Leftists Concern: Suffering or Shining India

Posted on October 23, 2009 by indra

Sitaram Yachuri, the most popular and vocal face of CPM, sheds tears about the poor rating of India on HDI and some other reports in a column in Hindustan Times that perhaps he patronises.

HDI: Per capita income, adjusted to purchasing power parity, declined from $3,452 to $2,753 from last year. Life expectancy at birth declined from 63.7 years to 63.4 years. The combined gross enrollment ratio in schools declined from 63.8 per cent to 61 per cent. Of the 100 students that enter Class 1, only 31 reach Class 10. Of these, only around 16 pass Class 12. Of these, only about nine enter the portals of higher education.

India’s HDI, which stood at 0.427 in 1980, is now marginally higher, after nearly three decades, at 0.612. HDR 2009 shows that 41.6 per cent of our people live on less than $1.25 a day and 75.6 per cent live on less than $2 a day. This latter figure, in purchasing power parity terms, confirms the findings of the prime minister-appointed Arjun Sengupta Report that 77 per cent of Indians survive on less than Rs 20 a day.

India is six rungs lower than its ranking on per capita income based on purchasing power parity. The benefits of higher growth have only been confined to a few and have not contributed to the rise in the overall quality of life for the vast masses of our people.

‘Save the Children‘ report‘: One-fifth of the children dying in the world are Indian. A total of 2 million die before their fifth birthday. One child dies every 15 seconds due to neo-natal diseases. More than 4, 00,000 new-borns die every year within a day of birth. One in three malnourished children worldwide is Indian, while 46 per cent of our children are underweight.

Yachuri is very good at providing the figures that shock and shame every Indian. But it’s unfortunate that he hardly plays a role that he can very much can in improving the conditions. He is one of the top few in CPM politburo. The party controls and runs three states-West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala for many years. Unfortunately, it could do better and prove its model of development in at least the first two states where it is having uninterrupted runs. If it would have done better on effective governance, West Bengal would not have seen the menace of Naxalism even after Congress went out of power in late sixties. One can’t get anything done there without the party intermediary. It’s not only the unions in industries that have ruined development. The party is omnipresent in every sector worst being in education with all teachers under leftist banner. It will be difficult for West Bengal to recover ever because of the hard social division between the population belonging to left and others. Even if Didi, if at all, wins next time, West Bengal will take many years to get its lost glory.

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Live 100 Years

Posted on October 22, 2009 by indra

Indians talked of a 100 years age as an ideal one with four ‘ashrams‘ or stages, each of 25 years spans dedicated to a different focus. Opinions vary. According to the scriptures many lived very long lives covering thousands of years, and some even became immortal. However, at the time of independence, the average life span in India was around 45years because of various reasons and deprivations. But with independence the things changed the average has gone up and may be nearing 70 years.

Scientists and medical practitioners are busy with improving the longevity of human beings and that too keeping the capabilities of body elements young enough to lead a good life. It is interesting to read such news:

British scientists are working on regenerative therapies that could help centenarians have bodies of 50-year-olds in the future. Researchers at Leeds University will be shelling out £50 million over five years to come up with solutions to pull off “50 active years after 50” by providing pensioners with longer lasting replacement body parts. Professor John Fisher revealed the “combination of a durable cobalt-chrome metal alloy socket and a ceramic ball means the joint should easily withstand the 100 million steps that a 50-year-old can be expected to take by their 100th birthday.”

US population of persons above 100years of age is on rise. In UK, the number of people who have reached the age of 100 has broken the 10,000 barrier for the first time this September.

When I wanted to get into the information about ‘100 years of age’ through Google search, I found the number of entries at 129 million. The information covers many aspects including how to survive after 100 years of age
.
The problems before the scientists will be to make the life at that age also as useful and enjoyable to live as at younger ages.

Will the long active lives not create many social problems? Should it be a priority of the scientists when millions of people die immaturely because of many deprivations?

