4 Indian-Americans honoured in US on Independence

Microsoft Corp chief executive Satya Nadella, Comedian and actor Aasif Mandvi, Carnegie Mellon University president Subra Suresh and former president of the University of West Georgia, Beheruz Sethna were honoured along with 36 others, the Wall Street Journal reported. File photo -Reuters

Four Indian-Americans were among 40 people who were honoured for their contributions to the US in the annual Great Immigrants tribute in New York on the country's independence day.

Microsoft Corp chief executive Satya Nadella, Comedian and actor Aasif Mandvi, Carnegie Mellon University president Subra Suresh and former president of the University of West Georgia, Beheruz Sethna were honoured along with 36 others, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Hyderabad-born Nadella created quite a stir recently by becoming one of the most powerful leaders in technology after taking over as head of the Microsoft Corp. He studied electronics and communication engineering before heading to the US in the 1980s.

Mumbai-born Mandvi first moved to England before migrating to the US when he was 16. He became famous as a correspondent on "The Daily Show," where he was known for his satire on issues such as Islam, the Middle East and South Asia.

Suresh, who is an engineer and scientist, was born in Chennai and moved to the US to work on a postgraduate science degree, graduating in 1979. He is the ninth president of the Carnegie Mellon University.

He served as director of the National Science Foundation from 2010 to 2013. Appointed by US President Barack Obama, he led the federal science agency in its mission to advance the fields of science and engineering research.

Sethna was born in India in 1948 and served as the sixth president of the University of West Georgia – the first Indian-American to lead a university in the US.

The July 4 event was sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, a foundation started by a Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie who spearheaded the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and was himself one of the most well-known philanthropists of his time

Mindless populism — facts and remedies

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley recently stated that there was no room for mindless populism in Budget 2014. In this article, the first of two, mindless populism will be defined and estimates provided; the second will contain further facts, and remedies.

The following simple definition of populism may be considered representative. Populism means expenditure programmes aimed at subsidising a large, preferably majority, of the voting population. In many countries, populism would be social expenditures targeted at the middle class. In India, these schemes would be those targeted at the absolute poor. However, what the Congress party did not realise, or appreciate, is the simple fact that the absolute poor were less than a quarter of the population in 2011-12, and possibly less than a fifth at the time of the 2014 election.

There is another element to the “mindful” nature of populism. Indian politicians should be aware that as per capita incomes have increased manifold, so has the percentage of the population subject to income tax. So this financing class worries about the efficacy of the delivery of subsidies to the poor, and to themselves. Mindless populism is now a deep negative for getting elected in India. Don’t believe me, believe the Congress which, despite many populist programmes, has just managed to register the largest loss for any incumbent national government anywhere at any time. In 2009 it won 206 seats; in 2014, just over a fifth of the seats. That is a world record for the BJP and Narendra Modi to be proud of, and for mindless populists to beware.

The longest running, and most expensive, of the social programmes for the poor is the food subsidy programme populistically called the Public Distribution System (PDS) — a scheme that has been in operation since the late-1970s. The total expenditure on this policy in 2014-15, thanks to its having been enshrined as law by the Sonia Gandhi-led previous government, is slated to be Rs 1,25,000 crore. The Tendulkar-defined poor today are likely to be around 250 million. So per poor person, the populism of the Congress dictated that the government would spend Rs 5,000 on food subsidies alone — that is, not including NREGA (let us call it by its original name rather than introducing the Mahatma into the controversy), not including fertiliser, not including diesel, not including kerosene, and not including LPG.

Incidentally, these excluded items together account for approximately Rs 1,75,000 crore.

Let us just concentrate exclusively on this PDS subsidy. Is expenditure of Rs 5,000 per poor person, “mindless” populism? The answer is a double emphatic yes. That is, it is not mindless populism but “mindless squared” populism.

