"public sector as untouchable holy cows"

Professor Raghuraman Rajan says:

"State ownership in many areas no longer serves the public interest, and the only reason it continues is because it serves the many vested interests that benefit from the status quo – the public sector workers who have cushy undemanding safe jobs, the unions who enjoy the power, the occasional corrupt executive who rakes in bribes, and the minister who enjoys the patronage." Full speech is here.

How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

"The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the Corn Laws. Let’s throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research which belongs to us."

Too many 'Bills'

Mahesh Bhatt said something very interesting one has to ponder: 

• "I am an imperfect person with an imperfect view of the world – couldn't that hold true for everyone else, including Anna?"

And 

• “Anna's bill is just as impractical and dangerous as the government's bill. The nation must question Anna's bill as much as the government's. The bill proposes to create a power that is dangerous. Democracy must destabilise power, not augur it in the wrong hands. I get abused online by Anna's supporters so badly when I criticise his agenda. Arre bhai, just because I am not with you, does it mean I am against you?”

Propagating Ambedkar’s free market ideas is not that easy!

Professor Mohammed Arif says:

“It has become a lot easier to propagate Ambedkar’s ideas of the capability of moral force to challenge the powers of vested interests. Today, information cannot be controlled. Information has been democratised. The internet has changed everything. Technology has changed the parameters of political and social debate. Today we communicate via email, Face book and Twitter which are available to everyone worldwide. Babasaheb said ‘If the depressed classes gained their self-respect and freedom, they would contribute not only to their own progress and prosperity but by their industry, intellect and courage would contribute also to the strength and prosperity of the nation’.”

Land and knowledge problem

Vipin has great piece in today's Mint on land and knowledge problem where he says "It is economically inefficient and politically tyrannical to force all farmers to accept identical contracts."

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction

That is a line from another piece in the Economist. A bit from the piece:

• ...Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year. 

• One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.” 

• But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. 

• Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change.

Let’s change

………..change as India aspires to become a global superpower and an economic rival to China. The shift is also a sign of a more egalitarian India, where low-caste students from modest economic backgrounds not only are able to rise into the middle classes but also can act with more confidence in the classroom and workplace in this traditionally hierarchal society. At the same time, the Internet provides a sea of information to anyone with computer access, allowing young Indians to learn without the help of the all-knowing neighborhood guru.

Middle ground is no ground

From Minding their own business by P. Vaidyanathan Iyer

• It is an unfortunate fact that bureaucrats are not sector experts, and hence, not the right fit. They are instead trained to be good administrators. The brighter among them manage to grasp the issues within a few months, but in this age of rapid change and innovation, the government can no longer afford to give regulators the luxury of time. 

So what is the solution, yes there is no other solution in the short period say at least next 15 years. But think of the following:

• It may not be that difficult to get academics, but they carry with them the baggage of too much theory and too little practical experience. For private sector stars, money is not the only driver. It is also the prestige attached to such seats. Besides offering decent compensation — which could be a middle ground between staid public sector salaries and lucrative private sector packages, the government must create an environment that allows them to function independently and effectively. The esteem value can go up only when the government goes that extra mile to give private sector achievers an impression that their expertise will be respected and made good use of. Perhaps we are not there yet.

Money lending and grassroots capitalism

Barun wrote long back a great piece on Grassroots Capitalism Thrives in India. It is still worth to read even today and ponder the misconceptions about the money lending business at local and global.

There are a lot of interviews against the money lending business: Some of them are:

• ‘Beware our swadeshi vulnerabilities'
• 'For-profit MFIs worse than money lenders'
• Hollowness in banking a major concern

Simply Hayekian!!

In an interview to ET British Historian Mr. Simon Schama says:

Ideas and learning

• ….we have become, in a difficult world, much more utilitarian about useful knowledge, with a very narrow range of what counts as useful…

• Teachers have to be storytellers, in addition to teaching their students analysis and how to ask questions and that does take time.

Indian Revolution

You also said British students should study the rise of Empire in South Asia, why not the fall as well…

• Of course, about that too. I was specially speaking of the 18th century. For some extraordinary reason, because of the way the British curriculum was designed, the entire 18th century is missing. And that’s the time when what Britain became was decided, Britain as an entrepreneurial innovator, as a ruthless commercial empire, and Britain still very surprisingly loses the part of the empire you would think would naturally fit with it, in the shape of the American colonies, and extraordinarily has an Indian presence which grows bigger and bigger.

• It is very important to understand that because of what the Raj became, the ruthless exploitation of sovereignty, but it started as a different kind of ruthlessness. It started as a kind of commercial plunder without the strings of government, and it was because Bengal in particular was disintegrating, was becoming this centrifugal sink-hole in which neither the Mughals had power nor did the indigenous governors, and the British found that they had to actually control the revenue system if they were going to pay for their trades.

• So it became backwards, they went into India backwards — which didn’t make them less imperialist. So, it’s a fantastic exercise in unintended consequences, what happened to British power in Bengal in particular. It’s a sort of thrilling, tragic, ferocious story. There’s this huge South Asian population in Britain, why wouldn’t this story be interesting to them as to pink people from Exeter and Liverpool? I was someone who did Indian history as an undergraduate, and loved it, I did the lay the 18th and early 19th century in India, after Warren Hastings, and nearly became an Indian historian. And I thought it very complicated and thrilling, and thought why not make it part of what kids are taught.

