Visa Hardball

At the lunch table the other day, the Visa Venkateswara   posts came up for discussion, and it occurred to us that, given her name, Goddess Visalakshi should be able to beat every Hindu deity hollow in this very popular and lucrative game. She is certainly losing out!

The materials-engineer-turned-journalist Sidin Vadukut has a funny post (funny only if you have not been hit by a stray ball in the game of visa hardball) -- Borderline Personality: Put Your Game Face On, Passport Control -- on India's e-visa scheme. Its funny-ness comes from his advocacy of strict reciprocity in dealing with travelers from different countries. For example:

USA: When visitors arrive at an Indian airport, immediately ask them to furnish the passport officer with passport photos that are no more than one hour old. Provide photo booths in the airport where visitors can take pictures at a nominal fee of ₹15,000 per photograph. When they have submitted seven copies of the photograph, allow them into the country after confiscating their footwear.

In any case, the reciprocity-in-the-visa-game is turning into a source of pain for Indians traveling to the US, and vice versa. While this has been happening on and off for quite sometime (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, with the earliest occurrence in this blog being from way back in February of 2006), the flare-ups make it to the press when the affected parties occupy positions far higher that that of a grad student or a professor. The latest celebrity to be denied a US visa is the Director General of CSIR!

Here's the The Economic Times report -- Indo-US ties: Denial of visas to scientists thorn in the flesh -- by Pallava Bagla who points out that India has been quite good at dishing out pain to the American academics who want to travel to India. The following excerpt is about the troubles of Dr. M.O. Garg, DG-CSIR:

This week, India's leading petroleum researcher Dr M O Garg, Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi went livid on what he called was a 'denial of granting a US visa' for him to attend a scientific meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Garg heads India's largest network of 38 civilian labs employing over 4000 scientists with an annually budget of about Rs 3800 crore.

On June 1, Garg recounts that he spent almost half a day filling out screen after screen of questions to apply for his US visa which he calls was like writing down 'my janam-patri or life history', a day later in usual fashion he was finger printed and photographed. On June 3, he was asked to appear for the 'visa interview' which he did at 8.30 am and he recalls that 'questions for which the consular official already had answers' were popped to him which he says he patiently answered.

Then it seems his troubles began when he was asked to appear for another face-to-face interview at new window where he was now given a piece of paper with several questions and a 'tracking number'. Garg says having procured several US visas in the past this now meant to him that he was being 'singled out'.

Amartya Sen's Tenure at Nalanda

Rohan Venkataramakrishnan presents a dim assessment of Sen's Chancellorship at Nalanda: This isn't the first time Nalanda and Amartya Sen have been controversial – it happened during UPA too:

Controversies from the beginning

From the very beginning, the Nalanda project ran into trouble. Conceived as a way of reviving an age-old institution that had once been the world's first university, the project initially garnered lots of interest from East Asian countries with links to India. Parliament passed a law in 2010 to set up the university with the assistance of the Nalanda Mentor Group, which included a number of other nations that were a part of the project, meaning the Ministry of External Affairs rather than the Human Resource Development Ministry was put in charge of what should have been one of India's most important educational institutions.

Even before the act had been signed by the president and notified, however, MEA appeared to have appointed a Vice Chancellor to run the university. [...]

Of Cellphone Radiation and Sparrows

[UPDATE: Harmful but not lethal an article from the print edition of today's The Hindu newspaper has some content from the essay below.]

A wave has a wavelength, usually thought of as the length of a successive crest and trough. When continuous and unobstructed, a wave repeats this ‘crest+trough unit’ endlessly. If we stand at a location, how many such crest+trough units pass us in a given time determines the frequency of the wave. Longer the wavelength, shorter the frequency of a wave.

Sea waves and sound waves require medium (matter) to propagate. But electromagnetic (EM) radiation are waves that don’t require a medium to propagate. Sunlight is an example, called the visible radiation. All such EM waves we put to use can be placed in a slot in the electromagnetic spectrum, a continuous band of several wavelengths (and hence, frequencies) as shown in the accompanied graphics.

In photoelectric effect electrons are released from metals subjected to EM radiation bombardment. Importantly, this effect depends on the frequency of the incident radiation and not on its intensity. This was shown in 1905 by Einstein and is a direct proof of the quantized nature of electromagnetic radiation. In 1922, he won his Nobel for this proof. Take home point? Higher the radiation frequency of the EM wave, greater the ‘damage’ caused by that radiation.

