Sunday Posts

One of the great contrasts between India, the world's most populous democracy, and America, one of the oldest surviving republics, is the differing approach what, paraphrasing the Founding generation (of United States), should be called the "Fear of the Caesar"! The American approach to this is perhaps best captured in the story of Benjamin Franklin. When a reporter asked, "Mr Franklin, what did we get - a Monarchy or a Republic?", while he was coming out of one of the meetings of the Constitutional Convention,  Franklin reportedly answered, "A republic, if you can keep it!" That fear of a Caeser, a strong leader who would undermined the republic, persisted. Another story, later recounted by Jefferson (told to Benjamin Rush in 1811), described a dinner that Jefferson hosted for John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. Three portraits adorned Jefferson's room, and Hamilton reportedly inquired who those were. Jefferson said they were of the three...

The Indian Prime Minister unleashed a big idea in his big speech last week, India as the HR Capital of the world! Speaking at the launch of Skill India campaign on the World Youth Skills Day on 15th July, he laid out the goal of making India the Human Resources capital of the world. This was a sound objective, something that is suitably aspirational for a statesman and rather obvious at the same time. There is a looming Global Workforce Crisis, using a term coined by Boston Consulting Group, which may notionally cost the global economy upwards of $10 trillion between 2020 and 2030 - and India has the right raw materials, young people, for a solution.  It is also India's  opportunity to lose. The country's 'Demographic Window of Opportunity', a period when at least 55% of its population is working age, opened in 2015. When population of most other countries are ageing - both United States and China would start to have more retirees than working people within the ne...

I wrote about the need for a paradigm shift in thinking about Higher Education in India and the pointlessness of carrying out the discussions, and drafting policies, without answering the question what this is all for. I alluded to the innovation of Morill Act for its boldness, but did not literally mean that is what India should now be doing. The discussion in India needs to be conducted in the current context of development of the country, and its specific challenges - how to build mass provisions for Higher Ed without allowing rampant fraud and profiteering, how to combine its heritage and global outlook, how to reconcile the variations of regional and religious thinking into an overarching Indian identity - and it would be an act of imagination, not mimicry. The current paradigm in Higher Education thinking is defined by three factors, the requirement of employable graduates, the need for an educated technocracy and the role of the State as the protector of public interests an...

I am in India, and one conversation that I notice is the aspiration to grow beyond the Back Office. More specifically, I am in Bangalore as I write this, the city which indeed built itself being the global back office, and one could perhaps both see the idealistic and pragmatic logic why India should grow beyond the back office. The idealist rationale is about capturing a greater portion of the value that is created, as evident in the aspirations of the start-up networks here in Bangalore. These new entrepreneurs, unlike the generation before them, are not content building Development Centres, which will do the jobs of the Western clients. One hears conversations about building software applications that will potentially change the way things are done, here in India but also abroad. The confidence deficit that defined the Indian businesses in previous decades seemed to have lifted, and the talk of taking on the established global brands and players have started in all earnestness...

An old, dated piece on Kolkata, titled ' Why Kolkata will win in 20 Years ', came to my attention. There are a number of things mentioned in this article that I don't agree with: The statement that Mamta Banerjee represents the moral end of Indian politics may invoke ridicule today, and the stereotype of Bengalis as business-averse and that they would need a Bengali-speaking non-Bengali for saving is mind-bogglingly absurd. But the two key propositions articulated here - that Kolkata is one of the most sustainable of the Indian cities, and that it can be fixed with good governance - are rather self-evident. Of course, Kolkata is home and I am partial, and I shall make no claims to objectivity here. However, the fact that I keep writing about it - and indeed, there are many many people from Kolkata spread all around the world will do the same - proves perhaps that there is more to it than the dirty, dreary, poor city that the place appears to be to a casual visitor....

If one has to go by the shelf space a writer gets, one of the most popular writers in India is Devdutt Pattanaik. A physician-turned-leadership consultant, he seemed to have caught the imagination of both the Indian Senior Executives as well as the aspiring young ones. A self-proclaimed mythologist, he is intent on discovering, and talking about, the Indian approach to leadership. This has been done before. This is a well-healed American model, epitomised by, among others, Steven Covey, who recycled biblical wisdom into self-help advice. In Mr Pattanaik's work, which has somewhat taken off from his initially successful attempt in Business Sutra, the Indian mythology is intertwined with management wisdom to say some pretty obvious things. But, like Mr Covey and the likes of Robin Sharma, he says things well, and it is sticking. Mr Pattanaik's success, I believe, is no fad, but rather a trend. This is because I see a number of people catching on to it. Mr Pattanaik is...

The Global Innovation Index, produced by INSEAD and others, is built around seven factors - Institutions, Human capital and research, Infrastructure, Market sophistication, Business sophistication, Knowledge and technology outputs and Creative outputs - and measures an economy's ability to innovate. India has continually slipped in the rankings, from 62nd in 2011 to 64th in 2012, to 66th in 2013 and now at 76th in 2014. Indeed, it is useful to contrast India with China, acknowledging the coveted hyphenation that many Indians desire: China has remained on the 29th position during this time, losing and recovering the lost ground during the in-between years (though China includes the territory of Hong Kong, which is treated separately and is a top 10 territory in these rankings). Not that rankings matter much, but they are useful reminders of where one is going. India's decline tells a story in the context of the rest of the world. In the past rankings, India was ranked 2nd...

