Reading India

The Death of Manmohanomics

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:08:00 +0530

On 14 November, top Finance Ministry officials made a crucial PowerPoint presentation to the global credit rating agency, Moody’s. Scared that the latter may downgrade India’s sovereign rating, as it had done with the country’s banking sector the previous week, the bureaucrats listed out a dozen big-ticket reforms that UPA-II had initiated in the recent past. It was an aggressive attempt to conclusively prove that there was no policy paralysis within the Government.

Ironically, and shockingly, the items that the bureaucrats discussed confirmed quite the opposite. The exercise established that Manmohan Singh and his A-team were unable to push through critical but politically sensitive decisions. It indicated that in the current political atmosphere—characterised by corruption scandals, squabbles among Cabinet ministers, bureaucratic coma, and fear and loathing within India Inc—governance and policymaking had lost almost all traction.

India's Similarity to the European Union

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:42:06 +0530

There is a European quality to India.

Like the European Union today, the Indian republic is a confederation of regions and attitudes with little affection between them and vastly different levels of governance, productivity and historical good fortune. And all of them, of course, are stuck with a uniform currency. The inefficient and the irresponsible are subsidized by the hard-working and the responsible, who also have to tolerate a free flow of migrants from the poor states. At least Europe does not have to pretend to be a single nation.

Putting Growth In Its Place

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 04:40:06 +0530

Putting Growth In Its Place:

Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like this. “After decades of mediocrity and stagnation under ‘Nehruvian socialism’, the Indian economy achieved a spectacular take-off during the last two decades. This take-off, which led to unprecedented improvements in income per head, was driven largely by market initiatives. It involves a significant increase in inequality, but this is a common phenomenon in periods of rapid growth. With enough time, the benefits of fast economic growth will surely reach even the poorest people, and we are firmly on the way to that.” Despite the conceptual confusion involved in bestowing the term ‘socialism’ to a collectivity of grossly statist policies of ‘Licence raj’ and neglect of the state’s responsibilities for school education and healthcare, the story just told has much plausibility, within its confined domain.

But looking at contemporary India from another angle, one could equally tell the following—more critical and more censorious—story: “The progress of living standards for common people, as opposed to a favoured minority, has been dreadfully slow—so slow that India’s social indicators are still abysmal.” For instance, according to World Bank data, only five countries outside Africa (Afghanistan, Bhutan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Yemen) have a lower “youth female literacy rate” than India (World Development Indicators 2011, online). To take some other examples, only four countries (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Myanmar and Pakistan) do worse than India in child mortality rate; only three have lower levels of “access to improved sanitation” (Bolivia, Cambodia and Haiti); and none (anywhere—not even in Africa) have a higher proportion of underweight children. Almost any composite index of these and related indicators of health, education and nutrition would place India very close to the bottom in a ranking of all countries outside Africa.

Karachi to Bombay to Calcutta

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 02:35:05 +0530

Karachi to Bombay to Calcutta:

Like many things in India, civil aviation was subservient to the monsoon. Since the rains, which begin mid-June, have typically abated by early September, the subcontinent’s first regularly scheduled airmail service was to have been inaugurated on September 15, 1932. But that year, the rain and lashing wind persisted, making the Juhu airfield, Bombay’s first airport, a quagmire. In those days, the field was little more than a dried mud flat on the Indian Ocean coast, north of what was then the city center, and in what is now the hub of India’s famous film industry, Bollywood. It took another month before the airfield dried out enough to permit the first flight of the new service, a venture that would grow into Air-India, the national carrier.

That it started at all was due to the persistence and vision of a tycoon and adventurer named J.R.D. Tata. In 1932, the 28-year-old industrialist cut a dashing figure. With his tidy mustache, trim frame, and pomaded hair, he looked like Errol Flynn. Finally, in October, after three years of lobbying the British colonial government, Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata, known to millions of Indians today as J.R.D., boarded a second-hand Puss Moth at Drigh Road airport in Karachi (in what is now Pakistan) for the flight to Bombay. Equipped with only a pair of goggles and the slide rule he used for navigating, J.R.D. took off with 120 pounds of mail. He stopped as planned in Ahmedabad, the halfway point in the 600-mile journey. “I was fuelled by Burmah Shell out of 2 gallon tins brought to the airfield in a bullock-cart,” J.R.D. remembered, according to materials in the Tata archives. “My only thought was to be on my way as quickly as possible so as to reach Juhu on schedule…and I managed to take off after 20 minutes in Ahmedabad after a lemonade and a brief talk to the press.”