Novartis judgment: Myth and Reality

In a must read write-up, Debunking Big Pharma's canard against Novartis judgment: Myth and Reality, Prof. Brook K. Baker, Professor of Law at the Harvard University and Senior Policy Analyst Health GAP, explains the essentials of the recent Indian supreme court verdict -- a landmark one that stood India up. Here is a sample to get you going.

Myth 8: The Novartis decision undermines the global search for new medicines.

Fact: Of all the canards, this is probably the most ludicrous. Big Pharma makes the vast majority of its profits on sales to rich patients in rich countries. Nearly 75% of global drugs sales by dollar volume in 2011 was in Europe, North America, and Japan. Indian sales comprised less that 2% of global sales. Drug giants do not make R&D decisions or shut down promising drug candidates because they didn't squeeze a little extra profit out of small market.

To the contrary, drug companies waste a lot of research dollars now trying to evergreen existing medicines instead of focusing on truly innovative medicines. They spend nearly 2 1/2 times on marketing and administration as they spend on R&D. Despite the "risks" of R&D they still retain more in profits than they actually spend each year on R&D.

Read more...

[Thanks Prof. Guhan Jayaraman for email share]

Blood and Gore in Book Reviews

John Sutherland has a terrific piece in The Guardian: Which book reviewer will win the 'hatchet job of the year' award? Not only does he have links to some of the juiciest of them, he even links to a review that demolished one of his own books!

I should make full use of this opportunity to link to demolition jobs that are pure fun: Matt Taibbi and Mihir Sharma. But they reviewed non-fiction, while Sutherland's piece is about reviews of fiction, poetry, anthologies, and the like.

Some excerpts:

Give someone a hatchet and, quite likely, they'll get bored of clearing the literary undergrowth and sink it in some luckless writer's skull. More so in a hothouse literary world like London's. And it's fun to watch, so long as the hatchet isn't descending on your own cranium. Every sport benefits from a bit of blood. Personally I stop reading reviews at the first mention of words such as "splendid", "magisterial", or "meticulous". Gore beats puff every time. [...]

I've published some 28 books ("Splendid", all of them), over what some unfriendly reviewers have recently been implying is an overlong career (notably that young stripe Sam Leith, damn him, who I see is one of the hatchet judges). Most reviews of my books have been friendly. But there's always been a couple of stinkers. And those are, inevitably, the ones you can – 40 years later – still recite by heart. More so as, when time passes, you begin to suspect your assailant may have got some things right.

My most recent effort, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, has received the kinds of review that would please my mother in the Spectator, the Times, the Financial Times, the Independent, the Evening Standard. But it got the loo read of the year award in Time Out ("top of the world, Ma!").

It also got a review of such savagery in the Telegraph that, if I were a betting man, I'd go down to Paddy Power and put a tenner on Jonathan Bate walking away with the 2012 hatchet of the year award, still dripping with my warm blood and brains. (That's the one link you clicked on, isn't it? Point proved). Forget loo read of the year. As far as Bate is concerned my luckless volume wouldn't even qualify as toilet paper.

The unravelling of Shiva Ayyadurai ...

... has begun.

Vinod Scaria has started a forum discussion thread on Ayyadurai at the Nature India website [Update (6 December 2009): Scaria's post has been removed by the forum administrators at Nature India; it's archived here, though]. Scaria is a scientist at IGIB (a CSIR lab), New Delhi; in his post, he says quite a few things that shatter Ayyadurai's self-portrait as a professional who -- before he gave up, or, was fired -- fought against immense odds for 'freedom for science' at CSIR.

Sidebar: Updates
(in reverse chronological order)

4. Rahul has an update in which he questions the ethics of Nature Network's removal of the forum posts by Scaria and Sivasubbu, while keeping alive Ayyadurai's 'commentary' on the front page of Nature India.

3. This post at The Shiva Ayyadurai Fan Club presents quite a bit of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Ayyadurai may have misrepresented his affiliation with MIT. If this suggestion proves true, it will completely damage his credibility.

