Professor Yash Pal

(26 November 1926 – 24 July 2017)

Prof Yash Pal was at ease with technology as well as science, and among many activities in his life, he had served as a charismatic Director of the Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad. Computer networks were but a dream in India in 1979; however, he encouraged Dr A. R. K. Sastry and me to carry out R & D in this field using the APPLE satellite which was being built at that time. We were but two among the hundreds of young scientists he had encouraged.

A visit to SAC was always inspiring. I remember escorting to that Centre a group of visitors from commonwealth countries who had come to participate in a workshop on computer networking. Most questions to Yash Pal were on the cost of setting up and running something like a SAC in their own countries!

Yash Pal was a visionary. He had shared Vikram Sarabhai’s early enthusiasm for the use of satellite communication and TV education. There was a TV studio brimming with teachers and actors with a rural background, producing TV programs with a development orientation. Mr. Kiran Karnik was then heading this activity.

Entertainment has gobbled up TV channels over the next few decades and the old dream did not quite materialize, but now there are hundreds of people working in India on technology for education. They use video and the Internet and keep working in the direction Sarabhai and Yash Pal pointed.

I remember a meeting of some group he had called as the then Chairman of the University Grants Commission. I was among the invitees. He was embarrassed by the fact they could not offer even a cup of tea to the invitees – the “karmacharis” were on strike! I remembered a time, ten years earlier when at the SAC many people had been voluntarily working on the campus hours beyond office closing time! Here was a man from the new-era institutions coping with one that is a left-over from the days of the British Raj!  

Yash Pal would be remembered by the hundreds of colleagues he had encouraged, by the millions of young people he had communicated with over TV, and by people now working in the institutions he had helped develop.

Srinivasan Ramani  

GDP Growth Slows Down to 6.1% in Q4 of 2016-17

  

Visit

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/note-ban-shows-up-in-indias-growth-economy-grows-6-1-in-march-quarter/articleshow/58928832.cms

I refer to this article in this blog post essentially to complete my series of posts which began with the Note Ban that made specified high denomination currency notes invalid currency from a specified date. There was a question of what costs and benefits could be expected of this policy decision. Many experts view the slow-down mentioned above as evidence of the effect of the Note Ban on the Indian economy.

It would be interesting to watch if tax compliance has improved because of the Note Ban and if it will result in a sustained growth in income tax collections year after year. There are other decisions taken by the Government such as introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) that will impact future growth.

A major decision that is on the anvil could eliminate future losses through Air India. We must wait to see if the Government shows the political will necessary to push through this reform. However, the Government has started planning for it. Visit

http://www.livemint.com/Politics/U2dPj4I3OOSXoS8EN4jDcI/Aviation-ministry-to-plan-Air-India-privatization-says-Arun.html

                                   x x x x x 

Here I Am

I wrote on April 12, 2016 about the problem of having an Uber or Ola cab meet me when I am standing somewhere in a big, crowded city. Visit http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2016/04/city-location-codes-clcs.html

It looks like there is a solution at hand. Google maps have introduced a “Parked here” mechanism using which I can mark a place on a map and add a note to it, like “In front of Namdhari Shop, on the same side of the road”. I can then send a message to someone sharing this information. The note I add in text form is also shared.

Imagine creating a similar facility for use by app-based cab operators. When I book a vehicle, I ought to be able to send my location information along with my noting in textual form. Once the cab is allocated to me, I should be able to see it on my map marked clearly to distinguish it from other vehicles.

Google has created a “Plus Code” to mark locations on the map. While apps can use it, it is not designed for the convenience of human users. The code looks like an arbitrary string of characters and is difficult to remember. Despite its drawbacks, I suspect that this code is going to see considerable use in future.

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Should the Act of Giving a Bribe be Treated as Legal?

Adam Jacobson had mentioned an interesting article available on the Web to Tanjam Jacobson who kindly sent me an email about it. It is a six-year old article. A search indicates that it has been widely read and discussed in many countries starting in 2011. However, I am sure that the paper would remain relevant to India till at least the year 5,000 A. D! The article is:

Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a Bribe should be Treated as Legal, 
Kaushik Basu, March 2011, Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance,
Government of India, New Delhi – 1
http://www.kaushikbasu.org/Act_Giving_Bribe_Legal.pdf

It is interesting to go to Basu’s website http://www.kaushikbasu.org and read more about him and his other interests.

Now back to Basu’ proposal on the act of giving a bribe – he suggests that if the bribe is given under fear of harassment by a public servant, the giver should not be subject to criminal liability. Decriminalizing the act of giving a bribe would encourage the giver to complain about, or testify to, the bribe-taker’s crime of demanding and receiving it. Further, says Basu, we should return to the bribe-giver the bribe amount recovered from the bribe-taker.

Basu quotes from Kautilya’s Arthashastra: “Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money”. I would suggest that it is equally difficult to separate ill-gotten wealth of a “neta” from the black money raised for his/her party!  

