Adding Nuance to the Marshmallow Test

This study is from over a year ago, but I came across it only yesterday. Here's an excerpt from The Marshmallow Study revisited: Delaying gratification depends as much on nurture as on nature.

For the past four decades, the "marshmallow test" has served as a classic experimental measure of children's self-control: will a preschooler eat one of the fluffy white confections now or hold out for two later?

Now a new study demonstrates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus three minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations. [...]

Children who experienced unreliable interactions with an experimenter waited for a mean time of three minutes and two seconds on the subsequent marshmallow task, while youngsters who experienced reliable interactions held out for 12 minutes and two seconds. Only one of the 14 children in the unreliable group waited the full 15 minutes, compared to nine children in the reliable condition.

Michael Bourne's meditation on this study alerts us to the possibility that the way the original study was presented to the public was essentially an appeal to our own tendency towards instant gratification: we are all suckers for simple stories that gel with our own worldview.

Links

1. Moises Velasquez-Manoff at Opinionator: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

2. Andrea Peterson in The Switch: How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research

3. Sunshine: Graduate Application in Public Health: A Personal Insight into the US Application System. With the growing trend of American universities using a common application process for entry into their undergraduate and graduate programs, a timely critique of the process that is being used right now for admission to public health schools in the US.

Jessica Benko on Randomized Trials and Poverty Reduction

A neat article on the use of randomized trials in economics research into poverty reduction: The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor. "Hyper-efficient" is probably hyperbole, considering how some of the insights and solutions needed several years of hard field work.

... One of the most cost-effective ways to boost attendance came as a big surprise: treatment for intestinal worms, which caused absenteeism to drop by one-quarter. And it wasn’t only the schools receiving treatment that benefited. Attendance also rose at nearby schools as the overall transmission rate in the region dropped. The researchers calculated that, on average, deworming “buys” one extra year of school attendance for just $3.50, less expensive than any other intervention tested. This unexpected finding has led researchers to found an initiative called Deworm the World, which has worked in partnership with governments and NGOs to treat 37 million children.

Sendhil Mullainathan on Mental Bandwidth

The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less:

Imagine that you are attending a late-afternoon meeting. Someone brings in a plate of cookies and places them on the other side of the conference table. Ten minutes later you realize you’ve processed only half of what has been said.

Why? Only half of your mind was in the meeting. The other half was with the cookies: “Should I have one? I worked out yesterday. I deserve it. No, I should be good.”

That cookie threatened to strain your waistline. It succeeded in straining your mind. [...]

Many diets also require constant calculations to determine calorie counts. All this clogs up the brain. Psychologists measure the impact of this clogging on various tasks: logical and spatial reasoning, self-control, problem solving, and absorption and retention of new information. Together these tasks measure “bandwidth,” the resource that underlies all higher-order mental activity. Inevitably, dieters do worse than nondieters on all these tasks; they have less bandwidth.

Pronab Sen on "Steep Poverty Decline" during 2004-11

Ideas for India gets Ashok Kotwal, its Editor-in-Chief, to interview Pronab Sen, Chairman, National Statistical Commission, "on the recent poverty figures that show a steep decline in poverty in India between 2004 and 2011." This bit is particularly revealing:

There are various stories floating around to explain the poverty decline. Some say it is on account of poverty alleviation schemes such as MNREGA, some say growth has trickled down. This story is slightly different. How can one sort out which of these makes most sense?

Through much more rigorous technical work than I have seen up to now. Too much of the discourse is based on either ideology or seat-of-the-pants analysis or casual empiricism. I am afraid that I too am guilty of all three.

Anirudh Krishna on Falling into Poverty

Like many other urban and middle-class Indians, I was raised to believe that people must be poor for some faults of their own. But these grandmothers’ tales disappeared like smoke when confronted with the reality that I experienced. Our team probed the factors associated with falling into poverty or remaining poor among a total of 35,000 households. Drunkenness, drug abuse, and laziness together accounted for no more than 3% of all instances (see Krishna 2010).

