Indian Scientists and R&D

Posted on March 4, 2012 by indra

I read a story recently how the only Nobel Laureate of science from India failed to explain his Raman Effect to her mother, Parvati Ammal to her satisfaction, though he tried his best to elucidate his discovery to best of his ability. As reported, “Raman worked all his life in India with the instruments that were available to him. He spent only Rs 2 to construct his instrument spectrograph. ”

The media can, if it wishes, play an active role in building the knowledge economy.

Indian media hardly quenches the thirst of few interested in knowing the developments in science and technology in the country. But I get excited to read the few that I come across:

“Indian defence scientists have developed a technology to package rotis designed to stay edible for 15 days and are hoping the civilian market will consume it with their version of a dal with a shelf life of 12 months.” Indian society perhaps needs today such technologies with kitchen loosing the charm.

“A prototype of an innovative air-conditioning system run by renewal energy, designed by two BIT-Patna students, has been awarded Bry-Air Awards for Excellence in HVAC & R (heating, ventilation, air conditioning and research).” In India’s climatic conditions the exponentially increasing number of airconditioners with affluence must be adding a lot of heat in the atmosphere and warming it. Innovators must go for a solar powered airconditioner and a system where it doesn’t warm the atmosphere.

A scientist from Jaipur, Prof Y K Vijay, Director of Center for Development of Physics Education at University of Rajasthan, has found an easy and affordable way to increase the fuel efficiency of a car using water.

After writing the blog based on Forbes India special issue on Indian Science Second Coming, I was a little morose as all the 18 of them have been working away from the country. I was trying to think of listing some great ones working in India. While Ramans are scarce commodity these days, I was wondering if the ecosystem in India is not conducive enough to get more and more students joining scientific research.

I came across a special issue of ‘India Today’ that had listed the following from different fields:

Pradyut Ghosh in the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) opposite Jadavpur University, Kolkata, is focusing on developing molecules that will free potable water from excess fluoride.

Sivananda Pai heads the Long Range Forecasting (LRF) division of the India Metrological Department (IIMD) in Pune and has introduced a new forecasting system in statistical approach, the world’s first such system.

Upinder S. Bhalla at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore focuses on a very broad area of how the brain works and how it reacts to sensorial stimuli.

Partha Pratim Majumder of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIMBG) in Kalyani is endeavouring to identify genomic alterations in oral cancer,

Bharat R. Char and Usha Barwale-Zehr spearheaded the research of India’s first genetically modified (GM) food, Bt brinjal, produced by the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Limited.

Vishwanath Mohan, chairman of Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialties Centre, has devoted a lifetime researching diabetes and its complications, particularly cardiovascular disease.

Ashoke Sen at Allahabad’s Harish-Chandra Research Institute has been working on string theory which tries to give a unified description of all matter and the forces we observe in nature.

Krishna N. Ganesh conducted breakthrough research in artificial DNA synthesis to diagnose a disease more accurately at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.

Subramaniam Ganesh has attempted to understand the biology behind inherited disorders that affect the brain at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Swapan Kumar Datta at the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, Delhi has focused in the field of genetic modification (GM) of rice.

V.K. Gupta aims to evaluate the potential of waste rubber tyres as an inexpensive sorbent material for wastewater treatment.

Paramjit Khurana at at Delhi University’s Department of Plant Molecular Biology has been working on creating all-weather crops that could increase the country’s productivity manifold.

Atul Gurtu, the particle physicist, participated in the experiment to decode the working of the universe at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.


Ratan Kumar Sinha, a mechanical engineering graduate from Patna University, has developed a thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.

Chetan E. Chitnis is working at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi, is the man behind the lead vaccine against the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, which binds to red blood cells (RBC), causing the disease.

Mitali Mukerji, from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi is focusing her research to understand genome variations in relation to susceptibility to disease for eventually providing personalized medicine.

Avadhesha Surolia, director of the National Institute of Immunology, Delhi, developed a new approach to the treatment of diabetes.

Amalendu Krishna work at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), relates to algebraic cycles and K-theory with no immediate application, but in future may come in handy to prove physical formulas, develop computer tools to make them faster and more efficient, make the internet work faster.

