Some random thoughts on adminstration

How skilling people can be more effective than government Doles!

Hon. Prime ministers recent thrust on National skill Development could be a game changer!
We are sitting on a huge demographic dividend, basically a crest of young populus, who would, if educated and skilled right, pull a nation out into massive growth and development.
This happened with England in 17th century and USA in the 20th.
Whats the idea?
The idea is to skill, rather than supremely educate the mass of people who'd drop out at various stages in the education pyramid.
So at the base of the pyramid would be primary schooling, then the secondary, followed by professional courses and the doctorates.
Naturally, for myriad reasons typically afflicting a poor developing country, not all choose to be engineers or doctors.
The guys and gals who drop out at 12th and 10th for eg, if aptly skilled, can contribute to the workforce, albeit at lower levels, and help themselves.
The skills may be driving, weaving, basic electronics, chip design, food processing or any thing in between.
United states has reportedly 3000 skilled apprenticeships programs and the like, making sure every american gets productive without necessarily having to acquire formal degrees and schooling.
Edison, for instance was barely educated, while Bill gates famously dropped out of Harvard.

Perhaps its a typically american way.
On recent visit to Thailand, for example, i found that this fledgling nation with miserable education and literacy standards when compared to India had developed itself and provided its peoples with all the amenities and comforts of modern life.
How did it do it?

Well government sponsors Skill development programs at all levels of school and college dropping outs, mainly into tourism sector, and all of them are actively employed thereafter.
This is critical in India, if we don't want a run of what United states experienced in 90's , when gun toting teens , borne out of wedlock and failed abortions, contributed, being jobless, into high crime rates.

In other words, Huge young population is a double edged sword.
Skill them and put into viable vocations immediately or risk having a huge spike in crime graphs, as was evident in England and USA during thier ages.
Considering our lumbering criminal justice system and lax policing standards, its a dystopian future not far away!

Such scenario is already playing out in north Indian BIMARU states, for instance.

Why stronger patenting laws can make india a more innovative country.

Its no rocket science anymore that Innovation is what drives wealth.
Around 80% of an Apple product's profit is shipped back to USA , which holds patenting rights, with china getting 20% for manufacturing it.
High end technology in avionics, computing, telephony, consumer electronics, defense etc are what drives today's economies.
United states has, by patenting and holding legal rights to products, been able to steamroll into a superpower in 20th century.
Its Detroit produces Boeing's commercial airlines, while its apples and Googles have led the digital revolution.
Its Bell labs discovered Transistors, the building blocks of the computing world, while its Dupont heralded the chemical age of Teflons and nylons.
Its IBM invented most of computer hardware, including accounting machines and mainframes of yore.
Even Hitler, it is sadly known, used IBM's machines to rapidly account, keep track and exterminate 6 million jews!

The point however is, that mass manufacturing and sweatshops, which Asians specialize in, will never truly create wealth.
It can , at best be used to alleviate poverty and herald a burgeoning middle class.
So while India's Infosys employs lakhs of people to mainly handle/create software systems of the west or when Biocon spends its time reverse engineering generics, it doesn't necessarily add value to the GDP that we require.



Its perhaps an Asian affliction, that we tend to indulge in the mundane , tedious and repetitive work rather than search for the unknown and the bizarre.
After all, this quest for weirdness is what drives innovation and knowledge.

So while the west was discovering the laws of physics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics ,principles of gunnery, mathematics etc in the 18th century, we were whiling away producing art ware and clothing in the sweatshops of united provinces.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, and with the information revolution ushering in seamless transfer of knowledge, we ought to invest in R&D.
Govermental R&D, I always believed, would be limited in scope and impact.
So while Goverment talks about millions of rupees as grants to few universities as seed money, i'd reckon thats a bad way to go.

Innovation, the best of its kind, comes from within.
Within every human there is an urge, provided there exists an incentive, monetary or otherwise, to indulge in the search of the unknown.
So while Edison fiddled away with hundreds of contraptions in his labs and 2 bicyclists in Kittyhawk shoved us into modern age of aviation, they were looking at secure patenting laws to ensure them a fortune.

The right approach to driving innovation should be for Goverment to actively promote it through policies and acts.
Schools should reduce curriculum based on rote learning as it exists now.
Instead , incentives should be given to innovative thought and creative knowledge.

At macro level, Goverment should ensure stronger patenting laws to ensure a developer of product or idea is adequately compensated. This may go in the face of our argument at international forums, but we must bite the bullet now.
Every human being, if his urge exists to create something, jugaad or otherwise, must be speedily given patents / rights to secure his product and gain out of it.
Goverment, for reasons of equality and affordability, can set aside certain sectors from this policy, or even subsidize the product at the level of end user.

