IIM/A Ranks 11th in the FT Worldwide Business School Rankings

Posted on February 1, 2012 by

For the second year in a row, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, (IIM/A) scored 11th place in the worldwide Business School Rankings from the Financial Times of the UK. These are annual rankings of the 100 best business schools in the world. The news, even for those who don’t read the FT, was relayed over all the IIM discussion groups and social media. It’s my old school, and of course I was interested.

Some of our classmates were skeptical. “But IIMA is ahead of Chicago, Berkeley, Kellogg, Duke and Dartmouth?” said one. “As much as I want to root for our alma mater, this doesn’t make sense, sorry.” Others agreed. “…does not make sense,” someone else said. “IIMA reputation western countries is still close to non-existent.” Another chimed in,”…and IIMC is not even on that list? That list lacks validity!“

Of course a ranking is all about methodology, and so with the help of yet another classmate, Navendu Vasavada, I had a look behind the numbers.

ALL ABOUT METHODOLOGY

The bottom line is that even though they looked at 20 indicators (including how international a school was, participation by women, and published research), FT gave the heaviest weightage to two factors:

  • The average salary of the alumni and alumnae three years after graduation, and
  • How much those salaries had increased from before they went to business school to the year of the study - a sort of ‘value-added’ kind of measure.

HIGH AVERAGE SALARIES (CONSIDERING THE COST OF LIVING)

Since this survey was international, the salaries were of course originally reported in a number of different currencies.  To allow for comparison, the FT converted them all into dollars. But they didn’t use the official exchange rate. Instead, they used the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rate published by the IMF.

The PPP is a measure that takes into account the difference in the cost of living in various countries. If a basic middle-class life-style costs $50,000 in the US, but half that in India, then a salary of $100,000 means different things in those two countries. This would mean, for an Indian school, that the average salary calculated in US dollars would be around 2.4 times higher than at the official exchange rate. So a salary of Rs1000,000 would be roughly US$21,000 at an official exchange rate of Rs 48:US$1, but about US$50,000 using PPP. (These numbers are approximate.)

In calculating the weighted average salary, first they left out everyone who had gone back to school and was a full-time student. (So people working on FBAs and PhDs would be out.) They also left off anyone working in the non-profit sector or in public service. They dropped the highest and lowest salaries for each school. FT also adjusted for the sectors in which the respondents worked, since there are massive sectoral differences in remuneration. Then they averaged the salary data for each school across the two most recent years (in this case, 2011 and 2010).

On a PPP basis, IIM/A alumni three years out had an average salary of $175 thousand – ranking right after Harvard’s $178 thousand and Stanford’s $192 thousand.

IMPROVED EARNINGS

The second most important factor they looked at was how much these salaries had increased from before the alum entered business school – which would have been 4-5 years earlier, depending on whether it was a one- or two-year program. This seems to reflect how much an MBA from the school improves the prospects of the average student entering it, and may be a surrogate indicator of its credential value. [Edited to add: Of course, since they did not control for the increase in non-MBA salaries, it would also include a component of how much salaries in general were rising in each market.]

IIM/A alumni also showed a sharp increase in salary from before entering the institute to three years out: 140%. This compared with 129% for Stanford, and 122% for Harvard.

However, here it wasn’t such a clear leader: The Indian School of Business showed a 177% increase; the National University of Singapore, 185%; and Peking University (Guanghwa), 201%. In fact, IIM/A only ranked 10th out of the top 100 schools on this score.

IIM/A also scored very high on “Career Progress Rank,” where it came in 1st.

On all the other indicators based on alumni ratings, it didn’t do so well: 29th in Value for money; 17th in placement success, and 92nd in “Aims achieved.” It came in 10th for “alumni recommended rank.”

And, I’m sorry to say, on the “soft” criteria (all reported by the school)  IIM/A performed dismally. It has the lowest percentage of women students (6%); no other school has single digits here.  Schools in the top ten had percentage ranging from 22% to 44% women students.  Even Indian School of Business had 29% women. Very few international faculty. Not much by way of research or publication (ranked 94th).

WHAT ABOUT IIM/C AND ALL THOSE OTHER SCHOOLS?