Virender Singh Sangwan is conducting what is the largest ongoing human trial of stem cell technology anywhere at the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad.

Ajay Sood created history in 2003 when his team generated electricity by passing liquid or gas through carbon nanotubes at the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) in Bangalore.

J.N. Goswami, the principal scientist of India’s moon mission succeeded in tracing water molecules on the moon for the first time ever.

Charusita Chakravarty, professor, Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, works on the development and application of quantum and classical computer simulation methods to understand properties of liquids.

Satyajit Mayor have been trying to decode the mysterious ways in which a cell works to apply that information to HIV research, stem cell differentiation, tumorigenesis and cancer treatments at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore.

Siva Umapathy, 52, has a template ready for early cancer detection and is attempting to find ‘biomarkers’ in cells using Raman spectroscopy, the Indian Institute of Science (IIS).

B. Sesikeran is the man who made available the knowhow for double fortified salt (DFS), with iodine and iron, to the 10 leading salt manufacturers in the country.

It provides a glimpse of some Indian scientists busy in cutting edge researches; No doubt, it is just a sample out of thousands of other smaller and bigger ones working in different fields of scientific researches in India. But still the question that haunts is: Is India rising in R&D in science?

Posted in economy, education | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A Passive Prime Minister

Posted on February 29, 2012 by indra

How can a person be so passive and that too when he is the prime minister of billion plus people?

BK Syngal is from my own batch from IIT, Kharagpur whom I met few months back in Bangalore during a reunion meet of our batch. BK has written a column in Financial Express about the ISRO scam and ‘the wrong impression created in the media and the knee-jerk response of the government system thereafter, leading to blacklisting scientists whom the nation owes a debt of gratitude to, and without even giving them a fair hearing.’ And he has all the desired credential to come to that conclusion. After getting an unprecedented 2G scam undergone his prime ministership, Manmohan has become over sensitive to create chaos. Manmohan could have certainly called Madhawan Nair and other scientists along with the present head of ISRO and understood the story fully rather than taking action on basis of a committee report. How can a prime minister remain so passive when Madhavan Nair had been writing so many letters and appealing to him about the injustice done?

Next example of his passivity is the custody of the children of Indian parents in Norway. How respected nations tolerate such humiliation and torture of its citizens? But perhaps Manmohan hardly bothers about the honour of the nation and its people. Why can’t India threaten Norway and break the diplomatic relations with it if necessary? How would he have reacted if it would have happened with his grandchildren? Perhaps Manmohan has reached an age where passivity is but the norms, and so he must leave the chair who can govern. But he is shameless and will continue till he is pulled out.

The Prime Minister remarks that the protests against Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) funded by NGOs based in the US and Scandinavian countries, was unnecessary and will hardly ease the situation. Perhaps, Manmohan is sort of good advisors as well as efficient troubleshooters. Manmohan would have taken the main political parties on his side and have used the process of dialogue and consensus building with key players to sort out the issue that is technical and related to the developmental goals of the country.

And finally the extreme example his passive approach comes from a direction from Supreme Court in which it asks the Centre to implement the ambitious interlinking of rivers project in a time-bound manner and appointed a high-powered committee for its planning and implementation. How mean it was for Manmohan to drop river interlinking project as soon as he took ever as PM just because the river interlinking project was the brainchild of the NDA government. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had formed a task force to get the project going against the backdrop of the acute drought that year

And the one scheme that could have changed the face of Bundelkhand was the interlinking of the Ken and the Betwa, two rivers in the same Yamuna basin, that became a casualty of the UPA’s early phase of unquestioned environmental activism, in spite of the fact that the three riparian states, UP, MP and Rajasthan, had already signed an agreement on it

How can a person such as Manmohan head a country as big and as varied as India? Why should Sonia keep on imposing such an inert person on the country? But how does it affect her personally? She needs a dummy and he is one.

