http://www.businessstandard.com/common/storypage.php?autono=295232&leftnm=4&subLeft=0&chkFlg=
Suman Bery: An inconvenient truth
Suman Bery / New Delhi August 21, 2007
An appreciating exchange rate has been good for the economy.
In recent months Indian monetary management has received its share of knocks from several distinguished contributors to these pages. Capital surges towards emerging markets have become a regular feature of the international economy over the last fifteen years, tracking the cycle of monetary easing and tightening in the developed world. Handling them has accordingly become part of the toolkit of financial authorities in all major emerging markets.
While events over the last week suggest that the cycle might once again be turning, the distinct sense conveyed by the critics mentioned below is that the most recent surge has been handled with considerably less aplomb by the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) than in the past.
The sharpest criticism (particularly by Shankar Acharya: “Midsummer Madness?”, Business Standard, August 9, but also Surjit Bhalla and AV Rajwade in various columns) is that excessive (and excessively rapid) nominal exchange rate appreciation (particularly in March of this year) has been permitted by the RBI.
In addition Acharya, citing several articles by Rajiv Malik of J.P.Morgan, argues that progressive liberalisation of external commercial borrowing (ECBs) for Indian corporates was irresponsible, given the magnitude of other capital flows heading India’s way.
Acharya is forthright about the preferred response, which is to repeat the earlier drill:
• Reserve Bank purchases of foreign exchange (“intervention”) should keep the nominal exchange rate within a range loosely related to a real exchange rate target;
• The monetary impact of such purchases should be neutralised (“sterilised”) through sales of government securities [or increases in minimum required cash reserve ratios (CRRs)] to hit either liquidity or interest rate objectives;
• Although he personally believes that intervention can be continued indefinitely and is almost wholly successful for good measure he proposes sharp restrictions on the volume of ECBs, presumably to limit pure arbitrage operations.
Despite being a committed liberaliser in other spheres (notably trade and taxation), Acharya justifies this enormous exercise of discretionary power by the RBI on the grounds that not to do so is likely to impose “significant, rising and avoidable costs for exports, output and employment”.
Similar concerns have been expressed by Rajwade in his columns, drawing in part upon case studies of the impact of the rising rupee. These are reinforced in his article of August 20, where he strongly endorses the use of increases in the CRR as the preferred sterilisation instrument. Surjit Bhalla, in his BS column of August 18 (“How India is different from China”) provides specific orders of magnitude on the growth benefits of sterilised intervention.
Acharya, Bhalla and Rajwade (ABR) are all serious, responsible and experienced commentators, and a shared consensus among them cannot be taken lightly. In his August piece, Acharya attributes the recent deviation from past practice to arguments “peddled in recent months by some IMF staffers and a small group of younger domestic economists”. While no longer young, and never with the IMF, I was mildly surprised not have been bracketed in the same company. I would, however, admit to the same lack of “hands-on, policy-making experience” which Acharya considers essential for credibility in these matters.
Starting with a joint paper with Deepak Lal and D K Pant in 2003, and more recently in these columns, I have been among those who have been arguing for greater nominal exchange rate flexibility, including appreciation when the occasion demands it. Quite apart from the analytic points that I make below, I feel that such flexibility is to be welcomed because it reduces the risks associated with the necessary, desirable and inevitable integration of the Indian financial system into world markets.
There is clearly no disagreement between ABR and myself on the ultimate goals of economic policy. These are to provide high, efficient, sustainable non-inflationary growth. Where we apparently differ is on the importance of the tradables sector (both manufacturing and services) in generating such growth, and on the appropriateness of intervening heavily in financial markets to bring about an ever-increasing share of tradables in national output.
The polar case of such a strategy is China, and it is dubious that we either should, or can go down that path.
The view that Lal, Pant and I took in our 2003 work is that the fundamental driver of growth is efficient investment. This is most easily achieved by a judicious widening of the current account deficit (which allows foreign savings to enter the economy so as to supplement domestic savings) and by allowing the nominal exchange rate to track underlying movements in the “real” exchange rate (not the real effective exchange rate), which is the domestic relative price of tradables to non-tradables. The real exchange rate is basically responsive to the domestic imbalance between demand and supply.
On such a view, exchange market intervention leading to reserves accumulation frustrates the widening of the current account that would permit enhanced investment while sterilisation, through its impact on domestic interest rates, exacts a further toll on investment and growth. On this view, the recent growth acceleration is precisely because monetary and fiscal policy eased sufficiently to permit the current account deficit to record a modest deficit.
As events have unfolded we have also seen that a strong rupee benefits some constituencies even as it may harm others, quite apart from the fact that it makes Indian assets more expensive to acquire and overseas assets cheaper. Finally, it is specious, arbitrary, and in the last instance impossible to draw fine distinctions between “good” and “undesirable” forms of capital inflow.
In brief in a fast-moving economy subject to myriad positive and negative shocks it is difficult to take a view on the equilibrium real exchange rate which will in any case vary across the economic cycle. Over the medium run it is clear that the real exchange rate will appreciate. The true concerns of macro managers are external and internal balance. As long as these are achieved, the composition of output is best left to the market to determine.
To conclude, I accept that there are pragmatic limits to the amount of nominal appreciation that is politically tolerable in a given space of time; also that the stability of capital flows is uncertain. My basic objection is to targeting a given effective exchange rate as an instrument of development policy. In this I do seem genuinely to differ from my esteemed fellow columnists in these pages.
The writer is Director-General NCAER. The views expressed here are personal. sbery@ncaer.org
Thursday, August 23, 2007
The 'Mistress Syndrome' in business decision-making
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2296364,prtpage-1.cms
When we were young, our elders cautioned us: “Remember, the grass on the other side always looks greener”. Yet, sometimes in taking business decisions we tend to ignore this advice. As I was watching (the movie) Life in a Metro some months ago, it began to make sense. What we exhibit in business decision-making is similar to a trait some people tend to exhibit in their lives — let’s call it the ‘Mistress Syndrome’.
Let me start with inorganic growth. For Indian companies to become global challengers, it is imperative that they acquire within India and abroad to get scale. However this cannot happen at the cost of defocusing on organic growth and the core business. One of the key reasons for the success of the Indian pioneers in globalisation other than IT has been strong and sustainable domestic business, which provide the resources and confidence to drive global acquisitions.
Yet I find a lot of companies which do not have sustainable domestic business models proclaiming three or four impending acquisitions. Both Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE and AG Lafley, CEO of P&G, are votaries of organic growth. They had used acquisitions to fuel some of their growth in the past, but they felt that just relying on deals could be dangerous. Immelt once commented “It’s so easy to overpay when buying growth, and experience shows that the bigger the deal, the bigger the risk”.
He is absolutely right. In most sectors, there is a lot of headroom for organic growth in India. One should not fall into the trap of buying growth at the expense of organic growth. It should be an add-on and not a substitute growth model. It brings an additional risk of complacency by targeting a lower organic growth post an acquisition. Remember it will not happen every year.
A similar ‘Mistress Syndrome’ is exhibited in new brand launches. A lot of marketers have the fetish to launch new initiatives in the name of innovation. The investments required are huge and if the innovation is not really incremental or radical it would be more sensible to direct the resources towards growing the existing power brands. The current trend is towards launching undifferentiated mass- premium niche brands.
In my opinion they are very much like the ‘Arm Candy’ one flaunts in some of the happening do’s in town. Leaders are far more tolerant towards these ‘Arm Candy’ brands or initiatives and they postpone a judicious stop-loss even in the absence of a long-term sustainable business model.
Unfortunately I have realised today’s boards are more tolerant towards leaders who promise light at the end of tunnel every meeting by conveniently shifting milestones as compared to someone who admits to a mistake and prevents further drainage of resources.
I have also concluded that marketers need to focus on a few ‘Big Bet’ new initiatives by committing investments instead of flirting with a large number of small initiatives while simultaneously working towards maximising the potential of their power brands.
Another instance of mistress syndrome is top-end focus. There is a lot of growth potential amongst the urban poor and in the emerging rural areas. Unfortunately they are not ‘Sexy’ enough and require much more hard work. So a new ‘Arm Candy’ in modern trade steps in. Some FMCG players have made a lot of disproportionate spends towards it without commensurate returns. However some smart players have managed to have win-win relationships with both modern and traditional retail since they believe that both will co-exist in the long term.
A lot of youngsters who do ‘Lateral Job Hopping’ demonstrate the syndrome. During the foundation years learning and professional value addition is more important than the employer label. After a few rounds of flirting with various organisations this realisation sinks in. But perhaps a trifle too late, just as in the movie Life in a Metro the protagonist realised this at the very end: was it worth the effort?
Let me conclude by emphasising that I am all for inorganic growth, new initiatives etc. as long as they make long term business sense and they are not funded by milking and weakening one’s primary resource engines. It is foolish to assume low organic growth potential in any category in India unless there is a strong environmental trend against it.
And it takes much less effort, risk and resources to drive organic growth instead of just trying to only chase inorganic growth. The same goes for betting on a few big initiatives as compared to flirting with countless incremental ones. Just as it takes much less effort to mend relationships at home as compared finding something outside.
The author is CEO, Consumer Products Division, Marico
When we were young, our elders cautioned us: “Remember, the grass on the other side always looks greener”. Yet, sometimes in taking business decisions we tend to ignore this advice. As I was watching (the movie) Life in a Metro some months ago, it began to make sense. What we exhibit in business decision-making is similar to a trait some people tend to exhibit in their lives — let’s call it the ‘Mistress Syndrome’.
Let me start with inorganic growth. For Indian companies to become global challengers, it is imperative that they acquire within India and abroad to get scale. However this cannot happen at the cost of defocusing on organic growth and the core business. One of the key reasons for the success of the Indian pioneers in globalisation other than IT has been strong and sustainable domestic business, which provide the resources and confidence to drive global acquisitions.
Yet I find a lot of companies which do not have sustainable domestic business models proclaiming three or four impending acquisitions. Both Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE and AG Lafley, CEO of P&G, are votaries of organic growth. They had used acquisitions to fuel some of their growth in the past, but they felt that just relying on deals could be dangerous. Immelt once commented “It’s so easy to overpay when buying growth, and experience shows that the bigger the deal, the bigger the risk”.
He is absolutely right. In most sectors, there is a lot of headroom for organic growth in India. One should not fall into the trap of buying growth at the expense of organic growth. It should be an add-on and not a substitute growth model. It brings an additional risk of complacency by targeting a lower organic growth post an acquisition. Remember it will not happen every year.
A similar ‘Mistress Syndrome’ is exhibited in new brand launches. A lot of marketers have the fetish to launch new initiatives in the name of innovation. The investments required are huge and if the innovation is not really incremental or radical it would be more sensible to direct the resources towards growing the existing power brands. The current trend is towards launching undifferentiated mass- premium niche brands.
In my opinion they are very much like the ‘Arm Candy’ one flaunts in some of the happening do’s in town. Leaders are far more tolerant towards these ‘Arm Candy’ brands or initiatives and they postpone a judicious stop-loss even in the absence of a long-term sustainable business model.
Unfortunately I have realised today’s boards are more tolerant towards leaders who promise light at the end of tunnel every meeting by conveniently shifting milestones as compared to someone who admits to a mistake and prevents further drainage of resources.
I have also concluded that marketers need to focus on a few ‘Big Bet’ new initiatives by committing investments instead of flirting with a large number of small initiatives while simultaneously working towards maximising the potential of their power brands.
Another instance of mistress syndrome is top-end focus. There is a lot of growth potential amongst the urban poor and in the emerging rural areas. Unfortunately they are not ‘Sexy’ enough and require much more hard work. So a new ‘Arm Candy’ in modern trade steps in. Some FMCG players have made a lot of disproportionate spends towards it without commensurate returns. However some smart players have managed to have win-win relationships with both modern and traditional retail since they believe that both will co-exist in the long term.
A lot of youngsters who do ‘Lateral Job Hopping’ demonstrate the syndrome. During the foundation years learning and professional value addition is more important than the employer label. After a few rounds of flirting with various organisations this realisation sinks in. But perhaps a trifle too late, just as in the movie Life in a Metro the protagonist realised this at the very end: was it worth the effort?
Let me conclude by emphasising that I am all for inorganic growth, new initiatives etc. as long as they make long term business sense and they are not funded by milking and weakening one’s primary resource engines. It is foolish to assume low organic growth potential in any category in India unless there is a strong environmental trend against it.
And it takes much less effort, risk and resources to drive organic growth instead of just trying to only chase inorganic growth. The same goes for betting on a few big initiatives as compared to flirting with countless incremental ones. Just as it takes much less effort to mend relationships at home as compared finding something outside.
