Namma Metro

Namma Metro -- Bengaluru's very own Metro Rail system -- will go live sometime today [more here, here, , here, here].

An editorial in DNA has declared the arrival or Bangalore 3.0! .

Right now, it covers only a 7 km stretch from M.G. Road downtown to Baiyappanahalli in East Bengaluru -- in a direction away from where we are, but one of the lines will come our way (it's still about a kilometer from our Institute). All in all, when the entire project is finished, a fairly large part of our great city will come under Namma Metro's benevolent coverage. [There's also at least one special line that will connect the city to the airport, some 35 km from downtown.]

Historic day for all of us at Bengaluru.

* * *

Churumuri has fabulous pictures of the MG Road station -- taken one day before the launch. Eye Candy!

Hans Rosling on Washing Machines

Nine minutes of magic.

Amartya Sen on Learning from Others

In his NYRB article on Quality of Life: India vs. China, Prof. Amartya Sen makes the obvious point that the pursuit of GNP and its growth has a larger purpose: increasing people's welfare.

Realizing, probably, that a direct comparison with China would allow his critics to counter him with China's longer experience with economic reforms (and, consequently, its higher GNP), he uses two different lines of argument. The first one is a comparison with Bangladesh, a country with half the per capita GNP as India's:

GNP per capita is, however, not invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for those features depend also on other things that we do—or fail to do. Compare India with Bangladesh. In income, India has a huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of $1,170, compared with $590 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power. This difference has expanded rapidly because of India’s faster rate of recent economic growth, and that, of course, is a point in India’s favor. India’s substantially higher rank than Bangladesh in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) is largely due to this particular achievement. But we must ask how well India’s income advantage is reflected in other things that also matter. I fear the answer is: not well at all.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas young women still have substantially lower rates than young males in India. There is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh’s current progress has a great deal to do with the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the country.

What about health? The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPT vaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite having only half of India’s per capita income.

A second argument is about some of the bad policy choices made by China, especially in healthcare:

... the economic reforms of 1979 greatly improved the working and efficiency of Chinese agriculture and industry; but the Chinese government also eliminated, at the same time, the entitlement of all to public medical care (which was often administered through the communes). Most people were then required to buy their own health insurance, drastically reducing the proportion of the population with guaranteed health care. [...] The change sharply reduced the progress of longevity in China. Its large lead over India in life expectancy dwindled during the following two decades—falling from a fourteen-year lead to one of just seven years.

The Chinese authorities, however, eventually realized what had been lost, and from 2004 they rapidly started reintroducing the right to medical care. China now has a considerably higher proportion of people with guaranteed health care than does India. The gap in life expectancy in China’s favor has been rising again, and it is now around nine years; and the degree of coverage is clearly central to the difference.

Sen has a more detailed version of this argument in this Lancet article.

* * *

See also Sen's guest editorial in ET in December 2006 urging Indian states to learn from the experience of the other states that have done well on different social indicators.

Robert Reich: "With Nuclear Reactors, You Get What You Pay For"

With nuclear reactors, you get what you pay for

[... snip ...]

... Reasonable precaution means spending as much on safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.

Here’s the problem. Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.

This is why it’s necessary to have such things as government regulators, why regulators must be independent of the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.

WTF of the Day: DST Seeks Your Ideas for Better Skin Whitener!

In partnership with Procter and Gamble, the Department of Science and Technology launched a brand new crowdsourcing initiative: DST - P&G Challenge of the Month -- a contest in which people suggest solutions to a specific technical challenge, with cash awards going to the "most suited solution."

This initiative was launched just this month. Here's the first "Challenge of the Month":

Innovative Whitening Technologies superior to Hydroquinone

Current best topical chemical active technology for skin whitening is hydroquinone. However, it induces skin irritation and sometimes hypo-pigmentation, thus not practical for cosmetics/quasi-drug usage. It is also banned (or may be banned) to use for cosmetics in several countries.

Challenge yourself to look for Innovative whitening technology or approach that could reduce facial hyperpigmented spot and lighten skin tone equivalent or better than hydroquinone.

The symbolism and the irony are just killing me ...

Fifty percent limit on reservations

Looks like this arbitrary, nationwide limit is now history:

The Supreme Court today virtually lifted its 50 per cent cap on job and education quotas, allowing Tamil Nadu to exceed the volume if “quantifiable data” justified it.

The order implies that any state can now do a headcount of all groups it deems backward, place the numbers before the state backward commission, secure its recommendation for higher or additional quotas, and pass a law implementing them. Such higher quotas can no longer be legally challenged for exceeding the 50 per cent ceiling but only on other grounds, such as a faulty headcount.

