Affairs Indian

Indirect Signaling in non-Indian Societies

2008-11-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

I was reading Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat recently. One of the things it says is that during the dot-com boom, companies laid excessive amounts of fiber-optic and other data carrying cable, so that communication became dirt cheap. The surprising thing is that communication is not dirt cheap for the consumer in the USA. In the competitive market, competing companies have somehow accomplished the feat of dividing up turf and avoiding a competitive price war without any explicit negotiations (that would be illegal). They signaled their intentions through indirect communication and were able to arrive at figures that were profitable to them (and, of course, detrimental to the consumer).

This kind of indirect signaling appears common in many societies. Its features are:

Enhancement of the common good
Existence of conditions which make agreements/pacts impossible
Decision making based only on observation of behaviour of other agents

It seems to find less purchase in India. For example, Jihadi terrorism finds a lot of sympathy in India. There are many people who are staunchly opposed to it, but there are also apologists for terrorism who give sympathetic reasons why it exists. This makes it hard to act against terrorism: there is always a section of apologists opposing any anti-terrorist move. On the other hand, in Western society people are somehow able to get together on issues like terrorism: everybody condemns it and no one makes apologies for it. Those who do make apologies for it are excluded nonviolently but very firmly. Society is able to act more coherently against the problem.

Another example comes from the recent India-Australia cricket wars. In Australia, Ricky Ponting set a nasty tone by employing a sledging approach as well as dishonourable calls (claiming catches that bounced) to win matches. Initially, the Australian press seemed annoyed with Ponting for this behaviour. But pretty soon, they almost magically banded together and began vilifying the visiting Indian team to put pressure on them. Harbhajan Singh came in for particularly nasty attacks. The Australian press went so far as to position a camera that exclusively shot footage of Harbhajan throughout one of the matches, and soundly criticized all off-field moves the Indians made. The Australian press rallied around this psychological attack on the Indian team in a way that the Indian press can never do. There is often a "fashionable" section of the Indian press which will support the Australians in such situations. Putting concerted pressure on the Australian team during their visit to India never occurred to the Indian press. Thus, teams like Australia have an extra card up their sleeve that the Indian team is unable to possess.

Perhaps another example of such signaling lies in the way European powers divided up India and avoided conflict with each other to a great extent in the 18th and 19th centuries. They somehow recognized it was better that a European power win control than the alternative of fighting among themselves and letting the Indians repulse them. The Indians, on the other hand, failed to recognize that defeating the European powers should have been higher on their agenda than trying to use the Europeans to defeat other Indian powers. Europe signaled, India didn't. This example may not be valid because I'm not sure the Europeans didn't explicitly discuss this among themselves. Maybe they did.

That Indians fight among themselves is well-known; we are taught this in our history classes from primary school onwards. It is obvious in our politics and our culture, which seem based on primacy. However, the distinguishing feature in indirect signaling is the indirectness. Some societies seem to be able to act in concert even without explicit agreements. India seems to be able to do this to a lesser extent than some other societies.

Dog Haters

2008-08-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

There have been some recent articles (here and here) about removing stray dogs from public spaces. The suggestion is that all dogs must have designated owners, who are then responsible for the dogs' actions. This may or may not be implementable in Indian cities, but the articles do have some asymmetric blind spots.

First, they start with the hidden assumption that the well-being of those to whom dogs are a nuisance trumps the well-being of those to whom the dogs are a benefit. An analogy given in one of the articles is that of a car:

Would it be just to enjoy the thrill of racing your BMW, yet not pay damages for breaking a 10-year-old kid’s leg in an unfortunate accident? No, it wouldn’t. And this is why parents’ associations don’t demand removal of all cars. Private property ensures costs and benefits are borne by the same person, encouraging citizens to behave with caution and due care.

Suppose we approach this from a different angle. One could equally well start with the assumption that the natural state of affairs is the presence of stray dogs and the happiness that people derive from it, and that if dogs are removed, those who demand their removal should be required to compensate others for the loss of emotional satisfaction. Dog haters (not taxpayers in general) should be exclusively required to pay for all expenses involved in removing dogs. Further, they should be held liable for any thefts deemed preventable with the presence of dogs which might have given due warning.

You shouldn't be able to divert a river or cut down a forest without compensating those who would be affected. In the same way, you shouldn't be allowed to remove the benefits of having dogs -- the natural state of affairs -- without compensating those who want the dogs around.

But, what about “animal rights”? “Animal right” is a contradiction in terms. All rights derive from human beings’ right to own oneself, from which follows an individual’s right to own things non-human. Slavery is unjust, but rearing cattle is business. And dogs are no exception to this.

The author seems to have missed the point completely. The point that animal rights activists make is that all rights should not derive from human beings' right to own animals as property because, for example, a BMW does not feel pain or anguish, while animals do. Moreover, the statement "Human beings have a right to own oneself" does not logically imply "an individual’s right to own things non-human", in spite of the author's blithe claim.

NYT on the Nuclear Deal

2008-08-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has this hack of an opinion piece on the Indian nuclear deal. I felt like expressing my Indian viewpoint on some of the things it said, so here goes:

Article: IN the next day or so, an obscure organization will meet to decide the fate of an Indian nuclear deal that threatens to rapidly accelerate New Delhi’s arms race with Pakistan — a rivalry made all the more precarious by the resignation on Tuesday of the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf.

Response: The Pakistan angle is always used as a catch-all to explain why India shouldn't have nukes. This is hypocritical and specious. Hypocritical, because rivalries between the USA and Russia have always been closer to nuclear flashpoint level than those between India and Pakistan. Specious, because India and Pakistan are actively taking steps towards reconciliation and there's no clear reason to believe that nukes will play a role in any future conflict.

Article: If the president gets his way, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — for 50 years, the bulwark against the spread of nuclear weapons — would be shredded and India’s yearly nuclear weapons production capability would likely increase from 7 bombs to 40 or 50.

Response: The NPT is no bulwark; all it does is allow for a veil of secrecy for certain nations to secretly proliferate with impunity. China has been giving nuke tech away to Pakistan for decades. The USA gave nuke tech to Israel. And Pakistan proliferated to Iran even as the US mollycoddled it and gave it military funds.

Article: India’s nuclear history is checkered at best

Response: Er, no. Now you're just lying. India has a perfect nonproliferation record.