The author is CEO, Consumer Products Division, Marico
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Life lessons from Narayana Murthy
http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/may/28bspec.htm
N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys Technologies, delivered a pre-commencement lecture at the New York University (Stern School of Business) on May 9. It is a scintillating speech, Murthy speaks about the lessons he learnt from his life and career. We present it for our readers:
Dean Cooley, faculty, staff, distinguished guests, and, most importantly, the graduating class of 2007, it is a great privilege to speak at your commencement ceremonies.
I thank Dean Cooley and Prof Marti Subrahmanyam for their kind invitation. I am exhilarated to be part of such a joyous occasion. Congratulations to you, the class of 2007, on completing an important milestone in your life journey.
After some thought, I have decided to share with you some of my life lessons. I learned these lessons in the context of my early career struggles, a life lived under the influence of sometimes unplanned events which were the crucibles that tempered my character and reshaped my future.
I would like first to share some of these key life events with you, in the hope that these may help you understand my struggles and how chance events and unplanned encounters with influential persons shaped my life and career.
Later, I will share the deeper life lessons that I have learned. My sincere hope is that this sharing will help you see your own trials and tribulations for the hidden blessings they can be.
The first event occurred when I was a graduate student in Control Theory at IIT, Kanpur, in India. At breakfast on a bright Sunday morning in 1968, I had a chance encounter with a famous computer scientist on sabbatical from a well-known US university.
He was discussing exciting new developments in the field of computer science with a large group of students and how such developments would alter our future. He was articulate, passionate and quite convincing. I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library, read four or five papers he had suggested, and left the library determined to study computer science.
Friends, when I look back today at that pivotal meeting, I marvel at how one role model can alter for the better the future of a young student. This experience taught me that valuable advice can sometimes come from an unexpected source, and chance events can sometimes open new doors.
The next event that left an indelible mark on me occurred in 1974. The location: Nis, a border town between former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, and Bulgaria. I was hitchhiking from Paris back to Mysore, India, my home town.
By the time a kind driver dropped me at Nis railway station at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, the restaurant was closed. So was the bank the next morning, and I could not eat because I had no local money. I slept on the railway platform until 8.30 pm in the night when the Sofia Express pulled in.
The only passengers in my compartment were a girl and a boy. I struck a conversation in French with the young girl. She talked about the travails of living in an iron curtain country, until we were roughly interrupted by some policemen who, I later gathered, were summoned by the young man who thought we were criticising the communist government of Bulgaria.
The girl was led away; my backpack and sleeping bag were confiscated. I was dragged along the platform into a small 8x8 foot room with a cold stone floor and a hole in one corner by way of toilet facilities. I was held in that bitterly cold room without food or water for over 72 hours.
I had lost all hope of ever seeing the outside world again, when the door opened. I was again dragged out unceremoniously, locked up in the guard's compartment on a departing freight train and told that I would be released 20 hours later upon reaching Istanbul. The guard's final words still ring in my ears -- "You are from a friendly country called India and that is why we are letting you go!"
The journey to Istanbul was lonely, and I was starving. This long, lonely, cold journey forced me to deeply rethink my convictions about Communism. Early on a dark Thursday morning, after being hungry for 108 hours, I was purged of any last vestiges of affinity for the Left.
I concluded that entrepreneurship, resulting in large-scale job creation, was the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in societies.
Deep in my heart, I always thank the Bulgarian guards for transforming me from a confused Leftist into a determined, compassionate capitalist! Inevitably, this sequence of events led to the eventual founding of Infosys in 1981.
While these first two events were rather fortuitous, the next two, both concerning the Infosys journey, were more planned and profoundly influenced my career trajectory.
On a chilly Saturday morning in winter 1990, five of the seven founders of Infosys met in our small office in a leafy Bangalore suburb. The decision at hand was the possible sale of Infosys for the enticing sum of $1 million. After nine years of toil in the then business-unfriendly India, we were quite happy at the prospect of seeing at least some money.
ALSO READ: The amazing success story of Infosys
I let my younger colleagues talk about their future plans. Discussions about the travails of our journey thus far and our future challenges went on for about four hours. I had not yet spoken a word.
Finally, it was my turn. I spoke about our journey from a small Mumbai apartment in 1981 that had been beset with many challenges, but also of how I believed we were at the darkest hour before the dawn. I then took an audacious step. If they were all bent upon selling the company, I said, I would buy out all my colleagues, though I did not have a cent in my pocket.
There was a stunned silence in the room. My colleagues wondered aloud about my foolhardiness. But I remained silent. However, after an hour of my arguments, my colleagues changed their minds to my way of thinking. I urged them that if we wanted to create a great company, we should be optimistic and confident. They have more than lived up to their promise of that day.
In the seventeen years since that day, Infosys has grown to revenues in excess of $3.0 billion, a net income of more than $800 million and a market capitalisation of more than $28 billion, 28,000 times richer than the offer of $1 million on that day.
In the process, Infosys has created more than 70,000 well-paying jobs, 2,000-plus dollar-millionaires and 20,000-plus rupee millionaires.
A final story: On a hot summer morning in 1995, a Fortune-10 corporation had sequestered all their Indian software vendors, including Infosys, in different rooms at the Taj Residency hotel in Bangalore so that the vendors could not communicate with one another. This customer's propensity for tough negotiations was well-known. Our team was very nervous.
First of all, with revenues of only around $5 million, we were minnows compared to the customer.
Second, this customer contributed fully 25% of our revenues. The loss of this business would potentially devastate our recently-listed company.
Third, the customer's negotiation style was very aggressive. The customer team would go from room to room, get the best terms out of each vendor and then pit one vendor against the other. This went on for several rounds. Our various arguments why a fair price -- one that allowed us to invest in good people, R&D, infrastructure, technology and training -- was actually in their interest failed to cut any ice with the customer.
By 5 p.m. on the last day, we had to make a decision right on the spot whether to accept the customer's terms or to walk out.
All eyes were on me as I mulled over the decision. I closed my eyes, and reflected upon our journey until then. Through many a tough call, we had always thought about the long-term interests of Infosys. I communicated clearly to the customer team that we could not accept their terms, since it could well lead us to letting them down later. But I promised a smooth, professional transition to a vendor of customer's choice.
This was a turning point for Infosys.
Subsequently, we created a Risk Mitigation Council which ensured that we would never again depend too much on any one client, technology, country, application area or key employee. The crisis was a blessing in disguise. Today, Infosys has a sound de-risking strategy that has stabilised its revenues and profits.
I want to share with you, next, the life lessons these events have taught me.
1. I will begin with the importance of learning from experience. It is less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how and what you learn. If the quality of the learning is high, the development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself in a previously unattainable place. I believe the Infosys story is living proof of this.
Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.
2. A second theme concerns the power of chance events. As I think across a wide variety of settings in my life, I am struck by the incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events that is crucial.
3. Of course, the mindset one works with is also quite critical. As recent work by the psychologist, Carol Dweck, has shown, it matters greatly whether one believes in ability as inherent or that it can be developed. Put simply, the former view, a fixed mindset, creates a tendency to avoid challenges, to ignore useful negative feedback and leads such people to plateau early and not achieve their full potential.
The latter view, a growth mindset, leads to a tendency to embrace challenges, to learn from criticism and such people reach ever higher levels of achievement (Krakovsky, 2007: page 48).
4. The fourth theme is a cornerstone of the Indian spiritual tradition: self-knowledge. Indeed, the highest form of knowledge, it is said, is self-knowledge. I believe this greater awareness and knowledge of oneself is what ultimately helps develop a more grounded belief in oneself, courage, determination, and, above all, humility, all qualities which enable one to wear one's success with dignity and grace.
Based on my life experiences, I can assert that it is this belief in learning from experience, a growth mindset, the power of chance events, and self-reflection that have helped me grow to the present.
Back in the 1960s, the odds of my being in front of you today would have been zero. Yet here I stand before you! With every successive step, the odds kept changing in my favour, and it is these life lessons that made all the difference.
My young friends, I would like to end with some words of advice. Do you believe that your future is pre-ordained, and is already set? Or, do you believe that your future is yet to be written and that it will depend upon the sometimes fortuitous events?
Do you believe that these events can provide turning points to which you will respond with your energy and enthusiasm? Do you believe that you will learn from these events and that you will reflect on your setbacks? Do you believe that you will examine your successes with even greater care?
I hope you believe that the future will be shaped by several turning points with great learning opportunities. In fact, this is the path I have walked to much advantage.
A final word: When, one day, you have made your mark on the world, remember that, in the ultimate analysis, we are all mere temporary custodians of the wealth we generate, whether it be financial, intellectual, or emotional. The best use of all your wealth is to share it with those less fortunate.
I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will shoulder in time.
Thank you for your patience. Go forth and embrace your future with open arms, and pursue enthusiastically your own life journey of discovery!
N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys Technologies, delivered a pre-commencement lecture at the New York University (Stern School of Business) on May 9. It is a scintillating speech, Murthy speaks about the lessons he learnt from his life and career. We present it for our readers:
Dean Cooley, faculty, staff, distinguished guests, and, most importantly, the graduating class of 2007, it is a great privilege to speak at your commencement ceremonies.
I thank Dean Cooley and Prof Marti Subrahmanyam for their kind invitation. I am exhilarated to be part of such a joyous occasion. Congratulations to you, the class of 2007, on completing an important milestone in your life journey.
After some thought, I have decided to share with you some of my life lessons. I learned these lessons in the context of my early career struggles, a life lived under the influence of sometimes unplanned events which were the crucibles that tempered my character and reshaped my future.
I would like first to share some of these key life events with you, in the hope that these may help you understand my struggles and how chance events and unplanned encounters with influential persons shaped my life and career.
Later, I will share the deeper life lessons that I have learned. My sincere hope is that this sharing will help you see your own trials and tribulations for the hidden blessings they can be.
The first event occurred when I was a graduate student in Control Theory at IIT, Kanpur, in India. At breakfast on a bright Sunday morning in 1968, I had a chance encounter with a famous computer scientist on sabbatical from a well-known US university.
He was discussing exciting new developments in the field of computer science with a large group of students and how such developments would alter our future. He was articulate, passionate and quite convincing. I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library, read four or five papers he had suggested, and left the library determined to study computer science.
Friends, when I look back today at that pivotal meeting, I marvel at how one role model can alter for the better the future of a young student. This experience taught me that valuable advice can sometimes come from an unexpected source, and chance events can sometimes open new doors.
The next event that left an indelible mark on me occurred in 1974. The location: Nis, a border town between former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, and Bulgaria. I was hitchhiking from Paris back to Mysore, India, my home town.
By the time a kind driver dropped me at Nis railway station at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, the restaurant was closed. So was the bank the next morning, and I could not eat because I had no local money. I slept on the railway platform until 8.30 pm in the night when the Sofia Express pulled in.
The only passengers in my compartment were a girl and a boy. I struck a conversation in French with the young girl. She talked about the travails of living in an iron curtain country, until we were roughly interrupted by some policemen who, I later gathered, were summoned by the young man who thought we were criticising the communist government of Bulgaria.
The girl was led away; my backpack and sleeping bag were confiscated. I was dragged along the platform into a small 8x8 foot room with a cold stone floor and a hole in one corner by way of toilet facilities. I was held in that bitterly cold room without food or water for over 72 hours.
I had lost all hope of ever seeing the outside world again, when the door opened. I was again dragged out unceremoniously, locked up in the guard's compartment on a departing freight train and told that I would be released 20 hours later upon reaching Istanbul. The guard's final words still ring in my ears -- "You are from a friendly country called India and that is why we are letting you go!"
The journey to Istanbul was lonely, and I was starving. This long, lonely, cold journey forced me to deeply rethink my convictions about Communism. Early on a dark Thursday morning, after being hungry for 108 hours, I was purged of any last vestiges of affinity for the Left.
I concluded that entrepreneurship, resulting in large-scale job creation, was the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in societies.
Deep in my heart, I always thank the Bulgarian guards for transforming me from a confused Leftist into a determined, compassionate capitalist! Inevitably, this sequence of events led to the eventual founding of Infosys in 1981.
While these first two events were rather fortuitous, the next two, both concerning the Infosys journey, were more planned and profoundly influenced my career trajectory.
On a chilly Saturday morning in winter 1990, five of the seven founders of Infosys met in our small office in a leafy Bangalore suburb. The decision at hand was the possible sale of Infosys for the enticing sum of $1 million. After nine years of toil in the then business-unfriendly India, we were quite happy at the prospect of seeing at least some money.
