India: The world's most remarkable election

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-the-worlds-most-remarkable-election-1667541.html

India: The world's most remarkable election

As the largest democracy on the planet prepares to elect a new government,
Andrew Buncombe reports on the choices facing the 714 million voters

Sunday, 12 April 2009

From the mountain heights of Kashmir to the palm-fringed beaches of Kerala,
from Nagaland in the remote north-east to the Maharashtra heartland, India
will this week throw itself headlong into the world's largest and most
extraordinary election.

Here, in the planet's biggest, if imperfect, democracy, candidates from
1,055 parties will be seeking the support of more than 714 million
registered voters – a number that has jumped by 40 million since the last
election in 2004. Across India's 35 states and "union territories" there
will be 800,000 polling stations ready to receive voters, while six million
police will be on duty to try to maintain order. Such is the sheer scale of
this enterprise that the voting is to be staggered over a month with five
separate polling days. The result will be announced in mid-May.

Among some of the leading players in this political carnival are a movie
star turned politician, whose rallies lure countless thousands of the poor,
desperate for him to transform his on-screen Robin Hood heroism into
real-life action; a "Dalit Queen", whose support among so-called
Untouchables could carry her to the prime minister's official residence; a
chief minister whose state saw a massacre of Muslims yet who has risen to
become a potential leader of his party; and an elegant, Italian-born widow
who holds the position as India's chief power broker. There are wealthy and
poor, old and young, high-caste and low, nationalists and those who want to
separate from India. There are those who preach peace, and those who promise
violence. There are dozens of languages and many different scripts.

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But if an Indian election provides a window in the extraordinary diversity
of the subcontinent, it should not distract from the fundamental point that
this is a contest for power. The centrist Congress Party, which heads the
current ruling coalition, is battling to fight off a challenge not just from
the main opposition, the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), but also from a third front of communist and left parties and even a
fourth front that includes disgruntled former allies. Some analysts believe
this election – the 15th since the country won independence in 1947 – is the
most open in recent years.

What is clear is that the election is taking place against a backdrop of
uncertainty and anxiety for India. While this emerging nation with its
middle vision fixed on superpower status has not suffered the same sort of
economic downturn as the West, many middle-class professions in the IT and
software industry have for the first time faced redundancies and layoffs.

At the same time there is mounting concern about the threat of terrorism.
Last year's Mumbai attacks saw more than 160 people killed by militants from
Pakistan, and the issue of how to avoid a repeat of such incidents has
dominated much public debate. India's relationship with Pakistan, which has
never been warm, but which in recent years had been enjoying something of a
thaw, has effectively now reverted to a stand-off. Meanwhile, the bodies of
nine of the militants who carried out the attack – another man was captured
alive – remain in a Mumbai mortuary waiting to be claimed.

"I will be voting BJP. The risk of terrorism is high and the Congress does
not support a strict law against terrorism," said Praveen Rana, an Indian
air force officer. "The problem for India is that 60 per cent of the
population is poor and they vote in their own interests. The middle classes
don't care about politics. That is why we only have bad politicians."

This criticism of politicians, particularly their alleged corruption, is a
constant among supporters of all parties. In a country where bribery is
embedded in everyday interactions – from getting a job or a canister of
cooking gas to paying off a policeman – ordinary voters are disappointed but
not surprised at reports of corruption. Indeed, Indian newspapers have been
full of such stories. Just this week, police in the southern state of Andhra
Pradesh, parts of which go to the polls on Thursday, uncovered wads of cash
worth about £3m in a supposed "votes for notes" scandal. One regional
watchdog claims £137m will be spent in the last few days of campaigning to
pay for inducements. Many ordinary people believe instinctively that
politicians are only interested in themselves.

"Nobody will help the poor. I have

to work for my survival," said Krishaiah, a wizened flower-seller from the
southern city of Hyderabad, touting strings of blooms alongside a noisy,
traffic-filled road. "Neither the Congress nor anybody else can help."

That people have such distrust of politicians ought not to be a surprise. Of
the 543 MPs returned to the Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament, in
2004, a total of 128 had outstanding criminal charges against them. Of those
alleged offences, 84 were for murder while other allegations included
kidnapping, extortion and robbery. "[To be prevented from standing] the law
requires a person to be convicted but a lot of these cases just drag on and
on," said Anil Bairwal, coordinator of the Association for Democratic
Reforms, a watchdog group that has collected these statistics. "By the time
it comes to court, the person may have retired or passed on."

Leading the Congress's re-election campaign is party chairman Sonia Gandhi,
the autocratic widow of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and
prime minister Manmohan Singh, a quiet, uncharismatic economist credited
with kick-starting India's development but who has taken the country into a
closer alignment with the US. Mrs Gandhi's quietly spoken 38-year-old son,
Rahul, a great-grandson of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,
is already a major presence in the party and is widely tipped as a future
prime minister. The Congress, which bought the rights to the Slumdog
Millionaire hit "Jai Ho" (Let There Be Victory) to use as its theme song,
has sought to highlight the country's progress over the past five years.

Leading the BJP is the octogenarian L K Advani, a man who despite, or
perhaps because of, his age has pitched himself as a politician of vitality
and new ideas. He has even started blogging. Despite the ascension within
the party's hierarchy of figures such Narendra Modi, a right-wing ideologue
and chief minister of Gujarat, which in 2002 saw a massacre of Muslims, the
BJP has tried to position itself towards the centre, arguing that it has
moved away from its nationalist past.

But its dilemma of whether or not to give up the so-called Hindutva vote was
underlined by the recent antics of Varun Gandhi, also a great-grandson of
Nehru but the black sheep of the dynasty. Campaigning for the BJP in India's
largest state, Uttar Pradesh, Mr Gandhi, who falsely claimed he had earned
two degrees in London, vowed to cut off the heads of Muslims – an election
promise that might have pleased Hindu extremists but which saw him thrown in
jail and held under anti-terrorism laws.

Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 MPs, was once a Congress stronghold but has
since been controlled by two caste-based parties. The current chief
minister, Mayawati, draws her support from Dalits and has gradually built
her support elsewhere in the country. Brimming with ambition and with a
penchant for commissioning super-sized statues of herself, the diminutive
Mayawati has been tipped as a possible premier if she takes her Bahujan
Samaj Party into an alliance with left parties in a third front.

