I have never understood why and how people loved to eat Marmite. This despite the fact that my wife, daughter and son all adore it. I am more in line with John Kelley of the Washington Post who writes about " Marmite, an English condiment that is perhaps the foulest compound legally sold for human consumption".
Kelley goes on to describe Marmite, a foodstuff that, like warm beer and rainy summers, informs the English national identity. "Imagine" he continues, " putting hundreds of anchovies in a blender, adding salt and axle grease, pureeing, pouring the contents on an asphalt roofing shingle, baking under a hot sun for several weeks, then scraping off a black, gooey precipitate and eating it. That is Marmite. "
Maggie Hall has even written a book about it titled "The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite: An Anecdotal A-Z of 'Tar-in-a-Jar.' " Under "vitamins," you learn that Marmite is packed with thiamine, riboflavin, niacin and folic acid; under "fishing," that some anglers think it attracts catfish and carp; under "museum," that a Missouri man has a shrine to Marmite in his basement, and under "outer space," that Yorkshire-born NASA astronaut Nicholas Patrick brought Marmite with him as his "comfort food" on a 2006 space shuttle mission. (It would also have been handy for patching damaged thermal tiles.)
"The traditional way to consume Marmite", according to Kelley, " is to butter a piece of toast and then spread a thin layer of the dark goo on it. A very thin layer. One-micron thick, ideally. That's what I tried to do anyway. My toast carefully Marmited, I took a bite and immediately felt as if I'd been hit in the face by an ocean wave, a wave befouled by oil from a sinking tanker, oil that had caused a die-off of marine birds and invertebrates, creatures whose decomposing bodies were adding to the general funkiness of the wave that had found its way inside my mouth. "
And to my general befuddlement, my entire family loves it!
anil
Monday, November 30, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Reflections on the terror in Mumbai
It was exactly an year ago that my wife, Ena and I were trapped in Oberoi's Trident hotel while the terrorists rampaged outside killing almost 200 people. I had written of our experience here and here and also reproduced an outsiders chilling account here. Over the past year as the import of these events has sunk in and as I reflect on our few days under the terrorists gun for those days in Mumbai, some thoughts rise to the surface.
Leadership or lack of it. During our entire ordeal, one thing was amply clear- there was no leadership at all not at the political, not at the civil service and not at the law enforcement agencies. None. Yes, there were a few individual acts of local leadership but on the whole the entire episode smacked of a polity that was cowering and cowed without anyone rising to the challenge of confronting the terrorists. It is true that the home minister, the chief minister of the state and the inspector general of police were finally sacked after these events but it was really a case of too little too late.
Lack of media restraint. The competitive instincts of the press very early on overcame any good sense in their coverage. Some of the press even marveled that they were allowed to come so close to the events or to film the most delicate of rescue operations. But that did not prevent them from airing operations that they had to know were not going to be helpful to the hostages held inside. Love of a scoop overwhelmed all scruples. One can only say that expecting the media to exercise restraint is akin to expecting a drug addict to kick his habit and go into rehab.
The unfairness of the coverage. We always knew that life was unfair. But it was glaringly obvious in the press and TV coverage of the events. It seems that the two deaths in Nariman House rated more importance than the 80 deaths in the ritzy hotels and, of course, the 100 odd poor that died in the CST were a media after thought. The rescue of a baby did get coverage but the very many acts of valour at the CST were glossed over or at best rated minor coverage even in the local press. The international press were expected to focus their attention on the foreigners in our midst, that was to be expected, but why did the Indian press follow so blindly ?
Transience of public outrage. The terrorists had struck at the elite in Mumbai and so the outrage was deep and expected. There were candle light vigils the next day and much hand wringing about the laxity of the politicians. Yet a few months later, when the time came to vote, it seems many of the candle light vigilantes were missing in action. It is the transience of public outrage that keeps the corrupt and ineffective in power. Gestures are important but reality requires real commitment.
The terrorists striking in Mumbai finally stirred public opinion to confront the dangers of fundamentalism.. .. in Pakistan. In the early days, the press and the public in Pakistan dismissed these terrorist attacks as being orchestrated by the Indian RAW ( the Indian CIA) but as the Taliban started their attacks at home, the mood changed. Somewhere in the month of March this year, I started noticing editorials in Pakistani newspapers recognizing that the Taliban were their problem and that it was no longer possible to blame India for all their troubles. This trend has continued and with the Taliban attacks in Punjab, the home of much of the Pakistan's army, the tide may well have turned in the fight against indigenous fundamentalism in Pakistan.
There are however two major issues that fuel this terrorism that remain untackled - money and the new recruits to the cause of the Taliban. The attempts to follow the money in the funding of the Taliban have been few and fitful. Most observers cite the difficulty of intercepting hawala transactions or funds routed through Islamic charities. Others point to the fundamental difficulty in curtailing opium production and transport from Afghanistan which provide the wherewithal for the Taliban to continue its fight. It is also clear that without tackling this problem, it would be almost impossible to stem the flow of funds that essentially is the staple of the terrorism. In all of these discussions it is fascinating to find that the entire effort is directed at controlling the supply of opium and none to controlling its demand. Capitalism states that supply will always rise to meet the demand for goods and services. I have yet to see a cogent detailed analysis of the market demand for opium/heroin. Is it because the major demand is in Europe and the US? The sad fact is that without controlling demand, it will almost be impossible to curb production and supply. Ideas to tackle this opium trade have ranged from the US buying the entire opium crop from the farmers directly every year for a few years and burning it, as they did in Turkey, to deliberately spiking the opium crop, or at least a part of it, with cyanide and letting it be widely known to the consuming market. One would imagine that the demand for Afghanistan poppy would rapidly evaporate ( or course it might increase the price of Columbian heroin- but that is another issue).
While there are at least some ideas floating around for curtailing this opium trade, the other major issue of curbing the fresh recruits to the Taliban cause has had fewer initiatives. The fact is that there are over 10,000 madrassas in Pakistan that still continue to turn out half educated semi literate fanatics and no significant attempt is being made to stem this flow of cannon fodder for the terrorists. These madrassas are not being closed or monitored, the teachers are not being replaced and the funds continue to flow into their coffers from Saudi Arabia and other muslim countries encouraging the mullahs and maulvis to concentrate on teaching their own version of Koran and seeding them with terrorist principles. In the final analysis, it is only when Pakistan shows that it is able to shut down these cannon producing madrassas that we will know that it is serious about fighting terrorism and that it realizes that the cancer lies within their polity and not without.
Leadership or lack of it. During our entire ordeal, one thing was amply clear- there was no leadership at all not at the political, not at the civil service and not at the law enforcement agencies. None. Yes, there were a few individual acts of local leadership but on the whole the entire episode smacked of a polity that was cowering and cowed without anyone rising to the challenge of confronting the terrorists. It is true that the home minister, the chief minister of the state and the inspector general of police were finally sacked after these events but it was really a case of too little too late.
Lack of media restraint. The competitive instincts of the press very early on overcame any good sense in their coverage. Some of the press even marveled that they were allowed to come so close to the events or to film the most delicate of rescue operations. But that did not prevent them from airing operations that they had to know were not going to be helpful to the hostages held inside. Love of a scoop overwhelmed all scruples. One can only say that expecting the media to exercise restraint is akin to expecting a drug addict to kick his habit and go into rehab.
The unfairness of the coverage. We always knew that life was unfair. But it was glaringly obvious in the press and TV coverage of the events. It seems that the two deaths in Nariman House rated more importance than the 80 deaths in the ritzy hotels and, of course, the 100 odd poor that died in the CST were a media after thought. The rescue of a baby did get coverage but the very many acts of valour at the CST were glossed over or at best rated minor coverage even in the local press. The international press were expected to focus their attention on the foreigners in our midst, that was to be expected, but why did the Indian press follow so blindly ?
Transience of public outrage. The terrorists had struck at the elite in Mumbai and so the outrage was deep and expected. There were candle light vigils the next day and much hand wringing about the laxity of the politicians. Yet a few months later, when the time came to vote, it seems many of the candle light vigilantes were missing in action. It is the transience of public outrage that keeps the corrupt and ineffective in power. Gestures are important but reality requires real commitment.
The terrorists striking in Mumbai finally stirred public opinion to confront the dangers of fundamentalism.. .. in Pakistan. In the early days, the press and the public in Pakistan dismissed these terrorist attacks as being orchestrated by the Indian RAW ( the Indian CIA) but as the Taliban started their attacks at home, the mood changed. Somewhere in the month of March this year, I started noticing editorials in Pakistani newspapers recognizing that the Taliban were their problem and that it was no longer possible to blame India for all their troubles. This trend has continued and with the Taliban attacks in Punjab, the home of much of the Pakistan's army, the tide may well have turned in the fight against indigenous fundamentalism in Pakistan.
