“Taming the Anarchy” is a must read for anybody interested in water. The analysis is stunningly original, the perspectively entirely new and the prose beautiful. Insightful and interesting in equal measures.
I am worried if it would be marketed aggressively enough, specially, in India and rest of South Asia. I hope there will be an Indian edition by a publisher with better local name recognition and distribution network.
Here are the lyrics and the youtube link:
Mele mein khoyi gujariya, jise mile mujhse milaaye
Uska mukhda chand ka tukda, koi nazar na lagaye
Jise mile mujhse milaye
Mele mein…….
Khoye se naina, totre baina, koi na usko chidhaye
Jise mile mujhse milaye…
Mele mein….
Matmaili sari bina kinari-2 koi na usko lajaye
Jise mile mujhse milaye
Mele mein…….
Tan ki gori man ki bholi-2, koi na use behkaaye
Jise mile mujhse milaye
Mele mein….
Doongi chavanni jo meri munni-2 ko laaye kaliyaan uthaye
Jise mile mujhse milaye
Mele mein….
“Many economists will tell you that the ideal intervention to help the poor is to simply give them money (a negative income tax) – that shores up their income – rather than directly controlling prices. In general, this is correct advice; but not in this case.
Suppose we collect $1000 from the rich and hand this out to the poor. Since the rich spend a tiny fraction of their money on food and the poor a large fraction, this transfer will cause food prices to rise. In general, this would not matter since the price was being driven up by the greater purchasing power of the poor. But in the present precarious situation, the risk is that if the negative income tax does not reach all the poor, then the ones who are left out will see their position deteriorating as prices rise further”.
Apologies to U2 fans for the title. It refers to my home, Bihar. It is an irony that in a place like Bihar where caste-identities are so strong, markers of caste–the surnames or the family names–are seldom used. I never realized how unusual it was until i ventured out of the state for higher studies, first to Allahabad(UP) and later to the United States. I do not use Shahi, my family name, in official documents or in informal introductions. None of my classmates (except when they were Bengalis, Marwaris or Muslims) in Bihar used it either.
In high school in Allahabad, it was different. Only my name did not have family name prefixed to ti and many of my classmates thought that may be i was from so-called lower caste and was trying to hide it. In the US, my friends presume that Kishore is my family name and when I tell them that it is not and I do not use my family name at all, they are surprised too. They find it amusing when i tell them that a whole generation in my home state has givern up family names and it is common for the members of the same family to have different last names.
Here in the US, Malcolm X ( who was Malcolm Little), Stokely Carmichael (who became Kwama Ture) and many other leaders and followers of Black Power changed their family names to disown the “slave names” or as in the later case to reemphasize his African roots. Watch here as Malcolm X explains why it was improper to use the old “slave-names”. This did not become the mainstream practice though.
What prompted Biharis to stop using their inherited family names? This may be an interesting questions for anthropologists or historians. I have not read anything on this. Unlike in the US, in Bihar the upper caste families who were privileged under the caste-system started the practice of not using family names. Why would they do so? My grandfather, who was one of the first in my extended family not to give family names to his kids, told me that the trend started in 1940s among Congress leaders /workers as a symbolic first step towards creating a casteless society in Bihar. India’s freedom movement was rich with such symbolism. In those days, Congress leaders where often the most educated and respected members of the society. They were the trendsetters and what they did was soon followed by most people. So, the new naming convention became popular.
Over the next two decades, casteism only became stronger. Earlier, caste was more about identity and ritual superiority. After independence, as the political power came in the hands of the Indians the caste struggles were about political power and control over the state apparatus. Higher stakes meant uglier caste rivalries. Three decades long bitter political rivalry between the Bhumihaar leader Sri Krishna Singh and the Rajput leader Anugraha Narayana Singh is stuff of the legends in Bihar. The rivalry continued after them, only in more blatant and naked forms. In 1950s and 1960s people avoided using family names for the fear of bias and discrimination by fellows of other castes. There are horror stories of what misfortunes your family name could bring to you from total strangers in an interview or in the marking of your exam books. These stories may be apocryphal but people believed in them and did not want to take an unnecessary risk.
