Manmohan is not honest

Posted on January 31, 2012 by indra

How can a person who causes damage to the image of the nation he represents be honest? ‘A common quip in New Delhi is that Ms Gandhi has power without responsibility; whereas Dr Singh has responsibility without power.’ However, I don’t vouch for even this much credit to Manmohan. Manmohan Singh is just a mediocre so far administrative capability is concerned.

A few recent instances of his administrative lapses are more than anything else to prove that. Manmohan didn’t do anything to better his image and at least in these incidents Sonia would not have interfered.

Manmohan has unnecessarily allowed the age issue of the Army Chief to linger. As soon as Manmohan came to know of it, he would have called the General and sorted it out talking one-to-one basis with him soon the issue. The whole issue is in a bad taste to the citizens of the country. It sets a bad precedent.

The way Manmohan has allowed the reprimand of the scientists of ISRO to be handled by his very poor assistants is another glaring example of his poor way of administration. Why couldn’t he call Mr. Nair, the former chief of ISRO, and discuss? Does Manmohan want to prove that he is better than his counterparts in Pakistan? Can anyone believe that the action was so messy because of Sonia’s interference?

Don’t the people of India know by now the vacillating approach of Manmohan on the issue of identity card issue? Couldn’t Manmohan mediate between Montek Singh and PC Chidambaram fighting for sanctioning fund for Aadhar project headed by Nandan Nilekani?

Time and again, Manmohan gets out of his slumber and does something that brings a hope and then he sleeps again. He had a press conference with media men and promised that he would regularly to do that to discuss the critical current issues of the country with media. After the very first meet where he had chosen few, the others kept on waiting for getting a chance to talk to Manmohan directly in the next meetings. But that never happened.

Manmohan as Prime Minister could show his administrative capability in improving the rating of ‘Doing Business in India’. Manmohan could get his minister change the emphasis to the outcome rather than allocation. He couldn’t bring any effective mechanism to monitor the big projects that decide the growth of the country? Manmohan couldn’t take any image building infrastructure project and get completed the long promised ones such as the railway link to Kashmir valley. Many a time I find Mayawati better than Manmohan. At least she could give a world class F1 course in record time and Yamuna Express way for state. Why couldn’t he take a high speed bullet train project even between a short distance to prove that India can do that? Is there any one project including one being demanded in memory of our brave jawans that can be associated with his name as initiator?

As reported recently, the steel minister boasted of India becoming the fourth largest steel manufacturing country of the world. Is it not in spite of the government? India could by now certainly become the second largest steel manufacturer if the government would have taken some bold policy decisions.

Could not Manmohan take some bold step for shipping sector instead of bemoaning for not spending 75% of the fund allocated for it in 11th plan?

I am sure for all the above failures in performance of Manmohan, Sonia’s interference cannot be a rational excuse.

Why the PM always is found failed?
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PS: Two news papers one of English and the other of Hindi have the same news on Manmhoan Singh in its headlines based on some article in Time Magazine. The headline in Hindustan Times is ‘Manmohan a quiet giant who could make history‘ ; and that in Hindi happens to be: अमेरिकी पत्रिका ने मनमोहन को बताया ‘आत्मघाती’. I am at loss. Do both mean the same? Did the Hindi Newspaper Bhaskar translate it from Hindustan Times and did a poor job? Is it the news based on an old article in Time magazine, planted by new media advisor in PMO that has now a new head?

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From Nano to Aakash

Posted on January 29, 2012 by indra

Four years ago Tata Motors unveiled the Nano (Images). Overnight Ratan Tata became an iconic figure of auto industry. India got a unique global recognition of an industrial nation with capability of breakthrough innovation. The world recognized India’s mastery of frugal engineering, frugal manufacturing, and frugal management.

However, a number of hurdles and management’s perception about the marketing made Nano’s sales trail far behind the early expectations when it went into regular production at Sanand. Recently Ratan Tata agreed about Nano’s failure to get fast enough volume sales: “I don’t think we were adequately ready with an advertising campaign, a dealer network. The Nano is not a flop. Tata Motors failed to capitalize on the early excitement surrounding the launch of the world’s cheapest car.” Nano didn’t flood the car market as expected. May be that Indian consumers are not willing to buy the cheapest because of a status hurdle.