How come, then, that IIM/A and Indian School of Business and SP Jain Institute (Dubai and Singapore) were in the top 100, and IIM Calcutta was not?

I don’t know for sure, but perhaps either the Institute or its alumni did not cooperate. The survey needed a minimum 20% response from the 3rd-year alumni of the school. It’s possible that enough IIM/C grads didn’t send in their answers. (Or that the school doesn’t keep track of them closely enough to have their addresses!)

[Edited to Add: This is probably true of IIM Bangalore too.]

SO WHERE’S THE WIN?

I think it’s pretty clear what fuels IIM/A’s success in the ranking is one factor more than any other. It’s the average salary, converted at the PPP rate. Most of the other stuff hurts its rankings rather than helping.

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Vodafone vs Indian Tax Department… Finally, a Win

Posted on January 20, 2012 by

So the saga seems to have ended. Vodafone’s foreign transactions were truly foreign, India’s Supreme Court says. That’s $2.7 billion the company doesn’t have to pay.

Those who’ve been following this blog might remember the story.

THE VODAFONE BACKSTORY

Hong Kong company Hutchison owned a stake in its Indian cellphone joint venture with the Indian company Essar, and it wanted out. It held its share in a Cayman Island subsidiary. This it sold to an eager buyer, the European company Vodafone, which was looking to get into the Indian market.  Vodafone also had a Cayman Island subsidiary, which bought the Hutchison shares in the cell-phone company for $11.1 billion in 2007. The deal was done,  and everyone went home happy. No taxes were due in India, they believed, because the whole thing was transacted offshore.

Except that the Indian Tax Department came after Vodafone for $2 billion in taxes. It wasn’t really an offshore deal, they claimed, there was an Indian nexus. Taxes should have been withheld.

Nonsense, said Vodafone. It was legally offshore. Besides, if anyone did owe taxes, it would be the now-unavailable seller, Hutchison. Not the buyer. Technically, they were correct.

The question was, would India’s courts allow the Tax Department to argue that it was a technicality-as-eyewash?

They did. The Tax guys went to court; much of the battle was about whether the Tax authorities actually had jurisdiction over this transaction. It’s been a longish battle, some of which I chronicled here.

At the time, things didn’t look good for Vodafone. The Bombay High Court had already ruled against them. They’d been asked to place funds in escrow in case they lost. The case went up to the Supreme Court.

THE SUPREME COURT SPEAKS

The Supreme Court, which had explicitly allowed this case to continue, finally gave its ruling today: The Indian Tax authorities don’t have jurisdiction over the overseas transaction. There was no “Indian nexus.” Vodafone don’t have to pay anything; they’ll  get back, with interest, the funds they have in escrow.

With that behind them, Vodafone can get on with running their business in India. They need to. They took a $3.4 billion hit to earnings in 2010 from increased competition. From their website: “Vodafone India was impaired by £2,300 million primarily due to intense price competition following the entry of a number of new operators into the market.”

I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with how it’s all played out. Both sides have had their say, in great and excruciating detail. There’s a decision that clarifies the law. India’s legal system has actually worked like it’s supposed to.

It also proves that it’s never over until it’s over.

Posted in Doing Business in India, Regulations | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

India: A Telling Corruption Study

Posted on December 8, 2011 by

Transparency International (TI) has published their annual survey of corruption perceptions — how corrupt various countries are perceived to be. As usual, India does not fare well. What’s particularly disturbing, though, is what the data now reveals.

TI publishes two things: a “score” which, on a scale of 1-10, measures corruption, and a rank out of however many countries were evaluated – 183 countries in 2011. A score of ten would be excellent, but no country gets that; New Zealand tops with a 9.5 (and the US gets only a 7.5). On that scale, India gets 3.1, which gives it a rank of 95 out of 183 countries, in company with Albania, Kiribati, Swaziland and Tonga.

Two years ago, when I wrote about the same study, India’s score was 3.4 and its rank was 84 out of 180 countries. At the time, I wrote: “Indian corruption seems to be improving gradually – but perhaps not as fast as in other places.”

I was wrong.

What is now noticeable, with the extra two year’s data, is that there’s actually a trend that started in 2008. In the wrong direction.

