Bihar I did not know about...

Bihar, as one "knows" - courtsey, the Indian MSM - is the back of beyond in a global, competitive economy... beyond any hope... and as VS Naipaul described it, where "civilsation ends"... one of the most backward, flogged states in Northern India....

Thanks to "Hat-Tips" (I guess that is what you say when you follow up from others' blogs) fromKrish and Cool Bihari, I could reach this news-report from BBC

5 spaces where Bihar outpaces rest of India:

Women Power
Bihar is the only state in India to have 50% of places in local municipal bodies reserved for women.... Today half of the 262,000 elected councillors to local municipalities in the state are women.

"The 50% reservation for women in civic bodies is not only empowering women but educating them to a great extent," says social scientist Dr Shaibal Gupta.

Speedy Trials
Fast track courts in Bihar have convicted and sentenced more criminals than courts in any other Indian state in the past 18 months.... Between January 2006 and May 2007, a total of 11,665 criminals were convicted through speedy trials and sent to prison... More than 2,500 were sentenced to life, and 21 others given the death penalty.

Politicians across party lines have also been tried through speedy trials.

Special Cops
Bihar is the only state in India where retired soldiers are being hired as policemen to stem the crime wave.

They mostly comprise the "special auxiliary police" force - about 5,000 retired soldiers were hired last year and sent to help police various districts.... The force has earned praise from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who has asked other states to emulate the model.

Cash Cow
Bihar has a long and tortuous history of chronically unprofitable state-owned companies and their unpaid employees taking their lives.

But Sudha, a dairy co-operative, is a shining exception and one of the most successful exercises of its kind in India.

Launched in 1993, the co-operative's revenues from a range of milk and milk products has risen from $73.5m in 2001-2002 to $136m today. The co-operative has 6,000 outlets covering 84 towns in the state.... More than 260,000 milk farmers in the state are members of the co-operative, and a private bank has even launched a pension scheme for them.

Now Sudha has begun "exporting" milk to other Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Delhi.

Model Taxes
Did you know that a simplified tax system conceived and launched in Bihar is now being emulated by Sri Lanka and various African countries and has been lauded by the United Nations?

Introduced by the municipality of Patna, the state capital, in 1993, the tax system, locally known as the "Patna model of taxation" simplifies property tax rates on the basis of the local area and use of property.

...States like Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh have adopted the same property tax model.

The UN was so impressed by the taxation model that it gave a $30,000 award to Bihar for introducing this method.

Now, one wonders... why do these facts not get reported in the Indian MSM??

Tips to Liberate/Occupy/Ruin a Country/Civilization

Rajiv Chandrasekaran provides these tips....since, as the Washington Post's reporter during 2003-04, he was a witness to the "history in making"...

Unlike almost anywhere else in Baghdad, you could dine at the cafeteria in the Republican Palace for six months and never eat hummus, flatbread, or a lamb kebab. The fare was always American, often with a Southern flavor. A buffet featured grits, cornbread, and a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner. There were bacon cheeseburgers, grilled-cheese-and-bacon sandwiches, and bacon omelets. Hundreds of Iraqi secretaries and translators who worked for the occupation authority had to eat in the dining hall. Most of them were Muslims, and many were offended by the presence of pork. But the American contractors running the kitchen kept serving it. The cafeteria was all about meeting American needs for high-calorie, high-fat comfort food.

None of the succulent tomatoes or the crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it into the salad bar. U.S. government regulations dictated that everything, even the water in which hot dogs were boiled, be shipped in from approved suppliers in other nations. Milk and bread were trucked in from Kuwait, as were tinned peas and carrots. The breakfast cereal was flown in from the United States–made-in-the-USA. Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes at the breakfast table helped boost morale.
-------

Whatever could be outsourced was. The job of setting up town and city councils was performed by a North Carolina firm for $236 million. The job of guarding the viceroy was assigned to private guards, each of whom made more than $1,000 a day. For running the palace–cooking the food, changing the lightbulbs, doing the laundry, watering the plants– Halliburton had been handed hundreds of millions of dollars.
---------