2. Wow. Things are happening fast. A second CSIR scientist, Sridhar Sivasubbu of IGIB, has joined the fray, with a separate post in Nature India forums [Update (6 December 2009): This post has also been removed; it's archived here, though].

1. Check out the blog of The Shiva Ayyadurai Fan Club.

* * *

While we are not in a position to comment on what really went on in those meetings (for example, Scaria paints him as not just unprofessional, but unethical as well), we can certainly form an opinion on what is available on the web. Scaria does a good job of unearthing this stuff for us:

... I am not amused to find a Nature Biotechnology in his CV with the word “submitted” in small type and his claim to have written a commentary in Nature , while it is nothing but a Blog in nature India.see it for yourself here. The homepage even features a PDF with a complete nature.com logo.

Here's the entry for his 'commentary'; as of now, it's No. 1 in Ayyadurai's resume under "Selected Publications":

S. Ayyadurai, Commentary: Innovation Demands Freedom, Nature, December, 2009.

Scaria is right: this 'commentary' is something that appeared in the Nature India website -- which is distinct from Nature, the science journal. To claim that it's a commentary that appeared in Nature (within a couple of days after it appeared at Nature India) says something about the man who has cried 'unprofessional' at every bloody opportunity.

[Thanks to this comment, I checked out this page that reproduced his 'commentary'; at that time, it featured 'Nature.com' logo prominenty, right at the top, as some sort of a 'masthead'. Evidently, Ayyadurai has been following blog comments; the masthead now features Nature India.]

[Similarly, I'm not able to locate the 'Nature Biotechnology' paper (which Scaria refers to in his scathing post) in Ayyadurai's CV, probably because this entry has now been 'corrected'.]

Shiva Ayyadurai ...

... is back in the news.

1. Through a blog -- Freedom for Science -- written by card-carrying members of Ayyadurai Fan Club. The blog has also made public the report by Ayyadurai and Sardana (check the side bar of that blog). The really juicy bits that led to Ayyadurai's dismissal (he claims that he resigned) are in Chapter 7. The report is also noteworthy for its atrociously sappy (and shall I say, 'unprofessional' -- see below) 'Dedication.'

2. In Heather Timmon's NYTimes story on how expats who choose to return to India find stuff here to be "inefficient" and "unprofessional". And the poster child for that stereotype-laden story is none other than Ayyadurai, whose saga at CSIR occupies over a third of it.

   [Do make sure to read Timmons' report all the way to the end, to learn a bit more about DG-CSIR's unique skills in handling journalists!]

   I have only one comment: Ayyadurai may have a "fistful of American degrees," but his tenure at CSIR was a disaster. For someone who was hand-picked by the top honcho, he had every opportunity to make his job a success -- but he botched it. As Timmons' story reveals, "Within weeks, he and his boss were at loggerheads." [See also Ayyaduraii's report -- with its 'Dedication', the stuff in Chapter 7, the stupid 'historical time-line' in Chapter 1. If that damned thing is not unprofessional, I have to wonder what is...]

   When outsiders fail in their jobs, it's natural for some of them to blame the environment, the 'inefficient' and 'unprofessional' culture of the natives. Timmons has been rather uncritical in peddling the stereotypes mouthed by those who failed in their jobs, fled, and now use martyrdom as a mask.

3. Also in a Nature - India article -- Innovation Demands Freedom [free registration required] -- penned by Ayyadurai himself.

L'Affaire Ayyadurai: Was CSIR wrong to hire a 'foreigner'?

Before I get to that question, let me first link to this post by Rahul Siddharthan, who has linked to Ayyadurai's website. Here's an excerpt from near the end of his post:

... [M]aybe he was already told not to expect to be hired in a permanent position, and his report was his way of venting his grievance at the CSIR DG. Which makes it even more unprofessional. Regardless of the truth or otherwise in his observations, I don't think the report will now be taken seriously, nor should it be.

But that shouldn't detract from two key issues. First, exactly what sort of position was Shiva hired under in the first place, why, and what was his mandate? Second, the need to reform and streamline CSIR remains: what does the DG plan to do in this regard? I suspect the CSIR DG made a mistake (caused by over-eagerness to "get things done") in hiring V A Shiva, and knows it; he should now make amends -- first, by coming clean on exactly what happened; and second, by making sure the need for reforming and modernising CSIR is not sidetracked.