There are however two major issues that fuel this terrorism that remain untackled - money and the new recruits to the cause of the Taliban. The attempts to follow the money in the funding of the Taliban have been few and fitful. Most observers cite the difficulty of intercepting hawala transactions or funds routed through Islamic charities. Others point to the fundamental difficulty in curtailing opium production and transport from Afghanistan which provide the wherewithal for the Taliban to continue its fight. It is also clear that without tackling this problem, it would be almost impossible to stem the flow of funds that essentially is the staple of the terrorism. In all of these discussions it is fascinating to find that the entire effort is directed at controlling the supply of opium and none to controlling its demand. Capitalism states that supply will always rise to meet the demand for goods and services. I have yet to see a cogent detailed analysis of the market demand for opium/heroin. Is it because the major demand is in Europe and the US? The sad fact is that without controlling demand, it will almost be impossible to curb production and supply. Ideas to tackle this opium trade have ranged from the US buying the entire opium crop from the farmers directly every year for a few years and burning it, as they did in Turkey, to deliberately spiking the opium crop, or at least a part of it, with cyanide and letting it be widely known to the consuming market. One would imagine that the demand for Afghanistan poppy would rapidly evaporate ( or course it might increase the price of Columbian heroin- but that is another issue).
While there are at least some ideas floating around for curtailing this opium trade, the other major issue of curbing the fresh recruits to the Taliban cause has had fewer initiatives. The fact is that there are over 10,000 madrassas in Pakistan that still continue to turn out half educated semi literate fanatics and no significant attempt is being made to stem this flow of cannon fodder for the terrorists. These madrassas are not being closed or monitored, the teachers are not being replaced and the funds continue to flow into their coffers from Saudi Arabia and other muslim countries encouraging the mullahs and maulvis to concentrate on teaching their own version of Koran and seeding them with terrorist principles. In the final analysis, it is only when Pakistan shows that it is able to shut down these cannon producing madrassas that we will know that it is serious about fighting terrorism and that it realizes that the cancer lies within their polity and not without.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Two Indian stories
Two great stories about India and Indians.
The first one describes the innovative approach of Dr Shetty in reducing the costs of open heart surgery and his plans to take his hospital to the Cayman islands so that Americans can fly over and get a surgery at one tenth the cost in the US. Mother Teresa's cardiac surgeon, Dr. Devi Shetty, keeps a photo of her on his desk that says "Hands that serve are more sacred than lips that pray." Shetty has kept that in mind, offering heart surgeries to those who couldn't afford them, but he's doing it with a business model that would make Henry Ford proud. The doctor has transformed Indian health care by opening huge hospitals (1,000 beds, compared to 160 on average in the U.S.) that offer procedures at sharply reduced prices. At his flagship hospital, an open-heart surgery costs about $2,000, while in the U.S., the surgery would cost between $20,000 and $100,000. And counterintuitively, the quality of care has increased, in part because doctors get more practice and specialize in just one or two types of surgery. Shetty plans to open four more "health cities" around India, and one in the Cayman Islands. More than 6 million Americans are expected to go overseas for affordable health care next year. And Dr Shetty plans to provide them an opportunity to do it at much lower costs than in the US.
The second story is about how Indian companies are now reaching world standards in terms of developing leaders. Fortune magazine selects the most successful businesses that know how to develop talent. Among the list of the ten best companies that develop leaders are such names as IBM, Proctor and Gamble, McKinsey, GE, McDonalds etc but they also include two Indian companies. The first one
ICICI BankHeadquarters: MumbaiRevenue: $7.4 billion*Employees: 36,335CEO: Chanda Kochhar
ICICI doesn't just have recruiters trolling for talent outside of the company; it also has 600 employees who act as talent scouts internally, identifying coworkers with leadership potential.
These internal recruiters tap 5,000 candidates a year, and a panel reviews a profile of each prospective leader and assigns a grade. Top -- or "A" and "B" -- employees complete a four-day residential training program with a set of structured exercises, guest speakers that include the CEO, and screenings of films such as "12 Angry Men." And throughout the year, the company brings in influential leaders such as management guru Ram Charan to share their expertise with the chosen employees. Another bonus: These trainees are the only employees who get company stock options.
The second one is Hindustan UnileverHeadquarters: MumbaiRevenue: $4.4 billion**Employees: 15,000CEO: Nitin Paranjpe
This consumer goods company likes to think of itself as a talent factory. And with more than 1,000 alumni sitting on boards globally, it can certainly make a strong case for that. The company uses what it calls a "70-20-10" model for developing its workforce: 70% of learning happens on the job, 20% through mentoring, and 10% through training and coursework. That's why employees go through a job rotation roughly every three years, bosses are measured on how well they coach their direct reports, and all employees take about a week's worth of leadership training and four e-learning courses every year. The company says that senior management spends 30% to 40% of its time grooming leaders.
The first one describes the innovative approach of Dr Shetty in reducing the costs of open heart surgery and his plans to take his hospital to the Cayman islands so that Americans can fly over and get a surgery at one tenth the cost in the US. Mother Teresa's cardiac surgeon, Dr. Devi Shetty, keeps a photo of her on his desk that says "Hands that serve are more sacred than lips that pray." Shetty has kept that in mind, offering heart surgeries to those who couldn't afford them, but he's doing it with a business model that would make Henry Ford proud. The doctor has transformed Indian health care by opening huge hospitals (1,000 beds, compared to 160 on average in the U.S.) that offer procedures at sharply reduced prices. At his flagship hospital, an open-heart surgery costs about $2,000, while in the U.S., the surgery would cost between $20,000 and $100,000. And counterintuitively, the quality of care has increased, in part because doctors get more practice and specialize in just one or two types of surgery. Shetty plans to open four more "health cities" around India, and one in the Cayman Islands. More than 6 million Americans are expected to go overseas for affordable health care next year. And Dr Shetty plans to provide them an opportunity to do it at much lower costs than in the US.
The second story is about how Indian companies are now reaching world standards in terms of developing leaders. Fortune magazine selects the most successful businesses that know how to develop talent. Among the list of the ten best companies that develop leaders are such names as IBM, Proctor and Gamble, McKinsey, GE, McDonalds etc but they also include two Indian companies. The first one
ICICI BankHeadquarters: MumbaiRevenue: $7.4 billion*Employees: 36,335CEO: Chanda Kochhar
ICICI doesn't just have recruiters trolling for talent outside of the company; it also has 600 employees who act as talent scouts internally, identifying coworkers with leadership potential.
These internal recruiters tap 5,000 candidates a year, and a panel reviews a profile of each prospective leader and assigns a grade. Top -- or "A" and "B" -- employees complete a four-day residential training program with a set of structured exercises, guest speakers that include the CEO, and screenings of films such as "12 Angry Men." And throughout the year, the company brings in influential leaders such as management guru Ram Charan to share their expertise with the chosen employees. Another bonus: These trainees are the only employees who get company stock options.
The second one is Hindustan UnileverHeadquarters: MumbaiRevenue: $4.4 billion**Employees: 15,000CEO: Nitin Paranjpe
This consumer goods company likes to think of itself as a talent factory. And with more than 1,000 alumni sitting on boards globally, it can certainly make a strong case for that. The company uses what it calls a "70-20-10" model for developing its workforce: 70% of learning happens on the job, 20% through mentoring, and 10% through training and coursework. That's why employees go through a job rotation roughly every three years, bosses are measured on how well they coach their direct reports, and all employees take about a week's worth of leadership training and four e-learning courses every year. The company says that senior management spends 30% to 40% of its time grooming leaders.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Expanding the sixth sense
In an earlier posting, I had mentioned the brilliance of a young Indian- Pranav Mistry- who while at MIT produced one of the most original innovation that one has seen in a long time.
Here Pranav is speaking at the TED conference in India and expands on what he intends to do with his amazing innovation of merging the physical with the digital world. He intends to publish his software to be open source and points out that the hardware is readily available at a cost of about $ 300.
Here Pranav is speaking at the TED conference in India and expands on what he intends to do with his amazing innovation of merging the physical with the digital world. He intends to publish his software to be open source and points out that the hardware is readily available at a cost of about $ 300.
Converting Jihadis
A generation of British Islamists have been trained in Afghanistan to fight a global jihad. But now some of those would-be extremists have had a change of heart.
Here is an interesting piece which explores this nether world.
Here is an interesting piece which explores this nether world.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Power to the people
Bob Zoellick, the President of the World Bank spoke recently of his experiences in visiting rural electrification in Vietnam "I went out to one of the rural electrification sites (in Vietnam) by helicopter quite far in the mountains, and I just came away with the impression of the criticality of electricity to really give a chance for development. As I recall, in Vietnam, about 98 percent of the public now has access to electricity, and this rural electrification program which we helped develop and implement was a life-changer for people. Particularly, when I saw the women in the rural communities, you can see what a huge difference it makes in terms of the ability to have a water pump so they don’t have to spend hours going to get fresh water. The ability to grind some of their grain, to have electricity so that they and the kids can read at night. They have some TV programs so they openly have access to the outside world."
My thoughts went back to 1998 when we started designing this program in Vietnam.I describe how the program was conceived and developed in my book: "A Passion to build" in some detail but here is an edited excerpt...
