Surgical Strike on Corruption

The Prime Minister and Finance Minister have taken a bold step to strike against corruption; they have demonetized existing versions of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 currency notes. The only way to use them now is to deposit them in your bank and subject the amount to scrutiny by the Income Tax Dept. This is the first major step against wide-spread corruption that I have seen in the last couple of decades. Some of those who deal in real estate, precious metals and jewellery, along with corrupt officials and politicians are going to be among the losers.

Photograph by Sarvagnya from Wikimedia Commons,  published

under  GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

It has been pointed out that banks will face a lot of additional work. There will be some chaos and even, perhaps, some slowdown of our economic growth. I believe this is all worth suffering through. Those below the poverty line are, hopefully, not going to suffer much; surely, they have no hoard of five hundred rupee notes! Those above the poverty line should be willing to pay some price for the nation carrying out a surgical strike against corruption!

This action should, ideally, increase peoples’ willingness to use banks and credit/debit cards for an increasing number of transactions, but the Government must encourage this tendency.  A strike has been made on existing black money, but there is no point in allowing future accumulation of black money in two-thousand rupee notes!

One step the Government could take is to withdraw tax on services provided by banks to retail customers. Credit and debit card transactions should also be free of service tax. All business transaction above a certain limit should be only through banking channels. These long-term measures are essential.

Demonetization is like the Delhi Govt. spraying water on the streets! It controls dust for an hour; do they have enough water to bring down all the pollution of Delhi day after day? 

The BSNL Saga Continued

This is sequel to my earlier blog post http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2016/10/ease-of-doing-business.html

I must add a note on what happened after I got my replacement SIM. I asked if I could get Internet data access. I was told to write a letter. I had spent a lot of time in the run-around to get the SIM; so, I said "Thanks, I will come back later for that" and rushed out. I was going out of town the next day and I left the phone with the BSNL SIM at home and went on my trip; it was not going to be of much use during that trip without data access! 

I did not try to use that phone for about ten days after my return, partly out of disgust. Then one morning this week, I switched the phone on and discovered that the SIM was not operational. The phone said that that the "SIM was not provisioned".

So, back to BSNL. The staff member at the postpaid desk looked up the records and found that the customer care people who had acted on my “SIM-lost” call (before the new SIM was issued) had disabled the phone number concerned. The staff member who issued the replacement SIM had informed them that a new SIM had been issued. But her communication did not have the desired effect. She said that she would send an email to them and that the SIM would be operational again within two hours. It is now working.

I don't worry too much about the run-around I was given. What else do you expect when three people are employed to do the work of one? One to tell the customer when to write letters, fill forms, and get Xerox copies made, one to handle the phone at the call centre, and one in the back office! It is naturally difficult for them to coordinate reliably!

What bothers me is that this is how millions of customers are treated by companies like this. The result is there for all to see. The losses of BSNL are described by the Hindu dated November 17, 2015 as follows ( http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/bsnl-reports-operating-profit-of-rs-672-cr-for-fy15/article7888002.ece).

QUOTE  

The net loss of BSNL though increased to Rs 8,234 crore for the reported fiscal compared with Rs 7,020 crore last year, mainly on account of asset depreciation calculated as per the Companies Act.   

UNQUOTE

Why blame the Companies Act? Depreciation is a fact of life; you cannot wish it away! Every company accounts for depreciation.

What is the value of assets that are depreciating? Wikipedia says that the assets of BSNL were ₹893 billion in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Sanchar_Nigam_Limited

That is close to 90,000 Crores of rupees, making BSNL the tenth largest company in India in terms of assets!

Meanwhile yet another telecom service provider has entered the field and is investing Rs. 150,000 Crores of rupees.
Reliance Jio initial investment at Rs150,000 crore: Mukesh Ambani

Rs 100,000 Crores seems to be chicken feed for India. It lets one company with roughly that much of assets bleed 8% of its net worth every year, while another company pours one and a half times that amount into creating a similar infrastructure. Would it not have made more sense to improve the management of the company with the tenth largest assets? Are we waiting for ₹893 billion to slowly wither away because of increasing competition?

Let me return to the starting point of this series of my blog posts. Ease of doing business is deplorable in most places in India. This does not merely affect the confidence of the foreign investor. It plays havoc with the productivity of the average Indian; and, a nation’s GDP is directly proportional to the productivity of its people.

We must also worry about productivity of the country’s wealth invested in public sector companies. What is the point in attracting the foreign investor when the companies in which our money is invested are loss makers? You can be sure that the foreign investor is not going to set up and run loss making companies in India. He will ensure that he gets a healthy return on his capital. Why can’t we ensure the same for our investments?

Compare the revenue per employee in two telecom companies of India

Company	Revenue (Rs. Crores)	Employees
BSNL	28645	> 200,000
Airtel	96,600	24868

Livemint reported the following in 2013:

QUOTE
In 2009, a panel consisting of technocrat Sam Pitroda and banker Deepak Parekh had recommended that the government sell a 30% stake in the company to the public and also cut its staff by 100,000.