In recent weeks, a fourth front has also emerged, made up of regional
parties such as the Samajwadi Party, another caste-based party from Uttar
Pradesh, and the Rashtriya Janata Dal from impoverished Bihar. While this
grouping is unlikely to be able to form a government by itself, its fortunes
have been boosted by the support of Konidela Shiva Shankara Vara Prasad,
better known as Chiranjeevi, a popular Telugu-language movie star, who last
year formed his own party in Andhra Pradesh. The larger-than-life actor has
drawn huge crowds as his campaign tours the state. "Reforms need to take
place," he said. "Rural areas have been neglected."

Pundits predict that whichever single party emerges with the most votes, it
will be forced to make a coalition to form a government. This time around,
there have been few pre-poll alliances with most parties opting to see how
they stand in a month's time. "The real election will start on 16 May," said
the veteran journalist and political analyst M J Akbar. "[The coalitions]
are all marriages of convenience. There are no clear ideologies."

In a region where democracy has often struggled, it is perhaps a compliment
to India's enduring civilian rule that few see radical changes, regardless
of whichever of the major parties forms the next government. What the
election does promise is terrific political theatre. Pull up a chair.

The India election in numbers

States

West Bengal: Bengal has been under Communist rule since gaining
independence, and hammer and sickle flags jostle for space with images of
Bollywood stars.

Kashmir: The most densely militarised place on Earth and still at the centre
of South Asian tension.

Uttar Pradesh: India's largest and most important state, with a population
of over 190 million. It is the electoral base of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty,
with Rahul and Sonia Gandhi both having constituencies here.

Gujarat: Fast becoming India's business hub, Gujarat is responsible for the
production of about 90 per cent of India's required Soda Ash. It also
provides about 66 per cent of all the salt used in India.

Kerala: A survey in 2005 ranked Kerala as the least corrupt state in the
country. At 91 per cent, it also has the highest literacy rate in India.

Bihar: Nearly 85 per cent of Bihar's population is rural.

Haryana: At 29,887 rupees (£410), the state of Haryana has the third highest
per capita income in India. It also has the largest number of rural
crorepatis (similar to millionaires when taking into account the cost of
living) in India.

Himachal Pradesh: In a 1981 census it was found that Hindus made up 95 per
cent of the state population.

Maharashtra: Contributing to 15 per cent of India's industrial output and
13.2 per cent of its GDP in 2005-06, Maharashtra is the richest state in
India.

Punjab: With just 6.16 per cent of the population living in poverty, Punjab
is considered the least impoverished of India's states.

Nagaland: Over 85 per cent of the population of Nagaland are directly
dependant on agriculture.

Orissa: Nearly half of the 38 million people living in Orissa are classed as
living below the poverty line.

Tamil Nadu: More than 10 per cent of India's businesses are based in Tamil
Nadu – the largest number for any state.

Sikkim: With only 540,000 inhabitants, Sikkim is India's least populous
state. At 76 people per square kilometre, it also one of the least densely
populated.

Mizoram: Christians make up 87 per cent of Mizoram's population – one of
only three Indian states with a Christian majority.

Karnataka: With GDP growth of 56.2 per cent and per capita GDP growth of
43.9 per cent, Karnataka has been the fastest growing state over the past
decade.

Arunachal Pradesh: The one million-strong population of Arunachal Pradesh is
grouped into more than a hundred tribes and sub-tribes.

Manipur: A politically sensitive area, foreigners wishing to visit must get
a permit which lasts up to ten days. Visitors are required to travel in
groups of four on arranged tours with authorised agents only.

Chhattisgarh: Known as "the rice bowl of India", Chhattisgarh is one of the
largest producers of rice in India – around 1.6 tonnes per hectare.

Assam: Separatist rebels and ethnic tension make this an unstable region,
with attacks on migrants and 605 bomb blasts in the past eight years.

Madhya Pradesh: Sixty per cent of children aged under five are malnourished,
leading to a mortality rate of one in 10 – among the world's worst areas for
malnutrition.

Jharkhand: With a rapidly advancing economy, poverty declined by 2 per cent
per year between 1994 and 2002.

Goa: Hundreds of thousands of tourists flock here each year attracted by
Goa's beaches and world heritage architecture.

Rajasthan: The largest state in India, Rajasthan has an area of 342,269km2,
around 100,000km2 more than the UK.

Andhra Pradesh: At 972km, Andhra Pradesh has the second largest coastline in
India.

Meghalaya: The population is mostly composed of tribespeople, 70 per cent of
them Christian owing to the work of early missionaries.

Tripura: A state ruled by members of the Left Front, including the Communist
Party of India (Marxist) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party.

Uttarakhand: The capital, Dehradun, is sometimes known as "the Oxford of
India" for its wide array of boarding schools.

Union territories

Chandigarh: The city of Chandigarh has the highest per capita income in the
country at 99,262 rupees (£1,350). It is also a union territory.

Andaman and Nicobar Islands: The islands were struck by the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami; 2,500 people were killed and 5,000 pronounced missing.

Lakshadweep: India's smallest union territory with a population of just
60,650.

Delhi: Current estimates put the municipal population at 17 million, making
Delhi the sixth most populous city in the world.

Puducherry: With colleges for engineering, the arts, sciences, medicine and
technology, Puducherry is considered an educational centre for southern
India.

Dadra and Nagar Haveli: These Portuguese colonies were liberated in July
1954, and an agreement signed in 1961 to merge them with the rest of India.

Daman and Diu: With a population of just 158,204 , this is India's second
least populous area.

General election facts

There are 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the directly elected lower house which
is also known as the House of the People. Elections take place every five
years.

There are 730 million registered voters in India, an increase of 40 million
since 2004.

Voting will be conducted at 800,000 polling booths and 1,368,430 electronic
voting machines.

More than two million security personnel will be on hand to ensure the
elections run without a hitch.

Of the candidates announced so far, at least 70 have criminal cases pending
against them. The charges include murder, rape, kidnapping, extortion and
assault.

Voting takes place over five phases between 16 April and 13 May.

India's biggest political party, the Indian National Congress, is part of
the United Progressive Alliance which brings together parties willing to
support a Congress-led national government.

The main opposition, the Bharatiya Jarata Party (BJP), is part of the
National Democratic Alliance. This coalition was the first to be forged
between a major national party and a range of regional players.

The Third Front, a leftist grouping, re-named itself the United National
Progressive Alliance last month. The UNPA lists the Communist Party of
India, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party among its 10
members.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Remembering Jawaharlal Nehru - By Kumar

It was the late 50's and a young boy in a small town caught a fancy for a box camera, having seen his classmate use one. He pestered his father until, one day, the senior man took him to a camera shop. The
shopkeeper displayed his wares; the father looked at each one before flinching at the asking price.

To cut a long story short, both father and son walked out of that shop without the buy, hugging the new camera
he wanted.