Article: ... exploits foreign nuclear energy assistance to make a bomb, as India did. [India] misused civilian nuclear technology to produce its first nuclear weapon in 1974

Response: How was it better or more ethical to use Nazi war tech to create nuclear weapons, and then use those weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of people, than to use civilian nuke tech to explode a handful of proof-of-concept weapons? Does the former not count as misuse?

Article: Just last month, the Pakistani government darkly announced that waiving the nuclear rules for India “threatens to increase the chances of a nuclear arms race in the subcontinent.”

Response: Perhaps this is just a pressure tactic from a nation which had also demanded the same concessions that India did but never got them? That ever cross your mind?

Article: India must sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a step already taken by 178 other countries and every member state of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. After all, why should the group’s members grant India a huge exemption from the rules that they themselves are supposed to follow?

Response: Perhaps this can wait until India achieves nuclear parity with the exclusive nuclear club and stockpiles a few thousand nukes. Why not ask why the nuclear weapon states aren't required to reduce their arsenal to the 5 or 6 bombs that India has? After all, the USA has thousands of nukes, enough to destroy the entire world. Why should a treaty designed specifically to protect the USA and other nuke countries' nuclear stockpiles be allowed to stand? Finally, this demand is ridiculously unrealistic in the face of the fact that India has consistently refused it for 5 decades and domestic public opinion is perhaps 90% opposed to it.

Article: India must agree to halt production of nuclear material for weapons.

Response: First, is India continuing to produce nuclear material for weapons? Then why aren't there any more than 5-7 nukes in India? Second, India should halt production when the existing nuke powers reduce their stockpiles to Indian levels, and not before that.

The world will be a better place when 60 year old, old-world, Nixon-era-educated India-haters like the authors of this article are all gone.

Rajiv Gandhi: Enhanced by Publicity and Imagination

2008-08-04T12:46:00.001-07:00

Of India's Prime Ministers so far, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi stand out as clear giants in the line-up. In terms of contributions to the Indian nation and popularity no one but Mahatma Gandhi can match Jawaharlal Nehru. Indira Gandhi was a great leader as well, immensely popular and able to take tough decisions that shaped the history of the subcontinent.

After Nehru and Indira, no one stands out quite as much in the line-up of Prime Ministers. Three significant leaders are Rajiv Gandhi, P. V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee. Lal Bahadur Shastri didn't have enough years in office and Morarji Desai was too stymied by politics. The others are small by comparison.

Among the three, the tallest leader is P. V. Narasimha Rao, who was the real architect of the economic reforms of 1991. The real challenge at that time was political and Rao provided Manmohan Singh with a shield that allowed him to complete the reforms unhindered.

However, Rajiv Gandhi's public image has been raised much higher than that of Rao and Vajpayee. This has been done by his family members and Family sycophants in the Congress party. He has a samadhi. An international airport, national medals and various institutions have been named after him. The Family jealously guards such "naming assets", ensuring that to the extent possible no assets are named after non-family members.

Rajiv Gandhi has a samadhi near that of Mahatma Gandhi. It is interesting to see what other samadhis are in the vicinity. Mahatma Gandhi (Raj Ghat), Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri have samadhis in the same location. Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri have obvious claim to samadhis here. Indira Gandhi is borderline: although she was a great prime minister, one wonders whether she should be placed in the same category as these three stalwarts. The others are completely out of place; this area is not the Family's personal space. Sanjay Gandhi was the nation's prime thug; his samadhi has no business there. Rajiv Gandhi did some good but is nowhere near worthy enough to merit a samadhi here.

In Hyderabad, the Family made certain through its extraordinary hold on the central government that N. T. Rama Rao's name was not applied to Begumpet airport. Instead, it was named the Rajiv Gandhi airport.

Now Rajiv Gandhi was a great prime minister and diplomat in his own right. However, the homage the nation paid to him is simply not commensurate with his standing. The Family's tendency to hijack the naming of national institutions for themselves must stop.

Huh? Hindus are Vegetarian: NYT

2008-06-24T07:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a "Huh?" quote from this interesting article in the New York Times:

It was a Muslim establishment, serving carnivorous fare. But in deference to its many Hindu patrons, the gruel came in a vegetarian version, too.

The stereotype of the vegetarian Hindu is surprising, considering that it is well-known to be false: most Hindus are not vegetarian. I read on a blog that NRIs encourage this stereotype: if that's true, is it because most Indian emigrants are vegetarian? It is a stereotype that many Indians believe: a non-vegetarian Hindu NRI once insisted that an overwhelming majority of Hindus are vegetarian.

The suprising thing is that, unlike most stereotypes, this stereotype is well-known to be false.

Stereotypes about Caste

2008-06-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

I read an article titled "Schedule Conflict: the persistence of caste in India" by a Harvard student recently. It brought home to me how stereotypes that are propagated and reinforced in Western schooling don't go away after a student grows up and begins thinking for himself. Here are some peculiarities:

the perennially disappointing “Hindu rate of growth.” -- Does anybody still use this offensive phrase, even flippantly or in quotes? The author probably picked it out of some newspaper or the other. It's used in the Indian media sometimes, but only to sarcastically point out the way the West perceived India's religion. I'd like to provide an analogy using America's race conflicts, but it would be too crass.
Traditional hierarchies—like caste—are supposed to be getting weaker. Why then was the nation’s capital suddenly in the grip of caste-based protests once again last week? -- This seems vaguely inaccurate. When you say "caste-based protests", one gets the sense that it has something to do with the way society treated them (recently), anger with their place in a hierarchy. These protests had nothing to do with this. It was simply a group with a sense of common identity demanding something. The Gujjars were a caste, but they were acting as any other group with a common interest would. This was not a caste conflict.
This is closely related to what I feel is a difference in perception of caste between Indians and the West. The West tends to think of caste as a "system", a social arrangement created with a particular purpose. If you're a particular caste, other castes must have treated you this way, you're above these castes, below those. Indians tend to view caste as a means of explaining identity, a label that identifies history. If you're a particular caste, you might have been born in this area, your ancestors must have done this kind of work, these are your customs.
what an Indian gets is still as much about who they are as what they have done. Caste members are eligible for certain government programs and jobs, as well as educational opportunities, based almost exclusively on their caste identity. -- This seems to be contrasting the Western work-reward notion (what you get depends on what you do, not who you are) with a hereditary reward notion. But that's not what's going on. The Gujjars are demanding affirmative action based on historical disadvantage. If a Gujjar shows acumen, he can still become a doctor or a businessman or a scientist.