For eg, if an Indian finds a way to build a powerful engine out of Hydrogen gas, he ought to be able to find funding to make it big, and more importantly, protect himself from thoroughly Indian phenomenon of copycatting, imitation and spuriousness
.
This way, every Indian will have an incentive to innovate.

However, this is not to denigrate institutional innovation, the sort which happens in BEL labs, or DuPont or Google.
Government funding to colleges , institutions etc can be supplemented by businesses, as in USA.

We must break the asian phenomenon of sweatshops and mass labor and concentrate on high end thought driven smart innovation resulting in wealth.
Sooner the better.

How Paper is more suited to Government than Digital.

Mughal government was sometimes called Paper Government. The whole system ran essentially on commands/ orders/circulars written down on paper.
Imgaine a government which spanned almost the area of Europe, held largely by muscle of mansabdars with their assortment of cavalry strength.
Orders need to be transmitted by central government, policies need to be implemented, taxes needed to collected, accounts be maintained, and punishments needed to be meted out.
All this would have been impossible without paper and its impressions which mughal government exclusively relied on.

Paper is a product which is easy to make, put impressions on , and preserve forever.
As an add on , we have figured out to create unique non recreatable fingerprint, the Signature.

The result is , paper is largely irreplaceable in terms of reproducibility, survivablity  and general affordability.
Working for Haryana Government, I could see FIRs(First information reports) dating back to 1800's!
This is because paper reports can survive for centuries, provided they get right temperature and biologically controlled environment.

Now we see a huge rush in Goverment of India as well as state governments to endorse everything Digital and related to electronic governance.
Most bureaucrats and politicians don't even understand basic computing before they willingly plunge into electronic mode, gleefully cutting ribbons of dusty array of computers and peripherals ostensibly arranged for "MantriJI" to inaugurate.

The fundamental question for me as we replace hundreds of government paper records with digital electronic ones is that how do we store it?
With digital information, it merely exists as 1's and 0's in an array of storage devices such as flash drives, hard discs and optical arrays.
The information is not tangible, or intuitively manipulable as a paper record.
Which lends to the question, is there a permanent way to preserve a record.

In Goverment, remember, some records are mandated, by law and rules, to be stored for eternity.
Some merely are worthy of destruction in a couple of decades, while most transitory information too have a decade of shelf life.
Has government figured out a way to store this information for such periods?

The technology, meanwhile, doesn't even exist in a satisfactory way!
Optical disks are notoriously unreliable, while hard disks do a favor as they last a year of hard work.
Flash drives, contrary to perception, cant store information forever, and left to themselves , they'd loose out all information in couple of years unless its plugged into a computer.

Goverments across the world are researching finer ways of storing digital information for long periods. Optical arrays and magnetic tape are closest conform-ants.
Etching data on Glass, DNA or silica is being researched, and if it works out, we can store data which can last even a few million years!

Meanwhile, the best way to cheat on this process is to take a printout and lock it away the old way.
And needless to say, most Goverment babus love this anyway!

What will happen if we dry out of energy?
Look around us, and everything we see is driven by energy!
It is said that induction of horses, which fed on the largest repository of energy on earth , the grass, single handedly led to massive empires that we saw of mongols and others.
Incan and aztects had empires far smaller in geographical spread than in Europe and Asia.
Why?
They didn't have the horse.
Without energy and propulsion, they had no means to impose their will on large geographical swathes.

Similarly, most of what we today use to transport, defend, communicate and eat rely upon the humble gasoline engine.

Its estimated that famines have all but been eradicated in India for two reasons.
One is green revolution and other is the availability of mass rapid transportation systems which can ship grains where need exists in relatively short times.
Everything we do today relies on energy, and most of it is imported from abroad, mainly from the Gulf Region.
We are sitting on awesome coal reserves, by one estimate good enough to last us 300 years, but Goverment policies and environmental concerns have contributed to making it a secondary energy source.

What if coal, of which we have ample reserves, was used to produce more electricity to power electric vehicles rather than gasoline engines.
With that we would have reduced our energy needs from abroad and also increased our Forex position.

However, not even a percentage of vehicles plying on the road today are electric, possibly due to lack of viable technology.

But message is clear, if we are using the Delhi metro which runs on electricity , you might be using an Indian power source rather than a middle eastern one which runs your SUV!

This is of course, excluding the inherent inefficiency of coal based power WRT to Crude Oil, as the former would need to heat water to turn turbines which in turn produce electricity.
Not to mention the obvious environmental repercussions of such effort!
Its estimated that we'd need 9 planets if every country in the world emits carbon at the same level as USA, for instance.


Going vegetarian can save the planet!
The most compulsive argument i could find to quit eating meat, including beef , is that they contribute an astonishing 51% to the climate change processes.
Methane and allied transportation costs of producing meat on table for most of us , surprisingly, is single biggest causation to global warming, much more potent than burning coal!

