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.

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.

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.

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!

I remembered that article recently when I spent some time in Bangalore, or as it now calls itself, Bengaluru. This is a city I’ve been visiting for years since the late 1970s, as it transformed from a bucolic garden city to the chaotic urbanism of today.

These days, Bangalore is an extensive building site, with new multistoreyed developments coming up, an underground metropolitan railway under construction, half-built overpasses, and excavated roads. Many of the streets are narrow neighborhood roads, built at a time when cars were scarce and parking seemed a waste of space. Amid all this is the traffic: cars and trucks, motor-bikes and scooters, auto-rickshaws and cyclists, and a few stray dogs and cats and cows (though far fewer than I saw in Delhi).

Accustomed to the orderly-even-when-clogged traffic flows of the US, I found the chaos of the traffic annoying at first, especially when stuck in it.  The only rule the traffic followed with any consistency was stopping at the red light. Beyond that, it wasn’t that drivers violated traffic rules, it was evident that de facto, there were no rules.

Then, as I observed it, it seemed… familiar. That’s when I realized –  the traffic moves organically, like a migrating herd of animals. It seeks possibilities and general directions. Drivers look for openings they can move into, while being aware of a limited personal space around other vehicles. They indicate their intentions by starting the move, rather than by using mechanical signals.

And, like animals in a herd, they can be noisy; the extended loud honking of trucks, the irritable buzzing of auto-rickshaws, the ringtones of reversing vehicles. The horn is a communication device, and they are no shyer about using them than a flock of geese settling on a lake.

Now it all made sense. The rules for herds: Move in the same general direction as the herd; try not to bump into others; if you see an opening, use it; let others in the herd know of your presence by calling out when necessary. Those are the traffic rules, too. (And red lights, of course.)

]]> http://rupabose.com/2011/07/29/herds-of-vehicles-in-bangalore/feed/ 2 webmaster blore traffic blore traffic 2 http://rupabose.com/2011/06/30/indias-population-and-the-decennial-census/ http://rupabose.com/2011/06/30/indias-population-and-the-decennial-census/#comments Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:54:02 +0000 webmaster http://rupabose.com/?p=1611 Continue reading →]]> For a country where a quarter of the people are still illiterate in any language, India conducts a pretty decent ten-yearly census. 2011 is a census year, and the provisional results are out for some of the main indicators. (The actual results won’t be issued until next year after they’ve had a chance to check and reconcile them.)

I’ve been watching these numbers from around 1971 with the intense interest of  a dieter stepping on the scales. India had under half the number of people it has now. Back then, population growth was considered a problem verging on a disaster tending to a catastrophe. Books like Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” dominated the discussion. Population growth is still a problem, further stretching already over-stretched resources and building in grounds for conflict. But at least in some areas, people have started talking of the Demographic Dividend, and acknowledging the energy, enthusiasm, and potential of a youthful demographic structure.

So what’s the news this year?

First: India’s population growth rate is declining significantly. From a high of 2.24% per year in the decade ended 1971, it’s down to 1.64% per year in the first decade of the Twenty-first century. Back in 1971, it seemed it would never go down, no matter how much the government pushed the Family Planning message: Do ya teen bachhe bas (2-3 kids, enough).

Of course, it’s a small percentage of a very large number. In ten years, between 2001-2011, India added 181 million people: One Brazil. Five Californias. Still, back then, we talked of India adding one Australia each year. That would have meant an addition of 220 million people over a decade, not 181 million.

By 2025, India expects its population to overtake China’s — which had, after all, implemented its one-child policy about a generation ago.

( The  US, with 310 million people, has the world’s third-largest population. But it’s only a fourth the size of  China, which has 1.34 billion or India, with 1.21 billion.)

When my grandfather was born, India had only one-fifth the population it has now.  Here’s what the population graph looks like:

FEWER KIDS AND MISSING GIRLS

There are actually fewer children under 6 years old in this census (159 million kids) than in the previous, 2001, census (164 million kids). The under-sixes are now 13% of the population, compared with 16% ten years earlier. In a not-so-encouraging development,  the numbers have fallen more sharply for little girls than for little boys: it’s 2.1 million fewer boys, but nearly 3 million fewer girls.