People are not poor because they wish to be poor or because of some character defect. Most have become poor due to influences beyond their personal control. These are the factors toward which preventive poverty policies must be geared. I will write of these factors in my next posting.

That's Prof. Anirudh Krishnaa, a professor of public policy and political science at Duke, discussing his research at the Ideas for India blog.

I came across his paper -- Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor: Who Gains, Who Loses, and Why? -- way back in 2006 [I blogged about it at HtOHL; BTW, that site is no more, but lives on at the Internet Archive]. Krishna has gone on to write a book on this research: One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How They Escape Poverty.

Prof. Dibyendu Nandi's Appeal to Scientists

Update [9:30 p.m.]: Dr. Partho Sarothi Ray has been granted bail -- he should be out sometime in the morning tomorrow. Some good news, coming as it does on the 10th day of Partho's detention.

* * *

Rahul has already posted the text of a letter from Prof. Dibyendu Nandi, an astrophysicist and Prof. Partho Sarothi Ray's colleague at IISER-Kolkata.

Prof. Nandi sent his letter by e-mail to quite a few people, and at his suggestion, I'm also posting it here -- the idea being that the call for justice for Prof. Ray should reach as many people as possible:

Fellow Scientists,

I am writing to you as an individual and in my personal capacity of having known you. You are perhaps, by now, aware of the plight of Partho Sarothi Ray -- a faculty at IISER Kolkata, whom I consider to be one of our most talented scientists. Partho was picked up by the police for a peaceful demonstration against the eviction of slum dwellers in Kolkata and is still in judicial custody. I would like to bring to your attention that a website detailing the case of Partho has been set up by some of us and is available at:

https://sites.google.com/site/appealforjusticeforpartho/

Personally for me, it has been difficult to come to terms with this case; however, I have come to realize that whether we completely support Partho's activities beyond academics, or not, is not the point. What is important is that there has been a miscarriage of justice to one of our fellow scientists; somebody who has never compromised on his science and his teaching at our Institute.

I encourage you to peruse the material in the website, including the many news stories and testimonials about Partho that are in the public domain and make an independent assessment. Based on this, I also request you to consider giving Partho's case and this website wide publicity within your Institutes, Scientific Organizations, Academies and beyond and join the appeal for justice. If you would like to give a testimonial on behalf of Partho and are willing to have it hosted in a public domain, write to us at: forpartho@gmail.com .

Day 9 of Dr. Partho Sarothi Ray's Illegal Detention

It's important to remind ourselves: he's in judicial custody under on false charges.

Some updates:

1. There's now a website set up by his colleagues and students: Justice for Dr. Partho Sarothi Ray. [Update: A blog has also been set up on WordPress.com. This one is better because it allows readers to leave their comments -- see #4 below.]

2. The news of Prof. Ray's arrest and illegal detention has been picked up by Nature. Its India portal has a post by Subhra Priyadarshini, and its Nature News Blog has a post by K.S. Jayaraman, Nature's India correspondent.

3. Quite a few media outlets have covered this travesty. Justice for Partho site has a compilation of links.

4. A letter has been sent to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh -- after describing the case of Prof. Ray (and that of another professor from Jadavpur University, Prof. Ambikesh Mahapatra), it urges Prime Minister Singh to "personally intervene to resolve these matters urgently." You can read the text of this letter, along with a first list of signatories here.

   Update: The letter has also been posted at at the Petition Partho blog. Leave a comment there if you agree with the contents of the letter.

Arrest of an Academic on False Charges

Rahul has a post on the arrest of Dr. Partho Sarothi Ray (a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at IISER - Kolkata, and an alumnus of IISc, Bangalore) by the Kolkata Police following a protest against a slum eviction drive.