ALSO READ: The amazing success story of Infosys
I let my younger colleagues talk about their future plans. Discussions about the travails of our journey thus far and our future challenges went on for about four hours. I had not yet spoken a word.
Finally, it was my turn. I spoke about our journey from a small Mumbai apartment in 1981 that had been beset with many challenges, but also of how I believed we were at the darkest hour before the dawn. I then took an audacious step. If they were all bent upon selling the company, I said, I would buy out all my colleagues, though I did not have a cent in my pocket.
There was a stunned silence in the room. My colleagues wondered aloud about my foolhardiness. But I remained silent. However, after an hour of my arguments, my colleagues changed their minds to my way of thinking. I urged them that if we wanted to create a great company, we should be optimistic and confident. They have more than lived up to their promise of that day.
In the seventeen years since that day, Infosys has grown to revenues in excess of $3.0 billion, a net income of more than $800 million and a market capitalisation of more than $28 billion, 28,000 times richer than the offer of $1 million on that day.
In the process, Infosys has created more than 70,000 well-paying jobs, 2,000-plus dollar-millionaires and 20,000-plus rupee millionaires.
A final story: On a hot summer morning in 1995, a Fortune-10 corporation had sequestered all their Indian software vendors, including Infosys, in different rooms at the Taj Residency hotel in Bangalore so that the vendors could not communicate with one another. This customer's propensity for tough negotiations was well-known. Our team was very nervous.
First of all, with revenues of only around $5 million, we were minnows compared to the customer.
Second, this customer contributed fully 25% of our revenues. The loss of this business would potentially devastate our recently-listed company.
Third, the customer's negotiation style was very aggressive. The customer team would go from room to room, get the best terms out of each vendor and then pit one vendor against the other. This went on for several rounds. Our various arguments why a fair price -- one that allowed us to invest in good people, R&D, infrastructure, technology and training -- was actually in their interest failed to cut any ice with the customer.
By 5 p.m. on the last day, we had to make a decision right on the spot whether to accept the customer's terms or to walk out.
All eyes were on me as I mulled over the decision. I closed my eyes, and reflected upon our journey until then. Through many a tough call, we had always thought about the long-term interests of Infosys. I communicated clearly to the customer team that we could not accept their terms, since it could well lead us to letting them down later. But I promised a smooth, professional transition to a vendor of customer's choice.
This was a turning point for Infosys.
Subsequently, we created a Risk Mitigation Council which ensured that we would never again depend too much on any one client, technology, country, application area or key employee. The crisis was a blessing in disguise. Today, Infosys has a sound de-risking strategy that has stabilised its revenues and profits.
I want to share with you, next, the life lessons these events have taught me.
1. I will begin with the importance of learning from experience. It is less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how and what you learn. If the quality of the learning is high, the development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself in a previously unattainable place. I believe the Infosys story is living proof of this.
Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.
2. A second theme concerns the power of chance events. As I think across a wide variety of settings in my life, I am struck by the incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events that is crucial.
3. Of course, the mindset one works with is also quite critical. As recent work by the psychologist, Carol Dweck, has shown, it matters greatly whether one believes in ability as inherent or that it can be developed. Put simply, the former view, a fixed mindset, creates a tendency to avoid challenges, to ignore useful negative feedback and leads such people to plateau early and not achieve their full potential.
The latter view, a growth mindset, leads to a tendency to embrace challenges, to learn from criticism and such people reach ever higher levels of achievement (Krakovsky, 2007: page 48).
4. The fourth theme is a cornerstone of the Indian spiritual tradition: self-knowledge. Indeed, the highest form of knowledge, it is said, is self-knowledge. I believe this greater awareness and knowledge of oneself is what ultimately helps develop a more grounded belief in oneself, courage, determination, and, above all, humility, all qualities which enable one to wear one's success with dignity and grace.
Based on my life experiences, I can assert that it is this belief in learning from experience, a growth mindset, the power of chance events, and self-reflection that have helped me grow to the present.
Back in the 1960s, the odds of my being in front of you today would have been zero. Yet here I stand before you! With every successive step, the odds kept changing in my favour, and it is these life lessons that made all the difference.
My young friends, I would like to end with some words of advice. Do you believe that your future is pre-ordained, and is already set? Or, do you believe that your future is yet to be written and that it will depend upon the sometimes fortuitous events?
Do you believe that these events can provide turning points to which you will respond with your energy and enthusiasm? Do you believe that you will learn from these events and that you will reflect on your setbacks? Do you believe that you will examine your successes with even greater care?
I hope you believe that the future will be shaped by several turning points with great learning opportunities. In fact, this is the path I have walked to much advantage.
A final word: When, one day, you have made your mark on the world, remember that, in the ultimate analysis, we are all mere temporary custodians of the wealth we generate, whether it be financial, intellectual, or emotional. The best use of all your wealth is to share it with those less fortunate.
I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will shoulder in time.
Thank you for your patience. Go forth and embrace your future with open arms, and pursue enthusiastically your own life journey of discovery!
Mumbai, Safe City? ??l*#$!*@!
Mumbai, Safe City? ??l*#$!*@!
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In Mumbai, you can stroll anywhere, at any time. In Mumbai, women are safe. In Mumbai, people are civilised, cultured - meaning really not like North India!
Really? Is all this really true? Why don't you ask that to the bruised and battered 10-year-old (10 year-old , for god's sake) girl lying in a hospital in Chembur? Asma Sheikh is a stinging slap on the face of all of us idiots who believe that Mumbai is this great safe land. The land of the erudite. The land of the sane.
It isn't. It is as safe or unsafe as any other major city in this sexually repressed country.
Here's what happened to poor Asma - she was returning home when a bunch of goons in a jeep, apparently rich brats, zoomed in and began to pass lewd comments on her and tried to molest her. Scared out of her wits (how else does a 10-year-old girl react?), she ran and her skirt caught the jeep. The boys, by now trying to flee the scene, just roared ahead dragging the poor girl along with them. One of the wheels even went over her arm breaking it in two places.
Her mother has said that her the underside of her legs have been bruised so badly that the skin has almost come off entirely and will, in all probability, need plastic surgery. See the story carefully, very carefully. Hear the girl wail in pain, listen to her mother saying - I saw the boys in front of me, but what could I do?
That's what all decent people like you and me feel these days? What can we do? Who is on our side? We never have the money, nor the contacts to really fight back and we are molested, abused day after day. Either its the rich, brats like these who have no business getting behind a jeep anyway (the driver didn't even have a licence), or its criminal goons who get away with anything because they are just so brazen.
In a country of ever rising incidents of rape and molestation, of countless sex crimes, our politicians are still saying - don't talk about sex education! How repressed and insane are we?
Someone said to me today - this is just a stray incident.
That's just such a typical, educated, middle class response - balanced, moderate, always objective. I'm sorry, today I am saying that I WILL NOT BE MODERATE WHEN A 10-YEAR-OLD IS MOLESTED. I DON'T CARE IF THAT'S EXPECTED OF ME BECAUSE I AM A JOURNALIST. PEOPLE WHO EXPECT THAT OF ME CAN TAKE A HIKE. I AM A CITIZEN FIRST, BEFORE A JOURNALIST, AND I HAVE THE RIGHT TO RESPOND AS A CITIZEN. AND IF THAT MAKES ME A BAD JOURNALIST, SO BE IT. I WOULD MUCH RATHER BE A BETTER HUMAN BEING.
AND THE CITIZEN IN ME SAYS - THRASH THE CULPRITS, THRASH THEM PUBLICLY, LET THE WORLD KNOW WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY DID AND WHICH FAMILY THEY COME FROM. LET THEIR PARENTS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THESE MONSTERS THEY CREATED.
I am tired of these escapist statements that these are stray incidents. They are not. They happen every other day. Some are reported, some are not. Let one woman who has travelled in a Mumbai train tell you that Mumbai is safe. No one will. Because they face abuse every, single day and still the myth persists that Mumbai is safe. It isn't. Deal with it.
Maybe it was once upon a time. Not now. Yes, it is better than Delhi and north India - but then even the jungle is much better than Delhi and north India. That is no comparison. Delhi and north India have animals roaming the streets. Nothing is worse than living in those cities. But Mumbai is certainly not safe.
It's like that other myth - Mumbai is cosmopolitan. Yeah, really? A city where is most parts the minorities cannot find a home. A city where entire chunks are only for vegetarians, rich Gujjus and Jains? A city where a Muslim friend of mine could not find a home for more than six months because he was a single man? Cosmopolitan? You must be kidding!
The only justice Asma can get is efficient, immediate punishment for the boys. Give them the harshest punishment possible, make an example of them, so that no brat ever dares to do something like this.
And let your girls carry pepper spray (my sister used to carry a blade and then a pocket knife all the years she travelled in a train and bus in Mumbai, a good eight years), arm your girls, let them fight back and fight to kill. I would love to see a few dead molestors on the street. Really, I really would. It would really set an example.
Mumbai is not safe. Repeat: Mumbai is not safe.
And if the Mumbaikar does not accept that now and does not do something about it now, if the protest doesn't happen now, then remember - we will become a Delhi and then see how you like it!
Baby Helmet
Baby helmet, infant headgear Head protection $21.95 per itemMaternity Belly Barbell
Pregnancy Piercings Navel Rings Unique New MaternityAds by Google
In Mumbai, you can stroll anywhere, at any time. In Mumbai, women are safe. In Mumbai, people are civilised, cultured - meaning really not like North India!
Really? Is all this really true? Why don't you ask that to the bruised and battered 10-year-old (10 year-old , for god's sake) girl lying in a hospital in Chembur? Asma Sheikh is a stinging slap on the face of all of us idiots who believe that Mumbai is this great safe land. The land of the erudite. The land of the sane.
It isn't. It is as safe or unsafe as any other major city in this sexually repressed country.
Here's what happened to poor Asma - she was returning home when a bunch of goons in a jeep, apparently rich brats, zoomed in and began to pass lewd comments on her and tried to molest her. Scared out of her wits (how else does a 10-year-old girl react?), she ran and her skirt caught the jeep. The boys, by now trying to flee the scene, just roared ahead dragging the poor girl along with them. One of the wheels even went over her arm breaking it in two places.
Her mother has said that her the underside of her legs have been bruised so badly that the skin has almost come off entirely and will, in all probability, need plastic surgery. See the story carefully, very carefully. Hear the girl wail in pain, listen to her mother saying - I saw the boys in front of me, but what could I do?
That's what all decent people like you and me feel these days? What can we do? Who is on our side? We never have the money, nor the contacts to really fight back and we are molested, abused day after day. Either its the rich, brats like these who have no business getting behind a jeep anyway (the driver didn't even have a licence), or its criminal goons who get away with anything because they are just so brazen.
In a country of ever rising incidents of rape and molestation, of countless sex crimes, our politicians are still saying - don't talk about sex education! How repressed and insane are we?
Someone said to me today - this is just a stray incident.
That's just such a typical, educated, middle class response - balanced, moderate, always objective. I'm sorry, today I am saying that I WILL NOT BE MODERATE WHEN A 10-YEAR-OLD IS MOLESTED. I DON'T CARE IF THAT'S EXPECTED OF ME BECAUSE I AM A JOURNALIST. PEOPLE WHO EXPECT THAT OF ME CAN TAKE A HIKE. I AM A CITIZEN FIRST, BEFORE A JOURNALIST, AND I HAVE THE RIGHT TO RESPOND AS A CITIZEN. AND IF THAT MAKES ME A BAD JOURNALIST, SO BE IT. I WOULD MUCH RATHER BE A BETTER HUMAN BEING.
AND THE CITIZEN IN ME SAYS - THRASH THE CULPRITS, THRASH THEM PUBLICLY, LET THE WORLD KNOW WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY DID AND WHICH FAMILY THEY COME FROM. LET THEIR PARENTS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THESE MONSTERS THEY CREATED.
I am tired of these escapist statements that these are stray incidents. They are not. They happen every other day. Some are reported, some are not. Let one woman who has travelled in a Mumbai train tell you that Mumbai is safe. No one will. Because they face abuse every, single day and still the myth persists that Mumbai is safe. It isn't. Deal with it.
Maybe it was once upon a time. Not now. Yes, it is better than Delhi and north India - but then even the jungle is much better than Delhi and north India. That is no comparison. Delhi and north India have animals roaming the streets. Nothing is worse than living in those cities. But Mumbai is certainly not safe.
It's like that other myth - Mumbai is cosmopolitan. Yeah, really? A city where is most parts the minorities cannot find a home. A city where entire chunks are only for vegetarians, rich Gujjus and Jains? A city where a Muslim friend of mine could not find a home for more than six months because he was a single man? Cosmopolitan? You must be kidding!
