Who Actually Paid For My Education? - An Excerpt

Who Actually Paid for my Education?
[Originally published in 2000.by Atanu Dey ]

India suffers from very low literacy even compared to other developing countries. Yet one gets to hear about the tremendous impact that Indian doctors, engineers and scientists have had around the world. This conveys the impression that the Indian schooling system works. I believe that that impression is wrong and that in fact the Indian school system is inefficient and biased against the poor.

Free Education

I spent many years the Indian school system and I must admit that I received very good schooling. My eleven years in a pretty good high school in Nagpur was practically free. I was given a scholarship during my bachelor’s degree in engineering. At IIT Kanpur, while doing a master’s degree in computer sciences, I received a stipend which was sufficient to pay for all normal expenses. I estimate that my entire education in India, including a master’s in computer science, cost me less than US$ 100 in today’s terms.

How is it that a poor society can afford to educate its children for free? I come from a middle class family and I am sure we could have afforded more than that. I am also sure that if the education had been priced at full cost, we could not have paid for it up front. [There is a way to circumvent this problem. See "Full cost pricing" at the end of this page.]

Someone else paid for my education. That is true for a very large number of people who are educated in India’s premier institutions–someone else paid.

Nagpur is a medium-sized city by Indian standards. It has a bunch of good high schools. You have to have a middle-class or better background to get into those because competitive pressures keep the poor out. But if you get in, and don’t goof off too much, you can do well in the competition for admission into a good engineering or medical college. And then you get heavily subsidized education in college. Armed with all the advantages, you fill out a bunch of applications, write the GRE and the TOEFL and off you go to the US, never to return.

Brain Drain

It was fashionable in the 1970s and 80s to refer to the migration of trained doctors, scientists and engineers to the advanced industrialized countries as a “brain drain.” Actually, it was a “resource drain” rather than a “brain drain.” India never really had a shortage of basic brains. There are hundreds of millions of basic brains in India. However it takes resources to train a basic brain and turn it into a useful brain. These scarce resources are lost to the economy when used to train brains that eventually migrate.

Just like capital flight from poor economies to the rich ones, the migration of trained manpower, human capital flight, is enormously expensive. It is an even more of a burden when the training is publicly funded. When a trained engineer migrates to the US, it is totally indistinguishable from a gift of US$ 100,000 from India to the US. Over the years, the total implicit subsidy from India to the US could be estimated to be of the order of hundred billion dollars.

Losses

When an educated person leaves India, there is a first-order loss to the economy if the education was publicly funded. There is no comparable first-order loss if private resources were involved in the training. But in either case, the economy loses the life-time stream of economic contributions that the migrant would have made. This is a second-order loss. There is what can be considered a third-order loss that is harder to estimate but whose impact may be the most damaging in the long run. This arises from publicly subsidizing higher education at the expense of primary education.

Primary education, somewhat like primary health care, has characteristics of what economists call a “public good.” The positive effects of primary education spill over into the larger economy more than that of higher education, which is more like a private good. Markets efficiently provide optimal quantities of private goods but are known to under-provide public goods. The market understandably fails in the case of primary education. The solution is straightforward: the public subsidy of primary education.

The essential point is that the subsidizing higher education is an inefficient use of resources which could have been used for primary education. And this distorted system has real-world consequences: the shameful neglect of primary education.

Dismal Statistics

The Indian constitution mandates universal primary education for all (see Article 8 of the Indian Constitution). Yet, 41% of children do not reach grade 5 in India. Compare that to some other countries:

Gambia 20%
Mali 18%
Senegal 15%
Tanzania 17%
Burkina Faso 25%


[Source: Human Development Report 1999. UNDP.]

Of the countries that rank lower than India in the human development index, only about four have higher percentage of children that do not reach the fifth grade. Mozambique does worse than India, for instance. But never mind small strange sub-Saharan African countries. Take Indonesia for example: only 11% of its children don’t go past the fifth grade. Or take Mexico with its 14% figure. Compare India with neighboring Sri Lanka with its 17%.

The failure of Indian primary education is hard to escape. Sixty years after India’s political independence, India is places 126th out of 175 countries ranked in the 2006 Human Development Report. India’s adult literacy rate is a dismal 61%, below Cameroon (68%), Angola, Congo, Uganda (67%), Rwanda (65%), and Malawi (64%). That 40% of today’s Indian adults cannot even “both read and write a short, simple statement related to their everyday life” implies that they did not get the equivalent of the most basic of primary education. Compare that to China’s 90% adult literacy. [Source: UNDP Human Development Report.]

Successful NRIs

The argument is often advanced that the Indian education system must be world-class. After all, doesn’t it produce world-class NRIs (non-resident Indians) like Vinod Khosla and Rajat Gupta? Yes, of course. And don’t they turn around and give millions of dollars to support the IITs? Yes, of course. Sure the NRIs send some money home. But what is the ratio of the amount India spends on their education to what these worthies send back home?

Even then, who could be so crass as to measure everything in terms of dollars? Surely there is something more important than money. Yes, there is. And it is the untapped human capital that India has in abundance and which it criminally neglects. It neglects them because the powers that be have it made under the current system and it serves their narrow purposes.

In practically every measure of education, India’s rank is so abysmal that it is depressing to even look at the figures. Even if the solution to India’s education problems were as little as a week’s worth of clean drinking water, India would still be in trouble. Around 60% of Indians don’t have access to clean drinking water.

For all our vaunted world-class scientists, doctors and engineers, India ranks miserably in the number of scientists and technicians it has: 0.3 such per 1,000 population. Compare that to: China 0.6, Islamic Rep of Iran 0.7, South Africa 1.7, Korea 2.9.

Hyperbole and Hubris

We in India lack many things. One thing appears not to be in short supply–the hyperbole and the capacity for self-delusion. We have pretences of being an information superpower. Our IT sector is supposed to make us great. It stretches the imagination beyond belief that this idea can be entertained by anyone. We account for less than 1% of the global $600 billion IT business. Remember we represent 17% of the world’s population. Even if we were to increase our share 10 times (and this is unreasonable by any account) we’d still be below the world average.