That’s nearly a million missing girls, and it suggests selective abortion (and possibly infanticide or neglect), owing probably to a huge cultural son-preference. Every decade since 1961 there’s been a growing disparity between the girls and boys under six. On the positive side, the sex ratio (number of women per thousand men) has improved slightly from 933 to 940, suggesting that older girls and women are surviving better.

LITERACY IMPROVING

I’d give two cheers for the improvement in literacy. When I was a kid, most people, especially women, couldn’t read. It’s not true any more, and there’s a growing market for print media in India’s many languages. Some 82% of males and 65% of females can read, up from 75% and 54% ten years ago. In another ten or twenty years, perhaps, nearly everyone will be literate.  This isn’t a brilliant achievement, considering that Sri Lanka did it a long time ago, as did the Indian state of Kerala. But it is an achievement.

WHAT’S THE FUTURE?

This graph of India’s population, based on UN projections, shows three different futures out to the turn of the century.

• In the highest case (red), population crosses 2 billion soon after 2050, and keeps going.
• In the middle case (pink), population peaks at around 1.7 billion, and then gradually declines to 1.5 billion.
• In the best case (blue), the peak’s here in 2040, and by the end of the century, population is back to 880 million, back where it was around 1995.

Some very few readers of this blog might remember my wedding. I say very few, because it involved a lunchtime foray to the Old Customs House, a government office full of shelves covered in ancient varnish and equally ancient files, graced only by a spectacular old fig tree out front. That was followed by a lunch at the Sea Lounge, and a return to work. That evening, at a friend’s apartment, we recited vows that we’d written ourselves.  Soon afterward, we went to my parents’ home in Delhi, and had an exchange of garlands under the sweet-scented madhu malati creeper on their verandah, and recited the same vows. My parents insisted on a wedding reception; my father being a scrupulously law-abiding civil servant, it was a modest (though very pleasant) tea-time affair at the IIC, within the bounds of the Guest Control Order. And because we’d suddenly been transferred to Tokyo, even the invitations had to be corrected by hand when the date was changed. (And our families first met each other many years after we were married. They liked each other immediately, making us think we probably should have introduced them earlier.) We didn’t even have telephones, much less the Internet which hadn’t then been invented.

This wedding was not that wedding.

This wedding involved several events, and a meeting of the clans. We not only met our co-inlaws, we exchanged online greetings. As with our parents, we liked each other immediately; and we were glad our youngsters, unlike our young selves, hadn’t waited seven years to introduce us.

Had it been in India, we’d probably have arranged it all and outsourced everything. It wasn’t India, it was California, and anyway having ignored our own parents’ well-meaning advice when it was our turn, we certainly had forfeited any right to interfere. The young couple did everything themselves, mostly on the Internet. They researched wedding planning on the internet, read wedding blogs, and found online checklists, and got their own checklists set up. They located their vendors on the Internet, and used Yelp to evaluate them. They hired the make-up artist and the photographer  and the caterers and a seamstress who adjusted the wedding gown and made sari blouses, and the mehndi artist. And on finding the mehndi artist’s website had a wonderful decorated cake, we commissioned one of those as well.

When they had their game-plan set up, it was a thirteen-page handbook sent by email to the key personnel. (Living in multiple cities and time-zones, email was an important means of communication.) They designed their own invitations, printed each one out on the computer printer, and addressed them all by hand.

This was a wedding that arrived on our doorstep in cardboard cartons. They bought everything they needed online: The table cloths. Vases. Candle-holders. Trays. A fire-bowl. Personalized mugs. Dried rose petals. 400 fresh roses. Fortunately, we had space to store everything, there was a lot. Later, wedding presents started to arrive, also in cardboard cartons…

They had a legal wedding, but unlike the Old Customs House, this was at San Francisco’s gracious City Hall, a domed structure with a great marble rotunda and classical carvings. The bride wore white. Her brother brought her red roses.