The government had failed to act on these proposals despite the BSNL board approving the same, stalling its revival plan.

UNQUOTE

end    

Ease of doing business

Please refer to my earlier post in this blog: http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2016/10/filing-complaint-with-police.html

I spent four hours and made two visits to a BSNL office and one visit to a police station; these were spread over two different days. This was all for getting a lost cell phone SIM replaced. Earlier, I had made a call to the BSNL call center to get the lost SIM barred. After my visit to the BSNL office, I 

• ·       filled in one form,
• ·       submitted a copy of my driver’s license,
• ·       registered with a police website as a user,
• ·       filled in a lost item complaint and
• ·       printed out a digitally signed copy of my complaint.

At the end, BSNL told me to pay Rs 20 for a new SIM and gave it to me. Obviously, some checking was necessary to make sure that I was not getting a new SIM for someone else’s phone number, but can the process be simplified? Banking and other financial services have made tremendous strides in making things easier for users. Can’t other sectors of the economy learn from them. I guess that it is not the job of a public-sector telecom company to worry about the customer’s time. Private sector telecom companies handle similar transactions a lot better – for instance one of them has equipped its outlets with photocopy machines to avoid telling the customer to run around for a getting a photocopy of his/her driving license.

So, we come to the question of whose business it is to worry about the citizen’s time and efficiency in getting things done. Who should worry about Rs 2000 worth of time being spent to get a Rs 20 worth of SIM?

India does not create even a million jobs a year,

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/job-creation-is-unfinished-business/article9246290.ece

,while the population goes up by 15 million per year or more. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/india-population/ 

Why? Part of the reason may be that the average Indian’s efficiency at work seems to be nobody’s business.

Ranking of economies - Doing Business - World Bank Group

Gives India the rank of 130 out of 189 countries in ease of doing business. The factors considered in calculating this rank is the ease of: Starting a business, dealing with construction permits, registering property, paying taxes, Trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and resolving insolvency.

The website goes further to rank seventeen cities of India on the ease of doing business as follows:

Hyderabad                       2

Ahmedabad                     5

New Delhi                       6

Mumbai                         10

Bengaluru                      13

Chennai                         15

Kolkata                          17

What can we do about this mess? I believe a lot can be done. If you are completing your education and live in a badly managed city/state, plan to move out! It is difficult to build a first-rate career in a third-rate environment.

If you are going to stay, use your vote in the next election to elect politicians likely to improve the working environment in your city/state. 
P. S. The queue in the photograph above has nothing to do with telecom or cell phones. It does, however, illustrate the fact that Indians are usually made to waste time in getting things done. 

Filing a complaint with the police

I lost a BSNL SIM in Bangalore on 18/10/2016 and went to their office asking for a replacement (For those of you who do not know it - Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. is the Govt. owned telecom service provider in India). I was told to file a police complaint and then file an application. I went through the first part of this process and was rewarded with an eye-opening experience. The police station told me to visit the URL http://www.bcp.gov.in and file a complaint online. I went to this website and clicked on “Lost and Found” and was directed to this page:

http://218.248.45.3:1300/

I registered myself as a user, giving ID information, mobile number, address etc. I received a One-Time Password on my email address. Using this, I completed the registration and filled in my complaint. I got a digitally signed copy of the police record of my complaint, which I will submit to BSNL tomorrow. 

What is eye-opening about this?

We can now do this for a lost cell phone, a lost card like a driver’s license, etc. I believe that the courts can and should order this process to be made available to complain about serious crimes too. Visit the following page to read the legal provisions relating to the First Information Report (FIR).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Information_Report

In reality, filing an FIR requires cooperation by the police station concerned. This introduces a weakness in the system, sometimes allowing the powerful, the rich and others interfering in this first step in seeking redress.

There is logic in requiring that the identity of the complainant should be verified before a complaint is recorded. In this age of digitalization, this process can be automated at least for a significant part of the population. This part of the population, having access to the Internet and the necessary skills to file an online complaint, can also help others when necessary.

The Electronically Filed Complaint (EFC) need not be called an FIR as this might have legal implications. It is for the courts to decide if they will treat such complaints as FIRs or not.

Merely digitalizing complaints about lost cell phones is not progress in a country which sees over 33,000 murders, over 33,000 rapes, and over 77,000 kidnappings/abductions per year (2014 statistics reported in Violent Crimes – National Crime Records Bureau http://ncrb.nic.in/StatPublications/CII/CII2014/chapters/Chapter%203.pdf ).

If a victim or witness cannot complain promptly and in his/her own words about a crime, “Digital India” will only be a mirage! 

Visit https://jaagruti.org/2013/12/13/reporting-a-crime-all-about-lodging-an-f-i-r-with-the-police/ to read about the intricacies behind filing a complaint!

Pneumonia is in the News; where is preventive care?

Secretary Clinton’s pneumonia news had spread quickly around the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/us/politics/hillary-clinton-campaign-pneumonia.html?_r=0

A friend of ours in Bangalore was hospitalized by an attack of pneumonia and spent many days in the ICU. Both cases raised one question in my mind. Had the person been given a pneumonia vaccine injection earlier?  If not, why not?