Judging the Indian education system based on a Chandrashekhar or a Ramanujan is misguided and delusional. It is like weighing a pinch of mustard seeds against a herd of elephants and declaring that the mustard weighs more. How do we manage to delude ourselves so? I believe that those doing the judging live in very rarified atmospheres. Their world is populated by jet-setting intellectuals and internet millionaires and H1-B visas and ecommerce and NRIs. Hard evidence to the contrary, it is more comforting to believe that we are not that badly off.

Is there any point in confronting the hard evidence, you may ask. Yes, there is. Unless we recognize the basic problem, examine it dispassionately, we are unlikely to even consider solving the problem. In a sort of defense through denial, we can go on with business as usual by declaring the problem does not exist. But the problem does exist. And the problem is not one that does not have wide ranging implications. The most devastating impact of our dismal educational system is that we are condemning ourselves to a future of exceedingly low economic development. If there is one thing that developmental economists have learnt, it is this: education is the most important factor in economic growth. Education has more impact on economic growth than natural resources, foreign investment, exports, imports, whatever. Neglect education and you may as well hang yourself and save yourself the pain of a slow miserable death.

So who paid for my education? It is the poor rural children, thousands of them, who paid for my education by losing their opportunity to become semi-literate. The system is tilted against them and unless there is a radical change in the way that education is funded, they will continue to pay the price for subsidizing the US for decades to come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FULL COST PRICING

A brief solution to the problem of full-cost pricing is easy to state. Price all higher education at full cost. If a year of engineering school costs Rs 3 lakhs, price it at that. Then give loans to every student that needs it to pay the price. The loan is repayable upon employment and in terms commensurate with the level of employment. If you earn big dollars in the US, pay in big dollars. If you work as a doctor in a small village in India, pay small amounts in rupees. Essentially, with the loan system in place, there is no need for public subsidies for higher education.

There's no India, nor Pak, says Shah Rukh Khan

There's no India, nor Pak, says SRK
IANS 12 July 2009, 12:00am IST

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan pitched for greater harmony among South Asian people as he accepted an honorary doctorate from a British university, saying governments were best left to their own "agendas".

"We belong to - I know it's a bit of a cliche but - one world. Specifically I think, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka — all of us, we're the same. I really believe we are the same," Khan told journalists after being made honorary Doctor of Arts by Bedfordshire University Friday.

The doctorate in recognition of his "exceptional achievement as a film actor and producer", was proposed by an Indian NGO called Routes 2 Roots, which works to bring South Asians together.

"My mother is from Hyderabad in India and father is from Peshawar (in Pakistan). So I do believe in this (cultural unity).

"Especially when you come away from India or Pakistan you realise there is no Indian or Pakistani — we're all together. We are - culturally, as human beings, as friends. These are the aspects that keep us together.

"As far as the (government) agendas are concerned, let them go on."

Invited by a Pakistani journalist to visit Pakistan, said: "I also do wish to go there - my family's there."

Earlier, in his acceptance speech, Khan said he was inspired by the doctorate to work for the education of poor children in India.

"While this honour is bestowed on me, I wonder if the deserving but poor and underprivileged children from India can also pursue their higher education in such universities and maybe earn a doctorate as well.

"This thought has been weighing heavily on my mind and I am hopeful that I would be able to contribute to this cause in the future," he added.

Asians of the Century - A Times excerpt

Asians of the Century
A combination of towering individuals and societies that played down individualism helped liberate, ravage and resurrect the vast, protean region
By NISID HAJARI
Worlds do not go gently. When the kings of Bali saw in 1906 that they could no longer fend off the Dutch army, they chose an ending both glorious and horrific--the now legendary puputan. They ordered their palaces set alight. Then, clad in ritual white and armed only with spears and sacred knives, the ranks of the nobility hurled themselves against Dutch rifles until a thousand Balinese lay dead against the soft, green earth. Much else was shed with their blood: one of the last obstacles to full Dutch mastery of the Indies, but also, more imperceptibly, a world beholden to rajahs and viziers, and an Asia that could not but appear to the world as magical and archaic and doomed.

For the young, Westernized narrator of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet, something, too, is born: "I bowed my head," he says after hearing of Bali's fall, "went back to my desk. I took out my diary and wrote these words: 'Today I begin.'"

For Asia what started that day, in many ways, was the 20th century. Kings would last longer: in ancient China the Qing dynasty would cling to power for another five years, and as late as 1955 the French still sought to foist the hapless Bao Dai upon Vietnamese who scoffed at that parody of an emperor. But after that moment--not everywhere, and not at the same time--new élites would guide the struggle for freedom, demanding more than the right to continue the old ways undisturbed. They chose words like liberty and equality whose pitch and force had been determined elsewhere. But more importantly, they clamored for the full independence of communities, nations, that were brought into being by their call.

What we now know as Asia followed from their actions. If the lands that stretch from the Hindu Kush to the East Sea share more than geography, that conceptual unity is in large measure a product of the 20th century. In that time guns and European mapmakers carved the boundaries that most countries now accept. Wars, trade and the wildfire ideologies of nationalism and communism shook the region while knitting together its parts. What those nations share, really, is a record of transformation--and a roll call of singular individuals who charted, often violently, that dizzying change.

Perhaps more than any other region of the world in the past 100 years, Asia can paint its modern history as a series of portraits. The style is hardly fashionable; even the region's many and sycophantic "official biographers" would admit, to paraphrase Nietzsche, that most great men are only agents of a great cause. Yet nowhere else have the actions and foibles of individuals so thoroughly marked the fates of mass populations, for good or ill. Taken singly, the life stories of most of these titans are as familiar as fairy tales to their countrymen (and often equally fabulist). Together, however, they tell a more complex tale: the story of the century itself.