The only justice Asma can get is efficient, immediate punishment for the boys. Give them the harshest punishment possible, make an example of them, so that no brat ever dares to do something like this.
And let your girls carry pepper spray (my sister used to carry a blade and then a pocket knife all the years she travelled in a train and bus in Mumbai, a good eight years), arm your girls, let them fight back and fight to kill. I would love to see a few dead molestors on the street. Really, I really would. It would really set an example.
Mumbai is not safe. Repeat: Mumbai is not safe.
And if the Mumbaikar does not accept that now and does not do something about it now, if the protest doesn't happen now, then remember - we will become a Delhi and then see how you like it!
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
The Curse of Being a Hindu in Modern India
Every individual has the right to self respect and dignity, especially from its fellow countrymen. Irrespective of the religion, caste, creed and all other secular lingo, we all should be treated fairly. However, somewhere down the line I feel in the present modern setup of India, self respect of the Hindus has been taken for a ride by media and politicians alike. We have been considered harmless and so nobody cares if there is any sort of infliction on us. For them, it is more important to concentrate on issues which aim at pleasing the minorities. And make no mistake, minorities not only include Muslims, but also Christians and other non-Hindu religions. I have nothing against my fellow "minority" countrymen, for in all fairness I have never even thought of them as "minorities". For me they are as Indian as I am. They definitely need a change in their socio-economic conditions and we all should support the cause. Infact, we have mutual respect for each other and if not for petty politics, there wouldn't be an iota of doubt on our camaraderie.
The recent coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did make me think that Hindus have been sidelined into oblivion. Agreed, there were lots of Muslim casualties and it is a despicable act of barbarism to kill innocent children, women, and others. Rightly so they have been given coverage to show the ghastardly side of the politicians. However, was there not even a single Hindu who lost his life in the riots? Leave that, even the media coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did not for once make an attempt to sympathize with the karsewaks who lost their lives. That was equally shameful on the part of the murderers and those karsewaks were innocent too. All these days, media termed the Godhra train carnage only as "the aftermath of Godhra" and in a split second the news turned to the innocent Muslims who were killed in the riots. Even a common Muslim felt the pain of the massacre of the karsewaks so why couldn't the media capture the trauma their families went through? Why couldn't the likes of Barkha Dutt who were capturing possibly each and every house of the Muslim victims for the primetime news did not for once go to the karsewak's family? Why were all the cameras turned to the Muslim rehabilitation camps and none to the Hindu camps? I have also felt the pain seeing media bits of the way riots shaped into a deadly massacre. Infact, majority of the common Hindus condemned the shameful act of genocide and attacked the Gujarat government for poor handling of the situation. We all felt the pain of our fellow Muslim brothers and I am definitely sure they had also felt the pain when the karsewaks were burnt alive and helpless.
Then why did the media not capture that part of the riots? And to top it all, how derogatory it felt when the deaths of the innocent Karsewaks in the burning train were termed as sabotage by few men to induce polarization, to gain prominence. How shocking it was to see the politicians leaving no stone unturned to prove that the train carnage was accidental and not preplanned just for the sake of their insatiated urge for more votes. In just one action, they jolted the self respect of the Hindus. And it is not only Gujarat, the Kashmiri Hindus have also not got significant media coverage for reasons well known to the media. They and politicians awake on this issue only when assembly elections in Kashmir are about to happen. And in all honestly, why will they cover such stories? They shall not gain anything by inciting the Hindus for it has been historically proven that we don't really feel loss of self respect for anything and everything. We believe in the "sab chalta hain" ("everything goes") attitude. Why will the politicians talk about issues pertaining to Hindus? We do not form the chunk of their vote banks. And even if we do, we celebrate the voting day as a national holiday staying at homes.
We are not asking for favors. We also do not mind our dear PM to suddenly wake up and announce reservations for "dalit Muslims" as if dalit Muslims are not a subset of the larger dalit community. We have been seeing this for quite a long time and now we have become thick skinned. What we request is to feel for our sufferings in the same vein as others. We also have a sense of self respect and dignity and expect fair treatment meted out to us. It is high time that media acts responsibly and in an unbiased way. We have already lost hope in our politicians. Hence, media becomes all the more potent. I am not undermining the goods media has delivered. However, there is always some scope for improvement and this is definitely one grey area where the media needs to pull up its socks.
Hopefully, there will be an all out attempt on the part of the media to rehabilitate our Kashmiri Hindus just as they are doing for the Gujarati Muslims. At the end of the day, it is an Indian that will benefit and not a Hindu or a Muslim.
http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/saurabhsaksena/559/42312/the-curse-of-being-a-hindu-in-modern-india.html
Vande Mataram
The recent coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did make me think that Hindus have been sidelined into oblivion. Agreed, there were lots of Muslim casualties and it is a despicable act of barbarism to kill innocent children, women, and others. Rightly so they have been given coverage to show the ghastardly side of the politicians. However, was there not even a single Hindu who lost his life in the riots? Leave that, even the media coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did not for once make an attempt to sympathize with the karsewaks who lost their lives. That was equally shameful on the part of the murderers and those karsewaks were innocent too. All these days, media termed the Godhra train carnage only as "the aftermath of Godhra" and in a split second the news turned to the innocent Muslims who were killed in the riots. Even a common Muslim felt the pain of the massacre of the karsewaks so why couldn't the media capture the trauma their families went through? Why couldn't the likes of Barkha Dutt who were capturing possibly each and every house of the Muslim victims for the primetime news did not for once go to the karsewak's family? Why were all the cameras turned to the Muslim rehabilitation camps and none to the Hindu camps? I have also felt the pain seeing media bits of the way riots shaped into a deadly massacre. Infact, majority of the common Hindus condemned the shameful act of genocide and attacked the Gujarat government for poor handling of the situation. We all felt the pain of our fellow Muslim brothers and I am definitely sure they had also felt the pain when the karsewaks were burnt alive and helpless.
Then why did the media not capture that part of the riots? And to top it all, how derogatory it felt when the deaths of the innocent Karsewaks in the burning train were termed as sabotage by few men to induce polarization, to gain prominence. How shocking it was to see the politicians leaving no stone unturned to prove that the train carnage was accidental and not preplanned just for the sake of their insatiated urge for more votes. In just one action, they jolted the self respect of the Hindus. And it is not only Gujarat, the Kashmiri Hindus have also not got significant media coverage for reasons well known to the media. They and politicians awake on this issue only when assembly elections in Kashmir are about to happen. And in all honestly, why will they cover such stories? They shall not gain anything by inciting the Hindus for it has been historically proven that we don't really feel loss of self respect for anything and everything. We believe in the "sab chalta hain" ("everything goes") attitude. Why will the politicians talk about issues pertaining to Hindus? We do not form the chunk of their vote banks. And even if we do, we celebrate the voting day as a national holiday staying at homes.
We are not asking for favors. We also do not mind our dear PM to suddenly wake up and announce reservations for "dalit Muslims" as if dalit Muslims are not a subset of the larger dalit community. We have been seeing this for quite a long time and now we have become thick skinned. What we request is to feel for our sufferings in the same vein as others. We also have a sense of self respect and dignity and expect fair treatment meted out to us. It is high time that media acts responsibly and in an unbiased way. We have already lost hope in our politicians. Hence, media becomes all the more potent. I am not undermining the goods media has delivered. However, there is always some scope for improvement and this is definitely one grey area where the media needs to pull up its socks.
Hopefully, there will be an all out attempt on the part of the media to rehabilitate our Kashmiri Hindus just as they are doing for the Gujarati Muslims. At the end of the day, it is an Indian that will benefit and not a Hindu or a Muslim.
http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/saurabhsaksena/559/42312/the-curse-of-being-a-hindu-in-modern-india.html
Vande Mataram
The Curse of Being a Hindu in Modern India
Every individual has the right to self respect and dignity, especially from its fellow countrymen. Irrespective of the religion, caste, creed and all other secular lingo, we all should be treated fairly. However, somewhere down the line I feel in the present modern setup of India, self respect of the Hindus has been taken for a ride by media and politicians alike. We have been considered harmless and so nobody cares if there is any sort of infliction on us. For them, it is more important to concentrate on issues which aim at pleasing the minorities. And make no mistake, minorities not only include Muslims, but also Christians and other non-Hindu religions. I have nothing against my fellow "minority" countrymen, for in all fairness I have never even thought of them as "minorities". For me they are as Indian as I am. They definitely need a change in their socio-economic conditions and we all should support the cause. Infact, we have mutual respect for each other and if not for petty politics, there wouldn't be an iota of doubt on our camaraderie.
The recent coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did make me think that Hindus have been sidelined into oblivion. Agreed, there were lots of Muslim casualties and it is a despicable act of barbarism to kill innocent children, women, and others. Rightly so they have been given coverage to show the ghastardly side of the politicians. However, was there not even a single Hindu who lost his life in the riots? Leave that, even the media coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did not for once make an attempt to sympathize with the karsewaks who lost their lives. That was equally shameful on the part of the murderers and those karsewaks were innocent too. All these days, media termed the Godhra train carnage only as "the aftermath of Godhra" and in a split second the news turned to the innocent Muslims who were killed in the riots. Even a common Muslim felt the pain of the massacre of the karsewaks so why couldn't the media capture the trauma their families went through? Why couldn't the likes of Barkha Dutt who were capturing possibly each and every house of the Muslim victims for the primetime news did not for once go to the karsewak's family? Why were all the cameras turned to the Muslim rehabilitation camps and none to the Hindu camps? I have also felt the pain seeing media bits of the way riots shaped into a deadly massacre. Infact, majority of the common Hindus condemned the shameful act of genocide and attacked the Gujarat government for poor handling of the situation. We all felt the pain of our fellow Muslim brothers and I am definitely sure they had also felt the pain when the karsewaks were burnt alive and helpless.
Then why did the media not capture that part of the riots? And to top it all, how derogatory it felt when the deaths of the innocent Karsewaks in the burning train were termed as sabotage by few men to induce polarization, to gain prominence. How shocking it was to see the politicians leaving no stone unturned to prove that the train carnage was accidental and not preplanned just for the sake of their insatiated urge for more votes. In just one action, they jolted the self respect of the Hindus. And it is not only Gujarat, the Kashmiri Hindus have also not got significant media coverage for reasons well known to the media. They and politicians awake on this issue only when assembly elections in Kashmir are about to happen. And in all honestly, why will they cover such stories? They shall not gain anything by inciting the Hindus for it has been historically proven that we don't really feel loss of self respect for anything and everything. We believe in the "sab chalta hain" ("everything goes") attitude. Why will the politicians talk about issues pertaining to Hindus? We do not form the chunk of their vote banks. And even if we do, we celebrate the voting day as a national holiday staying at homes.
We are not asking for favors. We also do not mind our dear PM to suddenly wake up and announce reservations for "dalit Muslims" as if dalit Muslims are not a subset of the larger dalit community. We have been seeing this for quite a long time and now we have become thick skinned. What we request is to feel for our sufferings in the same vein as others. We also have a sense of self respect and dignity and expect fair treatment meted out to us. It is high time that media acts responsibly and in an unbiased way. We have already lost hope in our politicians. Hence, media becomes all the more potent. I am not undermining the goods media has delivered. However, there is always some scope for improvement and this is definitely one grey area where the media needs to pull up its socks.
Hopefully, there will be an all out attempt on the part of the media to rehabilitate our Kashmiri Hindus just as they are doing for the Gujarati Muslims. At the end of the day, it is an Indian that will benefit and not a Hindu or a Muslim.
http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/saurabhsaksena/559/42312/the-curse-of-being-a-hindu-in-modern-india.html
Vande Mataram
The recent coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did make me think that Hindus have been sidelined into oblivion. Agreed, there were lots of Muslim casualties and it is a despicable act of barbarism to kill innocent children, women, and others. Rightly so they have been given coverage to show the ghastardly side of the politicians. However, was there not even a single Hindu who lost his life in the riots? Leave that, even the media coverage of "Gujarat revisited" did not for once make an attempt to sympathize with the karsewaks who lost their lives. That was equally shameful on the part of the murderers and those karsewaks were innocent too. All these days, media termed the Godhra train carnage only as "the aftermath of Godhra" and in a split second the news turned to the innocent Muslims who were killed in the riots. Even a common Muslim felt the pain of the massacre of the karsewaks so why couldn't the media capture the trauma their families went through? Why couldn't the likes of Barkha Dutt who were capturing possibly each and every house of the Muslim victims for the primetime news did not for once go to the karsewak's family? Why were all the cameras turned to the Muslim rehabilitation camps and none to the Hindu camps? I have also felt the pain seeing media bits of the way riots shaped into a deadly massacre. Infact, majority of the common Hindus condemned the shameful act of genocide and attacked the Gujarat government for poor handling of the situation. We all felt the pain of our fellow Muslim brothers and I am definitely sure they had also felt the pain when the karsewaks were burnt alive and helpless.