Now, it is neither the inspiration to create a casteless society nor the fear of caste discrimination that motivates people not to give their family names to their kids. It is just the convention in Bihar and to do otherwise is to be old-fashioned, traditional or even reactionary. In and of itself, I think using or not using family names does not make any real difference to people’s lives. It is not even a real issue but it tells us something about Bihar’s post-independce politics where something starting as a lofty gesture towards undoing the problem of casteism eventually became (an ineffective) coping mechanism as the problem worsened and society remained unprepared and unwilling to take any meaningful action.
Here is What IIM-A professors have to say about the recent fee-hike and academic autonomy. It is an old document, 4 years old, but issues remain as relevant as they were back in 2003-04. That said, I think they should post an updated version with most recent data available.
I browsed the position paper and i think the Profs have done a poor job. Their students would have done a much better job if this was assigned as a 15% assignment in their MANAC (Managerial Analysis and Communication) course. It appears to be a Committees’ report.
IIM-A professors consider a family earning $150,000/year in 2003-04 as a low-income family and then proceed to claim fair and stable representation of the low income group (~ 20% of all PGP students) in their student body over the two decades from 1983-84 to 2003-2004 in spite of a 50-fold (yes fifty-fold!!) increase in the fees. A family earning Rs. 150,000/annum is a low-income family in a country where 75% of the populations lives below $2/day!!! Do IIM-profs live in India?
Another interesting piece of information that strengthens the case for a fee-hike is the exponential rise in starting salaries of IIM-A grads. It was only Rs. 24,000/year in 1983-84; went up to Rs. 93,000 in 1993-94 and then crossed the million mark to reach 11,15,000 in 2003-04. There was four-fold increase in starting salaries over 1980s and a ten-fold increase over the next decade. That says something about the rising demand for management skills in India.
Sadly, we do not have data on faculties’ earnings in the report. As of now, the salary of a senior IIM-A professor is Rs. 25,000/month or Rs. 300,000/year. This, i think is abysmally low. Too low to attract top talent to teaching. Some would argue that management teachers can and do make a lot of money from consultancy. I think even that does not justify such low salaries. Good teachers are essential to building high performance knowledge institutions and in todays time we cannot attract the best to teaching if we pay such meagre salaries. Professor’s salary needs to go up too. This may be less of an issue for a top institution like IIM-A who can still attract the best due to their brand-value but it is critical for second-tier institutions. We need a good number of second-tier academic institutions too.
IIM-A has doubled its tuition fee. Other IIMs have also raised their fees substantially. And the fee debate is raging again. HRD minister Arjun Singh is worried about the poor. I think his worries are misplaced. I do not see anything wrong with the fee hike as long as it does not affect the ability of the poor to study there. An IIM degree results in a huge bump in expected earnings and IIMs should be getting a shae of that gain. The only thing needed to ensure access to all eligible candidates is educational loans without any collateral. That is already available and on more generous terms after the recent hikes. In fact banks fell head over heels to advance loans to IIM students. The credit market works perfectly. And there are no risks as every IIM student knows he will earn enough to be able to repay the loan.
The only downside that i can think of the fee hike is that it will discourage IIM students from working in social/public sectors where their skills are much needed but the remuneration is not high enough. Well, the hard fact is that even when fees were lower, very few IIM graduates joined those sectors. So, that cannot be a reason for keeping fees low. There are more efficient ways of encouraging graduates to join social sectors. My alma mater,IRMA, pays back your fee with interest if you take a job in the designated sectors and work there for a minimum of 3 years.
Arjun Singh and his predecessor Murli Manohar Joshi worried about access to poor. I think that their worries are misplaced if not phoney.
My own experience is that it is not the high fees that deter poor or lower middle class students from considering IIM as an option. Sky high application fees are a big deterrent. I know a lot of good students who do not apply to IIMs and other management schools because the application fees are so high and you are not sure if you will be successful. In fact the chances of success is pretty low unless one is absolutely a genious: one in 200. Think about it: application is costly, risky and there is no credit available for application fees. No wonder, a poor student who is risk-averse (or less confident about him/herself) does not apply even if he/she is a pretty good student.
Application fees is a big source of revenue for all b-schools. I am sure IIMs also make neat profit from applications. If minister Singh wants to improve access to IIMs for all classes, he should just ask IIMs to reduce application fees.
Application to IIMs should not be a gamble i think. By how much should the application fees be reduced? Should it be just enough to cover the cost of conducting exams? I am not sure. All of us know that we should not have zero or extremely low fees. That will attract a flood of non-serious candidates. Is there an optimal fee? I have not thought about it but it is an interesting empirical question.