Posted in governance, indian politics | Tagged | Leave a comment

Aakash Still in Aakash

Posted on February 27, 2012 by indra

It happens with most of the government projects. And following the same practice, Aakash, the tablet, was launched. Print and digital media beamed Kapil Sibal’s beautiful face with Aakash in his hand lifted towards Aakash as a trophy won after a grueling game. It promised to bridge the digital divide by reaching to 220 million students at a price unimaginable, only $35. As reported few hundreds of Aakash were distributed to the students of IITs for feedback. A little known company was to manufacture and supply it, and a newly born IIT was made responsible for fixing the specifications, its management and distribution.Many countrymen and I too got excited and waited.

There are already many branded tablets in use, with the Apple’s iPad at the top that sells in million every year. In US, and perhaps some top end ones in India too, many schools have made it mandatory to be carried by their students. Many cheap budget tablets are also commercially available in India too, but certainly not at the price of Aakash that was claimed to be the cheapest as the Tata Motors’ Nano among the passenger vehicles.

Very soon after the launch, the news of the controversies started appearing. Datawind has supplied 10,000 tablets till now, at Rs 2,276 each to IIT Rajasthan. Have they reached 10,000 users? No one lnows.
HRD kept mum and that confused the status. Kapil Sibal would have gone for a press conference and cleared the information on the mess. As reported, while according to the government, Datawind will not be associated with it anymore. The manufacturer claims to have no”official or unofficial” information about it.Further, the three older IITs also are now involved. I don’t understand why three and not one could have done it. Why couldn’t the government name a project CEO? Perhaps, this is the way a government works.
Interestingly, the Aakash related news and views have kept on appearing at regular intervals in print and digital media. It’s a good indicator of the interest of the people at large in the project. Some are:

HCL is planning to bid for the Aakash 2 tablets after the government releases an expression of interest for this purpose.

BSNL in the meantime announced to launch three tablets in partnership with Pantel, a company based in Noida, the cheapest one with a aprice tag of Rs 3,250, a few hundred rupees more than the commercial version of Aakash tablet.

The HRD ministry has also kept itself in news. It is now working for Aakash2 and rightly so. If iPad can have iPad2, why can’t Aakash2? And look at the high power top echelons of technocrats involved. As reported, a committee headed by Secretary, IT, R Chandrashekhar and with IIT directors and other stakeholders on board has already started working to take the Aakash 2 forward.

Here are some interesting media headlines:

Has the battery run out on Aakash tablet?; Aakash: flight of fancy?; Kapil Sibal’s Low-Cost Aakash Tablet May be Shelved; Confusion Reigns Over Datawind’s Future With Aakash;; Going for Cheap: India’s $35 Laptop; Aakash vs Apple: The Aspirational Indian Picks iPad; Is India’s $50 Computer Tablet Really Getting Shelved?; The Aakash is falling; Datawind quashes Aakash runours

Union Minister, Ms D Purandeswari promises the upgraded version of Aakash tablet to be launched in April or May without hike in price. I would have liked a Kapil Sibal‘s statement.

And I wish the dreams of the millions of hands waiting to touch Aakash get materialized.

Posted in education, governance, industry, manufacturing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

R&D and Innovations:Mindset Change Necessary

Posted on February 23, 2012 by indra

I have a reason to appeal to all those in IITs and other great institutions of the country pursuing engineering or pure science subjects: You have been the most talented among hundreds of thousands of the students appearing and succeeding in the toughest entrance examination of the country. You have been trained for excelling in finding solutions for the toughest problems in the fields of science and technology. Please do not prepare and join IIMs or other equally great institutes providing management studies. After all, the entry salary package offered by the big global enterprises, particularly the financial ones is not all that should be the only criteria for deciding to join them. If you switch over to finance and marketing who will lay the foundation of the technological and scientific might of the country without which it can’t dream of becoming a superpower. I do also appeal to the faculty and authority of both, the engineering colleges as well as the management schools, the first one to convince their students about the need of pursuing technology and science and the second one to dissuade the fresher for joining them.

While going through the profiles of 18 scientists of Indian origin in Forbes India who are changing the world, I got excited to find that many of them were engineers who completed their graduate courses in engineering in Indian colleges. And besides from the IITs, some were from less known institutes.

