Month: May 2011

Indian cities need some serious urban planning. What we have right now is a mix of sub-standard ideas, ad hoc decisions and delayed implementation. That is no way to treat cities like Mumbai.

Let us look at Mumbai. Yes, we got one Sea Link. Plenty of flyovers. An above ground metro and monorail are coming up. Some other random bridges are being talked about. But surely, we can do better than that. For one, the metro should have been underground for the most part and covered a lot more of the city. We need sea transport like how Hong Kong has. We need more bridges on the western and eastern sides of the city.

Who is thinking? Where is the vision for Mumbai? Are is our destiny narrow raids, traffic jams and crowded public transport?Who is responsible for making Mumbai’s urban infrastructure 10X better than what it is?

Abhishek’s school vacation is in June and July – he goes to the first standard when school re-opens. We were planning to go to the US in mid-July for 10 days, but are rethinking that. Any alternative recommendations? Our travel dates are July 10-20.

Some ideas that have come up are: one of the Club Mahindra resorts in India (the ones which are available are Binsar, Corbett, Nawalgarh, Mussorie, Kumbalgarh), Bangkok-Pattaya or Bali. My one worry about some of the Indian destinations are the rains. We aren’t the beach, ocean-jumping people, and are looking for a nice relaxed place which has plenty of things for a 6-year-old to do.

Places we don’t want to go this year: Europe, Singapore, HK/China.

So, any suggestions of specific places and hotels/resorts?

Thanks!

The Day I First Landed in the US….

Come May, and a memory that comes by is of a day almost exactly 18 years ago when I returned for good from the US to become an entrepreneur in India. And with that is the memory of the day I first landed in the US in September 1988. Let me start with the latter.

I landed in New York on an afternoon on the Labour Day weekend in 1988 just ahead of the orientation week at Columbia University. A friend was supposed to come and pick me up, but didn’t. This was in the pre-cellphone era, so I had no way to trace him. I had made a booking at YMCA, so went there by cab. The Lufthansa flight had left me very tired and with an upset stomach.

I reached YMCA and promptly fell asleep. The jet lag was taking its toll. I was feeling feverish, and was very hungry but didn’t want to go out on my own for some reason. My friend finally came in the evening, and that was a big relief. My first meal in the US was at Pizza Hut! It was my first taste of pizza. Post-dinner, I went off with my friend to stay at his graduate housing at Columbia – my housing request hadn’t yet come through.

For some reason, the memory of that day has stayed on. It wasn’t a particularly enthralling day.  But it was the first day in the land that was so different from India, and a start of a fascinating four-year journey.

…and the Day I Returned from the US

My US stay that began in September 1988 ended with my return to India in May 1992. I had quit NYNEX six months ago and spent that period in California working at a company as a precursor to coming back (with a friend) in a possible JV.

My return journey took me via Singapore. That was the most convenient way to come to Mumbai from San Francisco. The transit time in Singapore was  about 12 hours. I went to meet a person who ran a big trading business out of Singapore. I still remember meeting him at his office and seeing the huge Singapore port in the window from his office. He talked about Singapore and all that it had accomplished. I was riveted with his success story — after all, I was en route to India to become an entrepreneur.

When I landed in Mumbai, I had a distressing experience. The Customs officers would not pass my PC  which I had got on Transfer of Residence. They arbitrarily assessed it at a high value, and wanted money to clear it. The odds were stacked against me given the discretionary powers vested in the officers.

I spent the next 6 hours (my first 6 hours back in India) at the airport going from one counter to another — I was determined that I would not pay them anything that was not official. My mother waited patiently outside. It took inordinately long to get the paperwork done – and I left the airport in the wee hours of the morning without the PC. For that, I had to come back the next day to meet some Assessment Officer, and pay money (by cheque) before I could get the PC out.

The contrast between Singapore and India that encompassed a single day could not have been more stark. And even today, as I look back 18 years ago, even though things have improved in India, I cannot but help think of our lost decades that stunted a generation. Even today, we are still not able to outgrow the wrong turns we took post-Independence.

This week’s links:

• Why Middle Managers May Be the Most Important People in Your Company: from Knowledge@Wharton.
• Financing options for start-ups: by Fred Wilson.
• On Innovation: Steve Denning blogs about a Malcolm Gladwell article. “What has emerged over the last decade is a group of firms like Apple, Amazon and Salesforce.com that have learned how to get to the root of the problem and combine continuous innovation with disciplined execution. They are managed in a radically different way from traditional management.”
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta interview: on rediff.com. “I think Rahul Gandhi is making the biggest mistake in thinking that political mobilisation and outreach can happen independently of your record in government. That somehow you can be a big national leader without taking a clear public stand on the major issues of the country.”
• Democracy, Elections and Voting: by Atanu Dey. “Do we really have to inform and educate all voters? Can we do something which does not involve educating everyone but that will have the same outcome as if we were to fully educate all the voters? Yes!”
• India needs $110B in capital for solar report: WSJ on a KPMB study. “The solar sector has the potential to transform the Indian economy in the way the IT sector transformed the Indian economy during the 1990s.”