In the strange way that kids sometime understand adult compulsions, the boy did not feel so bad about not having the camera.

But the hurt in his father's eyes would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.

It is fashionable today to criticise Jawaharlal Nehru, but in many ways he was like the little boy's father. His love of his country was unquestioned; he wanted the best for his people, but had so little by way of resources.

Nehru was dealing with a newborn country that had
been denuded of all wealth by its own selfish, scheming and utterly degenerate kings and nawabs in concert with a criminal entity supported by the British crown known as the East India Company.

Why did we not take up the American way at independence? Because this was not America, where immigrants from England and other places in Europe came to settle; this was our own land which we did not own. In a way, we were left like the native Americans, the "Red Indians". Ask them what the American Way did to them.

Wait, the boy's story has more. He grew up, in the normal way kids all over did, and was soon on the threshold of college. He found he was weak in chemistry; his father, who was trained in the subject, sat down with him, and tutored him everyday until the young man was
confident enough.

Sure enough, that boy made it into IIT, and into Mechanical Engineering, too: a "hot" branch in those days. His father's pride, as he introduced his son to his other fiends and associates, made the boy realise his dad was there for him when it mattered the most.

Nehru did not live to see the economic superpower his country was turning into. But you are there to witness it; spend a few moments in thought about the Father of the IITs. November 14th is his birthday.

Jawaharlal Nehru is in real danger of being forgotten. You, of all people, should never, ever, let that happen.