Then why did the media not capture that part of the riots? And to top it all, how derogatory it felt when the deaths of the innocent Karsewaks in the burning train were termed as sabotage by few men to induce polarization, to gain prominence. How shocking it was to see the politicians leaving no stone unturned to prove that the train carnage was accidental and not preplanned just for the sake of their insatiated urge for more votes. In just one action, they jolted the self respect of the Hindus. And it is not only Gujarat, the Kashmiri Hindus have also not got significant media coverage for reasons well known to the media. They and politicians awake on this issue only when assembly elections in Kashmir are about to happen. And in all honestly, why will they cover such stories? They shall not gain anything by inciting the Hindus for it has been historically proven that we don't really feel loss of self respect for anything and everything. We believe in the "sab chalta hain" ("everything goes") attitude. Why will the politicians talk about issues pertaining to Hindus? We do not form the chunk of their vote banks. And even if we do, we celebrate the voting day as a national holiday staying at homes.
We are not asking for favors. We also do not mind our dear PM to suddenly wake up and announce reservations for "dalit Muslims" as if dalit Muslims are not a subset of the larger dalit community. We have been seeing this for quite a long time and now we have become thick skinned. What we request is to feel for our sufferings in the same vein as others. We also have a sense of self respect and dignity and expect fair treatment meted out to us. It is high time that media acts responsibly and in an unbiased way. We have already lost hope in our politicians. Hence, media becomes all the more potent. I am not undermining the goods media has delivered. However, there is always some scope for improvement and this is definitely one grey area where the media needs to pull up its socks.
Hopefully, there will be an all out attempt on the part of the media to rehabilitate our Kashmiri Hindus just as they are doing for the Gujarati Muslims. At the end of the day, it is an Indian that will benefit and not a Hindu or a Muslim.
http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/saurabhsaksena/559/42312/the-curse-of-being-a-hindu-in-modern-india.html
Vande Mataram
Monday, June 4, 2007
A V Rajwade: The Prime Minister`s right
I gave my first (and last) job interview in SBI more than 50 years back. During those days, the interview used to be with a committee of the bank’s directors. And one of them bowled a googly: “What would be your reaction if I say that our Prime Minister (Jawaharlal Nehru at that time) talks too much?” (Note the “if”). I somehow managed to deflect the ball, saying “Sir, if our Prime Minister does talk too much, it is his privilege.”
I was reminded of this incident in the context of the Prime Minister’s now famous speech at the CII conference and the, mostly critical, press comment it has elicited. While our present Prime Minister can hardly be accused of talking too much, it was certainly his privilege to say whatever he did at the conference, particularly when he had been invited to comment on the social responsibility of business. I would also not quarrel with his preaching the virtues of austerity and hard work: economic historians attribute the greater advancement of northern Europe as compared to southern Europe to protestant (Calvinist) virtues like thrift and education. In any case, he had the right credentials, being a man of impeccable integrity and humility (old timers in RBI have told me how he would stand in the queue to see the doctor in the RBI central office, even when he was governor).
But this apart, somebody like the Prime Minister does need to raise the issue of what the major stakeholders in the economy can do for the country, instead of merely asking what the government can do for them. (John Kennedy made the point in his inaugural address — think of what you can do for the United States, not merely what the United States can do for you.) How one hopes that the Prime Minister publicly raises similar issues with other stakeholders in the economy like the politicians in general and his cabinet colleagues in particular; the civil service and the middle class in general; and even the poor in this country. As for the politicians, for example, would he call upon all those who stand for elections and declare assets in crores of rupees, to at least have a PAN card? (Many crorepati candidates in the UP election did not have them.) Would he tell his Supreme Leader that education and employment reservations based on caste and religion would merely perpetuate the divisions in the society, and that it is more equitable to make these on the basis of economic criteria? That the present system has created a vested interest in having one’s own caste declared as backward or scheduled, sometimes leading to tragic loss of life as happened in Rajasthan last week? That fostering a culture of dependency on the state for everything is not the best way forward for the country? That every subsidy to other than BPL is at the cost of rural roads, water supplies and schools?
The civil service also needs to be told clearly that they are here to serve the citizens of this country and that they should not be producing shoddily drafted, less-than-clear laws, rules and regulations leading to endless delays, corruption and the harassment of citizens; that the secretary’s job is not merely to frame policy, but to also pay attention to how it can be implemented in the most citizen-friendly fashion; that even top civil servants need to give up their Brahminic indifference to mundane matters like form and system design, procedures, and so on. The endless and sometimes conflicting tax circulars regarding service tax, for instance, are only one example. The middle class in general also needs to be made aware that it has probably been the biggest beneficiary of fast growth in the economy over the last couple of decades, and is still the beneficiary of the maximum share of subsidies; and that these subsidies will have to be withdrawn as resources are needed elsewhere.
As for the broader constituency of the people of India, including the poor, it is the responsibility of those who believe in economic reforms, including the Prime Minister, to “market” them. Take the current issue of agricultural land for industry. The fact is that God stopped manufacturing land a long time back; industry can produce far more jobs on one acre of land than agriculture can; that unless there is a huge movement of workers from agriculture to industry and services, rural standards of living cannot improve. This does need to be emphasised, lest only those who see every change as a crime will gain populist support.
Tailpiece: When the home minister visited the recently bombed mosque in Hyderabad, he did so in a convoy of 24 cars. Is this any less ostentatious than a businessman riding in a Mercedes? Unfortunately, in our democracy, the politician’s worth depends on the number of armed guards, hangers on, and assorted officials in vehicles following him.
I was reminded of this incident in the context of the Prime Minister’s now famous speech at the CII conference and the, mostly critical, press comment it has elicited. While our present Prime Minister can hardly be accused of talking too much, it was certainly his privilege to say whatever he did at the conference, particularly when he had been invited to comment on the social responsibility of business. I would also not quarrel with his preaching the virtues of austerity and hard work: economic historians attribute the greater advancement of northern Europe as compared to southern Europe to protestant (Calvinist) virtues like thrift and education. In any case, he had the right credentials, being a man of impeccable integrity and humility (old timers in RBI have told me how he would stand in the queue to see the doctor in the RBI central office, even when he was governor).
But this apart, somebody like the Prime Minister does need to raise the issue of what the major stakeholders in the economy can do for the country, instead of merely asking what the government can do for them. (John Kennedy made the point in his inaugural address — think of what you can do for the United States, not merely what the United States can do for you.) How one hopes that the Prime Minister publicly raises similar issues with other stakeholders in the economy like the politicians in general and his cabinet colleagues in particular; the civil service and the middle class in general; and even the poor in this country. As for the politicians, for example, would he call upon all those who stand for elections and declare assets in crores of rupees, to at least have a PAN card? (Many crorepati candidates in the UP election did not have them.) Would he tell his Supreme Leader that education and employment reservations based on caste and religion would merely perpetuate the divisions in the society, and that it is more equitable to make these on the basis of economic criteria? That the present system has created a vested interest in having one’s own caste declared as backward or scheduled, sometimes leading to tragic loss of life as happened in Rajasthan last week? That fostering a culture of dependency on the state for everything is not the best way forward for the country? That every subsidy to other than BPL is at the cost of rural roads, water supplies and schools?
The civil service also needs to be told clearly that they are here to serve the citizens of this country and that they should not be producing shoddily drafted, less-than-clear laws, rules and regulations leading to endless delays, corruption and the harassment of citizens; that the secretary’s job is not merely to frame policy, but to also pay attention to how it can be implemented in the most citizen-friendly fashion; that even top civil servants need to give up their Brahminic indifference to mundane matters like form and system design, procedures, and so on. The endless and sometimes conflicting tax circulars regarding service tax, for instance, are only one example. The middle class in general also needs to be made aware that it has probably been the biggest beneficiary of fast growth in the economy over the last couple of decades, and is still the beneficiary of the maximum share of subsidies; and that these subsidies will have to be withdrawn as resources are needed elsewhere.
As for the broader constituency of the people of India, including the poor, it is the responsibility of those who believe in economic reforms, including the Prime Minister, to “market” them. Take the current issue of agricultural land for industry. The fact is that God stopped manufacturing land a long time back; industry can produce far more jobs on one acre of land than agriculture can; that unless there is a huge movement of workers from agriculture to industry and services, rural standards of living cannot improve. This does need to be emphasised, lest only those who see every change as a crime will gain populist support.
Tailpiece: When the home minister visited the recently bombed mosque in Hyderabad, he did so in a convoy of 24 cars. Is this any less ostentatious than a businessman riding in a Mercedes? Unfortunately, in our democracy, the politician’s worth depends on the number of armed guards, hangers on, and assorted officials in vehicles following him.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
A pig through the python
Scott McNealy, who used to like to style himself "chairman, president, founder, chief cook and bottlewasher" of Sun Microsystems, is not known for his affection for Microsoft. Quite the opposite. Speaking to the National Press Club of Australia way back in October 1996, he pronounced that "when the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their callipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office."
He had a point. The PC is ubiquitous, and every desktop in every office, of every programmer, secretary, manager or filing clerk has a full-blown office 'productivity' suite. The word processor is used to write temporary missives to the boss where a quick word would probably do, and to train our thoughts into bullet points where broadband thinking might be more rewarding. Cathleen Belleville, who worked at PowerPoint as a product planner from 1989 to 1995, once observed: "In the past, I think we had an inefficient system, where executives passed all of their work to secretaries. But now we've got highly paid people spending hours formatting slides because it's more fun to do that than concentrate on what you're going to say. It would be much more efficient to offload that work onto someone who could do it in a tenth of the time, and be paid less. Millions of executives around the world are sitting there going, 'Arial? Times Roman? Twenty-four point? Eighteen point?'" (The New Yorker, 28 May 2001).
McNealy famously declared to the San Jose Mercury, 3 August 1997: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste of corporate productivity'. So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since. Now I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see its earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going: 'What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work'."
The claim may be extravagant, but is not without merit. The computer on our desktop was sold to us as a productivity enhancer that would change our working lives, give us power at our fingertips, improve communication, and rid us of the stiff embrace of bureaucratic control. Some of the promise has come true. Word processors, spell checkers, and the other gizmos associated with the typical office suite have certainly brought massive productivity gains to particular sectors of business, to marketing managers and salespeople, to secretaries and clerical workers, and in doing so, have coincidentally saved the world from the dubious smudge of Tippex (invented back in the 1950s by Bette Claire Nesmith, who also happened to be the mother of Michael Nesmith, the one in the Monkees with the bobble hat).
But the long-term effects of the word processor revolution have not always been beneficial or profitable for the organisation. The office suite, brilliantly rebranded as the 'productivity' suite, long ago spread from its original preserve on the secretarial desk to the computer of every worker in the organisation, sometimes (as many computer professionals would argue) with detrimental effects.
Office suites have their virtues, but their overuse as a means of intradepartmental communications, and the working practices and culture that they promote, can get in the way of productive work, and paradoxically, increase the bureaucratic overload. We now routinely expect an elaborately prepared document where once a quick word and rapid action would have done, or a proliferation of PowerPoint presentations that "have 14 pieces of clipart, 13 fonts, right-hand justified, spell-checked, 13 colours", after which, as McNealy suggests, "you know your employee is exhausted by the time it finally comes off the printer."
McNealy's much cheaper, and more productive solution, was to remove PowerPoint and to "give everybody plastic Mylar sheets and all the pens they need to scribble on them", and to use what he describes as "the Bill Joy font. You can see where he licked his thumb and erases. It's so much faster," and leaves you time to get on with the job. (Bill Joy, of course, was the original designer of the BSD and Solaris flavours of Unix and was a co-founder, with McNealy, of Sun Microsystems.)
Is this a Luddite position? Well, maybe so. But anyone who has worked inside a large corporation knows the routine - masses of man hours are wasted producing documents which exist only to impress managers, and go straight from the desktop to the manager's in-tray to the wastepaper basket, and largely remain unread and unconsidered. A full office suite on every desktop encourages such a culture, where every line manager expects to receive a good-looking document to pass onwards up the line, until it finds its level and hits the appropriate bin. The bloated office systems of the major distributors even more so. Each office suite on each desktop comes at a premium, with a word processor, a spreadsheet and a visual presentation tool, crammed with features that are never used, and demands an upgrade every other year to conform with the current data formats. The content hasn't changed. The functionality hasn't changed. But the upgrade is essential to keep the cycle going.