Let me now turn to the question in this post's title. It's triggered by this column (free registration required) in Nature - India by Prof. Gautam Desiraju (who, btw, is now a colleague at IISc -- he moved from the University of Hyderabad recently).

Desiraju frames the issue as one of hiring an outsider -- and more specifically, a "foreigner":

There is no dearth of qualified and highly successful scientists with long and enriching careers in India. CSIR itself has many such scientists. Some of them have obtained PhD degrees from prominent universities abroad and have significant collaborations with respected scientists from around the globe.

Most of these scientists are also well aware of the ground realities in India, meaning they harbour realistic expectations of what may or may not be achieved in India. In short, there is no shortage of hard headed, knowledgeable and practical Indian scientists who have lived and worked in India.

The thought that prominent research organisations feel the need to turn to foreign shores to find 'leadership' for their rudderless bodies is anachronistic. This can hardly be a colonial hang-up: not after 62 years.

Now, it's possible that Prof. Samir Brahmachari, DG, CSIR, hired Shiva Ayyadurai in spite of the availability of a more capable CSIR insider. While we don't know much about why Ayyadurai was hired, what we do know is that he turned out to be a bad bet -- however, we know this only after his report blew up so spectacularly in Brahmachari's face.

But, isn't it too much of a stretch to cite what is essentially a case of hiring FAIL as evidence to oppose -- or, to erect nationalist barriers to -- hiring of outsiders?

Unfortunately for Desiraju, he undermines his own case with the last paragraph:

The rot has set in deep within CSIR and elsewhere. Cosmetic changes here and there would be like dusting rouge on a corpse. In the end, we run the grave risk of perishing.

Huh?

Didn't he start this line of argument with how CSIR is swarming with "qualified and highly successful scientists with long and enriching careers in India"? How, then, does this mighty CSIR morph, in just a couple of paragraphs, into a "corpse" in which "the rot has set in deep"?

Nature on the Ayyadurai affair

K.S. Jayaraman has a piece in Nature entitled Report Row Ousts Top Indian Scientist (probably behind a paywall). Leaving aside the bit about "top scientist," let me focus on the new information in Jayaraman's report. In the following, bold emphasis has been added by me:

1. "Ayyadurai says that the report — which was not commissioned by the CSIR — was intended to elicit feedback about the institutional barriers to technology commercialization."

2. "Our interaction with CSIR scientists revealed that they work in a medieval, feudal environment," says Ayyadurai. "Our report said the system required a major overhaul because innovation cannot take place in this environment."

3. [Deepak] Sardana [co-author of the report] [has written] to science minister Prithviraj Chavan on 19 October saying that "it is not possible for me to continue working without your immediate direct intervention" because of the problems triggered by the report.

4. "I am more worried that the incident will dampen the enthusiasm of Indian institutions to hire expatriates in the future," says Valangiman Ramamurthy, the former science secretary of the government's Department of Science and Technology, who recommended Ayyadurai's selection.

Just one quick comment. Ramamurthy may have "recommended Ayyadurai's selection," but he's being silly in suggesting that it'll affect the hiring of expats.

Sure, Ayyadurai is an NRI, but are all NRIs Ayyadurais?

For the record, Jayaraman's piece does salvage the situation by quoting several others -- Gangan Prathap, Rajan Sankaranarayanan, and Samir Brahmachari -- who don't see things the same way as Ramamurthy.

Ayyadurai: "[DG, CSIR] believes he knows it all"

In the 42-page document Shiva and Sardana described Brahmachari as the “director general who believes he knows all even though he has minimal depth of information and domain knowledge.”

The duo accused Brahmachari of “maintaining a close coterie of sycophants, mostly incompetent” and not allowing the opposition views for any debate. [source]

That's from the now infamous Chapter 7 of a report entitled "CSIR-TECH -- Path Forward" by Shiva Ayyadurai and Deepak Sardana. This chapter is about "the multiple challenges to realizing a CSIR-TECH company."

The authors also suggest a possible solution to this "challenge" of having to deal with a DG who "believes he knows it all" and who "maintains a close coterie of [mostly incompetent] sycophants". Here is their suggested solution, in full:

SOLUTION: 21st Century Leadership Training both short and long-term to be repeated until basic elements of leadership are learned. Beyond book learning.

May I request you all to stop laughing, now?

