National Disasters

India has been patiently waiting for 80-odd hours for news of the 5-year old Mahi who fell into a bore-well which had been dug without permission from any authority overseeing building codes. Visit

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/video/gurgaon-rescuers-reach-5-year-old-girl-mahi-who-fell-into-a-borewell-after-80-hours/1/202142.html

Lodged at the bottom of a 70 foot well, her life has been endangered by lack of oxygen. There have been spirited debates on television about the lack of coordination in the rescue effort. I hope that the child will come out alive out of this horrible experience, thanks to the brave men of the Indian army who have risked their own lives in the effort to rescue her.

What does the nation have to learn from this “accident”? TV anchors have yelled at the authorities who had turned a blind eye to a bore-well being dug in close proximity to a residential building. The callous builders have left the well uncapped, knowing that it is a death-trap for children going near it. I think of the general disregard for the law in the construction industry. This is not isolated as road accidents claim tens of thousands of lives every year due to disregard for traffic rules. Non-implementation of traffic rules is something India has accepted without any protest. Yesterday I travelled a hundred kilometers on a toll road after sunset and passed well over a hundred trucks. Very few had red lights on at the back. School buses regularly crush children while reversing, because the drivers are unfit to be trusted with any vehicle – none of them has any difficulty in buying a driver’s license.

Coming back to lax implementation of building codes – an astute commentator on TV said “If there is an earthquake in Delhi tomorrow, hundreds of thousands will die”. What agency can deal with ten thousand buildings collapsing at one stroke? How will the hospitals cope with the event? The situation looks bleak for many cities and towns in India. The majority of buildings have violated building codes one way or another. They are death-traps as surely as uncapped bore-wells are.

Corruption is not confined to the politicians and high level bureaucrat. It is rampant in every city administration. Mahi’s plight should wake up the nation to this peril. I hope it does.

I will conclude by referring to the Wikipedia which says that the word bureaucrat is one of the toughest words to spell. Tongue in cheek, it suggests using the abbreviation “crat”!

Focus on e-Content for Education, particularly in Indian Languages

1.   I will focus on one topic that is going to be very important for India over the next ten years and beyond.  

2.   I am talking about e-books or books in the digital form, particularly those in Indian languages. What is special about them, as compared to traditional books? The effort required to create the manuscript is the same in the two cases. But, there are two major differences:

a.   The cost of production is zero. Once the first copy is ready, it costs practically nothing to produce the later copies. Low cost tablets will be available widely, and every educational institution would be capable of providing WiFi access to the Web. Every tablet would be able to carry hundreds of e–books, if not thousands. 

b.   e-books in Indian languages are very few. The tools for putting manuscripts into e-book are not available. Standards have not been evolved for e-book formats.

3.   There are plenty of writers in various fields in India, and academics who can decide what books are most badly needed and are likely to be widely used. But, let us not under-estimate the significance of the technologists who need to show how we should face e-book revolution that is staring us in the face, and is going to have a greater impact on India than even the green revolution.

4.   Inexpensive computing devices are coming up rapidly – starting with tablets. There will be a whole variety of them, manufactured by various manufacturers. I am excited by the low-end book readers – I bought a Kindle Touch for about Rs 5,000, using an impressive e-ink display that allows me to change font size as needed to read under different conditions. It is small, very light, is quite rugged, and has a battery life of over a month!
 

5.   All I want to take from the tablet discussion is that there will be millions of them in students’ hands sooner or later. This will require content in Indian languages – thousands of e-books, with millions of copies needed in the case of each one of them. The content will cost a lot more than the tablets will.
     

6.   I believe that there are over 70,000 public libraries in India, over a hundred and fifty thousand high school libraries, and over 30,000 college libraries. For the moment, consider the cost of acquiring copies of ten thousand modern books for each of these libraries. This will cost Rs 25,000 Crores. Now consider that you may need copies of about 20 books a year for each of the millions of tablets Indian students will acquire. There has been a lot of discussion about making tablet hardware inexpensive, but none about producing e-content in Indian languages.

7.   We need lots of ideas to deal with problems like this. I will discuss just one. Imagine a project which encourages those who write useful, good quality books for use in libraries. Let this project select 100 such books in any of the languages of interest to India including English, and give national awards with a cash payment Rs 200,000 each to the selected writers. This will cost Rs 2 Crores per year. Those whose books are not selected for the award will retain the commercial interest to their creations and will be free to take them to any commercial publisher. The awardees, on the other hand, will be expected to transfer all rights to the Govt of India, except the copyright in its non-commercial form. This will ensure their name as the author, along with a short bio, to be retained in every copy to be distributed. I would propose that that these books be made free to download all over the world. Books in most Indian languages will be of significant value only in India, but those in English may be very attractive in many other countries. This will enhance the visibility and prestige of Indian authors.  What about those who prefer printed copies? The project can authorize any and every publisher to print and sell copies of the books.

8.   Let me come back to the technical issues in creating e-content. We need to sort them out before we plan any major content creation project. What are the essential requirements? How much flexibility should we give to implementers and e-book creators? How important is it that the lowest cost devices should be able to benefit from e-content produced Govt funds?

