India's industrial renaissance

Anand Giridharadas has this story in today's NYTimes about the industrial renaissance in India:

Here in Tamil Nadu State, where the changes are the fastest, global corporations are already taking advantage of this shift toward manufacturing. Victoria's Secret buys 6.5 million bras a year in this city, roughly one-tenth of its global total, from a factory run by Limited Brands, the parent company. Nokia recently erected a high-volume factory here that it says will produce more than 30 million phones a year and account for at least one-tenth of its global output.

Hyundai Motor, which produces cars in Tamil Nadu, has made India its global hub for the Santro hatchback; it plans to ship 100,000 India-made cars to 60 nations this year, and 300,000 within two years.

According to this WSJ story by Rasul Bailay and Peter Wonacott, network management is poised to see a big wave of outsourcing to -- where else? -- India:

The latest wrinkle in outsourcing has come to this: The network-computer guy working for American and European companies is an Indian engineer -- working in India. Industry executives think the market for long-distance monitoring of computer networks, dubbed "remote infrastructure management," could be worth tens of billions of dollars, as multinationals try to cut costs and Indian outsourcers tighten security checks on corporate data they manage.

Growth is expected as factories become more computerized and remote services expand to include controlling plant temperatures from afar and even monitoring who enters and exits the premises. "Theoretically," says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., "anything on a network can be managed remotely from India."

Donald Knuth

In 1957, a lanky, bespectacled college student named Donald Knuth caught a glimpse of a beautiful stranger through a window and fell deeply in love. The object of his affection blinked enticingly back at him. It was an IBM Type 650, one of the earliest mass-produced computers and the first Knuth had ever seen. Although computer science wasn’t even really a science yet, Knuth was a goner.

As he would later muse in a memoir, “There was something special about the IBM 650, something that has provided the inspiration for much of my life’s work. Somehow this machine is powerful in spite of its severe limitations. Somehow it is friendly in spite of its primitive man-machine interface.” Knuth saw it as his passport to the new, man-made landscape of computer science, a world he would never tire of exploring.

From this profile by Kara Platoni in the Stanford Magazine. Knuth is the author of The Art of Computer Programming. Here's a quick tale about this multi-volume epic:

In the early ’60s, publisher Addison-Wesley invited Knuth to write a book on compiler design. Knuth eagerly drafted 3,000 pages by hand before someone at the publishing house informed him that would make an impossibly long book. The project was reconceived as the seven-volume The Art of Computer Programming. Although Knuth has written other books in the interim, this would become his life’s work. The first three volumes were published in 1968, 1969 and 1973. Volume 4 has been in the works nearly 30 years.

And, check this out:

He famously regards e-mail as a time sink and no longer reads it -— except for correspondence (printed out by a department secretary) ...

A thought experiment

Okay, let's try a thought experiment. Assume that you are just finishing high school in a medium-sized town, and you have a pretty good academic record: first rank in school, and top one percent in your school board. Your family runs on a modest income, but it places a great deal of value on education. Your hard-working parents look forward to the good times that will surely roll in when you start your career after college.

Assume now that you have been admitted to one of the IITs (yes, you went through a moderately expensive coaching program by mail). While you have done quite well in academics so far, you are also aware that you will be studying with a bunch of other bright students. Thus, you are apprehensive about your ability to do well in your courses in IIT. In the meantime, you also have an admission offer from a second tier college.

Assume now that you somehow 'know' (say, God told you in your dream!), a priori, that you are not going to do well in IIT; you will pass, but not with flying colours; let's say you will be a 'six-point-someone'. You also 'know' that if you choose to go to the other college, you will do very well (above average marks, first class, etc).

Given this choice between doing well in another college, and being an also ran in an IIT, which one would you choose? Why?

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'IIT' here is being used as a proxy for any top tier institution in any professional field: AIIMS in medicine, NLSUI in law, etc. Clearly, we are talking about institutions in India, where there is a significant (perceived) difference between tier I and tier II institutions.

And, yes, there is a point behind this exercise. I will post my own choice at the end of the experiment, whose 'success' depends on your honest inputs. I thank you in advance for taking the time to comment.

Two more interesting takes on reservation

In an ad, Lenovo urged companies to be "equal opportunity employers", by giving everyone a Thinkpad.

On the day (12 May) the election results were announced, a Trinamool Congress functionary was questioned about the firm grip the Communist Party of India (Marxist) -- together with its allies in the Left Front -- continues to have over the entire state of West Bengal. He quipped (and I am paraphrasing here), "Those guys control so much (more than 80%) of the Legislature that there is virtually no opposition presence. I think what we need is at least 25 percent reservation for the opposition!".

Now, here's a guy with a sense of humour; I wonder why he is still with Trinamool.

An interesting take on reservation

Many people who claim they oppose reservation are not really opposed to reservation per se, but are opposed to the kind of reservation program that uses caste as its basis. They are amenable to a quota program based on economic considerations. For example, they say that poor among the general category also deserve to be included in the quota. And, in particular, they are aghast that a 'creamy layer' end up cornering much of the benefits of the quota program.

