India's Turn : When?

I remember a chapter in the second year titled 'India's Turn' that presented a rather startling fact - that India's  economic growth had started in the 1980s, well before the reforms initiated in 1990s. The narrative was as follows: Indira Gandhi, chastened by her defeat in 1977, now returned with a more pro-business attitude. This 'attitudinal shift' alone was sufficient to accelerate growth, and was followed by piecemeal reforms in the mid-1980s, following by full-blown reforms in the early 1990s. In this story, the reforms in the 1990s, at best, helped in sustaining the momentum that had already been built.

I have started reading the book 'India's Tryst with Destiny' by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. In the book, they state that growth during 1980-1987 was only 4.6% p.a, closer to the 'Hindu rate of growth' of 4% than to the growth rates we are now accustomed to. The 'high' growth rate of the 1980s was seen during the period 1988-1991, well after piecemeal reforms had been initiated and the fiscal deficit had started ballooning.

My problem is that, to make our education more holistic, we should be presented with an academic debate, rather than an academic piece of work. A debate would have enabled us to understand the issue in more depth and then form a perspective on it. At the very least, counter-views should have been suggested for further reading (and not testing). 

Was Gandhi a Marxist?

This article was published in Satya 2013, annual journal of Gandhi Study Circle, St. Stephen's College.

Was Gandhi a Marxist? This question arises from the fact that both Gandhi and Marx had similar views. Gandhi fought against caste, race and various other social sufferings. He fought against economic exploitation and oppression of the poor by the rich. Marx fought against political subjugation and oppressed humanity in his own way. According to him, capitalism, where the workers are exploited is an unstable system and leads to crises.

Their views were similar but not identical. Gandhi’s approach was quite different from that of Marx. Both of them believed that social conflicts existed because of disparities between the rich and the poor. But, they differed on their views on how the conflicts would be resolved. Marx believed in revolutionary means while Gandhi believed in reformist means.

To elaborate further, Marx’s Dialectical Materialism explains his views regarding class struggles. According to Marx, it is the internal contradictions within the system that brings about a change. The people who are being exploited will organize themselves together and revolt. This revolution would abolish the existing class structure. The English Revolution and The French Revolution are the examples of how revolutions took place because of internal contradictions and finally led to the emergence of a capitalist class.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” – Karl Marx

Gandhi, on the other hand, found class struggles to be quite superficial. His approach to resolving conflicts was through non-violence and Satyagraha. However, there is certain inconsistency in what he believed. On one hand he believed in harmonious co-operation between the poor and the rich, labour and capital and landlords and tenants. On the other hand, he also believed in struggling against exploitation.

According to Gandhi, the struggle against exploitation, unlike what Marx believed, will not take place through bloody revolutions, but through non-cooperation. If the workers can come together in the form of trade unions and refuse to co-operate with the capitalists, then they will be able to control the supply of labour. The capitalists will be forced to increase their wages. In Marxian terminology, Reserve Army of Labour is the biggest hindrance to the increase in wages and Gandhi believed that the only way to overcome this was non-cooperation.

"The idea of class war does not appeal to me. In India a class war is not inevitable, but it is avoidable if we have understood the message of nonviolence.” – Gandhi

What makes me believe that Gandhism is irrelevant today is the fact that people have become excessively self-centred and they are involved in an unending pursuit of acquiring more and more at the cost of the others. Gandhi believed in the mutual love between the labour and the capital. He wanted to convert the capitalists – the exploiters, which he thought could be done only through non-violence and Satyagraha. His theory of trusteeship was based on moral transformation of the capitalists, but we know that in today’s world, people do not give away their wealth (acquired through exploitation of labour and the poor) listening to moral preaching.

What Gandhi wanted to achieve was to educate and awaken the masses, make them conscious of their exploitation, bring them together into a powerful organization, so that they can struggle against the exploiters and fight for their rights. Even though Satyagraha and the non-violent ways might be thought of as moral preaching in the 21^st century, but we shouldn’t forget that it was this weapon which in part led to our Independence. Critics argue that Gandhi’s approach was applicable only to a specific historical context. True, but the need is not to side-line his ideas but to study them and revise them according to the changing situations.

Marx and Gandhi had very similar philosophies about what an ideal society should be. Both of them focused on a society free from exploitation. But again, their approaches to the achievement of this ideal state were different. Marx believed in a classless, stateless communist society which is described in the Communist Manifesto. On the other hand Gandhi believed in a non-violent, egalitarian and a democratic society where everyone is treated equally, irrespective of caste, race, and sex and where there is no discrimination based on income because the entire wealth belongs to the society as a whole.

