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The right step
All is not well
Stroke of bad luck |
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Varsities need liberal funding
A necktie for Mr Nek Chand
Resilience after the storm’s fury
So the NYSE closed. The world carried on. There's a lesson there
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The right step THE Union Cabinet has taken the right step by withdrawing the controversial draft amendments to the Right to Information Act. These amendments would have restricted the disclosure of file notings only to social and developmental issues. Information related to file notings, except on issues about national security, privacy and protection of commercial interest, can now be sought by concerned citizens. It was the UPA in its first term that gave the nation The Right to Information Act 2005. Indeed, the Act has proved to be a great boon in promoting greater transparency and in bringing accountability in government functioning. It has successfully empowered ordinary people while, at the same time, leading to disclosures that embarrassed people in powerful positions. No wonder, since 2006, Damocles’ sword had been hanging on the Act in the form of amendments approved by the Cabinet. However, thanks to stiff opposition in Parliament, these amendments could not be passed then. There was opposition to these amendments even within the Congress party and thus they have now been abandoned. We need to remember that it is because of the implementation of the RTI Act that thousands of Indians can trace the status of various applications pending with government agencies. Indeed, the Act has brought about accountability in the moribund bureaucracy, even as it has tried its best to resist providing information by various means, including by delaying it as much as possible. Even the Prime Minister expressed concern about the “frivolous and vexatious use of the RTI Act” some time ago. However, some instances of the Act being misused by motivated individuals should in, no way, be an excuse to dilute its provisions. Rather, ways and means should be found to deal with such frivolities, which are leading to an increasing number of pending cases with the Central Information Commission, in spite of the fact that the commission is settling more and more cases every month.
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All is not well THE sad state of education in Punjab’s government schools is no secret. However, villagers resorting to pressure tactics to underline the shortage of teachers in a government school in Sangrur district does underscore the desperation of the parents desiring quality education for their children. Unfortunately, this is not the first time villagers have taken an extreme step of locking school gates. Rather, in Sangrur district, three similar incidents have happened in recent times. While the merits of this unusual method of protest can be debated, there is no denying the fact that the authorities couldn’t care less about the condition of schools. Time and again The Tribune reports have pointed out the various ills plaguing school education. Staff crunch can be gauged from the fact that thousands of posts of teachers are lying vacant across schools in Punjab. Clearly, this seriously impairs the education of lakhs of students enrolled in government schools. What is worse is that the paucity of teachers is not the only gnawing reality of many schools in Punjab. The infrastructure in several government schools remains a picture of abject neglect as many schools do not even have requisite benches for students. About the education standards, the less said the better. During the past 26 years, the Punjabi and English textbooks of the Punjab School Education Board for Classes XI and XII have not been revised. These shortcomings widen the gap between the privileged classes that can afford to send their wards to private schools and the lesser placed, who have no option but to enrol their children in government schools. The state government has ignored the crucial issue of education for too long, unmindful of the fact that education is the first step towards equality of opportunity. Punjab, where 50,000 children remain out of schools, has to meet its education challenge. Only it must realise that the same can’t be met by mere lip service or making much ado about Adarsh schools, an initiative that too leaves a lot to be desired.
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Stroke of bad luck
A
stroke causes rapid loss of brain functions due to disturbance in blood supply to the brain. It is a medical emergency which can cause permanent neurological damage and death. Based on current estimates, approximately 1.8 million people are affected by stroke, annually. One-third of stroke sufferers die and a similar proportion remain partially disabled. Increasing life expectancy, sedentary lifestyle, growing urbanization and rising lifestyle diseases are important factors for the rising number of stroke cases in India. And, the medical facilities available are not equipped to take care of these growing numbers. As usual, one of the main hurdles in combating stroke is lack of data on the factors responsible for the problem: the number of people affected by the disease, the number of deaths by stroke, the number of people who suffer from partial or complete neurological damage and subtypes of stroke. This information is needed to improve management and care of the affected patients in hospital as well as in the community and also to undertake preventive measures. India, with its multiethnic population, is expected to have differing stroke rates, since the occurrence of stroke may depend on ethnic, cultural and dietary factors. In a country where medical certification of death varies from 100 to 0.2 per cent (average 10-12%) and regular autopsies are rarely done, collection of disease-specific data on death is a Herculian task. Yet, following WHO (World Health Organisation) recommended “Steps Stroke Surveillance System,” devised to build capacity according to local circumstances, may offer some solutions. A study conducted by Nagaraja and colleagues from Bangalore-based hospitals has given some hope. This report provides interesting data about hospital referral pattern; it says a timely diagnosis (possible in 92% of cases) and timely arrival in hospital can save most lives. Hypertension accounts for 35 to 50 per cent of stroke cases, and hence a change in lifestyle is a better option than cure in this case.