* * *

A couple of quick observations:

1. If Ayyadurai chooses to pull this kind of stunt against the man who hired him (and whose support he needs for setting up CSIR-TECH), I have to wonder why he's protesting his dismissal.

2. Having vitiated the working environment with his report, why would Ayyadurai -- a man with 4 degrees from MIT and with 'rich' experience in starting and running companies -- want his job back? Strange ...

Patent balance sheet at CSIR

Hidden in the Mint story about Shiva Ayyadurai's travails at CSIR, there is this revealing statistic:

Over the past 10 years, CSIR laboratories have been granted 5,014 patents in India and abroad. The money earned from these was Rs. 36.8 crore, but the cost of filing them was Rs. 228.64 crore, according to official figures obtained by Hindustan Times (HT) through the Right to Information Act.

* * *

BTW, the previous post on Ayyadurai has comments expressing strong views -- both favourable and unfavourable -- about CSIR. Just in case you are interested...

There's nothing new to report on Ayyadurai, but commenters have also pointed to a couple of links that tell us a little bit more about him and his short career as a 'consultant' at CSIR:

1. MIT News (from September 2007): East Meets West: Armed with 4 MIT degrees, Shiva Ayyadurai embarks on new adventure:

   In the 26 years since he first arrived at MIT as a freshman, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai has earned four MIT degrees and started two multimillion dollar companies.

   This fall, he will use his most recent degree, a Ph.D. in computational systems biology, and a Fulbright Scholarship to explore one of his lifelong interests: the intersection of Eastern and Western medicine.

   Ayyadurai's upcoming project is the latest in a series of personal ventures that have spanned fields as diverse as electronic communications, animation and molecular biology. His experience shows what is possible with an MIT education, he says.

2. Rediff.com: Scientist vs establishment battle simmers in CSIR:

   According to Ayyadurai, it all started when CSIR Director General Samir Brahmachari gave him a handwritten offer and detailed job description of the STIO's post.

   In June this year, Ayyadurai was in India on a Fulbright scholarship. "At that time, a scientist whom I know said the director general of CSIR would like to meet me. I met him the next day and he invited me to join the organisation and make it into a centre of excellence," Ayyadurai said.

   In a handwritten note, Brahmachari promised Ayyadurai that he would be the CEO of various companies he spins off and that he would also be eligible to be stake in such companies.

   "I accepted it because in the United States if two CEOs shake hands, the deal is done. In this case, I got a written offer few days later and it was fine," Ayyadurai said, adding, "It was much later on that I realised that according to Indian law, he can't even promise those things."

   Meanwhile, immediately after taking over, Ayyadurai set his sights on creating a structure for CSIR-Tech -- a company that would work with CSIR scientists to spin off their inventions into moneymaking products.

The Curious Case of Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai

Ankita Anika Gupta of Mint has the scoop.

Here's a basic outline of the plot: Ayyadurai, a 45 year-old NRI scientist / technocrat, was parachuted into the CSIR system at a plum salary (by Indian public sector standards -- Band Pay of Rs. 60,000 + Grade Pay of 12,000).

It's not clear to me what exactly his mandate or job description was, but he ended up producing a report that was critical of the leadership at CSIR.

Result: he has been fired!

Here is a summary of where the two parties -- Ayyadurai and CSIR leadership -- stand:

“(CSIR) is attempting to remove me (in) reaction to my addressing well-known, intrinsic leadership issues during the course of my professional duties to serve the cause of Indian science and innovation,” said Shiva Ayyadurai in a 30 October letter, a copy of which is with the Hindustan Times. [...]

Samir Brahmachari, director general of CSIR, said Ayyadurai’s services were terminated because he was a “financial mismatch”. “He was demanding too much salary,” said Brahmachari. “Everyone told me I was pampering him because he came from abroad.”

With so much of he-said-(s)he-said in Gupta's version of the story, I still don't have enough to be able to offer a comment.

Do read that story, though. It'll give you a sense of -- and an opportunity, perhaps, to bask in some schadenfreude on -- the kinds of troubles that our institutions (and their leadership) are capable of inviting.

Republic Day Awards: A sharp reaction from a reader

Graded awards like our National Awards -- Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan -- necessarily involve some judgement about the relative worth of awardees' contributions in their respective domains. This evaluation of relative worth can lead to strong disagreements.