This website run by CDC, a US Govt. agency, says that two-thirds of the adults in the US above 65 have taken pneumonia vaccine, but then one-third of the population in the US above 65 and not covered by the vaccine is over 15 million. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm

It is not, therefore, surprising that “each year in the United States, about 1 million people have to seek care in a hospital due to pneumonia, and about 50,000 people die from the disease. Most of the people affected by pneumonia in the United States are adults”. Their hospital and school systems ensure that children are pretty well covered by vaccines.

We are a long way off in India from protecting our adult population from avoidable cases of pneumonia. The poor state of health care for the bulk of the population makes this very difficult. The number of deaths in India due to flu and pneumonia is over 500,000 per year. 

For a moment, let us look at people like the readers of this blog. Many of them probably undergo an annual medical test costing a few thousand rupees. This usually includes a consultation with a doctor. Have you heard a doctor in that situation ask you if you have ever taken a pneumonia vaccine? Or, a flu vaccine? Suppose you are overweight, but not obese, and do not have condition like diabetes or high blood pressure. (To be labelled obese, an adult has to be about 30 pounds over the prescribed weight). Do you think that the doctor would talk to you about your weight and encourage you to shed some of it?

Benjamin Franklin said “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Why don’t our doctors focus on preventive care?

I will conclude that in most cases of death by pneumonia below the age of 80, the cause of death should be identified as “lack of preventive health care”. I am not saying that pneumonia vaccine will give you a guarantee of surviving an attack of pneumonia. It is enough for me if it significantly increases the chances that you will avoid the attack.

Different shades of vegetarianism and starving on a flight

My wife has been a vegetarian, much like the other 500 million or so vegetarian Indians – no meat, no fish or chicken. They get their proteins largely from lentils, beans and dairy products. Most of them are unfamiliar with sea weed and generally avoid it. Her problems started ever since she started flying foreign airlines. I usually make a special request for a vegetarian meal for her and often she lands up with a vegan meal, largely unknown in India. It is a Spartan meal and half of it is unfamiliar food. She cannot even eat the bread roll that comes with such meals, as there is no butter. The butter-substitute she gets is not very inviting. As a result of past experience, she shudders when hearing about a special meal! I suggested once that we should not make any meal request because airlines can give you a standard choice between veg and non-veg meals; but as luck would have it, the cabin crew told her on that flight that they had run out of veg meals, and if she was particular about it, she should have made a special meal request! So, this time she explained it to the travel agent and asked that she should get a veg meal – not vegan and not Asian Veg! Asia is a big place; vegetarian food varies a lot between countries. On board, she was told that her special meal was waiting! She was ready to choose a parachute instead! She would have been quite happy with what goes for a veg meal on transatlantic flights – bread roll with some butter, pasta, a little milk with the coffee and perhaps some cheese, but the only way to ask for it in advance lands you up with an interpretation of a vegetarian meal by a European chef! All advances in computers do not suffice to let passengers say in advance that they want a common veg meal on board.

It took a while to explain it to the cabin crew, who kept saying that next time she should instruct the travel agent. Their world is one of certainty. The fault is always with the customer! However, they made the effort to put together a tray for her with a pasta meal.

In a world of online customization, it seems tragic that the categorization of meals cannot even recognize the needs of ethnic groups as large as 500 million! It is a good thing we don’t all fly, but a lot of us do! You don’t need to recognize Indians or Hindus as a group with certain food preferences. If you offered an online choice, in advance, of a Veg meal (with dairy products) on intercontinental flights, they would be very happy; if you cannot offer that, at least give them a choice in advance between the common veg and non-veg food. I also request that e-tickets/itineraries should not merely say “special meal” – no one can guess what that means. They should say what type of special meal, so that we know what to expect.
  

In the last few days since we started talking about this problem on Facebook and in person, we have heard from several people that they have starved on board some flights because vegetarian food was not available. I tell them that they should avoid the concerned airline in future.  

End

India needs a solar energy revolution

Jigar Shah has posted a note on solar energy in India. Visit

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-solar-investment-can-light-up-india-jigar-shah?deepLinkCommentId=6158345653756973057

I responded to this post with the following comment. I repeat it here because solar energy is going to be very important for India. 

The problems with electrification of India have been mostly in distribution so far. Political interference has led to poor management of electricity distribution companies in the public sector. Giving free electricity to farmers has led to distorting the economics of these companies. Many farmers have been the losers because they do not get reliable power. 

In future, big thermal power plants will be seen as major polluters and will come under international pressure. The best way out would be to encourage builders to become energy entrepreneurs making new multi-story commercial buildings as well as new multi-story apartment complexes self-sufficient using off-the-grid solar systems. Many of these buildings use diesel generators for back up. Similarly, why can't they use solar power when it is available and switch over to the grid when it is not? Till technology gives us cost effective battery storage for back up, we might need to continue using diesel generators. However, it might be possible to use solar energy for meeting something like 30% of the total building load, most of it during peak-load periods.

                                              end