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Never miss an opportunity to make others happy even if you have to leave them alone to do it. — Author unknown
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Varsities need liberal funding INDIA aspires to be the knowledge capital of the world but the dismal state of the country’s higher education comes in the way. The colonial model of the university, essentially about managing and disseminating knowledge, continues to be the template for India’s higher education system. Universities set up in the mid-19th century laid down the syllabi, conducted examinations and regulated affiliated colleges. The Indian education system continues to perpetuate this colonial legacy. It treats the university like a government department, meant more to administer knowledge than produce it. Knowledge is, therefore, constricted and universities are cut off from the concerns of society and the economy. Moreover, higher education is losing its edge in India, with little innovation, lack of relevance and an ill-devised, regulatory framework. People think that poor infrastructure is our biggest problem. It’s not. The quality of students who come out of our institutes isn’t that great. India’s 1.2 billion population is what makes our markets attractive and cost-effective. But the measure of a country and society’s greatness is more than just commercial output — lagging in research and innovation. India’s economy is at the risk of being marginalised in a competitive world as higher education is not adequately prepared to capitalise on the creation and use of knowledge. We need an education system that produces a far greater number of graduates and professionals of better quality. Education should emphasise the need for knowledge and involvement that would be useful, healthy and practical. Also, quality education is necessary for the effective creation, dissemination and application of knowledge for building technical and professional capacity. Moreover, education has to be a positive agent for change by advancing the cause of students by enabling them to achieve their goals. India’s vision should be to create and develop universities that become centres of excellence rather than just providing degrees. The objective of higher education should be to further the R & D requirements of the country. Teaching and research are intrinsically bound together. We should never forget that universities are very much embedded in their regions and should become economic hotspots and play a major role in their respective areas. They should be dynamic institutions that are at the forefront of learning and research, and should play an important role in public policy. They should be administered as think tanks. Other than providing various social benefits, universities should leave a significant economic impact on society, by acting as incubators of innovations and ideas. A shining example of this is the contribution of Stanford University in spawning a whole new hub in the Silicon Valley and Palo Alto, a region which has sponsored thousands of millionaires and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Innovation must be in new courses and new pedagogic methods. There should be experiments in combining work with classroom teaching. We need to create an environment not only in our educational institutions but also in industry that actively encourages innovation and creativity. This requires moving away from rote learning and the information regurgitation-based examination system. Universities are considered critical institutions for innovation, production and diffusion of knowledge, and their most important investments are in research and human resources. Further, they must make an impact on society through research and thought leadership. In this changing context, Indian higher education should have freedom for establishing guidelines, defining the academic policy and curricula, securing and allocating funds within the existing guidelines of the education system. Also, attracting the best students and the best faculty and using the best teaching methodology are the needs of the hour. Science education in the universities is at a discount. No scientist, whatever his intellectual status, can produce any meaningful results if he is not aided by a team of good research students. It is thus necessary to ensure that future grants to universities have a large component of research assistance. The knowledge economy needs to maintain a symbiotic relationship with the industry as skilled resources and research output flow in one way while industry provides funding and research. We have developed sectoral clusters of textiles in Tirupur, of diamond in Surat and hosiery in Ludhiana. We have call centres in Gurgaon, auto component and automobile units in Chennai and entertainment units in Mumbai. As an experiment, can we create knowledge clusters where unnecessary regulations and bureaucratic constraints do not apply? The government needs to provide appropriate fiscal incentives and create such centres of innovation as can become magnets for innovators. To build on this, the innovation cluster must be an outsider-friendly place so that innovators are happy to shift there. It is essential that university-industry-government relations are analysed in terms of three interlocking dynamics: institutional transformation, evolutionary mechanisms and the new position in the university. While in the national system of innovation, institutions are supposed to play the leading role in innovation processes, in the knowledge-based economy, all three spheres have equal importance. Although there is tension involving these activities today, they coexist because they have been found to be both more productive and cost-effective. In any case, this process of change has led to a revaluation of the mission. The enhanced role of the university is promoting innovation in increasingly knowledge-based societies. The role of industry and the government need to be focused on improving the quality of education. We need better roads and larger airports. At the same time, we also need financially healthy universities that can emerge as centres of research and quality education. If the higher education system and research infrastructure built over the years collapse for want of funds, Indian industry too will suffer. For this reason it is necessary to consider that investing liberally in improving the standards of our universities is a direct investment in the future of India and
Indians. The writer is a senior professor, University Business School, Panjab University, Chandigarh.