Another product (Image) is facing similar fate.

Few months ago, Sibal launched a very ambitious project of $35 tablet- Aakash with a lot of fanfare. It was meant to leapfrog the application of technology in education to assist the millions of school children. Datawind was the manufacturer of the tablet. IIT, Rajasthan was providing technical support and deciding on specification. However, that project is also facing an unimaginable delay or may be premature demise. Many like me are shocked and shore about these halfhearted endeavours.

Sometimes I feel like believing that while Aakash was the cheapest solution just for handling the content required for school going children. However with the acquaintance of the top end tablets such as Apple’s iPad available in the market, the users took Aakash as a toy tablet of not much use to them. However, the deficiencies pointed about was its slow speed, heating up quite quickly, poor battery life, the resistive touch-screen, and it supported only Wi-Fi access to the Internet.

Interestingly, Aakash has generated huge excitement among gadget geeks and internationally renowned columnists alike. When Datawind offered Aakash’s slightly more expensive cousin, the UbiSlate7+ online on December 14 2011, the company in less than a week got orders for 60,000 tablets.

Initially it appeared that the manufacturer was having production constraints, but now as it appears the Aakash will require major up gradation and may not reach the market pretty soon.

I wish all IITs and its scientists and engineers would have helped Aakash to succeed once announced and launched by India’s HRD Minister so proudly for the sake of the poor students who can’t afford the i-Pads or similar tablets.

As such a right tablet for the school children at even $50 is still not ready though many dreamt of having one many years ago. If Datawind is not a right vendor or the services of some other reputed manufacturers must be sought to get over the drawbacks of the Aakash and make it really useful to the student community. The burden on their back must get reduced. The learning must get interesting and wide.

The Aakash project should not end up with adding one more in the list of failed tablets. One must remember the history of Popularly known, OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), that was MIT’s Negroponte’s initiative aimed at deploying millions of rugged, ultra low-cost, individually connected laptops to children between six to 12 years of age of developing nations that lack access to such devices. Aakash must serve the same purpose for Indian schools. I wonder if all the children in rural schools are ready to use a gadget like Aakash to bring equity in education.

However, the financial result of Apple announced last week tells the huge requirement of a gadget such as i-Pads. And I could get the insight of its manufacturing in China. I wish those interested must read the stories of the wonder called i-Pads and its manufacturing, though as usual some disturbing news came about the hardships in the Chinese manufacturing companies that has become a good masala for some media men.

Indian manufacturers, be it Godrej Chhotukool or Amul Auto’s tractors, and Indian thinkers such as Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, have been the pioneer in frugal engineering. India must go for a real big push to manufacturing electronics and Kapil Sibal must prove himself at least in one project.
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PS: Google has 88,100,000 entries for Nano car (Images) and that for Aakash tablet (Images) 3,820,000 as on January, 2012 ar 4 PM in India.

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A Winning Way for Vulnerable BJP

Posted on January 25, 2012 by indra

Some identify BJP as a party of business men particularly traders. And perhaps that was the reason that it opposed FDI in multi-brand retails that I and many like me didn’t like or agree. Most of the country men like or should like BJP as an alternative to Congress Party that survives as because there is some Nehru descendent owns it. Many like me don’t like the sycophancy and the family rule of Congress Party, though it has still many good leaders.

BJP or for that matter NDA even with its allying political parties such as opportunistic JD=U, fascist Shiv Sena and community-linked SGP can never win a majority at centre. With the major minority community that considers it as anti- Muslim not voting for it, BJP will always be having a big handicap. India has many constituencies where the percentage of minority voters is significant with overall population of around 20%. For example, Muslims are expected to influence the outcome of the UP results in at least 130 constituencies where their numbers are large. Keeping this in mind, the BSP has fielded 84 Muslim candidates, the Samajwadi Party 75 and the Congress 61.