With India's new government in power, the outlook for foreign investment is optimistic. Whatever effect this new government has on India's domestic polity, economic revival is their key agenda, and foreign investment has been the incumbent Prime Minister's favourite talking point in his previous stint as the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujrat. It is, therefore, logical to expect a foreign investor-friendly investment. This is more so because the economic nationalists in the Administration believes China is past its prime and India's moment has truly arrived: They would be looking to take advantage of the clear mandate the government has got and open doors everywhere. Accordingly, there is nothing to be surprised about the government's proposal to open up Railways and Defence industries to Foreign Investment. These announcements show that the government is unafraid of controversy and taking full advantage of its mandate: Railways is indeed India's...

As India approaches the 2014 General Election, and the prospect of a Fascist takeover becomes real, the grand old idea of India - that of a cosmopolitan nation - comes to the fore in sharp relief. This foundational idea of modern India, a nation that welcomed everyone and rejected no one, with an  identity to be conceived on the basis of inclusion rather than exclusivity, is the one up on the ballot paper, so to speak.  But this is a strange contest. Despite the fact that the idea of India is being contested upon, there is not a side standing for it. In the post-modern reality of Indian politics, the parties are jostling for positions on various other issues, ranging from India's pride to the battle against corruption, with various local and parochial issues lined up in between. The idea of India as conceived by the Founding Fathers and enshrined in its constitution is being represented, ironically as it must be, by the 'None of the Above' option on the ballot. Wh...

There is a saying - whatever can be said about India, the opposite would also be true. However, this epithet of being the land of the opposites is a benign one, almost affectionate. It is more a proclamation of India's diversity than an excuse for any hypocrisy. However, on the issue of whether Indians hate or love democracy, the opposites rule explain very little: The Indian attitude can rather be called, yes, hypocritical. Consider what Indians say about China and one gets the sense. On one hand, Indians proclaim that India's future is more sustainable than China, because, of course, India is a democracy. India's path may be torturous and full of surprises, but India is still moving ahead with its billion people not by government design but collective will. For this and this alone, Indians proudly claim, the world should recognise India as a great power, on the same pedestal with the other great powers. However, at the same time, when a visitor would point to th...

The context is the apparent demise of the 'Foreign Education Providers' Bill' in India, an event causing much anguish among certain sections of International Higher Education community. It is difficult to mourn for this bill, as this was an useless piece of legislation in the first place. The bill was initially designed for the Top 500 universities in the world, and the purpose of the legislation was to allow these universities to set up campuses in India and teach students and not take any profits away ever from India. In short, the purpose of the bill was to make India's educational improvement a responsibility of the Top 500 universities in the world. Despite the bill being an exercise in futility, this could still be considered an important artifact in Higher Education policy: Its insistence on the requirement that the university applying under it has to be in the Top 500 list on Times Higher Education or Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, a provision that was droppe...

India has a problem: Suddenly, everyone seems to agree on that. In a few short months, India has gone from being the beacon of a new economic order to a prospective failed state, only to be engaged with to avoid the creation of a black-hole equivalent of a state. Strangely, the Indians seem to agree: There is hardly any resentment in the country towards the fickle bond traders and currency speculators, who are primarily responsible for the anorexic Indian rupee, and rather a mood of self-blame, though not of introspection. India's time in the sun, and the hope of being counted alongside China, seems to be over. The International Media has started commenting on India's fall with gusto. Almost every major newspaper has run stories, mainly blaming inefficiency of its government, and primarily, of its Prime Minister, who seems to be a 'natural follower than a leader', as a German magazine hopefully observed. The Economist pointed to India's failure to reform its la...

Indians are feeling ashamed that the Rupee has touched a new low today, hovering around Rs 67.5 a dollar, presumably on account of the Government's insistence to pass the Food Security bill, which will guarantee 5 Kg of Rice and Cereals every month for every poor person, estimated to be about 800 million people. In a way, such shame is useful, because it was completely absent even in the face of starvation and poverty visible to any casual traveller to India. And, surely, the shame in the decline and fall of the Rupee is profitable too, as this would allow the well-endowed to simultaneously display their patriotism and make some money by hoarding dollars or sterling and helping the free-fall further.  Events such as this bring out in sharp relief what democracy is really about in India. At one end, there is this claim about the 'muddy', 'corrupt', 'populist' staff that the government does at an enormous cost to the economy, somewhat around 2% or 3% of t...

Indian policy makers like to view India as an emerging superpower. Their policy making in Higher Education is guided by this ambition, which goes beyond the usual rationale of labour productivity and national competitiveness. This is understandable: After all, a democratic government in an emerging country must forever keep it emerging for its own legitimacy. However, the ambitions of building an education system worth a superpower are problematic because this distort a practical, labour market led approach to Higher Education. This may open up wide gaps between demand and provision, making talent shortages worse and more permanent, and make the rhetoric unsustainable. Whether India can become a 'superpower', whether the world needs another one, whether this would bring any benefits to Indian citizens (who, no doubt, have to stump up the costs) are all valid questions, but should be left for another day. I intend to discuss here a few conjectures (which, admittedly, are n...