Early on, that narrative seemed destined to have more faceless authors. The late 19th century--the heyday of the Raj and a period when Western domination of Asia appeared unassailable--did bear its share of visionaries: in Siam, King Chulalongkorn helped fend off both British and French by modernizing his administration; in the Philippines, José Rizal was executed even while championing reform rather than revolution. Yet more often the crucial sea change welled up from a class rather than an individual. In lands like India and Indonesia, the opening of Western education to local students created an élite familiar with the ideals of European political thought--and their disregard in the colonies. Those wealthy few who could travel to Europe usually returned less awed by its citizens. By 1905, when British officials hacked the state of Bengal in two, India's middle-class intelligentsia could lead a boycott so successful that, three years later, the bales of Lancashire cotton on Bombay docks had dwindled by more than 25%.

Japan had already set the course--a task the archipelago nation would play throughout the century. Its reformers were fired by the same thought as those in China and India--to blend Eastern ethics with Western science--and though they issued orders in the name of a teenaged emperor, their leaders were several. None could dispute the scale of their success: when Admiral Togo's warships sank the Russian Baltic Fleet in 1905, Japan claimed a seat at the table of world powers. A generation of Asian nationalists would draw succor from that example of what could be achieved in their struggle.

To reach that point, however, would require more of colonized (or, like China, subdued) Asia. Champions of reform could organize, educate, even negotiate for greater responsibilities within the colonial system. But the boast of Dutch governor-general Bonifacius de Jonge--"We have ruled here for 300 years with the whip and the club"--would not fall to a debating society. (In tragic Vietnam, the French built 83 prisons and precisely one university.) "Give me 10 youths who are fired with zeal and with love for our native land, and with them I shall shake the earth," thundered Indonesia's spellbinder, Sukarno. He would need more. And his people would need him to draw out the challenge lying within their vast numbers.

Spoken now, that challenge seems almost self-evident. "Let the government then, to carry on its rules, use guns against us, send us to prison, hang us," said Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1930, as he walked to the sea to make salt--and thus to doom the Raj. "But how many can be given such punishment? Try and calculate how much time it will take of Britishers to hang 300 million of persons."

Given the temper of the times, though, the rhetoric of Gandhi and his ilk struck like a hammer blow. The Great War had both fueled the economies of the region and shown their populations the spectacle of a Europe weakened and base. The Great Depression wiped out the markets for colonial Asia's treasures--rice, rubber, minerals. From those elements would emerge peoples more confident, and angry. By focusing that discontent Gandhi transformed the Indian National Congress into a truly mass organization, rallying India's millions to awesome displays of civil disobedience.

Like all national struggles, those waged in Asia encouraged the writing of heroic myths. At least some of Sukarno's later reputation would rest on an active self-aggrandizement, while Ho Chi Minh during this period still skulked in the shadows, trying to foment revolution from Moscow and Hong Kong. In China the death grip in which Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong held each other would meet all the needs of epic: the Long March--begun by nearly 100,000 and finished by fewer than a tenth that number--still stands as the quintessence of struggle, both inside and outside the People's Republic. Yet China would also typify the perils of forcing so much upon single, charismatic leaders, as the loathing each felt for the other began to undermine the alliance they had formed against Japan.

Perhaps only the century's most transformative event could have pushed them together in the first place. World War II dismantled in weeks a colonial edifice that had been built over centuries. Japan slogged through China for four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor; its forces overran nearly all of Southeast Asia in barely three months. Outside of the Indian subcontinent, the misnamed "Co-Prosperity Sphere" that resulted was the closest thing to a unified Asia the world had yet seen.

To a certain extent that would stand as Japan's legacy, but not in the way the occupiers intended. Their lightning advance not only knocked down the West's defenses, but also its equally flimsy myth of white superiority. The locals who watched haggard British and Dutch marched off to internment camps could well believe that the colonizers' day had passed. At the same time, Japanese officials gave a forum to precisely those figures who could seize that audience. Sukarno, allowed to establish a nationalist umbrella group in Jakarta, turned his mellifluous voice to recruiting coolie laborers for the war machine, some 200,000 of whom may have died in the jungles of Malaya and Burma. ("I shipped them to their deaths. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I am the one," he would admit, a peacock to the end.) Yet he could also use the occupiers' "singing trees"--loudspeakers wired to radio sets--to pound home the nationalist message. For those, like Ho, who took advantage of crumbling Japanese control at war's end to lay claim to their countries, the occupation served as a means to a long-sought goal.

By that point, the combination of leaders and led had grown too powerful for returning colonizers to subdue.

Pressure from the United States, which kept its promise of independence to the Philippines in 1946, helped sway European governments, as did the weariness of their home populations. But the post-colonial moment ultimately demanded an individual touch--whether of warrior, statesman, braggart or showman. "I am the natural ruler of the country, and my authority has never been questioned," boasted Cambodia's god-king, Sihanouk. Paris believed him enough to sign over the nation in 1954. Next door, Ho and his genius general, Vo Nguyen Giap, forged Vietnam's peasants into a force capable of annihilating a garrison of legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu (though aided by Chinese artillery and with frightful casualties of their own). Jinnah delivered a bloodstained Pakistan. Aung San promised the possibility of unifying Burma's fractious tribes. Mao plowed through the rottenness at the core of the Kuomintang. When Nehru celebrated India's "tryst with destiny," his high-flown speechifying was as suited to the tenor and need of the times as Sukarno's loopy, inventive acronyms.

Those various triumphs in turn brought the region closer to a sense of shared destiny. In Asia's two largest countries, the ambitious, top-down economic plans imposed from New Delhi and Beijing produced stellar returns: in the decade between 1951 and '61, the national income of India rose 42%; in China it grew at an average rate of 8.9% a year between 1953 and '57. When a panoply of Third World leaders gathered in Bandung in 1955 to declare they would follow a path unmarked by either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, their bravado seemed less far-fetched than one might now imagine. Only a decade later once-bereft India would boast of a Green Revolution, fuelled by high-yield strains of rice and wheat that raised food-grain production to nearly 100 million tons in 1968-69--and the country to agricultural self-sufficiency by the 1970s.