From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad — the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams — could have been a world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of American troops was rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a detonated car bomb didn’t fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world’s most ancient cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside, the calm sterility of an American subdivision prevailed. … It was 130 degrees outside … Inside the Green Zone, air-conditioners chilled buildings to a crisp sixty-eight degrees.
--------

The recruiting process worked fastest when there were no requirements other than political loyalty. When Bremer's budget chief asked for "ten young goofers" to perform administrative tasks, O'Beirne's staff had a list of names at the ready. It included Simone Ledeen, the daughter of neoconservative commentator Michael Ledeen; Casey Wasson, a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children, and Todd Baldwin, a legislative aide for Republican senator Rick Santorum. A few days later, all ten received an e-mail from O'Bierne's office. It wasn't until they arrived in Baghdad that they discovered how they had come to the Pentagon's attention: they had all sent their resumes to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Because of the personnel shortage in Baghdad, six of the goofers were assigned to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they had no previous financial-management experience. They quickly earned the nickname the "Brat Pack.""
------

The responsibility for pulling together a civil administration plan rested with Mobbs, Feith's former law partner and a former arms control official in the Reagan administration. Mobbs had spent months in the Pentagon working up strategies to fight the oil well fires that Iraqi troops were expected to ignite as American troops invaded. He had no prior experience in the Middle East, no history of working with Iraqi exiles, and no exposure to other post-conflict reconstruction operations."
------

David Dunford, a retired ambassador who was put in charge of the Foreign Ministry, was among the fortunate few to receive a briefing packet before his deployment. In it was a four-page memo about the ministry that seemed to Dunford as though it had been written by a summer intern at the State Department. When his requests for more information from State went unanswered, he posted a plaintive query for advice on an Internet message board frequented by Middle East specialists. The gist of his message, Dunford said, was "Here I am and I don't have a clue as to what to do.""
------

One day early in 2004 as I was eating a meal in the green zone, the seven-square-mile enclave of air-condi-tioned comfort in Baghdad, I asked one of the Americans at my table what he thought of the massive suicide bombs that had killed dozens of people at a Shi’ite shrine in the city that morning. “Yeah, I saw something about it on my office television,” he replied. “But I didn’t watch the full report. I was too busy working on my democracy project.”

.......

in an earlier post, I had once noted that:

During the last century, US has made around 200 military interventions around the world.

Based on 3 criteria, viz.,


• declared goal of "regime change" or "saving a regime",
  
  
• deployment and long-term commitment of large number of ground troops, and
  
  
• deep involvement in the political process through use of American military and civilian processes),
  
  only 16/200 would qualify as efforts towards "Nation Building"

How the Other Half Lives... still.. in USA

Sometime back, I was invited by an e-friend to start blogging on a colla-blog How the Other Half Lives.

The site introduces itself as:

In 1890, Jacob Riis wrote about and photographed the appalling slum conditions in New York City. Around the 1890s, half of New Yorkers lived in slums (similar to modern Bombay) and Riis wrote his book to garner much needed attention. The book was called How the Other Half Lives.

India is changing and in many ways. Yet in many ways India is much the same. This blog is a fruit of that tension and an attempt to examine the ground in between.

Curious to find something more about Jacob Riis, I googled and reached a 2003 article by Jack Newfield, How the Other Half Still Lives, who "tried to retrace some of Riis's steps through modern New York's pain and deprivation" to "understand better how the other half lives now"

Given that US is a benchmark of Gilded-Age prosperity for most urban-educated Indians, these excerpts are worth quoting:

"...I hung out in unemployment offices, food-stamp application centers and the occasional job fair, where lines of job-seekers were never short. I traveled around in a van with volunteers from the Coalition for the Homeless... I visited union halls, food pantries, immigrant community centers and the dreadful Emergency Assistance Unit (EAU) in the Bronx. I interviewed community organizers, economists, politicians, leaders of nonprofit advocacy groups - as well as the jobless, homeless and hopeless.