      S. Ramani

India is undergoing a Zombie Apocalypse

There is a genre of fiction that deals with humans being converted to act as enemies of humanity. These converted humans are called zombies. Wikipedia describes them as persons bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli. The zombies convert others in turn by pushing them into a situation in which they have little choice but to convert. Imagine a situation in which you can either kill yourself, or be bitten by a human vampire and become a human vampire yourself!

On careful examination you can recognize zombie fiction is giving us metaphors of reality. The real world zombies are those without any conscience, but seemingly human otherwise. I realize that India is undergoing a form of zombie apocalypse; it is clear that a good part of the population has been converted. If you live in India, you have probably met a friend or relative who paid a huge bribe to get his son or daughter admission to an educational programme in a college or university. It is usually an illegal payment named the capitation fee on which the recipient pays no taxes. What are the victim’s chances of resisting the pressure to join the corrupt? He has his son or daughter’s future at stake. Is he going to risk it, by exposing the “not-for-profit” college that runs as a tax-free “public trust”? To get two samples of problems in educational institutions, visit

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-31/chennai/29603780_1_capitation-fee-medical-colleges-mbbs-admission

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Chennai/article497149.ece

I know of only one person who took the view that his son can do without admission into one of the corrupt colleges, and refused to pay a bribe, “risking” his son’s future. The boy has had excellent school education largely because of the inspiration from his father, a professor devoted to his science. It is no wonder that the boy was welcomed by a foreign university. Almost every one you know who was in this position has capitulated. Do students rebel against the system, even if they have seen their middle class parents give up a good part of their life-savings to pay the bribe? No, they do not wish to risk their future. Do they do anything about it after they complete their studies and go out to work? No, the problem is not their problem anymore.

The problem is not confined to the educational sector. Wikipedia offers a description of corruption in India in a variety of sectors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India

What happens to government employee whose salary does not enable him to pay capitation fees? He converts and becomes a zombie. Few people can afford to buy an apartment. The builders have spent a lot on bribes to authorities and have to recover it from their customers by charging exorbitant prices. Many of them convert! The media does put up a fight, but now the zombies are killing off investigative journalists. So, don't be surprised if you discover some journalists have joined the zombie world already, to save their own skin!

Getting jobs, particularly government jobs, getting good treatment in hospitals, getting a driving license, a ration card, all fall into this category. It is so much easier to “solve” one’s own problem rather than risk a fight that one may lose.
Corruption very often starts at the top, involving powerful politicians and government officials. What happened at the medical council of India and at the university grants commission are reminders of that. Visit

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121855/

and

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-11-05/india/28104917_1_cbi-raids-cbi-spokesperson-harsh-bhal-cbi-action (The text of the URL above has an error. The alleged raid was actually against a member of the UGC).

We need to understand the current anti-corruption movement in India in this light. Fear of the zombies has reached a new height. Hopefully this movement will do something to cut down the extent of the evil practices. If it fails, we will all have to join the zombies!

Srinivasan Ramani
June 13, 2011

Encouraging and protecting whistle blowers

The importance of whistle-blowers

Many instances of corrupt practice and tax evasion occur with hundreds of people knowing about it. But the victims become hostages of the wrong-doer for many reasons and do not squeal. For instance, visualize a college or university charging under-the-table-fees of Rs 15 Lakhs (roughly US $ 30,000) for admitting students who cannot honestly compete with other applicants on merit. This is illegal on two grounds: it is illegal for educational institutions to demand and accept such payments; secondly, it generates wealth on which income tax has been evaded. It becomes the so-called black money. Thousands of students pay such “fees” every year. However, they are too scared to do anything about it before admission which they desire so strongly. After admission, they do not wish to expose their college or university and endanger their own education. Similarly, practically every company or organization which cheats on tax has a number of employees who know about it. But the employees are too scared to blow the whistle. They may even get killed for doing something like that. Under these circumstances, the rare whistle-blower has to be encouraged, protected and supported.

I assume that there are a few vigilance organizations (V. O.) that wish to encourage whistle blowers, and that they themselves are not corrupt! We need to create an Internet based mechanism meeting the following requirements, to enable such an organization to work efficiently.

Desired characteristics of the proposed mechanism

a) Gives the whistle blower privacy – no one should know who he is till he decides to reveal himself
b) Gives the vigilance organization some way of separating credible tip-offs from spurious reports
c) Provides for a mechanism to prove that a claimant is actually the one who had sent a particular set of anonymous messages earlier

The provision in c) is meant to enable a whistle-blower to claim a reward when his tip-off is acted upon and proves to be beneficial to society.

I invite comments and suggestions on this proposal. Some of the technical possibilities are discussed in another blog I write www.newstudentresearch.blogspot.com

Srinivasan Ramani September 15, 2010

Republic Day Talk to Fellow Residents at Mantri Pride, Jayanagar, Bangalore, Jan 26, 2010

I wish to use this occasion to speak for a few minutes on some thoughts for us as an enlightened community. We have the education and resources that the average Indian may not have even in 2030. So, it is natural that we should aspire to act in a way that shows our sense of responsibility and culture. This day calls for such thinking.