Simply put, we rear around 71 Billion animals for around 7.1 Billion people, and the collective gases and goo they produce is cumulatively huge.
Essentially , if we all quit meat, we can cut carbon emissions to the extent of 50%, much more we can single pointedly do by any other measure!
I wonder if RSS and the BJP Goverment had ever used this to leverage thier point, as well as negotiated at WTO and UN to thier benefit.
As we burn up more coal to power our industries and homes, we are also increasing Per capita Carbon Footprint, something the west likes to deride at various forums.
I guess we can counter them by pointing out our largely prevalent vegetarianism is compensating for it, by and large.

So Go vegan, and save the planet!

Education and egalitarianism.

India has been a closed culture educationally, and has been characteristically so for the large part of its history.
Knowledge, that intangible key to progress, has been captured, much like inscrutable Vedic phrases; mystified, rarefied and allowed to exist only in close confines of its priestly class.
In India, knowledge is still supposed to be abstruse and not democratic.
A holder of this holy grail is supposed to confine , protect and cherish it as an embellishment, and look down upon others who are not fortunate enough to get a grasp of it.Puzzling formula, enigmatic and the recondite is preferred over simple and straight knowledge.
This is terribly unlike the west's quest to popularize knowledge , technology and "dummify" even the most difficult of ideas.

Simplicity, of course, is at the heart of knowledge, and Newton with his laws was to depict it years later.

The other facet of Indian knowledge was that it emphasized Mathematics, philosophy , the abstract and gave prominence to memorization rather than creative thinking, perhaps an unfortunate side-effect of centuries of cramming vedic texts.
The result was thousands of years of class divides, and a large underbelly of peoples who would confine themselves into straight jacketed jobs  and form, initially con-sensually, into various "castes", or social stuctures.
The pinnacle of all knowledge, the vedas themselves, were not written down until 6th century AD and were initially transmitted by word of mouth, memorized in fine phrases, rhythmic movements, nasal sounds and the like.


No one is sure who or how the words themselves came to fore, thereby leading credence to Asprushya theory of origin of vedas, attributing them to a divine origin.

Eventually when it was written down, it was remarkably accurate but not terribly legible or intuitive to a commoner, largely because of its usage of an extreme form of Sanskrit.
There is no such instance, perhaps, of such an amazing reproduction of spoken word from yore such as india's vedas. It is a remarkable feat to be proud of.

But unfortunately, it also led to India's quest with capture of knowledge, education and literature by its erudite class.
For next thousands of years, education would be imparted in encrypted Sanskrit, over informal "Gurukuls", and ashrams, where admission would be strictly regulated, and much like romanticized nature of the schools, would be basically a gathering under trees like peepal, neem etc.
What was nasty about these "schools" was that millions of "other classes" were kept out of this system totally, either by choice or compulsion.

This was for a combination of non inclusive measures by priestly class as well as renunciation by other classes towards sterile knowledge.


So entire generations of literature, math, science , philosophy and the like endured and developed in only a fraction of human minds belonging to the subcontinent.
Imagine what the possibilities would have been for Indian Knowledge if ideas would have allowed to germinate and develop in all its peoples!

Of course, this was not totally unlike the Clergy capturing the Biblical scriptures in Europe, where until one Gutenberg with his printing machine, willingly or unwillingly, egalitarianized it.
The result there was that there was a profligation of holy bible, leading to want of basic literacy in people wanting to decipher it.
But it had unintended consequences as well.
People, once being able to read, accidentally or otherwise, lay their hands on huge huge repository of ancient knowledge, philosophy, political philosophy, science etc which had been left behind by ancient Greeks and Romans.
Apparently, Europe had fallen into dark ages after years of invasions, which had led to barbarism and feudalism, as its knowledge was consigned to cold storage.



Now, with Gutenberg's press and wide dissemination of biblical literature, a revolution had begun, and Europe was pulled out of dark ages thanks to the democratic dissemination of knowledge we now know as renaissance.
Eventually this knowledge spiral would lead to Industrial revolution, with Europe becoming Master of Science, Math and war, marching years ahead of other oriental civilizations.
This knowledge it later put to barbaric use, by building ships , guns, canons and enslaving the rest of the world in a whirlwind tour of imperialism.


Nothing dramatic of that sort ever happened in India. 
Most Indians considered Education as terribly abstract , confined and best left to fussy pony tailed priestly class , while the later consider it as exclusive preserve not worthy of dissemination and democratization anyway.
Practical usages of any knowledge was never thought, perhaps because of this abstraction of knowledge by priestly class, who were isolated from the "activity" of the other classes.
The activity / labor was thoroughly confined to other classes of weavers, artisans, peasants, manual laborers, tillers, painters, and the priests had been bought up to disdain from physical activity.
So essentially, a priest holding an awesome theorem for better accuracy to predict movement of a parabola , would neither have an incentive nor a appreciation to build better weapons, or better machines. 