What I learned was that in some ways little has changed since Riis published his reportorial findings in 1890. The poor are still largely invisible to the complacent majority. Most Americans don't see the everydayness of poverty. It is segregated in "bad neighborhoods" and in impersonal government waiting rooms. We don't see all the people being told there are no applications for food stamps available at that location; all the people postponing medical treatment for their children because they don't have health insurance; all the people trying to find a job with their phone service shut off because they couldn't pay the bill; or all the deliverymen for drugstores and supermarkets paid only $3 an hour, which is illegal.
In one way we are even worse off than we were 113 years ago: We have no Jacob Riis now humanizing poverty, making the satisfied see it and smell it. We have no American Dickens or Orwell, no James Agee and Walker Evans, no Michael Harrington, no John Steinbeck, no Edward R. Murrow.

Something else in addition to poverty's invisibility that harks back to the first Gilded Age is the widening economic disparity between the rich and poor... In 1998 the top 1 percent of households collected almost 17 percent of the nation's income.... tax cut that gives the richest 5 percent of taxpayers most of the economic gain. This is a class-warfare policy of shooting the wounded and looting the amputees.

What is amazing is that this expansion of inequality took place without ever becoming a noticeable issue in American politics. This growing concentration of wealth has given the superrich domination over politics through extravagant campaign contributions and media ownership...

....Downward mobility is the hot new trend in the city of buzz and billionaires. By every measure, unemployment, homelessness and hunger are on the rise in New York. In December, unemployment jumped up to 8.4 percent, the highest it has been in five years, the highest of any of the country's big cities. New York has lost 176,000 jobs in the past two years, more than any other city. Today more than 1.6 million New Yorkers (20.2 percent of the population) are living below the federal poverty line; another 13 percent are barely above it.

And, as always, poverty is more severe among people of color. Blacks and Latinos comprise 47.5 percent of the city's labor force but account for 61.2 percent of the jobless. The city's poverty rate is 25 percent for blacks, 28 percent for Hispanics and 12 percent for whites....There are now 38,000 homeless people in city shelters each winter night - and 17,000 of them are children. Homelessness has increased by 82 percent since 1998.

...Every day the city's soup kitchens and food pantries provide about 1 million people with meals. The Coalition Against Hunger reports that because of increased demand, in 2001, the soup kitchens and food pantries have had to turn away 350,000 New Yorkers - including 85,000 children.

... Most poor people work. The roughly $10,700 a year that $5.15-an-hour minimum-wage jobs pay is without question not sufficient to hold a family together in New York. But a big part of the city's poverty crisis is the World of Low-Wage Work, just above the legal minimum--"McJobs," as organizers call them. There are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who are trapped in such jobs, from which they can be fired or lose shifts on the whim of a supervisor, at big chain franchises like McDonald's, Tower Records, Duane Reade drugstores and Gristedes supermarkets.

....More than 600,000 New Yorkers earn between $5.15 an hour and $10 an hour. Some 56 percent of these low-wage workers have no health insurance for their families, 52 percent have no pension or 401(k) plan and 37 percent receive no paid leave...

...About 800,000 city residents are eligible for food stamps, but do not receive them.... Only malice, or the most wretched incompetence, could explain the city's failure to provide food stamps to half the city's poor population. Food stamps add at most $4,000 of food to the table of a family living on less than $15,000 a year. They also recycle the money immediately back into the poor community's economy of supermarkets and bodegas. And if every poor New Yorker who is eligible received food stamps, it would inject almost $1 billion in federal benefits into the city's economy. Food stamps are the mother of all win/win propositions.

... With the recession now in its third year, New York's homeless population is larger than it has ever been. In the late 1980s the shelter population peaked at 28,700. Now it is 38,200. More than 85 percent of the city's homeless population are families, including 17,000 children. Forty percent of these nomadic children suffer from asthma and have no regular doctor.

