Have Your Say at BBC: You Never Know Who You Get to Hear

I read the news at BBC website a lot. And at times I take part in their debates called Have Your Say. Sometime last year, I got a call from them asking if I would like to participate in this phone in program. That debate was on 'Child Labor.' The guest at the program was the director general of ILO. Soon after, I once again participated in a debate on 'Economic Growth' and this time the guest speaker was the noted economist Jeffery Sachs (can't find a link for this one). But I never felt excited enough to blog about it. After all, I am just a caller. But this time around I am excited enough to blog about it even though I am 'just a caller!'

I got a call earlier this week from BBC asking if I would like to join in this Sunday's 'Have Your Say' about India and China's economic growth, and I agreed as usual. But the third time around the excitment was not that great. In fact, it was around six in the evening I remembered that I had to talk to them.

I got the call in the evening around 7.30 and as I was the first caller to go on air, so I was on phone before the program started. I did not know who the guests were. So, for a while I am on hold and I can hear a lot of things happening at the BBC studios. Suddenly, I hear the host for the program, Lyce Ducet saying, "Hello Professor Sen, it is so nice to have you with us from Boston" and I start jumping at this end, Oh! my god, Professor Amartya Sen is on the program!

Lyce Ducet asks Professor Sen, "Are you comfortable with the format of the program?" And he says that he is sorry but he is not really well versed with it. So she explains it to him, saying she would be switching from him to the guest in the studios (a student of Professor Sen, now a professor at Cambridge) to callers from all over the world and that it is really like taking a tutorial only for a million of viewers and the professor replies ".... but the tutorials are much more intimate." One minute later we go on air.

You can see a video of it by going to this page and clicking on 'Video: Watch Have Your Say' for "What will China and India's Growth Mean."

As the first speaker (from the audience) I made a couple of points saying that yes India is growing but I feel jittery about it for two reasons, one I am not sure how long it will last and two there are many many people who are untouched by it. Lyce Ducet reads a few related emails, and I get to speak once more.

Then after a while, Professor Sen responds and he says "... I could not catch the name of the lady from New Delhi ...." It does not matter Professor Sen, you are way too polite to bother about my name and the lady is anyway so excited to hear you respond to her queries.

I am sure some of you would like to hear Professor Sen speak and for the benefit of family and friends I start speaking (for a brief while) at 4.51 minutes of the video.

For me, it was so exciting to hear Professor Sen respond to what I said. But the icing on the cake was to hear him speak off air and he comes across as the same mild mannered person that he always is in front of the camera.

It has been a truely exciting evening for me.

Another Post at Globalvoices

I have often heard that Indian blogs reflect a very middle class mindset. I thought I would see what do Indian blogs say about things that are not so middle class. In this post at Globalvoices I tried to collect some such posts. They talk about child marriage, people leaving their villages to look for work in the cities, a visit to a village school and a debate about poverty in India.

What Percentage of 17-23 Year Olds are Enrolled in Undergraduate Courses in India?

Yesterday during the lunch time I was having this conversation with a professor about the reservations. He said, "... to give you some perspective Mridula, only 9% of the 20 year olds are enrolled in universities." My mouth was hanging open and it took some time to digest it. I asked him where I could find this figure? He said if I would search on the net, I would find it.

So here it is, from the horse's mouth and the actual figure, according to Arjun Singh, is still lower.

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
MINISTRY OF HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT

LOK SABHA
UNSTARRED QUESTION NO 2221
TO BE ANSWERED ON 14.12.2004

ENROLLMENT IN UNDER GRADUATE COURSES

2221.	SHRI ASADUDDIN OWAISI

Will the Minister of HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT be pleased to state:-


(a) the average annual number of candidates getting enrolled against under graduate courses at present;

(b) the percentage of such students to the total population of the country;

(c) whether the Government has set any target to increase this number; and

(d) if so, the details thereof and the time by which the target is likely to be achieved?

ANSWER

MINISTER OF HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT ( SHRI ARJUN SINGH )

(a) & (b): An average of about 78.50 lakhs students were enrolled annually through formal system of education for undergraduate courses in universities/colleges during the last four years, apart from enrollment in distance education. This is about 6-7 % of the population in the relevant age group of 17-23 years.

