The real ‘engines’ of growth

One notices a funny dichotomy when one flits through publications catered toward different sections of society, like India Together and The Times of India (if one can actually call it a ‘news’ paper anymore). One set seems to tell us that everything is going to hell and the other seems to paint an extremely optimistic picture of the whole thing we call liberalisation. Since people usually buy that which they relate to, it follows that both pictures are true: the excruciating poverty and the sleek new capitalism.

Society can never be comprised of watertight compartments. It is more likely to contain personalities who occupy the continuum between the two extremes. Take Bangalore, my favorite example. The slums are a picture of scarcity whereas the IT SEZs are a picture of excess. It is highly unlikely that the lower strata of society will gladly give their scarce resources to a population that already has too much. Someone must be doing it, for a price, of course.

Usually, the technological artifacts of an age represent its zeitgeist. The F-1 car is to me one such symbol of this era. It has all the striking features of our society:

• High performance
• Very high levels of organization (in terms of car design)
• High dependence of the whole on every single part (heard somewhere that the car won’t even start if all components are not working properly)
• Requirement of relatively ideal conditions (very wide, flat tracks, almost fricitionless profile, specialised tyres, etc ., )

The current financial crisis can be compared to a car crash due to failure to adhere to ideal conditions. Something fails, which brings down everything else. If you read any material on supply-chain management, you’ll understand what I mean. This is why Chinese melamine finds its way to the breakfast tables of half the globe. In comparison, the society of a century ago was like a Kinetic Luna – not very complicated, low performance (in terms of economic output), easily maintained by the owner herself (assuming minimal savviness), and useful in potholed roads.

With such stringent requirements, most modern corporates are willing to pay a high price to ensure that they get the resources they need. It is only when ideal conditions are created will it perform at desired levels. The march of the corporation in India has unfortunately turned into a zero sum game which is also unsustainable, quite like running a Ferrari in Chickpet. You have to break things down to give it room, and make sure nothing comes up later. For the Ferrari owner, life is good, but not for the person whose house was pulled down.

Thus, it is not quite the IT czars who are spearheading ‘growth’ in India or anywhere else, but the people who break things to make way for them. In an era of ever rising populations and decreasing resources, the industrial society requires resource allocation which is quite disproportionate to the number of people it represents.

A few examples are in order. Take the case of land in and around Bangalore. Scare resource, no doubt. But if one saw the number of IT parks coming up before this financial screw-up, one could easily think otherwise. This article (watch the embedded video!) describes the land mafia in Bangalore and the important players, including Muthappa Rai, who was interviewed for the article. It is an open secret that if you need 10 acres for building swanky townships or glass-enclosed IT greenhouses, you go to the mafia, not the government. Pratically everyone in Bangalore, especially in extension areas, lives on illegally occupied land, which later the BBMP is forced to regularise. Those who lose out on land are farmers and who lose out jobs are unskilled locals (due to huge migration), and hence arise organisations like the Kannada Rakshana Vedike which are kept in check by the police. The mafia to disenfranchise, and the police to keep it that way. Neat idea.

Water is probably hitting Bangalore more than any other resource, and the trenches are occupied by the private water tanker operators. Like the article shows, a single operator may deliver 50 – 60 loads of water a day, each of roughly 20,000 liter capacity. This adds up to mind-boggling numbers, and this was more than a year ago. I have myself seen Leela Palace getting atleast 10 – 15 tankers of water at 5 AM in the morning. And the website says:

Ensconced in 9 acres of tranquility that includes an azure lagoon, The Leela Palace mirrors the lushness of the Garden City. Harking back to the royal heritage of the Vijaynagar Dynasty, our hotel earns it name by showcasing gold leaf domes, ornate ceiling and grand arches.

They have a freaking lagoon!! This issue is becoming global. This set of pictures shows what can be, and is not very reassuring. Also, years of industrial farming is taking a toll on land and water, with desertification of erstwhile farmlands becoming a major issue. Farmland drops, food is scarce, starvation and conflict are inevitable.

The recent flare-up in Maharastra has also to do with appropriation of jobs (which are getting scarce nowadays!) by Biharis in the Railways. The fact that railway ministers for the past 12 years have been from Bihar may have something to do with this. The actions of the MNS may not be justified, but the resentment unfortunately is.