In India today with the proliferation of political parties, the elections are won and lost by additional few percentages of votes in favour. How can a community with population of 18% or more be neglected? The way BJP can bring the minority on its side requires it to innovate some acceptable programmes and projects that can benefit the majority of this minority.
I was really impressed with a report coming out of Bihar in Telegraph: “Jan. 14: The BJP today announced the launch of Shiksha Abhiyan, a programme under which party leaders and workers from the state to block-levels would convince people to send their wards to school.”

This may prove a wonderful move. Amartya Sen says, “Focus on health and education allowing growth to take care of itself.” I wish to make it further simpler and say, “Focus on just education and you will win the people.”

I wish BJP pulls out all its resources and goes to every family in rural and urban areas and approaches the parents without any bias. It can always show more focus on the minority and deprived families without telling that. Its own members or volunteers drawn from all the institutions of priviledged class such as one done in Times Group Teach India programme must convince the parents about the need of education and sell the dreams about the education that can catapult the family ahead and make them enjoy a better quality of living.

If BJP can’t bring the minority and dalit through embracing them in right manner, it must forget to lead or govern the nation that it wishes. However, the party will have to be cautious while taking up this massive education and skilling drive. The party must be sincere and move fast so that the project can distinguish it from the other parties that are still depending on money and manpower. It must avoid any conflict and invite all parties to join it in its drive. It must not do anything that can raise the controversy of its move as saffronisation of education and skilling.

The younger India will love to work for BJP if its leadership is innovative and inspirational and if it agrees to incorporate democratic means for all the decisions such as the selection of candidates for the elections at various levels. It will have to get itself engaged in the social work at grassroots level that helps even an ordinary person to get all his rights and benefits provided by the government and other agencies.

I don’t know if the BJP leadership will agree for taking the trouble for a future of its own or it will go the way only what RSS wishes, as many say. And let me be frank, I could not get convinced by any RSS men till date.

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For Parents of School-going Children

Posted on January 23, 2012 by indra

It’s again the examination time, be it finals or entrance examinations. Examinees as well as guardians or parents are equally stressed. While the coaching centres including private tuition sector remain crowded, the schools appear deserted. Teachers have shifted to the coaching centres or doing a fair business from home itself. The traditional schools and institutions but for some, are today just the registering centres and not for holding classes and teaching or completing syllabus of the courses. Are you one of such a lot of parents?

Attaining excellence in education is long drawn process. It demands sacrifices from the students as well as parents with no outing, no TV, no partying and many things. Lucky are very few who don’t make such sacrifices and still their children excel.

As your child starts growing, you will have to change your life style a little and create an ambience for the child to get interested in study and school. Please start buying good books and magazines and engage yourselves in reading them in your spare time. Your interest at home influences your child immensely. The child must perceive that studying through books aided by the school teachers, supervising parents, tutors or friends will be good for his or her life.

You must keep a close watch on the interest of your child. Please notice if by the time your child reaches class VII standard exhibits a clear cut interest. Don’t force him to prepare for becoming engineers that has become the major thrust of parents these days. It will be excellent if his activity indicate an aptitude for becoming engineer.

Are you one of those parents who wish to see your child into IITs or any other engineering institutes with good ranking? If he is among the top five in his class with good interest and scores in science and mathematics, you can try for these top engineering colleges.

If you do really wish to and your ward also wants to prefer, don’t loose heart even he doesn’t get into these top institutes. There are many tier I and tier 2 engineering colleges. Those are equally good. Try to impress on your child that the name of the college behind the degree of engineering hardly matters once he gets in to real career.

If your child has not succeeded to enter in IITs or the targeted institute, there is nothing to worry. Please appreciate that only 1-2% succeeds out of about 5 lakhs of the students who appear for the entrance examination every year. Don’t waste time and money for going one more time for coaching. Instead try to get into the best possible private engineering college suited to your means. If your child works hard, he will become equally good engineer. I found a large number of the engineers from unknown and unheard of engineering colleges doing really good in American companies in US or in MNCs in India.