PS: Sixtyfive and Up Looking for Job

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Education for Employability

Posted on October 21, 2009 by indra

Unfortunately, the educational curricula in the country didn’t change to match the requirement at the targeted jobs. This gap created a huge unemployed and underemployed lot that hardly justified the expenditure incurred on education by the parents and in turn disenchanted many particularly those living in rural India. It is shocking but a fact with large number of engineers and MBAs remaining unemployed or doing some real underpaid jobs in unrelated fields. The main culprits were certainly the educational institutes that just kept the students for a period and provided a paper called degree or diploma, sometimes even sold that. As realized by many, in India unemployability has been a bigger problem than unemployment.

I got a shock again when I was told that there are about 286 engineering, 283 management colleges in UP. What sort of engineering and management skill can be expected in the graduates coming from these institutes with insufficient and hardly knowledgeable faculty employed and facilities provided in the most of them?

And as usual another set of entrepreneurs again set up institutes to provide finishing courses for employability such as skill of communication in English, or certain basic knowledge of computer operation along with some soft skills as much as for how to tuck your shirt in, and to take bath shave before interview. Teamlease is one such company manufacturing employees, and as reported, it has ready-to deploy staff of 75,000 in 700 cities and employment exchanges in 10 states. And a majority of graduates in any subject including humanities could be made acceptable to the employers in many service sectors such as hospitality, telecom, and retails in demanding job market. Many social entrepreneurs also have appeared to improve the employability among the graduates. I wish the thrust would have gone to the roots of the education process at the school and college level.

Some companies such as NIIT provide training for IT and BPO sectors by building in the skill required among all types of graduates in science and technology from all sorts of institutes. As its CEO says, “the opportunity around employability is huge. A hundred such NIITs can exist.” According to an estimate of 2008, IT-training is $1.8 billion market with a growth rate of 40%.

And then companies such as Infosys and few other major players in IT sector have created a huge in-house training setup to train the graduates from second and third tier institutes to bring them up to the needs of the company. Through its Campus Connect initiative Infosys has reached to more than 500 engineering colleges benefitting 3,000 faculty members and about 58,000 students. The main focus is on enhancing the industry readiness of the students. Infosys in the process has set up the largest training centre in the world. It reminds of GM Technical Centre in US that later on became full-fledged institute. I wonder one day the Infosys centre may turn into a university creating employees and trainers for the IT sector. With only about 1 percent students from the top engineering colleges such as IITs, the task to make most of them employable is stupendous and will require many Infosys like initiatives. Similarly some like Nishant Saxena’s Elements Akademia are focusing on increasing employability of MBAs from B-schools outside the top 100.

However, the main thrust must be on improving the employability at the institute level itself, and if necessary the regulators must make an effective industry- academia initiative mandatory to bridge the gap between the requirement of the industry and the education that the institutes provide. And the government must encourage industry’s active involvement and even participation with the engineering colleges and B-schools, as it stands today.

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Education: Skill Gap, a Problem or Solution?

Posted on October 19, 2009 by indra

I am firm believer that India could meet the challenge of Naxalites or Maoists only through quality universal education and good skill training. Can some sociologists do a quick research by asking the young men and women of the country if they wish to get training with guns or on computers and machine/hand tools?

Only 11% of young persons passing class XII go to universities and other institutes for higher education. Can the country train the rest in building some skills that can make them employable in the country or abroad? According to an estimate, by 2020 the world will have a shortage of 46 million working people while India will have a surplus of 47 million working people. And today the persons with skills are in demand all over the world.

The government is alive to the needs. Private sectors are also aware of the challenge that is the sure way to the national priority to insure inclusive growth. There are many companies such as Bosch who are helping in skill building. NGOs and social entrepreneurs are also participating.

Prahalad in his mission ‘India@75’ set a target of 500 million trained manpower in India by 2022. The government accepted his target. And the action plan has started. For example, the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), a 51:49 public-private partnership, is mandated to skill 30 per cent of an overall target of 500 million people by 2022.

This is to answer an estimate that 80 per cent of 12-18 million new entrants to India’s workforce every year have very little opportunity for skills training. The current vocational training infrastructure caters to just about 2.5 million per year.