kumar

ON THE RECORD Umang Gupta

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/01/BUG80QN2IG1.DTL

ON THE RECORD
Umang Gupta
Chairman, PanIIT USA
Sunday, July 1, 2007

The CEO of Keynote Systems talks about the Indian Institute of Technology as engineering and business alumni gather this week in Silicon Valley.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be among the speakers who will visit Santa Clara this week when several thousand graduates of India's most prestigious university network, the Indian Institute of Technology, gather for their alumni conference.
At a time when the India is exerting a growing influence on the world stage, the IIT Alumni 2007 Global Conference offers a chance to understand the experience of a group of business, political and academic leaders who have played a particularly important role in Silicon Valley.
Representing this group of prestigious alumni -- who call themselves IITians -- is Umang Gupta, chief executive officer of Keynote Systems, the San Mateo Internet tracking firm. Gupta came to the United States during the Vietnam War and worked in the technology industry. He was one of the first employees at Oracle in Redwood City before striking out on his own.
In an hourlong interview last week, Gupta looked back on his three-plus decades of experience in the tech industry, highlighted the accomplishments of his fellow alumni, and explained the genesis and importance of the Indian Institute of Technology.
Q: Tell us a bit about the conference.
A: The seven IITs in India have probably graduated more than 100,000 alumni over the last 20 years. We refer to those alumni as the PanIIT movement. We did one event in 2003 here in Silicon Valley where I think we had more than 2,000 people. We've done subsequent events in Washington, D.C., and in Mumbai (Bombay) last year. And this one is going to be the largest, we think, with more than 4,000 people attending.
Q: This has been a powerful business network. How has it impacted the Indian business experience here?
A: IITians (graduates of IIT) are not just in business. Lots are in academia. Subra Suresh recently became the dean of engineering at MIT. We have many IITians who've done extraordinarily well in businesses. Victor Menezes was senior vice chairman of Citigroup until recently. Ajit Jain is No. 2 to Warren Buffett in the insurance business. So you have a network of people who are very well-connected, obviously very talented individuals and graduates in the lead institutions in IIT, and they certainly have quite an impact on both India and our future.
Q: With that broad a network, what are the common themes, common interests?
A: The biggest common interest is how they got into the IIT. Historically, 2,000 kids get selected out of 100,000-plus by taking a joint exam. Then you go through a five-year process of going to college together.
Even though you have seven different campuses, there are lots of intercampus activities. So we're all really pretty well connected and you have the same bonds that somebody would have if you came out of Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Dartmouth. Many IITians are also part of a particular industry. In many cases, the IT industry. The other aspect is that being Indian immigrants here, they certainly have quite an element of being connected.
Q: What things do you promote in common?
A: No 1, to galvanize and network alumni to help each other, like any other alumni organization would do. No. 2, to help strengthen our alma mater, the IITs, through faculty recruitment, research projects, donating back. No. 3 is contributing to both the local communities that you're part of, or back to India to the extent that you can help in connecting between India and the communities that you're part of.
Q: For Indians coming to the United States, what has been their experience regarding acceptance here over the past 20 or 30 years?
A: I can use my experiences. I came here in 1971 as a graduate student. This was at the height of the Vietnam War. I went to Kent State University and I absolutely had no angst or feelings of being not accepted or being discriminated against. Academic institutions are always open, they're incredibly liberal, and there's a great acceptance of folks coming from overseas. However, once you leave the institution, and you get into the working world, each one of us has had different experiences.
I was fortunate. I joined IBM as a sales guy. On the other hand, friends of mine would say that they did feel discriminated against in those days. I came out here to Silicon Valley in 1978. I was employee No. 17 at Oracle. I wrote Oracle's first business plan. I was Larry Ellison's first executive to leave to start a company of my own, which I then took public in 1993, called Gupta Technologies and really the first Indian-run software company at that time.
But I was not alone. About the same time, Vinod Khosla started Daisy Systems and after Daisy systems he co-founded Sun Microsystems and has been one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world today. So we had a few entrepreneurs, I'm going to say probably a handful, in the late '80s.
But in the '90s, the world changed. Completely. India started to deregulate. The Berlin Wall fell. There was no competing ideology to capitalism. By that time, many IITians had gone through a 20-year process of maturing in their particular jobs. Many of them had reached fairly good heights.
Rajat Gupta, who essentially graduated the same year as I did, ended up becoming head of McKinsey (consulting firm) in the mid-'90s. Arun Sarin is now CEO of Vodafone. These are all individuals who came to America in the early '70s but ended up working the ladder. You had others -- some of us here in Silicon Valley -- who ended up becoming entrepreneurs. It took time. But then the third thing happened, and that was the Internet.
Previously the river could only flow one way. You could send smart Indian guys out of college over here, and you could get a job but there were limits. But with the Internet, you could actually send the work over that made sense to do over there. And I know it's one of those things where oftentimes people have different viewpoints. But it has dramatically impacted both America and India for the good, because it has allowed so much of Silicon Valley to be able to take work that otherwise it just couldn't have done economically here and move it.
Q: Is there any limit to the work that can be outsourced?
A: I've always felt there's a limit. But let's go back and think about it. The Japanese -- in the late '50s, people would talk about early transistor radios being built by the Japanese. And everybody said, 'Oh, these are just cheap Japanese transistor radios.' Eventually, they built some of the best consumer electronics in the world. They did it because they ended up with a robust consumer economy.
The same happened with cars like the Datsun. Everybody thought these were cheap little cars. Eventually, when the local economy became big, they really started to become world leaders.
Now let's move back to semiconductors. People have yet to be able to really build the equivalent of an Intel somewhere else. The same is happening in software. So what's moved overseas? SAP development, Oracle application development, and those kinds of things have moved. But when you want to build the next Google, you build it here. And many companies that may start over there end up actually moving here.
You have to be close to that market. That's the reason why so many Israeli companies move here. Without a huge home market, it is almost impossible to build a world- leader company. Period. And those consumer markets for software, at least, just don't exist today in India or China or elsewhere.
Q: What is your take on Silicon Valley? What is it about the valley that makes it happen?
A: There's no place like it on Earth. It is a combination of an amazing academic setup -- Stanford and Berkeley and others -- combined with venture capital that has over time grown up here, so it's an institutional knowledge of how to invest, combined with companies that are at the center of their industries, whether it's the Internet or enterprise software or the semiconductor or hardware industries.
A spirit has emerged over time, like the wildcat spirit emerged in Texas when oil was discovered. Do similar ingredients exist elsewhere? Absolutely. Bangalore certainly has that entrepreneurial spirit, along with a fairly good set of technology companies there in the context of India.
But when you combine all of that with the presence of a local home market and venture capital and all those other things, we're still talking of a big difference. Austin certainly has a combination of venture capital and universities. Massachusetts has those, but somehow Silicon Valley here seems to definitely have a surfeit of everything.
Q: Some people would say this world that you describe has not dramatically affected America for the good, although it may have affected India. Is there a global elite, a global technocracy that's beyond nationalism?
A: Whether globalization is good or bad for America is a deeper question. America has no choice -- and no country has a choice -- but to globalize today. America led the fight against communism for the last century. What was that fight all about? Freedom of expression, freedom of property rights. There's a certain ideology of how to run one's life, country and society and everything else. We won that fight and with that win came a certain responsibility to help spread the notion of global capitalism in a global way across the world. That's what we're doing.
The real question is how do we come out winners in the globalization battle? I think the only way we're going to be winners is to continue to be highly competitive as an economy. Always be ahead of the curve on technology. The ability to innovate, the ability to explore new frontiers. That's what makes America.
Q: Cisco CEO John Chambers says the American educational system needs a lot of improvement. Is that where that logic would take you?
A: Absolutely. We can't just retreat into a shell. We have to be able to build and win the battle for globalization. The only way you do that is to help educate your citizens to be global citizens. You improve your K-12 system. You improve your college education, and you continually raise the bar for what you've got to do. And the bar for many of us, you know, was college. Many of our parents never went to college. Frankly, our grandparents, some of them never even finished high school, and so the bar just continues to go up.
Q: Why don't we move on to the root of the organization and what IIT is all about.
A: The IIT system got started in the 1950s as a result of an early decision by the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who felt that in order to compete there ought to be this elite set of engineering schools that would produce engineering graduates to create the heavy industry that India needed. So the five institutes were started.
One of them in Kharagpur was helped by multiple different countries. Then after that, subsequent institutes, the one in Kanpur, the one I come from, was helped by America. The one in Delhi was helped by Britain. The one in Chennai was helped by Germany and the one in Mumbai was actually helped by the Soviet Union at that time. 'Help' meaning a certain amount of financial help, professors from universities would come.
I still remember many of my professors there were from either Stanford or MIT or Cal Tech or elsewhere. I studied computer programming on the first computer ever brought to India.
It was an IBM computer, an IBM 1620, with punch cards and the whole thing. This was in the late '60s. These universities started to graduate mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and chemical, and then computer science graduates. As I mentioned, the process of getting into school was a very, very competitive exam. My graduating class was about 300. There were five institutes in the beginning, so 300 times 5 is 1,500 people out of 100,000 selected to get in. And now there are seven institutes, so there are about 2,000.
Q: Were these scholarships or were you paying?
A: We're paying, but they are heavily subsidized, no question.
Q: Why only 2,000 students?
A: Many people believe there should be more IITs. Within India there is a movement to add more IITs. Others say there should not be more IITs if you want to keep them to extremely high standards. I think over time there will be more IITs. But how many more it's hard to tell.
Q: Are we lifting up our brains in the United States in comparable ways?
A: My kids who go to school here, Ivy Leagues, and so there is absolutely no question that we produce an amazing set of elite kids in some of our Ivy Leagues today.
I think ultimately the real question is: Are we lifting up the large majority of Americans to those levels required to compete in the global world? We do a pretty good job of educating the broad majority of our citizens compared to most other countries. However, we could and we should do a better job.
Q: Where does the PanIIT organization come down on the immigration reform issue in the United States?
A: The first thing to know about our group is that we do not consider ourselves a political organization. We are first and foremost an alumni organization. To the extent that we have any opinions relative to politics, they are generally noncontroversial, at least from our viewpoint. As an organization, we believe America needs to retain its competitiveness. In order for America to retain its competitiveness, immigration reform clearly needs to focus on improving the capability for people who can help America going forward.
By and large, any immigration reform that helps to increase H-1B visas, any immigration reform that helps to improve the likelihood of IITians and other graduates like IITians entering America and doing well for America, as well as for themselves, is something that IIT supports.
Q: Is the H-1B program overly weighted to take advantage of Indian immigrants?
A: I think that has more to do with the nature of the outsourcing industry than the H-1B program. A very large part of IT outsourcing is from India. The industry didn't even exist 15 years ago, and as it started, much of that work has gone to Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro and Satyam. However, I think as the world starts to add other countries for IT outsourcing whether they be Bulgaria, Russia or China, the H-1B system will automatically start to become appropriate for different countries.
Q: China seems to be the biggest emerging threat to your present IT outsourcing. Northern Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Eastern Europe seem to be emerging areas. How do you stay ahead of the curve on that?
A: Ultimately, any industry has to stay ahead of the curve by constantly being ahead of either the technology or events or sticking to its core competencies or doing better with its customers. In the initial IT world, a lot of outsourcing was: Can I do something relatively simple or cheaper? Today, the tasks require a certain level of quality that is much higher than say 15 years ago. So maintaining cost-competitiveness and ensuring high quality are the keys to sound successful outsourcing.
Q: English fluency helps.
A: That's a natural advantage India has that I think is not going away soon.
Q: IT companies in India are trying to move up to research and development rather than being just cost-cutting outfits.
A: I think you will always find the ability to go up the food chain is a lot easier than going down the food chain. It is much easier to move from doing, let's call it SAP- and Oracle-style coding for an IT shop in any of corporate America's Fortune 500 companies, to move up to do programming for companies like Google or Microsoft where you are actually building parts of an operating system.
But, going the other way, which is to find rural Indians who don't necessarily speak English or even if they do speak English, it's rudimentary English. They may have a B.A. degree, but that B.A. or B.S. degree from a rural college in India is not the same thing as an IIT degree.
Q: Your group has a rising influence. What do you talk about and what are those things that are important to you?
A: Is there something common that all Indians would generally say, 'Yes, this is something we should stand behind?' It certainly would be immigration. We all believe that more immigration is good. We should encourage more globalization, more openness. We must move forward with being able to help be more competitive as a nation. Those are all things that IITians would unite on.
Q: How about domestic issues, health care?
A: Not at this point. Individuals absolutely do, but not as an organization.
Q: How has the environment changed in Silicon Valley in terms of the way folks who immigrate here are treated. Is there racism in the valley?
A: I have not felt personally, or known of, instances of racism. This is an amazingly open part of America. Silicon Valley is another meritocracy, very much so, and that's probably one of the reasons why our IITians love being here, because they've been part of a meritocracy so long in the IIT system. The answer is no. We haven't seen any racism.
Q: Is there a wall for advancement to the executive suite for Indians? Is that final frontier for Indians to be at the top of the heap in the valley, to be the financiers and the venture capitalists?
A: It is definitely happening. I don't think Vinod Khosla is the only one who has done well as a venture capitalist. Promod Haque of Norwest Venture Partners has done extremely well in the venture capital industry. You have people who have done well with major corporations like Vodafone, for example, or McKinsey. So I think that is definitely happening.
It just takes a long time. I think back to my days when I joined IBM. I could speak English reasonably well and so was very well accepted by and large. But I never thought of myself as the guy who was going to rise up the chain and finally end up being president of the IBM Corporation. I didn't look like somebody who could be president of IBM and I never even thought that's what I wanted to do. I just at some point left and said, "Fine, I'll start my own company and that's the way I'll do it." I think there are a lot of Indians who feel that way.
Q: Has America become the place whose lunch everybody wants to eat? Does America get to eat the world's lunch, or is America disadvantaged in the future?
A: I think it's a deeper economic question. If you go back in history again when New York was in the ascendancy and the Midwest and the West were just being discovered and people were saying, "Well, gee, you know all the money goes into New York," the issue of deficits between New York and Iowa never existed.
Why? Because we're all one nation. People thought it was OK. People could move back and forth and move money back and forth. The globalists would argue that we are becoming one large globe. And to the extent that has occurred, or to the extent that American values are going everywhere and American capitalism is going everywhere and people are trading with each other in peace, generally speaking in a way so that we can all improve our standard of living. Nobody has to eat anybody else's lunch. There is plenty for everybody.
Umang Gupta
Age: 57
Title: Chairman and chief executive officer, Keynote Systems Inc.
Education: Bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1971; MBA from Kent State University in 1972.
Work experience: Started his career with IBM in 1973. Joined Oracle Corp. in 1981 and wrote the company's first business plan. Served as vice president and general manager of Oracle's Microcomputer Products Division through 1984. Founded one of the early enterprise client/server computing firms, Gupta Technologies Corp., which he took public in 1993. Chairman and CEO of Keynote Systems since 1997.
Personal: Married to Ruth Gupta. Two surviving children, daughter, 25, and son, 18. The Guptas support charities for the developmentally disabled, including the Raji House in Burlingame, named in memory of their middle child.
Participating in this interview were Business Editor Ken Howe, Deputy Business Editor Alan T. Saracevic, staff writers Tom Abate, Ralph Hermansson and Jessica Guynn, and editorial assistants Colleen Benson and Steve Corder.