I have some advices for those whose children succeed to get into engineering.

Once your gets into engineering course and starts liking it, please dissuade him to get engaged in preparing for MBA or UPS examinations that has become a practice now with the engineering students. One must go for MBA only after an experience of 4-5 years at work. Unfortunately except for some institutes such as ISB, other institutes do allow fresh graduates for its MBA course. But then why did one go for engineering? One can do equally good by going for MBA even after any graduate course of his choice?
While in the final year of engineering, your ward has few other options too besides joining a company. Why should he not go for further studies such as M.Tech or Ph.D.? Many tech industries now prefer persons with higher qualification with R&D and innovation becoming a very important activity in this competitive world.

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India’s R&D, Science and Mathematics

Posted on January 19, 2012 by indra

We had a lot of hope from Nilesh, the youngest son of my cousin Nirmal. He wasted a year in Kota taking coaching for getting into IITs and then took admission in a private engineering school near Agra. He has just completed his first semester of engineering. He had preferred for electrical and electronics as his branch, not because he had interest in it, but as it could get him better chance for placement from the institute itself. Nilesh was with me last week. I was amazed when he talked about doing MBA as his goal after completing engineering. I advised him to focus on his engineering. MBA from a good college is not only expensive, but also makes the 4-year education of engineering a waste. More prudent way out perhaps is to go for an executive management course related to the sector the engineering graduate gets into for his initial employment. However, most students of engineering today are having almost similar wishes as Nilesh wanted. I don’t know if Nilesh would follow my advice.

Nilesh and his age group are least interested in mastering or even knowing the basics of their preferred subjects. Perhaps MGK Menon revealed the scenario very rightly when he said, “Most people are searching for money. So those who do science and are very good at it, want to do IIT entrance. Then they go for these tuition and so on. And by the time they finish with all those examination efforts and the tuition, they are completely drained. There’s nothing much left in them. And then they get into an IIT, and then what is their aim in getting into an IIT? Not to do engineering, per se, but to then get out and do an MBA. And from an MBA, they want to go into areas like finance, and so on. And very large number want to essentially enter the IT sector, which is the money-making sector.” Thus the left outs for teaching and R&D functions are certainly not the best, though only the best would have been desirable.

Let us look at few recent media reports in support of what I have tried to state:

“A student of the coveted institute, Siddharth Shah, was the first student from his batch to be picked up by a leading global investment bank during the summer internship. The company paid him Rs 2.5 lakh per month during the internship. With such credentials, Shah would be among the highest paid students of the institute in the campus placement.” Why should not this become the dream of all who can do that?

“Six undergraduate students at Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), University of Delhi, have walked away with offers from Deutsche Bank with a salary package of Rs 16.5 lakh per annum.”

“95% of students graduating this year from IIM-B are from a technical background (93% from engineering and 2% from science, commerce students make up 3% of the student body while other fields account for a mere 2%.It’s not much different at IIMA, where engineers constitute 91% of the student body.” “In sharp contrast, Harvard Business School (HBS) has the following division of its class of 2012 based on undergraduate majors: humanities and social sciences (43%); engineering/natural science/technology (33%); business administration (21%). Or look at Wharton: humanities and social sciences (43%), business (29%), engineering/math/science (25%); and others (3%).” Does it not require a serious overview to stop the loss of the best engineers by the policy makers who must consult and collaborate to find the solution desirable for the industry as well as for the candidates? “Should not tech pros get an MBA?”

The lure of the initial package in million offered by the private enterprises, particularly the financial institutions, from all over the world in the mind of the student community and parent fraternity is creating havoc for learning oriented education and the result of this aggressive but unscrupulous invasion on the knowledge society will be horrendous. India will hardly get the first class brain for the really skill requiring professions such as those of doctors, engineers and scientists. And this chaos is coming from the business model innovators of US. I hardly know what can be done about it.