Well done Ali Mehdi!! ‘They produce so many children and then expect us to fill their stomachs’

The recognition that the problem of development programmes is not simply a problem of governance and service delivery, but primarily that of unrealistic policy-making and planning, is significant in view of the fact that many public officials, right from the very top levels of the Central government to local pradhans, have very little knowledge of the actual living conditions of ordinary people, particularly the poor and marginalised.

Whose morality is this?

There is a reported news on “Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras, reader and chairman of Modern Indian Languages at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) was suspended for having consensual sex with.. “rickshaw puller”. This is high time for Section 377.

I am posting the full article below for record and readers ready reference

Whose morality is this?

February 18, 2010

First Published: 23:28 IST(18/2/2010)

Last Updated: 23:31 IST(18/2/2010)

Saleem Kidwai, Nivedita Menon, Mary John, V. Geetha, Shilpa Phadke and 13 other teachers and academics from universities across India.

We, as teachers and academics from universities across India, read with outrage and dismay that Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras, reader and chairman of Modern Indian Languages at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) was suspended for having consensual sex with someone of the same sex within the privacy of his home.

What made the press report that came out on Thursday in certain sections of the media particularly shocking was that there were either cameras placed by students within Dr Siras’ house or television reporters got into the house and made a video film of the alleged incident that was then passed on to the university authorities. The university authorities instead of going by the constitutionally recognised right to privacy within the four corners of one’s house have instead chosen to act against Dr Siras.

The outrage of the university authorities is deeply misdirected. Instead of suspending Dr Siras, they should have taken stern and serious action against those who so blatantly took on the role of playing moral police with no regard whatsoever for Dr Siras’ constitutionally recognised right to privacy and dignity within his home and the university.

What is the ‘gross misconduct’ for which Dr Siras has been suspended? It is not a crime for an adult to have consenting intimate sexual relations with another adult. It is not an offence for an adult to have consensual sex with another adult in the privacy of his home. Dr Siras, in line with the judgement of the Delhi High Court in Naz Foundation, has also committed no legal offence. On the other hand, he is the victim of multiple offences — his house has been entered into without his consent and his intimate life has been filmed without his consent.

The press reports repeatedly allege that Dr Siras was having consensual sex with a “rickshaw puller”. Is the occupation or implied class status of the individual involved the reason behind the accusation of ‘scandal’ and ‘outrageous’ behaviour? If so, then the AMU administration is violating the tenets both of India’s Constitution and of the ethics and values of an institution of higher learning with a history as long and distinguished as AMU which was built precisely to end discrimination on religion, caste or class.

One has to remember that it was only last year that Chief Justice Shah and Justice Muralidhar, in holding Section 377 inapplicable to consenting sex between adults in private, came up with the important distinction between public morality and constitutional morality. As they noted, “Moral indignation, howsoever strong, is not a valid basis for overriding individual’s fundamental rights of dignity and privacy. In our scheme of things, constitutional morality must outweigh the argument of public morality, even if it be the majoritarian view.”

If the Naz judgement with its stress on constitutional morality is taken seriously, the immoral actions will be not be Dr Siras’ conduct but rather the actions of the university authorities in suspending him for the expression of his constitutional right, the actions of the media to blatantly invade his life as well as the possible involvement of students of the university.

This incident follows a series of events that mark the shrinking of spaces of freedom and dignity within India’s institutions of higher learning. It is imperative that we protect institutions that should be bastions of building inclusive and democratic cultures for generations to come from narrow-minded moral policing of this kind.

This is the full text of the petition letter

The views expressed by the authors are personal

ASER makes the difference….

Wilima Wadhwa writes:

• The latest ASER (Annual Status of Education Report), an annual survey of learning facilitated by NGO Pratham, indicates that at the all-India level, private school enrolment increased from 16.3% in 2005 to around 22.6% in 2008—a rise of around 40%. In 2009, private school enrolment has marginally dropped to 21.8% in rural India.
• Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab and Kerala where private school enrolment is as high as 40%, and on the other are Bihar and West Bengal with private school enrolment closer to 5%.
• In 2009, in classes I-V, the percentage of children in government schools who could read at least at the class I level was 43.6%. The corresponding figure in private schools was 52.2%—a whopping 8.6 percentage points advantage.
• Once we control for characteristics other than the type of school, the learning differential between government and private schools falls drastically from 8.6 percentage points to 2.9 percentage points— from 20% to a measly 5%.
• In the case of English, the starting differential is greater and the narrowing a little less. The percentage of children in classes I-V who can read simple words (or more) in English is 26.5% compared with 44.2% in private schools—an advantage of 17.7 percentage points, or 67%.
• Once we control for other factors, this differential falls to 10.8 percentage points, or 41%. Hence, around 40% of the observed differential in English learning levels between government and private schools can be attributed to other factors.
• In the case of reading in the local language, in many cases most of the learning differentials disappear once other factors are controlled for—Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. For Madhya Pradesh, the difference is actually reversed— once other factors are controlled for, government schools perform better than private schools. In Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where government schools had higher learning levels to start with, the gap widens once other factors are taken into account.
• In the case of English, in most states, the starting differentials are greater and the narrowing of the differentials smaller as was the case for all of India. However, there are still states such as Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh where two-thirds of the learning difference is attributable to factors other than private schooling.

Intellectuals and Society

In an interview Prof. Thomas Sowell talks from his latest book Intellectuals and Society: Chapter 4 of 5

The Ph.D. Problem!!!!

Louis Menand writes in the forthcoming book:

• …..the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well-rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.