Many like me have been advocating that every child coming out of school after Class XII examination must be having at least one skill that can help him in getting employed usefully in life, if required.
I say so as the requirement of skill are pretty traditional: farmers, cooks, hairdressers and beauticians, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons, drivers for cars, commercial vehicles including some such as forklifts, and harvesters and other agriculture equipment or tractors. However, with level of technogies going fast, the skill level demanded is also getting higher. A plumber or electrician today must know much more.

For many service sectors too such as retail front-end selling and merchandising, pathology lab technicians, healthcare equipment technicians, administrative and secretarial functions, tourism guides, fitness instructors, and many tasks, the education can have special skill building courses as elective subjects at school level. The skill imparted at institute level may be only the basic, but the institute builds a capability in its student to learn further easily on the job. And the Union government is trying to follow the route with a promise of spending Rs31, 000 crore on skills development through vocationalization of secondary education.

Unfortunately, less than 6 per cent of the country’s huge number of persons joining the workforce receives any form of vocational training. India needs to expand vocational training from the present capacity of a mere two to three million to at least 15 million new entrants to the labour force.

As reported, the government has committed to set up 1,500 ITIs and 50,000 Skill Development Centres in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. Presently, vocational training in India comprises about 5,500 industrial training institutes and about 1,750 polytechnics. China has over 500,000 such institutes. India offers about 175 trade-training programs. The US offers over 1,500 trade-training programmes. So India is to go miles in vocational training.

India will have to go innovative, may be through informal route.

India must go for capacity increase of the vocational training institutes, as it produces six million students every year. I doubt this figure. Even if it is correct, that’s pretty low considering that an estimated 88.5 million people in the 15-29 age group need such training. The quality of the training imparted at these institutes must improve, as according to the industry, less than half of the six million people who have received vocational training are in the employable category.

In the next five years, with a projected average GDP growth of over 7 per cent, India will have the potential to create an additional 75-80 million jobs and of these, almost 75 per cent will require vocational training. Over 31 per cent of employers worldwide are looking for finding qualified and trained manpower, especially those in manual trades.

Can India take the route to prosperity through skill development of its workforce?

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Thinkers from India: Business, Science, Technology, Management

Posted on October 18, 2009 by indra

While some Indians still keeps on priding in Venki‘s Nobel, though he might have disowned his pride in his India origin. Some others are busy in history of some Indians who missed the Nobel. I remember at least one name of Acharya Jagdish Bose. His story was quite a popular one in our school and college days. As the history says, Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in 1909 for work on wireless telegraphy that relied on an invention by India’s Jagadish Chandra Bose. I never knew if Satyen Bose and Meghnad Saha also missed it as it appeared in one media report. But I had seen both of them as the celebrity alumni of Presidency College. Prof Satyen Bose visited IIT, Kharagpur too. Last year I had written about two Indians who are Nobel stuffs, but have missed. One was the economist Jagdish Bhagwati and the other the physicist, E.C. George Sudarshan.

And this year Narinder Singh Kapany, who was born in Moga (Punjab) and pioneered the science of transmitting light through glass fibres, missed it. The Royal Swedish Academy preferred to award of the 2009 Nobel physics prize for Shanghai-born Charles Kao for his work on transmission of light in fibres for optical communication and two others for their invention of an imaging semiconductor.

Hardly few in India know about these celebrity scientists. Why are they not known? Should not media devote some time on the people who work in the laboratories working to reveal something that can change the lives of the people? Among one of the reasons for the better success rates for the Indian scientists working in the laboratories of the developed countries is certainly the better equipment such as Synchrotrons that Venki has stated in his interview. But the scientists outside India are also having better exposure and get better working environment required for a breakthrough research too.

However, I was elated by getting a mail from Anand that had link that provided another reason for Indians for celebration. The names of five Indians appeared among the 50 best management thinkers (Thinkers 50) with CK Prahalad at the top. While three including Prahalad are Americans by now, the two are still Indians in every respect, and they are Ratan Tata and S. Gopalakrishnan, who co-founded Infosys Technologies Ltd. and has been its Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director since June 22, 2007 and President since August 21, 2006.

How many of Indians have known him and could appreciate his being named as one of the best management thinkers in the world? Has the media done sufficient to project him as belonging to the class that he has been recognized by a foreign agency?

