India Going to Crap?

In the shadow of its new suburbs, torrid growth and 300- ­million-plus-strong middle class, India is struggling with a sanitation emergency. From the stream in Devi's village to the nation's holiest river, the Ganges, 75 percent of the country's surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent. Everyone in Indian cities is at risk of consuming human feces, if they're not already, the Ministry of Urban Development concluded in September.

Economic Drain

Illness, lost productivity and other consequences of fouled water and inadequate sewage treatment trimmed 1.4-7.2 percent from the gross domestic product of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in 2005, according to a study last year by the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program.

Sanitation and hygiene-related issues may have a similar if not greater impact on India's $1.2 trillion economy, says Guy Hutton, a senior water and sanitation economist with the program in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Snarled transportation and unreliable power further damp the nation's growth. Companies that locate in India pay hardship wages and ensconce employees in self- sufficient compounds.

The toll on human health is grim. Every day, 1,000 children younger than 5 years old die in India from diarrhea, hepatitis- causing pathogens and other sanitation-related diseases, according to the United Nations Children's Fund.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aErNiP_V4RLc&refer=home

A Humanitarian's worst nightmare:Zimbabwe

NZVERE, Zimbabwe — Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.

In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.

And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. "If you get that, you have a meal," said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.

The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.

Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.

But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world/africa/22zimbabwe.html?pagewanted=all

Recipe for Famine

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=specialreport&srnum=2

 

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The bag of green peas, stamped "USAID From the American People," took more than six months to reach Haylar Ayako.

For seven of his grandchildren, that was a lifetime.

They died as the peas journeyed from North Dakota to southern Ethiopia. During that time, the American growers, processors and transporters that profit from aid shipments were fighting off a proposal before Congress to speed deliveries by buying more from foreign producers near trouble spots. As a result of legal mandates to buy U.S. goods, the world's most generous food relief program wasn't fast or flexible enough to feed the starving in Ethiopia's drought-ridden South Omo region this year.

"I am so grieved that I lost those children," said Ayako, a Bena tribesman, speaking in his local Omotic language. "They died of the food shortage."

The dry peas Ayako took home almost eight weeks ago had traveled more than 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) by rail, ship and truck, starting 15 miles south of the Canadian border with their harvest in August 2007. Stops included Lake Charles, Louisiana; Djibouti, the small African country whose capital on the Gulf of Aden serves as a port for food aid; and Nazareth, Ethiopia, two hours south of Addis Ababa, the capital. Warehouse stays punctuated each leg until the peas finally arrived in the village of Shala-Luka.

'Behind Closed Doors'

U.S. farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled efforts to simplify aid deliveries, leaving Africans to starve when they might have been saved, said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who led USAID, the Agency for International Development, from 2001 to 2006.

"No one can take the high moral ground against it, so they hide behind closed doors and kill it," he said. "It's all done behind the scenes."

Flunking the Intelligence Test

Flunking the Intelligence Test

The only real question about the Mumbai attack was just when it would come.

Sudip Mazumdar

NEWSWEEK

Published Nov 29, 2008 | Updated: 12:25  p.m. ET Nov 29, 2008

The hostage takers in Mumbai didn't need to wonder how large an armed rescue team the Indian government was sending, or when to anticipate its arrival. They had only to click on the nearest TV set, and there was the federal home minister, Shivraj Patil, obliviously telling viewers that 200 commandos had taken off on the two-hour flight from New Delhi at 2:30 a.m. Even after the aircraft had landed in Mumbai, the gunmen had plenty of time to get ready, as the troops were herded aboard rickety transport buses to be hauled from the city's northern edge to its southern tip. The commandos finally reached the scene about 6:30, roughly nine hours after the terrorists had launched their murderous attacks in the financial capital of India. The battle would drag on for the next two days while the body count reached 195 before the last gunman went down.