... Every governmental attempt to ameliorate poverty seems to attract its own breed of parasite and leech. New York has had scandals involving poverty programs, community school boards, nursing home operators and Medicaid fraud, kickbacks to politicians for helping get state contracts for drug and alcohol rehab facilities, and politicians monopolizing twenty-year no-bid care leases....

These are just excerpts... If interested the full article is here

I guess, every country - even the most prosperous one - has its own underbelly. India has its own - and so has USA

Don’t know whether this realisation is a reassurance or a damnation.... What I did recall was the first line Tolstoy's Anna Karnina:

"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

Not "just another brick in the wall"

Jaideep Sahni has this very interesting piece of Op-Ed in June 24th TOI. Some excerpts:

I was fifteen years old when I was asked to decide what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I’ve often wondered at the stupidity of this — how can a 15-year-old possibly make such a decision? The second thing I’ve never understood is the way I was asked. I was asked to choose the direction of the rest of my life from science, commerce and arts. Can all the millions of wonderful options in life be classified into three things? Just 15 and they have already shrunk your life....

....So what am I doing writing movies and lyrics in Mumbai? Well, before I started writing screenplays and songs, I used to make ad films, before which I used to be an IT consultant for big corporations. That’s the point: I might want to make movies, write computer software, design embedded systems for public utilities, write songs, learn how to fly planes, turn FM radio on its head, and a zillion other things. But does my education give me wings to fly, explore, change course?... why is it so detached from our dreams? Why didn’t I have the option to dabble in a wide variety of subjects while in college, so I didn’t have to spend a large part of my working life searching for what I really loved?

I’ve always had this funny suspicion that we are a nation of engineers who wanted to be singers, doctors who wanted to be actors, and so on. This is partly because we are a poor country and everybody makes life decisions based on how much he will be able to earn. And partly because nobody ever advised us any better. And that has made us a weird society. A nation which at all times is running on half-steam because a huge percentage of productive citizens are just passing time — because they’re not doing jobs they’d really like to do.

....Our schools lock children up in private little hells where they learn the fear of failure and the fine art of travelling through airless cells called careers where we spend the rest of our lives racing each other to places we never wanted to go in the first place. "

...where ambitions exceed power supply

Umred, a small colliery town near Nagpur in central India was in news a few months back.... and perhaps provides an insight into the dynamics of mass-scale social exclusion - and its implications - mentioned in the previous post.

...so here are Notes from Umred:

"India does not have enough electricity for all of its 1.1 billion people, and so daily outages as long as 18 hours are imposed on smaller settlements so that megacities like Mumbai can enjoy a 24-hour supply.... The burden is carried by villages and small towns.

...last February, in this small, dusty town of 50,000 in central India, where goats and children scamper through the byways, the blackouts triggered a violent revolt. Thousands marched on the local government offices, some pelting stones, others setting police jeeps ablaze. When the police fired their guns to scatter the mob, at least two people were struck and killed.... a recent visit to Umred suggested that the uprising might also reflect new anxieties stewing in a nation where ambitions are trickling down much faster than the means to achieve them.
--------

...Satellite television is beaming urban India's new cravings and anxieties into Umred's living rooms. Relatives who migrated to cities are returning home with tales of lucrative jobs and trendy nightclubs. The Internet has emboldened the young to hunt beyond the town for jobs, life partners and ideas....

"Electricity is essential to ambition," said Ravindra Misal, the 26-year-old owner of an English-language academy here, "because I need it to do my homework, I need it to listen to music if I am a dancer, I need it to listen to tapes of great speakers, I need it to surf the Internet... But I cannot, so people get angry. They have bigger expectations, but electricity is becoming a hurdle on their path."
--------

....(the) heightened expectations are distilled in a new craving for schooling. Across India, there is a new insistence among the uneducated that their children receive educations and break poverty's hereditary chain.

But the blackouts were distracting their children from their evening studying. When the parents marched in February, a principal demand was that blackouts be suspended during the annual examinations that can make or break a child's career in India.
-------

Sushrut Lanjewar, an 8-year-old with a Spider-Man T-shirt, is still learning his letters, but he has already reached a grown-up conclusion. He knows he must study his way out of Umred, and he intends to do so. He wants to be a botanist and discover a plant to thwart global warming.