Microsoft's own estimate (back in 2000) was that PowerPoint was used to create 30 million presentations a day. It takes little imagination to calculate the number of man hours expended in creating these presentations, and the distraction from productive work that such an effort necessitates.
McNealy, always quotable on the topic, takes issue with other aspects of the software: "Why did we ban it? Let me put it this way: If I want to tell my 40,000 employees to attack, the word 'attack' in ASCII is 48 bits. As a Microsoft Word document, it's 90,112 bits. Put that same word in a PowerPoint slide and it becomes 458,048 bits. That's a pig through the python when you try to send it over the Net."
Such a conclusion would apparently meet the approval of the Pentagon, where there are over 25,000 computers with PowerPoint, and General Henry "Hugh" Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an edict that while "you can still do a chart, don't lard it up with special effects, bells and whistles, because they are clogging up the military networks." (Wall Street Journal, 26 April 2000).
Many would argue that PowerPoint makes for better presentations. Bullet points have their own compelling force. Even before PowerPoint reached every desktop, there were marketing men who would design their documents by first deciding the number of bullet points, and afterwards defining the content to fit the number of bullet points available, the argument being that such arbitrary rules serve to concentrate the mind, and simplify the content.
In the same New Yorker article quoted above it is claimed that an unnamed leading US computer manufacturer distributed guidelines to its employees that take this principle to an extreme. Every PowerPoint presentation should follow a "Rule of Seven", and contain "Seven (7) bullets or lines per page, and seven (7) words per line."
While it is true that the compelling force of bullet points may bring clarity to some subjects, and raise the level of the poorest presentations, it is equally arguable that the ubiquity of PowerPoint presentations from the lecture hall to the business meeting lowers the overall level of discourse. The US Navy Secretary Richard Danzig has announced that he is no longer willing to sit through slide shows, saying that they were necessary only if the audience was "functionally illiterate". Too much time and effort is spent messing with PowerPoint, and not enough is spent on the message. In 2001, perhaps mischievously, Scott McNealy confirmed that his PowerPoint ban was still in place. "Look at our stock chart in the last four years since we've banned PowerPoint. Our productivity has skyrocketed!"
Ironically, the man credited with the original concept and inspiration for PowerPoint is one of the better known employees of Sun Microsystems, Whitfield Diffie, who is more famous for his adventures in the world of public key cryptography than for his role in devising a program to facilitate slide presentations while working at Bell-Northern Research (BNR).
PowerPoint was further developed by Bob Gaskins, BNR's head of computer-science research, who took the idea to Forethought, who released the first version in black and white for the Macintosh only in 1987. Not long afterwards, the company was purchased by Microsoft for $14 million, and PowerPoint for Windows was released in 1990. PowerPoint spread like the plague, and the rest, as they say, is history.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/richard-hillesley/14663/a-pig-through-the-python.thtml
He had a point. The PC is ubiquitous, and every desktop in every office, of every programmer, secretary, manager or filing clerk has a full-blown office 'productivity' suite. The word processor is used to write temporary missives to the boss where a quick word would probably do, and to train our thoughts into bullet points where broadband thinking might be more rewarding. Cathleen Belleville, who worked at PowerPoint as a product planner from 1989 to 1995, once observed: "In the past, I think we had an inefficient system, where executives passed all of their work to secretaries. But now we've got highly paid people spending hours formatting slides because it's more fun to do that than concentrate on what you're going to say. It would be much more efficient to offload that work onto someone who could do it in a tenth of the time, and be paid less. Millions of executives around the world are sitting there going, 'Arial? Times Roman? Twenty-four point? Eighteen point?'" (The New Yorker, 28 May 2001).
McNealy famously declared to the San Jose Mercury, 3 August 1997: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste of corporate productivity'. So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since. Now I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see its earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going: 'What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work'."
The claim may be extravagant, but is not without merit. The computer on our desktop was sold to us as a productivity enhancer that would change our working lives, give us power at our fingertips, improve communication, and rid us of the stiff embrace of bureaucratic control. Some of the promise has come true. Word processors, spell checkers, and the other gizmos associated with the typical office suite have certainly brought massive productivity gains to particular sectors of business, to marketing managers and salespeople, to secretaries and clerical workers, and in doing so, have coincidentally saved the world from the dubious smudge of Tippex (invented back in the 1950s by Bette Claire Nesmith, who also happened to be the mother of Michael Nesmith, the one in the Monkees with the bobble hat).
But the long-term effects of the word processor revolution have not always been beneficial or profitable for the organisation. The office suite, brilliantly rebranded as the 'productivity' suite, long ago spread from its original preserve on the secretarial desk to the computer of every worker in the organisation, sometimes (as many computer professionals would argue) with detrimental effects.
Office suites have their virtues, but their overuse as a means of intradepartmental communications, and the working practices and culture that they promote, can get in the way of productive work, and paradoxically, increase the bureaucratic overload. We now routinely expect an elaborately prepared document where once a quick word and rapid action would have done, or a proliferation of PowerPoint presentations that "have 14 pieces of clipart, 13 fonts, right-hand justified, spell-checked, 13 colours", after which, as McNealy suggests, "you know your employee is exhausted by the time it finally comes off the printer."
McNealy's much cheaper, and more productive solution, was to remove PowerPoint and to "give everybody plastic Mylar sheets and all the pens they need to scribble on them", and to use what he describes as "the Bill Joy font. You can see where he licked his thumb and erases. It's so much faster," and leaves you time to get on with the job. (Bill Joy, of course, was the original designer of the BSD and Solaris flavours of Unix and was a co-founder, with McNealy, of Sun Microsystems.)
Is this a Luddite position? Well, maybe so. But anyone who has worked inside a large corporation knows the routine - masses of man hours are wasted producing documents which exist only to impress managers, and go straight from the desktop to the manager's in-tray to the wastepaper basket, and largely remain unread and unconsidered. A full office suite on every desktop encourages such a culture, where every line manager expects to receive a good-looking document to pass onwards up the line, until it finds its level and hits the appropriate bin. The bloated office systems of the major distributors even more so. Each office suite on each desktop comes at a premium, with a word processor, a spreadsheet and a visual presentation tool, crammed with features that are never used, and demands an upgrade every other year to conform with the current data formats. The content hasn't changed. The functionality hasn't changed. But the upgrade is essential to keep the cycle going.
Microsoft's own estimate (back in 2000) was that PowerPoint was used to create 30 million presentations a day. It takes little imagination to calculate the number of man hours expended in creating these presentations, and the distraction from productive work that such an effort necessitates.
McNealy, always quotable on the topic, takes issue with other aspects of the software: "Why did we ban it? Let me put it this way: If I want to tell my 40,000 employees to attack, the word 'attack' in ASCII is 48 bits. As a Microsoft Word document, it's 90,112 bits. Put that same word in a PowerPoint slide and it becomes 458,048 bits. That's a pig through the python when you try to send it over the Net."
Such a conclusion would apparently meet the approval of the Pentagon, where there are over 25,000 computers with PowerPoint, and General Henry "Hugh" Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an edict that while "you can still do a chart, don't lard it up with special effects, bells and whistles, because they are clogging up the military networks." (Wall Street Journal, 26 April 2000).
Many would argue that PowerPoint makes for better presentations. Bullet points have their own compelling force. Even before PowerPoint reached every desktop, there were marketing men who would design their documents by first deciding the number of bullet points, and afterwards defining the content to fit the number of bullet points available, the argument being that such arbitrary rules serve to concentrate the mind, and simplify the content.
In the same New Yorker article quoted above it is claimed that an unnamed leading US computer manufacturer distributed guidelines to its employees that take this principle to an extreme. Every PowerPoint presentation should follow a "Rule of Seven", and contain "Seven (7) bullets or lines per page, and seven (7) words per line."
While it is true that the compelling force of bullet points may bring clarity to some subjects, and raise the level of the poorest presentations, it is equally arguable that the ubiquity of PowerPoint presentations from the lecture hall to the business meeting lowers the overall level of discourse. The US Navy Secretary Richard Danzig has announced that he is no longer willing to sit through slide shows, saying that they were necessary only if the audience was "functionally illiterate". Too much time and effort is spent messing with PowerPoint, and not enough is spent on the message. In 2001, perhaps mischievously, Scott McNealy confirmed that his PowerPoint ban was still in place. "Look at our stock chart in the last four years since we've banned PowerPoint. Our productivity has skyrocketed!"
Ironically, the man credited with the original concept and inspiration for PowerPoint is one of the better known employees of Sun Microsystems, Whitfield Diffie, who is more famous for his adventures in the world of public key cryptography than for his role in devising a program to facilitate slide presentations while working at Bell-Northern Research (BNR).
PowerPoint was further developed by Bob Gaskins, BNR's head of computer-science research, who took the idea to Forethought, who released the first version in black and white for the Macintosh only in 1987. Not long afterwards, the company was purchased by Microsoft for $14 million, and PowerPoint for Windows was released in 1990. PowerPoint spread like the plague, and the rest, as they say, is history.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/richard-hillesley/14663/a-pig-through-the-python.thtml
Friday, March 16, 2007
Behind the Sunni-Shi'ite Divide
It has come to this: the hatred between Iraq's warring sects is now so toxic, it contaminates even the memory of a shining moment of goodwill. On Aug. 31, 2005, a stampede among Shi'ite pilgrims on a bridge over the Tigris River in Baghdad led to hundreds jumping into the water in panic. Several young men in Adhamiya, the Sunni neighborhood on the eastern bank, dived in to help. One of them, Othman al-Obeidi, 25, rescued six people before his limbs gave out from exhaustion and he himself drowned. Nearly 1,000 pilgrims died that afternoon, but community leaders in the Shi'ite district of Khadamiya, on the western bank, lauded the "martyrdom" of al-Obeidi and the bravery of his friends. Adhamiya residents, for their part, held up al-Obeidi's sacrifice as proof that Sunnis bore no ill will toward their Shi'ite neighbors across the river.
Eighteen months on, one of the men who jumped into the river to help the Shi'ites says al-Obeidi "wasted his life for those animals." Hamza Muslawi refuses to talk about how many he himself saved, saying it fills him with shame. "If I see a Shi'ite child about to drown in the Tigris now," says the carpenter, "I will not reach my hand out to save him." In Khadamiya, too, the narrative about Aug. 31 has changed. Karrar Hussein, 28, was crossing the bridge when the stampede began. Ask him about al-Obeidi, and his cheerful demeanor quickly turns sour. "That is a myth," hisses the cell-phone salesman. "That person never existed at all. He was invented by the Sunnis to make them look good." Rather than jumping in to help, he claims, the people of Adhamiya laughed and cheered as Shi'ites drowned.
The bridge connecting the two neighborhoods is now closed for security reasons--just as well, since the chasm between them is too wide for any man-made span. Mortars fired from the cemetery behind Abu Hanifa, a Sunni shrine in Adhamiya, have caused carnage in the bustling markets of the western bank. There are more mortars going in the opposite direction; on a recent afternoon, the sound of an explosion on the Sunni side of the river is greeted with cheers by worshippers at a Shi'ite shrine in Khadamiya.
Those cheers are just one sign of how much venom has seeped into Sunni-Shi'ite relations in the year since their simmering conflict was brought to a boil by the bombing of Samarra's golden-domed shrine. The bloodlust is no longer limited to extremists on both sides. Hatred has gone mainstream, spreading first to victims of the violence and their families--the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have lost loved ones, jobs, homes, occasionally entire neighborhoods--and then into the wider society. Now it permeates not only the rancorous political discourse of Baghdad's Green Zone but also ordinary conversations in homes and marketplaces, arousing a fury even in those who have no obvious, pressing grievance. Neither Muslawi nor Hussein has suffered personal loss, but they are relatively able to tap into the same loathing that motivates the Shi'ite militias and Sunni jihadis. "The air has become poisoned [by sectarianism], and we have all been breathing it," says Abbas Fadhil, a Baghdad physician. "And so now everybody is talking the same language, whether they are educated or illiterate, secular or religious, violent or not."
Worse, there are clear signs that Iraq's malice has an echo in other parts of the Middle East, exacerbating existing tensions between Sunnis and Shi'ites and reanimating long-dormant ones. In Lebanon, some Hizballah supporters seeking to topple the government in Beirut chant the name of radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is blamed for thousands of Sunni deaths. In Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, sympathy for Sunnis in Iraq is spiked with the fear, notably in official circles, of a Shi'ite tide rising across the Middle East, instigated and underwritten by an ancient enemy of the Arabs: Iran.