Another gory example is that of coltan, used extensively for manufacture of computer chips. The unfortunate fact is that a lot of it is available in Congo, which has a war going on to secure these resources, destroying everything in its path. Like this article says:

More profitable than gold or diamonds, and more easy to extract, is the rare substance, colombo tantalite, known as coltan, an essential ingredient for microchips and cell phones. Found almost exclusively in eastern Congo, it can bring in a whopping $400 per kilo in the international market, giving rebel factions and neighboring governments a financial reason to keep the war going indefinitely. Only when the Congolese conflict caused a temporary suspension of coltan mining did the western world feel the reverberations of a war it had all but forgotten: Sony was forced to delay the launch of its popular Play Station 2.

My My. The poor rich kids must have found it intolerable without their PS-2s.

The unfortunate reality is that we have designed a system where comfort and excellence is almost always at the expense of the powerless and weak. There are very few daily activities that we can perform without directly or indirectly grabbing something from someone else. It of course comes packaged in hygenic tetra-paks, but the people driving our ‘development’ be it the State, the crime lords or those who exploit nature are getting their hands dirty enough for all of us. The world is going nuts, as it has been from a long time, but never before has the resource crunch affected us like now. Blame the population problem or WalMart, it is high time we learn to live within our (material, not financial) means.

Yup, word limit reached.

Timbaktu again

After nearly 5 months of postponement and conflicting schedules, managed to make my visit to Timbaktu last week. This was again with regards to the demo of my (ever!) prototype lighting system, which has somewhat matured now. As always, the takeback from Timbaktu is more than what one expects.

I was accompanied by Arun from the company I work with on this lighting project. He and I share common interests in education, especially at the primary levels and there are few places in the world where one can learn better about this than Timbaktu. This trip had two main takeaways: one in education and another in technology.

A view from the top

EDUCATION:

The Timbaktu school takes in only those children who are from an underprivileged background and those that the Government school rejects as failures. These children, from what I saw manage to do pretty well, atleast getting their 7th standard certificates which is definitely better than having none at all. Subba Raju, who has been in charge of the school program for more than a decade enumerates the following guidelines for providing children with a happy childhood:

• Good Nutrition is something he seems completely convinced about. On analysis, this seems obvious, but I have not seen many educators speak as passionately about it as Subba Raju.
• No-fear environment is another stress here. The children are rarely chided or restricted to things that they want to. It is usually difficult to find teachers in the classroom since they are with the children on the floor ! The children easily approach strangers like us and speak to us with what little English they have picked up (The medium of instruction is Telugu). It embarasses me sometimes to notice that small children have picked up English while I have not been able to learn any rudimentary Telugu. Their curiosity levels are extremely high and they will buzz around like bees if you are carrying any interesting looking gadget. Girls play cricket with the boys and are not ridiculed but treated with patience uncharacteristic of children their age. We witnessed a practice for a play which was written by the kids themselves with a little help, complete with songs set to popular tunes. They had been practicing it for 5 days, and one cannot but develop an inferiority complex looking at their proficiency within such a short span of time. Such observations strengthen my belief in the futility of externally imposed discipline and the power of autonomous learning. Remember, these are kids in the age 5-15!
• Non competitive learning is another interesting feature of this place. One may balk at the idea, but at then end of the day, it is similar to eating wholesome food, whereas competitive learning is like a body-builder’s diet supplement. Picking a few ‘desirable’ traits and encouraging only these is doing a great injustice to our posterity. Such practices are sometimes supported by simple-minded appeals to evolution, but are undoubtedly harmful given our lack of understanding of a phenomenon as complex as human development. One can ask how such children do in the outside world, and unsurprisingly, given their fearless attitude they adapt extremely well. Contrary to conventional wisdom, non-competitive learning creates more creative and committed individuals, since they usually converge to a discipline they are most suited to. Children are given ample choices to occupy themselves with, and choice available to individuals (not only economic) is increasingly being accepted as a metric of how developed a society is. Timbaktu no doubt qualifies as an extremely developed community.

The Timbaktu school is a must-visit pilgrimage for those interested in education of children and also for those who think starting their children on a IIT coaching class in 10th std is the best thing they can do.