In the run-up to the 2014 election, the welfare schemes of the UPA government came up for much discussion. Last year, at the time of the food securitybill, Sonia Gandhi’s dream project, which the BJP enthusiastically supported, it was believed that all was right with the PDS scheme, except perhaps implementation — and the BJP said they were doing PDS delivery much better than the Congress, and all one had to do was to look at Chhattisgarh, where three-time elected Chief Minister Raman Singh had completely revamped the corrupt food delivery system.

The table vindicates the BJP claim. It shows the PDS consumption for rice and wheat in selected states of India in 2011-12 (NSSO data). In Chhattisgarh, the delivery of PDS rice to the poor was close to the highest in the country — 4.2 kg per poor person. Not reported, per poor person PDS delivery of wheat was 0.5 kg. Thus, Chhattisgarh had nearly achieved the FSB target of 5 kg of foodgrains in 2011-12. Note, however, that both Tamil Nadu and Odisha are also PDS “success” states. But these three states are the only exception. Nationwide, the poor received only 1.9 kg of rice and 1 kg of wheat in 2011-12.

But there is another curious fact that emerges from just a casual perusal of the table. While PDS delivery increased substantially in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, the absolute consumption of foodgrains declined in these three states, as well as in all of India. And the decline is not small — more than 10 per cent in Chhattisgarh. The same pattern of declining total consumption is observed for the non-poor. This fact has several implications, especially for the consideration of mindless populism.

First, what this reveals is that the need for the food security act was never there, neither for poverty reduction nor for the attack on “hunger”. Foodgrains are what economists call an inferior good — as your incomes go up, and increase beyond the absolute poverty hunger level, your foodgrain intake goes down. For a poor person suffering from chronic hunger, cereal consumption does increase. However, past a certain biological need, cereal consumption plateaus, and then declines. From the data it appears that this peak plateau was reached sometime around 2000, and what can be said with near certainty is that the average poor person was not suffering from hunger in 2011-12, that is, while some fraction of households in India do suffer from hunger, this percentage is likely well below the Tendulkar poverty level of 22 per cent in 2011-12.

Second, as Dean Spears’ research has convincingly shown, which is also medically and biologically intuitive, digestion of food is a function of the quality of water intake and the quality of available sanitation. Hence, the desirability and advocacy of toilets before temples. So “thrusting” food down people’s throats (rich or poor) will not help wastage, or stunting, or health, if the appropriate and healthy sanitary environment is not present. For the lawmakers to be unaware of the inefficiency of food intake in the context of open defecation (lack of sanitation) shows a sinful disregard for facts that matter.

Third, and a final calculation, on the costof mindless food populism. Out of the 273 million poor in 2011-12, only half (145 million) received any PDS delivery of rice or wheat. The UPA government spent Rs 73,000 crore on food subsidy that year. Both rice and wheat subsidies to the poor added up to Rs 12,000 crore. In other words, the government spent more than Rs 6 to transfer Re 1 to the poor. Where the rest went is for you to figure out, but even a 2:1 ratio qualifies as mindless populism. What we have here is mindless cubed populism

India to become third largest economy by 2030: PwC

India is set to become the third largest economy in the world by 2030, according to latest estimates by a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report.

The London-headquartered accountancy giant said the rapid rise of the Indian economy with its young workforce would push it up from being the 10th largest economy in 2013 to the third largest by 2030, pushing the UK back into sixth place.

“In the longer run, other emerging markets may overtake the UK, but only India looks set to do so before 2030 according to our latest projections,” PwC said in its latest economic outlook.

China, the world’s second largest economy, is expected to close the gap with America by 2030, while Mexico is predicted to be the 10th largest economy by 2030, above Canada and Italy, both G7 nations.

Only a couple of years ago there were forecasts that Britain would rapidly become a second-class economic power and would need to defer to the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China in the near future.

China has ranked above Japan for a decade as the world’s second-biggest economy.

By some calculations Brazil leapfrogged the UK in 2012, with Russia and India close behind.