Are these scientists anyway inferior in their achievement than those serving the unscrupulous financial enterprises of US and other developed nations. If the management supremacy was the only reason for US becoming so successful, what was behind the success of Japan, Korea and now China that didn’t have management studies as its priorities?

A glimpse of the illustrious list of Indian scientists and mathematicians over the ages will certainly convince the younger generation that form the top of their respective institutes. Even those who were not that brilliant as them have found their ways to the developed nations and pursued higher education in their subjects of interest and reached the pinnacle. MIT’s Technology ‘TR 35’ list every year includes a number of Indians of Indian origins (View ‘MIT Technological Review’s Top 18 Indian Innovators Under 35’). If the young generation prefers to go to US and other developed nations with better educational facilities in the field of technologies and science, there is nothing wrong. Their achievements are excellent.

The government is also rising to the occasion and coming out with many policy changes to encourage R&D. Proposal for creating 1,000 doctoral and 250 post-doctoral fellowships in reputed foreign universities with monetary support, Indian Innovation fund, The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, National policy on Electronics are some initiatives. Many world class research institutes such as Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, are getting set up. The remunerations are improving. May be very soon, the country will free the possibility of employing even good teachers and researchers from the developed countries.

With a large number of R&D centres of MNCs in India, the prospects for the highly qualified are getting better and all that provides a lot of encouragement to the students in colleges to pursue higher and specialized qualifications.

But the most important thrust must come in improving the quality of the grassroots education particularly in rural India that will provide the largest number and that is not participating as on today in the game of higher education.

However, unfortunately the top management of the Indian industrial houses is still not contributing by collaborating with the educational institutes or by providing significantly higher remunerations to better qualified technocrats, scientists and mathematicians.

Posted in governance, industry, management | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Indian Scientists: Hope for India

Posted on February 20, 2012 by indra

Forbes India March2, 2012 issue, ‘Enough about Aryabhata’ may be a pleasant and inspiring reading to technocrats in India. It tells that cutting edge science is coming back to India. The issue also profiles and refers to many Indian scientists who with their pioneering works in their field are changing the world.

Mriganka Sur, the neuroscientist has done pioneer work in revealing how the brain works. 1

Prof. Jayant Baliga working at GE developed the IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) “because of which the world has not had to build at least 600 hydroelectric dams of the size of the Hoover dam!”.2

Harry Bhadeshia who invented some of the best alloy steel including superbainite, the strongest low alloy steel ever produced that is more than six times stronger than conventional steel. 3

The eighteen scientists selected by a panel of Jury and profiled in the issue are as follows:
The next three
Chaitan Khosla developed a treatment for celiac sprue and also did globally significant work in biodiesel.

Krishna Palem devised a new microchip that uses less energy and also developed solar powered notepad, iSlate.

Rakesh Agrawal works on efficient and cheap energy production from renewable sources such as solar and biomass.

Arvinda Chakravarti, a geneticist has provided insights into many diseases, including hypertension.

Chennupati Jagadish’s work can make solar cells far more efficient through clever use of nanotechnology.

Ajit Lalvani is working on TB prevention and has reported a radical new TB vaccine.

Vivek Sharma is in the research for the Higgs boson that will make us understand the origin of the universe.

Sangeeta Bhatia uses micro- and nano-technology to treat diseases like cancer.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan wants Indian villagers to help fight pollution by using efficient stoves.

Vamshi Mootha showed a correlation between reduced mitochondrial activity inside cell and type2 diabetes.

Anil K Jain is one of the pioneers of biometrics.

Rajiv Doshi developed a new class of therapy apnea.

Prashant Kumta works in the field of energy and medicine, and also in gene therapy, developed a safe and efficient way to deliver genes to cells.
.
Rakesh K Jain is a pioneer in tumour biology and vivo imaging, and has shown that blood vessels can be exploited to improve cancer therapy.

Ajay V. Bhatt was the lead architect responsible for one of the most ubiquitous technologies in the computing world: The USB.

The list might not be the comprehensive. However, it gives a glimpse of the fields of scientific research being carried out by the Indians.