What I’ve done in the graph is show a normalized rank to adjust for changes in the number of countries TI has evaluated.  That’s the red line, and lower is better. Here, India’s position initially improved. I’m guessing that the newly-added countries each year tended to score low, thus pushing India’s normalized rank up. The number of countries grew from 90 in the year 2000 to 183 in 2011.  But by 2008, the number of countries in the study had stabilized around 180… and India was drifting down in the rankings.

The green line is the score for India. There, higher is better. There did appear to be a very gradual upward trend there too – which ended in 2007. Since then, it flattened and then started to slide.

China hasn’t got much better than it was in 2009 – it had a score of 3.6 and a rank of 79. It’s kept the same score in 2011, but that’s yielded a rank of 75.

Posted in Asia, Doing Business in India, Economy | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Peaberry Coffee, Nostalgia and IIM/A

Posted on November 8, 2011 by

Two days ago, I saw this sign at our local Peet’s coffee shop.

It took me right back.

When I first came to IIM Ahmedabad as a teenager-from-Delhi, coffee was something that came instantly out of a bottle. Delhi’s main hot brown drink was chai, boiled into a strongly flavored soup with spices, or taken English-style with milk and sugar. In our house, we took tea fairly seriously; my Mom would get two kinds, one for flavor and one for strength, and blend them in an airtight can with a piece of dried orange peel. But coffee? That came from Nescafe or Bru. My standards weren’t high (which is just as well, because the standards of the IIM mess weren’t high either). I found the coffee adequate, if barely so.

For my friends from South India (and there were a lot of them), it was torture. Coffee, it seems, was supposed to come from freshly-roasted beans that were ground shortly before being made into a decoction. I had, at this point, never encountered a coffee bean.

My friend Srilata explained the process, and it was she who first told me about Peaberry,  the champagne of coffees in Madras (well, it was Madras then, it’s Chennai now). After all these years , here it was popping up as “rare and exotic” and worthy of a countdown at Peets.

I’ll probably stop by to sample some. To the best of my knowledge I’ve never tasted Peaberry coffee though my family-by-marriage is Tamil. (All the best Peaberry is exported, remarked my husband.) I confess it will be probably be wasted on me. I’m still a Philistine about coffee, quite content with instant coffee in a styrofoam cup with Coffeemate and artificial sweetener.

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Rest in Peace, Mrs. Das

Posted on October 15, 2011 by

Today Basna Das’s son contacted us to say she’d passed away.

We first met her a quarter century ago, when she interviewed with us for the job of ayah. We were seeking someone experienced to help us look after our first child. (We were pretty inexperienced ourselves.)  “Talk to Mrs Das,” someone told us, and arranged an interview. She was already a grandmother twice over, and had cared for a friend’s babies. We hired her.

Over the years, she helped us raise our kids and run our home. She moved with us from Delhi to Bombay to the US. Eventually she retired on a pension, but when she could, she visited us. And when I could, I visited her, living in a DDA apartment with her son and daughter-in-law and grandchild. By then, her health was indifferent, but she proudly showed me around her neat, clean and well-kept flat she’d bought with her savings.

Her life was a success story. I don’t know all of it; but over the years, she shared some of her memories. She was born in a small impoverished village in Bengal. She was an intelligent and curious child. But when she got home from her first day in school, her grandmother beat her and told her school was not for girls. Instead, she was kept home and married young to a much older man. He gave her two living sons and wandered out of her life. She heard, later, that he had gone to Bangladesh. The boys were her responsibility.

Nothing daunted, she decided to go to the city – Kolkata – and earn a living. She bought her first footwear, and again met opposition from the elders of her village. She was getting above herself. Footwear? Bare feet were good enough for her.

By this time, she was strong enough for them. “Very well,” she told them, “I’ll stay here barefoot. You support me and my children.” Somehow, that proposition didn’t appeal to them at all. So she made her way to the city, and eventually found a job as an aide in a nursing home.

It was excellent training; she learned modern hygiene, best practice in caring for patients, cleanliness, discipline. But it didn’t pay much, and when she was hired by a well-to-do professional family to care for their babies, she went. Eventually, a couple of jobs later, she moved to Delhi and found us.