In Mumbai and throughout India, people reacted the way Americans did after September 11: they demanded to know why their government had failed to protect them. "Since November last year I have been drawing attention to the iceberg of jihadi terrorism," says B. Raman, a former top official at India's equivalent of the CIA, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). "The government of [Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh reacted to the repeated warning signals of the moving iceberg in the same way as the Bush administration reacted to reports about the plans of the Al Qaeda for aviation terrorism in the U.S.—it just didn't react. It was in a denial mode."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/171366/output/print

Fixing Indian education

Private sector education entrepreneurs experiencing "schadenfreude" (German for joy in other people's misery) in the Manipal group's confrontation with the medical education regulator have much to learn from a poem written after World War II by a German pastor called Martin Niemöller about the Nazis. He wrote, "First they came for the Communists,/ and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist/ Then they came for the Jews,/ and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew/ Then they came for the Catholics,/ and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant/ Finally they came for me,/ but by that time there was no one left to speak up."

 

Irrational, corrupt and autocratic regimes must always be stood up to because there is no place to hide from them. Making peace (or an off-balance sheet settlement) only makes things worse because this beast feeds on itself. Medical education in India is regulated by an autonomous body called the Medical Council of India (MCI). MCI, like other vertical ayatollahs of education, has created a toll gate in milking education institutions with irrational capacity licensing norms around infrastructure sharing, faculty, curriculum, governance and much else. In true licence raj tradition, they have draconian inspection powers that create regulatory arbitrage with an answer looking for a question. MCI has arbitrarily halved the number of medical seats for Manipal and continues to make public noises about derecognition. Being singled out for selective enforcement means that an institution with students from 53 countries now mostly spends its energy (and money) expanding overseas because of regulatory cholesterol in India.

 

http://www.livemint.com/articles/2008/11/12225433/Fixing-education8217s-chole.html

India's Colleges Battle a Thicket of Red Tape

MUMBAI -- P.M. D'Mello, the principal of a pharmacy college here, wants to double student enrollment, fill the empty space in her building and help remedy the shortage of skilled workers that plagues India's economy.

The government won't let her.

Dean M.L. Shrikant, left, has been trying for years to expand the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai.

Under the labyrinthine regulations that govern technical colleges nationwide, the Principal K.M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy must provide 168 square feet of building space for each student. The rule is intended to ensure students have enough space to learn. But it effectively caps enrollment at 300, even though students are spread so thinly in the eight-story building that the top floor remains unused, its lecture halls padlocked.

The rules also stipulate the exact size for libraries and administrative offices, the ratio of professors to assistant professors and lecturers, quotas for student enrollment and the number of computer terminals, books and journals that must be on site.

"I am not free to run this school as I wish," Ms. D'Mello, 51 years old, says. "I am at the whim of unrealistic demands."

Loosening the Indian government's famously bureaucratic "License Raj" when it comes to governing businesses has helped spur an economic surge that has transformed the country and its standing in the world. In contrast, critics say India's educational system remains mired in red tape that stifles expansion and innovation.

The system falls far short of meeting the demand among young people for places in good colleges and universities. And it deprives India of the ranks of well-educated graduates it needs to supply crucial industries such as information technology and pharmaceuticals.

The mandate that pharmacy colleges must provide 168 square feet per student, for instance, meant that nearly 75% of the 25,000 people who took the pharmacy-college entrance exam this year in the state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, were turned away because there weren't enough seats, according to Ms. D'Mello.

The regulatory restrictions are especially severe in technical fields such as engineering, pharmacy, business administration and computer science. Almost every aspect of operations for about 8,500 private and public colleges and universities is overseen by the All India Council for Technical Education, a New Delhi-based government body empowered by law in 1987.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122652421295221817.html

Myopic policies: creation of world-class universities

The government will create 12 Central universities, adding to the existing 18. This is a mammoth undertaking, for which Rs. 3,280 crore (about $73 million) has been allocated from the budget. Earlier in the year, India announced that it would create 30 "world-class" universities, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in the coming five years. On the recommendation of the National Knowledge Commiss ion, the Centre is planning massive investment to upgrade and expand higher education. Other plans include enhancing the salaries of college and university academics — by as much as 70 per cent.

[.............]

Just pumping money and resources into a fundamentally broken university system is a mistake. Establishing new universities, especially those intended to be innovative, requires careful planning and an understanding of the weaknesses of the current system. Let us outline some of the problems that need fixing before resources are given.