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A necktie for Mr Nek Chand IN polite company it is considered poor manners to drop the names of famous persons. Even so I unabashedly mention here the name of a well-known celebrity. I refer to Mr Nek Chand, the extraordinary environmental aesthete of India. More than 50 years ago, when issues of pollution and environmental degradation were of little concern in our country, this amazing creator began to toil silently to transform discarded household waste into “a thing of beauty”. The culmination of Mr Nek Chand’s efforts is Chandigarh’s amazing Rock Garden, which will remain, in the words of English romantic poet John Keats, “a joy forever”. An international sports event was to take place in the city’s tennis stadium. Proud of our old association, I led a delegation of sports enthusiasts to request Mr Nek Chand to design some memorable images to adorn the venue. It was with some trepidation that we all approached the grand artist. Would the great man oblige us? Or would he dismiss our presumptuous demand with disdain? To our boundless relief, he agreed, on the spot, to design some items, in his own inimitable style, to beautify the entrance to the tennis complex. Not only this. He volunteered to carry away all the discarded junk that was crowding our stores, items such as worn-out tennis balls, strings, broken racquets, cans, plastics and the like. The meeting with Mr Nek Chand turned out, for us, a kind of coup. That very afternoon his truck arrived, cleaning up the store rooms of tonnes of what was regarded as cumbersome litter. True to his word, Mr Nek Chand delivered, well in time, his unique gifts. At the entry gate he installed exquisite figures of horses in motion, all constructed out of waste material. The media was enthralled. Foreign visitors posed to be photographed with the statues. Thousands of worn-out tennis balls were converted into strings of golden beads that greet spectators entering the stands. As the day for the commencement of the international matches drew near, a piquant situation arose. Mr Nek Chand had graciously agreed to be a member of our organising committee, which was, among its other functions, to receive the chief guest. In our enthusiasm for pomp and circumstance, we had prescribed a dress code for members, which included an official necktie. Now, creative genius as he is, Mr Nek Chand was quite at home in his dusty backyard, manually giving substance to his vision. The artificial elegance of the designated attire was irrelevant to the sculptor-designer. Too much of a gentleman to rebuke us for imposing sartorial standards on him, he mildly remarked that he had never in his life worn that foppish part of middle-class dress around his collar. Adding further to the embarrassment, one of our colleagues presumptuously offered to tie the unfamiliar raiment around the great man’s neck. Suddenly, the delicious irony of the situation struck me. In person was present one of nature’s priceless gifts to the Indian nation, a spirit accustomed to soar on what the famous poet termed “the viewless wings of fancy”. And here we were, trying to bind the genius to the ground with a ribbon of superficial physical standing. Was this true VIP to be displayed as a mere object of display for lesser mortals? A sombre lesson, indeed, was learnt that
day.
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Resilience after the storm’s fury
SANDY has passed, the skies are blue, and Washington, at least, is pretty much back to normal. It is of course different in New York. It is too early to do more that make the roughest tally of the costs of the hurricane, but not too early, I think, to appreciate how extraordinarily resilient our complex modern world is to really big blows. There are many way of looking at a disaster such as this, and none of us in trying to make an economic assessment should forget the human costs. But I think the narrow — what does it do to growth or GDP? — approach is much less interesting than what it tells about the way we live now. The first distinction to make is between economic activity and human wellbeing. We take GDP per head as a proxy for living standards, and by and large it is not a bad one. But an event such as this demonstrates the difference. There will be some loss of economic activity because of the disruption, but fixing things generates economic activity that would not otherwise have happened. In the coming months there will be a wave of investment in the infrastructure of the north-eastern states. There will be some short-term loss of output and estimates of the hit to GDP suggest it may knock 0.25 per cent off US growth. But it is quite possible that measured GDP will eventually end up higher, not just because of the reconstruction but also because the new kit put in will be better than the old kit that has been damaged. As for the crude numbers, current estimates of the cost at some $20bn (£12.39bn) should be seen in context of the costs of Hurricane Katrina at $100bn and the Japanese earthquake of more than $200bn. Even if that proves an underestimate, the costs are manageable. It is a huge blow; but it is a huge economy. I find this comforting. The 60 million people in the north-east generate about a quarter of US GDP. They produce more, in terms of economic output, than any other similar-sized region on earth. More important still, if you take national and international business together, New York remains the largest single centre in financial activity in the world. It will not always be so, for while London remains the main rival at the moment, power is shifting to Asia. But we know now that the New York Stock Exchange can shut for two days, the longest weather-related stoppage since 1888, and the world gets along fine. What can devastate the world economy is not a blow to its physical fabric by a hurricane or a tsunami, but rather a blow to its financial fabric and its economic self-confidence from a badly handled banking crisis. You can see the impact of the collapse of Lehmann Brothers on US GDP in the graph, but also the steadiness of growth in 2005 when Katrina hit New Orleans. There is a huge amount of concern about the way the world has become so interconnected that one small event