Sidebar: Over at Law and Other Things, V. Venkatesan has a great discussion of the Supreme Court's 1995 decision (in the Balaji Raghavan case) that reaffirmed the legality of the National Awards.

* * *

The post on this year's National Day Awards drew a sharp comment from Renu, who decided to follow it up with an e-mail. My own take on awards is one of utter indifference; who gets what is not a matter that's worth spending too much time over, particularly when politicians are involved in the selection process. Renu's letter, reproduced below with permission, has some strong arguments (that you may strongly disagree with!). But, as I said, I maintain my indifference.

Here, then, is Renu's letter (after some minor editiing):

I am still puzzled over this year's honours list. Little in it makes sense. After my rant on your blog here is one more email to tell you how upset I am with our warped sense of appreciation.

Sachin Tendulkar has done what exactly to merit the Padma Vibhushan? I am certain, deluded as we are, and Ajit Wadekar is, we will never find the nerve to award him the Bharat Ratna. Even then has he done more than Mihir Sen (who for many years was the only man to have swum five high seas straits in one year) or Rajyavardhan Rathore who narrowly missed a shoting gold at Athens, or Bula Chowdhury and Bhaichung Bhutia? Is cricket such a profound field of endeavour?

But there seems to be some sense of proportion among our netas and babus. I was outraged that Dr. Varadhan, this year, merited only a Padma Bhushan compared to Sachin's Padma Vibhushan, till I looked up Dr. CNR Rao's bio and found that the great chemist too has only gone the distance to the Padma Bhushan [Note: this is incorrect; A Padma Vibhushan went to Prof. Rao in 1985].

It was bad enough of Vajpayee to award his surgeon a Padma Shri for a routine knee replacement, and Lata Mangeshkar, a mediocre gramaphone on a string, the Bharat Ratna. But the MMS/Sonia dispensation has decided to steal a march over the previous government by honouring Asha Bhonsle with the Padma Vibhushan and Ustad Fahimuddin Rahimuddin Dagar the Padma Bhushan. The good Ustad should deliver a thappad in the face of the government, and like the late great Hemant Kumar, decline this measly token of recognition. The Ustad is one of the guardians of a dying art, Dhrupad, that dates back millennia. Legend has it that the Ustad's ancestors learnt it by meditating on the primeval Aum of Paramasivan himself. Dhrupad predates today's the popular variants of today's Hindustani sangeet - its khayals and thumris. Dhrupad's practitioners will tell you that their art was already a hoary one by the time of Amir Khusro and Tansen.

So if we lack the head to appreciate the sciences, we lack a heart to appreciate our arts as well.

And surely we have no soul either. Neither does Vidyakar or Udavm Karangal, nor Dr. Bundeshwari Pathak of Sulabh Sauchalaya, nor Baba Amte, that peerless pioneer of rehabilitation services find any mention in this year's honours list. It is said that Gandhi lost nothing for having been looked over for the Nobel Peace Prize. Similarly in ignoring Baba Amte for the Bharat Ratna and the Nobel, it is these systems of recognition that are poorer and mired in mediocrity.

Blogging, blogging

Quite a few articles about the rise and rise of blogging. WSJ's Tunku Varadarajan starts with the premise that the first blog was born ten years ago. His article has generated some controversy; start with someone believed by many to be the first 'blogger': Dave Winer, and follow the links (specifically, his own contribution in a comments thread).

Marc Andreesen lists the lessons he has learnt in his five-week long career as a blogger. Along the way, he cites this page of his from 1993 as the candidate for the title of "the first blog." He also says, essentially, that "original content is king":

... [It] is totally clear that original content is what generates readership, at least for most bloggers.

Some bloggers who blog a lot and link to a ton of interesting things every day have high levels of readership without a lot of original content, but I'd argue they are in the minority -- most of the bloggers I've talked to over the last year who have significant levels of traffic attribute their readership mostly to original content, and this is certainly true for my blog.

I can see this in my blogging statistics -- a piece of original content that goes viral generates way more page views than a piece of content that does not.

I guess I shouldn't expect this linky post to generate a lot of readership for this blog...

The Business Week has a story on blogs that make money. There's also a slide show on some of the more prominent money-makers. I have to confess that I am reasonably familiar with just one of them: Boing Boing.