That was what she truly loved to do: care for little ones. She spoiled our children in the sweetest possible way, hand feeding them at mealtimes, keeping them from harm, giving in to most of their demands… when she left me with my young children, she told me with tears in her eyes that I must be sure to hand-feed them or how would I know they were eating properly? (The kids were actually quite capable of feeding themselves, and did. They just liked their “Bana” to feed them.)

She earned enough to send both her sons to school so they got a high-school education. She helped find them wives and jobs. (Sadly one son predeceased her.) She learned how to sign her name so she could open a bank account, and read her bank passbook so she could manage her own finances. Her wisdom, her independence and her worldly experience made her highly respected member of her family.

When I went to Delhi, I visited her. She always wanted to see photographs of our children -now adults – and hear what they were doing. The last we heard from her before her final illness was a response to my letter telling her one of the kids she helped raise was getting married. She sent her joy and congratulations.

Only a few months later, she’s gone. She started life a poor and illiterate village girl with little or no support. But the life she made for herself was a tribute to her own intelligence and tenacity and mettle.

Rest in Peace, Mrs Basna Das.

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MBA Women and IIM

Posted on October 5, 2011 by

At the IIM USA meet at Pinnacle Point, I asked a question of Professor Samir Barua, Director of IIM/Ahmedabad, about women students.  Back when I was there, I said, I was one of 8 women amid a class of 110 students. What was the situation now?

It hadn’t really changed. Around 20% of the applicants and  9% – 17% of the students at IIM/A are women.

For reference: the Graduate School of Business at Stanford has 34% women; while Harvard Business School has 39%. (I took the numbers from the class profiles posted on their websites.)

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: WOULD COMPANIES HIRE WOMEN?

When I joined IIM, they told us that the main concern about women students was that they would fare badly at Placement, spoiling the Institute’s record; and that later they would struggle in corporate life. It wasn’t entirely a misplaced fear at the time: Those days many companies were biased and two of the top employers, Tata Administrative Service (TAS) and consulting firm AF Ferguson & Co (AFF), didn’t hire women.

But times were already changing; the women in our class were hired quickly. I actually worked for AFF only a few years later; by then, nearly half its consultants were female. TAS started hiring women (if I recall correctly) the very next year.

Nor, it would seem, did women do badly in corporate life once they got there. Chandrika (Krishnamurthy) Tandon joined Citibank, went on to a successful professional career at McKinsey before setting up her own consulting company (and then segued, very successfully again, into devotional music). Her sister, Indra (Krishnamurthy) Nooyi (from IIM Calcutta) heads Pepsico. Sri (Govindswamy) Zaheer is the interim dean of Carlson School of Business at University of Minnesota. Nadira (Hirani) Chaturvedi was an entrepreneur, starting an auto ancillaries business; these days, she’s teaching entrepreneurship and business strategy at a business school in Delhi. Veena (Gosain) Mankar, after a career in banking and finance, started a microlending institution, SwaadharFinServe. And that’s just people I know. There are hundreds of others out there, who with the passage of time may well be the Narayana Moorthys and Bill Gateses and Meg Whitmans of the future. (Meg Whitman, incidentally, is from Harvard Business School.)

So clearly, the argument that the IIMs would graduate unemployable and unsuccessful women has evaporated.

BUT WOMEN STILL FIND IT HARDER TO GET IN

So what’s the reason now? I can understand that only 20% of the applicants are women; in some ways, India’s still pretty conservative and families might balk at sending their daughters away to a male-dominated school. But how is it that only 9-17% of the students are female? That implies that women applicants actually have a poorer chance of getting in then men do — in some years, less than half the chance.

Later that evening, I had an opportunity to discuss it further with Professor Barua. He thought it was probably a “long-tailed distribution” problem. Male applicants do better — and worse — then females. If you were to graph their admission test scores, men would be   over-represented at the tails of the distribution.

The graph here demonstrates the issue. (It’s just an example, it doesn’t actually show any data.) If the women’s test scores were represented by the blue curve, and the men’s by the red curve, it’s evident that an institute that took under 1% of applicants would be selecting mainly off the right-hand side red curve. So for an institute like IIM/A, which accepts something like 0.5% to 1% of applicants, the accepted students are predominantly male.