“ Rural electrification of Vietnam was not part of my plan when I started working in that country. It was one of those chance issues that creep into one’s life unbeknown and unsought, but soon take over one’s total life’s concentration. So it was with projects that would provide power to the rural people of Vietnam. Little did I realize when I accepted the challenge that it would turn out to be one of the most satisfying aspects of my stay in Vietnam. And it had all come by happenstance.
A new World Bank country director, Andrew Steer, young and ambitious, had just taken over in 1997 and he .. asked me if I would design and implement a rural electrification project. .. I was determined to learn all I could about rural electrification, and I delved enthusiastically into all old Bank studies and projects.
I .. was determined that before we designed the project in Vietnam, our team would visit the villages firsthand to learn from them. That year, we laid out an aggressive program of field visits – every week we would visit a different commune in a different province. During the next year, we visited 30 provinces and over 100 communes, talking to rural households and commune leaders as well as the provincial leadership. We wanted to know what they were willing to pay, what they would use the electricity for, how they wanted the cooperative to be managed etc. These visits became the highlight of my stay in Vietnam. I visited areas that most expatriates had not even heard of and began to learn of the real Vietnam in the rural areas.
These visits became a voyage of discovery. Each commune we traveled to had a different story to tell and a different lesson to teach us. But as we visited these communes – from Vietnam’s northern borders to the southern mangrove swamps, from the fishing communities in the east to the poorest Hmong communes in the central highlands- one thing remained common. The commune office where we were received was almost always a brick room, with either a bust of Ho Chi Minh or a large painting of him. There would be a few cupboards in the room with a few circulars and books. Some of the wealthier communes also had a TV set that was used for the village meetings in the evenings. The secretary of the commune Peoples Committee invariably accompanied the head of the commune, who always came armed with a children’s exercise book in which he noted down all our questions and from which he produced the data regarding his commune.
During these visits, we were to meet some of the most interesting people in the country – a vivacious chairwoman of a PPC in the north who told me that she had shut down all the beer parlors in the cities of her province as one of her first acts to make sure that all men went home after work; another PPC chairman who wanted to make sure that all the communes in his province were electrified and that his own birthplace commune would be the last to be given power; the leader of the women’s artillery corps in the American War who had returned to fishing and whose commune the country had forgotten almost for two decades. There was also an English teacher who had never before met a foreigner and had never heard English spoken before we met him; the chief of a village who would talk only after we had shared rice wine with him from the communal gourd; Joseph, the priest who had been confined to his parish for two years but was not permitted to talk to his parishioners. And then there was the Thai general secretary of Dien Bien Phu province who cheerfully told us that he had five children and was exempt from the national laws on two children because he was from a minority community group, and who then wanted to honor me with a rice bottle laced with the bile of a live bear; the young man in Pac Bo who was so smitten with my wife, who often accompanied me in these sojourns, that he kept wanting to beat me in table tennis while Ena looked on. And also the consternation of Ranjit Lamech from the World Bank, who wanted to set up a dual accounting system in the villages only to find that there was not even a bank in close vicinity and that all finances were kept in a steel trunk in the schoolhouse!
In the north, we went up to the Chinese border and visited the secret hideout of Ho Chi Minh in Pac Bo. In the west, we went onto the Laotian border where the villages were reputed to be the centre of drug running from Myanmar and Thailand. In the central highlands, we visited some of the poorest villages among the Hmong and sipped wine from their communal gourds. It was to be learning experience the likes of which I had never had. While we were planning and designing the rural energy project, we were also learning real lessons from our travels. All these formed a kaleidoscope of our journeys, but they all added up to a picture of a country restless and on the move and wanting to do things
The conventional wisdom on extending electricity access to the rural areas, particularly the poorer ones, was that the biggest constraint was the high connection charges levied by the power companies. The Bank’s “best practices” paper recommends that for increasing rural access, some method needed to be found to reduce the initial connection charges for poorer customers, or there needed to be some availability of credit to spread these costs over some years. In a number of communes that we visited in Vietnam, the situation was somewhat different. .. When asked why more households were not connecting to the existing grid, the answer was a little surprising. The villagers said that they had difficulty in paying the monthly bills with an annual income of only 2 million VND. When asked whether the high connection charges of 0.5 million VND was a major barrier, their reply was that they could afford to pay the initial connection charges. When asked for clarification, the answer came. “Oh! We can pay for the initial connection charge easily by selling a piglet. It is the monthly dues that are a problem! You city people,” he added, “don’t realize that we don’t get monthly wages in the field, but have money in our pockets only when the harvest comes in.”
The prompt collection of power bills from customers in the rural areas has always proven to be a major issue in rural electrification projects around the world. Thus, the ones that were able to successfully tackle these issues elicited particular interest. There were two cases where the managers of the rural cooperatives had solved this problem, each in his own unique way.
The Dai Hai Private Agency was an organization for rural electrification in the southern province of Soc Trang established in 1992 by Mr. Nguyen Duc Thanh, a former teacher…. One of the reasons for its success had been its ability to collect payments for all the electricity sold from all of its customers. When I enquired what the average collection ratio was, Mr. Than told me that in the initial stages, a number of customers delayed paying their bills citing their financial difficulties, but now the collections were a hundred percent. When asked how this was achieved, he said the solution was quite simple - he requested the village priest to read out the names of the defaulters after each monthly mass in the church!
Another prevalent view in the Bank was that most villagers were too poor to pay the high power tariffs that generally needed to be levied to even recover basic operational costs. A similar issue had also been raised in the poorer villages of the Philippines. Father Silva had recounted that during his visits to these villages; he would summon the family and ask them if they wanted electricity. And the answer inevitably was yes, but that they could not afford to pay the monthly dues of about 100- 150 pesos. Whereupon he would ask the head of the household how many beers he drank in a week. The answer would come, “Oh Father! I drink only one can a day.” And each can of beer cost? About 10 pesos. “OK,” Father Silva would reply, “only drink every alternate day and put that money in an empty can every week. By the end of the month, you will have enough money for electricity for your family!”
The one problem that has dogged all efforts at rural electrification has been how to use it for productive uses. Once power came to the village and the households turned to TV programs for education and entertainment, they realized that perhaps there were other uses possible, which could bring in additional income. The productive use of electricity in the rural areas has always been hard to document. So the results of electrification of a rural area in Central Vietnam that led to a major economic improvement provided an interesting example.
Duy Son 2 in Quang Nam province had a cooperative, but had no electricity despite its proximity to the Chop Xoi Mountains and various water streams. .. As a result of his efforts, Mr. Luu Ban, the former head of the cooperative and the man who had dreamed of harnessing the waters for electricity, was awarded the title of “Labor Hero” by the government.
Over the next year, Hung, my operations officer, and I traveled the width and breadth of the country visiting different provinces and talking to commune leadership about what they wanted.
In our visits to the rural areas, a few staff from the national power utility, EVN, often accompanied us. In the early days, most of EVN staff treated these visits with disdain. Rural electrification was a loss maker in the national utility and the more ambitious staff were all busy building new power plants. But then in 1999, things changed. There was a minor rebellion in a commune in northern Vietnam where the villagers had rounded on the communist party officials for their corruption and rent seeking. Word of this slowly leaked to the outside world. The Party officials in Hanoi were grim faced to find that the rebellion had occurred in exactly the same villages where their own revolution had started some decades back. The grievances were the same: rural areas were neglected, promises made were not kept after the elections and ruthless and corrupt officials from the provinces looted the poor. The Party was sufficiently shook up by this development to order a swift reordering of priorities: the rural areas were to be given priority and their demand for electricity, water and medical facilities were to be met on a time bound plan.
The senior management of both EVN and the Ministry of Industry were delighted to inform the Party of their negotiations with the World Bank for a $150 million rural energy project, which would provide electricity to over 700 communes in the country. All of a sudden, our field visits started resembling wedding caravans as more and more senior utility staff joined in our discussions with the rural people. Many of these Hanoi or Danang based staff had never visited any of the rural areas, certainly never having examined in any depth their problems or what could be done about them. For many of them, all of this was a revelation, and they learnt more about their own country with some surprise. ..
By 1998, all these visits and discussions had gradually led us to develop our own model of rural electrification in the Vietnamese context. We all agreed that there would be no give away and that the rural households had to contribute not only to the capital cost of the development, but also in its operation and management. Having formulated the fundamental guidelines for the development of rural electrification in Vietnam, the Bank invited all the communes to participate in the project. To do so, however, they had to agree formally to certain fundamental principles. The choice was theirs, there was to be no compulsion, but every commune and provincial leadership had to provide a letter stating their willingness to abide by these conditions. These were: (a) all investments in the rural electrification project were to be economically viable; (b) there would be cost sharing between all the parties including the consumers, local governments, the national government and the World Bank; (c) the construction would be based on the most cost effective technology; (d) consumers would commit to connect to the network and agree to pay operating charges; (e) there would be no operating subsidies; (f) the local distribution utility would have a legal status with financial controls and (g) the community would accept the responsibility of managing the operations after the completion of construction. In effect, each rural household would have to pay about $20 for the capital costs and about $2 a month for the electricity they utilized. In most communes, more than two thirds of the households agreed to pay the connection charges. The provincial government would provide the land free while the national government would borrow from the Bank at low interest rates. All construction had to follow national specifications and after the completion of the construction, its operation and management would be transferred to the commune electricity cooperative.
