Caste and religious discrimination in India's private sector companies

Here's the abstract of this paper by Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell:

This article examines the prevalence of discrimination in the job application process of private sector enterprises in India. The study is based on a field experiment where authors replied to job advertisements in major English dailies sending three applications to each call – as an upper caste Hindu applicant, as a dalit and as a Muslim. Using statistical analysis they assess the data and find that discriminatory processes operate even at the first stage of the application process.

The authors used a neat method: Look for recruitment ads for entry-level or near entry-level jobs in private sector companies. Send three identical CVs with different names that would easily identify the (male) candidate's background: upper caste, Dalit or Muslim. And wait for who gets the call for the next step in the process (typically, an interview).

What did they find?

... [T]here are statistically significant effects of both caste and religion on job outcome. Appropriately-qualified applicants with a dalit name had odds of a positive outcome that were 0.67 of the odds of an equivalently qualified applicant with a high caste Hindu name. Similarly-qualified applicants with a Muslim name had odds of 0.33 of an otherwise equivalent applicant with a high caste name.

I would say this conclusion is pretty devastating. We will have to wait and see how the industry people respond to this study.

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Thanks to Madhukar Shukla (who also has an extended commentary) for the pointer. I was keen to read the paper ever since it was mentioned in Ram Mohan's blog. I'm glad it's now available in an open-access journal like EPW.

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Before closing, I also want to highlight something else from the paper:

The most common answer to an application was no response whatsoever. Rejection letters were rare: only 17 applications (one-third of 1 per cent) resulted in rejection letters. In other cases, those we classified as positive outcomes, employers either phoned or wrote to certain applicants asking to interview the person (or in some cases requesting the applicant appear for a written test). There were 450 positive outcomes of this type (9.4 per cent of all experimental applications).

The response rate itself is less than 10 percent! Unbelievable, isn't it? What kind of professionalism is this?

Tehelka's Operation Kalank: Some links

Rahul Siddharthan:

... What happened in Gujarat arose from an ideology that has been poisoning our lives since well before independence; and that ideology is not just alive and well, but given respectability by the participation in our political process of parties such as the BJP and the Shiv Sena.

It amazes me that people bother to protest when the RSS, or its offshoots like the BJP, are labelled "fascist". The founders of this organisation, such as M. S. Golwalkar, quite openly modelled the RSS after fascist European organisations of the 1930s. The inspiration ranged from their supremacist ideology down to cosmetic details like the wearing of shorts at their "shakhas". And Hindu supremacism is every bit as evil as white or "Aryan" supremacism.

The ideology has not changed one iota since those days. From Golwalkar's time, the RSS and its offshoots have continuously striven towards the same goal; and all the "incidents" punctuating their history since then -- such as Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, the Babri masjid demolition, numerous riots including the 1993 Mumbai riots -- all stem from that ideology: Hindus (of a particular description) are supreme, and don't dare to be nice to Muslims.

Dilip D'Souza:

Consider, on the other hand, the situation of the guys who feel forced to defend the killers.

They have to make out that your concern is motivated by elections, or profit, or some other triviality. They have to resort to the curious logic that because you speak about some murders, you don't care about other murders (and if you mention those, then its some others still). They have to ask peculiar questions like "Who started it?" -- because they cannot express straight out the perversity they really believe, that hundreds of innocent Indians killed across Gujarat somehow had asked to be murdered. They have to pronounce that Gujarat (or Bombay, or Meerut, or Delhi, or any of many other places before) has "moved on" and we must not "reopen old wounds." They have to insult you, your friends, your family, whoever -- because they have to try everything to discredit you who asks for justice.

Bhupinder Singh:

... for the already beleaguered BJP at the national level, Mr Modi has now become an albatross around its neck. It is yet to recover from its electoral debacle of 2004, it is not clear who exactly its leaders are, despite courageous attempts to re-live their past authority, Vajpaee and Advani have both age and past record against them. The skeletons in the cupboard that emerged after Pramod Mahajan’s death call into question the calibre of its NextGen leadership that now is on the defensive, more often squabbling amongst itself if not, like Ms Uma Bharti, discrediting, the mother Party. TV channels are not banned outside Gujarat, and Mr Modi’s misdeeds will not go unnoticed by the substantial number of fence sitter supporters of the BJP.