Oh, I said, your test must skew quantitative. It’s well known, whether through nurture, nature, or social expectations, that the kind of male-female distribution he described is typical of quantitative tests.

Yes, he said. The tests were indeed very quantitative. And I can see why. In India, especially with such tremendous competition for a limited number of places, the appearance of objectivity is very important. What could be more objective than a quantitative test?

But. What that does, of course, is then to skew management school admissions to a certain profile: Male, quantitatively-oriented. I think we had perhaps 10 students in my class who didn’t come from an engineering  or science background. And even those few were from disciplines like Economics or Accounting. From what I read, the situation now is not so different. (Unlike Stanford and Harvard, IIM Ahmedabad doesn’t post a convenient breakout of its student profile.)

DOES IT MATTER?

I would argue that it does indeed matter. Mid-career, I did a second MBA, this time at UCLA’s Anderson School. My class included someone who’d been a professional ballet dancer. And two doctors. And students from some 40 countries. And a very large number of women. It made for a very different experience. It was practical rather than analytical, informed by what people from all these different backgrounds brought to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting quantitative  analysis is meaningless; I’ve spent chunks of my career building models and spreadsheets and making forecasts. Numbers are attractive and useful, converting data into information is beguilingly so. But equally, it’s clear to me that what makes for an ability to succeed in the business world is a flexible understanding of the underlying realities. And the ability to work successfully with people Not Like You. Most workplaces are not very homogenous.

As India internationalizes, this will only become more important. As the Stanford website says, “The world is changing quickly and so are the challenges that face tomorrow’s leaders.”

HOW NOT TO FIX IT

Recently, someone forwarded me a news item: that some or all of the IIMs were going to tackle this issue in a typically Indian way, with “grace-marks.” It wasn’t clear from the article exactly what IIM/A (or IIM/B or IIM/C) was planning to do, but IIM Lucknow was going to award 5 “grace marks” to every woman applicant, and 2 to every non-engineer. IIM Rohtak was offering 20 points to every woman applicant, and 20 also to every non-engineer (not clear whether that would give women non-engineers 40 points). IIM Raipur would add 30 points for women-non-engineers, according to the article.

Ouch.

Diversity is, I believe, important. Not just as a matter of fairness, but as I argued, as a matter of learning. Only this is the wrong way to do it.

The problem with grace marks is that it immediately tags that class of entrants as inferior and also-ran. (It even quantifies the degree of perceived inferiority.) It creates resentment among people who believe that they should have had the places taken by the inferior (but female or non-quant) candidate.

The right way, in my opinion would be to take a second look at the admissions process. Should it have such a quantitative bias? Do the objective tests really reflect the potential of a candidate to succeed in the business world? The evidence suggests not. (I’m not suggesting it’s a disqualification, just not a necessary one.)

Stanford uses an objective test, the GMAT, as part of its admission process. The range among admitted students is substantial: 530 to 790. Harvard uses it too, and has an even wider range: 490-790.

The article didn’t say, but it’s possible that’s the approach taken by IIM/A. It has a writing test and a group discussion. Perhaps it’s a matter of weighting the components of the admissions differently, relying less on the quantitative sections.

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Mumbai’s Airport…

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

… isn’t as modern as Delhi’s, or Bangalore’s or Hyderabad’s. (Yet.) But some like it anyway…


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I haven’t been through Mumbai in a while. My recent trips have taken me to Delhi and Bangalore, both of which have brand new airports, built quite recently. I was curious about Mumbai.

So I asked a question of Facebook: Anyone flown into or out of Mumbai recently? How does the airport compare with the new airport in Delhi?

“I flew in in early July…Mumbai is a disaster,” said S.

Ricky Surie disagreed. “Mumbai is much better than New Delhi: you get from plane to car in 30 minutes. New Delhi is awful: you have to walk many miles from the gate to the immigration desk. After that, baggage is mercifully close ;-) “

I know what he means. Delhi’s old outdated airport was just that efficient. It was small, so there wasn’t far to walk; staffing had been stepped up, reducing the long lines so common in prior years; and getting from plane to car was faster than at any other airport I visited. Even big modern snazzy ones like Singapore and Dubai. Now Delhi’s just such a modern snazzy airport, and it’s a long hike to the gates.