The fellowship displayed at Bandung would, of course, prove as gossamer as the rhetoric. Only seven years later, Mao would make a mockery of Nehru's blithe Hindi Chini bhai bhai ("Indians and Chinese are brothers") by sending the Red Army over the Himalayas in the same week as the Cuban missile crisis. "Nonalignment is no ideology," an editor in New Delhi would complain. "It is an idiosyncrasy."

The cold war not only did not bypass Asia, as its propagandists might have imagined; it fed hungrily upon the region's predilection for single, domineering leaders. The Korean War, which flared barely six months after the Dutch left Jakarta, began both the shooting and the trend. In Seoul, Syngman Rhee hardened into the unbending patriarch who would be ousted by student demonstrators in 1960. His northern counterpart, Kim Il Sung, would butcher his way to infamy as one of the century's most paranoid, omnipotent heads of state. On the far banks of the Yalu River, the fanning of anti-U.S. sentiment would help Mao bend his young republic to his will.

All across Asia, leadership that once drew its legitimacy from the national struggle would henceforth be enshrined, linked inextricably to the nation itself. The shift fueled a welter of coups and cults of personality. Sukarno could no longer be satisfied as Great Leader of the Revolution, Mouthpiece of the Indonesian People, Father of the Farmers; in 1957, he would replace democracy with Guided Democracy--and name himself guide. Park Chung Hee and Suharto made few excuses for their iron rule, and fellow soldiers Ne Win in Burma and Phibun in Thailand even fewer. But the less obvious breaches of the national contract could, if anything, sting more. Part of the horror Indians felt at Indira Gandhi's imposition of emergency rule in 1975-77 drew from a recognition of how far the nation had traveled from the rectitude of that other, martyred Gandhi.

The same factors that had brought the original generation of nationalists to power--and their nations into being--made this, too: a continent of strongmen. The U.S. served as a handy foil for some regimes, a banker for others (Ngo Dinh Diem's in Saigon, Ramon Magsaysay's in Manila). Peoples haunted by war and deprivation often welcomed the firm hand of those, like Singapore's unflappable Lee Kuan Yew, who promised a more comfortable future. They also lent themselves as fodder for yet more mass campaigns. "China's 600 million people have two remarkable peculiarities," Mao liked to claim--poverty and blankness. "A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so... the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it."

Most often Asia's new emperors would only deepen the poverty. The salaries of Filipinos were, in real terms, half as much in 1985 as they had been in 1956; the share of the national income held by the wealthiest tenth of the country increased from 27% to 37% in the same period. Sukarno, who dashingly told the West to "go to hell with their aid," also told his citizens to cross out the zeros on their banknotes when inflation turned their rupiah into tissue paper. What the titans had wrought seemed so diametrically the opposite of their promise as to be darkly comic: the visions of shiny, virile factories gave way to the stubble of backyard blast furnaces that blanketed China after the horrors of Mao's Great Leap Forward. As many as 30 million Chinese may have died of starvation and disease between 1958 and 1962--not least because no cadres had the strength to challenge the Helmsman's faith in himself.

In time, that failure of will would devour entire societies. The combination of fervent populaces and unchecked leaders gave rise to the law of the mob, writ frighteningly large. While Suharto eased Sukarno off the stage he had held for so long, he also unleashed a bloodbath that began with suspected communists and continued through village grudges. An estimated half-million Indonesians were killed between late 1965 and early 1966, sometimes at the behest of army troops, more often by vigilantes. In China, Mao rallied 10 million Red Guards to the streets of Beijing in 1966; at his command--spoken or implied--they would mutilate in a decade the millennia of history that China had always used to define herself. Most gruesome, though, was the picture painted in Cambodia, where famine and repression and the sledgehammer pounding of U.S. bombers brought a society face-to-face with its opposite. The movement had a leader--the violin-playing schoolteacher Saloth Sar. But for years the Khmer Rouge underscored their malevolence by pretending not to have a Brother Number One, issuing orders in the name of an Angkar--"organization"--as blank as the slate they tried to make of their green, haunted land.

As at the dawn of the century, Japan would argue for a different path. For the bloodied nation struggling to remake itself under strict occupation reforms, the Korean War heralded a "miracle," not a nightmare. Over the next two decades, heavy industries transformed the boost received from American purchases during the war into an export machine, and the country racked up 10% growth rates year after year. Observers would turn to cliché to explain the boom, envisioning a population of loyal drones devoting their lives to the bottom line of Japan Inc. But the critical role played by the country's vaunted bureaucrats was at least equally apparent. Many in the West would cry foul over their strict management of imports and support of targeted industries; much later, critics would blast a financial policy that encouraged companies to run up a terrifying mountain of debt, implicitly backed by the state.

Those in the East would find more to appreciate in the Japanese system. Asia's authoritarian rulers could still push and pull levers when they liked: when South Korea's Park wanted a steel mill, he overrode his advisers and built what would become the world's biggest, at Pohang. The $800 million in Japanese aid he won for normalizing relations with Tokyo did not hurt either--any more than the flood of Japanese investment that would later revive the former subject economies of Southeast Asia. And the fundamentals of the Japanese success story required precisely what much of Asia had in abundance, high savings and cheap labor. The Tigers' replication of that success seems, in hindsight, almost as preordained as the victory of Asia's prewar nationalists. In China, still dizzied by the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping had only to unchain the entrepreneurial spirit of his people--and the country doubled its per-capita income in a decade.

The revolution inspired by those riches rivaled anything that came before. In countries like Indonesia, a powerful and corrupt few would gobble up a large share of the wealth; still, between 1970 and 1990, the number of Indonesians living in absolute poverty dropped from 60% to 14% of the population. As the ranks of the middle class swelled--in Thailand, Taiwan, India--so too did the scope of their demands. Refrigerators and TVs became attainable, even expected goals--then cars, computers, mobile phones. One could well imagine that the Asia envisioned by an élite few at the turn of the century had arrived.