Such people may find this Tehelka article appealing. The author, Purushottam Agrawal (who the blurb says teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University), presents a fairly detailed plan that takes into account multiple ways in which one could be disadvantaged. His is effectively an affirmative action plan in which people get 'points' added to, say, their entrance exam score; then, the 'merit list' is prepared. For example, a rural Dalit student from a poor family would get points for all three 'social handicaps': 'rural', 'Dalit' and 'poor family'.

I hereby propose a model of affirmative action that I will call miraa — Multiple Index Related Affirmative Action. As the name suggests, this model will take into account several factors when a candidate is considered for admission or employment.

In the specific situation of our country, miraa will consist of the following indices:

1. Caste/Tribe
2. Gender
3. Economic status of family
4. Kind of schooling received
5. Region where candidate spent his/her formative years
6. Status as a first generation learner/educational achievement in the family

If the points for 'caste/tribe' are different for different castes based on their relative 'social backwardness', this plan would certainly address one of the concerns I raised in this post over at How the Other India Lives: in the present quota program, a large number of castes are lumped together as OBCs, which could allow a few of the top castes to benefit disproportionately from the quotas, leaving behind a large number of really needy groups. So, Agrawal's MIRAA plan might help in converting a blunt tool (our present quota program) into a surgical knife. To that extent, I would support this MIRAA.

Having said that, I don't see it being acceptable to a large number of people, simply because it adds some complexity to the program. If at all it is even taken up for consideration, it will probably be killed by endless discussion on the relative number of points to be assigned to the different 'social handicaps' listed above.

But still, it's an interesting, nuanced perspective.

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Update (18 May 2006): In today's Hindu, A. Vaidyanathan (a development economist and ex-member of the Planning Commission) offers a similar perspective, but a different plan: restrict reservation to only those who don't pay income tax!

Indian doctors, made in China

Pallavi Iyer has an interesting opinion piece in today's Hindu about the growing number of Indian students studying medicine in China.

Currently, a total of 230 Indian students are studying for an MBBS at TMU. According to Professor Gao Feng Lin, Director of TMU's International Exchange Department, the number of applicants from India far exceeds the available places at the university. He reveals that TMU received over 600 applications in 2005 but was able to accept only 180.

Vishwajit Sagar, an agent with the Nagpur-based South East Asia Educational Services, recruited 107 Indian students to study medicine at Suzhou University in 2004. Last year, the number of new students at Suzhou had risen to 200. Mr. Sagar also recruited an extra 100 students for placement at Nantong and Jiangsu universities in 2005, which given neighbouring Suzhou's success, decided to throw open their doors to Indians as well.

"This is a win-win situation for all," claims Mr. Sagar.

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Thanks to Pradeepkumar for the e-mail alert.

Relief

After all the accusatory comments I have got for my previous post on Lok Parithran, this news (scroll down to the last news item in that page) brings some relief (via RosaVasanth's Tamil blog): Lok Parithran's Tamil Nadu unit has split. And what a split it has been! Just look at the allegations:

"We left Lok Paritran on Sunday in disgust after witnessing the favouritism shown to the Mylapore candidate Santhanagopalan, who was given all the financial support and workforce for the campaign. We got nothing by way of support. On the other hand, we were abused, humiliated and even threatened by our national leadership,"� said K. Rajamany, the Anna Nagar candidate and an engineering consultant.

He alleged that he was first appointed treasurer of the party but was sacked when he asked for accounts.

There is more! Mr. Elanthirumaran, who contested against M. Karunanidhi in Chepauk, makes this bizarre allegation:

�"... the party president and state general secretary had said that Mr. Santhanagopalan would get huge public sympathy and win in Mylapore if I got beaten up contesting in the politically sensitive Chepauk," he claimed.

Phew! If you will excuse me, I feel like basking in some schadenfreude ...

Women in IITs

Out of the 650 students in the undergraduate departments of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT-Kgp), only 32 are women.

An effort to trace why there are so few women in premier tech schools found that women constitute only one-eighth of the total number of JEE (entrance test) applicants.

To encourage more girls to apply, the IITs have now slashed the application fee for women by half. So, while men have to pay Rs 600, women pay just Rs 300.

The report (from three months ago) claims that this year, the number of women candidates went up to some 60,000 (from the usual 25,000 or so) this year. The results of this year's JEE should be out soon (does anyone know when?); we will see how well they have done.

In other news, girls in Karnataka have done quite a bit better than the boys in its SSLC (Class 10) exams, whose results were announced last Saturday. Pass percentage is 71% for girls, and 66% for boys. More importantly, this statistic is even more impressive:

While the ranking system has been abolished, all students who have secured 85 per cent marks and above, will have their marks-cards stamped “distinction”. As many as 15,954 candidates have secured distinction. Here too girls outscored boys with 9,236 girls obtaining distinction marks as against 6,718 boys.

Emotions and e-mail: they don't mix!