(c) & (d): The aim of the Government is to increase the enrollment against undergraduate courses to 10% by the end of Xth Plan period (2002-2007). This includes both formal and distance education.

(I have slightly changed the formatting of the original document listed above, otherwise some of the material was reflecting in very small fonts on my post, the original document can be found from the link given above or from here.)

Now, I have a few questions.

• Who will provide education to the rest of the 17-23 year olds who want to enroll for higher education, irrespective of the caste they belong to?
• What are the plans of the HRD Ministry to do something about increasing these numbers apart from recommending reservations that will affect even a smaller percentage of this 6-7% of the youth population?
• Will that bring in social equality we all are looking for or is this enough to bring social equality?
• Is 10% growth target fair?
• Or does this 10% aspiration reflects a severe lack of vision on part of the HRD ministry and would translate in very limited opportunities for today's youth in general?
• What do the figures look like in other countries? If you can point out to any online resources for this point, I would be so grateful.
  

Manjunath's Case Comes to the Trial

From The Indian Express

LAKHIMPUR KHERI, MAY 19:Exactly six months after the murder of Indian Oil Corporation’s young sales officer and IIM graduate Shanmugham Manjunath for his crackdown on fuel adulteration, the Lakhimpur District and Sessions Court framed charges against all the eight accused today.

The court has fixed June 5 for the hearing which will continue until June 7.

I hope the culprits are brought to the book fast.

Too Many Features You Say?

This Harvard Business Review Working Knowledge confirms exactly what you felt all along. Quoting from the article:

... [F]rustrated product owners . . . will spread the word of their dissatisfaction. This appears to be the case with BMW, whose 7 Series cars feature the complicated iDrive system, which offers about 700 capabilities requiring multifunction displays and multistep operations—even for functions that formerly required the twist of a knob or the flick of a switch. BMW included instruction sheets in the glove compartment because it is almost impossible to give the car to a valet parker without an impromptu lecture. According to industry news reports, sales of the 7 Series in the United States in the first half of 2005 were down about 10 percent relative to the same period in 2004. Past studies have established the power of positive word of mouth and the much greater prevalence of its negative form—and most of those studies were conducted before the Internet gave every dissatisfied party a global sphere of influence.

In light of these long-term consequences, how should companies today be designing products? It's undeniable that, in a store setting, consumers reach for the product that boasts the most features. But how much of a good thing is too much? Finding the happy medium

To achieve lasting prosperity, companies must find a way to resolve the dilemma we've described. The first step for many companies may simply be to take stock of the complexity they have built into their products and the toll it is taking on their customers. Executives at Mercedes-Benz recently did just that and, as a result, removed more than 600 functions from its cars. In 2004, Stephan Wolfsried, vice president for electrical and electronic systems and chassis unit at DaimlerChrysler's Mercedes Car Group, said that integrating all those functions caused truly important electronic parts to malfunction occasionally and made testing the system more expensive. Moreover, Wolfsried said, the functions were ones that "no one really needed and no one knew how to use." One example he noted was the storage of a driver's personal seat position in the car key. "It was done with good intentions, but if I take my wife's key at some point and can't find my own seat position any more, that tends to be annoying for me instead of comfortable." We suspect that in many companies, simply gaining this kind of heightened awareness of customer impact would help contain feature bloat.

I wish all academic articles were this readable.

Selectively Quoting from Freakonomics

I loved these lines from Freakonomics, don't ask me why :) it just reminds me of someplace I knew.

Upon completing his graduate work at the University of Chicago, Venkatesh was awarded a three-year stay at Harvard's Society of Fellows. ...

And yet he regularly left Cambridge, returning again and again to the crack gang in Chicago. The street level researh made Venkatesh something of an anomaly. Most of the other young Fellows were dyed-in-the-tweed intellectuals who like to pun in Greek.

Selective Reporting? I Don't Think So!