Boosters made the logical leap and suddenly an Asian Century, too, seemed inevitable. "Asia" itself had gained a sort of currency--as a region that shared one of the most extensive and speedy transformations the world had ever seen, and not a little smugness at that accomplishment. Leaders would loudly hail the deference of their hard-working, high-saving peoples.

Spoken more quietly was the threat: that without the strongmen (and they were almost always men), the masses would be reduced to an older, more familiar want.

That those leaders would be the ones reduced stands as the great irony of the century's close. Too much can be laid on the wave of democratization that has swept East Asia in the past decade, but the fact of it is nonetheless startling. The People Power revolution that brought down Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 wrote a script almost too perfect: a nation quiescent for more than a decade would rise and, relatively peacefully, replace their leader with his assassinated rival's widow. Reforms elsewhere would still depend upon central figures: Chiang's son Ching-kuo in Taiwan, Roh Tae Woo in South Korea, and in Thailand the revered King Bhumibol, who curbed Bangkok's generals in 1992. But everywhere they reflected the pressure of a spreading individualism--of populations emboldened by new influences and more stable living conditions to demand a say in their governing.

Not only strongmen would decry the change. Traditionalists would seize on an influx of usually alliterative evils--MTV, McDonald's, miniskirts--to prove that the region had not come into its own, only sold out to a West bent once again upon conquest. But they ignored the timbre of the transformation, the way in which Western culture was morphed by contact with the East. Cultures are both less permeable and more resilient than their defenders usually think. That Asia's have changed does not mean they are any less Asian. It is no accident, after all, that karaoke has become the region's most visible cultural element outside the subcontinent and one of its few unifying factors: instead of isolating the singer as a star, the microphone actually confirms him or her, reassuringly, as a member of the group.

On the other hand, neither has the region found a singularly "Asian" way of being (not even Japan's). In fact, talk of Asian values and an Asian Century has fallen to a whisper since the cascading devaluations of 1997 shamed the region's economic model. Those few patriarchs who cling to such rhetoric--Singapore's Lee, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad--now seem out-of-step, for such predictions ignore the fact that the history of Asia this century has been one of becoming. Towering figures may have helped that process along. But if the century heralded by the great men does come, the "Asia" thus ushered in, after 100 years of making and unmaking and remaking, will almost certainly not be what they once imagined.

- 23 AUGUST 1999

India Goes To The Polls Today

Catching them young: Advani surfs the net, Rahul legs it out

New Delhi: One is 81 years old, the other 38. But each is taking a leaf out of the other's book in the hope of catching young voters in the upcoming parliamentary polls.

The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) prime ministerial hopeful, L.K. Advani, is journeying across cyberspace like Gen Y, while the Congress' youth icon and general secretary Rahul Gandhi is walking to the doorsteps of young voters - something the former has done all his life.

There are 43 million new voters in the electoral rolls for the April-May polls and a bulk of them are in the 18-30 age group. The younger voters are not believed to be loyal to any particular party - and so it makes sense for politicians to try and impress them.

"We will vote for the one who gives our village a degree college. Age, experience and party don't matter," says 20-something Chandrashekhar Singh, a student from Sarai Meer village in Uttar Pradesh's Azamgarh district.

Tanu Sehgal, 24, working in a music production house in Delhi, says: "I will consider voting for a well-educated and experienced politician. Age for me is not a factor." And these are the votes that are being eyed.

While Advani has launched an internet campaign through Google and put it up on 2,000 websites, the Congress general secretary is travelling across the country, reaching out to people and mingling with youngsters.

The BJP has often said it has more young chief ministers than the Congress and harps on Advani's five decades of experience as against the sheltered existence of Rahul.

The Nano - Cheapest Car In the World from India

From The Times
April 10, 2009
Race to get behind wheel of the Nano

It is small, easy to drive and billed as the cheapest car in the world – and in Mumbai prospective customers queued to be among the first to own it.
The Nano, above, produced by Tata Motors, attracted customers from first-time buyers to families wanting an affordable second car. The customers will not, however, be able to collect their new cars straight away. They were applying to be one of the first 100,000 owners as Tata Motors took bookings for a contract that may take more than a year to fulfil.
Elavia H M , 67, wanted a Nano for her son who commutes to work in a taxi. “It is so cheap and it looks comfortable,” she said.
The Nano, which costs only 100,000 rupees (£1,300), can drive for 23.6km (15 miles) on a litre of fuel. The small car is also easy to drive on narrow Indian roads. (Reuters)

