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Shammi Kapoor, Undersea Cables and IT

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This blog is based on two interesting titbits from Harish Mehta’s The Maverick Effect . ~~   A surprising cameo in the NASSCOM story is the actor, Shammi Kapoor. Even though he was in his 70’s, he was connecting to the Internet (long before the Internet took off in India) to access world news. “He was an Internet enthusiast with an incredibly curious mind. He took to new technologies like a fish to water.” NASSCOM tried to enlist him to pitch the benefits of the Internet in India to bureaucrats and policy makers in government. He agreed to do it. For free. His celebrity status was a big attraction. He spoke passionately of the world it could open up, how he connected to his kids abroad via the Internet. “His personality and presentation skills helped us communicate the potential of the Internet to even bureaucrats.” ~~   In the 80’s and 90’s, there was the huge problem of terribly slow data links from the West to India. Even the laughably slow 64 kbps link could not b
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The NASSCOM Story

NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) is a trade association. It started by serving the needs of the still-in-infancy software companies, but has expanded to include BPO’s, R&D centers, and startups. “(NASSCOM is) India Inc brand builder, a think tank, a lobbyist group, an interventionist or more.”   This may sound like a reviled lobbying and backroom dealing entity, but as Harish Mehta writes in The Maverick Effect , back in 1988 (when NASSCOM was founded), it was a necessity. “NASSCOM was incubated at a time when it was an uphill battle to even get software recognized as a tangible product or a service, and something different from computer hardware.” Hard to even imagine such a confusion today…   Back then, the Indian body representing software companies was really a body for computer hardware companies, MAIT. MAIT treated software as the poor cousin. Mehta and a few others wondered if the only way was to form a dedicated body to represen
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Why Data is Critical to Governance

In Accelerating India’s Development , Karthik Muralidharan says: “The centrality of data for governance is seen by noting that the very origin of the word ‘statistics’ comes from its crucial role in managing the affairs of the state.” But India’s data systems are outdated. They are designed to track national progress, not for supporting day to day governance. The focus is on measuring visible inputs (how many schools?) rather than harder to measure outcomes (quality of education). The actual citizen’s experience is barely measured (was the service easy or convenient?).   Even worse, any data that is gathered is by the respective departments themselves. Who have a vested interest in making themselves look good. And who may not have the right data analysis or statistical skills anyway.   The lack of investment in our measurement infrastructure thus has many consequences: (1) money is spent on the wrong policies, (2) a focus on easily measured inputs instead of harder to q
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India's Population Growth Rate

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Is India’s population still growing? Or does the answer vary drastically across its states? This blog is not about the political (and therefore emotional) connection of those questions to the topic of delimitation. Instead, it is about the at-times surprising answers to the questions, without the political and moralising aspects .   Rukmini S’s post presents the data on this superbly. Even without China or Sanjay Gandhi-like birth control measures, the following has happened. “There was certainly a time when India's population was growing very fast. In the three decades after Independence, India's population had doubled. But from the 1980s, population growth began to slow down.” Today, India’s population growth rate is below the global average !   Unintuitively, all states are slowing , though they slow at different rates : “Until the 1970s, population growth rates in different states were quite similar. However, since the 1980s, India's southern states have
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Captured by the Audience

How do we define ourselves, asks Gurwinder Bhogal? Sure, we have internal drivers and ideas, but we also temper that with feedback from others. Are we overdoing it? Is it acceptable? Are we fitting in or becoming outcasts? This approach made sense since time immemorial when the feedback we got was from a small set of people with whom we interacted regularly.   But in the age of the Internet and social media, that approach is not working, argues Bhogal. We now get feedback from people we barely know. Even the famous people we listen to online, well, what they say online may not be “indicative of who they are”.   Who doesn’t like to be popular? But popularity online carries a new risk: “They often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of
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Problems with our Bureaucracy

In his book, Accelerating India’s Development , Karthik Muralidharan looks at the role of bureaucrats in India’s poor public service systems. As mentioned in earlier blogs, democracy forces politicians to over-promise. To deliver on those promises, they need a capable bureaucratic system. To improve the bureaucracy, investments have to be made. But we are a poor country – so there isn’t enough money to invest. Even worse, any investments in improving the bureaucracy will take a long time to translate into visible actions, but a politician’s re-election cycle comes within 5 years, why then would a politician invest in the bureaucracy?   In addition, politicians want to have pliable bureaucrats who will do their bidding. So they have actively undermined the professionalism and capability of the bureaucracy.   A lesser-known fact is that the Indian bureaucracy is understaffed . Not a typo. As a ratio of public servants to the population, India’s ratio is lower than China’s or a We
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Triumph and Dismantlement

So the American pre-polls were totally wrong. The race didn’t turn out to be “too close to call”. Instead, as Andrew Sullivan wrote: “It’s not just a Trump victory. It’s a Trump triumph.” How does he come to that conclusion? “There is, yes, a mandate. When one party wins the presidency, Senate, and probably the House, that’s usually the case.” Mandate for what? This one is easy to answer because Trump had easy to understand policy goals, unlike his opponent who seemed to have none. “Americans have voted for much tighter control of immigration, fewer wars, more protectionism, lower taxes, and an emphatic repudiation of identity politics.”   Wait, surely that last point (“an emphatic repudiation of identity politics”) can’t be true? Wasn’t Trump “whiteness personified”, as one political commentator said? Well, that’s not what the data says. Sullivan pulls up some of the relevant stats: (1) Trump won more non-white votes than any Republican since Nixon; (2) He gained massi
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