Emma wrote a post about a few thoughtless statements given by Mr. A.S. Murty, Director and Senior Vice-President, Human Resources, Satyam Computer Services. And in her comment section a few people say she is reporting selectively. Here is the link to the The Hindu Business Line Story. He laments that there are not enough senior women managers in Satyam because women have to balance family and career both. Later, quoting from the story, the reporter asks:

So would more women opt to remain single or childless in the future?

Family women a better fit

"This would not be healthy; the examples of many single women at the top is not a proud example I want to quote. Their anxiety, attitude, communication methods, etc, cause concern. Especially in divorced women, we commonly find problems and my experience is not positive. Some of these women are difficult to fit into teams; they can make both insensitive bosses as well as subordinates." Mr Murty believes that at senior levels family women fit in much better. But on the overall issue of women employees, his experience is positive.

"Contrary to popular belief women don't gossip much in office. They complete their task in time and leave. You might find male employees in office till 7 or 8.30 p.m., but their overall productivity is not necessarily better." He adds that to find women leaders Satyam is creating a forum of women leaders "who will themselves tell us what we need to do. We're completely open and flexible on this issue."

The last statements according to the comments left at Emma's blog, make the views of Mr. Murty balanced. I thoroughly disagree. The last quote in my opinion does nothing to wash away the insensitive comments and the huge stereotyping that he did about single women. Since 'his experience' is not positive with divorced women, it is the divorced women who are to be blamed? Of course how could he be accused of having a rigid mindset, after going through his comments. And all divorced women should fall in the category created by Mr. Murty?

I teach HR to college students and I am going to use this article to demonstrate 'what is stereotyping.' Thanks Mr. Murty and Satyam for giving me the material to use in my class and that has an Indian context too.

Update: Abi also writes about it.

Who Reports on the Media?

Well, The War for News blog does. More power to them.

Another IITK Suicide

I came to my blog today, the other one, Travel Tales from India, I saw a lot of people coming to my blog after searching for 'IITK Suicide' and landing on this post of mine through google search.

It immediately made me suspicious. I asked a friend and he says yes, someone did commit suicide yesterday. The last one happened in November end 2005. Within five months, comes the next one. I think end semester exams are going on again in the campus and both happened at the time of the end semester exams. I do not know the reason for both, but it makes me immensely sad that such young kids end up taking their lives with sickening regularity. Incognito writes about it from IITK:

In the evening, as alongwith a couple of friends we were looking at the 'F' list on the DOSA notice board, we couldn't help noticing that there was this course in Chemical Engineering that had around 12 fakkas (F grades). A little too high for a departmental course. And then someone remarked "Is baar kisi ne suicide nahi kiya na!" The entire group standing there burst out laughing. I bet, each one of us knew that the joke was sick. But then it was quite a fact that the suicide by a second year Mechanical Engineering student during the end-sem examinations had resulted in somewhat reasonable grading the previous semester. And this time, no one had done it.
...
An hour ago, I got the news. A Final year chemical engineering student ... had been discovered dead in his hostel room. He was one of those who had been awarded an F in the very course that was the thrust behind that demented joke that I had heard (and laughed at) about a couple of hours ago. History had repeated itself.

Times of India reports:

The incident invited strong reaction from the students who claimed that authorities could have saved Shailesh’s life by changing his course options. Hundreds of students assembled at Hall One where Shailesh used to live and demanded that the grading be made public. They also took to task Professor RB Chhabra of advanced thermo-dynamics who was present there. "We want to know whether Shailesh was intentionally being harassed by the authorities," said an enraged student.

After reading this, I feel I should have been blogging anonymously.

I went to this Tribune Link from Incognito's post. And to my surprise I found what I had written at Sulekha a long time back about an attempted IITK suicide has been quoted extensively. The Sulekha article is semi-fiction, but someone standing at the water tank part and a few others are true.

:)

This first blogpost by Delhi Blog makes me smile. The maximum number of email I have exchanged with 'e-people' has been about some information about Ladakh or travel but probably never did it result in someone starting a blog. Thanks for making Delhi Blog and your kind words.

My Second Post at Global Voices Online

I recently started contributing at Global Voices Online and did a first post on travel.

I did my second post today on education.