Young Indians say "no thanks" to American dream - An Excerpt

Young Indians say "no thanks" to American dream
Wed Mar 25, 2009 9:33pm EDT

By Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Anurag Kotoky
BANGALORE (Reuters) - For decades, the United States beckoned as the land of opportunity for bright, young Indians, lured by the prospect of prestigious university degrees followed by jobs on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.
Indians have since 2001 been the largest foreign student population on American campuses, comprising around 15 percent of all international students at colleges and universities in the United States, according to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.
But now, the economic crisis that has sent the U.S. economy into its worst recession in decades, has tarnished the sheen of the 'American Dream' for many Indians who are opting for university studies and career opportunities at home.
America's loss may be India's gain, analysts say, pointing to a 'reverse brain drain' that may see India reaping benefits for years to come as some of its smartest and most talented people put their energies into India' economy, Asia's third-largest.
"The brain drain has already begun to reverse. Now there are many magnets pulling the best talent. Before, the U.S. was where everyone wanted to go," said Vivek Wadhwa, a U.S.-based Indian academic who has written a paper on the issue. India's economy has boomed at around 9 percent growth in each of the last three years, lifting millions out of poverty and creating a generation of affluent and ambitious young Indians.
Many have pursued prestigious post-graduate degrees in the U.S. and Europe and then stayed after finding high-paying jobs.
But as the global financial crisis has kicked-in, Indians are seeing greater opportunities at home, where there are more job openings, the cost of living is lower and modern amenities such as shopping malls and condominiums offer them a comfortable life.
About 100,000 skilled Indian 'returnees' will come home from the United States in the next five years, Wadhwa estimated.
"When I joined Duke four years ago, nearly every student talked about wanting to stay and work in the U.S.," said Wadhwa, an adjunct professor at Duke University and a senior research associate at Harvard Law School.
"Now the vast majority plan to go back home. A few want to work here to pay off their loans, but they don't think they will be able to get jobs."
With U.S. unemployment at a 26 year high, prospects at home appear better for Indian graduates as firms such as Warner Bros and IBM announce they will move jobs to India and other outsourcing hubs after laying off workers in North America.
FINANCIAL AID
Rahul Dutta, 23, is a case in point. He has changed his plans to study in the United States and is now enrolled at a local university.
"My initial plan was to do my master's degree there and look for a job too, but now I realize that there are no jobs and no funding, so I took admission in a college in Delhi," said Dutta.
In Bangalore, south India's high-tech metropolis, Kripa Chettiar reached the same conclusion.
"I was looking at doing a master's in financial engineering at Columbia University," Chettiar said. "But now I am not even writing the GRE because now there's no point, as there is no financial aid available at all."
The GRE, or Graduate Record Examination, is the standard admission test for graduate university studies in the United States and several other English-speaking countries.
Garvit Bafna in Pune, a city near India's financial capital Mumbai, took the exam, but he says he will only move to America if he gets into a top-ranked university.
Even students who have passed the GRE exam are abandoning plans to study abroad due to lack of funds, said Rajiv Ganjoo, head of international education at Career Launcher, an educational service provider in India.
"It is a waiting game now," Ganjoo said. "Students are looking at the recession, at how the colleges react to it and how the government reacts to it, before taking any steps."
For students already in the United States, getting fellowships and other funding is becoming difficult, especially for foreigners as the pool of scholarship dollars has dried up due to shrinking university endowments from stock market losses.
The funding scenario is grim as compared to past years," said Cherry Harika, a 24-year-old from India's Punjab province who is studying for a masters degree at Boston University.
"My university has frozen new hiring. There are hardly any new job openings for foreigners, especially when U.S. citizens are losing their jobs."
Employer visa sponsorships are growing scarcer and President Barack Obama's administration is under pressure to restrict the number of temporary work permits issued to foreigners.
About 55,000 students in India took the GRE last year, down more than 20 percent from the year before, said Jaideep Chowdhary, who heads the GRE program at a private training institute in India.
Most students who study in the United States need to shell out around $50,000 for a two-year stay, he said.
Much of that money would come from loans which are not easy to get these days due to the credit crunch, especially for students with no reasonable assurance of a job.
By contrast, studying at the Indian Institutes of Technology in Madras, part of a highly reputed nationwide network of engineering and technology campuses, costs about $1,200 a year.
India too has taken a hit from the financial crisis which has slowed the scorching pace of growth of its IT outsourcing sector. One small advantage of the crisis for India may be the human capital benefits as the brightest stay home, said Wadhwa, who wrote a report titled "America's loss is the world's gain."
"This is an economic tragedy that significantly increases the chances the next Intel or Cisco Systems will launch outside the U.S.," Wadhwa wrote.
(Editing by Megan Goldin)

TAJ HOTEL OWNER SPEAKS TO CNN -

"Fareed Zakaria -- GPS" airs Sundays on CNN/U.S. at 1 p.m. (ET) and on CNNI at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. (ET). Zakaria spoke with Ratan Tata, the chairman of the Taj Group of hotels and the Tata Group, about the attacks in Mumbai, India, on this Sunday's program. A transcript of the interview is below.
Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata, whose company owns the Taj Hotel, discusses the attack in Mumbai, India.

Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata, whose company owns the Taj Hotel, discusses the attack in Mumbai, India.
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(CNN) -- Fareed Zakaria, host, Global Public Square: Ratan Tata is the chairman of the Taj Group of hotels, and also the Tata Group -- the largest private corporate group in India. It has interests in steel, cars, communications, computer technology, power -- and, of course, hotels. Their revenues last year were $62.5 billion.

Ratan Tata is often described as India's David Rockefeller. He joins me today to talk about how the attacks affect his hometown, the country and business in India.

Tell me how you felt when you first heard about the attacks.

Ratan Tata, chairman, Tata Group and owner, Taj Hotel: I've got to say that I was truly emotionally overcome when I saw this old, venerable, rather beautiful building going up in flames, and I kept hearing the grenades or explosives going on inside, the sound of gunfire, the fact that there were several hundred people in the hotel, either at dinner or living there. And I just felt tremendously helpless.

We can only say that -- you know, I have to say, the heroes of that evening were members of the staffs, many of them who lost their lives. But people used their heads and saved so many, and sheltered so many of the guests who were there either for dinner or otherwise, and got them out. But we've had a horrible loss of life, a completely wanton destruction of property.

And this morning, finally, after almost three days, we understand from the commandos that all of the militants are eliminated.

Zakaria: You must have known personally some of the people who lost their lives.

Tata: Yes, I did. And it was tragic, because some of the people had -- one in particular husband and wife were there to celebrate their anniversary. The husband made it, the wife didn't.

I knew several of the staff members -- not well, but obviously by first name -- and they were gone. Some of them were gone just in cold blood, I understand, just shot in the head or shot at point-blank range. Others were shot in a wanton, sort of random fire that took place.

And all in all, it was just a horrible event that I never thought we would ever see in India, leave alone at the Taj. Video Watch Tata discuss need for better preparedness »

Zakaria: When you were on your cell phone, trying to deal with this situation, did you feel that the police was responsive? Did you feel as though you were getting the cooperation you needed?

Tata: Well, you know, we were getting the cooperation that they could give us, but the infrastructure was woefully poor. Fires raged for almost three hours before we could get, on that first night, any fire engines who were there to respond with water. The police were woefully inadequate in terms of equipment and in terms of being prepared.

And it was only after the army and the commandos came in -- and even they were, in relative terms, ill-equipped against these militants, who were very well trained, seemed to have a plan of action.