Britain’s fall was partly related to the costs of the banking crisis and the recession that followed, coupled with a sharp decline in the exchange rate, which knocked about a quarter off the country’s value in relation to its main rivals.

But since the beginning of last year the economy has recovered all the lost ground from the recession and banks have begun lending again.

The pound has bounced back from about $ 1.40 in 2009 to $ 1.71 on Saturday.

Brazil, by contrast, has suffered a rocky couple of years that have slowed GDP growth and pushed down the value of the real.

Russia will close the gap on the top eight, but its reliance on the oil and gas industry for growth and its rapidly ageing population will prevent it jumping up the table as quickly as previously thought.

Only India will move ahead of the UK by 2030, though it will be sharing a projected GDP of $ 6.1 trillion among more than 1.5 billion people, only half as much again as the UK’s predicted output of $ 4 trillion, produced by a population less than a 20th the size.

PwC urged policymakers in the UK to implement further structural reforms to ensure that it remained ahead of emerging markets.

Teaching in tongues

The politics of language in India is often a farce; the pedagogy of language, on the other hand, is often a tragedy. So much energy is expended in an overstylised homogenisation-versus-diversity debate that we actually pay very little attention to the pedagogical failures that form the backdrop of this farcical politics. In terms of imagining a complex political relationship between languages, India is a triumph. But that triumph is not matched by the imaginative teaching of language. This failure is at many levels. The learning outcomes at the level of school education, as documented by ASER reports, are very poor. But its political implications are that there will be a large section of nominally educated Indians who will feel excluded from access to knowledge structures. Rather than blaming a poor education system as such, which often seems to fail to teach in any language, it is likely that this group will be permanently available for mobilisation against a language “Other.”

Some might think this fear is far-fetched, particularly since there is a massive turn to English anyway. States with pronounced vernacular nationalisms, like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, have also turned to English at earlier grades; and the poor seem to be voting with their feet for English. But the pedagogic effects of this are decidedly mixed. As Karthik Muralidharan’s brilliant empirical work has shown, it appears that from the point of view of learning outcomes, switching mediums seems to make students worse off. As he puts it, “switching medium of instruction may hurt accumulation of content knowledge”.

In Andhra Pradesh, according to this study, switching to English-medium private schools led to improvement in learning English, but also to worse scores in subjects like maths. To be clear, these results are suggestive. But switching mediums seems to be a real problem, exacerbated by the fact that English learning is hard to reinforce at home in most languages. But the larger point is this: so much energy has been expended in celebrating this turn to English as a kind of acknowledgment of modern politics, an iconic turn to a new cosmopolitanism, unfettered by the past, that very little attention has been paid to pedagogic effects. Language choice has been so consumed by a politics of identity that we cannot even get a proper cognitive debate on language going.

Think of other ways in which politics trumps pedagogy. You want to the see the real scandal of India’s political language compromise?Most students in India do at least three or four years of a third language, but the net retained learning outcome in that language, with some exceptions, is roughly zero. Three years is a long time to pick up a language, but no one has asked the question of why the formula is leading to such low linguistic competence outcomes in the third language. We can bemoan the loss of Sanskrit in north India. But this is not because it did not find adequate place in the school curriculum, in north India at least. In fact, quite the opposite. If you want to kill a language, make it a third language in an Indian school.

Think of how politics has trumped pedagogy at every stage of language teaching. First, there is a peculiar choice we have forced on students that access to good English often requires going to an English medium school; the distinction between learning a language and committing to it as a medium of instruction is often lost. There is very little pedagogical imagination. Because of linguistic politics, the emphasis in teaching has been more on differentiation than on finding commonalities. Learning a language has, paradoxically, been seen more as creating a barrier than building a bridge. The divide is very palpable, for example, in the pedagogic evolution of Hindi and Urdu; modern Hindi teachers in Delhi’s most progressive schools take expunging “Urdu” words to absurd lengths. But a little more imagination could bridge other divides: a little teaching of one or two more scripts for example, could make a Hindi speaker more functional in at least a couple of other regional languages. Two different stalwarts of Hindi literature, Shivani and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, could find a home more easily in Shantiniketan than in Benares, in a way that now seems unimaginable. But the obstacles to a more polyglot linguistic imagination are not pedagogical, they are political.