Virtual teaching: Some of it may even be off-shored!

The university classroom of the future is in Janet Duck’s dining room on East Chocolate Avenue here.

There is no blackboard and no lectern, and, most glaringly, no students. Dr. Duck teaches her classes in Pennsylvania State University’s master’s program in business administration by sitting for several hours each day in jeans and shag-lined slippers at her dining table, which in soccer mom fashion is cluttered with crayon sketches by her 6-year-old Elijah and shoulder pads for her 9-year-old Olivia’s Halloween costume.

In this homespun setting, the spirited Dr. Duck pecks at a Toshiba laptop and posts lesson content, readings and questions for her two courses on “managing human resources” that touch on topics like performance evaluations and recruitment. The instructional software allows her 54 students to log on from almost anywhere at any time and post remarkably extended responses, the equivalent of a blog about the course. Recently, the class exchanged hard-earned experiences about how managers deal with lackluster workers.

Interesting stuff. Two weeks ago, the Freakonomics blog featured an interview with Jamie Gladfelter, an online economics teacher for students in -- get this! -- six colleges all across the US.

Today's NYTimes also has another story about online tutoring (and other such services) outsourced to India.

TutorVista also stands out for its well-known venture backers, its scale and its ambition. The two-year-old company has raised more than $15 million from investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. TutorVista employs 760 people, including 600 tutors in India, a teaching staff it plans to double by year-end. Its 52-person technical staff has spent countless hours building the software system to schedule, monitor and connect potentially tens of thousands of tutors with students oceans away.

BlogBharti celebrates its first birthday ...

The wonderful folks at BlogBharti deserve our appreciation. Let's go there and say, "Happy Birthday", shall we?

Prof. M.S. Ananth's lecture on higher education in India

Prof. M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-Madras, will give a lecture on 25 November 2007 on a topic dear to many of us: "The changing environment of higher education and some India-centric concerns."

His lecture is a part of an annual lecture series organized by the Kumari L.A. Meera Memorial Trust. Among the trustees is my friend and colleague Prof. B. Ananthanarayan who also has a blog.

The lecture is scheduled at 6:00 p.m. on 25 November 2007 (Sunday) at the Indian Institute of World Culture, B. P. Wadia Road, Basavanagudi, Bangalore. If you are planning to be there, please let me know; it'll be great to meet up.

Felix Salmon on blogging

In a post on blogonomics:

... [T]he pamphleteers of the Victorian era were bloggers avant la lettre, and blogging is, in many ways, simply pamphleteering with a lower barrier to entry.

Raj Chetty

Rediff features an interview with Raj Chetty, a hot shot economist at Berkeley. The interviewer -- Arthur Pais -- actually allows Chetty to explain his research projects and its policy implications, and they are all very interesting. Sometime ago, there was a profile of Chetty in the AEI magazine, The American, covering much the same ground. But the interview is far better, simply because Chetty is a gifted communicator, and because Pais lets him talk.

You became a professor at Berkeley when you were 23...

Many people wondered if I was a student or a professor, but one of the things that is great about academics is that it is almost purely merit-based. It does not matter how you look, how you dress, or how you act. Once you establish that you are an expert in your subject and have good ideas, you immediately earn people's respect. Youth is to some extent viewed favorably (unlike in other professions that have a strict ladder system) since breakthrough discoveries are often made when people are young. My colleagues treated me like anyone else in the department as soon as I arrived at Berkeley, even though most of the graduate students in the department were older than me.