What makes this case particularly distressing is that the police have charged him (and six of his fellow activists) with crimes that allegedly took place some five days earlier -- on the 4th of April, a day on which Dr. Ray was elsewhere (to be precise, in the campus of IISER - Kolkata). With these allegations, the police have sought to keep them under their custody for two full weeks -- instead, the magistrate has ordered that they be sent to jail. Here's an excerpt from the ToI report on the court proceedings:

In the packed courtroom, lawyers Tamal Mukherjee, Shankar Mukherjee and Subhasish Saha bore holes in the police claim. Mukherjee said: "When the first arrests were made in the Nonadanga eviction case on April 4, the court had granted bail. These seven names didn't figure in the original FIR. Suddenly on April 9, the seven were shown as arrested in the same case. Police now claim they had arms and ammunition. The court gave them three days to unearth evidence but today, police could only show that seven bricks were recovered."

Mukherjee added: "Partha Sarathi Roy is a molecular biologist who has done his PhD in [IISc], Bangalore. He was in Kalyani when police claim that he led the attack on them. The case has been lodged by police. What's worse, the people who were assaulted by police had complained to Tiljala police with their medical certificates but no complaint was lodged."

It's heart-breaking that this academic activist will be spending the next several days in jail -- on false charges. It is important that we raise our voice in protest against this travesty.

Please read Rahul's post which has the text of a letter he received from Dr. Ray's friends and well wishers.

Also, please consider joining the protest by sigining this online petition. The State counsel's veiled threat of torture must terrify us all.

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.

Links ...

1. Jeanna Bryner in Live Science: Girls Get Math: It's Culture That's Skewed

2. Cornelia Dean: Women are seen bridging gap in science opportunities.

3. UW-M press release: Culture, not biology, key factor to math gender gap, UW researchers say

4. Sharon Begley in Newsweek: The Math Gender Gap Explained

5. The Econonmist: Fraud in Science - Liar! Liar!

6. Deepa Narayan: Poverty's Two-Way Street.

7. Roger Lowenstein's review of The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox.

ToI covers the IIT-K incident

Akhilesh Kumar Singh of the Times of India covers the callous way in which a boy with a snake-bite was turned away by a doctor at IIT-K's health centre. The basic details are essentially the same as those posted here as well as on Mridula's blog. The only new information we now have is the name of the doctor: Meera Batra.

Singh's report, however, does not cover the second incident in IIT-K in which a contract labourer died due to safety violations at his workplace.

AID comes to the aid of workers at IIT-K

This is just a quick follow-up on the IIT-K   incidents.

The Association for India's Development (AID) has a bunch of documents, which include a petition to the Director of IIT-K.

The petition seeks, among other things, free health care facility for all labourers and monitoring their working conditions to ensure that they comply with the laws regarding safety, minimum wages, and health and education for the workers' family members.

Over 400 people have signed this petition. Please do consider adding your voice in support of this good cause.

Thank you.

* * *

Thanks to my colleague Prabal Maiti and commenter Ravi for the pointer to the AID-India website.

Abhijit Banerjee on how well we understand the Economic Machine

The problem, in the end, is that we economists and development experts are still thinking in machine mode—we are looking for the right button to push. Education is one such button. Within education, there are more buttons: Economists talk of decentralization, incentives, vouchers, competition. Education experts talk about pedagogy. Government officials seem to swear by teacher training. If only we could do it right, whatever the favored “it” might be, we would be home free.

The reason we like these buttons so much, it seems to me, is that they save us the trouble of stepping into the machine. By assuming that the machine either runs on its own or does not run at all, we avoid having to go looking for where the wheels are getting caught and figuring out what small adjustments it would take to get the machine to run properly. To say that we need to move to a voucher system does not oblige us to figure out how to make it work—how to make sure that parents do not trade in the vouchers for cash (because they do not attach enough value to their children’s education) and that schools do not take parents for a ride (because parents may not know what a good education looks like). And how to get the private schools to be more effective—after all, at least in India, even children who go to private schools are nowhere near grade level. And many other messy details that every real program has to contend with.

This is from Abhijit Banerjee's article full of all kinds of interesting insights. Banerjee, an economist, is at MIT.

Manifestations of income inequality in India

The researchers found that for every three percent widening in a state's income inequality between the most affluent and the most poor, the risk for being underweight increased by 19 percent and the risk for being obese increased by 21 percent.