For those who follow Iraq from afar, the daily stories of sectarian slaughter are perplexing. Why are the Shi'ites and Sunnis fighting? Why now? There are several explanations for the timing of the outbreak of hostilities, each tied to a particular interpretation of how events unfolded after the fall of Saddam Hussein: flawed American postwar policies, provocation by foreign jihadis, retaliation by militias like al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, the ineptitude of Iraqi politicians and, lately, Iranian interference. But the rage burning in people like Muslawi and Hussein has much deeper and older roots. It is the product of centuries of social, political and economic inequality, imposed by repression and prejudice and frequently reinforced by bloodshed. The hatred is not principally about religion. Sunnis and Shi'ites may disagree on some matters of dogma and some details of Islam's early history, but these differences are small--they agree on most of the important tenets of the faith, like the infallibility of the Koran, and they venerate the Prophet Muhammad. Despite the claims by some Arab commentators, there is no evidence that Iraq's Shi'ite extremists are trying to convert Sunnis, or vice versa. For Iraqi fighters on both sides, "their sect is nothing more than a uniform, a convenient way to tell friend from enemy," says Ghanim Hashem Kudhir, who teaches modern Islamic history at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University. "What binds them is not religion but common historical experience: Shi'ites see themselves as the oppressed, and they see Sunnis as the oppressors."
Sunnis and Shi'ites are fighting for a secular prize: political domination. The warring sects, says a U.S. official in Baghdad, "are simply communities ... striving to gain or regain power." Without an understanding of the roots of the rage that drives people like Muslawi and Hussein, any plan--American or Iraqi, military or political--to stabilize Iraq is doomed to failure. And that power struggle in Iraq, whether it draws neighboring countries into a wider sectarian conflict or forces a realignment of alliances, has the potential to radically alter the Middle East.
I. ORIGINS
ISLAM'S SCHISM BEGAN IN A.D. 632, immediately after the Prophet Muhammad died without naming a successor as leader of the new Muslim flock. Some of his followers believed the role of Caliph, or viceroy of God, should be passed down Muhammad's bloodline, starting with his cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. But the majority backed the Prophet's friend Abu Bakr, who duly became Caliph. Ali would eventually become the fourth Caliph before being murdered in A.D. 661 by a heretic near Kufa, now in Iraq. The succession was once again disputed, and this time it led to a formal split. The majority backed the claim of Mu'awiyah, Governor of Syria, and his son Yazid. Ali's supporters, who would eventually be known collectively as Shi'at Ali, or partisans of Ali, agitated for his son Hussein. When the two sides met on a battlefield near modern Karbala on Oct. 10, 680, Hussein was killed and decapitated. But rather than nipping the Shi'ite movement in the bud, his death gave it a martyr. In Shi'ite eyes, Hussein is a just and humane figure who stood up to a mighty oppressor. The annual mourning of Hussein's death, known as Ashura, is the most poignant and spectacular of Shi'ite ceremonies: the faithful march in the streets, beating their chests and crying in sorrow. The extremely devout flagellate themselves with swords and whips.
Those loyal to Mu'awiyah and his successors as Caliph would eventually be known as Sunnis, meaning followers of the Sunnah, or Way, of the Prophet. Since the Caliph was often the political head of the Islamic empire as well as its religious leader, imperial patronage helped make Sunni Islam the dominant sect. Today about 90% of Muslims worldwide are Sunnis. But Shi'ism would always attract some of those who felt oppressed by the empire. Shi'ites continued to venerate the Imams, or the descendants of the Prophet, until the 12th Imam, Mohammed al-Mahdi (the Guided One), who disappeared in the 9th century at the location of the Samarra shrine in Iraq. Mainstream Shi'ites believe that al-Mahdi is mystically hidden and will emerge on an unspecified date to usher in a reign of justice.
Shi'ites soon formed the majority in the areas that would become the modern states of Iraq, Iran, Bahrain and Azerbaijan. There are also significant Shi'ite minorities in other Muslim states, including Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Pakistan. Crucially, Shi'ites outnumber Sunnis in the Middle East's major oil-producing regions--not only Iran and Iraq but also eastern Saudi Arabia. But outside Iran, Sunnis have historically had a lock on political power, even where Shi'ites have the numerical advantage. (The one place where the opposite holds true is modern Syria, which is mostly Sunni but since 1970 has been ruled by a small Shi'ite subsect known as the Alawites.) Sunni rulers maintained their monopoly on power by excluding Shi'ites from the military and bureaucracy; for much of Islamic history, a ruling Sunni élite treated Shi'ites as an underclass, limited to manual labor and denied a fair share of state resources.
The rulers used religious arguments to justify oppression. Shi'ites, they said, were not genuine Muslims but heretics. Devised for political convenience, this view of Shi'ites solidified into institutionalized prejudice. Sunnis likened reverence for the Prophet's bloodline and the Shi'ites' fondness for portraits of some of the Imams to the sin of idolatry. Shi'ite rituals, especially the self-flagellation during Ashura, were derided as pagan. Many rulers forbade such ceremonies, fearing that large gatherings would quickly turn into political uprisings. (Ashura was banned during most of Saddam Hussein's rule and resumed only after his downfall in 2003.) "For Shi'ites, Sunni rule has been like living under apartheid," says Vali Nasr, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.
But religious repression was uneven. Sunni Caliphs in Baghdad tolerated and sometimes contributed to the development of Najaf and Karbala as the most important centers of Shi'ite learning. Shi'ite ayatullahs, as long as they refrained from open defiance of the ruling élite, could run seminaries and collect tithes from their followers. The shrines of Shi'ite Imams in Najaf, Karbala, Samarra and Khadamiya were allowed to become magnets for pilgrimage.
Sectarian relations worsened in the 16th century. By then the seat of Sunni power had moved to Istanbul. When the Turkish Sunni Ottomans fought a series of wars with the Shi'ite Safavids of Persia, the Arabs caught in between were sometimes obliged to take sides. Sectarian suspicions planted then have never fully subsided, and Sunni Arabs still pejoratively label Shi'ites as "Persians" or "Safavis." The Ottomans eventually won control of the Arab territories and cemented Sunni dominance. The British, the next power in the Middle East, did nothing to change the equation. In the settlement after World War I, they handed the newly created states of Iraq and Bahrain, both with Shi'ite majorities, to Sunni monarchs.
II. SADDAM'S LEGACY
WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN ASSUMED POWER in Baghdad in 1979, Iraq's Shi'ites had enjoyed a couple of decades of respite under leaders who allowed them some measure of equality with the Sunnis. Then came Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Fearing a similar uprising in Iraq, Saddam revived some old repressions and ordered the murder of Iraq's most popular ayatullah, Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, uncle of Muqtada. Shi'ites made up a majority of those killed in Iraq's war with Iran, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, but after it ended they were once again shut out of most senior government and military positions. With the defeat of Saddam's army in the 1991 Gulf War, Shi'ites saw a chance to rise against the dictator. But they received no protection from the allied forces, and Saddam was able to smash the revolt. By some estimates, more than 300,000 Shi'ites were killed; many were buried in mass graves. For the rest of his reign, Saddam kept the Shi'ites firmly under his thumb. Several popular clerics were killed, including Muqtada's father. Saddam ordered the murder of Sunnis too, but there was a crucial difference. "When Saddam killed a Sunni, it was personal--because of something that person had done," says author Nasr. "But when it came to killing Shi'ites, he was indiscriminate. He didn't need a specific reason. Their being Shi'ite was enough."
Remarkably, despite the profound imbalance in political power and the legacy of repression, many individual Iraqis forged business, social and personal relationships between the sects. In Baghdad and other cities, most neighborhoods built in the modern era were mixed. Residents of Adhamiya and Khadamiya were able to reach across the Tigris and socialize. Mohammed al-Shammari, an Arabic-literature professor, fondly remembers evenings with friends in Khadamiya, followed by dinner and late-night revelry in Adhamiya, where shops and restaurants stayed open later. "Nobody asked us if we were Shi'ite or Sunni," says al-Shammari. "And we never thought to ask each other. I have friends I didn't know were Shi'ite until quite recently." Among the urban educated classes, it was considered unsophisticated and politically incorrect to ask people their sect, though there are other ways to find out (see box). Some of the people mentioned in this article agreed to be interviewed only if their names were changed. Many of Iraq's tribes have always included clans from both sects. Sunni-Shi'ite marriages were commonplace, especially among the educated urban population. In the winter of 2002, when Fattah, a Shi'ite computer technician, asked the father of his Sunni girlfriend Zahra for permission to marry her, there was no hesitation. The couple was married a few days before the start of the war, and Zahra says, "Many of the guests were themselves mixed couples."
III. THE IMPLOSION
FOR TWO YEARS AFTER SADDAM'S FALL, such ties were strong enough to keep widespread sectarian violence at bay. There were provocations: Sunni jihadi groups, such as Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda, began a bombing campaign against Shi'ite targets. But many Shi'ite extremists, rather than lashing out at Sunnis, sometimes joined them in the insurgency against the Americans and their allies. When Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army rose against the U.S. in the summer of 2004, it was supported by the Sunni insurgency. That fall some of al-Sadr's fighters joined Sunnis in the battle of Fallujah. Al-Sadr portrayed himself as a defender of Arabs, not Shi'ites alone. Even the hard-line Sunni clerics' group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, hailed him as an Iraqi hero; Sunni politicians spoke of a political alliance with the Mahdi Army.
Inter-sect relations, political and personal, began to fray with the approach of Iraq's first post-Saddam election in January 2005. Sunni parties boycotted the poll, allowing a Shi'ite coalition to sweep to power. With an assertiveness that at times bordered on arrogance, the Shi'ite-led government inflamed Sunni resentment. An especially sore point was the mass recruitment into the police and the military of Shi'ite militiamen, some of whom used the immunity of their uniforms to avenge old grudges against Sunnis. Sunni terrorism groups stepped up their bombing campaign, which convinced Shi'ites that the former ruling class was never going to accept its reduced status. By the time U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad persuaded Sunni parties to take part in a second general election in December 2005, the two sects were some distance apart.
Then came Samarra. The operation carried the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi's fingerprints, but Iraqi Sunnis were the ones who would endure the bloody fallout. For many Shi'ites, this was an atrocity too far. They turned to militias such as the Mahdi Army to avenge the desecration of the site, and those militias ran amuck, slaughtering Sunnis and attacking many of their mosques. After the first, furious convulsion of violence, the militias began a more systematic campaign of kidnap and execution. The bodies of their victims, bearing signs of bestial torture, were often tossed into sewers or garbage dumps. Jihadi groups responded in kind. The U.S. military had passed on most security responsibilities to Iraqi forces, but they proved unable to halt the killings. Worse, they were frequently accused of joining in the fighting, usually on the side of the militias. Last fall two U.S.-Iraqi joint security operations failed to stanch the bloodletting.
Saddam's execution became another flash point. Even Sunnis who had little sympathy for Saddam were incensed that the government chose to hang him at the hour of morning prayers on one of the most sacred Muslim holidays (Iraqi Sunnis celebrated the holiday one day before the Shi'ites). The choice seemed to confirm suspicions that Shi'ite political dominance would be a constant humiliation. "It was their way of telling us, 'We're in charge now, and you are so weak that even your holy days have no meaning anymore,'" says media analyst Kadhim al-Mukhdadi. "That morning I gave up hoping that things would get better."
He is not alone in that hopelessness. Sectarian lines have been drawn through mixed neighborhoods. Where Shi'ites are in the majority, Sunni families have been forced to leave for fear of death. Sunnis have responded with their own sectarian cleansing. A large portion of the mostly Sunni middle and upper classes has fled the country; Jordan and Syria together now have nearly 2 million Iraqi expatriates. Inter-sect marriages have become less and less common. Zahra's father has refused to give his younger daughter permission to follow in her sister's footsteps and marry a Shi'ite. "He is the same man," Zahra says in her father's defense. "But the situation around him has changed. Now if he allows a daughter to marry a Shi'ite, people will ask questions."
IV. A WIDER WAR
IN IRAQ, THE SUNNI-SHI'ITE WAR CAN sometimes seem no more than a series of concurrent battles between neighborhoods such as Adhamiya and Khadamiya. The people fighting may have no conception of any greater plan. The wider Muslim world, however, tends to focus on the big picture. Shi'ites are now politically dominant in Iraq, and Iran is the leading Shi'ite power. So in most Arab capitals, the sectarian war in Iraq is increasingly blamed on Iran. Taken along with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear ambitions, Iran's sponsorship of the Shi'ite Hizballah militia in Lebanon and its backing of Hamas, Iran's supposed meddling in Iraq is proof to Arab leaders that their old Persian rivals are determined to reshape the Middle East to suit their own interest.