.. the Ministry of Industry selected 670 communes to participate in the first part of the project. On this basis, the Bank agreed to provide to the ministry a loan of $150 million. Vietnam signed the loan in mid-2000 and construction work began soon thereafter to provide electricity to about 2 million people.
Vietnam’s first rural energy project progressed with great speed and by the end of 2004, it had connected over 900 communes to the national grid, thus providing electricity to over half a million new households. Not only were these rural households provided electricity in a short period of time, EVN and the Power companies also followed a strategy that provided for local people to participate in the construction and operation of the new systems. The construction contracts were designed to maximize local contracting industry participation even though it meant awarding and supervising over 600 contracts. These small construction contracts created major employment potential and became the foundation of an efficient local construction industry in the districts. After the completion of construction, it was agreed that the communes would help to manage the operation and maintenance of the local distribution grids. The power companies trained a large number of people from the communes, who then became service agents responsible for routine operations and maintenance, as well as commercial activities such as billing and collection. In most communes, two or three persons had by now been trained to perform this function. Thus, the project not only provided electricity to the communes, it also laid the foundation for local employment and management. It also had some other side effects. Mr. Hai, the Minister of Industry, told me that his election as minister was certainly helped by the fact that a large number of communes in his area had received electricity and that he had come to be known in the area as one who could really get things done.
One of the unanswered questions of rural electrification is to what extent it really helps economic development. We needed to measure this with some accuracy and so commissioned a five-year research project with the Institute of Sociology in Hanoi. But even before that, I undertook a travel program to see what I could find empirically on my visits….
I was curious to see what had happened to Tran Thi Hoanh who I recalled had seemed such a shy and unlikely leader of a women’s battalion. We went in search of her in the neighboring village of Ngu Thuy. Her husband greeted us and showed us the photograph we had taken on that day two years ago. I recognized her in the photograph, but wondered if she would remember the foreigner who had showed up one day two years ago at her village to switch on the power in her commune. Hoanh was busy organizing the women in the village, but consented to leave the meeting to come and meet with us. She walked in and greeted us exclaiming that indeed she remembered me from me from that past visit. Over tea I asked her if her life had changed since electricity came to her village and whether she had bought the ice box she told me she planned to buy. She smiled and said that life in the village was now much better and that she was busy organizing the women in her commune. But, no, she had not bought the ice box....
..I was pleased that we were having an impact in rural Vietnam. The word of the success of this project spread far and wide. We had managed to provide electricity to one new commune every day for the past three years!
Vietnam became one of the leading countries in the world to have provided electricity to over 90% of its total population. It had gone from only 50% coverage of households in 1996 to 90% in 2004. As I saw the success of Vietnam’s rural electrification program, I wondered if it were possible to repeat the success of Vietnam in rural electrification in my own country.
In December 2004, I was presented with a medal by the government of Vietnam and EVN for my contribution to the development of the energy sector in Vietnam at a simple but touching ceremony. But even more than this official recognition was a simple gift from one of the power distribution companies. At my farewell reception, Lien presented me with a painting on behalf of his company. It was a beautiful rural landscape and I had merely glanced at it. Then I saw the inscription at the bottom of the painting. It said, “To Dr Anil Malhotra. For helping change the rural landscape of Vietnam.”
This work has now been documented by the World Bank in a must see video
My thoughts went back to 1998 when we started designing this program in Vietnam.I describe how the program was conceived and developed in my book: "A Passion to build" in some detail but here is an edited excerpt...
“ Rural electrification of Vietnam was not part of my plan when I started working in that country. It was one of those chance issues that creep into one’s life unbeknown and unsought, but soon take over one’s total life’s concentration. So it was with projects that would provide power to the rural people of Vietnam. Little did I realize when I accepted the challenge that it would turn out to be one of the most satisfying aspects of my stay in Vietnam. And it had all come by happenstance.
A new World Bank country director, Andrew Steer, young and ambitious, had just taken over in 1997 and he .. asked me if I would design and implement a rural electrification project. .. I was determined to learn all I could about rural electrification, and I delved enthusiastically into all old Bank studies and projects.
I .. was determined that before we designed the project in Vietnam, our team would visit the villages firsthand to learn from them. That year, we laid out an aggressive program of field visits – every week we would visit a different commune in a different province. During the next year, we visited 30 provinces and over 100 communes, talking to rural households and commune leaders as well as the provincial leadership. We wanted to know what they were willing to pay, what they would use the electricity for, how they wanted the cooperative to be managed etc. These visits became the highlight of my stay in Vietnam. I visited areas that most expatriates had not even heard of and began to learn of the real Vietnam in the rural areas.
These visits became a voyage of discovery. Each commune we traveled to had a different story to tell and a different lesson to teach us. But as we visited these communes – from Vietnam’s northern borders to the southern mangrove swamps, from the fishing communities in the east to the poorest Hmong communes in the central highlands- one thing remained common. The commune office where we were received was almost always a brick room, with either a bust of Ho Chi Minh or a large painting of him. There would be a few cupboards in the room with a few circulars and books. Some of the wealthier communes also had a TV set that was used for the village meetings in the evenings. The secretary of the commune Peoples Committee invariably accompanied the head of the commune, who always came armed with a children’s exercise book in which he noted down all our questions and from which he produced the data regarding his commune.
During these visits, we were to meet some of the most interesting people in the country – a vivacious chairwoman of a PPC in the north who told me that she had shut down all the beer parlors in the cities of her province as one of her first acts to make sure that all men went home after work; another PPC chairman who wanted to make sure that all the communes in his province were electrified and that his own birthplace commune would be the last to be given power; the leader of the women’s artillery corps in the American War who had returned to fishing and whose commune the country had forgotten almost for two decades. There was also an English teacher who had never before met a foreigner and had never heard English spoken before we met him; the chief of a village who would talk only after we had shared rice wine with him from the communal gourd; Joseph, the priest who had been confined to his parish for two years but was not permitted to talk to his parishioners. And then there was the Thai general secretary of Dien Bien Phu province who cheerfully told us that he had five children and was exempt from the national laws on two children because he was from a minority community group, and who then wanted to honor me with a rice bottle laced with the bile of a live bear; the young man in Pac Bo who was so smitten with my wife, who often accompanied me in these sojourns, that he kept wanting to beat me in table tennis while Ena looked on. And also the consternation of Ranjit Lamech from the World Bank, who wanted to set up a dual accounting system in the villages only to find that there was not even a bank in close vicinity and that all finances were kept in a steel trunk in the schoolhouse!
In the north, we went up to the Chinese border and visited the secret hideout of Ho Chi Minh in Pac Bo. In the west, we went onto the Laotian border where the villages were reputed to be the centre of drug running from Myanmar and Thailand. In the central highlands, we visited some of the poorest villages among the Hmong and sipped wine from their communal gourds. It was to be learning experience the likes of which I had never had. While we were planning and designing the rural energy project, we were also learning real lessons from our travels. All these formed a kaleidoscope of our journeys, but they all added up to a picture of a country restless and on the move and wanting to do things
The conventional wisdom on extending electricity access to the rural areas, particularly the poorer ones, was that the biggest constraint was the high connection charges levied by the power companies. The Bank’s “best practices” paper recommends that for increasing rural access, some method needed to be found to reduce the initial connection charges for poorer customers, or there needed to be some availability of credit to spread these costs over some years. In a number of communes that we visited in Vietnam, the situation was somewhat different. .. When asked why more households were not connecting to the existing grid, the answer was a little surprising. The villagers said that they had difficulty in paying the monthly bills with an annual income of only 2 million VND. When asked whether the high connection charges of 0.5 million VND was a major barrier, their reply was that they could afford to pay the initial connection charges. When asked for clarification, the answer came. “Oh! We can pay for the initial connection charge easily by selling a piglet. It is the monthly dues that are a problem! You city people,” he added, “don’t realize that we don’t get monthly wages in the field, but have money in our pockets only when the harvest comes in.”
The prompt collection of power bills from customers in the rural areas has always proven to be a major issue in rural electrification projects around the world. Thus, the ones that were able to successfully tackle these issues elicited particular interest. There were two cases where the managers of the rural cooperatives had solved this problem, each in his own unique way.
The Dai Hai Private Agency was an organization for rural electrification in the southern province of Soc Trang established in 1992 by Mr. Nguyen Duc Thanh, a former teacher…. One of the reasons for its success had been its ability to collect payments for all the electricity sold from all of its customers. When I enquired what the average collection ratio was, Mr. Than told me that in the initial stages, a number of customers delayed paying their bills citing their financial difficulties, but now the collections were a hundred percent. When asked how this was achieved, he said the solution was quite simple - he requested the village priest to read out the names of the defaulters after each monthly mass in the church!