But a mysterious force is obstructing him, he said.

Several nights a week, he said, electricity vanishes from Umred. The houses darken. The televisions sputter off. Lanjewar, a nephew of the sporting-goods seller, lights a candle to finish his homework.

But he loses his focus, he said, because of the flickering light and the motionless ceiling fan that fails to blow mosquitoes away.

"Are these people crazy who keep turning off the light?" he asked, not just angry but inquisitive. Why do grown-ups keep telling him to do his homework and then shut off the light?

He was told that 8-year-olds in Mumbai have 24-hour electricity.

His eyes bulged. He looked like a child stripped of Santa Claus fantasies. "If they can get the light," he asked, "how come we can't get it?"
--------

Entering the hottest season, however, the crisis is so acute in Maharashtra that even Mumbai may face blackouts. They would be the first in decades, and Mumbai's Scotch-sipping elite is furious at the prospect of no air conditioning for 90 minutes a day.

In Umred, a 90-minute disruption would be a luxury. Its blackouts are typically eight to 12 hours a day.

"Why?" barked Abhay Lanjewar, the proprietor of a sporting-goods store in Umred. "They're humans in Bombay, but we're only animals here?"

==========

Deeper down, his is not a rhetoric question...

Cross posted at: How the Other Half Lives

Inequality has many faces...

Though P Sainath's article is about CEOs and the Wealth of Notions, but what struck me was this portion.

"This week's big news is that Mumbai has topped Maharashtra's HSC results with a pass percentage of 76.67. That should not surprise us. The metro's schools and facilities outclass those of other regions. True, even this time, the State toppers are not from Mumbai. They are from Wardha (in Nagpur division) and Amravati. Both in Vidharbha. But at 47.5 and 51.08 per cent, the overall pass percentages of those divisions are dismal. They are way below the State average of 64.25 per cent. And both have fared worse than they did last year.

Here's one reason why. Vidharbha, always electricity starved, saw 12- to 17-hour power cuts at the time the children were studying for their examinations. (It's a region where schools re-open weeks late to avoid exposing children to excessive heat.) The great metro of Mumbai was spared this "power crisis." (Some of the well meaning did write articles on how to be a good citizen and use your air conditioners more efficiently.) In one estimate, a 15-minute power cut in Mumbai could give Vidharbha two hours of electricity. Half that would have helped the students with their examinations. Further, malls and multiplexes lead Mumbai's biggest power guzzlers. But this is the city of 25,000 of India's 83,000 dollar millionaires. Not only home "to the largest number of affluent individuals," as an American Express study puts it. But also having "the fastest growing affluent population in the world." So the darkness is banished to zones such as Vidharbha — which produces more power than the other regions of Maharashtra.

....That rubs in an old truth. Merit = accident of birth + electricity. (And maybe a dash of geography.) "

It is an appropriate example of the skewed distribution of opportunities, of how inequalities - and "merit" - get created.... of the suicidal "siphoning-up" economy we live in...

Cross-posted at: How The Other Half Lives

"Opportunity Structure" & Un-earned Privileges

This is a long due post.... has been hovering my mind...

...Some months back, in my course Social Entrepeneurship, I had made a reference to the Opportunity Structure in a society. Opportunities are not equally distributed in a society, i.e., for some of us certain "opportunities" come easily, while for others they never do - and therefore, the achievements are not always a function of just "merit" and "capability".

"...e.g., suppose, you go to Chashire Home or School of Hope - or a T-Shirt manufacturer, etc. - and give a bulk-order of their produce, so that you can sell it in the campus (or elsewhere), make some margins and share it back with them. The chances are that, if you ask, they may give you the products on credit, simply because you come from a "background". That is, you can do this venture without "working capital". Morevoer, you also have an easy access to the 'market' (batchmates, campus people, etc.) to sell these products.