Forbes India made me feel happy, when I was morose after reading a report: Anand Kumar of Super 30, Patna on a visit to China told The Hindu in an interview in Beijing, “In the coming 15 years, I believe that all Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medal winners will come from China.”

There is a hope. I wish some of the Indian journals start reporting about the scientists and technocrats doing some wonderful jobs in many labs and institutions such as IITs, IISc, TIFR etc. The people of India must know about the innovators. And who knows some from among this lot may be the first to get a Nobel. I do also wish that the IIMs and other management schools discourage brilliant technocrats from taking their courses just for initial high salaries.

Posted in education, governance | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Education Today: Ramanujan and Premchand

Posted on February 17, 2012 by indra

Recent studies have found Indian students utterly inferior to the students from almost all countries. It was strange to find the Indians poorer in English and mathematics in comparison to even the Chinese. The Chinese have topped in that survey too.

India has a great history of its mathematicians in ancient India. It continued. The list of the best mathematicians of the world of all time has quite few Indian names- Apstambha (630-560 BC), Panini (520-460BC), Aryabhatta (476-550), Brahmagupta (589=668), Bhascara Acharya (1114-1185), Madhava (!340-1425), Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887=1920). Even today, we may not know their names, but many great mathematicians are working silently in US and there are some even in India.

I could never imagine after going through the report that Indians can be so bad today. But how can the findings be wrong in every case.

I get morose after reading the surveys. I was myself pretty good in mathematics and scored pretty high in School Final Examination. Rakesh and Anand were good too. And so I still have some special interest in mathematics and now in its history.

Mathematics, particularly arithmetic has remained very close to the heart and useful in day to day working life of almost every Indian. In my childhood, my mother and the family trader who use to buy our grains regularly teased and embarrassed me by asking the arithmetic problems regarding sales of grains and its prices or the money to be paid to the labourers. Those were the days when the measures were not metric. I had to struggle, whereas the locals knew the easy way of coming to the final numbers. A rural boy was better in tables.

What I shall like to propound was that the Indian students particularly from rural India were and, may be, are poor in English, but pretty good in mathematics. English was certainly a difficult thing. My uncle could not continue his education in West Bengal and he had to shift to UP Board where English was not compulsory.

As the story goes, Indian Mathematicians, RAMANUJAN failed in English in Intermediate, so his formal studies were stopped but his self-study of mathematics continued.

Interestingly, Premchand, one of the greatest writers of Urdu and Hindi India produced till date, failed in mathematics.

However, it is true that the Indian schools today fail to make the students to love to learn, master and apply the knowledge of these subjects, particularly mathematics. The teachers of mathematics might have scored hundred percent in mathematics in higher examinations, good for getting selected and employed as teachers, but hardly know the ways and means to make the subject interesting enough to make the students grasp the subject instead of mechanically following the process of solving it and getting the correct answers.

I always emphasize that the school curricula up to high school level must have only two subjects-language and mathematics. Mathematics requires much better teachers, the teaching aids, and perhaps essentially good laboratory and technological aids.

I am opinion that all targeted languages, say English, Hindi and French must be taught in comparative manner simultaneously at school stage with emphasis on developing sound communicating skills with sufficiently good vocabulary. All other subjects such as history geography or environmental sciences must be part of the text books in the languages. Those who get interested will certainly go for the specialization in higher classes as in our days we went for the science subjects.

It is heartening that some foundations, schools and their missionary teachers are working to find out a better means of teaching these subjects. I wish the government just facilitates them rather than interfering with their work.
———————
Indian Mathematicians
Ancient- Apastamba, Baudhayana, Katyayana, Manava, Pāṇini, Pingala, Yajnavalkya

Classical-Āryabhaṭa I, Āryabhaṭa II, Bhāskara I, Bhāskara II, Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri, Brahmadeva, Brahmagupta, Brihaddeshi, Halayudha, Jyeṣṭhadeva, Mādhava of Sañgamāgrama, Mahāvīra, Mahendra Sūri, Munishvara, Parameshvara, Achyuta Pisharati, Jagannatha Samrat, Nilakantha Somayaji, Śrīpati, Sridhara, Gangesha Upadhyaya, Varāhamihira, Sankara Variar, Virasena