IIT-Kharagpur top technology college in country: survey

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2007/June/subcontinent_June768.xml§ion=subcontinent&col

IIT-Kharagpur top technology college in country: survey
(IANS)

20 June 2007


NEW DELHI — The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, in West Bengal is the top technology and engineering college of the country, edging out IIT-Madras which held the position last year, a survey said yesterday.


According to the survey by Data Quest, a technology magazine in India, and International Data Corporation (IDC), a US-headquartered research firm, the seven IITs have bagged the top seven positions. IIT-Kharagpur climbed two places to the first slot.

The National Institute of Technology (NIT), Warangal, has stormed into the top 10 list for the first time. While IIT-Madras has slipped from the top slot to second position, IIT-Bombay climbed two spots to occupy the third slot. The premier IIT-Delhi had slid to fourth from No.2 last year, while IIT-Roorkee has jumped two places to fifth spot.

IIT-Guwahati is ranked sixth, while IIT-Kanpur is surprisingly the last in the rung of IITs at seventh spot.

While Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, bagged the ninth spot, Institute of Technology of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) was at 10th spot.

Describing the National Institute of Technology (formerly, Regional Engineering College) Warangal, being in the top 10, the study said that for the "first time, a second-rung school broke into the Top 10 list". It was at number eight, up four notches from last year.

N R Narayana Murthy of Infosys Lecture at Stern school of Business. N Y Uni

N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys
Technologies, delivered a pre-commencement lecture at the New York
University ( Stern School of Business) on May 9. It is a scintillating
speech, Murthy speaks about the lessons he learnt from his life and
career.

Dean Cooley, faculty, staff, distinguished guests, and, most
importantly, the graduating class of 2007, it is a great privilege to
speak at your commencement ceremonies.

I thank Dean Cooley and Prof Marti Subrahmanyam for their kind
invitation. I am exhilarated to be part of such a joyous occasion.
Congratulations to you, the class of 2007, on completing an important
milestone in your life journey.

After some thought, I have decided to share with you some of my life
lessons. I learned these lessons in the context of my early career
struggles, a life lived under the influence of sometimes unplanned
events which were the crucibles that tempered my character and
reshaped my future.

I would like first to share some of these key life events with you, in
the hope that these may help you understand my struggles and how
chance events and unplanned encounters with influential persons
shaped my life and career.

Later, I will share the deeper life lessons that I have learned. My
sincere hope is that this sharing will help you see your own trials
and tribulations for the hidden blessings they can be.

The first event occurred when I was a graduate student in Control
Theory at IIT, Kanpur , in India . At breakfast on a bright Sunday
morning in 1968, I had a chance encounter with a famous computer
scientist on sabbatical from a well-known US university.