According to Marx, we would reach communism because of the process of Dialectical Materialism. The germs of a future society lie within the present society and these opposites within the system contradict it and lead to revolution. Feudalism gave way to capitalism, because the germs of capitalism (the exploitation of the peasants and serfs by the lords) lay within the system itself. Similarly, capitalism will give rise to socialism and finally communism would emerge. It would be a society of dignity and freedom, a society with human conditions rather than ‘animal’ conditions of existence.

Gandhi asserted that one day moral transformation would take place which would lead to, what he called, Ramrajya. He explained the evolution through non-violence.  Violence and self-centredness are the qualities of a beast. Earlier we were beasts, wandering and hunting animals. Realizing the need to curtail violence, we took to agriculture. Hence Gandhi had faith that this streak of progressing through non-violence would continue till the ideal state is achieved. A man understands co-operation and is morally sound. This is what Gandhi believed we are heading to – from beasts to a man.

In today’s world, Marx seems to be winning the race because we foresee that communism might follow capitalism and socialism. China already claims to be a communist country. But, nowhere is Gandhi’s Ramrajya to be seen. The reason, I believe, Gandhi’s approach is difficult is because it is too ideal, it’s like bringing heaven on earth and converting the devils to angels. Marx’s communism might emerge as a future society because it’s not all that ideal and solves only those problems which can be tackled, given the current stage of human development.

Though both Gandhism and Marxism are similar in spirit, they are very different in practice and it becomes essential to re-read them and make changes to them as the society progresses.

The Unequal Race

Economists, I say, are trained in the art of justifying everything. Perhaps that is what has enabled me thus far to justify inequality. Humankind has developed and flourished due to inheritance; inheritance is the raison d'etre of our race coming to dominate this world. Think of it, a tiger's life is no different from its mother's. A mother tiger teaches the offspring as much as she knew, and then the offspring passes on the same knowledge to its kid. Humans, however, are different in this aspect. Our collective knowledge is stored for eternity, and then added to by every generation. What our ancestors did enables us to do even more. Similarly, what our fathers and grandfathers did enables us to do even better.

For example, I wonder how different my life would have been had my father not decided to join the navy, and instead stayed on in Gorakhpur. There would have been no question of joining DPS, R.K.Puram, and hence no path leading to St. Stephen's. There would have been no exposure to debating and quizzing as much as I got at these two institutions. Probably, there would have been no economics in my life! I am reaping the benefits of a decision my father took. Between me and someone who is still living in a small town, there is not much difference in terms of what we have done. It is the different between what our parents did, their parents did, and so on. The difference between us would be one of inheritance. Perhaps this is what most of us call destiny, or kismat.

I have had the good fortune of being involved in Bandhan microfinance's education program. The more I think of it, the more impressed I am by Bandhan's recognition of the multi-dimensional nature of poverty and inequality. Here's a short film I had made back then (I apologize for the copyright violations, of course): Bandhan's development projects. This would give you a better sense of the inequality I'm talking about.

The fact that I can justify this inequality in educational opportunities doesn't necessarily mean that I support it.  While I have absolutely no moral issues with our educational system being competitive, I have a problem with the competition being unequal. Is the competition between a Delhi-educated student and a small town student, for admission into an IIT or an IIM, a competition between equals? I do not think so. This was, of course, the basic principle behind reservations.

The problems that reservations bring up are by no means small. Firstly, there is the problem of identification - a problem that plagues any social scheme in India. How does one identify people who are deprived of education opportunities? Our policymakers have taken an economic and caste viewpoint to this. While caste-based identification is an abhorrence to me, I am not too comfortable with economic selection too, especially in its implementation. Moreover, isn't inequality a question more of degree than of existence? For example, a person who is poor and rural is at a greater educational inequality than one who is rural but rich*. Thus, any policy that identifies people based on the existence of certain parameters is bound to be flawed. The less be said about people mimicking this parameter, the better.

How then can educational inequality be bridged? At a national level, I do not have anything of import to suggest. However, each one of us can contribute something to the cause. While I am usually skeptical of volunteerism, I cannot help but be impressed by Jalnidh's initiative Eclaire. We need more of this.

---------------------------------

* - this is similar to any economists' arguments against using the head count ratio (HCR) as an indicator of poverty. Head counts tend to mask the degree of inequality within the less privileged section.

Satyamev Jayate

Every Sunday morning, Indian television viewers get to see a social issue being discussed in Satyamev Jayate. I never got a chance to view any episode until today. Everyone is aware of the commendable response that this initiative by Aamir Khan has received throughout the country. It is claimed that the show has left a bigger impact on the society than expected.