Here's what this ruling implies for the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka:

The quota volume in [Tamil Nadu] can, therefore, rise even above the existing 69 per cent if the data justify it. Tamil Nadu would ideally like 88 per cent reservations.

Neighbouring Karnataka, which had enacted a 50 per cent quota for the Other Backward Classes in addition to 23 per cent for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes — raising the total to 73 per cent — too has been allowed the same leeway.

Till a year from today, the quota volume in Karnataka will stay at 50 per cent, but the state can within that period do a survey of backward communities. If its backward commission then accepts that the data justify a hike to 73 per cent or higher, the state can pass a law to that effect.

Karnataka wants 57 per cent reservation for the Other Backward Classes alone, which means a total quota volume of 80 per cent.

Must-read article of the day: The Single Mother's Manifesto

It's by J.K. Rowling.

Yes, that Rowling.

It's about the ugly politics of the Tories, narrated using a bunch of inter-related things: raising a family as a single mother, watching single-parent families "castigated ... as 'one of the biggest social problems of our day,' and the importance of -- and gratitude for -- the safety net provided by the Welfare State that the Tories treat with great hostility.

It's great stuff -- mixing the personal and the political in a way that packs awesome power. Excerpts won't do justice to it, so just go read the whole thing.

When the going gets tough, ...

... the tough run to the government.

Ooooh! That delicious piece of snark from Uwe Reinhardt is almost as good as this other slogan from Jeff Frankel: There are no libertarians in a financial crisis.

Uwe Reinhardt's piece is a great lesson in rhetoric.

Go read all of it.

A great commencement address by Dean Dad ...

... except that he never gave it at a 'real' graduation ceremony. He has posted the transcript:

In boom years, I've seen some folks succeed a bit too easily, and draw some falsely flattering conclusions about themselves. It wouldn't matter, I suppose, if it didn't lead to a certain smugness about the failures of others. I've heard it said that success is a terrible teacher; no less a mind than Aristotle suggested that the opposite of a friend is a flatterer. When circumstances conspire to flatter us, it's easy to lose sight of the breaks we've caught. Yes, we help create our own luck, but we do no more than help. You don't choose your parents, or your genes, or your time and place of birth. As hard as you've worked – and you have – others have worked, too, to make this possible for you. Ignoring that is both inaccurate and rude. Assuming that the chain of responsibility stops with you is arrogant and infantile. I've worked hard, but I was also born to educated parents of dominant ethnicity and culture in a world superpower during the age of antibiotics and abundant food. That gave me possibilities not available for a similarly hard worker in most other times and places in human history.

Among those who've been on the underside for too long, I've sometimes seen a fatalism that can curdle into misplaced rage. If nobody around you catches a break, it's easy to assume that the fix is in, that someone, somewhere, is masterminding a scheme to keep you down. Sometimes it's partly true. But jumping to that too quickly can defeat initiative. It can lead to habits that amount to self-sabotage, and to distrust even of the possibility of something better. Among unsubtle minds, it's a short path from that to rage and violence, usually against whomever is close at hand.

Both of these stories we tell ourselves are wrong. The world is far bigger than our puny efforts, as well as those of anybody else. The fatal flaw in both is the same; the idea that the world is organized around you, whether in the form of 'your oyster' or a conspiracy. It isn't. But our culture acts as if it is.

Links ...

1. Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby: "So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species."

2. Harriet Harman, the UK's Equalities Minister, "[denounces] the City [of London] as a 'breeding ground for discrimination and unfairness', [and] ... has taken action with a new Bill which will oblige companies with more than 250 employees to publish the average hourly pay gap between men and women. Companies have until 2013 to comply, after which an annual 'gender pay audit' will become law.

   Harman is confident that the onus will now be on to companies to show they are being fair to female staff, rather than vice versa. The Bill also tackles discrimination over age and class and outlaws secrecy clauses for pay.

3. Pratiksha Baxi in Law and Other Things: A Critique of Tabloidization of Law.

4. SocProf: In Praise of Strong Social(ist) Policy.

5. Tara Parker-Pope: What Are Friends For? A Longer Life.

Links ...

1. Mukul Kesavan takes on the silly notion that "the current Lok Sabha elections are best seen as the aggregate of two dozen and more provincial elections." A parochial election?:

   If the turnout of voters doesn’t drop in Maoist areas, that can be counted as a victory for electoral democracy. If state-sponsored vigilantism in the shape of the Salwa Judum, invented by the Congress and embraced by the BJP, finds endorsement in these elections and encourages these parties to fight insurgencies elsewhere with paid vigilantes, the idea of the rule of law will have suffered a massive defeat. If Telangana votes for politicians committed to the separation of that region from Andhra Pradesh, we might learn something about the validity of language as the basis of political identity.