As early as 2004, Jordan's King Abdullah warned of a rising Shi'ite "crescent" running from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon. Although the Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad had the backing of the U.S., in many Arab eyes it represented the expansion of Iran's influence. Sunni Arab leaders have begun to ratchet up their rhetoric against Shi'ites in general and Iran in particular. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2006 said, "Most of the Shi'ites are loyal to Iran and not to the countries they are living in." After a storm of protest from Iraq and elsewhere, Mubarak claimed he had been referring only to matters of religion. In the predominantly Sunni Palestinian territories, supporters of Fatah have taken to branding their Hamas rivals as a Shi'ite organization. In January, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah informed a Kuwaiti newspaper that he had told an Iranian envoy that Iran was interfering in Iraq and endangering the region. King Abdullah also accused Iran of wanting to spread Shi'ism in Sunni countries.
But both sides are responsible for stoking tensions. Religious leaders of the Wahhabi sect, often backed and bankrolled by members of the Saudi royal family, contribute to the spread of sectarian violence by preaching a hard-line form of Sunni Islam that condemns all other strains as heresy. In Pakistan, moderate Muslims blame Wahhabi madrasahs as well as Iranian-funded Shi'ite seminaries for the escalation of Sunni-Shi'ite violence that has claimed more than 4,000 lives in the past two decades. In the latest attacks, three separate suicide bombings killed 21 during the Ashura rituals in January. In Lebanon, sectarian tensions have risen after years of relative calm. Hizballah, the Shi'ite militia, won praise from Sunnis when Israeli forces left Lebanon in 2000. But after the assassination in February 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, a Sunni, intra-Muslim antagonism began to harden. Sunnis blamed Hizballah's patron, the Syrian government, for the killing. While faulting Hizballah for provoking last summer's war, many Lebanese Sunnis stood with Hizballah in the face of Israel's onslaught against the country. But any residual Sunni admiration for Hizballah vanished by the end of the year, when Hizballah led a campaign to bring down the government of Hariri's longtime friend Fouad Siniora.
Iraq's Sunnis, for their part, have grown adept at playing to wider Middle Eastern concerns about Iran's influence in the region. Sunni politicians stoke these anxieties in the hope that Arab pressure on the Iraqi government will force it to give Sunnis a greater share of power. "If the Arab states don't come to our help, they will find [Iran] at their gate," says Mohammed Bashar al-Faidi, a spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars. "For the sake of the entire Muslim community worldwide, the beast has to be destroyed in Iraq." For leaders of terrorist groups, the fear of a regionwide Shi'ite ascendancy serves as a useful fund-raising tool as well as recruiting propaganda. Radical Sunni preachers and TV talk-show hosts across the Arab world are inflaming sentiments by accusing Iraq's "Persians" of ethnic cleansing. In January, an editorial in al-Ahram, a newspaper widely seen as the voice of the Egyptian state, declared, "Iran is working actively toward spreading the Shi'ite doctrine even in countries that do not have a Shi'ite minority." Iran, in turn, has accused Sunnis of issuing fatwas authorizing the killing of Shi'ites.
V. THE UNBRIDGEABLE CHASM
MOST IRAQIS, CAUGHT UP IN THEIR OWN terrors, have little time for the angst of the wider Islamic world. Those who can look past the daily horrors see an even more frightening future, in which their children carry today's hatreds into the next generation. With thousands being killed on either side, the nationalist, secular slogans that were long taught in Iraq's schools have lost much of their meaning. And children do not get too many lessons in secularism at home. "When we were kids, my parents taught us that Shi'ites had the wrong idea about Islam but were just misguided, not bad people," says Ayesha Ubaid, 26, a Sunni doctor's assistant whose late husband was a Shi'ite. "But now I hear my brothers and sisters-in-law telling their children, 'Those people killed our uncle and two cousins and stole our ancestral home.'" Her son Mohammed, 8, returned from school one afternoon and angrily asked, "Why did you marry an infidel?"
Ubaid lives with three brothers and their families. In November, they all moved to Adhamiya from Shulla, a mostly Shi'ite neighborhood where she was born. "I knew every brick of every house on my street," she says. "When we left, some of our neighbors cried and promised they would protect our house with their lives. But the next day, a Shi'ite family took the place, and nobody stopped them." Ubaid says she had considered raising Mohammed as a Shi'ite, out of respect for her husband. But now, she says, "that would be inviting disaster." Still, Ubaid says that in her new neighborhood, she feels as safe as it is possible to be in Baghdad.
Will she stay that way? With a large supply of luck, Operation Imposing Law, the new security operation enabled by President George W. Bush's "surge" of U.S. troops, may halt the sectarian fighting in Baghdad long enough for Shi'ites and Sunnis to start mending fences. If all goes according to plan, the Iraqi government will use the respite from violence to launch a massive economic program that will create jobs and improve civic services like electricity and water supply. If the government can do that, says veteran Shi'ite politician Abu Firas al-Saedi, "people won't immediately start hugging each other and become best friends again--but at least if they are busy working and making money, they will have time to forget the past." In this optimistic view, the militias won't take their fight from Baghdad to other Iraqi cities, where the U.S. presence is minimal, and any security gains in Baghdad will quickly spread elsewhere.
Conceivably, all that might happen. As Operation Imposing Law got under way on Feb. 14, there were some signs that Shi'ite militias might be reducing their attacks on Sunnis. Al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army to lie low and avoid direct confrontation with American troops. Al-Sadr himself and several of his top commanders are believed to have left for Iran. But few in Baghdad doubt that he will be back. "He is just bending to the wind because he knows his fighters can't face the Americans," says Hussain al-Moed, a rival Shi'ite cleric. "But he also knows that the Americans will leave. The Mahdi Army can afford to wait." Sunni jihadis have kept up their bombing campaign despite the security operation--and if they continue to strike against Shi'ite neighborhoods, the Mahdi Army may return to the fight.
It's too early to tell if the new operation will damp down sectarian tensions. "There are more ways in which this could go wrong than go right," says political analyst Tahseen al-Shekhli. "We have seen too many plans fail to have any faith in this one." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a lifelong Shi'ite partisan, has shown little patience for Sunni grievances and has failed to start an oft-promised national reconciliation process. So despite his professed conviction that the security operation is working, chances remain high that it will eventually falter, brought down by the inability of Sunnis and Shi'ites to find a political settlement or the reduction of U.S. forces that is bound to happen one day.
And then all hell would be let loose. Iraq is a country where almost every household has at least one AK-47. If there is no Sunni-Shi'ite rapprochement, a full-blown civil war would raise the daily death toll from the scores to the hundreds--to say nothing of the escalation that would come if neighboring countries became involved, Iran backing the Shi'ite militias, Arab states sponsoring the Sunnis. Such a war could continue for years, with each sectarian community splitting into smaller factions led by rival warlords. In Baghdad, the ethnic cleansing would continue to its logical conclusion, with the city split into a Shi'ite east and a Sunni west.
If it came to that, no bridge, no crossing, would convince the residents of Adhamiya and Khadamiya that they had dreams in common. Just as Muslawi and Hussein look back at the stampede over the bridge in 2005 and see different pasts, so Iraq's Sunnis and Shi'ites may now be contemplating a future that they cannot share. There could be no more bitter legacy of the Bush Administration's fateful decision to go to war in Iraq.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592849,00.html
With reporting by Charles Crain / Baghdad, Scott MacLeod / Beirut, Aryn Baker / Kabul, Ghulam Hasnain / Karachi
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Nitin Desai: Are SEZs a good idea?
| SEZs are business-friendly but not market-friendly. They work against an economic policy that promotes competition. |
| Political scientists draw a distinction between business-friendly and market-friendly governments. A business-friendly government works closely with business leaders, individually or collectively, to promote preferred activities. It likes to play God and decide who will be the winners. A market-friendly government, on the other hand, focuses more on setting rules of the game and levelling the playing field for all producers and sectors. A market-friendly policy does not rule out measures to assist producers. It only requires that such measures should be based on a sound analysis of market failure. |
| Where does the SEZ policy fall in this distinction between a business-friendly and market-friendly development policy? The policy is clearly well liked by large businesses that are falling over themselves getting a piece of the action. Of course the winners will be those who are best at deploying the old pre-reform skills in lobbying and winning over politicians. |
| The policy relaxations for the SEZs basically involve tax concessions that treat them as if they were units located outside India—a more liberal regime for external borrowings, and some significant relaxations of environmental and labour laws and of conditions governing infrastructure and urban development. |
| The SEZ policy is not a response to market failure. If anything, it is a response to governance failure. Perhaps it reflects a belief that growth and social justice cannot be reconciled—so go for growth in the SEZs and leave all the social justice stuff for the domestic tariff area. |
| If the policy regimes that are to apply to the SEZs are a good idea, they should be made applicable throughout. If they are an attempt to by-pass political constraints they will run into agitations sooner rather than later. Today these protests relate to land acquisition. Tomorrow they will be triggered by the application of more relaxed labour and environmental laws in the SEZs. Recent reports suggest that Naxals have already trained their sights on them. |
| The SEZs involve discrimination and discretion. The discrimination is between the policy regimes that apply to producing units within the domestic tariff area and those within the SEZs. The discretion lies in the case-by-case approval of proposals to set up these SEZs. Both of these involve a significant departure from a market-friendly system. Sooner or later they degenerate into what we politely call rent-seeking by politicians, bureaucrats and their business cronies. In some ways the SEZ policy marks a reversal of a trend towards non-discriminatory and non-discretionary regulatory regimes that started in 1991. |
| The SEZs are meant to drive rapid export expansion. But export production and production for the domestic market should not be separated in a sensibly-run economy. In an open trade regime with low tariffs there is no essential distinction between the two. Hence isolating export production in some policy-privileged enclave makes little sense if our goal is an open market economy. The SEZs will drive investment and production away from the domestic tariff area and lead to significant revenue losses, which some estimates put at Rs 1.75 trillion (Rs 175,000 crore). |
| The Indian policy on SEZs is clearly imitative of the Chinese policy that has led to the boom in places like Shenzen and Shanghai. But the motivation behind the Chinese policy has not been well understood. China went in for a policy based on SEZs to promote exports and economic growth because they followed a dual-track policy of a liberalised regime in a few cordoned areas in order to protect their public sector-dominated economy. Our reform path is not dual-track but gradualist—liberalising throughout the economy at a pace that is politically palatable. |
| The Chinese started with four SEZs and have six now. We are going in for SEZs on a cottage industry basis. As against Shenzen, which is nearly 50,000 hectares in size, the Indian guidelines envisage SEZs starting at 40 hectares (for warehouses). The largest ones contemplated are of 10,000-15,000 hectares in size. According to the web-site of the Ministry of Commerce, there are 14 functional SEZs at present and a further 61 approved and under establishment. Several hundred are under consideration. Each one of these will have a Development Commissioner and an Authority. Incidentally any person moving in or out of an SEZ will require a special photo ID card. Can you imagine the proliferation of bureaucracy, the barriers and toll gates impeding movement, the customs, excise and sales tax officers who will be employed to police all of them and the confusion and corruption that will ensue? |
| Much of the public criticism of SEZs has centred on the land acquisition processes. This is part of a broader issue of the misuse of the right of eminent domain embodied in the Land Acquisition Acts, which has been the theme in two earlier columns in this paper*. The central issue here is not the quantum of compensation or rehabilitation and resettlement. The real issue is whether state power should be used to promote private profit. But in all fairness some of the big players are relying on commercial acquisition, giving the land holders an equity stake in the project and ensuring jobs for the displaced persons. |
| The concerns about land acquisition have been made more acute because the SEZs on the outskirts of major towns seem very much like standard urban development schemes with none of the constraints of existing rights or municipal democracy. That is why some critics have described them as new zamindaris. They may well work but at the expense of the established urban areas nearby like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad. In fact, by driving commercial investments away they will make the problems of these metropolises worse. We may have a few shining new urban enclaves with thousands, maybe tens of thousands, living a Singaporean lifestyle alongside tens of millions condemned to live in continuing squalor. |
| The bottom line is that the SEZs do not address and in fact work against what is really needed—an economic policy that promotes competition, innovation and growth throughout the economy, an urban policy that focuses on affordable housing and services for all, a social policy that actively expands opportunities for all regions and classes and a political policy that bridges the divide between those who support continuing reform in the role of government and those who fear the rigours of liberal capitalism. |
| *“Land for Infrastructure,” Nitin Desai, Business Standard, April 20, 2006 “Land Rights and Development,” Nitin Desai, Business Standard, January 18, 2007 |
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