He was discussing exciting new developments in the field of computer
science with a large group of students and how such developments would
alter our future. He was articulate, passionate and quite convincing.
I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library, read
four or five papers he had suggested, and left the library determined
to study computer
science.

Friends, when I look back today at that pivotal meeting, I marvel at
how one role model can alter for the better the future of a young
student. This experience taught me that valuable advice can sometimes
come from an unexpected source, and chance events can sometimes open
new doors.

The next event that left an indelible mark on me occurred in 1974. The
location: Nis , a border town between former Yugoslavia , now Serbia ,
and Bulgaria . I was hitchhiking from Paris back to Mysore , India ,
my home town.

By the time a kind driver dropped me at Nis railway station at 9 p.m.
on a Saturday night, the restaurant was closed. So was the bank the
next morning, and I could not eat because I had no local money. I
slept on the railway platform until 8.30 pm in the night when the
Sofia Express pulled in.

The only passengers in my compartment were a girl and a boy. I struck
a conversation in French with the young girl. She talked about the
travails of living in an iron curtain country, until we were roughly
interrupted by some policemen who, I later gathered, were summoned by
the youn man who thought we were criticising the communist government
of Bulgaria .

The girl was led away; my backpack and sleeping bag were confiscated.
I was dragged along the platform into a small 8x8 foot room with a
cold stone floor and a hole in one corner by way of toilet facilities.
I was held in that bitterly cold room without food or water for over
72 hours.

I had lost all hope of ever seeing the outside world again, when the
door opened. I was again dragged out unceremoniously, locked up in the
guard's compartment on a departing freight train and told that I
would be released 20 hours later upon reaching Istanbul . The guard's
final words still ring in my ears -- "You are from a friendly country
called India and that is why we are letting you go!"

The journey to Istanbul was lonely, and I was starving. This long,
lonely, cold journey forced me to deeply rethink my convictions about
Communism. Early on a dark Thursday morning, after being hungry for
108 hours, I was purged of any last vestiges of affinity for the Left.

I concluded that entrepreneurship, resulting in large-scale job
creation, was the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in
societies.

Deep in my heart, I always thank the Bulgarian guards for transforming
me from a confused Leftist into a determined, compassionate capitalist!
Inevitably, this sequence of events led to the eventual founding of
Infosys in 1981.

While these first two events were rather fortuitous, the next two,
both concerning the Infosys journey, were more planned and profoundly
influenced my career trajectory.

On a chilly Saturday morning in winter 1990, five of the seven
founders of Infosys met in our small office in a leafy Bangalore
suburb. The decision at hand was the possible sale of Infosys for the
enticing sum of $1 million. After nine years of toil in the then
business-unfriendly India , we were quite happy at the prospect of
seeing at least some money.

I let my younger colleagues talk about their future plans. Discussions
about the travails of our journey thus far and our future challenges
went on for about four hours. I had not yet spoken a word.

Finally, it was my turn. I spoke about our journey from a small Mumbai
apartment in 1981 that had been beset with many challenges, but also
of how I believed we were at the darkest hour before the dawn. I then
took an audacious step. If they were all bent upon selling the
company, I said, I would buy out all my colleagues, though I did not
have a cent in my pocket.

There was a stunned silence in the room. My colleagues wondered aloud
about my foolhardiness. But I remained silent. However, after an hour
of my arguments, my colleagues changed their minds to my way of
thinking. I urged them that if we wanted to create a great company, we
should be optimistic and confident. They have more than lived up to
their promise of that day.

In the seventeen years since that day, Infosys has grown to revenues
in excess of $3.0 billion, a net income of more than $800 million and
a market capitalisation of more than $28 billion, 28,000 times richer
than the offer of $1 million on that day.

In the process, Infosys has created more than 70,000 well-paying jobs,
2,000-plus dollar-millionaires and 20,000-plus rupee millionaires.

A final story: On a hot summer morning in 1995, a Fortune-10
corporation had sequestered all their Indian software vendors,
including Infosys, in different rooms at the Taj Residency hotel in
Bangalore so that the vendors could not communicate with one another.
This customer's propensity for tough negotiations was well-known. Our
team was very nervous.

First of all, with revenues of only around $5 million, we were minnows
compared to the customer.

Second, this customer contributed fully 25% of our revenues. The loss
of this business would potentially devastate our recently-listed company.

Third, the customer's negotiation style was very aggressive. The
customer team would go from room to room, get the best terms out of
each vendor and then pit one vendor against the other. This went on
for several rounds. Our various arguments why a fair price -- one that
allowed us to invest in good people, R&D, infrastructure, technology
and training -- was actually in their interest failed to cut any ice
with the customer.

By 5 p.m. on the last day, we had to make a decision right on the spot
whether to accept the customer's terms or to walk out.

All eyes were on me as I mulled over the decision. I closed my eyes,
and reflected upon our journey until then. Through many a tough call,
we had always thought about the long-term interests of Infosys. I
communicated clearly to the customer team that we could not accept
their terms, since it could well lead us to letting them down later.
But I promised a smooth, professional transition to a vendor of
customer's choice.

This was a turning point for Infosys.

Subsequently, we created a Risk Mitigation Council which ensured that
we would never again depend too much on any one client, technology,
country, application area or key employee. The crisis was a blessing
in disguise. Today, Infosys has a sound de-risking strategy that has
stabilised its revenues and profits.

I want to share with you, next, the life lessons these events have
taught me.

1. I will begin with the importance of learning from experience. It is
less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how
and what you learn. If the quality of the learning is high, the
development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself
in a previously unattainable place. I believe the Infosys story is
living proof of this.

Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much
more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail,
we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can
indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.

2. A second theme concerns the power of chance events. As I think
across a wide variety of settings in my life, I am struck by the
incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with
intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed
often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is
this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events
that is crucial.

3. Of course, the mindset one works with is also quite critical. As
recent work by the psychologist, Carol Dweck, has shown, it matters
greatly whether one believes in ability as inherent or that it can be
developed. Put simply, the former view, a fixed mindset, creates a
tendency to avoid challenges, to ignore useful negative feedback and
leads such people to plateau early and not achieve their full potential.

The latter view, a growth mindset, leads to a tendency to embrace
challenges, to learn from criticism and such people reach ever higher
levels of achievement (Krakovsky, 2007: page 48).

4. The fourth theme is a cornerstone of the Indian spiritual
tradition: self-knowledge. Indeed, the highest form of knowledge, it
is said, is self-knowledge. I believe this greater awareness and
knowledge of oneself is what ultimately helps develop a more grounded
belief in oneself, courage, determination, and, above all, humility,
all qualities which enable one to wear one's success with dignity and
grace.