And it has led me to believe that what the city really needs is a crisis management group that could step into action instantly when we have a situation like this, where there's a plan of action, where they can deal with these kinds of crises instantly and well and professionally, and the people get equipped to do so.

We had people who died being shot through bullet-proof vests. And all in all, they've been ill-equipped.

Zakaria: It does appear from the outside -- many people are wondering why there weren't more commandos there earlier, why they didn't storm the hotel with hundreds of them to overwhelm them, why they didn't use teargas.

Are these questions being asked in India?Photo See images from the battlegrounds »

Tata: Yes, they are. They're being asked by us. We were told that their instructions were to minimize the collateral damage to the property. But that's a question mark, because much of the property went up in flames and was allowed to flare -- for all of you who watched it on television have seen that happen.

But I think, you know, something I want to say is that, rather than have us succumb to this kind of terror, what it has done is, I think, given us a resolve that nobody can do this to us. It has united us in the Taj.

The staff has been fantastic. The spirit of the staff -- you know, we lost -- the general manager lost his whole family in one of the fires in the building. And I went up to him today, and I told him how sorry I was.

And he said, "Sir, you know, we're going to beat this. We're going to build this Taj back into what it was. We're standing with you. We will build this thing back. We will not let this event take us down."

And that, I think, is the feeling that they have. And I have a feeling that that's pretty much echoed throughout the country. We're indignant, but we're not scared. If there's a view that has pulled us down, I think it'll unite the country that much more.

Zakaria: Do you worry that it will scare foreign investors, that they might be spooked in some way by this?

Tata: Yes. I have no doubt that, certainly short term, that may happen. And if it does, it would be natural that it take place, because, if you talk to some of the people who have had to go through this experience, either in our hotel or the Oberoi or elsewhere, this doesn't happen very often. And when it does, it spooks a lot of people, and rightly so.

So, we will have to do something as a nation to be able to deal with this kind of terror, if it is now being addressed to us, or directed to us. We've been very complacent, because we've really not had this kind of terrorism inflicted upon us.

And I think, as we look forward, we will have to put this into our equation of things we need to be prepared for. And crises infrastructure, I think is one that we will just have to address.

And if we need to get expertise from outside, we should not stand on ceremony to hold back. We should go to the best place possible to get expertise, and have that installed with us in terms of hardware, in terms of training, in terms of strategy.

Zakaria: Did you get this feeling that the terrorists seemed to know the hotel, and seemed to have plotted this very carefully in terms of the layout, where they moved?

Tata: Yes. There seems to be no doubt that they knew their way around the hotel, that they seemed to know it in the night or in the daytime. They seemed to have planned their moves quite well. And there seemed to have been a lot of pre-planning in terms of what they did, and how they managed to carry on for three days and sustain themselves during that time.

Zakaria: Could anyone have had some kind of inside connection?

Tata: I wouldn't know. I think this would be something that the investigation will show up.

Certainly, they had a lot of planning that went into it. Whether it was themselves, whether it was assistance from inside, or whether it was just a very well planned, very well organized investigation of the property, I really don't know.

Zakaria: You had been warned that there was some danger of some kind of attack. You had elaborate security measures. And it appears that the terrorists waited until you relaxed them at the Taj Hotel, which again suggests some kind of either inside connection or very careful watching of the situation.

Tata: Yes, you know, it's ironic that we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures to, you know, where people couldn't park their cars in the portico where you had to go through a metal detector.

But if I look at what we had, which all of us complained about, it could not have stopped what took place. They didn't come through that entrance. They came from somewhere in the back.

They planned everything. I believe they -- the first thing they did was, they shot a sniffer dog and his handler.

They went through the kitchen. They knew what they were doing, and they did not go through the front. All our arrangements were in the front.

Zakaria: You've been back now and seen the hotel. What did it look like?

Tata: It's -- I've only been in the lobby and into the restaurant where the last shootout took place. And I went there this evening just before coming here. It's a very, very sad and depressing sight.

The lobby is relatively untouched, at least at first glance. The restaurant where the firefight took place is riddled with bullet marks, and the walls are scarred with grenade blasts. And it looks like it's been hit by a bomb.

And, you know, I have to say that the commandos that faced this were very courageous people. Those who lost their lives in this, I think really gave their lives for the job they had.

And the reason I say that we got cooperation is that the commandos really did whatever they could, given what they had. And they paid a penalty for it in terms of loss of life of some of their leaders -- very good officers.

And the staff also went far beyond the call of duty to serve the guests. So, on the whole, I would say that we really are very grateful for the people that did what they did.

And the whole affair is just devastating, because it was so well planned and it did so much damage. It took such a loss of life. People were shot point-blank. They were -- they sprayed bullets from automatic weapons. They lobbed grenades.

And they did this for three days. And that's truly devastating. I understand the top floor of the hotel is gutted.

But we're all committed that we will build back this hotel to what it is. However long it takes, whatever it takes, this hotel will stand.

I can only say that it somehow epitomizes the will of my great-grandfather, because it stood up to all the abuse it has. And we will have it in shape, hopefully, for another 100 years. iReport.com: Share tributes to those lost

Zakaria: And in broader terms, India's economy and India's business -- you're also going through a global slowdown, a financial crisis, at least in the Western world.

How will India handle this? Are you bullish about India's prospects?

Tata: Well, I think that India doesn't suffer from the same cause of economic turndown that is plaguing the West at this time. And I believe that, with an adequate infusion of capital and credit into the Indian economy, which the government can easily do at reasonable rates, that we can invigorate, or reinvigorate, the economy on a domestic basis, so that we can go through this period of downturn without too much strain in India.

But it will call for the government being bold in terms of what it puts back into the banks, and what it almost mandates the banks to do in terms of getting the credit to the consumer.

Zakaria: But you see domestic demand as being strong enough to keep things going at a reasonable growth rate.

Tata: Yes, I do. And mind you, we don't have toxic paper. We don't have subprime and mortgage problems.

The issue is that money had been drawn out of the economy to combat inflation. And if we can live with a slightly higher inflation, it is my probably uneducated view that we can reinvigorate the economy.