Further, with globalization and scarcity of talent and trained persons, the best of India’s brains still prefer to go to foreign soils for studies or jobs. The next best try to get into the MNCs that have established its shop in India. For the analytical jobs, many financial giants such as HSBC are hiring chartered accountants, MBAs and graduates in engineering, mathematics and statistics.

Our education system as such is hardly encouraging the students to appreciate and get interested in knowing any subject to its ultimate depth. It’s just a chance that some rare species for reasons unknown go for teaching and R&D.

India’s disadvantage is also due to the wide spread deprivation and the lack of education of the parents in the majority of the population. They just can’t give up an opportunity to get to the top ranking jobs.

Under this scenario, how can one think of getting in competition with the country where the education at early stage itself as well as the society, make a student interested in pursuing a subject of interest rather than a subject that pays the most as initial package?

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India vs.China: R&D

Posted on January 13, 2012 by indra

The prime minister’s speech at Bhubaneswar at 99th India Science Congress made many revelations about the nation status on R&D after six plus decades of independence. As usual, I felt like compiling a data on India vs. China. The objective is to tell academicians and policy makers of the nation that India must rise and let them help in this by making education a mission without which a nation can’t become a super power.

1.India published 233,027 scientific papers in 2010 compared to 969,315 research articles by China.

2.China recorded a 22.83% growth in publishing scientific research compared to 14.27% by Indian researchers.

3.On an index of state of art science, China was placed at 0.86 with India coming on the negative end of the scale at -2.48 though the citation levels (how many other researchers read the papers) was higher for India than China on average.

4.India had 159 areas of competencies in different scientific fields while China had 885 such areas. While India is publishing more in chemistry. engineering, biology and biotech, China is publishing a lot more in computer sciences, medical specialties, mathematics, physics and health sciences.

5.China patents five times more than India for every billion dollars of GDP and the growth in registering new patents has risen rapidly over past five years. In 2005, China had filed 93,485 patents and this galloped to 153,060 in 2007.

6.China is going to target investing 3% of its GDP into scientific endeavours by 2020 while India is still ‘aspiring’ to ramp it up from the current 0.9% to 2% by 2017.

7.China’s GDP is $6,980 billion as per IMF compared to India’s $1,843 billion. China investing about 2.5% of its GDP last year in S&T works out to $174 billion compared to India’s 0.9% which works out to roughly $16.5 billion.

8.Even a decade ago in 2002-03, China had 8.5 lakh researchers producing 40,000 PhD theses in sciences compared to India’s 1.5 lakh people producing about 1,000 PhD theses in R&D.

9.While China invests heavily through state-run scientific institutions, it also pulls in a large amount of private investment from outside. It has nearly 100 international research facilities that have come up since 2003.

10.India’s public investment in R&D has, in comparison, gone down with time and has been unable to attract partnerships with the private sector as well.

11.Among the four nations that have achieved an all-members-gold IMO (International Maths Olympiad) with a full team, China has been at the top with 11 times, Russia and USA 2 times each and Bulgaria 1 time. Is it not surprising that the nation of Bhrahamgupta, Bhaskaracharya, the inventor of zero and decimal, is no where in mention?

12.The Global Innovation Index 2011 ranks India at 62 among 125 nations’ innovativeness, while China is at 29. Interestingly, the main author of the Index is an Indian.

I shall agree that there are very rational reasons for India’s poor performance. I shall discuss that next time.

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Science, R&D and Prime Minister

Posted on January 10, 2012 by indra

A Prime Minister is really under strains and stresses, facing hundreds of problems of this most populous democracy on the globe. He can have an honest intention and so promises but can also expect to be excused for not keeping a tab on the implementation. India and its prime minister wish to be a super power. Why should it not? If China can, why can’t we?

Recently, it appeared Manmohan Singh was morose once he came to know of the India’s status of R&D in comparison to China while preparing a speech for the 99th India Science Congress at Bhubaneswar. His speech made us more morose. He himself gave a lot of real facts on education and R&D in India.

“The number of scientific publications by Indian scientists working in India has increased at more than 12% per annum against the global average of 4% over the last few years,. India has moved from the 15th rank in 2003 to the 9th rank in 2010 with respect to the number of publications in peer valued journals.