Hindutva is no longer a Category

2008-06-18T06:03:00.000-07:00

Recent developments show that Hindutva is no longer a uniform ideology. Like in any other large group, there have always been differences in the Hindutva camp. But the Shiv Sena's recent call for Hindu terrorist cells is so far away from most Hindutva ideology that it doesn't deserved to be identified as such. It appears that there are many Hindutva parties that would not even imagine such nonsense. Perhaps this is no more than the rantings of an old man.

But there is no doubt that this will affect the reputation of all Hindutva parties, as well as provide cannon fodder against Hinduism and India.

Twenty20 and ODIs

2008-06-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of apprehension about the Twenty20 format. It is such a short version of the game that people are worried it will result in a sort of hack-and-slash cricket. It is so attractive and popular that there are worries the beauty and the fine technique of longer versions will become obsolete.

But maybe not. The Kitply cup ODI victory may be an indication of how the Twenty20 format can actually help players prepare for ODI matches. The Indian team in the first match between India and Pakistan was fresh from the first IPL Twenty20 tournament, and not only ended the 12-ODI winning streak of the ODI-trained Pakistan squad, but routed them by 141 runs. India gave away 3 extras; Pakistan gave away 38. Pakistan fielded miserably, dropping crucial catches which allowed the Indian top-order batsmen to raise the Indian total to 330. Of course one match is not enough evidence, but maybe the Twenty20 format forces players to play a tighter, more focused game, something that the ODI-trained Pakistan squad simply had no answer to. It's a different, more nimble kind of warfare.

One of the biggest complaints about the Twenty20 format is that it is designed so that batsmen can go after bowlers. 20-run overs are not uncommon, and some think this will discourage bowlers. This is a misconception based on an inability to adjust your measures to a different situation. It needs to be understood that in Twenty20 a 10-run over is not so bad. A 5-run ODI over is the same quality as an 8 to 10-run Twenty20 over; that's all.

If anything, the bowlers' performance becomes even more crucial in Twenty20. The value of a bowler who can pull off some tight overs is very high in the 3-hour format, and the bowlers end up bowling more accurately under more pressure. This hones their skills.

The overall effect of Twenty20 remains to be seen. But initial indications are that it looks like a great thing for Indian cricket.

Gandhi, Churchill and Hitler

2008-05-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

It is fashionable among some in Britain to poke fun at Gandhi. If they are to be believed, Gandhi was weak, simple, foolishly idealistic, and it was Churchill who really saved Gandhi's India by successfully leading a defence against Hitler.

It is well known that Churchill looked upon Gandhi with great distaste. Some Brits who love Churchill like to paint Gandhi as naive, repeatedly publishing articles stating that the world needs more Churchills and less Gandhis. The tone of some of these articles is derisive towards Gandhi; the author of one article even refers to him using Churchill's infamous epithet. Many of these articles are linked to the Churchill Center's struggle to have Churchill declared the Man of the Century by Time Magazine. This center goes so far as to hint that Gandhi was an admirer of Hitler, using this quote from Gandhi: "I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed." One question that is asked repeatedly is how Gandhi would have managed against Hitler.

Now, I think this is a ridiculous question to begin with, one that is intended to confuse rather than elucidate. One might as well ask whether one would choose Einstein or Gandhi to delve into the laws of the universe. Different people choose different roles; it is stupid to compare the historical roles of Gandhi and Churchill. What is being compared is their impact and their strength of character. And when it comes to character, Churchill's mean-minded pettiness vis-a-vis Gandhi is well documented. Apart from his public distaste for Gandhi as a person, Churchill has made some truly ugly comments, such as the time when, asked what he wanted to do about the millions of Indians who were dying in the Bengal famine, wished aloud that Gandhi was one of them.

Nevertheless, this entire mess of unlogic does give rise to an interesting question. What would Gandhi do if he was faced with Hitler? Gandhi was non-violent in the British context because he saw this as a good solution to the colonization. Non-violent methods were sufficient to restrain the British, who had based the entire colonization on arguments of inherent moral superiority over Indians and who were worried about this international image. Some think that Gandhi would still have chosen non-violence against the Nazis. But I think that if he realized the Nazis had no interest in being perceived as benign, his methods would have changed too. I think Gandhi would (with heavy heart) have gone to war.

Telangana

2008-05-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

The arguments for Telangana are quite old, but I still can't exactly understand them. All of the arguments seem to be based on emotional grudges and wishful hopes rather than any understanding of how creating a separate state would help the people of the region. Pointed questions are sidestepped rather than answered.

For example, consider this FAQ from the US-based Telangana Development Forum.

Q: Isn't it economically better to be a bigger state than a smaller state?
A: Bihar is bigger than Goa but poorer, so this argument is false.
>: Citing exceptions doesn't prove anything; the fact is it is much harder for a smaller state to compete economically because its bargaining power is low.

Most of the argument is based on the notion that rich Andhra people habitually come to Telangana to "steal" resources or "divert" them to Andhra. The source of this sentiment is easy to trace: blaming someone else for your problems is always the path of least resistance.

The idea that the Andhra regions are exploiting the Telangana regions may be grounded in truth. But there is no verifiable data on any of these sites to support this. Almost all of the claims are rants rather than arguments.

Off the top of my head, here are some reasons why Telangana would be BAD for everybody involved:

Loss of bargaining power for both Andhra and Telangana. The whole is much more powerful than the sum of the parts.
Partitions of states with protracted separation movements hate each other (e.g. India-Pak, Pak-Bangladesh, Punjab-Haryana). This has always been true. The governments and people of Andhra and Telangana would spend inordinate amounts of energy quarrelling with each other.
Politicians will have finer control of the pie. Instead of having one top dog, we would have two top dogs in the same area. As the number of top dogs increases, things always get worse for the ordinary people.
Look at Karnataka and Tamil Nadu fighting. Arguments over various issues are bound to crop up between neighbouring states. The balance of power lies with larger states. If Tamil Nadu or Karnataka have a problem with the much smaller Telangana, they will chew up the small state and spit it out. It is an unrealistic dream to imagine that everything can be worked out between Telangana and its neighbours.

Brain Drain

2008-05-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

It seems very dangerous to be a small country with large reserves of a natural resource in today's world. Quite swiftly, a media campaign painting the country's situation as requiring Western intervention is drummed up. Over a few years this builds up to the point where the country can be invaded, and its resources are signed away in order to "pay" for "rebuilding".

But India seems exempt, partially because it is a large country, and partially because there aren't many crucially important natural resources. The one really abundant resource in India is manpower. But India willingly gifts this resource to various rich countries; there is no need to invade.

