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An Indian Passport and Indianness

M. F. Husain surrenders his Indian passport and takes up Qatari citizenship. As the drama plays out and now peters out in the media an interesting question to ask is what is it that makes one an India.

Now one could write a book on this subject (not me, I’ve already got a gig going but someone, I’m sure) but here’s a short blog post.

Whether you have an Indian passport or not is a terrible way to look at it. From the Husain media circus, it appears that surrendering the passport was really the event that made him unIndian. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, Barkha Dutt (link to NDTV above) seemed to think that was the case. It so happens that India does not permit dual citizenship. The OCI is not the same as citizenship. If like many other countries like the US, India did permit dual citizenship then Husain could have added the Qatari passport and no one would have cared.

I have many friends who live in India but hold a US passport. I think they would consider themselves Indian.

What about residency? Is that a good criterion? But then there are all kinds of Non Resident Indians. Short stays, long stays, those that are waiting for the kids to go to college to return. And then there are those who don’t intend to go back but still feel very connected to India.

I think that its just silly to try to draw these boundaries, and affix labels. Let’s just celebrate a shared culture with great diversity within it and fuzzy boundaries at the edges.

And it is downright hypocritical to celebrate Sunita Williams as one of our own, but decry M F Husain surrendering his passport as abandoning his country.

Sena Mobocracy

As the Shiv Sena stokes the fires of communalism, parochialism and other uglisms, Shahrukh Khan remains unfazed.

Siddharth Varadarajan writes

When confronted by the mob power of the Shiv Sena, MNS or other right-wing groups, the police in India invariably give in to their demands, no matter how irrational or unreasonable, and force the targets of their illegal pressure to give up their rights. So art galleries anywhere in India think once, twice and a hundred times before exhibiting a single painting by M.F. Hussain, movie hall owners agonise over whether to show ‘controversial’ films or not, screenplay writers and movie directors allow politicians, pundits, granthis and maulvis to vet their projects before they are launched, scholarly works of history are banned because their contents do not conform with the cherished hagiography of some group or sect, writers like Taslima Nasrin are hounded out of the country by mobs who claim to have been offended by books they have never read, shops fear to stock Valentine cards because of threats by self-appointed guardians of morality and ‘Indian culture’.

To me this is a law and order issue. Regardless of whether the protesters are right or wrong, if they go from protesting to rioting and arson, the police must act swiftly and decisively.

In India this is not as simple an issue as it might seem like. There are too many people, typically unemployed youth, who will gladly participate in a riot for the money. If the risk of being injured in a lathi charge goes up, all that will change is the asking rate for a rioter.

But letting the rioters destroy public and private property is just not an option. It subverts our freedoms and creates an alternate extra-governmental power center. Don’t feed the beast.

India’s Parliamentary Form of Government Rocks

Last week was a good week for President Obama. A State of the Union Address that was much more plain speak than his usual soaring rhetoric. Then he went into the lion’s den – the Republican Caucus – and demolished them on national television. Without a teleprompter, this time.

That said, the arithmetic in the Senate hasn’t changed. You still need 60 votes in the senate to prevent a filibuster and the Democrats don’t have them. So the stalemate continues.

The use of the filibuster has increased over time to where getting anything passed in a Senate with 100 seats requires 60 votes. Ezra Klein writes about how a supermajority of 60 votes is now a necessity for anything significant to pass in the Senate.

For someone who was educated in India (Civics used to be a separate subject in school) the filibuster and its evolution into a supermajority requirement in the Senate, seems odd. In fact there are many things about the system of government in the US that are odd and like the filibuster don’t really serve the purpose of furthering either democracy or good governance.

Start with the role of the President. There was a time in India when as impatient young people with ideas, my friends and I would look at the American Presidential form of government admiringly. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Presidential form of government that elected a President directly and then he or she would be able to rule wisely and justly and do what was right instead of being beholden to the party apparatchiks or coalition partners?

Wrong. The American President is the head of the Executive, but any significant change involves legislation, which is what the US Congress does. And the US Congress can oppose or stymie the President, or just tie itself up in knots trying to pass legislation. When it does, it is full of compromises and earmarks. And the President, as you can see, can do almost nothing about it.