The University of Rajasthan leads among the top 50 Indian scientific institutions in citations per paper under international collaboration.

India produces 8,900 PhDs annually in science and engineering, three thousand more than five years ago.”

Manmohan was perhaps trying to prove how hard his government worked for improving R&D in India.

India’s R&D-spend has remained lower than 1% for more than a decade now, 0.65% in 1996, 0.75% in 2001, 0.89% in 2006, 0.8% in 2009 and 0.9% in 2010. And Manmohan promised that ‘the total R&D spending as a percentage of GDP would increase to 2 per cent by the end of the XII Plan Period from the current level of about 0.9 per cent.

Manmohan also expressed his unhappiness that ‘Industry contributed only 25 per cent of the total R&D expenditure today, and must increase its contribution’.

“GE and Motorola have created world class technology hubs in India, while India’s own industry has not done so, except perhaps in the pharma sector.”

Will his promise of the increased government investment in R&D get materialized? Interestingly, as reported, Manmohan promised the same what Atal did few years ago on the same platform.

Will Manmohan sit with the Indian CEOs of technology companies, convince them and take a positive commitment and ask his minister of science and technology to monitor and be accountable?

If Manmohan is pained with ‘the recent survey of 2000 Indian women PhD holders in science that had found 60% of them unemployed’, will he ask some agency to investigate and find out the ways and means to improve the situation?

Manmohan Singh passed on some good news too about girls and women.

“49.6% of the INSPIRE awardees are girls. More than 60% of INSPIRE fellows pursuing doctoral research are women.” These are all improving performances. Unfortunately, the competitors have gone ahead. India will have to have a strong strategy to catch up.

“The country’s Agni Missile programme has a women scientist — Tessy Thomas at the helm and for the first time last year three women scientists received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize as compared to total 11 women awardees for all the years since 1958 upto last year.

A proposal to build national capacity and capability in supercomputing will be implemented by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore at an estimated cost of Rs5, 000 crore.

Another proposal is there to set up a Neutrino Observatory at Theni in Tamil Nadu at a cost of Rs1,350 crore to study the fundamental particles that form the universe.

Tribals of Koraput region received global recognition for conservation of bio-diversity and developing climate resilient farming systems.”

China has 16 universities in the top 500 (13 in engineering, 1 in medicine and 1 in social sciences) while India has just 2. China has 6.8% of the world’s top 500 universities and accounts for 19.8% of global population—India’s figures are 0.4% and 17.1%, respectively.

India’s gross enrolment ratio in higher education has gone up—from a dismal 5% in 1980 to 12.5% in 2007 to 17.27% in 2009-10—with the rise in GDP growth. But India requires hundreds of new universities and thousands of colleges and must focus on the quality of teaching and research.

It is not bad to make China as benchmark for adding capacity, but the system must be designed to ensure the quality of the new institutes as we;; as for improving the existing ones.

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Media and 99th India Science Congress

Posted on January 7, 2012 by indra

Media is considered one of the important pillars of democracy. It must assist in covering and propagating the news of national importance. The 99 th India Science Congress, the greatest show for the science and scientists of the country got held at Bhubaneswar between Jan 3-7, 2012 with a theme ‘Science and Technology for Inclusive Innovation – Role of Women’. Interestingly, for the same reason, perhaps, Geetha Bali, vice chancellor of the Karnataka State Women’s University, Bijapur headed the Congress.

On January 3, 2012, I saw one full-page advertisement in national newspapers with photographs of prime minister, governor and chief minister of Odisha, and two central ministers but neither any scientists nor the head of the Science Congress. How can the country expect the people to know about the science unless the country’s rulers don’t give right amount of space to scientists or the work getting carried out in scientific and technological sector?

I was expecting the print as well as digital media to cover the Science Congress sufficiently so that its importance and message could have gone across to the millions of the country men for all the days from the Science Congress. However, the media thought it prudent to keep the function a local issue. It covered the opening speech of the prime minister, may be borrowing from the website of the prime minister, but just that much. For the next few days the national printed media did hardly carry any news of the Congress and its various conferences and expositions and exhibitions.