Vijay Govindarajan and Rakesh Khurana are other two among ‘The Thinkers 50’. I shall agree to Venki when he has said in an interview, “… And then you need luck.”

And I request the media to let the people know about the great Indian scientists and technocrats who are doing wonderful jobs in India and abroad. Why should they waste writing columns after columns about the unscrupulous politicians, so called leaders and corrupt bureaucrats and officers and showing them on the hundreds of small screens in prime time over and over again all time?

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Collapsing Empires: GM and now Toyota

Posted on October 16, 2009 by indra

I have been under an awful halo of the two giants. Reasons are obvious. I worked for the automobile industry and a company that had a long tie with General Motors. I had contacts with many from GM, US as well as its subsidiaries in UK (Bedford), Europe (Opel), and Japan (Isuzu) in my years of professional activism.

And though I never came anywhere near Toyota Motors at work, but Toyota was so impressive in developing its production system that I could remain passive about knowing it. Toyota Production System evolved as the most impressive system in operation management for manufacturing sector with Total Quality Control, Kanban or Just-in-time, Total Productive Maintenance, and many techniques for shop floor management.

The emergence of Toyota Motors as the largest automobile manufacturer of the world was the headline a year ago when it surpassed the US giant General Motors. And then the world saw the collapse of General Motors. Even after significant financial aid from US government, it had to resort to bankruptcy route for revival. Many opine that American giant will never be back to its old position. But still perhaps GM must be owning the maximum number of IPRs in auto technologies in the world.

And now comes the news, ‘Toyota Motor that earned $18.8 billion only two years ago is floundering’. Toyota expects a record loss of 450 billion yen ($5 billion) for the 2009 fiscal year that will end in March, on top of a similar loss for 2008. Some analysts are forecasting the company could again lose money in 2010.

Unfortunately, Toyota is not the same what it stood for-the company of total quality. The company underwent a spate of recalls in the middle of the decade. Has the scale betrayed its roots as a quality leader in auto business?

Last week, Toyota announced its biggest recall ever in the United States after a crash in August in which a California highway patrol officer and three family members were killed.As reported the trouble was with some floor mat.

Even till last year, I had been advising my children in US to go for Toyota. What has gone so much wrong?

As conceded in media, even in the domestic market, Toyota is no longer producing cars that excite the customers. Auto sales have fallen in recent years, partly because of a growing disinterest in cars among younger Japanese buyers. Can the auto leader come out something that can delight the next generation?

Both the giants provide some lessons for those aspiring for the top position. It’s difficult to remain at the summit. Can the premier management schools in world over provide the answer to get over the problems Toyota is facing or will it make these failures only their case studies? Will or can Toyota have confidence in their ability to suggest the reliable roadmap?

Interestingly, both, GM India as well Toyota Kirloskar India are planning big in India with significant amount of investment. Both are interested to be in small cars in India. GM India has gone for a tie up with Reva Electric for producing the green cars in big way.

India is doing great in auto manufacturing and if the sector gets sufficient government support, it can excel and go ahead of China in at least some segments.

Posted in industry, management, manufacturing | Leave a comment

Terah -Thirteen

Posted on October 15, 2009 by indra

‘Outlook’ has come out with an anniversary issue and many celebrities have written about 13*. I remember one of the finest interpretations of 13 from Manju Deshbir, the wife of my class friend, Deshbir Singh at IIT, Kharagpur for whom I worked between 1997-2000. She bought a car for me and went for its registration number whose digits added to 13 that sounds ‘terah‘ in Punjabi. Terah according her referred ‘Yours’ and that means to God Almighty. When I decided to retire, I had to buy a car that is Alto. By some chance without my asking for it, the registration number of 4621 that I got again added to 13.

Last Sunday, when we were at Sears’ photo studio for photographs of the family, an initiative by Shannon, the photographer enquired about the total number in the group. There was a little bit confusion. How many are we now- 11 or 13? We are now 13. When we are in India, they are 11 here in US. That caused the confusion. This includes Krish who have arrived on September 25.



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We are ‘Tera(h)‘.