See this report for more on the study by S. V. Subramanian and coworkers at the Harvard School of Public Health. Here's another key finding:

In an additional finding, higher per capita consumption expenditure at the state-level, which is a marker of economic development, was associated with an increased risk of obesity. Yet, no association was observed between higher state per capita consumption expenditure and reduced risk for undernutrition, suggesting that economic development does not have a guaranteed connection to alleviating disease among the impoverished, noted Subramanian.

* * *

Here's what Amartya Sen had to say about "endemic undernourishment and hunger" in India (go to my old post for more):

... [It] is amazing to hear persistent repetition of the false belief that India has managed the challenge of hunger very well since independence. This is based on a profound confusion between famine prevention, which is a simple achievement, and the avoidance of endemic undernourishment and hunger, which is a much more complex task. India has done worse than nearly every country in the world in the latter respect. There are, of course, many different ways of shooting oneself in the foot, but smugness based on ignorance is among the most effective.

Two updates on 'Shocking'

Mridula has an update on the IIT-K incident. She also has a second update from which we learn about the death of a construction worker and the effort by the contractor to hush it up.

Both the updates are quite harrowing; they don't need any further commentary. Go read them on Mridula's blog.

Shocking

A child is taken to the health centre of a premier institution for emergency care and first aid. He is refused treatment, and he dies while being taken to another hospital.

Why was he denied emergency medical assistance? He was just a construction worker's child. In other words, he was not "officially" associated with the institution, so he was not 'entitled' to treatment at the health centre.

The following mail (which I received through an anoymous tip, but Mridula has confirmed the events described in it) is truly devastating, and needs no further commentary. Read on:

---

A Tragic Death at IIT Kanpur

Students of IIT Kanpur were shocked to receive a mail on Monday forwarded by the President of the Students' Gymkhana. The mail is attached below and a brief description of the later developments are given after the mail.

This is to share an incident which reflects the state of affairs for the disenfranchised in our Institute of excellence. I suspect this incident could not be reported by anybody in authority in the Institute and hence would not reach most of us. In this case too we got to know of it just by chance, as would be evident from the account, which makes us believe that occurrence of such incidents may not be a rarity after all, but that is just not shared with the community. A similar incident happened a month ago and the sequence of events are much similar. This account is to inform the community of this incident, acknowledge a feeling of collective shame that this could occur in an Institute which claims to be the best, and hopefully to evoke some collective action to prevent such occurrences in future. I am sure of the facts, as I got to know of it from a first person account and yet would not name anybody to avoid unnecessary personal vilification. This is the system and not the individuals involved.

On Sunday morning at about 4.15 am one of the canteen owners of one of the Halls was going back after work when he chanced upon a crowd of migrant workers at the security crossing near the Motor Transport/Air-Strip road. Apparently a boy, whose family had been employed in the construction site of the Environment Engineering building had been bitten by something poisonous (they were not sure whether it was a scorpion or a snake), in his sleep. The workers including the family consisting of the father a brother and a younger sister (his mother is no longer alive) had come to the SIS (institute security service) for help. The boy who was around 12-13 seemed to have been bitten around 3 in the morning and was alive though unconscious. The SIS guards (there were around 20-25 of them there) kept urging the workers to take the boy to the city hospital but refused to extend any help. The group of migrant workers did not know anything about the city, and this is usual because they are brought from far of places like Malda and Chhattisgarh by the contractor and are herded back at the end of their term. The canteen owner requested the SIS to lend their jeep for transporting the boy to the Health Center. The SIS guards refused to ask for their jeep (though several of them had their walkie talkie) and instead told this man that the boy would not be treated in the institute Health Center and hence has to be taken to the city. At this point the Canteen Owner decided to take the boy in his motorcycle, along with another worker to hold the inert form, to the Health Center.