Another prevalent view in the Bank was that most villagers were too poor to pay the high power tariffs that generally needed to be levied to even recover basic operational costs. A similar issue had also been raised in the poorer villages of the Philippines. Father Silva had recounted that during his visits to these villages; he would summon the family and ask them if they wanted electricity. And the answer inevitably was yes, but that they could not afford to pay the monthly dues of about 100- 150 pesos. Whereupon he would ask the head of the household how many beers he drank in a week. The answer would come, “Oh Father! I drink only one can a day.” And each can of beer cost? About 10 pesos. “OK,” Father Silva would reply, “only drink every alternate day and put that money in an empty can every week. By the end of the month, you will have enough money for electricity for your family!”
The one problem that has dogged all efforts at rural electrification has been how to use it for productive uses. Once power came to the village and the households turned to TV programs for education and entertainment, they realized that perhaps there were other uses possible, which could bring in additional income. The productive use of electricity in the rural areas has always been hard to document. So the results of electrification of a rural area in Central Vietnam that led to a major economic improvement provided an interesting example.
Duy Son 2 in Quang Nam province had a cooperative, but had no electricity despite its proximity to the Chop Xoi Mountains and various water streams. .. As a result of his efforts, Mr. Luu Ban, the former head of the cooperative and the man who had dreamed of harnessing the waters for electricity, was awarded the title of “Labor Hero” by the government.
Over the next year, Hung, my operations officer, and I traveled the width and breadth of the country visiting different provinces and talking to commune leadership about what they wanted.
In our visits to the rural areas, a few staff from the national power utility, EVN, often accompanied us. In the early days, most of EVN staff treated these visits with disdain. Rural electrification was a loss maker in the national utility and the more ambitious staff were all busy building new power plants. But then in 1999, things changed. There was a minor rebellion in a commune in northern Vietnam where the villagers had rounded on the communist party officials for their corruption and rent seeking. Word of this slowly leaked to the outside world. The Party officials in Hanoi were grim faced to find that the rebellion had occurred in exactly the same villages where their own revolution had started some decades back. The grievances were the same: rural areas were neglected, promises made were not kept after the elections and ruthless and corrupt officials from the provinces looted the poor. The Party was sufficiently shook up by this development to order a swift reordering of priorities: the rural areas were to be given priority and their demand for electricity, water and medical facilities were to be met on a time bound plan.
The senior management of both EVN and the Ministry of Industry were delighted to inform the Party of their negotiations with the World Bank for a $150 million rural energy project, which would provide electricity to over 700 communes in the country. All of a sudden, our field visits started resembling wedding caravans as more and more senior utility staff joined in our discussions with the rural people. Many of these Hanoi or Danang based staff had never visited any of the rural areas, certainly never having examined in any depth their problems or what could be done about them. For many of them, all of this was a revelation, and they learnt more about their own country with some surprise. ..
By 1998, all these visits and discussions had gradually led us to develop our own model of rural electrification in the Vietnamese context. We all agreed that there would be no give away and that the rural households had to contribute not only to the capital cost of the development, but also in its operation and management. Having formulated the fundamental guidelines for the development of rural electrification in Vietnam, the Bank invited all the communes to participate in the project. To do so, however, they had to agree formally to certain fundamental principles. The choice was theirs, there was to be no compulsion, but every commune and provincial leadership had to provide a letter stating their willingness to abide by these conditions. These were: (a) all investments in the rural electrification project were to be economically viable; (b) there would be cost sharing between all the parties including the consumers, local governments, the national government and the World Bank; (c) the construction would be based on the most cost effective technology; (d) consumers would commit to connect to the network and agree to pay operating charges; (e) there would be no operating subsidies; (f) the local distribution utility would have a legal status with financial controls and (g) the community would accept the responsibility of managing the operations after the completion of construction. In effect, each rural household would have to pay about $20 for the capital costs and about $2 a month for the electricity they utilized. In most communes, more than two thirds of the households agreed to pay the connection charges. The provincial government would provide the land free while the national government would borrow from the Bank at low interest rates. All construction had to follow national specifications and after the completion of the construction, its operation and management would be transferred to the commune electricity cooperative.
.. the Ministry of Industry selected 670 communes to participate in the first part of the project. On this basis, the Bank agreed to provide to the ministry a loan of $150 million. Vietnam signed the loan in mid-2000 and construction work began soon thereafter to provide electricity to about 2 million people.
Vietnam’s first rural energy project progressed with great speed and by the end of 2004, it had connected over 900 communes to the national grid, thus providing electricity to over half a million new households. Not only were these rural households provided electricity in a short period of time, EVN and the Power companies also followed a strategy that provided for local people to participate in the construction and operation of the new systems. The construction contracts were designed to maximize local contracting industry participation even though it meant awarding and supervising over 600 contracts. These small construction contracts created major employment potential and became the foundation of an efficient local construction industry in the districts. After the completion of construction, it was agreed that the communes would help to manage the operation and maintenance of the local distribution grids. The power companies trained a large number of people from the communes, who then became service agents responsible for routine operations and maintenance, as well as commercial activities such as billing and collection. In most communes, two or three persons had by now been trained to perform this function. Thus, the project not only provided electricity to the communes, it also laid the foundation for local employment and management. It also had some other side effects. Mr. Hai, the Minister of Industry, told me that his election as minister was certainly helped by the fact that a large number of communes in his area had received electricity and that he had come to be known in the area as one who could really get things done.
One of the unanswered questions of rural electrification is to what extent it really helps economic development. We needed to measure this with some accuracy and so commissioned a five-year research project with the Institute of Sociology in Hanoi. But even before that, I undertook a travel program to see what I could find empirically on my visits….
I was curious to see what had happened to Tran Thi Hoanh who I recalled had seemed such a shy and unlikely leader of a women’s battalion. We went in search of her in the neighboring village of Ngu Thuy. Her husband greeted us and showed us the photograph we had taken on that day two years ago. I recognized her in the photograph, but wondered if she would remember the foreigner who had showed up one day two years ago at her village to switch on the power in her commune. Hoanh was busy organizing the women in the village, but consented to leave the meeting to come and meet with us. She walked in and greeted us exclaiming that indeed she remembered me from me from that past visit. Over tea I asked her if her life had changed since electricity came to her village and whether she had bought the ice box she told me she planned to buy. She smiled and said that life in the village was now much better and that she was busy organizing the women in her commune. But, no, she had not bought the ice box....
..I was pleased that we were having an impact in rural Vietnam. The word of the success of this project spread far and wide. We had managed to provide electricity to one new commune every day for the past three years!
Vietnam became one of the leading countries in the world to have provided electricity to over 90% of its total population. It had gone from only 50% coverage of households in 1996 to 90% in 2004. As I saw the success of Vietnam’s rural electrification program, I wondered if it were possible to repeat the success of Vietnam in rural electrification in my own country.
In December 2004, I was presented with a medal by the government of Vietnam and EVN for my contribution to the development of the energy sector in Vietnam at a simple but touching ceremony. But even more than this official recognition was a simple gift from one of the power distribution companies. At my farewell reception, Lien presented me with a painting on behalf of his company. It was a beautiful rural landscape and I had merely glanced at it. Then I saw the inscription at the bottom of the painting. It said, “To Dr Anil Malhotra. For helping change the rural landscape of Vietnam.”
This work has now been documented by the World Bank in a must see video
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Mahatama Gandhi and MIT
There is a connection strange as it may seem between Mahatama Gandhi and MIT. I came to know of it in a rather strange way myself. A few months ago I received a call from a professor at the University of North Carolina who said he was writing a book about Indians who had graduated from MIT and had made major contributions to India. Prof Ross Basset said that my name had been given to him by some alumni from MIT during his research as one of those.
During the colonial period, roughly one hundred degrees were awarded by MIT to Indians.One of them was Kalelkar who was then not an occasional satyagrahi, but a committed freedom fighter and Gandhian. Yet Bassett revealed that this young man would later go to the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and take a degree in engineering. In fact families associated with Mahatma Gandhi sent a total of nine sons to MIT during the nationalist movement. Their importance to India and to the historical understanding of India is disproportionate to their numbers. These men—and they were all men—often from elite families, formed a technological elite in the last days of colonial India. Their careers show a technological nationalism in India and represented an important foreshadowing of the period after independence.
Perhaps one reason Indians were drawn to MIT was that it was based on a notion of
engineering and engineering education largely antithetical to that held by Indian engineering colleges.The first engineering college in India began operation in Roorkee in 1847. The British established the engineering college at Roorkee and the later engineering colleges in Sibpur, Poona, and Madras, as a way to produce intermediate grade engineers for the British Public Works Department, which had control over the schools. As a consequence, these schools had a very limited curriculum, focused on civil engineering, the discipline most needed by the Public Works Department, and within civil engineering, focused on narrow vocational training in such areas as surveying and estimating.