Nowhere have political concerns more damaged language pedagogy than in Hindi. This is true in three respects. First, the Hindi-speaking region is the only region where there is a genuine social divide over language. In all the other regions, elites are not embarrassed by their identification with the regional language. No Bengali runs away from Bengali as a mark of social distinction in the way in which elites in north India, at some point, get embarrassed by Hindi. A lot of the politics of Hindi imposition is not directed against other regions; it is more a product of the fact that the Hindi-speaking region is subject to a peculiar politics of ressentiment, in a way no other region experiences.

Second, pedagogic choices in Hindi have been constricted by identity and purity concerns, not the growth of the language. It is not an accident, therefore, that this is one language in which modern disciplines have grown the least, at least compared to Malayalam or Bengali. No wonder even Hindi papers source so much editorial content from English writing. And third, if you want to seewhat is wrong with Hindi, just see the typical CBSE or ICSE syllabus. It is not clear, first of all, whether this syllabus was designed to excite kids about the possibilities of the language or whether it was designed by a group of morose social reformers who thought the Hindi syllabus was occasion to be earnest, boring and identify all the ills of Indian society. Its earnest paternalism and infantilism is in stark contrast to most children’s social worlds and is a permanent turn off from the language. No language has been damaged as much as Hindi has been damaged by its intellectual custodians.

India was truly innovative in not following the identification of language and nation-state that bedevilled Europe. On the other hand, in the ensuing politics, pedagogy has been given short shrift. Therefore, we waste so much of our children’s efforts, we constrict their choices, create false conflicts and ultimately damage language in the name of preserving it. The politics of Hindi is not driven by a desire to impose; it is driven by a larger learning and social failure.

NASA reschedules launch of carbon dioxide monitoring satellite

American space agency NASA is all set to launch a satellite designed to study atmospheric carbon dioxide on Wednesday, after it cancelled the lift off in the final minute of the countdown on Tuesday.

NASA said the countdown stopped at 46 seconds because of the failure of the launch pad water suppression system and added that the launch team has completed troubleshooting the snag. A valve that is part of the pulse suppression water system had failed to function properly during the final minutes of the launch on Monday, the space agency said.

“The failed valve has been replaced with a spare, and the system is being tested in preparation for Wednesday’s launch attempt,” it said.

The satellite named Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), which would be launched aboard a Delta II rocket, will produce the most detailed picture of natural sources of carbon dioxide, as well as their “sinks” – places on Earth’s surface where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere, the space agency said in a statement.

“The observatory will study how these sources and sinks are distributed around the globe and how they change over time,” NASA said.

The Planning Commission, in practice,for ias mains

As speculation mounts by the day that the Modi government is thinking of winding up the Planning Commission, this is an opportune moment to reflect on the relevance of the institution in the context of a rapidly changing Indian economy and society.

One way of classifying institutions is in terms of the balance between their potential positive power (PPP) and potential negative power (PNP). Potential positive power may be broadly understood to mean the capacity and power to enforce or facilitate positive change that would hasten the achievement of national goals. Potential negative power, on the other hand, refers to the capacity or power to obstruct, delay or derail positive reform, in cases where such reform threatens entrenched vested interests, status quo or business as usual. The exercise of PNP is often a ruse to foster corrupt practices, but it can also be an exercise of wanton power for its own sake, reflecting a perverse sense of power-induced pleasure.