Modern- Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar, A. A. Krishnaswami Ayyangar, Amiya Charan Banerjee, Raj Chandra Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose, Harish-Chandra, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, D. K. Ray-Chaudhuri, Sarvadaman Chowla, Narendra Karmarkar, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Jayant Narlikar, Vijay Kumar Patodi,Srinivasa Ramanujan, Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, S. N. Roy, Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande, Navin M. Singhi, Mathukumalli V. Subbarao, S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan

Posted in education, governance | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Gloomy Growth, Hopeless Managers

Posted on February 14, 2012 by indra

It is getting serious. Slow down is real. Achievable growth rate for the current fiscal is being reduced again and again.
According to a survey of professional forecasters by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), forecast for growth in gross domestic product (GDP) was scaled down by 60 basis points for 2011-12 and by 40 basis points for 2012-13. The revised GDP forecast for the current year now stands at seven per cent, down from 7.6 per cent earlier. For 2013, the growth forecast is now 7.3 per cent, compared with 7.7 per cent projected earlier.

I wish instead of presenting the dismal decaying governance, the persons at the head of affairs be he is our prime minister; finance minister or head of planning commission or reserve bank would have laid out the roadmap of reversing the growth rate from reducing to increasing. They must do what they can and let the industrialists, farmers and the workers know whatever their expectations from them are.

Growth in savings fell to 13.7% during 2010-11, compared to 21% in the previous year because of high inflation, pulling down the share of gross domestic savings in GDP by 1.5%,

Finance minister is loosing sleep brooding over the huge subsidy. “As the finance minister when I think of enormity of the subsidies to be provided, I lose my sleep. There is no doubt,” Mukherji expects the subsidy bill, pegged at 1.4 lakh crore in the budget, to overshoot the target by 1 lakh crore. Mukherji must prepare a course to cut down the unproductive subsidy. Instead of the subsidy, the amount of expenditure on infrastructures such as irrigation facilities must increase exponentially. The subsidy must gradually end. It is not benefitting the desired needy lot but getting distributed in unscrupulous individuals who design, plan and implement the system to make it easy for them to grab the major portion.

January exports rose 10.1% to $25.4 billion while imports rose 20.3% to $40.1 billion. Import is surpassing export month by month may go to $160 billion increasing the trade gap. Is it all oil? How much of the increase is because of so called globalization and free trade? Interestingly, India may import $100 billion worth of gold. Is there any harm in finding fair means in reducing the import? Is there any effort to keep the import to only the most essential? Do we put any effort for that either through incentive, motivation, or even regulation? Government seems to know the need to curb the import.

Industrial production growth is low. Manufacturing sector might have a policy but hardly has the support of any industrial policy to make it grow visibly bringing hope.

The World Bank recent cautioned India in particular to prepare for a crisis. Should India not take it in right spirit?

Communists suggest to collect the tax concessions given to the rich (nearly R15 lakh crore during the last three years) and to use for public investments to build our much needed social and economic infrastructure while generating large-scale employment. But could not the government demand some control on bad money in public banks? The banks find hundred of reasons for not giving loans of few thousands to a needy farmer or artisans but hardly hesitate to loan millions to many in so-called unscrupulous business community.

And now even CBI director A P Singh says, “It is estimated that around 500 billion dollars of illegal money belonging to Indians is deposited in tax havens abroad. Largest depositors in Swiss Banks are also reported to be Indians.” Can nothing be done to bring back the money? It is amazing just how little India is willing to carefully look at the sources of the $50 billion inflows that the RBI calls “remittances”.
Every year, the government provides direct and indirect subsidies worth R3 lakh crore, half of which is direct.

It will do little or nothing to dismantle the transfer economy that feeds its votes. How long we give on pouring in the tax-payers money in white elephants of public sector companies?

If the government and people are satisfied with the present way of development and growth, how can some divine powers brings it?

Government lacks the mission and vision, perhaps both.

I myself and many are still hopeful for a resurrection of the economy in time with a right kind of leadership. However, many question if Manmohan Singh can fix the government that he made lethargic?