The result was an economy dependent on human labor, skill and the grind.
Innovation, creativity and thought was put on backseat and our GDP, though a whopping 25% at the end of 18th Century, was entirely based on huge numbers and hands, churning out garments and stuff based on pure labour.
Quality of the literature and education suffered incredibly due to this isolation, and one sir Thomas Macauly, in its minutes of 1835, rather unfairly, thundered as to how a shelf of western knowledge was superior to all literature of the orient.


To govern India with its few ICS officers was terribly cumbersome, and the constant litigation and the paperwork , not the kind the warrior class of England would be interested in, required the services of an army of educated clerks and lawyers.
This was the real reason for British serving their fruits of English education to natives.
The English then quickly relegated all the oriental books, including vedas, by translating them onto a bookshelf of fairly readable, juvenile literature thereby condemning them to commonplace and eroding the myth of their invincibility.


Indophiles like James Princep, Alexander hamilton, Elphinstone etc. all played a part in helping translate, preserve and bring the esoteric ancient Indian knowledge to the masses.
But only a few cults and sub-sects really dig into what it had to offer.
The rest, so it was, readily embraced anglicized knowledge, and within decades we had hundreds of lawyers and clerks, all enjoying its ensuing benefits of Government employment.


However, it was not until 1930's until one suave lawyer, Dr Ambedkar, dealt a second blow by agitating for affirmative action in all spheres , including education.
Thereafter, we had streams of small numbers of educated "Other Classes" pilfering up , much like bubbles, onto positions and jobs hitherto the domain of the priestly classes.

We are now into third phase, possibly the final one, in the cycle of Indian Renaissance.
Idea Cellular's new Advertisement about IIN or Idea Internet Network has been at the heart of many trolls, satires and faking posts.
It showed all manners of oppressed men and women, reaching out and learning knowledge over a humble mobile phone rather than give up after failing to get admission into India's notoriously choosy and expensive universities. The ad probably conveyed, inadvertently, the sign of our times.
Anything can be accessed now through a humble mobile device, over its internet network.
Cliched and banal as it was,it probably was putting across the most pertinent point of our times.


Today, we have information and knowledge freely available , and anyone , even the uneducated, can access it with ease with a variety of options like animation, videos, TV programmes, Mobile Apps etc.

We are in an information revolution.
Where thousands of information asymmetries will be broken down, and things and people seamlessly integrated.
Caste and Gender will be eroded substantially, if not totally, with this third blow. Why?

Anything that makes sense to the economy will endure.
Back in the old days, knowledgeable males, priestly class and ones who had access to credit and information controlled the strings of the economy.
And wealth.
The weavers, the skilled artisans, the priests, the soldiers were all cocooned in their respective occupations attaining a degree of specialization. Knowledge was in silos.
With the advent of information revolution, anyone with an aptitude in anything will train themselves into it, and there will be a cross fertilization of ideas, skills and jobs. Hon. Prime minister's National Skill development programme is a step in the right direction.
The idea is to capture all those lesser educated dropouts at the second grade, and skill them. That way they'd end up with a skilled job rather than menial labor.
And probably pushing up the GDP the way china has.
Of course, this is a stop gap arrangement to net all those dropouts while we address the problem itself.
So , essentially its a social churning.
Castes and gender are facing a major challenge.
An MNC would care less about caste and gender of its employees and much more about his contribution to the company.
In Bangalore, a 60 billion dollar industry grew overnight while the government was looking the other way. Young people of all hues got thousands of jobs in its BPC(Business process centers), Call Centers and IT sweat shops.

There are things holding back these changes no doubt.
With castes, its the surnames and the selective matrimony that endures in the name of tradition.(KhatriMatrimony, Baniamatrimony)
With gender, its the biased right wing movements which hinders females to move to next level.
But as with anything, its basically the Economy, Stupid!
As millions are reared out of poverty , and as india embraces capitalism and globalization with an evangelist attitude, Adam smith , and not marx , may be its savior.
Caste-ism and Gender equality will not make any sense at all in the new economy.
Keeping an 60% percent of educated "lesser castes" will be foolish just as keeping out 50% of your workforce of females.


No country, except perhaps the insanely endowed sheiek-doms of middle east, can develop without allowing all its peoples, without exceptions, a part in their growth story. With middle east, of course, as the oil reserves dry out, they may be staring at sheep rearing as prominent occupation again.
As we are ushered into the new age economy, skill sets, and the IQ of the person wielding it, would be far more relevant than his caste, context, gender and geography.
Perhaps this is a reason to be anxious, for some.