Although the first Indian attended MIT in 1880, only in the twentieth century is it
possible to trace the lives of Indians who went to MIT with any specificity. The first MIT student to play a significant role in the technological development of India did so through a larger social movement. In 1908, after two years of study at MIT, Ishwar Das Varshnei came to Poona to set up a glass factory under the umbrella of a nationalist organization, the Paisa Fund. The Paisa Fund, so called because it raised money by asking for donations of a paisa each (a paisa was a sixty- fourth of a rupee) from a broad spectrum of Indian society, was supported by Tilak and sought to develop indigenous Indian industry.
During the 1930s, a small princely state in Kathiawar, Bhavnagar, was the leading source of Indian students at MIT. In fact, Bhavnagar, representing less than 2 percent of the population of India, produced almost half the Indians who earned degrees from MIT in the 1930s. This concentration in Bhavnagar was further concentrated in the family of a lifelong friend of Mahatma Gandhi, Devchand Parekh. Parekh had a vision of a technological India built around Indians trained at MIT and worked to realize this vision within his family.
Between 1920 and 1939, MIT had enrolled on average 7 Indian students per year. By the fall of 1944, that number had increased to 24. But in April 1945, with the Indian government’s offering unprecedented funding for graduate training abroad, MIT had 271 applications on hand from Indian students, a number representing over half of the scholars the Indian government was planning to send to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Although MIT was able to admit 16 for the fall semester, it had placed 180 Indian students on its waiting list, implicitly stating that the students were well qualified for MIT but that there was no room for them.
MIT made another little known contribution to the technological development of India after independence. The Sarker Committee, after its chair, N. R. Sarker, has become well known in India for its role in laying out the framework of the Indian Institutes of Technology. This committee of twenty- two had nine Britons and thirteen Indians. Among the Indians were some of India’s leading scientists, such as J. C. Ghosh and S. S. Bhatnagar, and representatives of India’s leading industrial enterprises, such as A. D. Shroff, who worked for the Tatas. On the committee also, but unnoticed before by historians, were two young Indian engineers with doctorates from MIT: Anant Pandya and M. D. Parekh.
In the decades after independence, the Indians did have means and opportunity. The sons of Indian elites—lawyers, civil servants, educationalists, businessmen, and engineers—went to MIT in increasing numbers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And this trend has continued. The contributions of these Indians who returned from MIT to rebuild the nation are manifold and hopefully Prof Basset's research will be provide us the details.
During the colonial period, roughly one hundred degrees were awarded by MIT to Indians.One of them was Kalelkar who was then not an occasional satyagrahi, but a committed freedom fighter and Gandhian. Yet Bassett revealed that this young man would later go to the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and take a degree in engineering. In fact families associated with Mahatma Gandhi sent a total of nine sons to MIT during the nationalist movement. Their importance to India and to the historical understanding of India is disproportionate to their numbers. These men—and they were all men—often from elite families, formed a technological elite in the last days of colonial India. Their careers show a technological nationalism in India and represented an important foreshadowing of the period after independence.
Perhaps one reason Indians were drawn to MIT was that it was based on a notion of
engineering and engineering education largely antithetical to that held by Indian engineering colleges.The first engineering college in India began operation in Roorkee in 1847. The British established the engineering college at Roorkee and the later engineering colleges in Sibpur, Poona, and Madras, as a way to produce intermediate grade engineers for the British Public Works Department, which had control over the schools. As a consequence, these schools had a very limited curriculum, focused on civil engineering, the discipline most needed by the Public Works Department, and within civil engineering, focused on narrow vocational training in such areas as surveying and estimating.
Although the first Indian attended MIT in 1880, only in the twentieth century is it
possible to trace the lives of Indians who went to MIT with any specificity. The first MIT student to play a significant role in the technological development of India did so through a larger social movement. In 1908, after two years of study at MIT, Ishwar Das Varshnei came to Poona to set up a glass factory under the umbrella of a nationalist organization, the Paisa Fund. The Paisa Fund, so called because it raised money by asking for donations of a paisa each (a paisa was a sixty- fourth of a rupee) from a broad spectrum of Indian society, was supported by Tilak and sought to develop indigenous Indian industry.
During the 1930s, a small princely state in Kathiawar, Bhavnagar, was the leading source of Indian students at MIT. In fact, Bhavnagar, representing less than 2 percent of the population of India, produced almost half the Indians who earned degrees from MIT in the 1930s. This concentration in Bhavnagar was further concentrated in the family of a lifelong friend of Mahatma Gandhi, Devchand Parekh. Parekh had a vision of a technological India built around Indians trained at MIT and worked to realize this vision within his family.
Between 1920 and 1939, MIT had enrolled on average 7 Indian students per year. By the fall of 1944, that number had increased to 24. But in April 1945, with the Indian government’s offering unprecedented funding for graduate training abroad, MIT had 271 applications on hand from Indian students, a number representing over half of the scholars the Indian government was planning to send to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Although MIT was able to admit 16 for the fall semester, it had placed 180 Indian students on its waiting list, implicitly stating that the students were well qualified for MIT but that there was no room for them.
MIT made another little known contribution to the technological development of India after independence. The Sarker Committee, after its chair, N. R. Sarker, has become well known in India for its role in laying out the framework of the Indian Institutes of Technology. This committee of twenty- two had nine Britons and thirteen Indians. Among the Indians were some of India’s leading scientists, such as J. C. Ghosh and S. S. Bhatnagar, and representatives of India’s leading industrial enterprises, such as A. D. Shroff, who worked for the Tatas. On the committee also, but unnoticed before by historians, were two young Indian engineers with doctorates from MIT: Anant Pandya and M. D. Parekh.
In the decades after independence, the Indians did have means and opportunity. The sons of Indian elites—lawyers, civil servants, educationalists, businessmen, and engineers—went to MIT in increasing numbers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And this trend has continued. The contributions of these Indians who returned from MIT to rebuild the nation are manifold and hopefully Prof Basset's research will be provide us the details.
Monday, November 2, 2009
A new age of publishing
The rapid advances in technology have interesting consequences in the area of book publishing. In the earlier part of the year, Amazon brought out its e-book called Kindle on which you are able to read books that can be downloaded from the internet. While the screen is only 6 inches, I found it quite readable since it replicates a paper printed book. Its real strength, however, lies in your ability to download the latest books from Amazon.com in a few seconds and that at a sale price almost half of that for the hard or soft cover books. The sheer convenience of this has led me to read even more books that I normally do. Kindle has now gone international and their e- reader is available in a large number of markets outside the US.
And now there is another twist that is even more fascinating. Publishing. Kindle provides an avenue to publish your own books directly and to sell them on the Kindle store. So now you can write your book, upload it on to the Kindle bookstore, set a price that you want it to sell for with no directive from any agency. Your e-book can now be read by anybody who has a Kindle worldwide at the price you have set. And all this can be done within two weeks and without waiting for arrogant publishers who often keep aspiring authors on tenterhooks for almost an year.
This new world of book publishing is likely to gain even more adherents as other agencies are rapidly producing their own e book readers and their own bookstores. The famous US book chain Barnes & Noble recently released its e-book reader called Nook and both Apple and Microsoft are likely to enter the scene in early 2010. Thus e-books will now be available around the world at a touch of button without the heavy cost of postage. Many classical books can be obtained for a song. For example you can obtain the entire works of Jane Austen for less than $1.
As is usual each new technology brings its own particular set of issues. In the case of e-book publishing, the real problem becomes marketing. There are so many e- books that are now being published on the internet, that it is difficult to decide which unknown author to read even if the price of the book is only $ 0-5. Yes, there are a large number of books that are available free.. I am sure though that it is only a matter of time that the internet will give birth to critics who will review these books and publish their comments to encourage new writers and to provide some avenues to determine the quality of these books.
But it is a uniquely democratic breakthrough and one which as a budding writer I heartily commend. You can start by encouraging this trend by reading my latest book on your Kindle –“A Passion to build” for only $ 4!!
And now there is another twist that is even more fascinating. Publishing. Kindle provides an avenue to publish your own books directly and to sell them on the Kindle store. So now you can write your book, upload it on to the Kindle bookstore, set a price that you want it to sell for with no directive from any agency. Your e-book can now be read by anybody who has a Kindle worldwide at the price you have set. And all this can be done within two weeks and without waiting for arrogant publishers who often keep aspiring authors on tenterhooks for almost an year.
This new world of book publishing is likely to gain even more adherents as other agencies are rapidly producing their own e book readers and their own bookstores. The famous US book chain Barnes & Noble recently released its e-book reader called Nook and both Apple and Microsoft are likely to enter the scene in early 2010. Thus e-books will now be available around the world at a touch of button without the heavy cost of postage. Many classical books can be obtained for a song. For example you can obtain the entire works of Jane Austen for less than $1.
As is usual each new technology brings its own particular set of issues. In the case of e-book publishing, the real problem becomes marketing. There are so many e- books that are now being published on the internet, that it is difficult to decide which unknown author to read even if the price of the book is only $ 0-5. Yes, there are a large number of books that are available free.. I am sure though that it is only a matter of time that the internet will give birth to critics who will review these books and publish their comments to encourage new writers and to provide some avenues to determine the quality of these books.
But it is a uniquely democratic breakthrough and one which as a budding writer I heartily commend. You can start by encouraging this trend by reading my latest book on your Kindle –“A Passion to build” for only $ 4!!