Bureaucracy without accountability: India is famous for sclerotic bureaucracy, and higher education fits into that mould. Few decisions can be made without taking permission from an authority above, and the wheels of decision-making grind slowly. Fear of corruption or loss of control entrenches bureaucracy. Teachers and academic leaders at colleges and universities have little incentive to innovate higher education — indeed quite the opposite. It is completely impossible to build world-class universities in this bureaucratic context. If the new institutions must tolerate responsibilities to both the Central government and the States in which they are located, the bureaucratic burden will be completely overwhelming.

Location: Great universities need to be located on friendly soil. In general, the best universities worldwide are in or near major urban centres or in places with intellectual traditions and strength. While it is entirely appropriate to have a good university in each State, the idea of a truly world-class university (an institution that can compete with the best in the world) in cities like Guwahati or Bhubaneswar is simply unrealistic. It would be extraordinarily difficult to attract top professors or even the best students, and the "soft" infrastructure, such as most cultural amenities, is missing. High-tech industry is also absent in these locations and would be difficult to lure. No amount of money will guarantee the establishment of a world-class university in such places.

The academic profession: Indian academics deserve higher salaries, and the move to dramatically improve remuneration is a positive step. It would be a serious mistake to simply give more money to the professoriate without, at the same time, demanding significant reforms in the structure and practices of the profession. Indian academics are rewarded for longevity rather than productivity, and for conformity rather than innovation. The most productive academics cannot be rewarded for their work, and it is almost impossible to pay "market rates" to keep the best and the brightest in the universities. World-class universities require a salary structure that rewards productivity.

Academic culture and governance: Indian universities are enmeshed in a culture of mediocrity, with little competition either among institutions or academics. Universities are subject to the whims of politicians and are unable to plan for their own future. Academics are seldom involved in their leadership and management. Bureaucracy governs everything and holds down innovation. Without essential and deep structural changes in the way universities are governed and in the culture of the institutions, there is little possibility for improvement. An additional challenge is that some of the world-class universities are to be created by improving existing State universities. This will be extraordinarily difficult since these institutions, with very few exceptions, are mired in mediocrity and bureaucracy, and are hardly amenable to change and improvement even with the carrot of additional resources.

Corruption at many levels

An element of corruption exists at many levels of the higher education system, from favouritism in admissions, appointment to faculty positions, cheating in examinations, questionable coaching arrangements, and many others. Damaging at all levels, corruption destroys research culture and makes a world-class university impossible.

Meritocracy at all levels: World-class universities are deeply meritocratic institutions. They hire the best professors, admit the most intelligent students, reward the brightest academics, and make all decisions on the basis of quality. They reject — and punish —plagiarism, favouritism in appointments, or corruption of any kind. Much of the Indian academe, unfortunately, does not reflect these values. Some of the problem is structural. The practice of admitting students and hiring professors on the basis of rigid quotas set for particular population groups — up to 49 per cent — however well-intentioned or justified, virtually precludes meritocracy. Deeply ingrained in Indian society and politics, the reservation system may well be justified — but to have successful world-class universities, meritocracy must be the primary motivating principle.

Role of research: World-class universities are research intensive. All highly-ranked universities in the world exhibit this characteristic. India faces several problems in developing a research culture. It is fair to say that today no Indian university, as an institution, is research-intensive. India's universities can claim a small number of departments that have a high level of research — and many highly accomplished professors work in the system. And some institutions, such as the IITs and some non-university agencies like the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and AIIMS, produce impressive research and are respected internationally. The creation of a research-intensive university is mandatory to achieve world-class status.

Resources: Rs.3,280 crore for the 12 new Central universities, plus the other impressive amounts announced for related projects, sounds like a lot of money. In fact, it is very inadequate. A world-class research university that can play in the best international leagues is an expensive undertaking — to establish and then to sustain. As an example, one large research-intensive new Chinese university cost around $700 million to build and has a total annual budget of close to $400 million.

Conclusion: The challenges facing the creation of world-class universities are daunting. Indeed, if India is to succeed as a great technological power with a knowledge-based economy, world-class universities are required. The first step, however, is to examine the problems and create realistic solutions. Spending large sums scattershot will not work. Nor will copying the American academic model succeed.

