occur every day. Many of them could be avoided if there were stop signs and if people figured out what they meant and behaved accordingly. Assuming that on average an Indian on the road spends an extra hour stuck in traffic, here are the numbers. Number on the road each day: 50 million (5 percent of population.) Total man-hours lost: 50 million. Using a conservative $1 as the value of a man-hour, estimated cost of traffic jams is $50 million per day. Between $15 and $20 billion is the loss over the year.

Twenty billion here, twenty billion there, and soon you will be talking real money. There have to be hundreds of other small leakages in the huge economic system that is India, each bleeding the economy in apparently trivial ways. And when they are all added up, we find that India is an astonishingly poor immensely populated third world country. Which makes me conclude that

If you don’t have STOP signs on your roads that have millions of vehicles on them, you might be a third world country.

Dawood Ibrahim has the distinction of being labeled by the US as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT)”. The ISI is the Pakistani intelligence agency which some argue is the primier agency involved in global terrorism. ISI was the midwife involved in the birth of the Taleban, is involved in Al Qaida, nuclear proliferation, attacks in various places in India — particularly the north east states of India such as Assam (via the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh). The ISI has been implicated in scores of terrorist attacks all over India including Mumbai.

Anyway, the FPJ report says:

According to intelligence inputs and statements of some underworld members arrested in the country [India] recently, his masters in Karachi have asked Dawood to set his house in order and step up violent attacks in India.

This is not an isolated report. Pakistan is well-known around the world as a terrorist haven. Every major act of terrorism, including the two attacks on the World Trade Center in NY (don’t forget that the Sept 11th attack was the second attack), has links to ISI and Pakistan. Pakistan is the intermediary which funnels Saudi Arabian money into global terrorism. Unfortunately, India is the favorite target for the terrorists from Pakistan.

For the Pakistani terrorists, India has a bunch of very favorable features. First, it is right next door. Second, India does not respond when it suffers terrorism: it merely complains and bitches, and moans. So the terrorists use India as a beta-test site, a sort of a dry run for the main event. Hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu was the dry run for the hijacking of the airliners for the Sept 11th attack, for instance.

Experts in global terrorism are unanimous in their conclusion that Pakistan not only is the home of terrorism but that the state actually funds and encourages terrorism. India, better than most other nations, is the target of Pakistani funded terrorism. So what does India do? Here is what India does.

India runs buses and trains (the train service is called ’samjhauta’ which means ‘understanding) to Pakistan, plays cricket with Pakistan, and behaves as if Pakistan is a good neighbor. Then — and that is what mystifies me the most and the point behind this post — India whines and bitches in international forums and pleads with the United States of America to declare Pakistan a “terrorist state”. Let me repeat that: India does not declare Pakistan a terrorist state; it expects the US to declare it a terrorist state!

If you continue to hob-nob with the state that is hell-bent on your destruction, and you beg a different state that would not give a rat’s ass about the terrorism you suffer, to please declare the state as a terrorist nation, but you yourself do not declare it a terrorist state, you might be a third world country.

There you have it. As you are well aware, children indulge in corruption like nobody’s business in India. Scams perpetrated by the scores hit the newspapers with sickening regularity. One day you hear that a bunch of children have accepted kickbacks to the tune of hundreds of mllions of dollars in military equipment purchase. Next day you read about a couple of children who were involved in siphoning a few hundred million dollars’ worth of public monies meant for ‘fodder’. Then you read that some children were caught running a fake stamp-paper racket and the loss to the public purse was of the order of a few billion dollars.

I tell you, the corruption that children are responsible for is a crying shame. It is a matter of great urgency that they stop it immediately and the best way to do so is to force them to take an oath that they will cease and desist from ever indulging in corruption. I am very relieved that this terrible problem has been addressed at last.

Which brings me to conclude that if you figure lecturing innocent children solves the problem of institutionalized corruption by the bureaucracy and practically every politician of every party, then you might be a third world country.

Reading some of the more outlandish claims about how India is an IT superpower is a surreal experience. The chest-thumping, right from the highest offices in India to the lowliest journalistic office, is a sight to behold and marvel at. Don’t know why they have to do it. Perhaps they are plain ignorant or perhaps they feel that if they repeat a lie often enough, it will become true in the real world. Their naivete is touching and pathetic.

If you put on airs about being an information and knowledge superpower when about 351,587,482 (more than the combined populations of US and Canada) of your citizens are illiterate, you might be a third world country.

On reviewing the archives, I note a glaring omission. The blog needs some humor. Sure the topic is extremely serious. But one can definitely make a serious point with humor. So I want to add a bit of humor occassionally.

One of my favorite standup comics is Jeff Foxworthy of the “you might be a redneck” fame. You will find some examples of Jeff’s humor here. If you don’t know what a redneck is, you will have fun finding out. Here is a redneck writing to his son. Or check out some redneck photos. You will conclude being a redneck is as much a state of mind as anything physical.

Jeff is a redneck and is therefore qualified to poke fun at rednecks. Perhaps by poking fun at his own kind he is innoculating himself and also attempting to understand himself.

With a nod in his direction, I would like to start a series which I would call You might be a third-world country if …. I am from India, a third-world country. I attempt to innoculate myself against the complacency that is popularly expressed in slogans like mera bharat mahan and India is Shining.

If you get excited about how many times GW Bush called you “sir” within a minute and consider it newsworthy, you might be a third-world country.