TECHNOLOGY:

My association with Timbaktu and Ashok Rao’s lectures have gradually moulded my perspective on technology and its purpose. Technology is undoubtedly shaped by the cultural milieu it is surrounded by, and this is apparent if you listen to technical proposals from different cultural universes. IITB’s business plan competition awarded a 1 crore prize to a group which came up with an idea to make a more realistic simulator for automotive video games. The people in Timbaktu are more enthusiastic about a system that will help detect wild boar intrusions into fields. Like I had mentioned in a previous post,  Liberal thought left purpose for individuals to define for themselves. This sounds good in theory, but ground realities makes social purpose identical to what those with the most money think it should be. Which is why a video game simulator is more valuable than a boar detection system. Since technology has a high correlation to social purpose, it is hardly surprising that HDTVs, iPods, Mobile phones (or whatever they are calling it nowadays) generate a lot more interest, since the reigning social purpose is to pander to consumer preferences. Like a friend puts it “One rupee, one vote”.

With technological virtuosity being the order of the day, it is natural to think of villages as a primitive society where nothing ‘happens’. However, if one cosiders a hypothetical society where conserving the environment or promoting an equitable society was considered good, many of the technological artifacts that we consider as ‘cool’ turn out to be exactly the opposite. Timbaktu may be considered a ‘poor’ place, but will be exemplary in this hypothetical society. Technological development will take place in such a society, but in a direction that does not make too much sense in our present culture. It is my hope to further the technological boundaries of such a society.

Melkote – round-up

Two other interesting people were among the speakers: Punit Singh and U. Ravikumar. Punit is probably one of the leading designers for micro-hydro systems in the world right now. With a PhD in turbine design from the University of Karlsruhe, he has been designing, installing and commissioning micro-hydro systems for 3-4 years now. From a 100 KW system in a tea factory in Darjeeling to a 150 W ‘pico’ hydro in Agumbe, he has quite literally done them all. He narrated his experiences with providing clean and perennial energy in places where no electric company will dare lay a wire, especially in the impoverished districts of Koraput and Kalahandi in Orissa. I had been to those installations in Orissa, and Punit is quite a demi-god in Bodamanjari(Koraput). Karlapat(Kalahandi) ran into too many issues, for unknown reasons or pure bad luck.

Punit during presentation

The following picture is of the Agumbe system that Punit and I jointly commissioned along with an excellent mechanic, whose name I forget. He is at the leading edge of turbine design in the world at this scale, and with a firm view to serve society.

Agumbe in Monsoon!

U. Ravikumar is a versatile person with innovations in many areas, rainwater harvesting, innovative toilet designs which are useful in dry areas (and everywhere else as well!), and clean cooking alternatives for rural homes. His stove, which provides one of the cleanest solutions for burning wood, is a stunning application of mechanical engineering and thermodynamics.

Ravikumar during a presentation on rainwater harvesting

These people were excellent examples that you can do extremely good engineering (unlike our Infy, TCS crowd) while attempting to solve everyday problems that society faces. There is always a weak argument that some academics put forward about the lack of funding. Ravikumar is a good example that commitment is paramount, and other problems usually solve themselves if what you want to do is clear in your mind. There are still many open problems in micro-hydro for instance: lack of cheap Electronic Load Controllers, efficient generators that work at sub 10KW range, which can be made out of off-the-shelf components (The blue thing below the orange basket in the micro-hydro photo is an induction motor, gives an efficiency of around 40-50%) and these are extremely challenging problems that find no takers.

Finally, round up of interesting news for the past few weeks. Islam has taken over Christianity as the dominant religion, Urban populations will exceed rural ones for the first time in history, Syria has been accused of interfering with Lebanon’s internal affairs resulting in a lack of a government there, Somalia’s umpteenth government is on the verge of collapsing (calling Somalia a country is giving it too much. It seems to be a wasteland surrounded by countries), Sudan is still blocking UN peacekeeping missions from entering (while civilians are dying wholesale), violence in Kenya is not looking like it wants to stop, Zimbabwe has hit 100,000% inflation (yes, 1 lakh percent!!), banks are still collapsing all over, Iraq until yesterday was being bombed in the south by Shi’ite militants and in the north by Turkish planes trying to flush out Kurdish rebels, Ecuador almost went to war against Cambodia, farmers in Argentina have stopped sending produce outside the villages (bad thing since it is the largest exporter of soy, and big exporter of beef and wheat), no need to talk about Tibet, children as young as 7 in South African schools play a game called ‘rape me, rape me’ simulating sexual attacks ( SA is the unofficial ‘rape capital’ of the world), Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are at it again, and oil prices fell to 102$ a barrel. Thank God for little mercies in these interesting times.