Bestow all the kindness, keep us in peace and give all the happiness.

We were one of the luckiest to have all the three sons with their family within 30 minutes of driving time in Deville, Pleasanton and Santa Clara in California near San Francisco. But perhaps it can’t remain so for long. Shephali with her medical professional qualifications may have to move to East, and so ultimately Rajesh will have to join her. But that is the life.

During this US visit, it might be a good and rare opportunity for all the family members to be together for a family photographs. Though the innovations have made the distance irrelevant, it always remains a wish to live together or at least nearer.

* “13 is nothing more than a number, just one number in a harmless and immensely useful abstract system of counting and measuring developed by our ancestors.”- Sanal Edamaruku

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Textex- My Dream e-Gadget

Posted on October 15, 2009 by indra

While reading and talking about e-readers, Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s competitive version or for that matter many others including some from the Chinese that are getting into market or will soon be available, I always hope one day some entrepreneur cum innovator will produce Textex too.

Textex is to be similar gadget like e-reader that can store his text books as well as functions as exercise books for the students. One gadget with a weight less than net book will make the students free from the load that they are to carry every day. Based on the storing capacity, the students can also get additional reading materials and notes in the device. At the end of the academic year, the students can get the books of the next class loaded deleting the old stuff.

The gadget will have to be robust in design for the mishandling by the youngsters and cheap to be affordable. However, the market potential will be tremendous running into millions and billions in quantity, as it will be universally usable throughout the world. May be, many book lovers such this writer may love to possess one to load books of his choices and to keep writing the ideas generating while reading the books.

This is my dream e-Gadget. Many aspects of the specifications remain to be freezed. I wish someone who knows about some gadget that is near to my expectations will let me know. I also request those working in computer hardware to let their friends know about this dream of an old man.

Can’t some in IITs such as Ashok Jhunjhunwala help me in knowing about the viability of such a gadget and make an old man get some pleasure? I am sure the Indian government with a project to produce $10 laptop in competition with MIT’s $ 100 laptop is serious about the project.

As manufacturing manager, I had been pioneering flexibility in machine tools used for high scale of production to take up the challenges of changing product design cost effectively in automobile sector. I wish some technocrat to develop a single gadget that can impart knowledge and entertainment for the knowledge seeking masses.

And the gadget of my dream will reduce the global warming in real significant way by eliminating paper altogether from the education business.

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Media: It also serves

Posted on October 14, 2009 by indra

‘India Today’ and ‘Outlook’ are the two national weekly magazines that reflect the mood of the nation. With its vernacular editions, its circulation is large enough to have impact on the people too.

Both have covered one unique topic each this week, that made me think about its impact on the minds of the people of India. ‘Outlook’ has made the 14th Anniversary Special Issue of October 19, 2009 on ‘1984- 14 EVENTS FROM THE YEAR THAT CHANGED INDIA‘. Somehow I don’t like to remember 1984, a nightmare in India’s history. I don’t know why ‘Outlook’ and its management preferred to select that issue again at this time.

Ramachandra Guha in its lead essay ‘The Axis Year’ summarizes the year so rightly: “Marked by instability and conflict, by assassination and mass murder, it was in 1984 that the Republic of India came closest to being, as it were, a non-functioning anarchy.”

Fortunately for me and many like me, ‘India Today’ compensates. ‘India Today’s special issue of October 19, 2009 is on ‘Nation Builders, 40 builders of India’s growth machine’. Vinayak Chatterjee in his opening essay, ‘The Frame Work‘ introduces the significance and achievement in the infrastructure sector of the country.

The foundation of 21st century India lies in companies like Larsen & Toubro with over 37,000 employees and an annual turnover of Rs 34,000 crore that has to its credit projects like the world’s longest LPG pipeline, or Indus Telecom, a one-lakh tower company, the result of a partnership between three independent telecom operators.

It also lies in Hyderabad’s sleek Rajiv Gandhi International Airport with its 20,000 sq m of glass conceived by the man behind the Oslo airport, in BEST that transports 45 lakh Mumbaikars in 4,300 buses every day, in BHEL that generates 73 per cent of the total power in India, in ONGC, the world’s largest oil and gas company, and in Tata Steel that produces 6.8 million tonnes of steel.