The flight to Bombay (today, Mumbai) was “bumpy and hot” but otherwise uneventful, except for what an internal Tata Group review of the founding of the airline describes as the “killing of a bird which flew into the cabin of his machine.”

Heard it on the Grapevine

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 22:20:05 +0530

Heard it on the Grapevine:

“Wine takes time; it can not be made with valuations in mind,” says Gurnani, who has recently started selling outside of Maharashtra, in Bangalore. “It’s a labour of love. You go to a trade fair, and see thousands of great wines, and you realize how inflated your ego is as an Indian winemaker.”

“There is a saying in South Africa,” says Gurnani, smiling. “How do you make a million dollars in this business?

“Start with a billion.”

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:20:05 +0530

Where the Rubber Meets the Road:

If the tickets for the inaugural Indian Grand Prix sell out at something close to full price, Jaypee will make $30 million in ticket revenue, and end up with a loss of roughly $35 million on the race itself after sanction fees and other operational costs are paid—without taking into account the $200 million price tag for the track itself. In a series of interviews in the run-up to the race, Sameer Gaur has predicted that Jaypee can break even in “the next three to four years”. Some of that revenue may come from the racetrack, which can be rented to other events throughout the year, but as the analysis in “Formula Money” demonstrates, even long-established circuits in countries with a larger racing fan base have had great difficulty meeting their costs.

For Jaypee, the real business opportunity will come from property development rather than racing—or the other sports facilities, like a cricket stadium, that will accompany the track at Jaypee Greens Sports City. Under the terms of its arrangement to build the Yamuna Expressway, Jaypee was able to purchase the land for the project—approximately 2,500 acres—from the UP government at essentially the same price the state paid to landowners; a spokesman told me the cost was around 800 per square metre, or roughly 3.2 million per acre. “We do have around 1,500 acres of real estate,” Gaur told The Times of India in September. “And there would be some advantages from the real estate as well.” Formula 1, one might say, represents a very high-profile advertisement for the sale of the Jaypee properties surrounding it—and the company’s considerable investments and landholdings throughout the rapidly urbanising Yamuna corridor.

Moral Minefield

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:30:05 +0530

Moral Minefield:

Over the course of the 20th century, Tata Steel—the flagship firm of the House of Tata—became synonymous with Indian industrialisation, ethical capitalism and social philanthropy. The company introduced fair labour practices long before they were enshrined in Indian law or, in some cases, even before they had been adopted in the West. Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy (JRD) Tata, the son of RD Tata who became chairman in 1938 and ran the Tata Group for half a century, was credited with having infused Tata Steel with a “people first” approach that produced a competitive edge—generating high productivity from a loyal workforce, which allowed it to produce good quality steel at low costs for many decades. All the leading business figures of the Tata family set personal examples as philanthropists by bequeathing large portions of their personal wealth to trusts.

But on closer scrutiny, the acquisition of Corus and the Kalinganagar firing episode represented two sides of the same coin—the culmination of two distinct but mutually reinforcing developments whose interrelation had largely gone unnoticed. The first was a dramatic transformation of the global steel industry, resulting in a highly predatory and competitive sector, whose new mantra might as well have been “acquire or get acquired”. The second, directly connected to the first, was an aggressive drive towards “mechanisation, consolidation and expansion”—which increasingly set steel companies, especially in the developing world, on a collision course with mounting resistance from local communities, whose way of life and even survival was often at stake.

Kingdom of Sloth

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:41:06 +0530

Kingdom of Sloth:

In the first week of November, during a mid-career training course for officers of the rank of joint secretary, a guest lecturer at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, the premier training institution for India’s bureaucrats, was shocked to note the one point of unanimity among the 25 attending officers. All of them said they were unwilling to take any decisions on file because of the fear of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. Says the lecturer who did not wish to be identified, “It seems like the bureaucracy has gone on strike against Right to Information.”

AFSPA’s Bitter Roots

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:47:06 +0530

AFSPA’s Bitter Roots:

“This is a unique legislation, the kind of which has never been contemplated by since this Indian Parliament came into existence… What I am trying to submit is that this is a martial law…. It is being sought to be introduced in this House as a most innocuous measure. If anybody analyses this bill, one will find that it seeks to indemnify any person for any act done for quelling disturbance in an area declared so by either the Governor of Assam or the Chief Commissioner of Manipur within their jurisdiction… [W]e want a free India. But, we do not want a free India with barbed wires and concentration camps, where havaldars (sergeants) can shoot at sight any man. If that is the concept of free India, I think I may as well be a traitor.”

