Premier

Risk is built into capitalism because the rewards of investment arrive in the future. Risk usually comes from the unknown responses of customers and competitors in the marketplace. But in India, the greatest uncertainty still emanates from government and its overweening regulators, despite 18 years of economic reform. If anything holds India back from realizing its true potential, it is weak institutions of governance. Nowhere is this heartbreaking truth clearer than in the tale of Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company. Founded in 1964 by Badrinarayan   Ramulal   Barwale  (who received the World Food Prize in 1998)  Mahyco , as it is known, has done pioneering work in hybrid seeds. Today Monsanto holds a 26% stake in the company. Having produced hybrids of cotton, sorghum, sunflower and wheat, it is currently researching improvements to more than 30 crops. The development of genetically modified eggplant, known locally as  Bt   Brinjal , was the latest in thi...

Unrecognised private schools, which cater to the poor in the slums and villages of India, have been under threat for a long time. With the passage of the Right to Education Act the threat is now real. The new law specifically calls for these schools to be closed or recognized within three years. In 2008, the Delhi High Court in 2008 had also wanted to close roughly 10,000 such schools in the national capital. The reason why budget schools do not get recognition is because they do not meet standards—for example, they do not have a playing field of a certain size or they cannot pay the minimum government teacher’s salary--which is over Rs 20,000 a month after the Sixth Pay Commission. If they had to pay this salary or have such a playing field, they would have to quadruple their fee and the poor would no longer be able to afford it. Unrecognised private schools are successful because teachers are accountable to parents who can move their child to a competing school if they are not sa...

 which everyone was invited provided you wanted to have fun. It brought magical nights to millions across India, a respite from their drab, desperate lives. It was filled to the brim with desire--for cricket and Bollywood, for chatter and glamour, for tomfoolery and unrequited sensuality, and for high rolling betting. (There was even satta market on the beleaguered Lalit Modi’s fate as the league commissioner, and the returns from every rupee on Mr Modi surviving were Rs 5.50 last Saturday.) IPL is indeed a metaphor for a new India—crass, brash and razzmatazz--but it is in big trouble. What began as a trifling spat between Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi ended in the resignation of the minister and the suspension of the IPL commissioner. Everyone has had a say by now and some good suggestions have emerged for the reform of the IPL and the cricket board (BCCI). But in the chorus of remonstration there was a definite anti-capitalist refrain. Coming as this does on the heels of the gl...

Recently on Karan Thapar’s program on television, a ‘stylish left wing’ commentator (SLW for short, a useful acronym that I owe to Saubhik Chakrabarti) said with a straight face that our troubles with the Maoists originated in our neo-liberal economic model and our post-1991obsession with growth. She then went on to lecture us about the callousness of the new middle class whose chief passion is vulgar consumption, and there is growing disparity between the rich and the poor. Karan Thapar, sensing a juicy moment of controversy, smacked his lips and looked intently at me, asking me to respond. I explained patiently to my distinguished SLW panellist that growth is a necessary condition for lifting the poor everywhere, including in the tribal areas. It is not a sufficient condition, however, for people also need functioning schools and primary health centres, honest policemen and forest officers. The real problem, I said, is not with our economic model, but with poor governance. As a res...

I was in Mumbai on that December night in 1984 when tragedy struck in Bhopal. I was head of an American multinational’s Indian subsidiary, a company not unlike Union Carbide, whose managing director also happened to be my friend. We were among a few foreign companies that had stayed on and had toughened under the punishing conditions of the ‘license-quota-permit raj’. I was in shock over the horrific human tragedy but my sadness came from another thought, ‘what if it had been me’? I placed myself in his shoes and wondered if I would have acted differently? Probably not, and I thought about human vulnerability and how unbelievable lucky I was. The epic, Mahabharata, reminds us that life is uncertain. Just as Yudhishthira is consecrated ‘universal sovereign’, he gets trapped in a rigged game of dice and loses everything, including his kingdom and his wife. The loaded dice is a metaphor for the fragile human condition. Imagine, if life is a game of dice governed by rules known to be dec...