This doesn't matter to a few Indians. But for many, those living in India and even some who have "gifted" themselves to the West but still care about India, this is a sad thing. India should do things to prevent it, they believe. But there is cause for despair, and little cause for celebration on this front. Rao's reforms of 1992 have brought a modicum of prosperity to India, but some governments don't seem to have learnt the positive lessons from those reforms.

People are important. All efforts should be made to keep the best people, by keeping them happy. Money spent on retaining good talent is repaid many times over. The presence of talent has a ripple effect, stimulating talent in other individuals. The loss of talent has exactly the opposite effect: the loss of talent is exacerbated by the loss of potential mentors for new talent.

Reports such as this one are especially wrenching.

The Food Crisis, and the Fingers Pointing at India

2008-05-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

In the current global food price crisis, George Bush and Condoleeza Rice deflected attention away from America by pointing fingers at the convenient focal points for all negative changes occurring in the world today: India and China.

The American appetite for fuel already has most of the world irritated; it is already blamed for the half-million Iraqi deaths. Now bio-fuels have made imminent the near-starvation of a billion other humans. The American publicity machine recognized that adding this to the list of transgressions wouldn't do much good. So a simple, plausible deflection was arranged: India and China are eating more, they are to blame.

The pro-American media is quick to try to soothe tempers in India by saying that Indians eating more is a good thing. But this is just meant to blind gullible Indians. After hearing this, who will the starving man in Africa blame? The Indians who are enjoying a "good thing" by eating more while the African starves, obviously. This statement is simply a smart publicity move to kill two birds with one stone: soothe ruffled Indian feathers, and still make everybody blame Indians (who are trying to eat enough to survive) rather than the Americans (who want to drive more SUVs and luxury cars).

Besides, the figures show that these statements are completely false. Indian foodgrain consumption increased by 2% in 2007-2008, while American foodgrain consumption increased by almost 12% in the same year!! (See this report). So even in terms of who's eating more (setting aside the biofuel issue), America is to blame more than India.

The problem I am trying to address here is not the food crisis itself, but attempts to evade responsibility and pin blame on others through a publicity machine. Such attempts are indeed a "cruel joke".

Free Press: India and USA

2008-04-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Both India and the USA have a "free press". It is a social innovation the USA takes credit for. A free press is not traditionally associated with third-world countries like India. There is some element of truth to that: until about 1990, the press in India was indeed not very effective as a counter to the government. That has changed, and the press in India now seems to have achieved vibrancy. The press in both countries has problems, but they are different.

In the US, the big problem is the effectiveness of the government's public relations machinery. The government apparatus has learned all the tricks and methods for managing public opinion. This includes more effectively putting out the government's point of view than any private newspaper could manage and methods for subverting some of the press's insiders. These include various inducements as well as the threat of denial of sources. The government's efficiency in public relations means than whenever the government needs to, it can neutralize any effects of a "free press".

In India, the press is also stymied by subversion of its insiders. But this subversion is a lot more ad-hoc and less institutionalized than in the US. Individual politicians cultivate individual journalists and editors according to their strategic vision and financial resources. The lack of cohesion is increased by the large number of warring political parties, making it harder for any party or politician to control all the press. The second factor is the general low standards of evidence and article writing in the press. Many leading dailies have errors which would make a class 10 student cringe. The quality of writing can be insipid and there is not effort to make content complete. There are often articles that are 2 or 3 lines long.

Overall, it seems to me that the Indian press is more effective at exposing problems in government than the American press. This is simply because, although the press in the US is a lot better developed and more mature than the Indian press, the Indian political establishment is less well-versed at managing the press than the American political establishment.

Heart Disease in India

2007-11-29T00:39:00.000-08:00

Indians are the most likely people in the world to have heart related problems. To those Indians whose close ones were at one time or another affected by heart disease, this may not be that much of a suprise. While a great deal of attention is (appropriately) being focused on the AIDS epidemic in India, heart disease is not given much priority. The accounts from doctors are alarming.

http://in.rediff.com/getahead/2005/may/16heart.htm
"By one estimate, 60 percent of the world's coronary heart patients will be in India by 2010"
http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/29heart.htm
"India has the highest incidence of heart related diseases in the world and the number of those affected is likely to double in the coming years"

The size of the problem is staggering. Even if the above predictions turn out to be inflated, India is ill equipped to deal with problems on such a colossal scale. The cost to India in terms of rupees spent, human resources lost and emotional, will be colossal.

Part of the problem may be that we Indians don't have a central health information resource specific to the Indian population. Even for a third-world country, this is surprising. When we try to find information online, we are assured by websites for Americans or Europeans that until we are in our 40s, we are safe and need not worry about heart problems. However, this is true only for American and European populations. Indians are susceptible from the time they enter their 30s.

India needs premier central health institutes that can fund research into the epidemiology of medical problems, disseminate information that is relevant to the Indian population, and track the progress of strategies to counter the spread of such problems in the Indian population. Existing institutions such as AIIMS currently provide the best medical care, but do not have large-scale, nationwide epidemiology programmes. Of course we need hospitals, but without epidemiologic knowledge, we are simply shooting in the dark.

Is Caste Causally Responsible for Poverty?

2007-11-18T14:27:00.000-08:00

Caste is, of course, a very good indicator of poverty in India. In the past, people were denied access to certain facilities based on their caste. This meant that certain castes weren't allowed to develop in certain ways, and it became the root cause of today's poverty structure, which is overwhelmingly biased against certain castes.

But I want to ask the question: does caste continue to be causally responsible for poverty? More specifically, conditional on the situation prevailing say 10 years ago, is caste still being used to deny opportunities to people today? Or, are we confusing the effect of the socio-economic stratum for the effect of caste?

Let's be even more specific. Descendants of poor families are more likely to be poor than descendants of rich families. Descendants of both poor and rich families are also likely to retain their caste, since caste is hereditary and inter-caste marriage is still relatively rare. Thus descendants with castes which are poorer today are likely to be poorer than descendants of castes which are richer today. In statistical terms, the wealth of the family at the start of the time period under study is a confounder for the effect of caste.

The right way to ask the question is: take two families with similar economic conditions but with different caste; is one of the families likely to have richer descendants, say 50 years in the future?

The 123 Indo-US Nuclear Deal

2007-08-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

It's true that the Commies are no friends of the nation but that doesn't mean they are wrong about everything.