The success is also in experiments like JUSCO, a private-public partnership providing urban services in Jamshedpur, Mysore and Kolkata and HCC, that has built the 4.7-km long Bandra-Worli Sealink and the Farakka Barrage in West Bengal.

All the stories as well as the essays are informative and inspiring for the optimistic lot of the country. Indus Towers with one lakh towers is the world’s largest independent tower company. And the idea of sharing the towers by the competitors to lower the cost is a model that got India’s innovative approach to telecom expansion appreciated by many globally. And JUSCO claim that ‘Japanese drink water directly from the tap in Jamshedpur’, makes one proud and confident and so does the information that India Post is the world’s largest postal network. Unfortunately, India Today is not available for the readers on website. One must buy it, if possible.

I am one who doesn’t believe in the old journalistic axiom that bad news sells better. I shall like to be with the editor-in-chief of ‘India Today’ and take pride in what we have achieved: “India is the fifth largest producer of electricity in the world, the second largest rail network under a single management and has also the third largest number of telephone subscribers the world over.”

With memories of 62 years of post independence India, I can only rejoice with hope. I wish the news magazines to cover the stories of many other achievers in its future special issues such as the great teachers/ scientists of the Institutes of excellence, the grassroots innovators from the rural India, and many who are striving in their own way to take India ahead in the race of development.

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Sharecropping and Bihar

Posted on October 13, 2009 by indra

I came across two articles related to this highly debated subject recently, first on Bihartimes.com and the second in Business Standard.

The news reports in media about the Bandyopadhyay commission has again raised this sensitive subject. The commission on land reform going by its experience of West Bengal suggests the state government enact a new act to protect bataidars (sharecroppers), cap land ceiling and computerize land records. The government naturally will have to weigh every aspect of the recommendations before tabling it. It must not take a course of appeasing some vote banks because of the assembly election next year.

Many, particularly left leaning thinkers, do fix the responsibility of the growth of naxalism in Bihar to the overdue land reform. The share cropping issue has some similarity with the house property in urban India and the whole world that are put on rent by the owner. Many states have age-old laws that protect the tenants, even the rogue ones. The issue relates to the right of property for individuals. The share cropping is also an issue of the right of property.

I have been hearing about the issue of sharecropping since my childhood. Once my maternal grandfather lost his four well bred bullocks in a burglary. They were the envy of his neighbours. He stopped farming and switched over to sharecropping. And I closely followed the system that was so informal. He used to give the land for a year’s two crops. It was either a fixed amount of the paddy or on sharing basis that used to be 50-50 or 75-25 of the produce depending on the land quality and irrigation facility. The tenants used to take concessions with many excuses, but the relationships were never bitter unless some tenant cheated him. He used to look after the fields and suggested the actions required to the tenants. He quite often provided financial support too. After his death my parents took the responsibility and my mother played the main role as she knew all the tenants. I remember how she got a well built for a plot of land that lacked the irrigation facility. For all practical purposes, I took a leave and got that done to make her happy. Mother managed the landed property till she was alive, But after her death I found it unmanageable from a distance and I sold all the property. Perhaps that was the best option.

Later on the system changed to cash payment in advance, an amount depending on the quality of land. With the prices of produce increasing significantly, it has become a win-win for the both.

With the landholding reduced with divisions among the next generation heirs who decide to be independent, the farming is hardly profitable. Many small land holders who remain in farming occupation even lease the land of other smaller ones to make it viable. The myth that the sharecroppers are all from deprived class is totally false. According to me putting a low figure for land ceiling has caused the maximum damage to the business of farming. With increasing cost of the inputs and the use of machines in farming, the land holdings must be consolidated to a higher limit of ceiling. The divisions in the families of the land holders over years have hardly left few with land that the present land ceiling act allows. On average the landholding has come down to 5 bighas in the villages that I know. How can a 5-bigha farm sustain even a nucleus family?

It is not share cropping that is the issue. The issue is to find answer to make a farming of 5-bighas viable.

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