The two institutions with perhaps the highest quotient of both PPP and PNP in the government of India are the Planning Commission and the ministry of finance. In my five years in the Planning Commission, I saw many instances of PNP and how this became a source of great resentment against the Planning Commission, both among state governments and Central ministries. Of course, at times, the Planning Commission acted with sagacity in checking profligacy of funds and schemes. But there were many cases where in-principle approvals, investment clearances, grants-in-aid and other decisions appeared to smack of bureaucratic red tape more than an application of mind motivated by the broader national interest and effectiveness of functioning. There were also visible vestiges of the old Stalinist command and control, inspector raj mindset.

But it is also true that in these five years I saw innumerable instances of the exercise of positive power. I believe there are at least five broad areas in which the Planning Commission played an extremely positive role: one, pioneering an inclusive planning process; two, facilitating and mainstreaming reform, especially emphasising the principle of subsidiarity, recognising the deep diversity of India; three, co-ordinating across, if not breaking down silos; four, being the spokesperson of the states at the Centre; and five, arbitrating disputes by taking a more long-term and holistic view of issues.

The 12th Plan process saw a completely unprecedented architecture of plan formulation. For the first time in the history of the Planning Commission, the 12 working groups on water, rural development and panchayati raj were chaired by eminent experts from outside government and included the best minds and practitioners from across Central and state governments, academia, research institutions, industry, civil society, and panchayati raj institutions. It was clearly recognised that all wisdom does not reside within government and that the best plans, programmes and policies could be made only with the active involvement of those outside government. This wasnot mere tokenism in the name of participation. Final decisions were made by these inclusive working groups. For me, the true indicator of the success of this process was that even though none of the players involved were fully happy with the final outcome, something truly pathbreaking was achieved. This only reflected the spirit of compromise that is a hallmark of good governance, as a hard-fought consensus was thrashed out among the members and the chair and co-chair, who was in each case the seniormost official of the concerned department.

The result was a series of landmark proposals that constitute a paradigm shift in water management in India, including the first-ever National Aquifer Management Programme, a new approach to incentivise de-bureaucratisation of large irrigation projects and irrigation management transfer to increase water use efficiency, a new integrated approach to rural drinking water and sanitation, a proposal to regularly audit the industrial water footprint, a new approach to flood management, a scheme to empower gram panchayats, a radically reformed MGNREGA, etc, each of which drew upon best practices pioneered by the states, who have always led the reform process in our country.

At the request of the chief minister of Punjab, I chaired a high-level expert group on waterlogging in Punjab. The group, consisting of the nation’s best experts on the subject, conducted a thorough investigation of the problem in close partnership with the state government and came out with a package of solutions, which was generously supported by the government of India. When the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh went on a fast, raising a series of legitimate grievances of the state with the Centre, the prime minister asked me, as member in-charge of Madhya Pradesh, to work with all concerned Central ministries to hammer out an amicable solution, which was done in record time, to the satisfaction of the aggrieved CM. Similar roles were played by other members in other contexts, which illustrate how the PC can be an effective mediator and problem-solver for states, rather than their tormentor.

My aim in the Planning Commission was to be a support available 24×7 to dynamic officers in the states to showcase their best practices and help mainstream these across the length and breadth of the country. I attempted to do this with the Jyotigram separation of power feeders scheme in Gujarat, the participatory irrigation reforms of Andhra Pradesh, the water regulator of Maharashtra and many others. My hope is that whatever the Modi government decides will only give greater strength and momentum to this positive role of the Planning Commission, in whatever shape and form

Panchsheel 2014

Last week’s celebrations in Beijing, marking the 60th anniversary of the Panchsheel proclamations, from Delhi’s perspective, might have looked like a ritual that had to be performed. For China, though, the occasion was about mobilising regional political support, including from India, for a new security framework that President Xi Jinping has been promoting with some vigour.

As it rises to become a great power, China is determined to reconstitute Asian geopolitics, which had been dominated by the United States since the end of World War II. Central to Xi’s argument is the proposition that the US security role in Asia is a manifestation of outmoded Cold War thinking. He is suggesting that American alliances must be replaced by a new regional security order.]