The Congress single-handedly constructed and negotiated this deal. They refused to share the details of the deal with any other parties. Why? The PM pretended to defend the deal in Parliament but revealed nothing new. Why? Maybe the Congress wants all the credit, but why should the nation trust the Congress? Openness about the deal is in the best interests of everyone.

Sonia Gandhi "endorsed" the deal, but frankly I don't think she is qualified to grasp the subtleties of such a deal.

Now it has been proved that the Congress has been trying to delude the nation. One day after Manmohan assured India that our autonomy won't be compromised, the US released a statement saying India can't conduct nuclear tests under the deal! Even for Manmohan and Sonia, this is the height of stupidity. Such blatant deception is amazing.

It is not only about aligning with the US. We have to remember that the West has NEVER in history made a deal that profited India more than them. We have to be careful in dealing with them, lest our freedom disappear.

Chuk De India: Pleasantly different from most Bollywood fare!

2007-08-11T07:32:00.000-07:00

Shimit Amin seems to be shaping up as one of India's best directors. This is his second movie, and both were excellent, multi-faceted and multi-layered movies. According to wikipedia, Chuk De India received mostly negative reviews from film critics -- scores of 2/5 and the like. Perhaps the critics are a big impediment to good cinema in India. This movie is definitely up there, just a little below Lagaan and other classics.

Chuk De India is a movie with hockey as a central theme, but it is about much, much more than hockey. It makes statements on so many levels that it is worth spending some time on them.

Most Bollywood films are not really pan-Indian in spirit. They divide India into zones:

"India": The "real" India consists only of Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, UP and to a lesser extent Bihar, Bengal and, especially in older films, Kashmir.
"South India": Everyone living "over there" is a "Madrasi". According to Bollywood, these are weirdos who have heads smeared with vibhooti and start their sentences with "AAAIY AAIYA JEE... AAMA AATA JEE..." type nonsense popularized by Mehmood and assiduously cultivated by Bollywood ever since.
Nonexistent India: The rest of India, especially the North East (Assam, Tripura, Sikkim, Nagaland, Arunachal, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya), Orissa, and to some extent MP are completely left out of all Bollywood films.

First of all, this movie lampoons stereotypes (which, sadly, Bollywood propagates).

It actively seeks to break the South Indian stereotype, but it does fall short: it makes the common mistake of pronouncing and spelling "Telugu" as "Telegu". This shouldn't have happened in a film that is making it a point to show that Telugu is not the same as Tamil. But that's really nitpicking, the spirit was right.
We see much more of Europe, America and Australia in Bollywood films than some parts of our own country. This film features individuals from Manipur and Mizoram and makes it a point to note that they are as Indian as anyone else. Again, the film falls a little short of the mark: none of the people who are not from traditional Bollywood's "core India" get a major role.
In India, Cricket is treated as being the only worthwhile sport. A lot of characters in the film look down upon hockey -- an impediment that the players have to face. It was an interesting decision to use hockey instead of cricket in the movie. Director Shimit Amin handles this very well. By the middle of the movie, I was quite excited about hockey.

Next, this movie makes a very strong statement on women's rights. This forms a theme that runs throughout the movie: the women are expected to give up what they want for families and boyfriends. None of this is over the top; it is handled with fine balance, showcasing the frustration of women who are on the edge of something great but have no one to share it with, least of all their families.

For a change from typical Bollywood movies, all of the characters are developed well in this movie. Each one has a little story, ordinary but interesting. The team members' quirks are alternately amusing and aggravating. The interactions between the members of the team are normal -- seniors bullying junior players, people taking a dislike to each other because of some initial incident, cliques and factions with grouches against each other or against the coach. Much of the movie is a well-paced story about how the players and coach gradually grow to like each other and come together as a team.

Shah Rukh Khan is finally displaying what a good actor he is. He always had the potential, but for the first 10 years or so of his career chose films requiring fairly ridiculous "M-M-M-Main-Main T-T-T-Tu-Tu" type stuttering as a substitute for comedy and an identical persona in roles that were really quite varied. I didn't like him in those years, but his role in Swades was great. In Chuk De India, his character is not fleshed out in much detail. The character had an incident when he was a hockey player 7 years before the main events of the movie, was branded a traitor and had to go into hiding, a button that's easy to push. For most of the movie, he is a tough, impassive coach: a role that doesn't require much acting. But for all that, Shah Rukh handled the role reasonably well.

Chuk De India also has high levels of realism, a quality Amin also displayed in his Ab Tak Chchappan. Indian sports movies typically feature actors who very obviously can't play the sport. Most of the realizations of Indian scenes are unrealistically glamorous: posh bathrooms,designer clothes, and over-the-top attitudes are pleasantly missing from this movie. Chak De India's actors look like they can actually play hockey. And they behave and live like real Indians. And the facilities in the movie look like real Indian facilities. When the team ends up in Australia, the scenes there and the reactions of the Indian team are very believable.

The sport itself is showcased much less that I would have liked. Although the nature of the movie draws the audience into the game, there are no cool hockey moves or tricks, nothing that would excite anyone actually interested in the game itself. None of the type of magic that prompted officials to inspect Dhyan Chand's hockey stick! There are some scenes where the coach plans strategy with the players, but these are just atmospheric scenes. The strategies are not shown in the movie. This is the one area where I felt the movie could have done better.

Overall, it was a fantastic movie. India needs more movies as balanced as Chuk De India, and it needs more directors like Shimit Amin.

Teachers: The Biggest Impediment to Education in India

2007-06-27T05:04:00.000-07:00

A small portion of the Indian population is experiencing unprecedented prosperity levels as a result of the new globalization wave and the economic reforms of the Narasimha Rao government. These forces have led to India being catapulted into a "knowledge economy". The press, both Indian and foreign, often cite figures comparing the number of engineering graduates from India favourably in comparison to Western countries. There is a general sense of optimism, a feeling that our educational system is at par with or superior to the Western systems.

However, the truth is that the economic prosperity is masking the mess into which our educational systems are devolving. The Indian educational system at all levels (primary, secondary and tertiary) is worse off than it was a decade ago. The reasons we are not seeing immediate effects are manyfold. Perhaps the two biggest reasons are: 1. there is always a lag of a decade or two in the manifestation of the effects of such a lapse; 2. globalization cushions the effect, providing easy access to skilled workers from elsewhere.

However, the devolution is real. The scientific advisor to the Prime Minister, esteemed scientist C. N. R. Rao, has in his official capacity advised the Prime Minister that Indian science education has been on the decline for almost two decades, and that the effects will be felt soon. (See, for example, this article.)