So, today I was looking at TRPs of this show. The Television Viewer Rating has plummeted from 3.8 in the first month to 2.9 in the second month. I have always heard people talking optimistically about this show, but the popularity seems to be fading away. Obviously, these ratings are not a true indicator of what the actual situation is.

Though Aamir Khan seems not to be worried about these falling TRPs, his aim has been to improve the viewership. But what I see as a matter of concern is whether the very purpose of the show is fully achieved or not. Today at the end of the show, which focused on caste discrimination, Aamir Khan talked about how those freedom fighters made us free in 1947 because of which we remember them today and similarly, we should also make our society free from the evils of casteism so that the coming generations remember us. What I doubt is that if today’s show was vibrant enough to encourage the present generation to act? It was shown that how people perceived that casteism has almost come to an end at least in urban areas but it exists even today in well reputed universities and practiced by the youth of the country.

Yesterday, I was watching IIFA, which was too uninteresting except a couple of performances by Priyanka Chopra and Bipasha Basu. Not getting into all that, this IIFA was called ‘green’. Before and after every break, tips to conserve electricity and save environment by doing your bit was shown, but I doubt how many of the viewers actually followed it? Or even if they did, will it be sustainable? The problem lies here!

For viewers, Satyamev Jayate might be something worth to watch on a rainy Sunday morning like today, sitting in the drawing room, sipping a cup of coffee. What I think is that human memory is short lived. An hour and a half show on a Sunday is nothing to turn the stone upside down. Ofcourse, it is creating awareness among the masses but I feel there should be follow-ups the entire week after the episode is broadcasted on Sunday, to show more real-life stories, problems, experiences and the ways in which we can fight against them as it is our responsibility as the youth of the country.

I am not denying the fact that in rural areas, thousands of villagers gather in a place and watch the show, which definitely has a positive impact. Ofcourse, the show is doing something noble. Something is better than nothing! It would be wrong for me to say that it’s a half hearted approach, but with little more effort if something substantial can be achieved, it will be in the betterment of our very own society. 

Why perfection is never seen

All of us seek perfection from those around us - our friends, our families, our colleagues and so on. Some of us acknowledge that perfection will not be found, and hence we accept imperfections in those around us. However, our criteria for such forgiveness are often very blurred. There is no consistent framework within while we can put our life experiences.

I will put this article into two sections. The first will deal with the theoretical underpinnings of what I mean to say. The second is the practical application of these theoretical underpinnings. For those of the readers who aren't quite fans of deductive logic, I would suggest that you skip the first section.

----------

Hence, the sense in which I will be talking about 'perfection' here is not professional perfection, but perfection in our social interactions. Also, the 'framework' that I talk about is deductive logic - the formation of certain exogenously-given premises, and using a small set of fairly axiomatic steps, arriving at a conclusion based on those premises.

Beginning with this framework, the first step is to acknowledge that every human has a different set of premises. While I have said that this is exogenously given, we can qualify it better. I would believe that every human's set of premises is determined by his experiences, and also his reaction to these experiences*. Even if the experiences were the same, the reactions would most probably not. This could happen for several reasons - a person might be constrained in several spaces (especially true of children and women, the elderly, poor individuals, unhealthy people), there might be a 'random' component to any social outcome and that the external environment might not remain constant, such that the outcomes are not the same. While I have used a fair amount of jargon here, the point to be emphasized is simple enough -  no two individuals start with the same set of premises.

Even if we assume that all humans are rational (and I don't see any reason not to) and that they employ the same set of axioms (this is where disagreement is more likely), this will lead to different conclusions. Hence, conflict is inevitable in modern society. Note that we made barely any assumptions here - even the assumption of rationality and uniqueness of axioms is merely intended to show the power of the argument. Relaxing these assumptions will, in fact, further strengthen the argument that I have made. However, I must make a qualification here. Divergence of premises is no reason to assume divergence of conclusions. These conclusions might end of being the same. Here, I diverge from deductive logic in saying that the probability of such an occurrence is low.

----------

In practice, each one of us falls into several disagreements with our friends and colleagues. Since we do not know what premises/beliefs that lead to a particular action, we take the action itself as a proxy for the belief system. For example, if I convinced my friend to join me for a movie, and then my friend called me up at the last moment to say no, then I do not have perfect information as to what lead my friend to make that particular decision. I would use whatever knowledge I have of the action of his not coming to reach a judgement.

It would seem better that I should rather just acknowledge the lack of information and then move on with life, rather than being miffed with my friend. However, how many of us actually do that? None whatsoever. The reason being that, in practice, perfect information will never be available. Hence, we will never reach a judgement. Even if our friend is actually the bad guy in the picture and keeps repeating his actions, I will never have enough information to indict him, and to take necessary action.

For this reason, such an outcome is never observed. As humans, we all would have certain preferences between certainty and information. The example we have considered in the previous paragraph is one of a person who prefers 100% information. On the other hand, if certainty was the only thing I cared about, then to say that 'life exists on mars' would be the best outcome - since it is 100% sure. However, most of us would be quite uncomfortable with such an assertion. 

We thus choose a point that has both uncertainty and lack of information. This is where our preferences differ. Each one of us would accept different levels of uncertainty (and by corollary, of lack of information) given how much information we have. Hence, this is a matter of preferences.

For this reason, perfection in social relations can never be seen. Even if I personally want to be as rational as possible, I would never be able to be perfectly rational unless I am ready to accept being a weak, indecisive individual who can be taken for a ride by virtually anybody. All of us wouldn't, and this is why perfection is never an outcome in social relations. We all forgive some, and don't forgive some. How much we forgive is given by our own preferences. Our acquaintances will never agree to how much we forgive, because they have different preferences. Hence, conflict will always be present.

---------------------------

* this is somewhat similar to Karl Marx's dualism in that man's experiences and his response to those experiences form the complete set

World's cheapest Tablet - The Aakash

As far as memory serves, the tagline mentioned above was (and is) used when ‘The Aakash Tablet was first talked about. Not being a gadget-goer at all, this post coming from me is rather surprising. But what really compelled me to write about this issue was a recent article I read some place – ‘what really went wrong with the Aakash?’

For those who would like a mention of its features - The Aakash is a low-cost computer with a 7-inch touch screen and 256 MB RAM running under the Android 2.2 operating system. It was in 2011, that India's IT minister Sh. Kapil Sibal announced the launch of the Aakash tablet for Rs 2,500 with much fanfare. It is part of the ‘One Laptop per Child’ idea. That moment, I recall my brother telling me with much excitement, ‘And I shall book this digital leveler ASAP’. (Well, he is a computer engineer after all!). And so, he became one of those 1.4 million users who registered for the gadget. (:O)

But I guess, that was the ONLY happy part. A series of blunders followed. First, there was an IIT-Rajasthan versus DataWind quarrel over specification issues, making headlines. According to a statement by Datawind's CEO, Suneet Singh Tuli, the company supplied 10,000 tablets to IIT-Rajasthan which were part of an initial order of 1,00,000 tablets that Datawind was supposed to supply to the government at a price of $49.98 per unit. But after only a few hundred tablets reached the students, IIT-Rajasthan started rejecting the Aakash tablet, allegedly after reports that the device was failing during pilot testing and did not meet the quality criteria set by the institute. IIT-Rajasthan was then removed from the Aakash project, and IIT-Bombay was then chosen.

The process became murkier when DataWind entered into a war-of-words with its ex-assembly vendor, Quad Electronics. While the ‘registered’ customers awaited the delivery of Aakash, the Hyderabad-based assembler of the tablet, Quad Electronics, sued DataWind alleging that the British Indian firm failed to procure its contracted inventory or pay for the tablets. DataWind retorted saying it won't procure any more tablets from Quad and would settle the issue legally.

And to top it all, the prototype turned out to be a disaster. Some phones in the market worked faster than this contraption. The battery wouldn’t last two hours if a user tried to play video files on it. The touch screen, apparently, wasn’t ‘touchy’ enough. Similar computing devices with superior capabilities have been brought out of Chinese factories but India seems to have lost the plot; what could have been an incredibly compelling story is now nothing but a stillborn.

What I’m trying to put across through this post is that almost three years ago, when we first heard of an ultra low-cost tablet to be launched by the Indian government, then known as ‘the $35 tablet’, India made it to the headlines across the world. ‘Steve Jobs innovates for the rich; this is for us’, one of my friends had remarked. So what went wrong – Is it all the quarrels? Is it the MHRD, which claimed to come up with an effective program in too short a period? Or is it the failure of the initial prototype? Well, it is ALL of these.

And now the news shows the launch of an upgraded version of the tablet. The Aakash II is reported to have improved hardware with Google’s Android 4.0 OS, 256MB of RAM and 2GB flash storage. And it shall hit the market around December this year. So, lets just wait-n-watch on this one before commenting any further.

 

Cut-offs : Fallacies of the critics

Just watched the following discussion on the Delhi University cut-offs (click here for the video). Apart from Chetan Bhagat's revealingly thoughtless accusations and assertions, there are several other clarifications that are in order. I am in no way defending status quo. However, what I am saying is that we could see the education system as a set of 'markets' or domains - the high school domain, the graduation domain, the post graduation domain and so on. There are several 'market failures' in each of the domain. Trying to set right one of the domains without correcting the failures in the other domains would be inefficient. The familiar theory of second best is inapplicable here because the failures in the other domains are not intrinsically immune to being corrected. With this in mind, I begin my discussion of the DU cut off system.

Firstly, the appalling suggestion by Chetan Bhagat that SRCC and other 'good' DU colleges should set up more campuses. At one level, it is hypocritical on his part ('excellence is exclusive', according to Bhagat. Click here for the video) to oppose dilution of quality in IITs and to suggest something similar in DU. However, I do not intrinsically subscribe to the fact that excellence is exclusive, and hence leave such a shallow argument at that. More importantly, to set up new campuses for SRCC, Hindu etc requires a whole lot of infrastructure. While we can talk about diminishing returns to a factor, we must consider what exactly is the limited factor we are talking about. In view of my previous discussion of market or (in the case of education, when 'market' doesn't sound all that right) domain failures, the domain failure that I see here is one of post graduation. 

It is the most obvious thing to any Economics student at Delhi University, for example, that even India's best economics degree suffers from a severe and crippling shortage of quality teachers. One of my co-interviewees at the Rhodes Scholarship interview confessed that even fresh postgraduates with no teaching experience and unverified aptitude would be invited to teach at one of the colleges. If we go about increasing the intake without considering such factors, we will just create a situation where Economics, for example, will be the new engineering - lots of third grade institutions that add nothing to the students. New colleges cannot be set up unless we increase the quality of output from our postgraduate institutions. Period.

Second is the system of cut-offs. I agree with critics that treating all state and central boards as equivalent is criminally objectionable, to state it mildly. However, we must realise that it is a court order that forbids colleges from taking out percentiles in each of the different boards (this is what I have read somewhere, but am unable to find a link right now). At best, Delhi University has committed a crime of inaction in not challenging such an order.

Secondly, to argue that we must de-link admissions from the Class XII boards is pointless. If admissions to even the liberal arts or pure sciences are de-linked from the boards, what is the purpose of having the boards in the first place? There is a domain failure in that the boards do not reflect the aptitude of students*. Do we correct it by making the boards more relevant, or do we correct it by having this pointless appendage called the boards, and then also have an entrance examination for various courses? Again, we must realise that there will be multiplicity of entrance exams, since an Economics (H) entrance exam will have to be different from a Philosophy (H) entrance exam and so on. The rot begins at the boards level, also because there is an incentive for state boards to inflate marks as as to better the lot of their students. Hence, basic economics demands that it is at this level that the problem must be addresses. Delhi University in this case is the victim, not the perpetrator.

Finally, we come to the suggestion of having interviews. Given my experience at St. Stephen's College, I believe that interviews are the best way of gauging suitability of a student for a particular course. I will not feign knowledge of why other colleges do not have interviews, for I am sure there must be some reason. In case the reason is some rule of Delhi University, then more autonomy must be granted to the 'institutes of excellence'. If there is some other reason, then we must address it.

A little footnote about media coverage of the issue. The way the media handles this issue year after year has something to say about the intelligence level of those running such shows. Remember the ruckus over the 100% cut-off at SRCC last year? Firstly, they failed to qualify the 100% cut-off. It was for science students who now wanted to pursue B.Com (H) now; hence, it was the result of a 4% gap between commerce students and science students that SRCC had committed itself to (this year's lower cut off, hailed by the media, is just a sleight of hand, with the 4% margin having been reduced). Even now, they say that the cutoff for science is 99.25% at Hindu, without qualifying that statement as to which course, and for students from which stream. Is such misleading coverage not worth condemning? Secondly, one student cleared the 100% cut-off this year. Even in my year when the science cut-off for the same course was 98.75%, only one science student cleared the cut-off (incidentally, my dear friend Manchit Mahajan). If one student cleared the cut-off anyway, how does it make a difference whether it is 98.75 or 100? The media certainly needs to be more intelligent.

-------------------

* - I have no hesitation in saying that my marks in physics and chemistry did not reflect my aptitude for the subject. The only justification I see is either that I worked hard, or that I severely over-estimate others' aptitude. However, hard work cannot always be a substitute for aptitude per se, as my CAT experience taught me.