Over to the Supreme Court

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:01:06 +0530

Over to the Supreme Court:

For every argument raised by Tamil Nadu in support of its claims, there is counter-argument in Kerala that appears equally plausible. Yet, each time the controversy gets embroiled in extraneous issues, two things stand out: One is Kerala’s refusal to ack nowledge the genuine need of the farmers in the otherwise drought-prone regions of Tamil Nadu for the waters of the Mullaperiyar; the other is Tamil Nadu’s refusal to see that it cannot rely on or continue to expect more and more from the resources of an other State to satisfy its own requirements to the detriment of the other State. A solution perhaps lies in acknowledging the two truths, but neither government can afford the political repercussions of such a confession.

Why I Left India (Again)

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:38:05 +0530

Why I Left India (Again):

I was excited about moving to India and I thought I had the right expectations—after being away for eleven years (I grew up in Mumbai), I was prepared for India to feel less like home and more like the flight’s “Indian vegetarian meal”: visually familiar but viscerally alien.

Our move was a success by any metric. My wife and I are software professionals, and our careers flourished at an Indian rate of growth (R.I.P., “Hindu rate of growth”). Our daughter attended a preschool in Bangalore whose quality matched any in the Bay Area. Our three-bedroom flat in Defence Colony, Indiranagar, was so comfortable and so American-friendly that my friends called it the Green Zone.

And yet, two years and nine months after our move to India, on one of our regular evening jogs along our impossibly leafy street, my wife and I found ourselves discussing not whether we should return to the U.S., but when.

A month later, we were back in California.

Nonsense

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:05:05 +0530

Nonsense:

“Except the Congress, give your vote to any of the other 44 candidates in the fray. Do not worry excessively that there are corrupt individuals among the candidates. If they win, the Lokpal Bill will send them to jail” ~ 10 October 2011

Let us try and understand Kejriwal’s logic (if it can be termed that)—as long as the Congress is kept out, it does not matter that corrupt politicians are elected to Parliament. In fact, to take this argument to its logical conclusion, Kejriwal seems to suggest that if enough corrupt non-Congress politicians are elected, they will pass a Lokpal Bill that will ensure they are sent to jail. It says something about the IIT joint entrance examination that a man who can make light of logic so easily got through.

India’s Myopic Opposition

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:30:06 +0530

India’s Myopic Opposition:

Just as relevant today as it was two years ago. With BJP retaining its myopic worldview and the Left continuing on it’s self-destruct policy, there doesn’t seem to be any viable opposition to the Congress, no matter how incompetent they have become.

The fault line along which these various factions have emerged is a deep one, and it suggests a serious identity crisis within the BJP. The ideological wellspring — and, some observe cuttingly, the puppet master — of the BJP is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s foremost right-wing Hindu organization, which has been accused of helping to demolish a mosque in Ayodhya and of complicity in the anti-Muslim Gujarat riots of 2002. But after two successive electoral defeats, pragmatists within the BJP as well as external analysts have perhaps begun to realize that too much Hindutva — too much of a focus on temple-building, for instance, or too much spurning of the Muslim vote — is hurting the BJP. The RSS, on the other hand, insists that the BJP is floundering because it has diluted its Hindutva to appear moderate. For a party that is barely 30 years old, this is a midlife crisis that has struck much too early.

The Grooming of Rahul Gandhi

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:37:05 +0530

The Grooming of Rahul Gandhi:

The country, frustrated with Singh’s ineffectiveness, is looking to the leader who will take Singh’s place when he finishes his term in two years, and they are turning toward Rahul Gandhi. Gandhi is the son of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party’s reclusive leader and the widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister who was assassinated in 1991. (Rajiv himself was the son of Indira Gandhi, who was killed in 1984.) Since 2004, Rahul, who studied at Harvard and at Trinity College, Cambridge, has been tailored for higher office by Congress Party grandees. But Rahul, 41, is untested and rough around the edges: though he assumed the position of the general secretary of the All India Congress Committee four years ago, he has little to show in terms of concrete party accomplishments. But there is little doubt in most minds that, given the paucity of other options, Rahul will get the top job when Singh retires. Not only does he seem destined to inherit a political mess; it remains to be seen whether two years will prove long enough to groom the next ruler of the world’s largest democracy.