At the primary and secondary levels, India's education programme has been a failure. Although literacy levels have been creeping upwards gradually, the rate of progress was far lower than what was envisioned when the constitution was adopted (free compulsory education for all children upto 14 years by 1960; see Constitution of India, Part IV Article 45). Often, the government is blamed for not providing teachers with sufficient resources, not paying them enough or for not monitoring them well enough.

However, an alternate viewpoint is that the teachers are themselves responsible for aggressively demoting the status of education and making education subservient to politics. Teachers in India are overwhelmingly unionized and political, and resist positive change in an organized fashion. Politics is endemic to the teaching profession. These views from the book The Political Economy of Education in India by Geeta Kingdon and Mohammed Muzammil are explained in detail in this article by Swaminathan S. Aiyar, consulting editor of The Economic Times. I think this viewpoint might explain the reason why, despite struggling against illiteracy for so many decades, we have failed to make inroads into universal education in India.

Sycophancy in the Congress Party

2007-06-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

The Congress party's least attractive feature is its heavy culture of sycophancy. There are many parties in Indian politics that are based on sycophancy towards individuals: examples include the DMK, AIADMK (under both Jayalalithaa and M. G. Ramachandran) and the Telugu Desam during the NTR years. But the Congress party is, I think, the only one where dynastic sycophancy plays such a strong role.

The Congress party formed two entirely different entities before and after independence. Soon after independence, the towering Nehru successfully transformed the Congress into a dynastic hegemony (possibly; some say it was Indira and not Nehru who did this). Amazingly, this hegemony has now become self-sustaining, almost religious. The dynasty itself no longer has to expend energy to maintain it. It has persisted through the deeds as well as misdeeds of Indira Gandhi, through the Rajiv Gandhi years, through the "dark ages" when no Nehru-Gandhi family member was at the helm, and seems to be growing in zeal even now, during the Sonia Gandhi years.

The years without a Family member leading the Congress were a time when alternative leadership could have taken hold, but the Congress party workers had the religious zeal of converts. No one other than a Gandhi family member, any Gandhi family member, could satisfy them. P. V. Narasimha Rao, the true architect of India's financial reforms and successful party caretaker during its hardest period, was sidelined, refused a place in Delhi (though Rajiv Gandhi -- having accomplished much less than PVR -- was given a samadhi) and his body was ignobly returned to Hyderabad after he passed away. The Gandhis are famously jealous of merit; while claiming great laurels for their own family (naming various national and state institutions and monuments after themselves) they deliberately keep similar merit awards away from other deserving leaders.

In current times the toadyism has reached new heights. The most senior and accomplished politicians in the Congress willingly submitted themselves to the absolute will of Sonia Gandhi, a political neophyte. Nay, they begged her to rule over them. Sonia Gandhi is much more powerful than even the Prime Minister of India, whom she had the total liberty to choose. While there is nothing wrong with a strong person leading a political party, the amazing thing is that Sonia Gandhi did nothing to assume such absolute power. She has no political or governing experience or accomplishments; indeed she has no experience of any sort whatsoever. The power was handed to her on a platter because she was the only viable deity in the Congress party religion.

Already, other heirs apparent to the Congress monarchy are treated with nearly apotheosized reverence. Look at the picture at the top of this post, from this article on Rahul Gandhi's birthday. Rahul Gandhi is not even in attendance!

In another example of this deification of the Gandhi family, Congress workers have put up a poster depicting Sonia as the goddess Durga in Moradabad; see the picture at top.

Some argue that this is a fault of the lower level Congress workers and not the main leaders; however, the leadership reinforces this kind of behaviour by doling out perks to Gandhi Family loyalists. For example, it is well known that the Congress's current candidate for the post of president, Pratibha Patil, is a long-term Family loyalist who stood by Indira Gandhi even through the Emergency. (According to this report, she even added her own touches to the Emergency, including forcible sterilization.)

While the Congress party itself is fairly functional, the idea that the ruling party should be so staunchly monarchic, and so anti-democratic, is disturbing. If those are the ideals they hold, how can they be trusted to rule the country?

Is Hindutva good for Hinduism?

2007-05-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

The golden ages of Hinduism began ending around 1000 CE, when Ghazni and other invaders realized that rich plunder was to be had and turned their sights towards India. Since that time, Hinduism has been in decline for a millenium, suffering periods of intermittent persecution and defamation at the hands of various Muslim dynasties and Westerners.

Hindutva rose as a response to such persecution and defamation during the independence struggle. Hinduism had survived centuries of Muslim rule, only to be defamed by the British who were motivated by multiple factors: orthodox Christian distaste, a need to justify colonialism, and the need for a divide-and-rule wedge between Indian Hindus and Muslims. Several Hindus evolved a body of thought which ascribed positive qualities to Hinduism, recognized its past and strongly opposed its orchestrated erosion and systematic denigration. Today, Hindutva is represented by organizations such as the Shiv Sena (SS), Bajrang Dal (BD), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHS) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The stated goals of the Hindutva bodies seem reasonable: stop conversions of Hindus to other religions, ensure a level playing field for Hindus in India and stop denigration of Hinduism in popular media. Some of the functions that these organizations perform are essential if Hinduism and Indian culture are to survive. However, they often adopt methods that turn them into liabilities rather than assets to Hinduism.

Why Hindutva is Good for Hinduism

Proselytism. Hindus traditionally did not proactively combat erosion via proselytism, restricting their opposition to resisting conversion. With the well-developed propaganda techniques and large funds available to Christian and Muslim organizations in India, a strong anti-conversion stance is required within Hinduism to prevent erosion.
Scholarship. During the years of Hindu decline, Hindu scholarship was widely neglected among the Hindu population. This is in contrast to most of the other major religions, including Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It resulted in a dearth of articulation for Hindu viewpoints, and most scholarly voices on Hinduism were those of Westerners. Hindutva provides a Hindu-point-of-view critical evaluation of non-Hindu viewpoints on Hinduism.
National Unity. The Hindutva movement strongly espouses the integration and non-differentiation of castes within Hinduism. In this sense, it acts as a counterfoil to parties like the Congress, which profit by splitting the country along caste lines. The Hindutva movement's solution, involving integration of all castes into leadership positions at all levels and fluidity of caste definitions, is preferable to the divisive policy of crystallizing caste lines by providing hard caste definitions and differential benefits to different castes.