Then came the ceremonial wedding. The young couple asked our friend Sri to design a kolam geometric pattern especially for them, and she came up with one that was simple, elegant, and incorporated — at their request — an elephant. Using, of course, a computer program to do it, rather than the more traditional rice-flour in water used as a paint on a mud floor…

They requested our friend Aks to officiate, working with a ceremony they wrote themselves. (This was another point of commonality — but our ceremony was maybe a third as long and had no officiant.) It incorporated Shakespeare’s sonnet 116, and the Gayatri mantra — both found online (with a translation of the Sanskrit, too).  It incorporated vows and seven steps and I dos and I wills. It had a role for all the parents, asking us to welcome the new member of our families. (“We will!” we all shouted, enthusiastically.) It happened around a fire, made in the fire-bowl that arrived on our doorstep earlier. And it included an exchange of special-ordered garlands that arrived at the site that very morning…

The bride wore purple. The bridegroom wore a natural silk kurta embroidered in gold. These items were possibly the only major things that weren’t purchased or planned online (though we did check out the India Saree Palace on Yelp before sourcing the clothes from there…)

A wonderful time was had by all. And we’re thrilled to have a new member to our family and a whole new set of relatives!

IIM USA is the alum organization for graduates of all the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). There used to be only three (A, B & C – Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta); now there are 6, and more are planned. And enough of these graduates are in the US for a viable and interesting alums group. Ashima Jain, IIM USA’s founder president, did much of the organization. As I said in an earlier post, she’s one of those people who make things happen.

[ETA: IndiaWest carried a report on the same convention, here.]

FROM MEDICINE TO MORTGAGES

The first half of the conference had a healthcare theme. David Green, keynote speaker, is the president of Aurolab, an India-based non-profit entity that provides medical supplies at 5-10% of their commercial cost. Their first product was an intra-ocular lens, which they sell for $4 and commercial companies sell for about 20 times that. It’s achieved by trimming costs and margins — and getting the best professional help. As David pointed out, it’s about using the same set of tools an MBA degree provides, but instead of using them to create shareholder value, they use them “in favor of poor people.” Next up: An inexpensive, Bluetooth-enabled hearing aid, priced at 10% of the current cost of a good hearing aid. Though designed for India, it may well be marketed in the US too.

Pradeep Jaisingh chased a dream back to India from Dallas: World-class cancer care in India. He spoke about how his original vision of building a cancer hospital in Delhi morphed, which proved impossible because of real estate costs, morphed into a chain of “hospitals within hospitals.” His company, International Oncology Pvt Ltd, partners with existing hospitals to set up specialized cancer care units within their institutions. Takeaway quote (which resonated with me because it could be the theme of my book): “The opportunities are tremendous, the challenges  — formidable.”

Professor Shivendu of UC Irvine, a former IAS bureaucrat from India, spoke about Piracy and Privacy on the Web. The Internet facilitates the first and reduces the second. After lunch, a panel of entrepreneurs shared their stories. Nickhil Jakatdar amused us with his tale of founding a start-up with little more than a partner and a great deal of enthusiasm. When they won a business plan competition at US Berkeley, an angel investor wrote them a check for $350 K, and they were off and running. BV Jagadeesh went a more traditional route, raising money against his home. Anna Patterson, once and future Googler, left them to start a new search engine company before being wooed back. And Amit Garg is on the other side of the table: he’s at Norwest Venture Partners and moderated the panel.

Professor Samir Barua, Director of IIM/Ahmedabad, held a discussion about the Institute’s directions as competition increases. In India, the brand is very strong. They get 220 thousand applicants for 3 thousand places (across 6 Institutes). Internationally, it’s less well-known. I asked about women students; back when I was there, I was one of 8 women amid a class of 110 students. What was the situation now? Not much different, it turns out: around 20% of the applicants and between 9% and 17% of the students are women. The discussion then turned to what the IIMs could do to become better-known internationally. Having originated as government-funded institutes, they do have limitations, though those restrictions are gradually being removed.

After that, Gopi Kallayil  (also at Google) spoke about caring for the “Innernet” — the brain and body we live in. His five tips:

• Focus on the essential;
• Don’t multitask;
• Allow for one minute of mindfulness daily;
• Make appointments for mindfulness on your calendar at least weekly;
• “Friend yourself.”

Professor Sanjiv Das of Santa Clara University spoke about defaults on home mortgages, from the point of view of the lending banks. The only factor, he said, that determined whether an owner would default was how far under water the loan was. If the value of the loan greatly exceeded the market value of the house, the owner was likely to default. In those situations, banks that wanted to modify loans would be best off reducing principal; next best would be reducing the interest rate. Changing the term of the loan didn’t help.

DANCES WITH VERVE

The evening wrapped up with a unique Bollywood dance performance from the seniors of the Indian Cultural Center at Milpitas. The Jollywood Troupe comprises men and women from 60 to 80, and they gave a delightful show with energy, romance, and finesse. At the end of it, they pulled everyone onto the dance floor to join them.