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Brave Thinkers
For more than 150 years, the Atlantic has told the stories of people who commit acts of moral and intellectual bravery by espousing unpopular or controversial positions. Recently, in a special issue of the magazine, the editors chose 27 leaders - from business and politics to science and media - who embody this great tradition today. These are people who are risking careers, reputations, and fortunes to advance ideas that upend an established order.
In business and technology,Shai Agassi,Thorkil Sonne, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.,Jeff Zucker and Mark Zuckerberg.
In Politics,John Fetterman,Ralph Nader,Craig Watkins,Jim Webb,Iftikhar Chaudhry and
Morgan Tsvangirai.
In science and health Danny Day,Alex de Waal,Freeman Dyson,Henry Greely and Camille Parmesan
In culture Walter Hussman, Jr., Steve Jobs,John Lassater,Montgomery McFate,Trey Parker and Matt Stone
In business and economics,Shelia Bair,Ben Bernanke,Barack Obama,Paul Polak and
Meredith Whitney
For details on these choices, you need to read the Atlantic monthly. The more interesting issue for me is if we could do this in India? And when? Here is a challenge for the likes of Vinod Mehta in Outlook and Arun Purie of India Today.
In business and technology,Shai Agassi,Thorkil Sonne, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.,Jeff Zucker and Mark Zuckerberg.
In Politics,John Fetterman,Ralph Nader,Craig Watkins,Jim Webb,Iftikhar Chaudhry and
Morgan Tsvangirai.
In science and health Danny Day,Alex de Waal,Freeman Dyson,Henry Greely and Camille Parmesan
In culture Walter Hussman, Jr., Steve Jobs,John Lassater,Montgomery McFate,Trey Parker and Matt Stone
In business and economics,Shelia Bair,Ben Bernanke,Barack Obama,Paul Polak and
Meredith Whitney
For details on these choices, you need to read the Atlantic monthly. The more interesting issue for me is if we could do this in India? And when? Here is a challenge for the likes of Vinod Mehta in Outlook and Arun Purie of India Today.
Brain Drain- a new argument
In this rather interesting piece, Michael Clemens and David McKenzie present evidence against the conventional view on brain drain and how it affects the developing countries.They argue that the flow of skilled emigrants from poor to rich countries can actually benefit both parties.
“The common idea that skilled emigration amounts to "stealing" requires a cartoonish set of assumptions about developing countries. First, it requires us to assume that developing countries possess a finite stock of skilled workers, a stock depleted by one for every departure. In fact, people respond to the incentives created by migration: Enormous numbers of skilled workers from developing countries have been induced to acquire their skills by the opportunity of high earnings abroad. This is why the Philippines, which sends more nurses abroad than any other developing country, still has more nurses per capita at home than Britain does. Recent research has also shown that a sudden, large increase in skilled emigration from a developing country to a skill-selective destination can cause a corresponding sudden increase in skill acquisition in the source country.
Second, believing that skilled emigration amounts to theft from the poor requires us to assume that skilled workers themselves are not poor. In Zambia, a nurse has to get by on less than $1,500 per year -- measured at U.S. prices, not Zambian ones -- and a doctor must make ends meet with less than $5,500 per year, again at U.S. prices. If these were your annual wages, facing U.S. price levels, you would likely consider yourself destitute.
Third, believing that a person's choice to emigrate constitutes "stealing" requires problematic assumptions about that person's rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all people have an unqualified right to leave any country. Skilled migrants are not "owned" by their home countries, and should have the same rights to freedom of movement as professionals in rich countries."
Again the "belief that skilled emigrants must cause public losses in the amount of their training cost is based on a series of stereotypes. First, large numbers of skilled emigrants are funded by themselves or by foreign scholarships. A survey of African-born members of the American Medical Association conducted by one of the authors found that about half of them acquired their medical training outside their country of birth. Second, many skilled emigrants serve the countries they come from for long periods before departure. The same survey found that African physicians in the United States and Canada who were trained in their country of birth spent, on average, over five years working in that country prior to emigration. This constitutes a substantial return on all investment in their training.
Third, there is the stereotype that skilled migrants send little money to their home countries, as they tend to come from elite families and bring their immediate families with them when they leave. But new research reveals this to be simply unfounded. Skilled migrants also tend to earn much more than unskilled migrants, and on balance this means that a university-educated migrant from a developing country sends more money home than an otherwise identical migrant with less education. The survey of African physicians mentioned above found that they typically send home much more money than it cost to train them, especially to the poorest countries. This means that for a typical African country as a whole, even if 100 percent of a physician's training was publicly funded, the emigration of that physician is still a net plus.
Fourth, it is simply not true that all higher education in low-income countries must take place under massive public subsidy. When publicly subsidized higher education is the only way for someone who is not already wealthy to acquire higher education, that person's emigration necessarily means that the subsidy emigrates too. But even in very low-income countries, there are alternative ways of financing higher education. One is to create ways for students to pay up front for their own training, as Makerere University in Uganda has done, but many African universities do not. Another is for the government to give student loans so that students can pay for their own training after the fact, which Kenya has done, but many African governments do not. Both of these break the necessary link between the departure of a worker and the departure of a public subsidy.In the Philippines, training of the vast majority of nurses who leave the country is financed by the students themselves, the recruiters, or the foreign employers, not by the public; there is no reason whatsoever why similar professional schools could not be established throughout Africa.
Then there is the common view that skilled migrants who leave for a rich country never come back.Again this is not true. "A striking example comes from recent research in the Pacific, which has amongst the highest rates of skilled emigration globally. Consider Tonga, a small island nation with a population of only 100,000, where skilled workers might stereotypically be thought to have little incentive to go back. Even in this case, by age 35, just over a third of the nation's academic brightest who had migrated after high school were already back working in Tonga. And in Papua New Guinea, half of the most academically skilled migrants had returned home by their early 30s.
In the United States, more than 20 percent of foreign students receiving Ph.D.s already have firm commitments to return to their home countries at the time of graduation, and many more will likely return in subsequent years. Of course there is large variation across countries: Migrants are much more likely to return to booming economies with good job prospects, as is seen by the flows of Indian tech workers back to India in the last decade. But even in cases where few migrants return, those that do may be particularly motivated by a desire to help their home country and may return to key leadership positions. One recent calculation finds that since 1950, 46 current and 165 former heads of government received their higher education in the United States.
One of the more persistent beliefs is that the" emigration of doctors kills people in Africa.Allowing or encouraging doctors to leave Africa for rich destination countries can reduce the number of doctors within the countries they come from, although even this is not clear if more people undertake medical training with the hope of migrating. However, the level of medical care provided by doctors in Africa depends on a vast array of factors that have little or nothing to do with international movement -- such as scant wages in the public health service, poor or absent rural service incentives, few other performance incentives of any kind, a lack of adequate medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, a mismatch between medical training and the health problems of the poorest, weak transportation infrastructure, or abysmal sanitation systems.
To illustrate just one of these -- the lack of rural service incentives -- policies that limit international movement choices per se do not change the strong incentive for African physicians to concentrate in urban areas far from the least?served populations. Nairobi is home to just 8 percent of Kenya's population, but 66 percent of its physicians. More Mozambican physicians live in the capital Maputo (51 percent) than in the entire rest of Mozambique, though Maputo comprises just 8 percent of the national population. Roughly half of Ethiopian physicians work in the capital Addis Ababa, where only one in 20 Ethiopians lives.
This and the many other barriers to domestic effectiveness of physicians may explain why, across 53 African countries, there is no relationship whatsoever between the departure of physicians or nurses and poor health statistics as measured by indicators such as child mortality or the percentage of births attended by modern health professionals. If anything, the relationship is positive: African countries with the largest number of their physicians residing abroad in the rich country are typically those with the lowest child mortality, and vice versa. This suggests that whatever is determining whether or not African children live or die, other factors besides international migration of physicians are vastly more important. Fiddling with immigration or recruitment policies of destination countries do precisely nothing to address those underlying problems.
But do skilled emigrants build trade and investment ties. "Not always. Just as fears about possible negative effects of brain drain are typically overblown, so is the hype over the ability of countries to tap their diaspora to set up trade and investment. The well-known case of emigrants in Silicon Valley facilitating the growth of the Taiwanese, Chinese and Indian information technology industries is an important example demonstrating that high-skilled workers abroad can have transformative impacts on home country industry. But unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the rule.
In particular, skilled migrants from small islands and from sub-Saharan Africa, where highly skilled emigration rates are the highest, are not likely to be engaging in trade or investment. New surveys find that less than 5 percent of skilled migrants from Tonga, Micronesia and Ghana have ever helped a home country firm in a trade deal, and when they have, the amounts of such deals have been modest. Few migrants from these countries had made investments in their home countries -- at most they had sent back amounts of US$2,000-3,000 to finance small enterprises.