Why Hindutva is Bad for Hinduism

Proselytism. While Hindutva serves as a foil to proselytism, the methods adopted by Hindutva parties, which sometimes include physical violence, threats and rioting, lead to an unsympathetic attitude towards them. By association, any anti-proselytism movement, and sometimes even Hinduism itself, is viewed as violent. A major problem is that this viewpoint can take root even among Hindus (especially educated ones), who then distance themselves from any anti-proselytism stance.
Scholarship. Hindutva provides critical evaluation of Western commentary on India. However, a lot of Hindutva scholarship and argument is of the quack variety. Unfortunately, it is clear from their writings that most Hindutva commentators have reached their conclusions even before examining the evidence, and the evidence is often manipulated and partial. Even respectable scholars whose views happen to agree with Hindutva positions are immediately suspect because of this. Additionally, Hindutva proponents are wont to subject scholars and artists they disagree with to violent defamation and even physical threats. This completely erodes any credibility that they might otherwise have had, since they are unable to participate in critical discourse. Again, Hinduism as a whole suffers, by association and because of errant behaviour by its self-proclaimed champions.
National Unity. Hindutva actions are a form of feudalism that tend to polarize the nation. It is an ineluctable fact that India has large minorities of non-Hindus. This is not likely to ever change. The extreme steps taken by Hindutva organizations tend to create divisions along religious lines. While Hindutva organizations seem to work for Hindu unity, they simultaneously cause inter-religious rifts.

Dera Sacha Sauda versus The Sikhs

2007-05-27T17:32:00.001-07:00

The recent violence in Punjab and Haryana over the Dera Sacha Sauda chief's choice of dress highlights one of the most fundamental problems in India. This is a problem which runs deeper than something like corruption or overpopulation (not to play down the importance of those issues).

The Sikhs (or anyone else) have no right to tell anyone how to dress. Blasphemy, in any form, is not an offense in any civilized society. Everyone should have the freedom to say and do whatever they please -- as long as it is not designed to cause disturbances. Unfortunately, the Sikhs in Punjab have failed to recognize this.

The recent incidents are neither isolated nor unusual. Second year students in colleges think they have the right to rag incoming freshmen. RSS and VHP activists think it is their right to smash the offices of newspapers that publish anything they disagree with. Naga christians think they have the right to chase Hindus out of Nagaland. National governments think it is perfectly fine to imprison and torture anyone who says anything against a minister (an outstanding example: the Emergency of Indira Gandhi). Soldiers think it is normal to torture Kashmiri kids, and kill them if they refuse to cooperate. Muslim organizations think it is their right to serve death sentences on authors who disagree with anything in the Quran. The Naxalites think they can dispense social justice to (maim and kill) anyone they don't like. Marathas think they have the right to prevent non-Marathas from working in Maharashtra. The CPI(M) thought it was within its rights to order its cadres to cut thumbs off villagers who don't vote for the party. Indians everywhere thought they could attack any Sikh in the aftermath of assassination in 1984. The police everywhere think it is their right to thrash and torture everybody in jail cells.

This lack of respect for individual civil liberties is characteristic of India. Individuals and organizations suffer from a God complex: "if it is within my power, I have the right to do it". The Dera Sacha Sauda incidents just serve to illustrate a greater malaise.

Getting back to the Dera Sacha Sauda affair, police have registered an FIR against the head of the Dera Sacha Sauda. This may be proper procedure when complaints are made against him, but it is surprising that the police is doing nothing about the rioting hordes who mortally threatened Dera members.

So, what are civil liberties worth? One of the questions we Indians must ask ourselves is this: "Do we serve our collective national soul better by granting civil liberties to others who disagree with us, or by aggressively enforcing our own opinions?"

The Natures of India and the U.S.A.

2007-05-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

In the U.S.A., there is a sense that India is on the brink of something like a world takeover and is about to catapult itself into advanced-nation-dom. Many Indians have also started believing that this will be so, without paying attention to the fundamental systemic differences between the natures of the so-called advanced countries and India. This belief is no doubt spurred by the rapid expansion witnessed since economic liberalization in 1991.

But I think our pre-1991 economic structure accounts for only part of the backwardness. The rest is due to our ancient social structures. A long time ago, Indians invented a social structure that ensured stability and internal safety and removed much of the uncertainty associated with everyday life. This had its merits, but it also led to a society that is non-confrontational, too scared to assume leadership roles and afraid to innovate if it involves taking risks. Oh, it's easy to come up with counterexamples: in a country of 1.1 billion people, there are bound to be some who do all those things. But the average Indian is more likely to be a sheep than the average American, and less likely to be a lion.

Looking at this whole issue through a Dennett-ish Darwinian lens, one can see pseudo-evolutionary forces at work everywhere. Indians are probably among the most inbred people on the planet, and it shows in the number of congenital diseases and the general state of health. Our safety nets, which include nearly guaranteed intra-tribe marriage, seem to have nibbled away at our gene pool over the centuries until we remain a tired and spent population. In social terms we remain "safe", preferring life paths that lead to stability rather than achievement. Removing the bonds of what Gurcharan Das calls the License Raj is only the first step. The important question is, can we shed the bonds of our own degenerative culture?

The answer seems to be in the affirmative, as Western influences and the powerful new media wear down cultural barriers and our own Bollywood films encourage us to rebel against ancient socio-cultural mores. Cross-cultural marriages and heterodox life patterns are increasingly taking hold. But in adopting such novelties, is India headed towards a major shark-jump? Will the India of tomorrow be so different that it is not recognizably Indian? I think the answer is yes.

The U.S.A., in contrast to India, is founded on principles of evolutionary efficiency. America is not just a country, although it is strongly tied to its real estate. America is a meme, a concept: a country defined by the intelligence and ability of its inhabitants at any given point of time. The inhabitants themselves are less important than what they can contribute to this Amerimeme. An immigrant is only as important as the brains or labour that he or she brings into America; amazingly, this also applies to its citizens. The state gives citizens the opportunity to be useful -- but if they're not, they (and likely, their bloodlines) are doomed to oblivion.

India is a little more forgiving. A less-than-important man may, and usually does, father a multitude of offspring, some of whom may end up useful. No doubt this happens in America, too -- but less frequently. America is less forgiving of inefficiency and error than India is.

Reservations - The Right Way

2007-05-27T17:28:00.000-07:00

Reservations are back in the news, and have been for a while. The Congress government has proved resolute and determined to implement reservations in sweeping steps. There are multiple consequences, including nationwide protests, accusations of a sacrifice of merit, concerns about the impact on the economy should reservations be approved for the private sector, increased polarization and mutual distrust among various socioeconomic classes.