The global -- I mean, the domestic demand is quite strong. What is happening now is that there is no credit in the market, and whatever there is, is at very, very high interest rates.

Zakaria: And if you had a message to the world, who have witnessed all this and seen your hotel -- the hotel that your great-grandfather built -- go up in flames, what would it be?

Tata: I think my message would be that this has been a terrible blow to us, but we will, in fact, overcome the challenges that are ahead. It has not, in fact, diminished our commitment to go ahead with what we had in our minds, and that we will rebuild what has been damaged or destroyed, and that we will only come out stronger and, in fact, more determined than we were before this very unfortunate event took place.

Zakaria: Mr. Tata, our condolences to all your staff.

Tata: We will not be defeated.
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Zakaria: Thank you.

Tata: Thank you

Luxury mall showcases wealth gap in India - Reuters Report

Photo Credit : Reuters

Luxury mall showcases wealth gap in India
Mon Oct 13, 2008 8:53pm EDT


By Krittivas Mukherjee NEW DELHI (Reuters) - With gold-plated ceilings, exotic fountains and the clink of champagne glasses, the Emporio Mall in New Delhi is the perfect place to wile away a hot afternoon browsing through designer boutiques.

The mall, adorned with palms and scented with lavender, is the exclusive playground of India's rich, which despite the effects of the credit crisis still have plenty of cash to buy designer accessories with thousand dollar price tags.

Getting access to this little piece of air conditioned paradise amid the hustle and bustle of the sweltering capital will cost $5. That's about one week's salary for 80 percent of India's billion plus population.

With a phalanx of security guards keeping out the destitute and a pricey admission fee, some social observers see India's first luxury mall as a symbol of an economic apartheid that they say increasingly divides the 'haves' and 'have nots' in India.

"The conditions, the ground conditions are not like those of Western cities," said Satish Deshpande, professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.

"So, we are tending more and more toward a kind of apartheid, a kind of separation that is very sharp and sharply visible in our cities, in gated communities."

The widening wealth gap has major implications for India, which faces a general election next year, and has been plagued by waves of violence in its provinces that analysts say is at least partly due to the socioeconomic divide alienating segments of society.

The issue is likely to play a central role in next year's general election in which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Congress party will seek re-election.

The party took power in a coalition government four years ago on a platform of more 'inclusive growth' for India's 'have nots', a promise upon which it has mostly failed to deliver.
Asia's third-largest economy has grown nearly 9 percent a year over the past four years, driven largely by consumer demand from the middle-class and soaring foreign investment. Despite the boom, official data shows an estimated 800 million of India's billion-plus people live on 50 U.S. cents a day.

The top 10 percent of India's population owns between 33 to 50 percent of the country's wealth, according to a range of estimates by the government, think-tanks and academics.

Uneven economic growth is posing a serious security threat to India, Singh said last December, pointing out that a large proportion of recruits for militant groups came from regions untouched by India's scorching growth.

NO EUPHORIA FOR INDIA'S POOR

While the middle and wealthier English-speaking classes are profiting from an economic surge, it is unclear how well this is trickling down to hundreds of millions of Indians living in small towns and rural areas.

Analysts say the failure to deliver social justice and development to India's poorest regions have alienated people and helped open up economic, social and religious divides.

Socio-economic divides and governmental apathy are said to fuel some of India's deadliest insurgencies in which thousands of people have been killed, including a four-decade-long Maoist rebellion and several armed movements in the remote northeast.

A contest for jobs and development is in part the reason for a violent Hindu-Christian conflict raging in the country's east.

"These divides and disparities lead to disaffection, large-scale migration and discord," Singh said last year at a meeting of state chief ministers, drawing a rare link between economic inequality and internal security by a top government leader.

"In many cases internal security problems arise out of uneven development and we need to address this issue if we are to make any long-term headway in combating extremist elements," he said.

A government panel report last year on the informal sector said the buoyancy in the economy lead to a sense of euphoria at the start of this century.

"However, a majority of the people, who did not have even Rs. 20 a day for consumption, were not touched by this euphoria. At the end of 2004-05, about 836 million or 77 per cent of the population were living below Rs.20 per day," it said.

GATED COMMUNITIES

Inside the Emporio mall, the sybaritic grandeur is a sharp contrast to the grinding poverty of the Yamuna Pushta slum, one of New Delhi's most notorious, where the stench of raw sewage wafts from open sewers and barefooted children play in the dirt.

Visitors to the mall are greeted by porters who swing open glass doors leading into two huge oval atriums decorated with crystal chandeliers, fountains and pillars. The fittings on the three floors are burnished wood, etched glass and brass.

The mall sprawls over 32,500 square meters (350,000 sq ft) of retail space. It houses scores of exclusive brands such as Cartier, Dior, Jimmy Choo, Zegna, Chopard and Dolce and Gabbana.

Given India's rapidly expanding millionaire base, it is hardly surprising the country has emerged as a delectable destination for luxury brands, which until the mall opened were mostly sold in small boutiques in luxury hotels.

Retail consultant Technopak estimates that some 1.8 million households in India earn $100,000 or more a year, spending a tenth of that on luxury goods.
This adds up to a potential market of $18 billion, a figure that is expected to rise to $56 billion by 2012, assuming the financial crisis does not make too big a dent.

When India gained independence in 1947, the country embraced a socialist ethos where extravagance was looked down upon. That has changed with the freeing up of the economy since 1991.

The bullish embrace of ritz has made India's social divide starker.

The most coveted things in the world are as easily available here as the basic necessities of life are denied to a vast majority of its people. And perhaps no-where more so than inside the Emporio mall where an unabashed celebration of luxury is on full display.

Suresh Garg, a rotund businessman shopping at the Emporio, embodies the spirit of the new, hedonistic India.

"We have been pushed around for far too long - a Third World country," he said. "But now we have arrived. Now we are no less than anyone and we need to show it off."

(Additional reporting by Sunil Kataria and Rina Chandran; Editing by Megan Goldin)