But Akhil disagreed: “No comparison- Delhi Airport is World Class- Mumbai Airport is still a construction site.”

I stopped by Yelp to see what other reviewers had to say. Some people liked the new terminal; a few mentioned the service, and one reviewer the “air of calm” (though she also said the tarmac was chaotic, and the bus she was in had to honk its way through to the plane). But… many others disliked the service, found the airport dirty, and the air conditioning ineffective.

A TAXI TALE

The world over, taxi tales are like fish stories: Everyone has one.

Here’s one from Naveen Anand, who noted that the touts have shifted base from Delhi to Mumbai. “Last visit I had to take a cab from Mumbai airport to Wadala… Didn’t see the pre-paid counter before exiting. Cabbie asked for slip..I said what slip?… He said if no slip, please leave! When I got off, he offered to take me for Rs 600, saying the slip would be for Rs 700! I declined… Finally another cabbie took Rs 200 in advance — and dropped me outside the airport to put me in another cab to which he paid Rs 150.00 !!”

IS HYDERABAD THE BEST?

S. figures Hyderabad trumps the lot. “The best airport in India today is Hyderabad — combination of world class, super efficient baggage handling, the right size, competitive by the meter radio cab system outside exit, stunning landscaping for the first few kilometers…”

Ricky Surie had the last word: “Hyderabad is great, but the Bangalore airport is on another planet ;-) !”

Posted in Doing Business in India, Infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

India: The “Ease” of Doing Business (World Bank Rank)

Posted on September 7, 2011 by

I’ve just started to update my book on doing business in India, and I came across this statement: In 2008, The World Bank ranked India as 120th out of 178 countries in the difficulty of doing business. At that, its rank had improved from 2007, where it ranked #132.

This is the World Bank’s annual ranking, based on a survey about the complexity of regulation. So, I wondered, how has that changed? Had its rank improved further?

Um, no. India ranked 134 in 2011, right behind Malawi, (but ahead of Indonesia). It’s up one rank from 2010′s 135.  China, by the way, is 79. (I’m not sure this makes sense; all the anecdotal stuff I hear is that India is tough, but China is tougher.)

Singapore and Hong Kong come in at #1 and #2. New Zealand’s 3rd, the UK 4th and the US is 5th.

India’s 2009 and 2011 ranks aren’t strictly comparable. The World Bank now evaluates 183 countries, not 178. Also, an indicator on which India performed better than average in 2008 — Employing Workers — has been suspended in the 2011 rankings (it’s being reviewed for methodology).

But still — these rankings are no way an improvement.

WHAT ARE THESE RANKINGS, ANYWAY?

Each year, the World Bank looks at countries across the globe, ranking them on how far they regulate 9 areas of business. The numbers indicate India’s 2011 rank out of 183 countries. A rank of 91 would be above the median, and 92 would be below it. Clearly, India ranks above the median only on two counts, though it’s close on Registering property

  • Starting a Business  (173)
  • Dealing with Construction Permits (157)
  • Registering Property (94)
  • Getting Credit (32)
  • Protecting Investors (44)
  • Paying Taxes (164)
  • Trading Across Borders (100)
  • Enforcing Contracts (182)
  • Closing a Business (134)

The World Bank notes the limitations of this ranking in a note:

The ease of doing business index is limited in scope. It does not account for an economy’s proximity to large markets, the quality of its infrastructure services (other than services related to trading across borders), the strength of its financial system, the security of property from theft and looting, its macroeconomic conditions or the strength of underlying institutions. There remains a large unfinished agenda for research into what regulation constitutes binding constraints, what package of reforms is most effective and how these issues are shaped by the context in an economy. The Doing Business indicators provide a new empirical data set that may improve understanding of these issues.

WHO DOES IT TALK TO?

Unlike many surveys that talk only to a limited audience (e.g. executives of large multinationals) the World Bank’s Doing Business surveys a wide range of people:

Surveys are administered through more than 8,200 local experts, including lawyers, business consultants, accountants, freight forwarders, government officials and other professionals routinely administering or advising on legal and regulatory requirements.