In defence of DRDO

Remember the Indian Express' very harsh spotlight on the functioning and performance of DRDO, the Defence Research and Development Organization? You may also recall a partial response by the DRDO chief, Dr. M. Natarajan.

Now, R. Ramachandran, one of the best science reporters in India, pitches in with his perspective in an op-ed in the Hindu. But it is strange that Ramachandran's defence of DRDO starts with this:

Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that the money spent on the DRDO is a total waste. How is a mere one-twentieth of defence expenditure responsible for the apparent vulnerability of the armed forces to perceived threats? Or more precisely, compared to Rs.500-1000 crore of annual defence procurement based on DRDO technologies, imports have been around Rs.10,000-12,000 crore. (The current annual budget for capital acquisitions for defence is about Rs.35,000 crore.) Surely, the nation's defence ill-preparedness cannot be attributed to the "wasted" 2-3 per cent of annual procurement. Why is there no political or media focus on the 90-95 per cent of the annual defence expenditure and the manner in which it is being spent?

Ramachandran goes on to discuss some of the financial and operational constraints faced by DRDO. However, two things don't gell with each other. The value of defence goods coming out of DRDO's work is less than a 1000 crore per year over the last 20 years or so (Rs.14,800 crore for the period 1985-2005). Compare this to the actual DRDO budget for the last year: my figure is about 3000 crores, and Ramachandran seems to indicate that it is about 5000 crores. This is a pretty big gap.

While I was appalled that some in the defence services were willing to accuse DRDO of 'destroying' our defence-preparedness, it is equally appalling to see the DRDO side responding with insinuations that our defence people (who make purchase decisions) are motivated by things other than the best interests of the nation. Here's a quote from Ramachandran's piece:

... Any demand placed on the national defence R&D system should reflect such an assessment. Unfortunately, many of the Services' demands would seem to be derived from foreign vendors' sales pitches — what have come to be termed BBC (Best of Brochure Claims) in DRDO circles — and their lobbying network of arms dealers, agents (very often ex-service personnel), and middlemen operating in the country. As a result, system specifications (which constantly keep changing) placed on defence R&D would seem to mirror not the actual dynamics of the security environment of the country but the dynamics of technological evolution of the global defence industry, which the DRDO is expected to realise fully.

Clearly, the two arms of the same establishment -- the services and R&D -- must first stop sniping at each other in public. This sort of nasty insinuations -- veiled questioning of the other party's patriotism -- can do a lot of damage. They must sit together and sort things out.

M. Natarajan's response ...

... to the series of articles in the Indian Express (I have collected all the links here) trashing the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO). In a conference on defence finances, M. Natarajan, the chief of DRDO, made a number of remarks that answer -- only obliquely, of course -- some of the concerns. There's one place where he even talks about "uninformed reporting". Do read this Hindu report on his speech.

Harsh spotlight on DRDO

Update: Here are the links.

Articles:
1. Big picture
2. Missiles
3. Main Battle Tank
4. Combat aircraft
5. Who audits the DRDO ?
6. DRDO's human resources
7. Some success stories
8. Advice from V.K. Aatre, DRDO's ex-Chief

Editorial (13 November).

Column by Vinay Shankar who was "director-general, artillery, during the Kargil conflict" (15 November).

Milind Deora's column comparing DRDO with DARPA of the US (21 November 2006)

The Indian Express has an ongoing series of articles (links in the sidebar) by Shiv Aroor and Amitav Ranjan strongly criticising the functioning of Defence Research and Development Organization. The immediate provocation is DRDO's request for an "assured grant' of Rs. 10,000 crores (about 2.2 billion US dollars) every year for the next 15 years.

Using parliamentary testimony (and leaked reports), Aroor and Ranjan pound on the organization relentlessly for sloth, drift, delay, cost overruns, and misleading the country (with its slogans on self-reliance). They cite examples from DRDO's flagship programs: "the ... guided missile programme, the Arjun tank, the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA Tejas), the Samyukta communication system and Kaveri jet engine."

This sentence sums up the entire series of articles:

... if there’s one thing this behemoth of 50 laboratories with a staff of about 33,000 has developed to almost perfection, it’s this: wrapping itself around the flag to hide a record of delay and non-delivery in virtually all major weapons programmes.