With the students, I tried to take advantage of the fact that I was roughly the same age as them to make it easier to approach the professor. In one of my classes, my teaching assistant (a graduate student) and I started the class with a practical joke. She began the first lecture and pretended to be the professor. I sat in the back, dressed informally like the other students. I started raising several questions once she started the lecture, eventually asking whether she was really qualified to teach the class. I then suggested that perhaps I should teach the class myself. The students were quite surprised that one of their peers would be so brash. She said, "Sure, why don't you give it a try?" I got up and began teaching. The students figured it out and enjoyed the joke. It was particularly funny because one of the students asked me while I was sitting in the back if I knew whether this professor was supposed to be hard!

Thanks to Swarup for the pointer.

Subprime crisis, structured investment vehicles, and ...

... the sharp and sophisticated people who run THE markets!

Great video. Hat tip to Marc Andreessen.

Why we hate

Alex Gunz has an excellent overview of what psychologists have found out about this important question. The article starts out with personality-based theories (for example, "New research ... [shows] that people who are very low in the commonly measured “openness to experience” construct seem to be more likely to be both right wing, and prejudiced."). But it moves quickly to the situational causes, and this is where it gets scary. It appears that it's easy to make us -- yes, all of us -- create "Those Bastards Over There" and start hating them. It has a nice discussion of the situational forces -- competition, upbringing, culture, situations that make you feel low, etc, with vivid examples from clever experiments.

Here's an excerpt, that has a pretty positive message:

Prejudices, it seems, are more malleable than the people holding them tend to think. The end of World War II saw Germany and Japan switch rapidly in the Allies psyche from terrible enemies, complete with derogatory nicknames, to stalwart friends, demonstrating that even those prejudices that had been chiselled, literally, into granite, aren’t. Ever since Sherif's experiment, psychologists have wondered about the best way to help such thaws along.

Recently psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Trop (2006) gathered the results from hundreds of studies on this question (covering thousands of people), and used complex "meta analysis" statistics to take a powerful new look at the collected results. What they found is strong support for the ‘contact hypothesis’ - that personal contact between group members helps improve feelings. Contact even works substantially better when a number of conditions are present. From what you've heard so far, you won't be surprised to know that it helps to have a shared goal to work towards (like getting your bus unstuck), and that it is good to have a shared outgroup to rally against ("stupid vandals"). Other things help too, though, such as having the contact occur on an equal footing, with no group having higher status than the other.

As they say, read the whole thing. Don't forget to read the kicker in the final section!

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Thanks to the ever-excellent The Situationist for the pointer.

Three great posts on Tehelka's Operation Kalank

Prem Panicker, who picks apart some tired old arguments from those who support Modi/BJP. You have to read his counterarguments on his blog, but let me quote this part where he calls them out for vacuous name-calling:

... [C]ould we please stop using “"secular", “intellectual” and such like adjectives, invariably with the arbitrary ‘pseudo’ preceding it, in this knee-jerk fashion? It is an indication of nothing so much as the intellectual laziness of the person using such portmanteau adjectives. It has never been made clear to me what is in fact wrong with being secular, or an intellectual; in fact, it is none too clear how those terms are defined, in the first place. I believe religion is a matter of personal faith—and yes, I am religious. My beliefs, my faith, manifests in the privacy of my home; I don’t have this exhibitionist desire to parade it before the world. And equally, I believe that everyone out there has the right to worship whatever takes their fancy, equally in private, without allowing their faiths, their beliefs, to become a nuisance for the rest of us. Does that make me ‘secular’? And does the fact that I think my attitudes and beliefs through, and put them into words, make me ‘intellectual’? Damned if I know; damned if I know, too, how you decide whose secularism is true secularism, and whose secularism is ‘pseudo’. To use such phrases in lieu of debate is laziness; to then require the foreshortening of those phrases into ‘p-sec’ and the like is—what—an attempt to reduce the risk of RSI?

Over at Indie Quill, Amrita too takes on a few other arguments coming from pro-Modi/BJP quarters:

You’re not with us ergo you’re with the Congress: Grow up. I was going to make this huge speech about how there are more things on heaven and earth and blah blah blah - but why bother when it all boils down to this: Grow. Up.