on one side of it can cause havoc on the other side, but the lesson here seems to me to be quite the reverse. We can manage with flights grounded for two or three days. We can manage with power going down, notwithstanding the fact that computer systems are down as a result. Indeed the communications revolution, giving people a much greater freedom to work from wherever they happen to be, seems to have made for a more robust world economy, not a more vulnerable one. None of this should downplay the human cost of any disaster, let's remember that again, but let's also try and think through what lessons might be learnt from this experience. I can see at least five. One is that we should try to build spare capacity into essential services. That covers obvious elements such as back-up computer servers, and making sure the back-ups are located physically a long way from the primary ones, or planning for there to be excess electricity generating capacity, something that the UK should heed — and what about spare airport capacity too? A second lesson is the value of contingency planning. What happened in New York was at the outer limits of such planning and that carries a lesson too: you need to think the unthinkable. But you could say that in the case of New York's public utilities the system worked. I suspect this was helped by the fact much of the planning was not of a tick-box, health and safely nature but a tough-minded, New York character. A third is less tangible. Just watching the way ordinary people in Washington went about preparing for the storm and the way small businesses stayed open even when public transport was shut, made me aware of the social glue of a society when faced with trouble. The US has shown the some of these wider strengths in coping with Sandy and that deserves respect. A fourth is that we learn from the unusual more than we learn from the routine. Just as the UK learnt from the experience of staging the Olympics and is I hope trying to apply those lessons more generally, so we can already see that the US is seeking to learn. Whatever you think of US national politics, municipal administration has done pretty well. If US politicians at a local level can lead competent administrations, could national ones find ways to lift their game? We'll see, but I am hopeful. Finally, I think the points above have wider application. In other words, building spare capacity is something we should try to do as individuals and employees. Scenario planning is a helpful discipline in many aspects of our lives. We should all be more aware of the importance of social glue, as well as professional competence — and we all need to learn from things that go badly, as well as things that go
well. —The Independent
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So the NYSE closed. The world carried on. There's a lesson there
THE boss' demands were blunt and direct, as usual. “When the bell rings I want you standing next to it. Inside it if possible. When that market starts trading again it's the free world saying to the terrorists, you can't beat us, you won't win. I want to feel the excitement.” That was September 2001, when the New York Stock Exchange reopened following some local difficulty (it was in all the papers). Closing Wall Street for four days may not have been Osama bin Laden's greatest hit, but when trading resumed it felt like a big deal. We cheered. We weren't cowed. We had our freedoms and our stock markets. The idea was that the Dow Jones would soar in a defiant roar. In fact, it slumped in a rare example of genuine panic selling: Freedom 0, Terror 1. This latest closure of the supposedly premier stock market in the world is much less of a big deal, not just because Hurricane Sandy is not as malicious as
Osama. Indeed, the question is raised of what difference it really made. Facebook got two days' grace — its shares fell yesterday, when the market reopened, rather than on Monday — but that's about the extent of it. The trading world has moved on so much since 2001 that it is now possible to buy or sell more or less whatever you want from anywhere in the world. If you had decided on Monday that you just had to buy a bunch of Microsoft, well you could have bought the German listing through Interactive Investor at just £10 per trade. Other brokers offer Microsoft derivatives, or other proxies for the share. If it really came down to it and you had a wizard idea about an American stock on which you had to bet Right Now, well you could always spread bet. Even if it were an esoteric instrument in which the spread betters weren't offering a market, it wouldn't take long to persuade one of them to come up with one. So where we are is that the NYSE being shut for a few days is bad for the NYSE, and — at a stretch — a blow to New York's status as the leading centre of finance. Beyond that, well the pictures were newsy. What are stock markets for, anyway? In theory to raise funds for companies that need to expand and as a price discovery mechanism — the continual ebb and flow of trading is how we find out what's valuable and what's not. At the moment hardly anyone is able to raise funds from the capital markets, so stymied are they by eurozone panic. And the price discovery element doesn't really apply either. High-frequency trading algorithms — computers trading at laser speed, trying to turn a cent every thousandth of a second — now account for 70 per cent of completed transactions and 99 per cent of all exchange quotes in New York, say my friends at Charles Stanley. Those computers are weighted towards positive headlines. They buy on the hint of good news. Jeremy
Batstone-Carr of Charles Stanley says: “A positive market reaction launches an armada of media commentators to the floor of the NYSE and elsewhere eager for affirmative “uppish” commentary, innocent from the knowledge that these market practitioners have virtually zero impact on market action anymore no matter how brightly coloured their jackets, braces... or ties might be. The trouble is, algorithmic vacuum cleaners just don't do good interviews.” Will the NYSE and the London Stock Exchange still exist in 30 years' time? It's not presently clear why they
should. —The Independent
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