Based on my life experiences, I can assert that it is this belief in
learning from experience, a growth mindset, the power of chance
events, and self-reflection that have helped me grow to the present.

Back in the 1960s, the odds of my being in front of you today would
have been zero. Yet here I stand before you! With every successive
step, the odds kept changing in my favour, and it is these life
lessons that made all the difference.

My young friends, I would like to end with some words of advice. Do
you believe that your future is pre-ordained, and is already set? Or,
do you believe that your future is yet to be written and that it will
depend upon the sometimes fortuitous events?

Do you believe that these events can provide turning points to which
you will respond with your energy and enthusiasm? Do you believe that
you will learn from these events and that you will reflect on your
setbacks? Do you believe that you will examine your successes with
even greater care?

I hope you believe that the future will be shaped by several turning
points with great learning opportunities. In fact, this is the path I
have walked to much advantage.

A final word: When, one day, you have made your mark on the world,
remember that, in the ultimate analysis, we are all mere temporary
custodians of the wealth we generate, whether it be financial,
intellectual, or emotional. The best use of all your wealth is to
share it with those less fortunate.

I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees
that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to
give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat
the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I
believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will
shoulder in time.

Thank you for your patience. Go forth and embrace your future with
open arms, and pursue enthusiastically your own life journey of discovery

Why are IIM directors soft on Arjun Singh and hard on Murli Manohar Joshi, asks Indian Express Editorial.

Why are IIM directors soft on Arjun Singh and hard on Murli Manohar Joshi, asks Indian Express Editorial.


Why are IIM directors soft on Arjun Singh and hard on Murli Manohar Joshi, asks Indian Express Editorial.

The author is president, Centre for Policy Research

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/29209._.html

Lessons in unreason
Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

The day IIMs caved in to HRD's quota blackmail, higher education lost its last pretence of autonomy

Respected Heads of IIMs: I hope you will pardon my presumptuousness in writing to you like this. But this matter is of some importance. Last week we saw a chilling episode unfold in the history of Indian higher education.

The facts are simple. The Supreme Court has ordered a stay on implementing the OBC quota. In response, IIM Ahmedabad had initially proposed what seemed
like a sensible measure: release the general list of admitted candidates, while withholding the list of candidates admitted under the OBC quota for this year. This list would be released depending upon what transpired in the apex court. This proposal was reasonable. It did not put on hold the academic calendar; nor did it prevent the implementation of OBC
reservations, if the court gave the green signal. But then, the IIMs, following a directive from the HRD ministry, first issued on April 5 and reiterated on April 19, decided to withhold the release of any lists.

Whatever the outcome of the court proceedings, the manner in which the IIMs conducted themselves is outrageous. A terse one-line order issued by a joint
secretary of the Government of India was enough to bring India's mightiest institutions to their knees.

Perhaps it is a sign of just how chilling this episode is that we have even failed to register all that it reveals.

The bane of Indian higher education is that most of it is now governed by political rather than pedagogical considerations. Many excellent universities are now empty shells because they became appendages of the
government: everything, from the academic calendar to appointments, is increasingly determined by ministries and politicians. Even regulatory institutions like the UGC, whose job was to shield universities from egregious government interference, have often become conduits for political design. The lines that separated the professoriate and the civil service are being seriously eroded. Government secretaries now regularly attend meeting of independent regulatory bodies and most states have no compunction putting civil servants in charge of our affairs. But we took solace in the fact that
a few islands of excellence survive, their eminence protecting them from government interference. Alas, this illusion was finally shattered last week.

What was disturbing is that your eminent institutions were becoming a party to the government's attempts to almost blackmail the court. After all, the compromise IIM-A had suggested would have honoured the integrity of all positions; instead you chose to play into government's hands by abetting a scenario of potential chaos that would have ensued if the entire list was
withheld. Of course all institutions, even autonomous ones, have to negotiate with government. But to see the premier institutions put aside all logic, morality and reasonableness to comply with a unnecessary and
illegitimate government order, to see them become party to the government's disrespect for institutional proprieties, was shocking indeed. The public would have sided with you; neither pro- ,nor anti-reservationists would have had reason to disagree with the solution you proposed. Yet you chose to cave in. Is it because you don't trust your own judgment? Is it because you are
no longer capable of providing leadership? Is it because institutional propriety has ceased to matter?

There was also the odour of double standard in what you did. When Murli Manohar Joshi had, in the name of justice, sought to regulate fees, cries of autonomy immediately went up. When Arjun Singh passes an order that is at least as serious, if not more so, there is quiet acceptance. For those of us who have despaired of our successive ministers of education, this double
standard is glaring. Do we now judge institutional proprieties by the yardstick of our ideological allegiances? Whatever may have been your reasons, the effect of your decision will have been to erode the credibility of institutions. The mark of an institution's greatness, after all, is its ability to rise above the taint of partisanship.

I admit readily that running institutions is not easy. The multiple pressures, the diverse demands put on you do not lend themselves to simple solutions. And what can academics do when the political class is hell-bent
on destroying education? What can we do in the face of a seeming political consensus? What can we do when the most academically accomplished prime minister a nation could wish for lets his ministers run riot? But the IIMs
are important just for this reason. India looks to its best institutions not just to build a reputation by selecting a few out of hundreds of thousands of students. It looks to them to provide leadership to society, to extend the boundaries of the possible, and to enlarge our ambitions. But we cannot imagine institutions of higher education being able to do this, if they cannot stand up to governments on behalf of what is right and legal. The IIM
Ahmedabad website proudly makes two claims. First, that the empowerment of faculty has been the propelling force behind the institution. But there is very little evidence of faculty governance in decisions like this. Second, that the institution combines the best of eastern and western values. I wondered what this referred to. After all it was one of the virtues of the Indian tradition that even kshatriyas used to keep their arms outside before entering the gurukula.