The Indian Parliamentary system actually is dead simple in comparison. The majority party or coalition in the Lok Sabha gets to rule. Their leader becomes the Prime Minister who is the head of the government. Bills from the government, may be opposed vehemently by the opposition, but they need only a majority to pass which the ruling party already has. If a bill is defeated on the floor of the Lok Sabha, a no-confidence vote might follow which could bring down the government. Something that happens only rarely.

The Rajya Sabha, the other house, is involved in law-making but doesn’t have any teeth. Neither does the President of India. In general, if you are elected into a majority, you can rule unhampered. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t other challenges – coalition politics does weaken the government – but that is more related to the politics of the moment, where regional parties are much stronger than they have been in the past, than a structural issue with the functioning of the legislative process.

The American Congress is bicameral. Both houses are powerful and actively involved in shaping legislation. Districts that elect the House of Representatives are drawn based upon population, just like the Lok Sabha. But the Senate is a completely different animal. There are two senators per state. Wyoming with a population of half a million sends two senators to the senate and so does California with 37 million people. Because of this, the composition of the Senate is not really representative of the American people.

At the state level things can get even weirder. The symmetry in how democracy functions in India at the state and national levels is absent in the US. A state like California whose finances are in shambles is unable to do much about it because every important piece of legislation can be forced to a referendum. This law was inflicted upon California by Californians themselves. To change this law you need a 2/3rd majority in the Assembly. Till that time, you can’t raise taxes and you can’t take on the public employee unions. The result is deficits galore.

Matt Yglesias has another problem with American elections. It is with the number of officials that people need to elect.

Consider, for example, America’s staggering quantity of elected officials. If you live in Toronto, you vote for a member of the Toronto City Council, you vote for a member of the Ontario Parliament, and you vote for a member of the Canadian Parliament. That’s one large Anglophone city in North America.

What happens in New York City? Well, you’ve got a city council member, a borough president, a mayor, a public advocate, a comptroller, and a district attorney. You’ve also got a state assembly member, a state senator, an attorney-general, a state comptroller, and a governor. Then at the federal level, there’s a member of congress, two senators, and the president. That’s sixteen legislative and elected officials rather than Toronto’s three. New Yorkers don’t have three times as much time in their day to monitor the performance of elected officials. Instead, New Yorker elected officials simply aren’t monitored as closely.

So the next time you feel like we should seek a different form of government in India, count your blessings. It could have been much worse. We could have adopted the US form of government instead of British parliamentary democracy in 1950.

Photo by thecnote

Management Consulting in India

A new research paper Management Matters: Evidence from India suggests that the average Indian company can be improved significantly with the help of modern business practices. The study involved offering free consulting to a set of mid sized companies in the textile industry. The companies that availed of the free consulting showed a significant improvement in efficiency, lower inventories and higher profits, after they implemented the recommendations. The paper is long but is an interesting read. Also read Ajay Shah’s take on it.

The first thing to ponder is if Indian business practices are less modern. They may be technologically behind the best in the world and they might suffer on account of the creaky infrastructure that supports them. But is it also true that even in the context that they find themselves in, their business practices leave much to be desired?

The paper implies that this is indeed the case. I tend to agree with its conclusion. This is not to say that there aren’t well managed Indian firms – the research focused on mid-sized family owned businesses. But I think that it is safe to say that like technological innovation, management innovation is largely centered in the western world. A lot of it is applicable even to the Indian context, but it’s penetration is not too deep.

The authors then go on to say that the reason why Indian firms are not well managed is because management is not well informed about modern management techniques. They distrust outsiders and rarely use management consultants and so leave themselves in a low information cocoon. They don’t hire business school grads and there isn’t much mobility within the industry that could disseminate best practices.

One of the recommendations of the authors is that a robust management consulting industry could solve some of these problems. The research was supported and partly financed by a management consulting firm, Accenture. So this conclusion is somewhat self-serving, but not necessarily incorrect because of that.

After employee mobility in the industry, management consulting is perhaps the most successful way of disseminating new business practices. My sense is that Indian companies are not very open to management consulting in general. The cost is perceived to be very high. The change they bring about is thought to be too disruptive. And the improvement in the business, too chancy.

Maybe its management consultants who need to look at themselves to see if they are responsible for the underuse of their services in India.

English Medium Education Can Lead to Poorer English

Giridhar Rao has a new essay out From Mother Tongue to Many Tongues which makes two interesting points

One that English medium education can lead to “poor educational outcomes”

“It is now well established that when a child begins learning in his or her first language that child is more likely to succeed academically and is better able to learn additional languages.”