Xi has affirmed that “in the final analysis, it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia. The people of Asia have the capability and wisdom to achieve peace and stability in the region through enhanced cooperation.” Heady stuff indeed. This kind of rhetoric has not been heard in Asia for decades.

The Panchsheel is at the very heart of Xi’s conception of a new security order for Asia. The five principles were outlined by Zhou Enlai in separate joint statements with Jawaharlal Nehru and Burma’s U Nu in 1954. These principles — respect for territorial integrity and national sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, cooperation for mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence — were later expanded at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. The first summit of the non-aligned nations in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961 endorsed these principles.

Last week in Beijing, Xi argued that “it is no coincidence that the five principles of peaceful coexistence were born in Asia, because they embody the Asian tradition of loving peace”. Xi went on to add that, thanks to the contributions made by China, India and Myanmar, “these principles are accepted in other parts of Asia and the world”. For some, Xi’s attempt to recalibrate Panchsheel for its contemporary foreign policy needs might seem empty rhetoric at worst or political romanticism at best. A more careful look, however, would suggest China is dead serious.

The idea of “Asia for Asians” is of old provenance and has a record of repeated failures. Way back in 1940, imperial Japan called for a “bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western Powers”. If Tokyo’s call found some political resonance among those Asians yoked to the European empires, Japan’s own colonial ambitions exposed the limitations

of the slogan “Asia for Asians”. In fact, nationalist China, British India and the US pooled their resources to defeat Japanese imperialism.

In the immediate post-war period, the idea of “Asia for Asians” gathered much momentum after Nehru convened the Asian Relations Conference in early 1947. Yet the impact of the Cold War and new nationalisms in Asia undermined the hopes for Asian unity. As it normalised relations with the US in the 1970s, Beijing toned down its campaign against the American military presence in Asia. It believed American alliances in Asia would counter “Soviet hegemonism” and prevent the revival of “Japanese militarism”.

China now appears confident that an America in decline has opened the door for the construction of a new security order in Asia. Xi’s vigorous pursuit of “Asia for Asians”, however, has run into some political resistance. China’s expanding military clout and its assertiveness in territorial disputes are driving some of its neighbours into a tighter embrace with the US. Although Xi has repeatedly sought to give reassurance that China’s rise is peaceful and Beijing will never exercise hegemony, few Asians are willing to take it at face value.

In a controversial move this week, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe decided to re-interpret Japan’s peace constitution. After being a passive partner in the military alliance with the US all these decades, Tokyo is seeking a more active military role in shaping its security environment. Communist Vietnam, which fought a bitter war against the US in the 1960s and 1970s, has rapidly expanded its security cooperation with Washington. The Philippines, which threw American military forces out of the country in the early 1990s, is restoring the American presence and deepening defence ties with Japan.

If Beijing is trying to undermine American alliances in Asia, its neighbours are trying to strengthen them. How does India respond to this unfolding contestation in Asia? On the face of it, a non-aligned India should oppose all alliances and support collective security proposals seemingly in tune with Delhi’s “idealist” tradition. Yet, India’s foreign policy record speaks otherwise.

After its conflict with China in 1962, India turned first to the US and then the Soviet Union to balance Beijing. Despite its embrace of Moscow, Delhi rejected the proposals for collective security that emanated from Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev (1969) and Mikhail Gorbachev (1986). Put simply, non-aligned India was not averse to playing balance of power politics when compelled by external circumstances.

As an increasingly powerful China seeks to reorder Asia, Delhi must firmly locate China’s Panchsheel campaign in a clinical assessment of Asia’s rapidly evolving geopolitics and its consequences for Indian security. China is doing what rising powers, including the US, have done before — frame one’s national interests in universal terms, push other major powers out of one’s immediate vicinity and replace the old regional order with a new one. Beijing is undoubtedly following a well-trodden path in international politics. But Delhi appears a long way from developing an appropriate strategy to cope with Asia’s new power play