And the icing on the cake:

The City of Fremont proclaimed 23 April 2011 as IIM USA Day!

From rural areas, we’re hearing more about the price of success: water tables impacted by industrial development; farm land sold to companies who can’t employ the uneducated farm workers who formerly made a precarious living there; pesticide poisoning inadvertent or deliberate.

So I was particularly pleased to get a 2008 paper (co-authored with Trishna Satpathy) from my friend Dr Aasha Kapur Mehta, an economist who works in the area of Chronic Poverty. It’s the story of one small village, Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra. It’s the story of one man, Anna Hazare (who’s  recently been in the news for his battles against corruption). And it’s especially appropriate for Earth Day.

THE VILLAGE BEFORE

This is Ralegan Siddhi before 1975: A village fallen into poverty on the back of a fragile ecosystem and recurrent drought.  Most years, it doesn’t grow enough of any crop to feed the villagers. Well-water’s available only at a depth of 65 feet, and the wells go dry in the summer. Men have left, looking for jobs, but uneducated and unsophisticated, they don’t earn enough to send much money home. (The village  school only goes to 4^th grade and only 10% of the kids attend it anyway.) Farmers borrowed from money-lenders, and now they’ve lost their land when they couldn’t repay their loans.

And – it’s gotten worse. One starving resident had a brainwave; he started an illegal-but-very-profitable liquor business. Soon, others copied him. As villagers drink away their troubles, the place is awash in booze, domestic violence against women, and rapidly increasing debt.

The leadership of the village, considering the whole thing hopeless, focus on what they can salvage from it – government grant money and local power. As often happens in India in these situations, they’re notoriously corrupt.

A major drought in 1972 brought in various charitable organizations to help. The government tried to build a tank to catch rainwater and improve the village’s water situation. The project’s screwed up and fails to harvest water. No one is surprised.

And then came Anna Hazare.

AND THEN CAME ANNA HAZARE

Bapurao Hazare (Anna, pronounced un-nah means ‘elder brother’ in Marathi and it’s used as a title in respect and affection) came from a Ralegan family, but as a child moved in with his uncle in Mumbai to go to school. Eventually he joined the Indian Army.  In 1975, he took his Army pension, and went back to Ralegan Siddhi.

Though they didn’t know it at the time, they were in luck.

Hazare started with a simple but costly gesture – using his own money to rebuild the decrepit village temple, which had lost all its wooden components to alcohol-fueled theft. Rural India is nothing if not religious, (well, maybe not the liquor vendors) and people chipped in to help. They had no money, but they donated the labor.

After that, Anna Hazare’s stock in the village was so high that villagers started coming to him to resolve disputes. He formed a Youth Group of young men from the village, and started campaigning against booze. Pretty soon, the illegal bars were closing down. Some pressure from the Youth Group probably helped.

Having got everyone’s attention and respect, he sold the villagers on some important principles:

• No addictions to liquor or anything else;
• Smaller families through family planning;
• No tree-felling;
• No grazing animals on public land, which had been overgrazed into wasteland.

Oh, and local volunteerism: Eventually, they would settle on one work-day in fifteen from every able-bodied adult. This involved everyone in the village, and provided the labor for some important changes.

SLOWING THE WATER, SAVING THE LAND

Rain came irregularly to Ralegan Siddhi, and the water didn’t stay. The degraded land sloped, the hard surface absorbed little, and the run-off took away more topsoil. Well-water ran deep, seasonal and unreliable. Government projects failed; no one cared enough to do a good job. Until Anna Hazare.

He started getting people to build low dams to harvest rainwater and replenish the water table. They contoured hillsides and planted them with trees and shrubs. In 1981-82, the government selected the village for COWDEP, one of its initiatives to conserve and improve depleted wastelands. This time, with Anna Hazare’s leadership, the villagers supervised the projects. He even managed to get the faulty 1975 tank rebuilt; and this time, with local oversight, it was done right.

The water table rose, and they shared to cost of digging wells. Ralegan Siddhi was no longer a wasteland.

Ralegan Siddhi had suffered from the Tragedy of the Commons in a bad way. Half-starved animals grazed the wasted land; the grass refused to regenerate. Hazare encouraged the villagers to grow trees, tapping into a governmental forestry program that provided free saplings. The leaves gave green fodder for animals now fenced away from the not-actually-pasture and stall-fed instead. The grass-land revived — and milk yields quadrupled.