However, skilled workers do engage with their home countries in a number of other ways apart from remittances. They can be an important source of tourism for their home countries; more than 500,000 visitors to the Dominican Republic each year are Dominicans living abroad. They are also tourism promoters: 60-80 percent of skilled migrants from four Pacific countries and Ghana advise others about traveling to their home countries. They indirectly spur trade, through consuming their home country's products, and they transfer knowledge about study and work options abroad. The lack of involvement in trade and investment therefore largely reflects a lack of productive opportunities at home, not a lack of interest on the part of migrants in helping their home countries.
Conventional wisdom once held that the wealth of a country declined when it imported foreign goods, since obviously cash was wealth and obviously buying foreign goods sent cash abroad. Adam Smith argued that economic development -- or the "wealth of nations" -- depends not a country's stock of cash but on structural changes that international exchange could encourage. In today's information age, the view has taken hold that human capital now rules the wealth of nations, and that its departure in any circumstance must harm a country's development. But economic development is much more complex than that.
But thanks to new research, we have learned that the international movement of educated people changes the incentives to acquire education, sends enormous quantities of money across borders, leads to movements back and forth, and can contribute to the spread of trade, investment, technology, and ideas. All of this fits very uncomfortably in a rhyming phrase like "brain drain," a caricature that would be best discarded in favor of a richer view of the links between human movement and development.”
“The common idea that skilled emigration amounts to "stealing" requires a cartoonish set of assumptions about developing countries. First, it requires us to assume that developing countries possess a finite stock of skilled workers, a stock depleted by one for every departure. In fact, people respond to the incentives created by migration: Enormous numbers of skilled workers from developing countries have been induced to acquire their skills by the opportunity of high earnings abroad. This is why the Philippines, which sends more nurses abroad than any other developing country, still has more nurses per capita at home than Britain does. Recent research has also shown that a sudden, large increase in skilled emigration from a developing country to a skill-selective destination can cause a corresponding sudden increase in skill acquisition in the source country.
Second, believing that skilled emigration amounts to theft from the poor requires us to assume that skilled workers themselves are not poor. In Zambia, a nurse has to get by on less than $1,500 per year -- measured at U.S. prices, not Zambian ones -- and a doctor must make ends meet with less than $5,500 per year, again at U.S. prices. If these were your annual wages, facing U.S. price levels, you would likely consider yourself destitute.
Third, believing that a person's choice to emigrate constitutes "stealing" requires problematic assumptions about that person's rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all people have an unqualified right to leave any country. Skilled migrants are not "owned" by their home countries, and should have the same rights to freedom of movement as professionals in rich countries."
Again the "belief that skilled emigrants must cause public losses in the amount of their training cost is based on a series of stereotypes. First, large numbers of skilled emigrants are funded by themselves or by foreign scholarships. A survey of African-born members of the American Medical Association conducted by one of the authors found that about half of them acquired their medical training outside their country of birth. Second, many skilled emigrants serve the countries they come from for long periods before departure. The same survey found that African physicians in the United States and Canada who were trained in their country of birth spent, on average, over five years working in that country prior to emigration. This constitutes a substantial return on all investment in their training.
Third, there is the stereotype that skilled migrants send little money to their home countries, as they tend to come from elite families and bring their immediate families with them when they leave. But new research reveals this to be simply unfounded. Skilled migrants also tend to earn much more than unskilled migrants, and on balance this means that a university-educated migrant from a developing country sends more money home than an otherwise identical migrant with less education. The survey of African physicians mentioned above found that they typically send home much more money than it cost to train them, especially to the poorest countries. This means that for a typical African country as a whole, even if 100 percent of a physician's training was publicly funded, the emigration of that physician is still a net plus.
Fourth, it is simply not true that all higher education in low-income countries must take place under massive public subsidy. When publicly subsidized higher education is the only way for someone who is not already wealthy to acquire higher education, that person's emigration necessarily means that the subsidy emigrates too. But even in very low-income countries, there are alternative ways of financing higher education. One is to create ways for students to pay up front for their own training, as Makerere University in Uganda has done, but many African universities do not. Another is for the government to give student loans so that students can pay for their own training after the fact, which Kenya has done, but many African governments do not. Both of these break the necessary link between the departure of a worker and the departure of a public subsidy.In the Philippines, training of the vast majority of nurses who leave the country is financed by the students themselves, the recruiters, or the foreign employers, not by the public; there is no reason whatsoever why similar professional schools could not be established throughout Africa.
Then there is the common view that skilled migrants who leave for a rich country never come back.Again this is not true. "A striking example comes from recent research in the Pacific, which has amongst the highest rates of skilled emigration globally. Consider Tonga, a small island nation with a population of only 100,000, where skilled workers might stereotypically be thought to have little incentive to go back. Even in this case, by age 35, just over a third of the nation's academic brightest who had migrated after high school were already back working in Tonga. And in Papua New Guinea, half of the most academically skilled migrants had returned home by their early 30s.
In the United States, more than 20 percent of foreign students receiving Ph.D.s already have firm commitments to return to their home countries at the time of graduation, and many more will likely return in subsequent years. Of course there is large variation across countries: Migrants are much more likely to return to booming economies with good job prospects, as is seen by the flows of Indian tech workers back to India in the last decade. But even in cases where few migrants return, those that do may be particularly motivated by a desire to help their home country and may return to key leadership positions. One recent calculation finds that since 1950, 46 current and 165 former heads of government received their higher education in the United States.
One of the more persistent beliefs is that the" emigration of doctors kills people in Africa.Allowing or encouraging doctors to leave Africa for rich destination countries can reduce the number of doctors within the countries they come from, although even this is not clear if more people undertake medical training with the hope of migrating. However, the level of medical care provided by doctors in Africa depends on a vast array of factors that have little or nothing to do with international movement -- such as scant wages in the public health service, poor or absent rural service incentives, few other performance incentives of any kind, a lack of adequate medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, a mismatch between medical training and the health problems of the poorest, weak transportation infrastructure, or abysmal sanitation systems.
To illustrate just one of these -- the lack of rural service incentives -- policies that limit international movement choices per se do not change the strong incentive for African physicians to concentrate in urban areas far from the least?served populations. Nairobi is home to just 8 percent of Kenya's population, but 66 percent of its physicians. More Mozambican physicians live in the capital Maputo (51 percent) than in the entire rest of Mozambique, though Maputo comprises just 8 percent of the national population. Roughly half of Ethiopian physicians work in the capital Addis Ababa, where only one in 20 Ethiopians lives.
This and the many other barriers to domestic effectiveness of physicians may explain why, across 53 African countries, there is no relationship whatsoever between the departure of physicians or nurses and poor health statistics as measured by indicators such as child mortality or the percentage of births attended by modern health professionals. If anything, the relationship is positive: African countries with the largest number of their physicians residing abroad in the rich country are typically those with the lowest child mortality, and vice versa. This suggests that whatever is determining whether or not African children live or die, other factors besides international migration of physicians are vastly more important. Fiddling with immigration or recruitment policies of destination countries do precisely nothing to address those underlying problems.
But do skilled emigrants build trade and investment ties. "Not always. Just as fears about possible negative effects of brain drain are typically overblown, so is the hype over the ability of countries to tap their diaspora to set up trade and investment. The well-known case of emigrants in Silicon Valley facilitating the growth of the Taiwanese, Chinese and Indian information technology industries is an important example demonstrating that high-skilled workers abroad can have transformative impacts on home country industry. But unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the rule.
In particular, skilled migrants from small islands and from sub-Saharan Africa, where highly skilled emigration rates are the highest, are not likely to be engaging in trade or investment. New surveys find that less than 5 percent of skilled migrants from Tonga, Micronesia and Ghana have ever helped a home country firm in a trade deal, and when they have, the amounts of such deals have been modest. Few migrants from these countries had made investments in their home countries -- at most they had sent back amounts of US$2,000-3,000 to finance small enterprises.
However, skilled workers do engage with their home countries in a number of other ways apart from remittances. They can be an important source of tourism for their home countries; more than 500,000 visitors to the Dominican Republic each year are Dominicans living abroad. They are also tourism promoters: 60-80 percent of skilled migrants from four Pacific countries and Ghana advise others about traveling to their home countries. They indirectly spur trade, through consuming their home country's products, and they transfer knowledge about study and work options abroad. The lack of involvement in trade and investment therefore largely reflects a lack of productive opportunities at home, not a lack of interest on the part of migrants in helping their home countries.
Conventional wisdom once held that the wealth of a country declined when it imported foreign goods, since obviously cash was wealth and obviously buying foreign goods sent cash abroad. Adam Smith argued that economic development -- or the "wealth of nations" -- depends not a country's stock of cash but on structural changes that international exchange could encourage. In today's information age, the view has taken hold that human capital now rules the wealth of nations, and that its departure in any circumstance must harm a country's development. But economic development is much more complex than that.
But thanks to new research, we have learned that the international movement of educated people changes the incentives to acquire education, sends enormous quantities of money across borders, leads to movements back and forth, and can contribute to the spread of trade, investment, technology, and ideas. All of this fits very uncomfortably in a rhyming phrase like "brain drain," a caricature that would be best discarded in favor of a richer view of the links between human movement and development.”
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