We are so lucky – with a stadium and a big swimming pool nearby, not counting the small one close to Mantri Garden. We have Lal Bagh. We also have the Madhavan Park with a set of great trees that can be the envy of anyone living in the concrete jungles of Navi Mumbai or Noida. Can we do something as a community to preserve these treasures? For instance, can we prevent our end of the Madhavan Park from looking like a dump? Yes, we can. We can also prevent the gardeners from burning dried up leaves and dead branches and, thereby, reduce pollution. We can protect the great rain tree that stands in the little triangle on our way out to the Madhavan Park circle. We can do some shramdan to make that triangle look a little better.

On a more general note, we can get corporators and the local MLA to visit the building once in a while and meet us a community. We can give them one of those fine breakfasts that the Committee organizes for our own meetings. We need the elected representatives of the city to ensure that this area will not be allowed to run down.

Lastly there is one more point I wish to make. As an enlightened community, we can lead the city in reducing dirty and dangerous work for our fellow men. You would have seen three men on the garbage truck every morning, meticulously separating the garbage into multiple piles – plastic bags, glass items, metal items, kitchen waste and so on. Once in a while there will be broken glass and medical waste mixed up with all these. Can’t we separate our garbage into recyclables and biodegradable waste? We are all proud of the way this building collects recyclable paper and donates it to FAME. We were happy to see when garbage bags with different colors were distributed to enable separation of waste. It was a good attempt. If it did not work, we need not give up the effort; we can find a way that works. Let us separate recyclable material from our garbage. Let us show we care.

Thank you for listening.
Ramani

Finding reliable information about government announcements and policies

This is largely a copy of a post in my other blog - Science and Technology Projects for Student Research. I re-post it here because it has relevance beyond science and technology. It is a matter of public interest – how do people find out reliable information about government announcements and policies.

The history of search engines has been a most exciting one. The development of effective search techniques will ultimately get ranked with the invention of printed books. These two, along with the development of the Internet, have made it possible for knowledge of human society to be made widely available among its members, but don’t get carried away! We have got a long way to go. The search problem shares something with the halting problem, at least in practical terms. If you spend time on searching for something, a good fraction of the time you come away with the information you wanted, but you never come away saying that the information you searched for is not there! You go away frustrated, feeling that searching is often a never-ending business. At least in terms of a human lifetime!
I had this feeling last week, searching for the information a friend abroad had asked me. He plans to visit India, SriLanka and Nepal on an Indian multiple entry visa. Someone has told him that if you enter India with that kind of visa and go to any other country, say Nepal, you need to stay out of India for at least 60 days before you re-enter India. I helped get a definitive answer to this by searching the Web for relevant information. It seems that the Government had announced this rule in Dec ’09 and later relaxed it in some way. I redoubled my effort to get a definitive answer to my friend. Can I get a reliable source’s final answer to this question? I searched the Web in different ways and then asked a renowned travel agency and sent email to an agency to which the Indian consulate outsources part of its visa application processing. The more I searched the more confused I got with contradictory information.
Why do I write this? I would like you to try and find the answer. You may be lucky in finding an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. Or you may not. Suppose you do find an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. How sure are you going to be about that answer?
Do try this experiment. You may not have a friend with this problem. But you may get good ideas on what more needs to be done to help people searching for information, particularly when they do not have the benefit of a professional in the field who knows where to look for information and what to trust.

Srinivasan Ramani

India Deserves better Auto Rcikshaws

Auto rickshaws are the most popular form of public transport in India after buses. They have not changed much in design over decades. A significant number use two-stroke engines, giving low mileage and causing pollution. Most do not have a reverse gear and hence execute crazy maneuvers on the streets endangering people around. They are surely not deigned for safety. They are very noisy, causing noise pollution. On top of all this, they are not inexpensive. Ask the driver of any new auto you get into, and he will tell you what he paid for it.

A country that has sent a rocket to the moon can certainly design a better auto to take millions to work. Please permit me to offer a suggestion:

a) The Government of India should announce a scheme to attract the best talents in India to design a better auto, and promote public-private partnership in R & D.
b) This can be in the form of a design competition to be completed within 18 months, thereby not restricting the competition to established firms.
c) The prizes would in the form of orders for autos to be used within Government. Some Govt vehicles are used for delivering and collecting files, going to make small payments, etc. Autos can replace these. This will also reduce the practice of officers’ children getting dropped at school by Government vehicles, etc. An order for 5,000 autos for the best design chosen, followed by prizes of Rs 2 crores and Rs 1 crore for the II and III place would make it worthwhile for a number of companies to participate.
d) Announced selection criteria should include specified marks under: efficiency, cost, reduced pollution and safety. There should also be marks for radical new designs such as electric autos and hybrid autos. A panel of judges with impeccable reputation should make the selection.
e) The process should be completed by Jan 26, ’11, and the selected manufacturer should be invited to send two-dozen of the newly made autos to participate in the Republic Day parade.

There are two major reasons for India to push this forward:

a) This will be a contribution to slowing down global warming.
b) India has the world’s largest market for autos. We ought to capture
the worldwide market.

Srinivasan Ramani
Dec 3, ‘09