Let me be clear. The issue is not reservations. The cause for concern goes even deeper. The IIMs are, in numerical terms, small institutions. But their power to define aspirations is large. In succumbing to the government, in
the manner you did, you disempowered all those who are fighting for values you hold dear: institutional propriety, autonomy, and a proper matching of ends and means. One thing the history of institutions teaches us is that
autonomy has to be earned, it does not inhere in mere statutes. Your faculty, your boards can leverage the power of their eminence to reform higher education, if they so desire. Those of us interested in, and
associated with, India's higher education already feel considerably diminished by the track record of so many institutions. The day IIMs succumbed was truly a sad day, because we felt even smaller.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research

IIMs likely to lose autonomy

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/IIMs_likely_to_lose_autonomy/articleshow/1946866.cms
 
IIMs likely to lose autonomy
NEW DELHI: Indian Institutes of Management may no longer function as autonomous societies for the government is seriously considering Institutes of Management Bill so that the six premier B-schools are made answerable to Parliament.
Coming within days of IIMs first refusing to toe the government advice of keeping admission list on hold till the OBC reservation issue was settled in the Supreme Court, the move will definitely ruffle IIMs and India Inc. Institutes of Management Bill would be modelled on the lines of the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961, under which the IITs function.
A top government source said consultation on the proposed bill was on with the law ministry. He also sought to allay the apprehension that the proposed law could result in the erosion of the autonomy of IIMs.
‘‘IITs have made a mark for themselves without undermining their autonomy. Government feels functioning of IIMs and IITs need to be brought on par,’’ the source said. HRD ministry officials, however, refused to comment on the development.
If the proposed bill is modelled on the Institutes of Technology Act, there would be definite changes in the administrative and financial powers of IIMs. The B-schools would have a board of governors and a senate as administrative units.
But it is the financial autonomy of IIMs, which gives it the current teeth, which would undergo major change. IIMs, especially Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata, are not dependent on government funds but once they are brought under an act of Parliament, every IIM would have to maintain a fund in which money provided by the Central government, all fees and other charges received by the institute, money received by way of grants, gifts, donations, benefactions, bequests or transfers and money received by the institute in any other manner or from any other source would be kept.
Even investments would have to be made with the approval of the Central government. Accounts of IIMs would be audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General.
 

IIM alumni body cites Nehru, files PIL in SC

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/IIM_alumni_body_cites_Nehru_files_PIL_in_SC/articleshow/1947065.cms
 
IIM alumni body cites Nehru, files PIL in SC
NEW DELHI: An alumni association of IIM graduates has filed a PIL in the Supreme Court questioning the validity of the 56-year-old caste-based reservation policy saying its continuance has put paid to Jawaharlal Nehru's dream of a "young and vibrant nation free from the vices of caste and communal divide".
The PIL by 'Pan-IIM Alumni Association' quoted a letter written by the country's first PM to the chief ministers, which said: "I dislike any kind of reservation, more particularly in services. I react strongly against anything, which leads to inefficiency and second rate standards. I want my country to be a first class country in everything. The moment we encourage the second rate, we are lost."
The right to primary education remains unenforced even after 60 years of independence, but the ruling class has not blinked in sacrificing the high ideals of Nehru at the altar of vote-bank politics, the PIL said and sought an honest evaluation of the benefits of caste-based reservations.
Clarifying that the association is not against affirmative action of the state, the petitioner said imposition of mandatory reservation in higher education smacked of arbitrariness being without basis.
 

Opening New IITs

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opening_New_IITs/articleshow/1939900.cms


LEADER ARTICLE: Opening New IITs
Pankaj Jalote and B N Jain
[23 Apr, 2007 l 0040 hrs IST]

The government recently said that it would open more Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). While any move in this direction is welcome, the existing model of wholly state-funded IITs is not amenable to increasing the numbers and enhancing quality.

After the first five IITs which came up three to four decades back, the government has set up only one, in Guwahati. But since the 60s, India's population has doubled and numbers of the educated seeking admission have probably gone up tenfold. Unable to cope, the government started renaming existing institutions as IITs. The key difficulty today in starting an IIT is attracting and retaining good faculty.

To attract quality faculty, we need good students, a vibrant research environment and attractive compensation. Good students are available in plenty in India, at least at the undergraduate level. The challenges lie in the other two areas, and they cannot be met by promoting new IITs exclusively in the government sector due to resource and management constraints in the present model.

In an era of public-private partnerships (PPP), it is worth extending the PPP approach to starting new IITs. Private sector dynamism and long-term social commitment of the government can come together to create quality institutes. A modified BOT (build-operate-transfer) model can be applied here.

The government can specify norms for an IIT and its support for the project. These norms can include autonomy, selection process for students and faculty, reservations, governance structures, and conditions for financial support, such as what it will provide per student and per faculty. It can also specify norms for giving the landand its share of the initial capital for a new IIT.

With these guidelines in place, the government can invite respected individuals and business houses for a partnership to start a new IIT. The project can be executed by the partner, who, apart from bringing his share of the initial capital, can go on to provide ongoing support to the new IIT. This would be in addition to the government lending support as per its norms.

The official salary scale of the IIT faculty can remain the government-approved scale, this coming from government grant. However, the private partner can provide additional compensation to the faculty, pegging this to market levels.



The private player can also provide funds to invite faculty from abroad, something that is difficult to do from government funds. In general, funds provided by the private partner can be used for activities that cannot be undertaken with government money.

In this modified BOT model, the private partner is actually paying money, and not making any, in the B and O phases. Why would a private player participate? Many rich individuals and organisations in India would like to direct their wealth to societal uses, such as academic institutions. Given the IIT brand, it will be easier to get them to start a new IIT than, say, a new college or university.

Since the new institution is an IIT, it would be eligible for research grants and partnership programmes. A fully private university in India will find it almost impossible to support research, as can be seen in most existing private institutes, including well-funded ones. With research funding available from regular funding sources as well as multilateral agencies, an exciting environment can be created, particularly with leadership support from the private sector.

The board of governors can remain the top body of an IIT built through PPP. The government can stipulate that the board will consist of eminent people, specify that a few seats will be nominees of the government, and lay down that the director will be selected by a professional search committee appointed by the board. The initial agreement can last for 20-30 years, after which the IIT may revert to the government, or the arrangement may be extended.

A likely area of contention is the fee structure. Although it can be stated that the IIT can make no profit and extra revenues generated will go towards expanding the institute, there is likely to be a difference in opinion on the level of fees and how it should be determined. One possibility is to have norms where per student support is a function of fees as the fee increases government support decreases.

As part of the agreement, the govern-ment can also state that the new IIT should build mechanisms to create new faculty for itself as well as for other institutions. This is not as hard as it may sound. With incentives, it is possible to attract young graduates to join the PhD programme where they may do a joint PhD with some world-class university (with which this new IIT can get into an MoU, and for which funds will be provided by the private partner) and also do part-time teaching in this new IIT.

The PPP approach, unlike the government one, has reasonable scalability. There is no reason why with different partners, a new IIT cannot be created every couple of years at least for the next decade or so. The new models that are likely to come up in new IITs will also help existing IITs to change and upgrade their management and compensation approaches. With D Sanghi, S Biswas, K Ramamritham and D B Phatak. The writers are IIT professors.