Now, imagine that instead of you, it is one of those construction workers who are there on the campus these days, who approaches the same suppliers (Chashire Home, School of Hope, T-Shirt Manufacturer, etc.), with the same "business plan". S/he will need the "working capital" and even though being in the "market" (XLRI Campus), his/her access will not be as smooth...

This difference would remain irrepective of the "ability" of the person...

Around the same time, I had come across (thanks to Annie's post on theotherindia) an insightful listing by "M." about these "opportunities" (or as she puts them "undeserved privileges") on her blog.

This is a list worth looking at. To quote a few of these "Undeserved Privileges":

1. i've had a complete schooling. it's not expected of me to drop out of school to do the housework or take up a job...

6. when i'm seeking specialised help for a financial, legal or medical problem, i'm treated with courtesy. the people in charge don't treat me with scant respect because they're doing "Charity"...

12. i live in a house where i can turn on the tap to get water enough for my needs, without having to fetch it from miles away...

17. i studied in an english medium school. i will never be disqualified from getting a job because i dont know english...

etc. etc...

In a subseqent post "M." also related many of her "undeserved privileges" to the traditional caste system that "has merely ended in my life", but still lives in many other lives:

being a brahmin is a relatively small issue in my urban, metropolitan world. i am more affected by the global caste system based on wealth, than by our traditional one based on ancestry.while the caste system of money is equally savage and brutal, i realise that im still privileged to be able to say that that is the main caste system that affects my life. because for so many people - dalits, the indigenous tribal groups - caste is a daily, life-threatening, livelihood- depriving, degrading reality still.

i, in my relatively well-to-do state, have no right to pass the judgement that traditional casteism has ended. very simply, because it has merely ended in my life. there are still many lives whose continuing suffering cannot be swept aside - their experiences are still valid and real and should not be denied.

All of this also reminded me of two other encounters with these "un-deserved/un-earned privileges" that we - I - have:

One was an old post on Vikrum Sequeira's blog about his Akanksha Experience about why the 8-10 year old Prachi dropped out of school. He had written as a teacher,and I could resonate with his hurt:

"...Prachi was one of my best students. She had a flair for mathematics and was extremely creative.... Prachi recently left Bombay with her family. They left because of one simple reason: they could not make ends meet.... Prachi's father was working as a private driver and earning about Rs. 4000 (USD $87) a month. Almost half of his earnings paid for the squalid hutment in the slum; the rest of the money was used to raise his family of five.... I'm sad for two reasons:

First, I miss her. As a teacher, you care about your students and want them to do well in life. In the case of Prachi, the goodbye is especially depressing because I will never see her again. If I were a teacher in a more developed country, I could have taken down a phone number or an email address. But all I know is that Prachi has gone to a village, somewhere in rural Uttar Pradesh.

Second, I wonder what would have happened if Prachi was afforded the education she deserves. In fact, I believe that she would have done great things if she had grown up in a more privileged background or in a more egalitarian country. Most likely, her potential will not come to fruition. And that does more than upset me; it hurts."

The other was an old mail which had long back floated in my mailbox (don't know the origins), but parts of it did clarified the perspectives for me:

• If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
  
  
• If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation ...you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.
  
  
• If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep...you are richer than 75% of this world.
  
  
• If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace ... you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
  
  
• If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.

So, yes!... We have a choice:

We can:

count our blessings!

count our guilts!... OR

count our responsibilities!

Take your pick...

Do Highly-Paid Indian CEOs Really Add Value?

It seems that CII (Confederation of Indian Industries) may soon decide not to invite politicians to their parties, summits, meetings, or whatever... First it was Mani Shankar Aiyer in April, who raised the question:

"Industry has been enormously benefited by the processes of economic reform that we have seen in this country over the last 15 years or so. But the benefits of these reforms have gone so disproportionately to those who are the most passionate advocates of reforms that every five years we are given a slap in the face for having done what the CII regards as self-evidently the right thing for this country."

...and then, last week, it was Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister himself, who in his Ten Point Social Charter, gave a not-so-gentle reminder to the CII members about their social responsibility: "corporate social responsibility must not be defined by tax planning strategies alone".