As reported in media, Manmohan Singh recently got out of his slumber and has started taking interest in matters that may help to boost the economy. I wish it’s true and continues.

Posted in economy, governance | Tagged , | Leave a comment

‘Aakash’ Lost in Ministry Mess

Posted on February 12, 2012 by indra

It is unfortunate and shameful too. It is more so where it has become a conflict between the HRD ministry and IIT, Rajasthan. A country can develop its own indigenous advanced interceptor missile and successfully test it. It can compete with the advanced countries in technologies related to nuclear plants. However, if one has followed the recent launch of Aakash (Images), the tablet by Kapil Sibal with so much of fanfare and the mess thereafter, India is so poor in manufacturing.

As I could understand the Aakash project of the HRD Ministry, it was meant for students in schools up to class XII and not for the students for graduate courses in engineering, post graduate or PH.D. As the first thing, I couldn’t understand why the IIT, Rajasthan was given the responsibility of creating the specifications of the tablet and not to other older and mature IITs. Fortunately now the ministry has involved three of them.

I can very well infer that the IIT, Rajsthan prepared the specifications target for just schools. But after the launch, someone in HRD ministry decided to make it for the use of IIT students. And the officers collected feedbacks from IIT students, who knew of Apple’s tablet iPad the best in its class. Datawind’s Aakash was declared as under-specified.

And look at the expectations now “The IIT or HRD now wants Aakash 2 to run at – 20 degree and up to 50 degree Celsius, withstand steep and sudden fall and waterproof against rain with a 1.2 Gega Hertz (Ghz) microprocessor as against 366 mega hertz (Mhz) in Aakash and random access memory (RAM) of 700 megabytes, double of the original. The battery specified can run up to eight hours.” One can produce tablets of this specification if the price is not a constraint. But then why not buy the Apple’s iPads? The schools in India require 220 million tablets. And the 90% or more will require it to be cheap at around $50 a piece.

Aakash must be in two three models- one for the students of lower classes up to Class VI, the second one for the students from class VII to XII and the third one for the students of the higher education, all with increasing prices and better specifications for the applications.

It amazes me also to know that the HRD ministry wishes PSUs such as Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) and Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited (BHEL) to produce the Aakash Tablets. I couldn’t understand the rationale for this thinking. Why couldn’t the government call HCL and Wipro that are already in manufacturing of computers and doing a lot of work in the field of education too in big way through its foundation and seek its assistance? May be that these companies could have found the solution of a tablet for the students in the desired price range effectively.

If the mess is not cleared, it will be another failure of the government missing an opportunity to help in bridging the digital divide of the student community. And the result as someone says will only be disastrous:

“Huge amounts will be spent, either on delivering a crippled device or, perhaps, on not delivering anything, if there are further procurement issues. Economies of scale count, and 220 million is a huge number. Globally, 67 million tablets were sold in 2011. If we assume a price of $50/unit (Rs 2,500), that could work out to a total spend of Rs 55,000 crore. Just for comparison, the entire 2011 HRD ministry budget was Rs 52,000 crore.”

Let the Montreal based Datawind execute the order it got an order if it can execute it with a quality required for school application. For the higher end tablets, HCL and Wipro may be roped.

Shiv Nadar has recently made a statement in an interview: “Five years from now, the entire school will be on a tablet — like an iPad, at a very low cost. India will make an effort to do it. Our Foundation is also working on it. A very good teacher will play the role of augmenter. Also, the teacher will be located anywhere and helping students”. It gives a hope.

I wish HRD Ministry could name a technocrat some one like N R Narayana Murthy for this project.

Posted in education, governance | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Will India’s Education Revolution Succeed?

Posted on February 6, 2012 by indra

Kanti Bajpai has written a wonderful article dealing with a need for bringing about ‘an education revolution’: “No country has transited from being poor and backward to being rich and developed without an education revolution.”

We are hardly to wait for the reports such as one from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009+ test, to know, understand and worry about the abysmal state of our education system.

Interestingly only the students from Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu were selected to participate, as the states were rated the best. We could have also sent the students from the 100 best schools of urban centres. I wonder if the result would have been very different. And even if it would have been somewhat better or more correctly respectable, what would have been its worth?