I don’t know if they actually believe this “logic” or whether this is the catchiest thing they could come up with for the TV cameras but either way it’s absurd. There are those of us out there in the wilderness that don’t believe in a single thing that the Congress or the Left believes in, that are very happy and proud of their nationality, culture and religion - and feel absolutely no desire whatsoever in campaigning for a Hindu rashtra, feel belligerent about events that went down 800 years ago or want to shoot the next Muslim we meet.

I know the leaders of the Sangh Parivar think highly of Indira Gandhi’s leadership qualities, but take it from me: nobody bought it 30 years ago when she tried to tell us she was India and we’re not about to buy that you’re India either and that voting against you makes us anti-national. Mrs. Gandhi is what is commonly called a cautionary tale, people. She fucking lost her marbles and got booted out of office for it. Ask Atal Behari Vajpayee about it: I’m sure he remembers a few things from that time.

Patrix takes the argument to the trash-Tehelka crowd:

As far as the allegation of why Gujarat and why not goes, I don’t think anyone has ever stopped those individuals or any other media outlet from investigating other acts of terrorism. If Tehelka investigates Gujarat, you are free to investigate Kashmir, Delhi 1984, Bombay blasts 1993, and the more recent Hyderabad blasts 2007. More the merrier, right? Go and steal Tehelka’s thunder. We have plenty of acts of terror going around (unfortunately) to keep everyone busy for a long time.

And here's a bonus! It's from Rohit, who concludes that "It is high time Mr Modi is asked to leave."

Many of my friends on the Right (and indeed on INI) endorse Modi brand of politics. It is regretful. Notwithstanding Modi’s administrative acumen and pro-market policies, he can never emerge as the mascot of the Indian Right. After all, the starting point of any such movement must be respect for the individual irrespective of his community allegiance. A chief minister who presided over an administration where people were killed only for the religion they professed can never lead a movement which would place the individual at the pinnacle.

Tehelka tells us what we have always known

Indian Express: "What a sting operation in 2007 says has been in the public sphere since 2002. We have always known that the state in Gujarat allowed the gruesome violence to play out, when it didn’t actively collude in the killings."

The Economic Times: "The Tehelka-Aaj Tak sting operation adds nothing new to the shameful truth about how the state machinery enabled the ruling BJP and its sister-organisations to carry out the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat."

The Hindustan Times: "But in a way, all the grisly details that were aired on prime time TV have been recorded and known for some time now."

Some have seen this exposé as something that Tehelka did with the intent of targeting the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. That may well be the case, but that need not detract us from the 'on camera confessions' from so many people implicating themselves and so many others in the 2002 massacre. Not just politicians, but police and public prosecutors as well.

And the utter lack of remorse with which the men behind the massacre recount the grisly details is absolutely, totally chilling. For example:

Suresh Richard, an accused in the Naroda Patiya massacre, confesses to rape. He tells you he is not lying, because he is admitting to it in the presence of his wife.

As Tarun Tejpal tells us repeatedly in his editorial, "Read. And be afraid."

That message is for mere mortals like us. But how about the judiciary? Here's HT:

So while the Tehelka footage seeks to provide a ‘flesh and blood’ reminder about what took place in Gujarat in 2002 and has re-stirred many of us into sitting up with horror, the real business — that of bringing the guilty to justice and providing the nation with a closure on the episode — lies elsewhere.

The commission of enquiry looking into the Godhra train deaths and the subsequent mayhem was first set up by the state government on March 2, 2002. With growing criticism against the head of the commission, retired High Court judge K.G. Shah, being close to the BJP, the commission was ‘reconstituted’ on May 22, 2002, with retired Supreme Court Justice G.T. Nanavati heading it. One understands that what the commission is investigating is a vast collection of disparate, disjointed, rambling incidents that require interviewing many witnesses and many conflicting points of view. But considering the fact that it will be the report’s findings that will enable judicial proceedings to be carried out against the many individual perpetrators of the pogrom, it is time for the Nanavati Commission to deliver that report and set the ball in motion.