Predictably, among all the other points, it was the fourth point about the CEO salaries - i.e., about "excessive remuneration", "conspicuous consumption", "vulgar display of wealth", "ostentatious expenditure", etc. - that caused much flutter...
(I used the term "Predictably", since all other nine-points were about the nice things that the industry should be doing. This was the only one which mentioned what the audience of CII conference, the CEOs, should not be doing. This is what he said:

"...Four, resist excessive remuneration to promoters and senior executives and discourage conspicuous consumption. In a country with extreme poverty, industry needs to be moderate in the emoluments levels it adopts. Rising income and wealth inequalities, if not matched by a corresponding rise of incomes across the nation, can lead to social unrest. The electronic media carries the lifestyles of the rich and famous into every village and every slum. Media often highlights the vulgar display of their wealth. An area of great concern is the level of ostentatious expenditure on weddings and other family events. Such vulgarity insults the poverty of the less privileged, it is socially wasteful and it plants seeds of resentment in the minds of the have-nots."

The "damage control" started immediately. Sunil Mittal, CII's newly elected chief, complemented the Prime Minister for his "unusual and landmark" speech, but also pointed out the CEOs' salaries "cannot be legislated", since there is a crunch of talent.

Financial Express was quick to point out that its research on the salary increase of top 100 CEOs ("only 30%" increase from Rs 189.98cr to Rs 246.96cr between 2005 and 2006) shows that "wealth generated by 100 big companies has been greater than the pay growth of their bosses." - FE's criteria of "wealth generation", however, was not profits/sales of the companies, but the increase in their market-capitalisation (and that too duing one year!)... I am not sure why FE did not look at profits, turnover, or other more tangible and sustainable criteria of corporate performance to prove its point...

Mainstream media also went into a spin to point out the wasteful government expenditure, and/or why Manmohan Singh had to make this speech after his party was rejected by the "aam aadmi" in the UP election, and/or his speech was like a simplistic Sunday sermon, etc., etc...

...all of which may - or may not - be valid reasons to reject the suggestion. However, even if one acknowledges these counter-arguments as valid, and that if industry has to become competitive, there should not be a bar on CEO salaries to attract the world-class talent, it is worth asking the question:

Do the Highly-Paid Indian CEOs Really Add/Create Value to Business?

The only comprehensive study which related the CEO salary and corporate performance, that I could recall, was done by two of my colleagues - Profs Ramkumar Kakani and Pranabesh Ray - a few years back. A report on the study - titled CEO Salaries Outstrip Growth of Profits (The Hindu BusinessLine, Aug 9, 2002) - can be accessed here.

A two part article by the authors can be accessed here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

I find this study more comprehensive because:

it covered the trends over 22 years, from 1979 to 2001 (and so, the conclusions are not based on temporary up-/downturns and business cycles), and

it compared the the hikes in CEO's salaries with increase in (1) employee wages, (2) sales and (3) Profit before interest depreciation and tax (PBDIT).

Quoting from the findings:

"in the last 22 years, growth in managerial remuneration was almost five times that of the same in employee wages. Between 1992-93 and 2000-01, the compounded annual growth rate of sales was 11.52 per cent, 13.84 per cent for PBDIT and 9.81 for employee wages. However, managerial salaries grew by 33.1 per cent."

"...the welfare expenses and return on capital employed decreased over the year. Even the return on equity dropped sharply between 1995 and 2001."

Conclusion of the Study:
"It implies that while the compensation for the CEOs has increased, this has not resulted in a positive change in the performance from the point of view of all other stakeholders including equity shareholders. This in fact raises the question of justification in the phenomenal rise in managerial remuneration."