(Philip G. Altbach is Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, U.S. N. Jayaram is professor and dean, School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.)

http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/23/stories/2008102355501000.htm

Reform needs some 'vested interests'

The same week that Singapore hosted the first Formula 1 race under floodlights and on its city's streets, Indian newspapers carried more depressing reports and photos about the state of the roads in Gurgaon. Yet, this satellite city to national capital New Delhi was once touted as the Singapore of India, a claim that is truly laughable today.

The difference between Gurgaon's roads and Singapore's — in fact, almost no Indian road would stand up to comparison — is also a measure of the distance India has to travel to bridge the gap in corruption, and, importantly, how little India's political system has perceived the true benefits of economic reform.

Since it is unfair to compare Singapore — the size of a medium-sized Indian district — with a country as large and diverse as India, the analysis here has been restricted to Gurgaon. Gurgaon's administrators seem to perceive no benefit in improving the quality of life and of doing business in their city. Singapore's rulers and citizenry are almost obsessive about the optimum delivery of public services. They are attuned to this way of thinking because they have clearly enjoyed the benefits of vibrant business activity.

http://business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=336162

Why Europeans are getting taller and taller-and Americans aren't

When Vincent van Gogh was thirty-one years old, in the fall of 1883, he travelled to the bleak moors of northern Holland and stayed at a tavern in the village of Stuifzand. The local countryside was hardly inhabited then—"Locus Deserta Atque ob Multos Paludes Invia," an old map called it: "A deserted and impenetrable place of many swamps"—but a few farmers and former convicts had managed to carve a living from it. They dug peat, brewed illegal gin, and placed poles across the marshes to navigate by. Any squatter who could keep his chimney smoking for a full year earned title to the land he cleared.

There is little record of what happened to van Gogh in Stuifzand—whether he got lost in the marshes or traded sketches for shots at the bar. When I visited the village, the locals mentioned him merely to illustrate an even greater national obsession: height. At the old tavern, which is now a private home, I was shown the tiny alcove where the painter probably slept. "It looks like it would fit only a child," J. W. Drukker, the current owner, told me. Then he and his wife, Joke (a common Dutch name, they explained, pronounced "Yoh-keh"), led me down the hall, to a sequence of pencil marks on a doorjamb. "My son, he is two metres," Joke told me, pointing to the topmost mark, six and a half feet from the floor. "His feet"—she held her hands about eighteen inches apart—"for waterskiing." Joke herself is six feet one, with blond tresses and shoulders like a Valkyrie. Drukker is six feet two.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?currentPage=all

Echo of Moscow

In the land of the Soviets, the voice of the Kremlin was everywhere, an omnipresent reality-via-radio that long preceded Orwell's dystopia. Lenin and Trotsky fomented revolution primarily in print—in the commanding editorials of Iskra and Pravda, in the frenzied leaflets passed around in St. Petersburg meeting halls and later reprinted in "Ten Days That Shook the World"—but the leading instrument of enculturation and inundation under Joseph Stalin was a broadcast technology called radio-tochka, literally "radio point," a primitive receiver with no dial and no choice. These cheap wood-framed devices were installed in apartments and hallways, on factory floors, in train stations and bus depots; they played in hospitals, nursing homes, and military barracks; they were nailed to poles in the fields of collective farms and blared along the beaches from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk.

The radio day commenced at 6 A.M.

First, the Soviet anthem, then "Govorit Moskva . . ." ("Moscow speaking").

If someone in a communal apartment shut off the radio, he was considered suspect, defiant, a potential "enemy of the people." The broadcasts issued the edicts of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, announced the details of the Five-Year Plan, declared the latest triumph of the Soviet Army and the perfidies of the capitalist West. In addition to the news, there was classical music and readings of classical Russian literature, along with "radio meetings" of village workers and soldiers' mothers. The Soviet people rarely heard Stalin's actual voice—halting, dry, with a thick Georgian accent—but through the radio they absorbed his pronouncements, his view of culture and the world, his implicit message of paternalism and threat. It is hard to imagine now the totality of the instrument and the perverse imagination required to conceive it, but radio-tochka existed for decades, as present as water and electricity and twice as reliable. It was such a successful tool of propaganda that when, in 1942, Hitler visited occupied Ukraine he expressed his admiration for Stalin's methodology and bemoaned the fact that the German people were still listening to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all