Taylor replied, ‘Well, Ayn, it’s primarily because he wasn’t truthful. He said all these things and couldn’t back them up.’ And Rand said, ‘Oh, I see. The Big Lie’. Rand liked McCarthy and detested Eisenhower, ‘a conservative who lacked principles and backbone’. She was indignant over a 1957 Time Magazine article recounting a 1945 meeting between General Eisenhower and his Russian counterpart, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, in Berlin. The two had been debating the strengths of their respective forms of government. The article quoted Eisenhower as saying, ‘I was hard put to it when [Zhukov] insisted that [the Soviet] system appealed to the idealistic and [that ours appealed] completely to the materialistic, and I had a very tough time trying to defend our position because he said: “You tell a person he can do as he pleases, he can act as he pleases, he can do anything. Everything that is selfish in man you appeal to…. We tell him that he must sacrifice for the state.” The fact that Eisenhower...

Ayn Rand and the world she made, Anne C. Heller, Tranquebar Press, Chennai, 2010,567 pages, Rs 495, ISBN 978 93 80658 01 8. It is not easy to connect a writer’s life with her ideology. Most biographers assume that there is an obvious and intimate connection and get on breezily with the job. Too often the connection turns out forced and the reader feels that she has been taken for a ride. Anne Heller’s excellent biography of the Ayn Rand is an exception. Her great achievement is to have connected Rand’s extraordinary legend and individualistic philosophy of unbridled capitalism to her life as a youngster, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, an awkward and wilful Russian Jewish prodigy, who had written four novels by the age of eleven. Heller makes you believe that that Rand’s excessive self-absorption and vehement protest against any form of collectivism are rooted in her family’s suffering in early-twentieth-century Russia, where Jews were violently persecuted and personal freedom died when...

Nothing is quite perfect in the world and certainly not human beings, as the Mahabharata reminds us. Our tendency to latch on to bad news at the expense of good news is unexcelled, and we tend to lose all balance in our judgements and miss out on the small victories of the day. Lalit Modi, the creator of the Indian Premier League of Cricket (IPL), has gone from being public hero to public enemy and this turnabout causes us some discomfort. If only we realized that dharma in the public place is different from private morality, we might be spared the confusion. The good Vidura tells us in the Mahabharata that in judging a king’s action he looks to results. If it benefits the people, it is an act of dharma. Hence, a ruler would agree to ‘sacrifice an individual for the sake of a village and a village for the sake of a nation’. Vidura is half brother and royal counsellor to the king of Hastinapur and he speaks from the experience of managing a state. In agreeing to sacrifice a person in ...

Our obsession with the English language has served us brilliantly. It has kept us united as a nation; it has contributed significantly to the social mobility of Indians; it has been a major factor in our recent success in the global economy. One of the cheerful things happening in India is the quiet democratising of English. Dalits are today its biggest advocates because English allows them to work in call centres and other modern jobs where there are fewer caste barriers. A recent survey in Mumbai shows that Dalit women who knew English rose economically by marrying outside their caste--31% of Dalit women who knew English had inter-caste marriages compared to 9% who did not know the language. Dalits identify vernacular languages with caste oppression. Hence, Dalits across the country hailed Mayawati’s decision to introduce English from the first grade in U.P. (That there aren’t English teachers is another issue!) The linguist, Peggy Mohan, likens social mobility through English to...

The summer of 2010 will be remembered by many Mandal Education Officers in Andhra as a particularly lucrative one. Emboldened by the new Right to Education Act, they swooped down on unsuspecting schools in the slums and villages of Andhra Pradesh in order to shut them down. By June end they had created so much fear and terror among poor parents that the Secretary of Education of the state government had to clarify that the new law gives unrecognized schools three years to gain recognition and will not be closed immediately. By then corrupt officials of the state bureaucracy had achieved their objective. Bribes had tripled and one official even boasted that he may not have done as well as at the Commonwealth Games, but it had been one his best months. India must be unique in the world for wanting to close down schools that serve the poor. What would be admired elsewhere as an example of entrepreneurial initiative (or jugaad as we say) is illegal here. These schools typically charge fe...

Two weeks have gone by since the Allahabad High Court pronounced a historic verdict on a property dispute that seems to go back at least five hundred years. The verdict says less about the law and more about our country which is remarkable for the extraordinary continuity of its traditions rather than their antiquity. We live at the same time in the first, the eleventh and the twenty-first centuries, and the court’s judgment has upheld this continuity and simultaneity of our historical lives. The verdict has ensured communal harmony but do we have reasons to worry that it might encourage demolition of other mosques on sites where there were pre-existing temples? Nothing is quite perfect in the world and certainly not human beings. Well-meaning legal and secular fundamentalists, who have criticised this judgment, seek moral perfection in a pragmatic nation. Both Hindus and Muslims worshipped inside the 2.77 acre compound of the Babri Masjid--at least since the 19th century. This peace...

Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, Hardcover, price $28, 384 pages, Random House, 2010 We have come to accept that the 500-year domination of Asia by the West is coming to an end and that the balance of power in the 21st century will rest on the fortunes of China, India and the United States. In “Monsoon,” Robert D. Kaplan goes further, suggesting that it is in the Indian Ocean where history will be made and where the global struggle for democracy, energy, religion and security will be waged. Mr. Kaplan, whose books include “Balkan Ghosts” and “Warrior Politics,” has a gift for geopolitical imagination. Maps do matter, he feels, and the right map can stimulate thinking about the future of the world. To understand the 20th century, it was important to understand the map of Europe. When it comes to the 21st century, however, Americans are at a disadvantage because of an inherent bias in their mapping convention: Since the 16th century, when F...

No son of a peasant ever wants to be a peasant. This is an old truth going back to when the first city appeared on the earth 10,000 years ago. A farmer yearns to live in a city and be called a ‘citizen’. From the word ‘city’ also comes ‘civic’ and ‘civilized’. A civilized person is supposed to show concern for his fellow citizens; and from this act of civic kindness is born ‘civilisation’. The city loosens the barriers of prejudice—of caste, religion, and feudal status--and this is why every peasant wants to part of the urban proletariat. The city emerged in history when a farmer first discovered that he could exchange his surplus grain with something that his neighbours possessed. He stood at a trading post. Soon a bania came along. He bought the grain, opened a shop, and a bazaar was born. With surplus food, everyone did not have to toil for food—they could buy it. Thus arrived brahmins, barbers, charioteers, poets, and prostitutes--all the grand occupations and services that could...

It is one thing to win power, another to wield it. Two dispirited leaders met in Delhi this week. President Obama was chastened by dramatic electoral losses in the US Congress and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh disheartened by never ending corruption scandals. Both seemed to have forgotten the fundamentals of what created their respective democracies. Just as one cannot understand America without the concept of liberty, so is India inexplicable without the idea of dharma. At the end, their spirits did lift but both leaders have much work to do to restore confidence in their ideals. John Boehner, the new speaker-to-be of the House of Representatives and an architect of the Republican recapture of power, explained Mr Obama’s fall from grace. He said that President Obama had ‘ignored the values that have made America—economic freedom, individual liberty and personal responsibility’. It does not matter if Mr Boehner is right; half of America believes it. Every nation is an ‘imagined commu...

Although human life is less than the blink of an eyelid interms of the universe, it is staggering what it is able to create. Thirty million (yes, three crore!) poor women in Indian villages have taken small loans and started enterprises. With the loan they buy a cow to sell milk, or invest in a sewing machine to sell clothes or open a small kirana shop. What began as charity work by NGOs has become self-sustaining business, thanks to the entry of professional microfinance companies (MFIs) who are gradually replacing the village moneylender. In many districts, micro-credit is as common as a cell phone or a paan-walla. It has given women dignity, many of whom display the same intelligence and drive as our best entrepreneurs in Bangalore. It is financial inclusion at its best. Success, however, creates envy as the Pandavas discovered in the Mahabharata. The problem began in October when politicians in Andhra Pradesh accused microfinance companies of loan sharking and causing suicides. T...

There is a lesson in the morality play that we are witnessing today which has been triggered off by the 2G financial scandal. It comes from a scene in Malcolm Gladwell's recent collection of essays called What the Dog Saw, and I have condensed it below: On the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas, waiting to be sentenced by the judge. Mr. Skilling was no ordinary criminal. He was wearing a navy blue suit and a tie. Huddled around him were eight lawyers. Outside, television-satellite trucks were parked up and down the block. Skilling was head of the energy firm, Enron, that Fortune magazine had ranked among the “most admired” in the world and valued by the stock market as the seventh-largest corporation in the United States. It had collapsed five years ago, and in May, Skilling had been convicted by a jury for fraud, and almost everything he owned had been turned over to compensate former shareholders....