Ouch!

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Thanks to a good friend for the e-mail alert.

Redeeming Shing-Tung Yau's reputation

After Silvia Nasar and David Gruber trashed   Prof. Yau's reputation, Dennis Overbye tries to restore some of it in his article in today's NYTimes. This new effort can at best be described only as a partial success.

[I]n 2003, a Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman, sketched a way to jump a roadblock that had stymied Dr. Hamilton and to prove the hallowed theorem as well as a more general one proposed by the Cornell mathematician William Thurston. Dr. Perelman promptly disappeared, leaving his colleagues to connect the dots.

Among those who took up that challenge, at the urging of Dr. Yau, were Huai-Dong Cao of Lehigh University, a former student, and Xi-Ping Zhu of Zhongshan University. Last June, Dr. Yau announced that they had succeeded and that the first complete proof would appear in The Asian Journal of Mathematics, at which he is the chief editor.

In a speech later that month during the string theory conference, Dr. Yau said, “In Perelman’s work, many key ideas of the proofs are sketched or outlined, but complete details of the proofs are often missing,” adding that the Cao-Zhu paper had filled some of these in with new arguments.

This annoyed many mathematicians, who felt that Dr. Yau had slighted Dr. Perelman. Other teams who were finishing their own connect-the-dots proofs said they had found no gaps in Dr. Perelman’s work. “There was no mystery they suddenly resolved,” said John Morgan of Columbia, who was working with Gang Tian of Princeton on a proof.

This new piece of dirt doesn't help Yau's cause at all:

In a twist, a flaw has been discovered in the Cao-Zhu paper. One of the arguments that the authors used to fill in Dr. Perelman’s proof is identical to one posted on the Internet in June 2003 by Bruce Kleiner, of Yale, and John Lott, of the University of Michigan, who had been trying to explicate Dr. Perelman’s work.

In an erratum to run in The Asian Journal of Mathematics, Dr. Cao and Dr. Zhu acknowledge the mistake, saying they had forgotten that they studied and incorporated that material into their notes three years ago.

An outrage comes to an end

It is atrocious that our media even dared to 'announce' -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that Prof. V.S. Arunachalam (former Scientific Advisor to the Defence Minister) was the 'mole' mentioned by Jaswant Singh in his recent book; such an outrage could never have happened in a country with strong libel laws. This episode must surely count as among our media's darkest.

Do read this HT column by Arunachalam to get a feel for what he and his family went through:

... [T]he front gate had to be locked to prevent people invading our privacy. That didn’t stop a few overzealous cameramen and reporters from squatting outside hoping for some sensational developments. What then followed could only be described as pure nightmare. I was left scrambling with all the phones at home ringing incessantly and all asking the same questions about my alleged betrayal. My factual denials didn’t satisfy. With nothing to hide, I decided to stay at home, despite a few well meaning friends advising me otherwise. In hindsight, I wish I had done that at least for the sake of my family members. On seeing all the calls and people waiting outside, my sister, a heart patient had a few episodes of pain and all I could pray was that the tablets stashed under the tongue would work their magic. My son who took all the calls in the night, refusing to even think that his father was a traitor, was a broken young man in the morning after hearing numerous summary judgments from speculators and sensationalist media-men.

The ordeal ended only after Jaswant Singh 'clarified' that "it was irresponsible to accuse me." Here's the concluding paragraph from Arunachalam's piece:

Many years ago, I stood before President Venkataraman in the hallowed hall of Rashtrapati Bhavan receiving one of the nation’s highest honours. Yet a few days ago, because of a whodunit gone awry, I was being accused by zealots of unspeakable crimes against my country. I now know the transience of such recognitions: “We are all naked when faced with the absurd”.

Monsoon forecasts

Technology is coming to the rescue of the beleaguered India Meteorological Department (IMD) to perfect the monsoon prediction system in the country. The weather office is working in collaboration with Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune; Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore; Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad; and Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation, Bangalore, to fine-tune the forecasting system. The mandate is to put in place an integrated method for studying the weather. Based on advanced technology, a dynamic model is being developed in collaboration with IISc — a welcome change from the present statistical model that is prone to inaccurate prediction.

From this story in the Financial Express. Given what happened   last year, IMD seems to have learned its lessons, and is doing the right thing by collaborating with other organizations.