Interestingly while Union ministers Kapil Sibal, Vilasrao Deshmukh and Ashwani Kumar skipped their schedule participation at the Children’s Science Congress, running parallel to the ISC, former president APJ Abdul Kalam did what he is best at doing: Igniting young minds towards science, asking “Do you want to fly?”, and evoking a “loud yes” from thousands of participants. The former president asked students to repeat his poem with him: “I am born with potential…I am not meant for crawling; because I have wings, I will fly.” I got haunted by the question, ‘Why did the ministers skip the function?’

I don’t know why the media didn’t report anything from the lectures of the distinguished scientists or the Nobel laureates present in the Congress.

Nirupama Rao, India’s ambassador in US addressed the Congress as the main speaker. However, some columnists tried to answer the question raised by prime minister. Interestingly according to prime minister, ‘nearly 60% of the 2000 Indian women PhDs in science were unemployed and the main reason cited by them was lack of job opportunities.’ Many employed ones might be busy in doing nonscientific assignment too.

However, here is some interesting information from the Congress from blogs:

Dr. Michiel Kolman, Senior Vice President , Elsevier, raised this thought-provoking question, “India – A Scientific Super Power to be?, in his presentation on India’s research performance over the last five years. “India retains its position in the top 10 nations worldwide and also shows an impressive growth of 14.3% which is exceeded only by China with 22.8% among the top 10 nations. Interestingly, the quality of the publications is determined by the citations per article, based on data in Elsevier’s SciVerse Scopus database, has been rising over the past 5 years (2.0 to 2.7 citations per article) outperforming China (2.2) but still below the larger science nations such as the UK and the US which are at 6 while Japan is at 4 citations per article.”

Dr Vijay Bhatkar, Chairman, ETH Research Lab, Pune delivered a special lecture on India’s initiatives in Exascale Supercomputing, and that India’s mission is to build petascale supercomputer by 2012 and exascale by 2018/2020. “At present, however, only four systems from India are in the top 500 list against 41 systems from China. India’s best system ranked 47th in the list of top 500. At present the top first ranked supercomputer (K Computer) is with RIKEN, Japan and the 2nd ranked is with China.”

The Indian media is wasting its money and resources in many unnecessary contents. I wish it meets aspirations of the thinking class too.

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The Changing Bihar

Posted on January 4, 2012 by indra

I am really happy today. Bihar has come out with a roadmap of 1.5 lakh crore for spending on improving its agriculture. But more so with a statement of the development commissioner: “Agriculture will be taught as a subject from high school (from Class IX). Agriculture will be another stream apart from traditional science, art and commerce for students at the Intermediate level,” I have suggested this in my writings about Bihar. It might not be my idea but some in Bihar government must be having similar thinking as mine on the subject.

I am sure the curricula will be more practice based particularly in rural Bihar. In good old days when we attended the village schools, we used to have a good size flower growing area in the front of the school and the lone teacher encouraged the students for growing seasonal flowers. I saw a similar thing a middle school in Silicon valley USA in 2008. The step taken by Bihar government will certainly bear long term result. It will make the students to appreciate the farming as an honest and respectful career. Agriculture today integrates traditional knowledge with science and technology.

With the decreasing landholding of the farmers, it will be only with scientific approaches that the farming can remain as sustainable profession. The country requires thousands of farmers like Sumant of Nalanda who has produced a global record in production of paddy. Every farmer must emulate and improve his ways to average the yield to global standard. ‘Yields per hectare of food grains, fruits and vegetables in India are far below global averages. India’s rice yields are one-third of China’s, and about half of Vietnam’s and Indonesia’s. Even India’s most productive states Punjab’s yield of rice in 2010 was 3.8 tonnes per hectare against the global average of 4.3 tonnes. The average yield for apples in India (J&K) is about 11 tonnes per acre compared to the US, New Zealand, Israel or China, where yields range 30-70 tonnes per acre. Bihar’s example of the inclusion of agriculture as subject in school may be copied by other agriculture dominated states to. With 60% of Indian population dependent on farming, this is a welcome move. Workers with the knowledge will certainly help in meeting the yield target.