So they’re averaging 40-50 people surveyed per country, though I’m sure the actual number in each place varies quite a lot.

THE BOTTOM LINE?

India’s still an attractive place for companies. But as with people — attractive shouldn’t be confused with easy.

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Brazil’s Population Growth Rate Fell Faster than India’s: Why?

Posted on August 30, 2011 by

A recent National Geographic article grabbed my attention: Brazil’s population growth rate fell sharply in the last three decades.

The article started with a list of names: Jose Alberto; Murilo; Geraldo; Angela; Paulo; Edwiges; Vicente; Rita; Lucia; Marcellino; Teresinha. These were the 11 children of the interviewee, the mother of Professor Jose Alberto Carvalho, one of Brazil’s most eminent demographers. But as for Professor Carvalho himself — well, he and his siblings had a total of 26 children, slightly over 2 each.

With different names, that could have been my story. My father was one of 8 children, two of whom didn’t make it into adulthood. But none of his siblings had more than 2 kids, and some had only one.

It could have been the story of most of my friends in urban India.

Of course, the countries aren’t precisely comparable. Brazil’s GDP at $1.6 trillion in 2009, is similar to India’s $1.4 trillion. (World Bank numbers.)  But Brazil’s population, estimated at 190.8 million in its 2010 census, is one-sixth of India’s.

And yet. It was pretty remarkable. I dug around for the numbers, and here they are:

Brazil is a Catholic country, and large families were the norm. As this graph shows, its population growth through the early 1980s exceeded India’s. And then something happened.

ELECTRICITY, TV, AND FEMALE EMPOWERMENT

The article focused on three factors: female education; electricity; and TV, specifically “novelas” — lengthy and gripping serials about families.  In a nifty graphic, it related the decline in fertility to these three things.

  • In 1960, women averaged 2 years of schooling and 6.3 children. Only 19% of households had electricity; and very few had TV.
  • In 1980, women were up to 3.5 years of school, and down to 4.4 children. More than half of households, 54%, had electricity. Around a third, 36% had TV access.
  • In 2000, women got 8.5 years of education (more than the 7.3 years men averaged), and had only 2.4 children. Nearly all households — 95% — had power, and 90% had TV.

Again, how come?

CITIES ARE WHERE IT’S AT

One underlying factor — people moved into cities, fast.  In 1960, more than half Brazil’s population lived in the countryside. By 1980, only a third did. Now it’s nearly 90% urban.

In India, more than 2/3 of the population is still rural. It’s a lot harder to bring electricity, television, and education to hundreds of thousands of villages than to a few big cities. The graph below shows the percentage of people living in cities in the two countries.

I wondered if this could be replicated in India, and the answer is, probably not. The article touched on the military dictatorship that forced the pace of urban growth, pushing the population into the cities. It had its social costs in cramped housing and dangerous streets and women commuting long distances to work.

SO WHAT ABOUT TV?

I remember when people used to half-joke that the best way to reduce India’s population would be to introduce TV to the villages, so people would be too busy watching to make babies. In Brazil, it’s nearly true.

But not, according the the National Geographic, in quite that way. It’s the role models provided by the novelas. These soap operas present glamorous women (because women like to watch stories about glamorous women, and men don’t exactly mind either), with small families.

Why small families? Well, presumably because it’s difficult to be glamorous when you’re caring for 6.3 children. But also for a much simpler reason: It’s easier to manage a storyline with a reasonable-sized cast of characters. Not to mention a lot easier to film.

The women viewing these programs took the point. Asked why they wanted smaller families than their mothers or grandmothers, they said: Too much work; too much expense.

What’s India watching?

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Updating ‘India Business Checklists’

Posted on August 20, 2011 by

The rights to India Business Checklists — published in 2009 by John Wiley — have reverted to me. (Thanks, JW!)

A lot has changed since I researched it in 2008. A lot more is likely to keep changing in India and the world. I’m looking forward to the massive task of updating this book, then republishing it in a format more suited to continual updating.

I’m open to suggestions about what needs changing, and how it could be better. Email me or leave comments!

Posted in Doing Business in India, General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment