Didigiri
by Sudipto Das
Mamta Banerjee has provoked the media to coin a new term - didigiri. It’s not that we didn’t have fiery didis or behens in the past. Margaret Elizabeth Noble, christened ‘Sister’ Nivedita by Rabindranath, was no doubt a fiery didi or behen. Generally Rani Lakshmibai is not thought as a didi, nevertheless, she was indeed a fiery lady. History will point us to so many fiery didis. But still the term ‘didigiri’ was never used for any of them. It seems to have been reserved forever for Mamta-didi. That’s indeed an achievement for our beloved Didi, but I can’t say if it’s a great or ‘un’great one!!
Didi’s recent surprise victory in West Bengal is being perceived by her as the attestation of her electorate to her fiery opposition, often quite irrational, to land acquisition by the government for private companies. Her oppsotion has cost West Bengal the prestigious Nano factory from the Tatas. It’s true that the way West Bengal government has handled the entire issue of land acquisition was indeed very undemocratical and heinous. Some credit surely goes to Didi for bringing the Left front government in West Bengal at task. Without her opposition the nation won’t have known the atrocities and the corruptions that the Left has been indulging in over the past three decades in Bengal and elsewhere. But at the same time it’s also of utomost interest to make sure that the path towards industrialization of rural India is not met with such blockages. It’s here that BJP has to play a great role as opposition in the center.
It’s beyond doubt that to provide the growing population of India with effective employment (not the type of NREGS) industrialization is the only way. Agriculture doesn’t generate enough revenue compared to the people employed in it. The much needed employment and keeping pace with the high GDP growth need extensive industrialization. China’s is a very good example how industrialization can impact GDP and overall economy. It’s not recommended to follow everything that a communist and closely guarded China did. Nevertheless, there are several things that are worth following. For industrialization, the foremost thing that government has to do is setup an efficient policy for procurement of land that not only has a human face but also makes proper business sense. It’s here that the opposition can play a great role in bridging the gaps between UPA & Didi and help the country in a big way.
Land acquisition is a double edged sword which has to be handled with lot of care and prudence. The people who can be negatively impacted immediately are the ones whose lands are acquired. But in the long run the same people would be benefited in several ways once the industries are setup. It’s the role of the political parties to work at the grass root levels and explain the long term benefits of industrialization. Also at the same time the land deals should be very transparent and financially viable both parties - those whose lands are being acquired and the industries. The Left did really a very shoddy job in making the dealings transparent. But what Mamta did was actually throwing the baby along with the bath water.
I’m sure with the increased focus on industrialization, the issue of land acquisition would crop up in several states and one of the most important things that the government has to finalize is a good and efficient policy for it. I’d like to see BJP doing a really great job here to counter Didigiri!!
How to Fix the Hole in the Bucket (Part 2)
by Sudipto Das
(You can read Part 1 here.)
To fix the ‘hole’ small NGOs may not be the solution because it would take ages to cover the full country. Government alone has to do this with the help of private partnerships. Things that we need immediately are:
- Much better food storage facility so that bulk of the perishable fruits and flowers and vegetables are not wasted daily. Our Finance Minister Mr. Pranab Mukherjee has recently pointed out that we need a revolution in Food Processing. Yes, we need that more than many other things.
- Much better retail chain that gets rid of the innumerable middle-men. The gap between the farmers and the end buyers should come down so that farmers can get higher sale price and buyers lower retail price. This has a positive effect on the standard of living of the farmers because they are also buyers of farm products produced by other farmers. Multi nationals like Metro Cash and Carry, Reliance etc should be encouraged in this area. The story of millions losing jobs due to these multi nationals is a political myth propagated by people with vested interests. Detailed studies have shown that the people who would be mostly impacted are the middle men, who have been exploiting the poor farmers since ages. The small grocery store owners can be absorbed into the big retail chains in various roles. Even the middle men can also be absorbed - but they can’t exploit the poor farmers any more.
- Much better infrastructure - good roads across the width and breadth of the country so that perishable farm products can reach markets in much faster time.
- Better yield of farming through corporate farming of large tracts of unfragmented lands. Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar had once pointed out that even with their full throttle Reliance and its likes can cover only 2% of the existing farm lands of our country. There’s space for hundred more Reliances and ITCs.
- Better delivery of government aids. Using Smart Cards like National ID has a great role to play in. As pointed out earlier, ”leakages” are common in this respect- higher than 75 per cent in Bihar and Punjab.
The public expenditure required in all these can be used for schemes like NREGS. Each of these activities will save government from the wasteful gimmicks like Rs3/kg rice. Similar thought process can really help us in this moment when our fiscal deficit is touching 10% of GDP.
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com
There’s a Hole in the Bucket
by Sudipto Das
There’s a children’s song which goes like this:
There’s a hole in the bucket,
Dear Liza, dear Liza
There’s a hole in the bucket,
Dear Liza, there’s a hole.
Then fix it, dear Henry,
Dear Henry, dear Henry
Then fix it, dear Henry,
Dear Henry, fix it.
Hary Belafonte and his wife used to often enact the roles of Henry and Liza live on stage. I’d first heard this song as a small kid in our old gramophone on one of those 78 RPM discs. Little did I know that a bucket with a hole is indeed a very important thing. Within a few years the bucket with a hole came back in the maths book. I used to really dread those maths problems where we’re asked to calculate how long it would take to fill a bucket which has a hole. I used to always wonder who on the earth would like to fill a bucket with hole? Isn’t it much more efficient to first fix the hole, as told by Henry, and then fill it? There were certain sums where the bucket wouldn’t be filled at all because the rate at which the water drained out of the hole used to higher than that of filling.
Times have passed. Gone are the days of those gramophones and Hary Belafonte and the maths of ‘hole in the bucket’. But the bucket never sank into oblivion. It’s there everywhere around me. And very much like the tougher problems where the bucket would drain out totally, the buckets around me also seem to be in a state of being perpetual drained out. More interesting is the fact that people are ready to pour more and more water in the bucket, but not ready to fix the hole.
According to reports, a fresh estimate from the ministry of food processing says a whopping Rs 58,000 crore (close to USD 1.5billion) worth of agriculture food items get wasted in the country every year.
In 2008 India produced 230 million tonnes of food grain and converted itself from a net importer to net exporter in the sector. Even though India is second in tropical fruit production after Brazil and in vegetable after China, the farmers over here do not get proper price for their produce. “The reason is we cannot process and preserve more than 10-15 percent of our production. It perishes. Else farmers sell it at throw-away prices” - that’s what Pranab Mukherjee has reportedly told very recently.
The government has issued a total of 223 million ration cards against a total estimated 180 million households. In other words, there are at least 43 million ghost cards.
As per published reports, the Planning Commission says, adding that “leakages” are common - higher than 75 per cent in Bihar and Punjab. During 2003-04, it estimates that eight million tonnes of food grains out of 14 million allotted to BPL families never reached them. “For every 1kilogram that was delivered to the poor, Government of India had to issue 2.23 kilograms” of food grains.
There is no comprehensive estimate about the exact figures of the leakages. But there’s no doubt that much of the food problem and poverty can be tackled if some Liza fixes these leaks. The recent budget presented in the Lok Sabha yesterday has gone gung ho over the various bucket filling strategies like National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Antyodaya Anna Yajona. Many populist measures like Rs 3/kg rice to BPL families, free power and loan waiver are also in the plate - all these at a point when the fiscal deficit of our country is close to 10% (including the deficit of the states) of our GDP. No one is saying that filling the bucket is a bad thing. But isn’t it more efficient to first fix the hole in the bucket and then fill it with what ever you like?
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com
Prayer of ‘Aam Aadmi’
by Sudipto Das
You’ll Protect Me in Distress, That’s Not My Prayer -
I Shouldn’t Lack Courage in Distress.
You’ll Rescue Me, That’s Not My Prayer -
I Should Have the Strength to Swim.
That’s what Rabindranath Tagore had prayed for in Gitanjali. It’s a prayer that each of us perhaps sings in our hearts. There’s nothing like sailing through a storm all with my own courage and zeal. There’s nothing like keeping my head high without bowing in front of anyone for mercy or help. There’s nothing like having faith in my own self and being confident. What I want is just the courage and the zeal and the confidence in myself. That’s what I pray for to the Almighty.
Well, that’s all what I want for me and my countrymen. I want my country to be a land of courageous people Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.
But alas, my government doesn’t allow us to hold our head high. It doesn’t want to see us standing on our own feet. It wants to cripple our self confidence and make them believe that the only way for them to survive is to wait for mercies thrown out to us. We’re never provided with the right amenities that can help us procure our own food and shelter. Instead, we’re converted into beggars at the hands of the governments. We’re crippled to the extent that we can do nothing than wait for the free food and shelter thrown on us.
My government has broken my land into innumerable fragments of castes and creeds. The land no longer belongs to Indians of Bharatiyas or Hindustanis. Fragments of it belongs to the Upper Class, some belong to the Dalits, some to the Scheduled Tribes and some to Scheduled Castes, some to Hindus, some to Muslim, some to Jats, some to Yadavs, some to Bengalis, some to Dravidians, some to North Indians, some to South Indians…….. There are reservations for each of these fragments.
Tagore would be pulling his beards apart in heaven to see this. He would be scratching off his own lines which he had written some hundred years ago:
No one knows whence and at whose call
Come pouring endless inundation of men
Rushing madly along to lose themselves
In this vast sea of humanity that is India.
Aryans and Non-Aryans, Dravidians and Chinese
Scythians, Huns, Pathans and Mogols -
All are mixed, merged and lost in one body.
Today the main effort of the government is to tear apart this body and segregate the Aryans and Non-Aryans, Dravidians, Scynthians, Huns and the Mongols and restrict them to reserved ghettos.
Let’s raise our voice and say, No, we don’t need rice at Rs 3/kg, but we need the right education, health care and infrastructure so that we can earn enough to buy rice at the normal rate. We don’t want to live on the mercy of the government, but with the cooperation of the government. We don’t want to be crippled by the government, but we want to stand on our own and make our own living.
Let’s raise our voice and say, No we don’t need reservation. We all are one and we’ll stay happily at the same place and earn our position with our own credentials.
The government may not listen to our voice. Because if there is no poor, if everyone has self esteem then who will it fool in the name of ‘Aam Aadmi’?
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com
Why so much fuss about a Mole when there’s a Mountain ahead?
by Sudipto Das
It’s quite encouraging that the present HRD minister at the center is really trying to solve some real issues. Compared to his predecessor Mr. Arjun Singh, Mr. Kapil Sibal is no doubt a MUCH better option. At least, for Madam’s sake, he is trying to see real leaks in the pipe rather than being in a utopian world of hypothetical leaks. But now the point is whether Mr Sibal is running after the right leaks or whether he is devoting all energy to fix microscopic holes in the pipe when several portions of the pipe line are totally non exisent? Isn’t it like talking about cakes when people don’t even have the bread to eat?
Yes, there’s no doubt that examinations, in their present forms, need to be changed. Mr. Sibal has all the right to do that. Similar things have been done in many Western countries. I’m sure any educationist of repute would agree with Mr. Sibal about the necessity of changes required in our present system of education, specially the way the examinations are held. But how many kids actually reach the stage of giving the secondary examinations?
Let’s consider the following facts.
According to reports while 96% of India’s children enroll in primary school, by the age of 10 about 40% drop out.
The government’s education expenditure as a percentage of GDP has never ever risen above 4.3% of GDP, despite the target of 6% having been set as far back as 1968 by the Kothari Commission.
A closer look shows that GDP seems to be rising at a much much faster pace than the government’s education expenditure to be able to reach the 6% target.
Though the Common Minimm Program of the previous UPA government included the target set by Kothari Commission, the public expenditure on education has actually declined from around 3.23 percent of GDP in 2000-2001 to 2.88 percent in the recent times. As a proportion of total government expenditure, it has declined from around 11.1 percent in 2000-2001 to around 9.98 percent during the previous UPA rule.
The quality of education imparted in the free government run schools is very dismal. Even if it’s free, still many people from the lower income group go out of their way and send their kids to private schools or tutions. Absteeism of teachers in government run schools is one of the major reasons for the poor quality of education in the government schools.
In this respect it’s noteworthy to see what Mr. Santosh K Mehrotra has mentioned in his book “The Economics of Elementary Education in India”: Amartya Sen’s introduction to the Pratichi Education report (Pratichi India Trust, 2002) notes: We encountered some disturbing evidence that primary school teachers often show much less regard for the interests of children from pooer and lower caste backgrounds. We observed much greater teacher absenteeism in schools with a majority of children from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes (75%), compared with other schools (33%).
Why the problem of absenteeism is never brought under limelight is also a well know fact. The teachers of the elementary schools provide a strong cadre base for most of the cadre based parties like Congress and many others. The scene nationwide might not be as bad as that in Left ruled West Bengal, but still it’s at a quite alarming state and should be tackled ass soon as possible.
The teachers of the government schools are perhaps the least accountable in the entitre government machinery. If your neighborhood roads become pathetic the local PWD enginner is accountable for that. Even if he doesn’t do his job throughout the year, still at least before the election the roads are repaired. Water connections, electricity connections, gas connections are all made in haste before the election. But have you ever heard of the standard of education or the behavior of the teachers of the schools changing before the elections? On the contrary the teachers are busier with their ‘party work’ during elections and are seldom seen at schools.
Mr. Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar and Gurucharan Das have been writing in the columns of Times of India for quite some time that a very simple way to improve the quality of the education in the government run schools is to give coupons to the families of the kids. These coupons should be redeemable either at the government schools or at any private schools which are ready to provide education at the same rate. Given the salaries of the school teachers, the monetary value of the coupons would be quite attractive and many private schools would be interested to admit kids against them. The salary of the school teachers would be directly linked with the amount a school draws from the collection of coupons. This system has worked quite well in many countries and it shouldn’t be hard to implement such things in India.
Now doesn’t it look like there are many more important things to be taken care of by Mr. Sibal? Isn’t it like thinking too much about a small mole when a big mountain is ahead?
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com
Who are the Educated Middle Class People?
by Sudipto Das
Till some time back (might be a decade) the ‘Educated Middle Class’ was a secluded minority with only BJP to its side. In the nineties no political party other than BJP used to think of the people belonging to this minority community.
Things have changed since the days of nineties. The sample space of polulation which constituted the ‘middle class’ has also changed drastically over the decade. The vivacious and change-thirsty younger generation of the middle class, mostly urbanized, of the nineties, then in their twenties or early thirties, is now middle aged and many of them have moved to the upper middle class category. Their ideas and ideologies are no doubt important even in today’s political scenario. But they no longer command the strength in terms of critical mass. There have been innumerable new entrats in the category of middle class, thanks to the trememdous economic growth that the country has seen over the past one decade.
No doubt education is still an important distinguishing factor for people entering into ‘middle class’, but its form has changed a lot. Education has perhaps taken the real form only in recent past when it’s no longer restricted only to books and examinations. Lots of hitherto unexplored avenues have opened up innumerable options for people. Vocational training has become very important along side conventional education, of schools and colleges and examsm, for most of these new avenues.
The surge in business in areas of BPO, textiles, travel, tourism, hospitality, entertainment, communication and many others has triggered the requirement of huge resources all of whom may not be highly educated in conventional terms, but surely trained adequately. This entire new group of people and their families have slowly marched into the middle class.
The driver who drove me around in my recent trip to Uttarakhand, the petty vendior who supplies mid-day lunch in front of the Wipro Corporate office on Sarjapur Road in Bangalore, my previous driver who now runs his own real estate agency at a suburban Bangalore locality, the milkman, the lady who has been selling flowers to us since the past many years and recently setup a decent sized flower stall in front of our apartment, the plumber who now has his own hardware shop and many people around me are no longer struggling lower class people. Almost all of them have two wheelers and every one of them has a mobile. All of them are the new entrants to middle class. Are they educated? I would say, yes. They do read news papers, may not be in English, watch televisions, are aware of the recent economic downturn and all of them have the same ambition and vision as mine - to achieve more in life. It would have been really a ridiculous day-dreaming even a decade back to think of the sort of improvement that these people have made in their life. But it’s a reality now. They are now in the same category that I belong to and have been belonging to for the past many decades.
It’s very important to acknowledge this drastic change in the membership to the club of Middle Class. No longer is this club a neglected one. Suddenly the whole political class has understood the strength of this class and has started ‘appeasing’ them, if at all I should use the word ‘appease’ which is generally used in some other context. But is this context different? No. All political parties want to woe this newly visible and prospective powerful class in all possible ways. It’s no longer a class that matters only to BJP. But it’s something that matters to all because it has attained a critical mass, which is impossible to ignore.
It would be foolish to assume that this entire class watches the so called English Language Media and are swayed away by some sort of pro UPA and anti BJP propaganda of Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt. Yes, a part of this class is indeed influenced by the media, specially the English, but the majority of this class still watches vernacular channels.
My aunt, more than seventy years of old, regularly watches local Bengali channels in Calcutta and reads regularly Bengali periodicals and novels. Even my mother, though a doctorate and would be retiring from a central government job this year, prefers to watch Bengali channels than NDTV or CNN IBN. Same is the case with many of my Kakimas (aunties) and Kakus (uncles) and dadas and didis across the country. Same is the case with the driver Prakash who drove me around for fourteen days across Uttarakhand in April just before the polls. All of them belong to different parts of India and all belong to the middle class and all of them don’t create their own views based on the English Language Media. But still they didn’t vote for BJP this time.
Prakash told me in the first week of April that BJP won’t get a single seat in Delhi. Now it’s like a prophecy, but then I just laughed and thought he was being partial to Congress, which I finally found out he was not. He himself adores BJP for all the work it has done. He showed me enthusiastically the development in Uttarakhand that the BJP governemtn has done. But still he told me very clearly that people have the ‘perception’ that BJP may make things ‘unstable’. That was exactly the same thing that I heard even from many of my Kakus and Kakimas later. So we can’t rule out this perception as being created by the English Language Media.
I feel BJP has to take a stock of this new much-aware and off-course-not-fool Middle Class. It would be foolish to blame the English Language Media totally for creating a perception. This would be again under estimating the intelligence level of the Middle Class people. They are more aware than what others can think of. If my seventy plus aunty can know about Amartya Sen as the person who can eradicate hunger and famine in years if given a chance, why can’t someone else know about, say, Nandan Nilekani?
If Middle Class could do the right thing in nineties in bringing BJP to power, why should we assume that they have created a wrong and biased perception of the same party now? So the bottom-line is that, Middle Class was intelligent ten years back. They are no less intelligent now. If their perception changes they will again bring back BJP to power.
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com
Fresh Challenges for BJP
by Sudipto Das
As days pass by the challenges for BJP to strike back are getting tougher. Fresh challenges are cropping up as the UPA government is taking newer steps in desirable direction. But that’s indeed a healthy scenario because now the opposition has a higher goal in front of them. Like it’s always more challenging, and satisfying too, to become the first boy in a class of all bright students, it can be a really cherishing coming back to power for the BJP because of the competition from a rejuvenated Congress after the decisive victory in 2009 elections.
Coming to power in the 1990s for BJP against a decaying Congress and coming back to power now against a fresh Congress are not the same thing. Nevertheless, it’s indeed a positive sign. At the end of it the country would be benefitted with a better and stronger opposition and alternative in future. It’s same as that of a fiercely competitive market where the consumer is finally benefitted by the constant improvement of the quality of the products from competing companies.
In the 1990s both the bottom and the middle of the pyramid of Indian population were equally frustrated with the complacence, misgovernance and corruption of successive Congress governments. The emergency, the anti Sikh riots and the Bofors scam were still not things of distant past. The constant and brazen appeasement of the minority community for years by the Congress had also alienated them from the majority class, who by no way were communal. At that point of time BJP came up with fresh hopes for everything better not only for the educated people, but also for the ‘Aam Aadmi’.
Very ironically this very section of the voters turned their back to BJP in the recent election. But the reason is little different. Over the decade the aspirations of the people have changed.
People had already tasted prosperity since the days of NDA rule. Buoyed by the strong wind of the global economic boom the subsequent UPA government had limited chances to stop India’s growth. One had to be really dumb to stop the natural growth and prosperity that India was enjoying out if inertia of the high-speed global economy.
It’s no longer a mystery how Lalu Prasad Yadav turned around the fortunes of Indian Railways. Driven by the initial ground work done by Nitish Kumar, the previous Railway Minister, and the buoyant economy, anyone else also might have turned the Indian Railways around.
The perception of the UPA government being in favour of ‘Aam Aadmi’ was also created without much of effort. The ‘Aam Aadmi’ saw prosperity not because of the fact that the UPA government did something extra ordinary. The natural growth of Indian GDP, in lines with the flourishing world economy, bore the fruits of development for the ‘Aam Aadmi’ too. On top of that a few further gimmicks like loan waiving and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme added more to the perception. Hence, surprisingly, the anti incumbency wave was quite low against the ruling government.
All this itself had made the task for BJP to come back quite challenging. To add more to the challenge, UPA has started taking some steps that can’t be ruled out as just gimmicks.
The recent induction of Nandan Nilekani into the cabinet as the overall boss of the National ID project is one such act. It’s a very well thought plan.
The UPA government could have inducted any one of the Ambanis, or a Godrej or the Tata or someone else for the same job and still it would have worked out quite well. But no one else, than Nandan Nilekani, is looked upon as an ideal by anyone who is educated and hails from the middle class and who is young - someone who represents, or would be representing, India in the very near future. In Nandan Nilekani’s own words, India’s best asset at this point of time is her ‘demographic dividend’ coming from this huge chunk of educated, urbanized, middle class people. A few years back also this ‘dividend’ was not considered that big a thing either in business of politics.
Nandan Nilekani’s story, along with that of Narayan Murthy’s, is something that anyone with limited means but unlimited vision and ambition and passion can associate with. He comes from a middle class family without any golden connection as is the case with majority of Indians. He achieved everything in life by his sheer credibility and the favourable economic conditions of India - something that majority of Indians would also aspire of. His is an inspiring story that can raise hopes among the majority of Indians - but not the stories of the Tata or an Ambani or a Godrej.
Narayan Murthy has described this event as important as Sam Pitrada’s telecom revolution and Swaminathan’s Green Revolution. Inducting someone like Nandan Nilekani into the cabinet is a master stroke that can endear the UPA government to the majority of educated, urban, middle-class Indians, who are going to be the main driving force of our country over the next few decades.
I see this as a fresh challenge to the opposition. BJP has to come up with strategies that will align with the future class that would yield ‘demographic dividend’ to our country. This class no longer would be ‘Aam Aami’ staying in the hinterland of India waiting for a ‘White Tiger’ to become a ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. This class, again in Nandan Nilekani’s own words, would be the one that would change the way politics is looked at and the way our country has been functioning. This class can’t be ignored or crushed. The system has to change as per their aspirations. Anyone who is not aligned with this new system would perish and anyone who goes with them will cherish the fruits of ‘demographic dividends’. So it’s high time that BJP gets aligned with this new ‘White Tiger’.
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com
Makes & Breaks in Politics: Analogies with Corporate World
by Sudipto Das
One of the most important concepts in Indian culture and philosophy is that of the role of a creator, savior and destructor. People in India, since ages, have believed that the life cycle of anything, be it a nation, or civilization or a human life, is nothing but three phases of creation, survival and destruction. From the religious point of view also Brahma the creator, Vishnu the savior or protector and Shiva the destructor have been associated with the highest level of divinity. Keeping aside the theological aspects of this concept, it also has a very far reaching implication in almost everything thing – including the corporate world and the politics.
In a span of three decades the creation, growth and the recent debacle of BJP is a very relevant phenomenon in this respect. There have been introspections (or atmamanthan – one of the terms that Vajpayee had made popular even among the Hinglish crowd), review meetings, innumerable columns and writings on the causes of the debacle. Very logically nothing surprising has come out of all these. Most of the things that have been pointed out seem to be known to all. Nevertheless, none of these findings should be ignored with a ‘we-all-knew-this’ attitude like the kids in the class of Christopher Columbus who were all asked to place a boiled egg with shell firmly on a table and Columbus was the only one to break the shell, flatten the bottom and place it firmly on the table.
In Swami Vivekananda’s words ‘education is the manifestation of perfection already in man’. It’s no rocket science or the lack of it that makes someone a success or failure. In most cases debacles happen for reasons that are always known. So all the exercises for reinventing the reasons for any failure is always welcome. It’s also important to study success and failures at various fields and spheres because at the end of the day the reasons for any success or failure have some common things, knowing which just helps us to become more aware, educated and enlightened.
I’d like to analyze the growth and decline of a company which I’ve see from a close distance and draw an analogy to the same for politics. The intention is to infer that growth and decline always follow a particular pattern and the successful corporate and politicians always try to understand the pattern as best as possible.
The nineties saw a large number of technology startups in the San Francisco Bay area, popularly known as the Silicon Valley. The nearby universities at Stanford and Berkeley always provide an uninterrupted supply of talent to the Bay Area. Most technology companies either are head quartered or have important design centers in Bay Area. Intel, HP, Sun, Google all started in Bay Area. One of the technology areas which saw quite a few startups in nineties is called EDA or Electronic Design Automation, which provides CAD (Computer Aided Design) tools for designing semiconductor chips for electronic products. While semiconductor, which includes behemoths like Intel, IBM, Nokia, Motorola, Sony, Samsung and innumerable others, is a huge industry, EDA is very small. Individual revenues of Intel and Nokia are $40b and $50b respectively and the entire EDA industry has revenue of only $4b. That’s why EDA is perhaps one of the most fiercely - often bordering to nasty – competitive industries.
Little different from the Congress monopoly in Indian political scene, EDA had a sort of oligopoly dominated by the big brothers Cadence & Synopsys for quite some time. There were many small entities like the regional parties, but none could do anything significant till late nineties when a company named Magma suddenly rose like a sphinx. With barely a few million dollars of revenue in late nineties it attained $250m (1/8th of total EDA GDP) in 2005. When the semiconductor design houses were getting frustrated with the complacencies of the biggie-duo Cadence & Synopsys, a dashing young Indian entrepreneur, Rajiv Madhavan, still in his twenties, brought in fresh hopes and newer and more efficient ideas for making chips. The big brothers Cadence and Synsys didn’t provide a one-stop-shop and the customers had to buy a suite in pieces and stitch them together. On the contrary Magma came up with a single stitched elegant suite. Most importantly Rajiv exactly understood the problems and the aspirations of his customers - the chip makers.
The result was phenomenal. Apart from Google, not many startups in Bay Area can boast of such a success in so less time. Magma came into being in late nineties and by 2002 it had already become number two in areas of its operation, displacing the big brother Cadence. Magma’s reputation in customer satisfaction became a matter of threat even to the other big brother Synopsys. The entire designer community felt proud to be associated with Magma. In started attracting the best of the talents.
In a few years Rajiv could ‘destruct’ the old hegemony of the big brothers Cadence & Synopsys and ‘create’ a successful company. Rajiv was indeed a great Creator with all the right traits required for ‘creation’. He was aggressive, emotional, passionate, possessive, ruthless and ambitious. The Big Brother Synopsys tried its best to put him down, but he was just unputdownable.
The next logical phase of the business is retention or ‘protection’ of the growth. There’s a startling difference between destruction/creation and protection. It’s no theology, but sheer practical sense, that the protector Vishnu has been given a totally different image than the destructor Shiva. The Protector is much more matured, not emotional, very practical, composed and off course much more benign than the Destructor. The traits required for destruction/creation and protection are as different as playing cricket and singing songs. It’s not necessary that Sachin Tendulkar can also sing like Kishore Kumar. That’s when the problem started with Magma. Rajiv is an excellent creator but turned out to be a bad protector. He went on with the same aggression, arrogance and emotions with which he’d created the company. He slapped a law suit on the Big Brother Synopsys without much reason and drained huge amount of money for fighting the case. Synopsys kept on dragging the case as long as possible because they knew Magma would bleed heavily with the sky-rocketing legal costs in USA. His views and comments in public became too harsh and arrogant as compared to the relatively soft image of Synopsys. At the same time his lofty claims about some of Magma’s future products didn’t turn out to be fully true in due course. Gradually people started to dislike the very arrogance and aggression in Rajiv that they had liked few years back. In the mean time very silently and humbly Synopsys came up with a really good product that challenged Magma’s superiority in recent times. Gradually people started to prefer the ‘softer’ Synopsys rather than the ‘hard’ Magma. That was also the time when the global slowdown starting taking its toll and Magma went into a whirlwind downfall.
Let’s turn back to the rise and decline of BJP from just two seats in 1984 to close to 200 in 1999 and down to 120 in 2009.The nineties saw the dramatic rise of BJP who could well understand the pulse of the nation. India had been frustrated with the fifty years of misgovernance, corruption and minority appeasement by the Congress. Indians badly needed some fresh outlook, transparency and a cultural nationalism to pump up the declining global position of India. BJP came up with the right mix of aggression, passion and emotion to destroy a fifty year old dynastic misrule and setup the startup of a successful coalition government in the center for the first time. Almost the entire educated middle class aligned themselves with BJP in the nineties.
But when came the turn of protecting the same government it started losing ground because of the same reason why Magma started failing. The same aggression that brought BJP to power became the negative point. The excessive attack on the older Big Brother Congress was not taken in the right way by the same people who’d voted the Congress out a decade ago in favor of BJP.
Like I hope Rajiv matures as a protector, BJP can also overcome the transition from a destructor/creator to a protector. It’s just a maturing phase that will pass by. The same people who had brought BJP into power in nineties might not be the best candidates to play the role of ‘Protector’. There has to be a change of guards. This shouldn’t be seen as an embarrassment or humiliation for the old timers because their contributions and expertise are not being ignored. It’s only that after Sachin’s innings it’s time for Kishore Kumar to sing. Let Sachin not attempt to be Kishore Kumar. Sachin is Sachin and Kishore Kumar is Kishore Kumar. It’s no embarrassment to Sachin that he is not Kishore Kumar. It’s just not his cup of tea.
Coming back to where I’d started – let’s understand that we not only need a Shiva, but also a Vishnu. That’s what runs a business, and that’s what runs politics!!
Postscript
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com
The “For Aam Aadmi” Image of Congress
by Sudipto DasThere’s no denying that fact that the image of Congress being a pro ‘Aam Aadmi’ party did lot towards winning decisively in 2009 LS elections. It’s totally a different thing all together whether the steps that the UPA government had taken in the past five years were really the best possible ones. Nevertheless, on the basis of all these the perception that Congress has worked towards the overall development of bottom of the pyramid has been already been created.
It’s now the task of the opposition, lead by BJP, to make sure that the populist steps, that UPA has taken in the past five years and will take in future, don’t put a long term dent in the financial health of our country. But again doing so is a double edged sword. Saying anything against the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or waiving of loans would directly hit popularity. There’s lots of credence in making people understand that any step with very short term populist outlook would be very detrimental to the same people for whom the schemes are being created.
Let’s take the example of the NREGS. Yes, it did give some economic security to around 45 million households amidst a global slowdown. But couldn’t something else be done that would have had even greater impact? Already there have been enough talks about the futility of the work against which the employment has been provided. In many cases the sort of work done is comparable to what is said of the US about what they did to come out of the great depression of the thirties - one group digging up a hole and another filling it back. In stead of that the government could have launched many useful infrastructure projects and provided employment. The Golden Quadrilateral project has been almost stalled. A lot of employment could have been generated had all the incomplete roads were completed on time.
There’s no doubt that loan waiver scheme for the farmers was just an eye wash. In reality only the rich farmers were benefited. Majority of the poor farmers, who take money from the local money lenders, are still not benefited at all by this and they are the ones who continue to commit suicide throughout our country. In stead of waiving the loans, which anyway doesn’t impact majority of the farmers, the government can think of something like micro finance which can have much greater reach and impact.
Things like RTI and fixed terms for civil servants are indeed very good steps in instilling hopes in people. The RTI was a great success. A large number of PILs were filed in the past few years just because more and more information were available to the common people. These steps are simple to implement and can’t be criticized easily. BJP should come up with more such steps and propose them in the parliament.
It’s written in the wall that you can’t win any election any more unless you have the confidence of the bottom of the pyramid. But that doesn’t mean that you have to become populist in an unviable manner. That’s where BJP has to play a great role - that is to serve the “Aam Aadmi” in a much more efficient way than what Congress is perceived to be doing or have done.
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com/
Does Educated Young India Get Attracted towards Educational Qualification of Candidates?
by Sudidpto Das
Now that enough introspection and analysis have been done, it’s time for BJP to take corrective actions and work effectively towards improving the confidence of the people. It might not be possible to come up with a single antibiotic for all the headache, stomach pain and body ache at the same time. And by any chance if someone comes up with any such single-shot-solution that will surely be another grave mistake to apply it. Corrective measures are meant to be staggered and modified from time to time in order to account for all possible feedbacks. Faster the feedback mechanism, faster would be the settling time for the corrective measures.
Failures are the pillars of success. It’s good to fail and learn. That way the arrogance and the adamance of the success can be controlled to a great extent. But at the same time success shouldn’t be looked down. It’s always a good think to find out what all factors lead to a success. In the context of the recent election it’s not a bad thing to identify some aspects that might have helped the Congress to win more seats than BJP.
One of the aspects, as pointed out several times, is indeed the projection of youth by the Congress. Besides that there’s also one important thing that people may be overlooking. Doesn’t the election throw some light on the hypothesis that the educational background of candidates might have played a greater role than any other election in the past?
It’s not that highly educated people never took part in election in the past. Also education is not just measured by some professional degrees - otherwise Rabindranath Tagore can’t be considered educated at all. But that can be taken as an exception. As a general rule qualification is indeed a good measure of education and learning. Going by that standard this election did have some highly qualified people and most of them have won decisively.
Starting from Manmohan Singh (Cambridge), Jayaram Ramesh (IIT), Prithviraj Chauhan (BITS Pilani), Shashi Tharoor (UN) to S M Krishna, Kapil Sibal and many others there have been a platter of technical expertise from various domains ranging from engineering, to economics to law and International Relations. Most of these people are from Congress.
To top all these there are also a few personalities like Montek Singh and Shyam Pitrada, who are not directly associated with politics but are no less involved with the Congress machinery.
For the millions of first time voters, most of whom are not illiterates, such credentials might have played a great role in creating a perception that Congress is better ‘qualified’ to run the government. Such a perception may or may not be true always, but at the end of the end it’s this perception that might have turned the wheels in favour of Congress.
Even though a rational person may be against dynastic politics but still the suaveness and external polish of many second generation (and fourth generation in one case) young politicians did tilt the public sentiments in favour of dynasty because the alternative in many cases were just no match for the sophistication of the heirs of the chairs.
Does that mean that more educated the youth of India would be more and more they would prefer the sophistication and suaveness and polish rather than a rustic down to earth true worker? It might be too premature to come to any conclusion like this.
Whatever be the case even the most techno savvy person would prefer a half naked Gandhi, devoid of any popular perception of sophistication, against the impeccably dressed and eloquent and suave Jinnah.
So when there is indeed some basis for the hypothesis that qualification of candidates may have helped Congress this time, but at the same time it’s not the only criteria for winnability. People did see ground work also apart from qualification. That’s why Captain Gopinath could get only 18000 votes in perhaps the most techno savvy and hi-tech constituency of India - that’s Bangalore South - against BJP’s Ananth Kumar, who defeated not only Gopinath but also another US returned and educated young turk from Congress.
I’d like to conclude by saying that a safe bet is to field candidates with really good educational background and also strong track record of developmental services.
Mamata Banerjee won’t have won so much this time had she not had Derek O’Brian, one of the most popular personalities among the elite Calcuttans, a well educated and popular singer - Kabir Suman - who had revolutionized modern Bengali songs some two decades ago, a very successful doctor like Kakali Ghosh Dastidar and few others from corporate sectors also - most of whom had fought and won this election. Mamata played a very safe game this time by attracting the elite and highly educated people from various spectrum of society.
This indeed is a good thing to think about for BJP. One of the major reasons for the unparalleled popularity of Atal Behari Vajpayee among the youth of 90s is off course his literary sense and poetic style of oratory. People used to wait for Vajpayee to speak because every time they expected some new expression and new words hitherto unheard to most vernacular unaware English educated youth. The educated people used to get attracted to his diction of words and impeccable knowledge of literature and language - something a rarity in politics. By the same logic the next generation youth of the 2000s getting attracted to Cambridge, Harvard, United Nations and IIT may not be a fluke.
Sudipto blogs at http://sudiptounplugged.blogspot.com/