At the Health Center, the person at the desk refused to entertain the case, when he came to know that the boy was not related to an Institute employee and was neither a student. The canteen owner tried to impress upon the person that the case was very serious and the boy may just survive if only the hospital intervened and the formalities and the expenses could be handled later. He also volunteered to get the health card of his father who is an Institute employee, as treating guests is routinely done in the HC. The attendant at the desk refused to comply but conceded to give the phone number of the doctor on duty. He told the canteen owner that he may call up the doctor to check if she would treat the boy, but not to mention that he was calling from the HC, but tell her that he was calling from one of the hostels.

The canteen owner called the doctor, who when she realized that it involved the child of worker, was extremely annoyed and said that this facility was not available to them. When the canteen owner pleaded that the case was serious and may turn fatal she apparently shouted 'which language do you understand?' and slammed the phone down. After that the canteen owner decided to take the child to the city and requested the hospital attendant to provide the services of the ambulance so that he could be taken as soon as possible and anyway it is extremely difficult to negotiate the GT road with an unconscious person. But he was refused even that. The boy was still alive till that point.

The rest of the story in short - the canteen owner took the boy to a nearby nursing home in Kalyanpur (about 2 kilometers from the institute) but that setup was not equipped to handle snake bites. Then he drove with the unconscious boy all the way to the Hallett (medical college) - the doctor on duty was much more prompt and immediately attended to the boy, but unfortunately he had already died. Then this canteen owner drove all the way back to the campus with a dead child in the pillion. As he ended his account 'bilkul kuch achcha nahin lag raha hai tab se - health centre hote hue ek chote se bachche ko marne de sakten hain - kyun ki woh ek mazdoor ka bachcha hai sirf isiliye?'

Students have investigated the reported event and their representatives are in possession of the names of all the people who are involved in this incident. The students arranged a condolence meeting yesterday evening and marched to the Health Center to demand an explanation from the Chief Medical Officer. After a long standoff and hours of deliberations with the authorities the CMO met the students but failed to answer many of the questions students had about the issue. Students are presently planning to get the whole campus community involved in the protest. What saddens the entire student community and me is the reluctance of the institute administration letting the entire campus community know and the tax-payers know about the incident. The reasons they give are beyond any sane argument. Witnessing a few incidents during my stay at IIT Kanpur has led me into thinking that this time too, the incident and related issues shall be buried to bask into what I feel is vacuous feeling of glory.

Supreme Court's war on street food

Vir Sanghvi is angry. In his latest column, he argues strongly against the Supreme Court's recent ban on the "cooking of food items on Delhi pavements." Here's his sixth line of attack on the ban:

Six: And finally for the so-called hygiene argument. I am angry enough now to be blunt.

Of all the arguments advanced to justify the ban, this is easily the stupidest.

Only a fool believes that it is hygienic to ban the means by which street food is heated in front of you to temperatures at which no bacteria can survive. Anybody who eats on the streets knows the basic rule: be careful of food that has not been freshly cooked; try and ensure that the vendor heats it before your eyes.

The stupidity of this ban lies in the failure of those who propound it to grasp this basic fact. Years ago, when I was editor of Bombay magazine, we conducted a survey of street food and hygiene. Our lab told us that the chutney used for bhel puri was often too full of bacteria for human consumption (though this is an arbitrary distinction because most Indians have acquired the ability to survive high levels of bacteria), but the report made it clear that anything that was heated to high temperatures was much safer because most of the bacteria had been destroyed in the cooking process.

And yet, the Delhi ban turns this basic truth on its head. A roadside vendor can still sell you a samosa or a kachori. You have no way of knowing where the kachori was made or what went into the samosa. For all you know, the samosa could have been made near a dung heap four days ago — long enough for it to be contaminated by bacteria. Because the vendor will no longer be allowed to reheat it or crush it on his hot tawa, the bacteria will flourish and multiply.

And the Municipal Corporation will encourage this bacterial multiplication — all in the name of hygiene.