Gandhi Engineering?

Just as Japan popularized kanban (just in time) and kaizen (continuous improvement), so Tata may export to the world what may perhaps be called a ‘Gandhi Engineering’ – a mantra that combines irreverence to established ways with a scarcity mentality that spurns superfluities.

quote from the article on the Nano, which, given my bias towards the word ‘Gandhi’, caught the eye. This was quite an interesting thing for me to reflect and read upon, and see whether the statement holds water. The validity of the article by and large does not rest on this statement, but the validity of the statement is what interested me. There is a PhD. thesis by Dr. Shambu Prasad, which is probably one of the first few critical assessments of Gandhi’s view of science and technology. Quite an interesting read, and I went back to it to get justifications or rebuttals to the above statement.

Ratan Tata, when asked for the inspiration to make the Nano, referred to the unsafe modes of transport like the two wheeler carrying four people which is so common in India, and wanted to make something more safer. Whether the Nano is the answer (instead of, say, better public transport) is another thing, but the thought in itself seems to be quite in line with Gandhi’s view that technology and technologists must be sensitive to the problems of the people and try and solve them. It was also Gandhi’s view that scientists must immerse themselves in the actually prevailing living conditions of the people and see if they can do incremental changes using newly discovered techniques, which people can relate to, and actively participate in the development and use of. It was his opinion that there was plenty to be learned even from the unlearned villager which could lead to progress in science. In this view, the Nano can hardly measure up. It is a solution “given from above”, so to speak, and cars can hardly be called the daily staple of transport for the majority of the people. The public transport holds that place, and anyone who has travelled in a village bus or the passenger compartment of a train will know how ill-designed these modes of transportation actually are. The way to make public transport attractive is somehow thought to lie in introducing Volvos, which cater to the taste of the people who hardly use public transport (Bangalore, from experience, not included. Mysore is a nice glaring example of AC buses running with 2-3 people onboard, when I have seen women waiting for hours together to get a single bus upto their village, in the unsafe hours of the late evening).

About ‘irreverence to established ways’, lots has been written about Gandhi’s critiques of the Industrial Civilization and Western science. However, the reason behind this is not that he was against industries or science, but what they stood for, and what world-view they imposed. Natural sciences have looked at nature as a mass of atoms clumped together which fortuitously resulted in what we call today as life. Value, or meaning of life, is essentially zero, since we were after all composed by random coupling of matter. This was what irked Gandhi particularly and this facet of his attitude toward western science taken up to show his irrelevance in modern day life, branding him as anti-modernist and anti-progress. However, he was very much impressed by the method of science and the spirit of enquiry that western scientist were imbued with, and lamented at the lack of the same in practitioners of Indian systems like Ayurveda and Unani, whom he perceived to be resting on the laurels of past greatness and were too self-satisified to build upon the innovations of their forefathers. I had commented on what the Nano’s world view was in the previous post, and it is unlikely that Gandhi would endorse such a view by lending his name to what is being called ‘Gandhi Engineering’.

‘Scarcity Mentality that spurn superfluities’. Gandhi was of a scarcity mentality, having travelled across the country and realising that there was not much here in terms of material abundance. He enjoined scientists to voluntarily donate their talents for the upbringing of the masses, knowing that a poor people can offer very little in terms of material benefit but they are the ones who most need the effort of the scientists. Abstinence from superfluities are also something that comes naturally from this outlook. However, one should look at what is being called superfluities in the Nano. One read of the article would tell you that longevity is what is being considered ’superfluous’, in the author’s terms. One can scarcely imagine how this can be reconciled with Gandhi’s view of cheap, reliable and user-friendly technology. ‘Innovation’ with pure cost cutting in mind, and then spending large amounts on advertising to generate a market is completely crazy to my mind. If a person is willing to endanger the life of his/her family by taking them on one two wheeler, then how spending a lakh on a car that will give half the mileage of his two wheeler and is not expected to last very long is not a superfluity in itself eludes me. The market for the Nano is more likely to be yuppie climbing-the-social-ladder types rather than the family that Ratan Tata so endearingly points to in his interview. If one reads a sampling of the interviews with people, asking them about the Nano, the ones most enthusiastic about the Nano comes from the former group, not the latter.