... Though e-mail is a powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major problems. First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.

In effect, e-mail cannot adequately convey emotion. A recent study by Profs. Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago focused on how well sarcasm is detected in electronic messages. Their conclusion: Not only do e-mail senders overestimate their ability to communicate feelings, but e-mail recipients also overestimate their ability to correctly decode those feelings.

Here's the link to the story by Daniel Enemark in the Christian Science Monitor.

Gosh, these guys actually got 34,000 votes?

Over at Vkpedia Vijay has an interview of Santanagopalan Vasudev, Lok Parithran's candidate in the Mylapore constituency in Chennai.

On economic policy:

Frankly, I don't have any concrete agenda. The fact is we are a new party. We know that there are plans now, and that they don't work. The existing policies are flawed. So, we need to do a lot of research on those lines and come up with policies that will work.

On the change that Lok Parithran wishes to bring about:

We know for sure, all of us, that the current political setup is not correct, and it has contributed negatively to our country's growth. You and I are in the same mess. I think it is time to clean up the mess, and I seek your support. It is all too easy to pass comments about politicians and the state of our country. We think it takes courage to stand up, and we think we have ideas to make things happen. [...] As I have always maintained, it is not about political power, but about political activism. ...

And finally, on the issue of reservation:

I'm very doubtful about introducing reservations in medical education. After all, it is a question of life and death. Why would I want anyone who is incompetent to be handling such a situation? Should we open up reservations in niche areas? I will not favour it.

Frankly, I am surprised that nearly 10,000 votes went to this party in the Mylapore constituency alone.

Questions you have been clamouring to know the answer to ...

Over at Scientific American: Why does fat deposit on the hips and thighs of women and around the stomachs of men? Answer: Harmones Hormones and sex-specific fat.

Over at Wired: What are the fastest-growing plastic surgeries in the US? Answer: those that deal with the aftereffects of 'gastric bypass surgery'.

New IITs?

Check out this report in the Deccan Herald:

To meet the burgeoning demands for human resources in the global market, the Centre plans to create more world-class institutes like the Indian Institute of Technology, in the 11th plan that will begin in 2007.

This was indicated by Planning Commission Deputy Chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia on Thursday at a function here to celebrate Technology Day, which commemorates the 1998 Pokhran tests.

“Many more IITs should be created to expand our capacity for creating skilled people. We are paying a lot of attention to have new IITs, in the 11th plan,” Dr Ahluwalia said, adding that the Centre would prefer to create new institutes rather than rename or upgrade the existing institutes.

If these institutions are going to be created from scratch, whatever happened to the plan to upgrade a bunch of 7 engineering colleges?

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Yogesh Upadhyaya points to this article in the Financial Times with news about the status of the scheme to upgrade the seven engineering colleges. See his comment below.

Visa Venkateswara Swami

Deccan Herald covers the "God of Sure Visas":

The 500-year-old Balaji temple at Chilkur, about 40 km from Hyderabad attracts plenty of visitors, the devout praying for a hundred different things, as at most temples. But none as many as those who want visas. So, much so, the (swayambhu) god here has begun to be referred to as 'Visa Venkateswara Swami'. It is a growingly popular belief, around here, that this god grants the most difficult-to-obtain visas to go abroad for jobs, post-marriage emigrations, or higher studies, in a miraculously short time after making a vow.

... when your vow is fulfiled, you come back and make 108 circumambulations. To help you remember the numbers as you walk around, the temple gives you little pieces of paper with 108 marks on them so you can keep count by crossing out one number each time you complete a round.

Priceless ...

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Thanks to my friend anc colleague Jayant for the tip-off.

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Update: Kaps points to this post about another such temple near Chennai; even a US consulate official recommends it!

Tutoring, outsourced

Thousands of U.S. students such as Del Monte are increasingly relying on overseas tutors to boost their grades and SAT scores. The tutors, who communicate with students over the Internet, are inexpensive and available around the clock, making education the newest industry to be outsourced to other countries.

Tutoring companies figure: If low-paid workers in China and India can sew your clothes, process your medical bills and answer your computer questions, why can't they teach your children, too?

-- Amit R. Paley, in this story in the Washington Post.

Analyzing Google

In the last several weeks, there have been a bunch of interesting articles analyzing Google: the company, its swagger, its business, its prospects, its competitors, and yes, its motto ("Don't do evil"). Here are the links to a few good ones:

First up is the Wall Street Journal piece: Management a la Google by the management strategy guru, Gary Hamel.

Next is the London Economist piece: Fuzzy math: In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one. The accompanying photo-cartoon itself is worth a visit! Also, don't forget to check out this short take by the Economist on the phenomenon called "Web 2.0".

Finally, here are two fine pieces by Robert X. Cringely: It Doesn't Take an Einstein to Realize Why Microsoft Is Headed Down and Google Is Headed Up (from last week) and Google Doesn't Have to Try Nearly as Hard as Microsoft, Yet to Maximize Its Success Google Ought to Try Even Less (from this week).