The Coming "Unemployment Explosion"

This is a continuation/ appendix to an earlier mail on Future of Work/Employment in India:

According to the TeamLease' India Labour Report 2006 (pdf format, 100 pages):

Coming Unemployment Explosion

India's working population in 2020 will be equal to India's total population when reforms started in 1991

Projecting current variables forward means 211 million unemployed in 2020; an unemployment rate of 30%

Unemployment will largely be a youth problem; nine out of ten unemployed are likely to be in the 15-29 age bracket

Inefficient Labour Markets

Unorganized employment grew by 31% versus Organized employment of 4% in the nineties

Labour laws may not be affecting overall growth but are influencing where jobs are created and amplifying the substitution of labour with capital.

The Report also predicts that by 2020, India will have merely 88mn graduates... (which, in a way would be a jump of the total 'stock' of 26mn in 2004)

If interested, you can download the report from here...

Divided by "English"

It is pardoxical to write this post in English....

India consists of some 18-22 scheduled languages... A tower of Babel!

One of its strengths is also its "large English-Speaking" population (but then, in India everything is large due to its size and proportion... where else on the planet, will one call a population on 120mn people - twice the size of the population of many countries - a "minority")

But, the "large English-Speaking" population, actually consists of around just 30-40mn people (out of 1bn+)... These are the people who can read-write-speak "English". The others have there own version of "Hinglish", e.g.:

(Photo Credit: Unknown)

One of the assumptions one makes as an educated, urban Indian is that it is the size of the "large English-Speaking" population that gives India an economically competitive advantage over other countries in the world in this globalised world. It also leads to some other implicit assumptions, e.g.,

"good" education gets equated with English-education

English is seen as essential for higher studies in engineering, medicine, science, social science, management, etc.

knowledge of English becomes a symbol of sophistication, of being cultured, and even of intelligence (or as the term currently in vogue, of "merit")
Etc.

And as happens with deeply cherished and widely shared social assumptions, they get enacted in the "real" world, shape the social reality, and become a self-fulfilling prophesy - i.e.,

because
...teaching in higher education is done in English, selection tests are designed in English, job interviews are conducted in English, candidates get selected on the basis of their knowledge of English, etc.,
therefore
...more technical books are written/published in English, there is greater demand for learning in English (or more number of shops that teach "English speaking"), knowing and conversing in English becomes "smart", "cool", "in" etc...

It is in this context, Sankrant Sanu's post on the "The English Class System" is worth looking at (actually, recommended!)

The following two tables are from his post, and show that:

Rich countries are more likely to speak their native language:

...while the poor countries adapt their "colonial" language:

I don't think that, based on this data, one can generalise that speaking the language of one's past colonial rulers makes a country poor. However, the fascination with English (or the colonial language) among the poor (and mostly post-colonial) countries does explain the historical antecendents of the linguistic divide between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of these societies. As Samuel Huntington had noted:

"As the former colonies moved towards independence... promotion and use of indigenous languages... was one way for the nationalist elites to distinguish themselves from the Western colonialists and to define their own identity. Following independence, however, the elites of these societies needed to distinguish themselves from the common people of their societies. Fluency in English, French or another Western language did that. As a result, the elites of non-Western societies are often better able to communicate with Westerners and with each other than with people of their own societies..."

And so - among many other divisions - India also remain "divided by English"... There are "English-haves" and "English have-nots"...

... Or as, in an earlier post about Garima's story, I had quoted from an article by Barkha Dutt:

"...Garima’s story exposes India’s paradoxical relationship with the English language. Nobody in the world speaks English like us. We have our own idioms, our own words and our own accents.

We pretend to love our own English and brag about how it is India’s great selling point; the reason we dominate the global outsourcing business. But, of course, deep down we know that our English is not the English that the West really wants. And so, each time we talk to Britons or Americans, we subtly alter our diction and inflection. When we set up our call centres, we drop the subtlety entirely and start accent classes to teach our young people to abandon the speech patterns of our own society and to migrate to a virtual, linguistic, middle America, where they become impersonators of people they will never meet and never know.

But within India, we still treat our own English as the great social decider. We laugh at regional accents, smirk at those who make grammatical errors and feel most at home with those who talk like us. Everyone else belongs on the other side of the English divide. And as it turns out, the other side of the class and caste divide as well."