I came across this article by Tavleen Singh (read it in The Afternoon, May 19), and it struck a chord:

Our most serious problem is the inability to build basic 21st century infrastructure without which there is little doubt that our great Bharat Mata will by the middle of this century resemble one, gigantic slum. More than 700 million Indians are expected to be living in urban centres by 2050 and to accommodate them experts calculate that we will need to build 500 more towns and cities. We have not started to build the first of these yet…It is our misfortune that the voice of poor Indians is only heard at election time. If it was stronger and louder all the time India would change more rapidly. It is our misfortune that the loudest voices in India are of educated, middle class Indians who are easily fooled into supporting some red herring like the Lokpal bill when there are much more serious issues to protest about. So in the near future India will continue to look like a broken down, decaying country despite impressive economic growth while little countries like Thailand go from strength to strength.

Where is the vision and will when we need it most to transform India?

I met a friend on one of my flights back from Delhi. He has a factory in Jammu and goes there often. One point he made in the conversation: doing business in J&K is different from doing business elsewhere in India. Case in point: the Indian Penal Code has a variant there called Ranbir Penal Code.

A simple point, but one that stayed with me: Kashmir is different from India. And then I thought: why should that be the case? Of course, there are historical precedents, but I think we ought to integrate J&K fully into India – one people, one of rule of law.

The conversation also brought back memories of my only visit to Kashmir as a 10-year-old with my parents and sister. We took the Jammu Tawi Express, and then went to  Srinagar, Gulmarg, Sonmarg. I still have a photo of all of us in the traditional dress. Hope to go there again soon.

Given the travelling I do, airports are natural transit points. And I cannot stop complaining about the inefficiencies and stupidities. I want to add one more to the list – the dumb security check.

They have the scanners installed but absolutely ignore the results of the scan. Instead of only checking those who beep when they pass through, every passenger is hand-checked by the security staff. Why then install expensive scanners when their output is going to be ignored? The result is that at peak travel hours the queue to pass through the security check becomes quite long at some airports (definitely, in Mumbai).

My point in these rants is not to be a complainant all the time, but to see how we can improve simple things that have a logical solution – if someone spends time to question the process. Politicians and airport staff don’t have to wait in the queues, so they don’t feel the pain. But, at least, they can think when they look around.

I read about Manohar’s in an article in Mint a couple months ago. I visited it recently looking for books on Indian politics and elections. Everything that Mint says about them is true – and more! The collection of books on India is absolutely amazing. I am still of the school that likes to look inside a book before deciding to buy it, so there could be no better way to spend an hour.

The staff (especially an old-timer, Rajaram) have an exceptional knowledge of books. All I had to go was to ask for a topic, and they would find me books.

So, if you have time some time next time you are in Delhi,  stop by Ansari Road and spend time at Manohar’s.

I was looking for data on past Indian elections – Lok Sabha and Assembly elections over the past 10 years. One obvious source is of course the Election Commission site but what they have is mostly PDFs and some XLS files (could not find XLS files for 2009-2011 Assembly elections). I am looking for the following:

• a website where I can do drill-down analysis , at the constituency level, see how the voting patterns have changed across Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in a particular constituency
• Raw XLS files for all Lok Sabha and Assembly elections from 1998 onwards (including the most recent ones). Like I said, the EC website doesn’t seem to have the last three years assembly elections XLS
• visualisation software recommendations that can help present the data in a way that can support decision-making

Any recommendations? Would any one of you be willing to work together with me to help create this by aggregating bits that are available?

My goal is to make a site that has all the info readily available for analysis and comparison. It will allow us to see how voting patterns have changed in India. Ideally, we should overlay this with socio-economic data at the constituency level.  If something exists, I’d like to see it. Else, let us work together to create it!

From two posts (Part 14 and Part 15) in the series “It’s Up To Us Now” that I wrote a year ago:

Let us first think about the change India needs.

India needs political leadership of the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Lee Kuan Yew. From that leadership will flow policy changes that we need as a country. The hard and soft foundations of a nation has to be engineered. The soft foundation encompasses national interest, the elimination of corruption, the elimination of artificially created divisions of castes and communities (which are today being used as ‘vote banks’), the creation of a truly modern education system, real economic, personal and political freedom, efficient markets, and so on.

The  hard foundation is about infrastructure that will ensure the urbanisation of India:  modern high-speed nationwide rail network, sufficient power generation capacity to meet the needs of an industrializing economy, ubiquitous affordable broadband access, efficient ports and airports, etc.

The hard and soft foundations will not only eliminate poverty but actually propel India to become a truly important participant in the global scene. To bring that about, India needs foresighted, intelligent, and dedicated leaders.

This kind political leadership exists in India. Such leaders are born once in a lifetime. India is fortunate to have a few such leaders. But they are not where they need to be.

Just to be clear: this leadership is not about photo-ops, but about getting things done. It is about working against the odds and delivering results. India has had many such leaders – but somehow they have been lost in the maze of cut-throat politics.

That is what Middle India’s change agents need to change. We need to ensure that these leaders can get to the top. We need to give them an environment for them to succeed. This is where the passionate few need to come together.