However, there is another area that I shall the government administration to appreciate. Rural women need enlightenment and informal education more than anything else to become more productive. Can the government take a 5-year project for reaching to these rural women, to make them appreciate their important role, the basic hygiene, the need of sanitation, and certain skills that make them empowered to contribute to the society?

Many of these women can certainly be trained to produce many saleable consumer items based on inputs available locally for urban population and add to the earning of the family. Surprisingly, in many regions in Bihar one can observe that the younger generation of the female population are not interested to work and participate in sharing the burden of the family copying the life style of the women of the well-to-do families in the villages. Can such imparting of skills to the girl students be also planned?

Can the government find a scheme to provide some incentive to the girl students to teach their parents at home whatever they are taught in schools? The scheme will be multiplying the output. It is important to emphasize on the slogan, ‘Educate a Woman and She Educates a Family’.

I shall be looking forward to see the agriculture in the schools around my village.

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2011: The Year of Shame or Pride?

Posted on January 2, 2012 by indra

Was 2011 a year of shame as many call it or a year of pride as the other group claims? Never in the history of Independent India had so many ministers and executives were in Tihar for different scams. Never a chief minister sacked so many ministers as in UP. Far in South, a chief minister got detained for land scam because Lok Ayukta wanted that.

Should 2011 be not a year of pride that a simple man such as Anna Hazare made millions to come on streets to fight corruption? After many years India saw the rejuvenation of younger India participating against a serious national malady such as corruption. Was it not something to pride that the parliament that hardly work, sat for passing one Bill demanded by the people and witnessed some of the best debates? August 27 and the debate producing the sense of the house was the pinnacle of the parliamentary democracy and the midnight shaming chaos and fiasco on the floor of Rajya Sabha on December 29 was the worst of the caricatures of the parliamentary democracy.

A corruption-tainted UPA government hibernated suffering policy paralysis and one could see a great finance minister of 1991 really at loss and almost helpless as prime minister of the country. And the people of the country found themselves almost leaderless. Economy slowed, Sensex bottomed. Inflation appeared unmanageable and rupee lost its value the most. Both the economist prime minister and finance minister kept themselves in blaming the external factors as reasons without taking even any significant step of their own. But more shaming they did never try to consult the opposition to take them on the same side to face the trouble with some bold steps.

However, some news reports kept the hope alive,

The young students got Aakash for them in 2011. Indians bought almost 3 lakh of branded tablets in 2011.Indian schools, teachers and educationists are conscious of the shortcomings of its education sector and trying to work on ways out through technology. Tablets are getting popular. Some are trying to reach rural India too.

India is far behind in agriculture productivity. Yield is poor. But that is the potential too. A young farmer in Nalanda, Sumant, set a new world record in paddy production. Sumant managed to grow 224 quintals of paddy per hectare beating the world record held by Chinese farm scientist Yuan Longping.

Even the 2011 World Bank report ranked India 132 among nations for the ease of doing business. And the government fails to take a note of it. However, the zeal of Indian entrepreneurship of the young Indians is moving ahead providing pride and making even the advanced countries to envy it. Flipkart and Educom are the examples from the many doing wonderfully well commercially. Even the Dalit entrepreneurs are contributing significantly. And it is happening in spite of the poor governance. India story is moving ahead to get noticed.

At least 11 achievers of Indian origin were among the 360 people featured on the list ‘30 Under 30’ list compiled by the American business magazine Forbes—of people that it says will “reinvent the world”—would only reinforce that notion.

I am sure the government and the politicians are conscious about the aspirations of the millions of the young Indians. And they will take notice of it and change themselves.

2012 will make up the wrongs happened in 2011 and every Indian will do something significant and innovative that will add to the strength of the nation to make it reach to the top.

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