CBSE (Class XII) results: Kendriya Vidyalayas lead the show

First, some interesting statistics:

• Total number of students taking the exam is 4,95,016, with 2,07,019 (42 percent) girls and 2,77,289 (58 percent) boys.
• As already noted here, 514 students had an aggregate score of 95 percent and above. This 'super-elite' group has 282 girls (55 percent) and 232 boys (45 percent).
• The 'elite' group -- those with 90+ percent aggregate -- has 8120 students, with girls enjoying a 52 to 48 percent advantage over boys.
• In the Delhi region, 160,484 students took the Class XII exam this year, and 131,484 (81.93 per cent) of them passed it. Accounting for 32.5 percent of the candidates taking the exam, this region seems to be the largest of CBSE's six regions -- the others being Chennai, Ajmer, Guwahati, Panchkula and Allahabad.
• Some 8.7 percent of the exam takers are from the Chennai region (which has Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Goa, Maharashtra, Pondichery, Andaman and Nicobar Islands). Of the 42,823 students from this region, 91.4 percent passed, placing it at the top. With just 62 percent of its students passing the exam, Guwahati region is at the bottom.
• More interestingly, the Chennai region accounts for a whopping 57 percent (289 out of 514) of the super-elite group!
• Among different types of schools, the Kendriya Vidyalayas have the best record: 93 percent of their students passed the exam. They are followed by Jawahar Navodaya (90 percent) Central Tibetan Schools (86 percent), independent private schools (82 percent) and other government schools (79 percent).

Information culled from the following links: The Hindu (and more), The Indian Express, Delhi Newsline, Newspost India (and more), and Hindustan Times.

* * *

The news about Kendriya Vidyalayas topping the charts is very interesting. They are fully funded by the Central Government, whose employees get preferential allotment for their children in these schools. This mechanism ensures that their children's education can go on un-interrupted even when they get transferred in the middle of the academic year. In a way, this may be seen as the bureaucrats' desire (and ability!) to take good care of themselves.

Unlike the other government-run schools which are plagued by teacher absenteeism and lack of facilities -- we are talking about basic infrastructure such as classrooms and blackboards! -- Kendriya Vidyalayas have good facilities, well-paid teachers and a good management that has a lot of respect for its stake-holders: the bureaucrats. KVs show us what is possible when the government shows a lot of interest in running them well, and in funding them adequately.

A lot of people have been clamoring for getting the government out of school education. Their primary argument is that the government is just incapable of doing a good job of it. Kendriya Vidyalayas offer us a great way to counter these critics. Unlike private schools, KVs have an admission policy that's not skewed in favour of the rich -- children of government employees get preference, irrespective of the income level of their parents. Having said that, they have not been created for the poor either! At present, they graduate less than 100,000 students; their website claims that they have nearly a million students on roll, and nearly 40,000 teachers.

I don't know the per-student cost of KVs; but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't two or three times the cost at other government schools. So, universalizing the KV model would require a far greater financial commitment from our government -- a commitment that it has been unwilling to make so far.

But the key message is this: KVs show us that excellence in education and government ownership can co-exist.

A revisionist(?) look at Nehru's legacy

In column in the Business Standard, the brave Jaimini Bhagwati takes up the tough task of convincing us to give Nehru's economic policies a break. Given the conflicting advice and demands from his associates and others, the 'correct' or 'optimal' economic choices were not at all obvious; and he appears to have chosen a middle path.

Within his political peer group Nehru had sharp differences of opinion both with those who argued for a lower government profile and those who advocated tighter controls. For example, in 1950 the then finance minister, John Mathai, opposed the creation of the Planning Commission. At the same time, Nehru was subjected to severe criticism from the left by Jayaprakash Narayan. It appears that Nehru decided to follow a left-leaning compromise among the several competing points of view. This has been corroborated by Arvind Panagariya in his article titled Political Economy of Trade and Foreign Investment Policies in India 1950-2006 (NCAER Golden Jubilee Conference, December 2006), which concludes that "it can be justifiably argued that if the influence of Nehru had not been dominant and India had strictly followed the prevailing academic orthodoxy, the outcome would have been more, not less, protectionist ... on balance, Nehru's approach produced a more liberal outcome in the 1950s".