Basu recognizes that his proposal, if implemented, could make public servants vulnerable to blackmail and false charges of bribe-taking. His suggestion for preventing this is to increase the punishment for blackmail and false accusation.

Let me now share my thoughts about Basu’s proposal. In the first place, the proposal ought to be implemented; there is no doubt about that. However, that may not be enough. A lot more would need to be done. Let me mention a couple of issues that would need to be considered.

One problem is that legal solutions to Indian problems get buried under pending cases. Read the article titled Twenty-three years after accepting a bribe

Wealthy criminals hire lawyers who exploit every weakness in the legal system to get the final decision delayed by a few decades. During this time, the problem gets solved for the accused as witnesses die, or undergo a miraculous change of mind. In some cases, the accused themselves die of old age before all possibility of appeals and adjournments is exhausted. I wonder if the Indian judicial system would have been better if no possibility of appeal had existed for the cop in the news item mentioned above. He would have gone on to serve one year in jail and could have lived the rest of his life, hopefully, in some sensible manner.

There is another problem – proportionality of punishment. Times of India had reported a case in which a constable was dismissed from service for receiving Rs 100 from a passenger at the Indira Gandhi Airport in New Delhi:

HC relief for constable sacked over graft charges (The Times of India, New Delhi Edition, 31 Jan 2010, Abhinav Garg, Abhinav.Garg@times-group.com). Visit http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/HC-relief-for-constable-sacked-over-graft-charges/articleshow/5518515.cms

The constable’s appeal was heard fifteen years after the conviction. In comparison, consider a public servant elected or otherwise, against whom a five Crore bribery charge is proved. The bribe taker would have surely caused a loss to the public exchequer worth many times the bribe amount. What is loss involved? Can we measure it in terms of lives that could have been saved with it? Prof Robert Black at Johns Hopkins has calculated the cost of saving a life. You can read the news report on his work and calculate for yourself how many lives we can save in India with Rs 5 Crores. My estimate is that we can save at least 5,000 lives. What is the punishment for gobbling up that much, or more, of public wealth! The Prevention of Corruption Act provides that the offence be punishable with “imprisonment for a term which shall be not less than six months but which may extend to five years and shall also be liable to fine”. Note that the law does not specify rigorous imprisonment.

I would vote for the punishment to be enhanced to a life imprisonment at least, without any possibility of remission or parole, if the bribes taken add up to Rs five Crores or more.

Justice is always implemented with human decisions. It cannot be 100% satisfactory in all cases. We make practical compromises in framing the law, to minimize unfairness. However, the question is who the compromises benefit? Who are left in the lurch? I feel that legislation that simplifies the system and speeds up justice would do more good than harm.

Failure Modes of Internet-based Elections

Many companies and organizations depend upon online voting to elect people to leadership positions.  It is difficult to ensure that the system used cannot be subverted. It is like ensuring that a rambling big house is safe against entry of burglars. The house might have strong walls and doors, but a single point of weakness can endanger the whole thing. For instance, can one remove a set of tiles and enter the house? Or can someone inside the house be fooled into opening a door for the intruder?

Good technology is valuable in making elements of the system strong, but envisaging all possible modes of failure requires healthy skepticism and a system science point of view.

A service provider usually makes available the software and related infrastructure for running an election to the entity holding the election over the Internet. The service provider is selected to be a trusted partner, and is beyond suspicion.

However, the client organization needs to ensure that everything else is well thought out and is free of risks. Some service providers create a password file starting with a list of email IDs of all voters provided by the client entity, and linking a machine-generated password to each ID. Each voter will need the password linked to his/her email ID in the password file for casting a vote. The service provider’s system would send an email to each voter for this purpose, giving the password to be used. It would also describe the procedure to be followed.

The password file would be sent to an officer nominated by the client entity, to inform them the list of all voters contacted. This would also allow the voters to be offered any necessary help in case of a missed email, etc. The officer nominated to handle the password file could be a paid employee or an elected person (let us call this officer Y). Some of the possible risks to the election arise from how safely this file is handled.

Another possible risk arises from the fact that the list of eligible voters may not be accurate enough. Some of them might have left their companies and their email accounts might have been deleted, unknown to the party conducting the election. Hundreds of orphaned emails inviting members to vote and giving the necessary password could bounce; the election software might direct them to Y. How these emails are handled, and who all can access them, will again decide how reliable the election is going to be.

One would have to consider the specifics of any system used and the supervisory mechanisms that oversee the election to find possible modes of failure such as the two described above.

In many cases, there may be simple ways of reducing risks from any anticipated failure mode. For instance, the service provider who makes the IT infrastructure available for elections could withhold the password file till the election is over and then make it available to Y. Similarly, there is no need to make available any bounced emails to Y till after the election is over. This means that Y cannot help any voter who does not receive an email from the service provider; however, if the list of voter email addresses given to the service provider is reliable, Y’s intervention would be unnecessary.

The mode of operation described above is only one of many possible modes; but the concern for integrity of the election will be there in any case!