The reason given for reservations is that in the current socioeconomic milieu, different categories of people face different challenges in obtaining education and employment. The social and economic obstacles are hypothesized to be so large that, even if education assistance is substituted for reservations, the impact would not be sufficient to ensure sustainable overall equality.

Multiple Index Related Affirmative Action (MIRAA)

One question that arises often is, why only caste? It would appear that the optimal way to ensure equality would be to use a basket of indicators including caste, gender, economic status etc. One such basket, named Multiple Index Related Affirmative Action (MIRAA), has been suggested by Prof. Purushottam Agrawal. The argument for using caste alone is that caste is the biggest indicator of underdevelopment. Indices such as MIRAA could certainly be more effective in improving the condition of people than caste alone, since they would allow reservations to be effectively targeted at the people who need them the most.

To understand MIRAA, we first consider the basket of socioeconomic indicators it suggests. The primary considerations when choosing such indicators should be as follows:

The indicators should be indicative of education and employment levels
Information on the indicators should be readily available

The indicators considered by Prof. Agrawal under MIRAA are the following:

Caste/Tribe
Gender
Economic status
Kind of schooling received
Region where candidate spent formative years
Educational status of parents/family

Each candidate is awarded 0 to 5 points based on his/her status on each of these indicators, for a maximum of 30 points. This then forms 30% of the score used by any institution to determine admissions.

Debating MIRAA

This system is already being debated on Tehelka. Praise for the system includes the fact that is is proven: Jawaharlal Nehru University has used it successfully in the past. The system is a self-organizing score in the sense that it targets the right sections of society in a manageable way. The need to target the right people is mentioned by several readers on the Tehelka debate. The system also appears to balance the needs of the group and the rights of the individual. Put another way, 70% of the final admission score is "merit" based.

Criticisms include one from Amit Sen Gupta, another commentator on Tehelka, who believes that:

Targeting of affirmative action to a section within “backward” castes will be used as a powerful tool to deny the benefits to as many as possible

and that the system would be a non-starter on a nation-wide scale. Some readers on Tehelka also expressed concerns about the exact weights given to various indicators.

The points raised by Mr. Gupta bear thinking about. One strength of MIRAA is that it is a single transparently computable score. This is good for scalability. MIRAA also does not explicitly target a section within backward castes. It targets those who are suffering the most; as an implicit consequence, it will target backward castes. Within backward castes, it would target specific sections, but this is still implicit. The system as a whole remains simple, based on a single score, and thus not prone to overly high levels of manipulation.

The unstated but most contentious issue is likely the low overall weight given to caste/tribe - just 5 points out of 30, or in the bigger picture, just 5% of the total candidate score. Resolving this bone of contention is crucial; most of the difficulties with MIRAA are likely to be about the relative weighting of the indices and about the total percentage of the MIRAA score included in the total candidate score.

Objections by other readers serve to strengthen this assertion. The exact weights used to compute the score here were selected based on the individual reasoning, personal experience, or personal preferences of a person or some persons. The 30% number was arrived at the same way.

In a word, MIRAA as it stands today is a subjective system.

Making MIRAA Objective: the Modified MIRAA Score

Turning MIRAA into an objective system requires only a little tweaking of the system itself. It would, in addition, involve some survey sampling and statistical analysis.

To understand how to make MIRAA an objective system consider what we mean when we say that a person belonging to a certain category, say an SC candidate, is at a disadvantage compared to a forward caste (FC) candidate.

An objective way of defining the amount of disadvantage is the following. In an examination, suppose the average SC candidate scores 12% less than the average FC candidate. Then the SC candidate is at a disadvantage of 12 percentage points compared to the FC candidate. In the above situation, the SC candidate should get a MIRAA score of 12. This is the correct score because it neutralizes the real disadvantage the average SC candidate has relative to the FC candidate. It is objective because the score is completely data driven; personal opinions don't come into the picture. The data and methods used to establish the actual disadvantage would be a matter of public record.

The MIRAA set of indices can be used to refine the above further. For example, SC women may, on the average, score 18% less than FC men, while the difference for SC men may be 10%. SC women should get a MIRAA score of 18, while SC men should get a MIRAA score of 10.

The same system can be extended to include all 6 variables. In this modified MIRAA system, there is no artificial percentage attached to group needs, such as the 30% in the original MIRAA. Their modified MIRAA score is is simply added to their score in the entrance exam to determine the candidate's final score. This final score may add up to more than 100, but that is not a problem if rank (based on the final score) is used to determine admission.

The modified MIRAA system handles the balance of merit and group needs in a more correct way by restoring to each candidate exactly the amount of merit that he/she was deprived of by the socioeconomic system.

Potential Drawbacks of the Modified MIRAA Plan

This method appears to have a drawbacks as well.

First, it appears to reward poor performance. The strata that perform the worst would have the highest MIRAA score. Thus it could be argued that this system may actually encourage poor performance. This objection is not valid in reality however. A counterpoint is that, within each stratum, candidates are selected by fair competition according to merit. Thus there is a strong incentive for each candidate to perform higher, and those who perform lower within each stratum would fail to obtain seats.

The second objection is that there is no single standardized exam in India (analogous to the SAT in the USA) on which the difference in score between different strata could be evaluated. This objection can be resolved by using statistical methods (such as "grading on a curve") to normalize the scholastic achievements in different educational boards. Alternatively, if it is felt that there are fundamentally different categories of examinations and the score should be different in each, several categories of exams could be created, with a different table of modified MIRAA scores for each.

Discussion and Conclusions

The existing reservation system does not necessarily get resources to those who need them the most; however, some sort of assistance must be provided to those who have historically suffered from socioeconomic discrimination. Prof. Agrawal's suggestion of MIRAA takes 6 important indices, as well as merit, into account when computing a score, and is simple enough to be implemented transparently. If implemented, it would be instrumental in giving specific socioeconomic strata of people the assistance they need. However, MIRAA as it stands today faces some objections that can be traced back to the subjective origins of its scoring system.

A "Modified MIRAA" score is proposed that achieves the same objectives as the original MIRAA system but eliminates the subjectivity of the score, potentially increasing its acceptability. The Modified MIRAA is also perfectly fair: it compensates each socioeconomic stratum for exactly the loss in merit imposed by the socioeconomic system. As a consequence it also balances merit and socioeconomic status in a natural way. The price paid for the objectivity of the Modified MIRAA score is data collection and statistical analysis; however, this could also be done using simple and transparent protocols.