Lifetime Oprtunity

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:07:05 +0530

Lifetime Oprtunity:

It would have been sheer cussedness to not be entranced by the Golf Estate sample unit. A scale model of the entire layout showed clumps of white-lit buildings, rising like glowing stalagmites from the midst of a 75-acre expanse of land. The grounds included a nine-hole golf course and 20 swimming pools—which, even to somebody who liked swimming pools, sounded excessive. The kitchens were stocked with Miele equipment (“the same people who did Barack Obama’s kitchen in the White House”, Rawat had said during our very first phone conversation), and the drawers had spoons and ladles in them. A plump copy of The Silver Spoon cookbook sat propped open on a stand, as if I had interrupted somebody in the act of making a soufflé. The bedrooms—three, all gorgeous—had books stacked on the bedside tables, titles so wildly out of the mainstream that they felt like genuine personal choices: Tom Bedlam by George Hagen and Wanting by Richard Flanagan, both of which, I would discover in an eerie coincidence, were described by New York Times reviewers as “Dickensian”.

Downstairs, in a cappuccino bar where Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’ was being piped through ceiling speakers, Rawat poured me coffee, and I was introduced to Harsh and Anubhav, who have been working with M3M for the past year. Wearing shiny new suits, they both seemed to treat Rawat with a gentle disdain. Through the far window, Harsh pointed out that construction work on Golf Estate had begun six months earlier, but I could only see two desultorily built floors of a single block. Golf Estate still needed five-and-three-quarter towers, not to mention the clubhouse, the reversible golf course, the ice-skating rink and the other promised amenities, all to be built in the remaining two-and-a-half years. I couldn’t imagine how that would happen.

“There’s going to be an aqua gym here, and there’s a reflexology walk in the Merlin,” Anubhav said.

“Everything they see in Hollywood movies, they put in here,” Rawat said with a laugh. “Sometimes without knowing what they are!”

Anubhav and Harsh frowned. This was loose talk, they seemed to feel. Then Anubhav informed me that Merlin was named not after the Arthurian magician but after the Merlion, Singapore’s half-piscine, half-leonine mascot. “Because it will be Singapore-style living.”

They talked about the Merlion with such familiarity that I asked: “Have you gone to Singapore?”

“No,” Harsh admitted, and I felt wretched for having asked the question, as if I’d cheated in a game the rules of which I knew only too well. “Maybe we’ll ask M3M to take us there, as a reward, once this project is done.”

I lingered under the air-conditioning vent before stepping back into sun, waiting also for Rawat to finish a quiet conversation with Harsh before joining me. On the music system, there was a final crash of drums, then a few seconds of silence—and then the opening bars of ‘Free Bird’ again, the song on loop all day, an unchanging soundtrack in a landscape awaiting breathless change.

Falling Man

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:07:05 +0530

Falling Man:

In a 1996 interview, Singh had been asked point-blank about his aspirations for the top job, and his response was uncharacteristically blunt: “Who doesn’t want to be prime minister?”

In fact, Singh was secretly approached two years later, in 1998, with a proposition to put him forward as a prime ministerial candidate. The Congress was fractured at that point in time, and the era of unstable coalitions had begun. A senior Congress leader who had joined Mamata Banerjee’s breakaway Trinamool Congress told me that he and Banerjee had hatched a plan early in 1998 to approach Singh—who was then unhappy in the Congress—and offer him a safe seat in North West Calcutta. They were confident that the upcoming snap elections would deliver a repeat of 1996, with no party as a decisive winner, and believed they could cobble together a coalition with Manmohan Singh as the prime minister.

“I went to his Safdarjung Road residence and put this proposition to him, to join the Trinamool Congress,” the senior leader told me. “I said, I’m authorised by Mamata Banerjee to offer you a ticket from North West Calcutta, the constituency of the aristocratic Bengalis—the Bhadralok. There is no way anyone could beat you there, and after the elections the prime ministership will be offered to you on a platter.”

“Do you know what Manmohan Singh said?” the leader continued. “He said, ‘This country will not accept a Sikh as the Prime Minister.’”

Kashmir's Mass Graves Come To Light

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:26:06 +0530

Kashmir's Mass Graves Come To Light:

Sidiq has been working on the river for 12 years now. Every week or two, as he hoists a shovel full of sand from the riverbed, he finds himself staring at a skull, a broken skeleton, or a shattered femur. “Most of the dead were young men. You could see their shiny teeth; you could tell from the skull, he was very, very young. One day I found a young man…. He had been badly tortured. Both his hands and feet had been chopped off,” says Sidiq as he sits beneath the majestic maple trees lining the riverbank.