The aim of this blog post is to sensitize all those concerned with the integrity of online elections to some of the obvious risks in one mode of operation. 

Arithmetic of Demonetization - big dividend unlikely

The Times of India says that 90% of scrapped notes have been deposited and a big dividend is unlikely. Visit:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/90-of-scrapped-notes-back-in-system-big-dividend-unlikely/articleshow/56210235.cms

Obviously, there would have been a dividend to the Govt. if a large number of "owners" of black money had burnt their banned currency holdings instead of laundering them, but those guys have obviously paid a large number of intermediaries to deposit the loot in small lots under different names. 

One hope is that income tax collection this year could be significantly more and thereby provide a dividend to the government. 

Another hope is that more people will pay more income tax in future years because the government has shown that it is willing to take major steps to penalize tax evaders. 

The doubters point out that slowing of the economic growth will reduce tax collections this year at least. 

The results for this year will be really known only after March 31. Meanwhile the budget is expected early in February. It may bring reduced corporate taxes as indicated by the Finance Minister informally. What else can we expect? Visit
http://indianexpress.com/article/business/budget/budget-2017-here-is-what-we-can-expect-from-the-upcoming-financial-year-4435513/ 

Remembering Professor MGK Menon (1928-2016)

                             Photo: ISRO, from Wikimedia Commons

Prof Menon FRS, passed away on November 22, 2016, less than a week short of his 88^th birthday. I had worked at TIFR from mid-sixties to mid-eighties. He was Deputy Director, TIFR when I joined the Institute and was appointed Director in 1966, after Dr Homi Bhabha was killed in an air crash near Mont Blanc.

I don’t intend to write a scientific or technical essay here describing Prof Menon’s (MGK’s) very significant contributions to science, and his leadership that played a role in ensuring that science and technology activities contributed to nation building. You may consult Dr Ramanath Cowsik’s articles for this ( http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/105/04/0522.pdf and

http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/111/11/1868.pdf ).

I will only note down a few personal memories. I should, however, mention the success MGK had in leading the TIFR and the Dept. of Electronics. The environments he created and preserved enabled hundreds of us in science and technology to succeed in our work. 

My early memories of those days include one of 1964. I was working for my M Tech degree from IIT Bombay, doing a one-year project at TIFR during my second year of studies. Dr PVS Rao (PVSR) was my project mentor along with Prof JR Isaac at IITB. It was a day in May 1964, and Dr Rao had invited me to accompany him as he went to the airport to receive the CDC-3600 computer TIFR had ordered. It arrived by a chartered 707 and the Films Division was there to cover the arrival and to get an interview with Dr Rao, and we had over a dozen trucks waiting to take the computer to TIFR! PVSR had asked me to phone MGK and tell him about the arrival.

A few years later, when I was a Research Associate at TIFR, I ran into MGK at a party the molecular biologists were having to celebrate something. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that he recognized me and knew what I was working on. Colleagues ascribed this to his photographic memory, but I personally think that must have had an organized way to keep track of the relatively small research staff TIFR had at that time; but it would have surely been more than a hundred! Uday Bhaskar’s article in The Hindu ( http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/A-humanist-of-rare-elegance-statesman-of-science/article16685875.ece ) corroborates my comment on MGK’s remarkable attention to detail. I should also mention that he was a very good public speaker. His talks must have been the result of good preparation. No spontaneous public talk could be that good.

During the fifties, under the leadership of Homi Bhabha, TIFR had created three groups in three new fields of work: molecular biology, radio astronomy and computer science & technology, centered around three Indian scientists who had done promising work abroad and were willing to return to India. After Bhabha’s death, it was MGK’s turn to lead the TIFR. He supported Dr R Narasimhan (RN) in broadening the base of computer science and technology work in the Institute. He also supported Dr PVS Rao in his work on the design and development of a real-time computer and on large real-time applications of national importance.

MGK’s interest in technology went way beyond the computer field and encompassed many areas in electronics, including microwave technology and semiconductor electronics; work in these areas at TIFR were headed by Mr RVS Sitaram and Mr KV Ramanathan respectively.

A talk MGK once gave illustrates the excitement of cosmic ray research at the time of his doctoral work at the University of Bristol. His thesis adviser was Prof Cecil Powell, who had pioneered the technique of using photographic emulsions to detect cosmic rays. Powell’s team discovered a new type of meson, the pi-meson in 1947 using this technique. MGK had joined Powell’s lab in 1949 to do his PhD work. MGK said in his talk that one evening he was working at the lab, when a telegram arrived for Powell. MGK received it and called Powell on the phone; his home was within walking distance. Powell asked him to open the telegram and read it out over the phone. Well! The telegram informed Powell that he had won the Nobel Prize for Physics! Powell said, “Goku! Why don’t you put that telegram in your pocket and walk down to my place?” Menon said that it was his first sherry that day!

Astronomers paid a unique tribute to MGK in 2008, naming the asteroid 7564 as Gokumenon in his honor. They had discovered it using a telescope in India.