WATER FROM THE CANAL

Faced with widespread poverty, the Indian government tries. It starts thousands of projects designed to improve rural conditions, and many of them fail. The Kukadi Canal, only 3 km from Ralegan Siddhi, had many such examples. Over a 100 lift-irrigation projects had been set up to bring canal-water to the fields; all failed but one – in Ralegan Siddhi.

What it had was better organization, so the farmers could unite to pay the necessary capital costs and the electricity bills in an equitable way. Eventually, the canal supplied 40% of the village’s water needs. Now it could plant not just drought-resistant millet and sorghum, but actually grow vegetables and fruit trees.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH ECOLOGY

This is Ralegan Siddhi now:  By Indian rural standards, it’s wealthy. Incomes have risen ten-fold. Water’s available in the village; women – the traditional bringers of water – no longer have to walk a mile or two to fetch it.  The village’s growing prosperity has attracted services; a bank is moving in, a doctor practices there,  and the government has opened a clinic.

In 1995, Ralegan got a new school going up to 10^th grade, though not before they threatened a hunger strike until the government certified it. In contrast to the pre-1975 situation, all the children go to school regularly; and 95% complete 10^th grade, India’s school-leaving grade. Physical education allows many boys to pass Army fitness tests, a passport to  regular employment and later a steady pension. The children are involved in the volunteer efforts to plant trees and maintain dams, learning at the same time about the importance of the village’s ecology.

By the time my friend Aasha visited there in May 2007, the village was green and tree-shaded though May’s the hottest time of the year. Here’s what she writes: “Lush green trees lined the road leading to the centre of the village and the green fields were in direct contrast with the rather barren landscape outside the village. Mango, guava and tamarind trees surrounded the Training Centre. The wells had plenty of water.”

But that’s not all the story. Anna Hazare involved the whole village in these efforts, including people of lower castes. In time, this allowed reforms to break some of the traditional caste barriers. More than just the physical changes, he’s transformed how the village operates, and its power structure.

(Note: This post is based on the paper Escaping Poverty: The Ralegan Siddhi Case, by Aasha Kapur Mehta and Trishna Satpathy and published by the Indian Institute of Public Administration’s Chronic Poverty Centre as Working Paper No. 38. I’ve never been to Ralegan Siddhi myself. If I’ve inadvertantly introduced errors, leave a comment and I’ll fix them!)

But what I found intriguing was a little tab that says: Trace me. It opens up to provide a code number and a message that says, This potato is traceable! You can track this potato all the way back to the farm.

All you had to do was to enter the code on their website. So of course I did, hoping for something like “Farmer Ed’s Potato Spread” and an address.

Alas. There was less to it than that. The code only revealed that it was a regular-sized organically-grown russet from Oregon. No back to the farm at all. I suppose it would have been something boring like “Field number 32446″ anyway.

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Some vegetables are a lot easier to track to their origins.

When I was in India recently, I stayed with my friends Sujata Madhok and Mukul Shukla. They’re both journalists… and more. One morning, Mukul said “You must see my kitchen garden. It’s on the roof.” I went up, expecting to see a few pots of tomato plants, and maybe a curry-leaf shrub or two.

Oh no.  There were indeed a couple of tomato plants, volunteers that had hidden in the soil and popped up when conditions were right. But this was a serious effort, a mini-farm, a symphony of lettuce and cauliflower and broccoli in clay pots. The whole thing was organic; they were improving the soil with compost made in an old bathtub ripped out after a remodel. (The other bathtubs had become beds to grow more vegetables.)

The terrace was up three ladder-like staircases. Fortunately, water was pumped to roof tanks, so it didn’t involve hauling water up. But all the pots and soil  were carried up there.[Edited to Add:  In comments, Sujata said, "Our driver-turned-gardener Ramchander does much of the hard work on this impromptu farm."  ]

A clothes line with a few clothes-pegs attached testified to the multiple uses of the space.

“This used to be a great party terrace,” their daughter said, rather regretfully. Like many teenagers, she didn’t look that impressed with her parents’ achievements.  Her friend was more appreciative, and took Mukul up on an offer to help herself to the organic lettuce for a cool salad.