More worrying is the real situation in the country. More than 60% of the schools in even urban regions are very poor in standard of teaching. And more than 60 % of the students are having their schooling in the rural India, where the primary education, I mean learning at primary school stage, is just non-existent. The teachers are neither motivated nor capable to make even a normal child learn. The parents are not educated enough to help the school going children to make up the shortcoming of the schooling with the poorly qualified teachers. There is hardly any tuition or coaching facilities. Going to school and staying there getting taught by the teachers, is hardly interesting. I don’t feel like believing that attractions of getting the mid day meal keep them in school or make them learn.

Surprisingly, the conditions even in the majority of urban schools are not very encouraging. Even the education standard of the highly expensive schools is not comforting. There may be many excuses, be it the skill of the teachers or the very high numbers of students for each teacher to handle.

I was surprised that many schools are outsourcing the teaching of the mathematics and science subjects in senior classes to the coaching enterprises. Tuition in group is another prevalent way, though costly as well as stressful for the students that is popularly used to make up the shortcomings of the school teaching. There are many excuses put forward by the school authorities for the deficiency, but hardly any out of the boxes solution to improve the quality of the education to the desired level.

While some corporate houses such as Nadar Foundation or Premji Foundation and quite a number of NGOs are trying to improve the quality of education for the children from the deprived and rural families, the sum total of their work is just negligible considering the number requiring the similar facilities.

I wish at least 100 top corporate houses would have pulled together their resources to scale up the work of these successful models of educational institutions. Can the energy of the whole nation converge for providing the quality education for all and every child? It will certainly be a revolution that the nation needs badly. Unlike all other projects till date, the government and the political leadership must cooperate to get the country educated and that too with quality teaching at all the schools.

Posted in education, governance | Tagged | Leave a comment

Two Wished Election Codes

Posted on February 4, 2012 by indra

Many would have imagined that the present UP election would be fought on the issues such as corruption or the world’s worst poverty prevailing in the country and more so in the state that is undergoing election battle. But on all battle fronts, the issue present is either community or caste. Is it in the interest of the country? Should not the Election Commission or the highest in judiciary if not the parliamentarians ponder over the subject? Should not the EC ban the mention of caste and community from any election campaign? Will it be unconstitutional? If yes, why can’t the constitution is changed?

While the other codes of conduct once the election dates are declared are causing the slow down or almost shutting of government functions, the election time does also cause a lot of hidden social turmoil because of the mentions of lolly pops for certain castes and community.

What will be the ultimate of reservation? I would not have asked it but unfortunately the reservation accommodated for very genuine reasons in constitution has been perpetualized for political reasons and because none wants to irritate those who had been beneficiaries. In the present campaign, the Congress Party seems to promise an offer 4.5%-9% out of 27% of OBC reservation for minority. SP has gone to promise 18% for minority. This figure is based on the percentage of minority in overall population.

Tomorrow each of the castes or community in India may ask for the share of reservation of its caste based on its own population or may go for even protest and some political party may back those groups. Let me explain a little more clearly. A particular caste among the category of schedule caste or a specific tribal group may ask for fixing up the reservation for it based on its population.

Are not the politicians and community leaders playing with a fire that can divide the various communities and made them bitter against each other? Can the people and their leaders, legislators or judiciary give a clear decision based on the worst situation?
Will the religious leaders be forbidden from issuing fatwas for voting for a political party or a candidate? Such religious fatwas must be banned in election time. The great country got divided once on basis of religion and suffered the misery that was unprecedented. Why can’t the reference of caste or community in open be constitutionally banned and instead the whole effort is directed to the right education and skilling of the people?

I am sure the promises of reservation for the minority community out of the permitted reservation for OBC are already creating ripples in the society.

I thought with the expansion of education, the youngsters in North India will make the seniors shun community and caste. Though it has not happened till date but perhaps good education for all will be the only answer to end this menace. What EC or parliament can’t do with its mighty power, the people will do that. And that is the hope for the region.

Posted in economy, governance, indian politics | Tagged | Leave a comment