   To imagine that these are local or provincial issues is silly. ...

2. Prithviraj Datta, a doctoral candidate in political theory at Harvard, argues against allowing expat Indians to vote in Indian elections.

   ... the political needs of the resident are very distinct from those of the expat. Residents, quite obviously, are subject entirely to the demands and the authority of the Indian State. Their political grievances can only be redressed by the Indian State, through its various forms and agencies. To them, therefore, the vote is an essential means of ensuring that their views are heard, their interests represented.

   This is not true of expats, however. Their daily lives are not mediated to the same degree by the Indian State. The sources of their most immediate political grievances are likely not to lie within the Indian State, but rather in the countries in which they reside as foreign nationals. To allow expats to vote as members of the constituencies to which they belonged while they were in India thus does violence to the notion of local representation.

3. 3 Quarks Daily features a Meena Kandasamy poem, "Reverence: Nuisance"

4. George Scialabba: Justice: A Syllabus.

5. Now that we live in the age of Google Profile Results, how can you manage your reputation online? I like one of the suggested methods: "Ms. Allison also changed her last name, which is another way to clean your Web footprint as is using a middle initial." [Link via Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam]

6. Miracle at Louisville: PhD degree in one semester.

Vikram Garg on India's Middle Class

Vikram Garg: Thoughts on India's Middle Class.

... It seems that for now these [middle class] aspirations are mostly consumerish and professional, not political.

But why not ? So much is wrong with India’s politics. What [explains] this most unforgivable disengagement ? Many different reasons have been proposed, but I think it really starts in school. Although the syllabus is now much better, when I was in school I mostly learnt about the Freedom Struggle, Shivaji and the Maratha Empire. I learnt a lot about what the results of the Freedom Struggle should have been and how a democratic India should be run. But I learnt absolutely nothing about what happened in the 50 odd years of a supposedly ‘free’ India. My textbooks were silent on the Emergency, the Babri Masjid demolition, problems in Punjab, Kashmir and the North East. They were silent on the day to day corruption. They did a very bad job of making me an Indian citizen. Add to this, the traditional nepotistic and self-serving attitudes of most Indians meant that we choose ambitions/aspirations with little regard to what effect our life will have on the broader society we are part of.

So in India today, we have a generation of young men and women who ‘dream’ of Harvard, neuro-surgery, nano-technology and New York, but there are few signs of environmental lawyers, quality journalists and film-makers, professors with India-specific research interests and politicians from the middle class. The entire nation seems in decay, institutions that are the fundamentals of the nation are collapsing, because the young blood that would have nourished them is now either in America doing a PhD in Computer Science or working in a tech company in Bangalore. For now it seems, middle India has abandoned the Republic.

Dennis Overbye on science and democracy

I think he overstates his case when he says, "Science and democracy have always been twins;" but I really liked the middle part of his article, where he defends science from "cultural and religious critics":

The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.

Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.

Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

Citizen Initiative: Never Forget

Never Forget   has been in the works for 2 months, and it went live this Republic Day -- yesterday. While the 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai is the immediate trigger (look at the site's banner), it is only a hook; the site is meant for changing the very way we are governed, by getting the community -- us -- to monitor our politicians by holding them up to their own election promises.

... [I]f WE, the people, who elect them, do not care to evaluate their performance periodically, WHO will be the appraiser of enforcement of promises?

We maintain that, as a collective force, we can work to keep track of what our elected representatives -- whether at the centre, state, city, town, district or village level -- promised us and how far the promises have been fulfilled.

How is this going to be done? Here's the Vision statement:

At the heart of our effort is the idea of promises that can be evaluated. We want to find out whether our elected leaders are implementing what they promised to do in their common minimum program/manifestos , and that can be done by periodically monitoring the progress on each and every one of them. And this data can be used by the electorate to assess performance by way of our ballots.

The other core principle that we base our endeavor on is that of verifiable analysis. Each and every claim made in the course of our effort, without fail, will have to essentially be accompanied by a reference either documentation or factual press release. We believe that this will give our work the credibility that is seen lacking in several current editorials and articles about the state of the nation.

The people behind this initiative are young, tech-savvy, driven and committed. I met one of them -- Animesh Pathak, a fellow BHU alum (he blogs here), and I still remember his energy and enthusiasm while he was describing this project to me.

Go check out Never Forget. More importantly, if you believe in the concept, participate in it.