A fellow sand-digger in his early 40s, Naseer Ahmed, found a skull in March. “It was a small skull. It would have been a 16- or 17-year-old boy. The other day, it was a thigh with flesh still on it,” Ahmed said. “It is a haunted river.”

A Cognitive Psychologist Explains Why Sachin Always Fails

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:27:06 +0530

A Cognitive Psychologist Explains Why Sachin Always Fails:

“The fact is that human beings are not Bayesian. I am not talking about a walking talking encyclopaedia of cricket such as you. Ordinary fans do not remember scores with that degree of accuracy. And when it comes to computing a probability of failure of Sachin given crisis, they mess it up. The expansion of the Bayesian is pretty complicated to the human mind.”

He wrote it down : P(Sachin fails| crisis) = [P(crisis|Sachin fails) x P(Sachin fails)]/[P(crisis|Sachin fails)xP(Sachin fails)+P(crisis|Sachin does not fail)xP(Sachin does not fail)]

“Most men lose it when it comes to prior probabilities. In fact, in 1993, Dawes, Mirels, Gold and Donahue explicitly tested and confirmed that P(A|B) is most often approximated by the common human mind by P(B |A)”

“What?”

A Heady Dose of Humour

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:22:06 +0530

A Heady Dose of Humour:

A sharp repartee does not necessarily lead to an audience rolling in aisles; a few quiet chuckles from ‘those who know’ are always preferable. But there is always a problem with ‘in’ jokes: the quiet appreciation of the few are invariably overshadowed by the simmering anger of the great many that nurture the suspicion that they are being mocked by those who have rarely had it bad.

This point was driven home at a TV show Mani and I did in Miranda House, one of the best women’s colleges of Delhi University. The audience didn’t think that the competitive displays of Stephanian humour were very funny — not because they weren’t amused per se but because the ‘in’ jokes from a bygone age also reeked of social privilege. They interpreted the closed world of overgrown schoolboys as evidence of social condescension. The students weren’t earnest radicals; they aspired to a society where opportunities were equal and not determined by glibness and social skills. In a crudely cricketing sort of way, their role model was M.S. Dhoni, the Ranchi boy who made good, not the Nawab of Pataudi from Winchester and Balliol College.

The Insurgent

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:29:38 +0530

The Insurgent:

We came to a stop in Mayur Vihar in East Delhi, and entered a large concrete apartment block, where Kejriwal had rented a three-bedroom flat for Hazare. A tall, dark-skinned man opened the door and led us into the drawing room, where bowls of chopped salad had been set out on the table alongside plates of rice and dal. Brand new cutlery, cups, towels and dustbins sat unused in plastic bags on the floor in one corner of the room. Manish tapped on one of the doors, and Kejriwal briefly emerged before turning into a toilet to wash his hands and feet. He had agreed to an hour-long interview, but first he wanted to finalise the text for a pamphlet with Sisodia, who was sitting on the floor with a computer on his lap. Kejriwal sat down next to Sisodia and pointed at the screen. “Here I was thinking something should come,” he said. “No no, don’t erase ration card corruption. Keep it simple.” Kejriwal scratched at his head, absorbed in thought and looking for words. “Yes, driving licence corruption,” he said. “Good, this is punchy.”

“How much time do you want?” he asked me. And then, “Can I have some food first?”

As the food was served, Hazare emerged from his bedroom without his iconic Gandhi cap; he had a shaved head, and two faint furrows ran across his forehead. He, too, sat on the floor, and turned toward Kejriwal. “I shouldn’t have praised Nitish Kumar—I think Lalu will not support us now,” Hazare said, referring to the legendarily corrupt former Bihar chief minister.

“OK,” Kejriwal said, almost shouting Hazare down. “We’ll talk about it some other time.”

Hazare didn’t speak another word after that, eating his plate of rice and dal in silence. When Kejriwal finished eating, he lay back on the floor and fell asleep. I tried to start up a conversation with Hazare, but Sisodia insisted on answering on his behalf.

About 30 minutes later, Kejriwal jolted upright, as if waking from a startling nightmare, and turned immediately to Sisodia. “How about ‘Government Lokpal is a Betrayal’?” he said, like a man who dreams only of political slogans, before answering himself: “No, leave it for a while.”