The National Human Rights Commission report, based on the findings of a team visiting Gujarat between March 19 and March 22, 2002, also mentions what the latest Tehelka sting ‘shows’. It had called for the CBI to look into those cases that it stated to be the very worst incidents “of murder, arson, rape and other atrocities, including many committed against women and children”. So, in a way, while Tehelka has jogged our memories and shown us what is deemed to be another visible and horrifying aspect of the Gujarat riots, the job is pending with the Nanavati Commission. Surely, any delay in starting the judicial process against the killers and their abettors — and there were abettors in the state official machinery — will be a delay in bringing justice not only to victims in Gujarat but also to the nation. Instead of sinking into the quicksand of politics that is bound to develop from the Tehelka ‘exposé’ in the months leading up to the December polls in Gujarat, let the Commission findings be expedited fast. Before a very real genocide turns into a myth that turns into a rumour that no hand of the law will be able to touch.

Questions about stem cell research at AIIMS

An anonymous commenter has posted the contents of an e-mail message raising some strong ethical concerns about the stem cell research at AIIMS. You may recall that this work is already the subject of a different ethics inquiry as the researchers published the same work in two different journals.

These comments come from an anonymous source, and I have no way of verifying their validity -- if any of you can do that, please e-mail me (or, blog your findings). Further, it's entirely possible that the AIIMS researchers have answered some or all of the criticism (though one allegation -- that they have tried some procedure without establishing its effectiveness in animals -- is pretty damaging). At this point, I just want to point to the comment, as the ethical issues raised there are quite serious.

Towards the end of that comment, there's also something about the callous way in which clinical trials are conducted in India. This, again, is something that is well known.

All in all, it's a pretty grim way to start the day ...

Jim Watson leaves Cold Spring Harbor

Here's the Scientific American story:

World-renowned geneticist James Watson today resigned as a top officer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), in Long Island, N.Y., culminating a rapid fall from grace triggered last week by racially charged statements he made during a newspaper interview.

"This morning I have conveyed to the trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory my desire to retire immediately from my position as its chancellor, as well as from my position on its board, on which I have served for the past 43 years," Watson said in a statement in which he heaped praise on the research facility to which he brought both fame and infamy. "Closer now to 80 than 79, the passing on of my remaining vestiges of leadership is more than overdue. The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired."

"Crime against peace"

According to an entry in Wikipedia, "A crime against peace, in international law, refers to the act of military invasion as a war crime, specifically referring to starting or waging war against the integrity, independence, or sovereignty of a territory or state, or else a military violation of relevant international treaties, agreements or legally binding assurances.'' As per the definition above, the war against Iraq by the US led so-called "Coalition of the Willing" qualifies in no small measure as indeed a crime against peace. It may be further noted here that the next paragraph of the Wikipedia entry reads, "An important exception to the forgoing are defensive military actions taken under Article 51 of the UN Charter.''

The basis of the launch of the war (to provide the pretext required to circumvent the "crime against peace" charge), was that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed "weapons of mass destruction" which was always known to be bogus, and was covered with the fig leaf of "intelligence failure". However, what is also known is that the Bush administration in the US has been suffused with enthusiasm for a doctrine of preemptive strike and regime change and for the use of massive force against an inimical government with nary a thought for the peoples of the country. Therefore, it may be readily concluded that it would not be possible for the Bush administration to credibly hide behind the exception referred to earlier.

That's B. Ananthanarayan writing in Lok Raj Sangathan . His blog is here. And here's the Wikipedia entry on crime against peace.

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For the latest demonstration of "the gap between what President Bush and members of his administration were saying publicly during the run-up to the war and what they were saying, and doing, in more private settings, " take a look at the Crawford Transcript, and the accompanying commentary by Mark Danner.

How does a normal person become total dickwad?

John Gabriel explains the process with a simple graphic. And I confess that I had to look up the meaning of dickwad even though it was clear from the context.

Link via Ann Bartow at Sivacracy.net.