I blogged about this in my post More English and More Non-English.

But the other interesting point made is that English medium education can lead to general “language impoverishment”. (L2 here is English and L1 is the mother tongue.)

Starting L2 as early as possible, and teaching as much of the curriculum as possible through the L2 does not result in effective or widespread L2 acquisition. At best, this results in “subtractive bilingualism”: an L2 acquired at the expense of L1. Most often, the result is simply language impoverishment; not being able to use either L1 or L2 adequately.

The essay cites many references. Please go read it if you can.

The second point, that an early start or transition to English medium education, can actually lead to communicating in all languages poorly, including English, is counter intuitive and some of you may disagree with it just based upon your own personal experience or the people you know. But I would argue that the readers of this blog likely had a privileged environment – exposure to English at home and with friends early on etc. – or may have been gifted enough to overcome the disadvantage. So you are not exactly a random sample of India’s population.

Across the cross section of India, I think English medium education works to disperse educational outcomes. For a small minority, it results in better English skills but no better general educational outcomes. This small minority, who have an “English friendly” environment, an English medium education poses no hurdle, or a very small one. But the rewards are linked to opportunities in the global marketplace for higher education and jobs, including the export oriented service industries in India.

For the large majority, however, according to the research, English medium education works differently and leads to poorer educational outcomes and poorer language skills. If this is the case, it must be a matter of great concern to education administrators.

Whether there is language impoverishment in India compared to other countries, is a tough question to answer. In the companies I have worked in, American employees in the same role have uniformly had better English skills than Indian employees. But language impoverishment would imply that the English skills of the American employees were better than the Mother Tongue skills of Indian employees, which I wouldn’t know. My guess is they are.

More English and More Non-English

Chetan Bhagat has a recent post on his blog which is a transcript of a speech that he gave at the British Council in Delhi. He defines two groups in India. One, which he calls E1, is proficient in English and gets all the good jobs. The other, E2, is familiar with the language but is not proficient. E2 is ten times the size of E1. He would like to see effort being made, by the likes of the British Council, to shift more people from E2 to E1.

It’s hard to argue against this point of view. Expanding E1 or for that matter E2 as well is good. Spoken English skills are what have enabled India to create the huge offshore services sector. English is also the common language that links India and is therefore the de facto language of big business. Better English skills – spoken, written or really at any level – enhances a person’s employability and opens higher paying job opportunities.

But is more and better English the only dimension there is to language in education? I see two problems with this. More »

Best Practices in Voter Bribery

India’s general elections are around the corner. As you know, the most important factor that determines the outcome of our elections is money – how much and how it is spent – in the crucial electoral process of buying votes.

The amount of money spent is, of course, a key determinant of electoral victory. We will cover that in a later article on Corruption and Campaign Finance. In this article we will discuss the state of the art in actually getting the bribes into the hands of the voters. More »

More on IT Unpolicy

In my previous post IT and the Role of Government I objected to Atanu Dey’s arguments against having an IT policy for India. He proposed, what I called an “IT Unpolicy” – basically, do nothing.
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IT and the Government

Atanu Dey has a series of posts that criticize the IT Vision Document released by the BJP in the runup to the Indian elections. In his latest post The Rational IT Policy, he proposes an IT policy that basically does nothing – an Unpolicy, if you will. It requires government to stay out of the way of individuals and the market which will make their own decisions about using IT or not.

To me this seems wrong-headed. I think it is important for any government that comes to power to nurture and encourage the use of IT in government, business, education and at home.
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Career Advice to the IIM Ahmedabad Graduating Class

Last week I was at IIM Ahmedabad for my 20 year reunion. For two days and three nights we had non-stop fun reliving all the special memories from our times at IIM. Reunions, some say, can be quite a let down. Your classmates and you went down different walks of life, they’ll say, and you don’t quite have that connection anymore. Our reunion was, if possible, even better than the high expectations we came with. The reconnection was instant, as if no time had gone by. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.

During one of the few serious sessions on campus, we talked to some of the current PGPs and PGP Xs about careers and career choices. (PGP is the Post Graduate Program, which is the regular two year MBA. PGP X is a 12 month program akin to an Exec MBA). Given how bleak the job scene out there looks, and how concerned the students were, I thought I’d do a post for IIM A students graduating this year or the next. More »