India shining blogging

In the beginning, there was Good News India, a site meant for "News from India: of positive action, steely endeavour and quiet triumphs ~ news that is little known." While the site still exists, it has not been updated in over two years.

Now, the husband-and-wife team of Dhimant and Anuradha Parekh have started The Better India with similar objectives. Here's the blurb:

The Better India is an attempt to bring out the happy stories, the unsung heroes and heroines, the small good deeds happening across India and showcase them to the world. Over here, you will be able to read about the incremental progress being [made] by the industrious people of this country, the developments happening on the social and economic front.

Anuradha and Dhimant have highlighted several heart-warming stories, including the latest one on Writing to Save Cultures. Do please go over there and say hello to them! They would love it if you could give them some feedback. You could also contribute to the site through citizen essays.

Quote of the day (and a link)

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I found the quote from this Tom Friedman column on Sarah Palin's assertion that "in the middle class of America, ... that [higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes] is not patriotic."

[Aside: The Wikiquotes version reads, "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."]

Anyway, I wanted to use this quote to link to this Freudian Slips post about an important lesson any taxman or taxwoman must learn -- the earlier the better:

... [Y]es, that one file taught me that honest taxpayers are not a realm of fiction. They exist. I may not come across them very frequently. But I should accept one when I come across.

Diversity in American universities: Fact and fiction

First the fiction. Sometime ago, Onion published a 'story' titled Black Guy Photoshopped In:

In the spirit of celebrating diversity at Iowa State University, a black guy was digitally added to the cover of the school's 2001 spring-semester course catalog, school officials announced Monday.

And, here's a fact:

... Black students made up an average of 7.9 percent of students at the colleges studied, but 12.4 percent of those in viewbooks. Asian students are also more likely to be found in viewbooks than on campus, making up 3.3 percent of real students on average and 5.1 percent of portrayed students. [...]

Diversity is Good!

Scott Page, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies. Claudia Dreyfus of the NYTimes probes him on the benefits of diversity:

Sidebar: Scott Page's book has been reviewed by Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell. Three Toed Sloth's Cosma Shalizi has an article that goes into how Page's version of "diversity is good" is different from -- and stronger than -- James Surowiecki's "wisdom of the crowds" and the catch-all "division of labor".

* * *

Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that?

A. Because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.

People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call “tools.” The sum of these tools is far more powerful in organizations with diversity than in ones where everyone has gone to the same schools, been trained in the same mold and thinks in almost identical ways.

The problems we face in the world are very complicated. Any one of us can get stuck. If we’re in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place.

But if we have people with diverse tools, they’ll get stuck in different places. One person can do their best, and then someone else can come in and improve on it. There’s a lot of empirical data to show that diverse cities are more productive, diverse boards of directors make better decisions, the most innovative companies are diverse.

Breakthroughs in science increasingly come from teams of bright, diverse people. That’s why interdisciplinary work is the biggest trend in scientific research.

Sure enough, the interview gets to what this idea has to do with affirmative action.

Q. The term “diversity” has become a code word for inclusion of racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. Is that what you’re talking about?

A. I mean differences in how people think. Two people can look quite different and think similarly. Having said that, there’s certainly a lot of evidence that people’s identity groups — ethnic, racial, sexual, age — matter when it comes to diversity in thinking.

Here’s the bottom line: I myself am an affirmative action child. I got into the University of Michigan in the 1980s on a program. I’m from a rural part of Michigan. No calculus in high school. So I was given bonus points toward undergraduate admissions.

If the policy had been to consider mainly grades and SATs and not to make room for some geographic diversity, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten in.

Are bloggers like real journalists?

Not all bloggers, for sure. But there are quite a few whose work would qualify as journalism -- in the sense of reporting -- of both news and investigative kinds. Want some examples? Take a look at journalism professor Jay Rosen's stinging response to a clueless op-ed in LATimes. Among the examples, this is my favourite:

2003 to present. Groklaw becomes the go-to source for coverage of SCO vs. IBM. Law blog -- one obsessive blogger, plus readers -- takes on saturation coverage of key lawsuit involving open-source software, becomes an authoritative source of knowledge for the case's participants, who have never seen anything like it.

On being a Dalit student at AIIMS

I had been to school at the Navodaya Vidyalaya for seven years, and I knew about casteism from my experience there, but it was nothing compared to AIIMS. In school, I used to think I wouldn’t have to go through the same humiliations if I were at a big institution. I came to the biggest of them all, but in vain. At least we would eat together at Navodaya.

That's from Ajay Kumar Singh's deeply moving piece in the latest issue of Tehelka. [Hat tip: Shivam Vij].