Month: July 2011

From a post a year ago (after a trip to China):

Seeing Shenzhen and Shanghai, all I can say is that anyone who thinks that Mumbai can become a Shanghai or India can do a China has not visited China. Sitting here in Mumbai, we can imagine and dream. But going to the places, one is struck by the scale of what has been created in so short a time.

Two developments said it all in India while I was away. A Bandh was organised across India bringing the nation to a halt. The additional sea links that should have been built a generation ago in Mumbai were further delayed.

A friend I was talking to put it so well: “We build for yesterday, China builds for tomorrow.” In India, there is little semblance of any planning; we are always playing catch up. Three decades ago, India and China were equally behind in the development race. Today, one country has gone so far ahead, and the other still trundles along – a little faster than before, but not in the race.

This week’s links:

• Evolution of MVAS in India: A presentation by Analysis Mason.
• Africa’s mobile economic revolution: from The Guardian. “The power of telephony is forging a new enterprise culture, from banking to agriculture to healthcare.”
• India’s half-finished revolution: from The Economist. “India’s liberalisation began with a bang in 1991, but two decades on the unreformed parts of the economy are becoming a drag on growth. Time for another bang.”
• India learns to innovate: by Rajeev Mantri. “India has always failed to achieve its potential when it comes to commercializing technology, but with the return of talent from abroad and the emergence of a large domestic market, it now has momentum.”
• News Redux: by Andy Rutledge. “Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable.”

I still remember reading James Gleick’s Chaos a long, long time ago. It was beautifully written and simplified a complex subject. Now, Gleick takes what is a seemingly simple topic – information – and weaves a wide array of stories around it. We are all flooded with information, and have a hard time keeping up and sometimes, making sense of it all. The book is about the people from the past who made our information world the way it is.

From Publisher’s Weekly: “In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon’s neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon’s story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. With his brilliant ability to synthesize mounds of details and to tell rich stories, Gleick leads us on a journey from one form of communicating information to another, beginning with African tribes’ use of drums and including along the way scientists like Samuel B. Morse, who invented the telegraph; Norbert Wiener, who developed cybernetics; and Ada Byron, the great Romantic poet’s daughter, who collaborated with Charles Babbage in developing the first mechanical computer. Gleick’s exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.”

I was drawn to this book by a chapter entitled “The Voter.” I had heard and read bits about how the US political parties would do microtargeting. The science of analysing and targeting voters came alive in this 30-page chapter, and that then encouraged me to sample other chapters in the book. As we are awash in data, analytics is going to play a key role in many industries. This book is a good starting point for starting to think about how to manage and make sense of data.

From Booklist: “Every click we make, every cell phone call, every credit-card purchase enlarges our “digital dossiers,” business journalist Baker explains in this bracing behind-the-screen investigation into the booming world of data mining and analysis. Our digital echoes collect in a vast ocean of data that marketers and government agencies alike are eager to trawl, if only it were charted. Enter the top-notch mathematicians Baker dubs the Numerati. Baker gamely visits eerily high-tech companies and speaks with algorithm wizards intent on quantifying everything we do in all arenas of life in order to mathematically model humanity and manipulate our behavior. Baker’s report on microtargeted marketing, the use of workplace data to “optimize” employees, the scrutiny of online social networks, and the robotic reading of millions of blogs supports his warning that we’re “in danger of becoming data serfs—slaves to the information we produce.” This is a fascinating outing of the hidden yet exploding world of digital surveillance and stealthy intrusions into our decision-making processes as we buy food, make a date, or vote for president.”

Two books that I have found particularly useful are:

• Rethinking State Politics in India by Ashutosh Kumar. This looks at India as a collection of regions. From the book: “This volume adopts a sub-national comparative method for carrying out an in-depth analysis of the politics of identity as well as development in the large, multi-level polity of India by focusing on micro narratives that may otherwise be passed over while viewing the larger picture. The articles focus on regions within states and not the state per se, as the unit of analysis. Interestingly, they employ both intra-state and inter-state regional perspectives in a comparative mode to highlight the nuanced nature of the movements for autonomy.”
• Electoral Politics in Indian States by Shastri, Suri and Yadav. This fills in the gap between the elections and provides richer data.  From the book: “Using detailed electoral data from the 2004 elections from across the country, the volume covers various states, including Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala from the south; Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, and Rajasthan from the west; Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh in the north; and Jharkhand, West Bengal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, and Manipur in the east. It examines the phenomenon of the ‘third electoral front’, which came into being with the 1989 elections and continues till date. From its origins in a time of political and economic instability and social upheaval, the front has, by this time, given way to a more stable order, even though the era of single party ruled governments has given way to coalition politics. The book highlights the role of state and regional politics at the center, and how the clout of regional parties has increased over the last ten years.

Admittedly, these are heavy reading. But for those like me who came in late to understanding India’s politics, they are a good start and reference.

I have been going through some books on India’s political landscape, and especially some of the recent elections.

Sage has books on some of the recent elections edited by Paul Wallace and Ramashray Roy.  Since these books are published a year or two after the elections, there is time for some in-depth research and analysis. The 2009 elections book has come out recently. While one may not necessary agree with everything that is said, there are enough good insights to make this a useful addition for those seeking an understanding of India’s electoral politics.

From the book introduction: “According to the contributors, the public outcome of the 2009 elections indicated a demand for integrity, continuity, and competence — values that were considered almost obsolete in today’s political scenario. At the same time, the contributors admit to problems in structure, providing for minority cultures, stability, and contentious public policy issues.”

Cities are amazing places to live. I for one have lived almost all my life in two of the biggest of them all – Mumbai and New York. Glaeser’s book celebrates cities and discusses what makes cities different and successful. Given that one of India’s biggest challenges is going to be to create new cities to house people moving away from agriculture to manufacturing in the coming books, this book can offer a lot of good inputs.

A brief from Booklist:  “One thing constantly attracts people to one city rather than another — how much housing construction is permitted. Restrictive places, such as New York City, coastal California, and Paris, have a tight housing supply with prices only the wealthy can afford. Hence, middle-class people move to the suburbs or cities like Houston. Other features of metropolises — their incidences of poverty and crime, traffic congestion, quality of schools, and cultural amenities — also figure in Glaeser’s analysis. Whatever the city under discussion, Mumbai or Woodlands, Texas, Glaeser is discerning and independent; for example, he believes that historic preservation isn’t an unalloyed good and that bigger, denser cities militate against global warming. Thought-provoking material for urban-affairs students.”

From a blog post a year ago:

I have been thinking about this idea for some time. The most recent trigger came in an Economic Times op-ed I read a few days ago arguing for an Indian shadow cabinet – like they have in the UK. I think it is a great idea, but I don’t think the Opposition in India will do it.

Given that the Opposition in India (the BJP and the Left) have basically become the Parties of No, there is a need for constructive Opposition where proper alternatives are placed, with the No. That will only happen if there are people who effectively ‘shadow’ the various government portfolios.

India needs an alternative set of policy ideas from the many that are being pursued by the Congress-led UPA government. Can we come up with “India’s Best Opposition” and use the Net to start a discussion on these ideas?

This week’s links:

• The Post-PC era will be a multi platform era: by Horace Dediu. “The very reasons which are driving developers to spread their bets across all and any new platforms should indicate the potential for new platforms and the sustainability of small platforms. The thesis that one dominant platform wins the mobile “war” is naive.”
• Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic: by Clay Shirky: “It isn’t newspapers we should be worrying about, but news, and there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have.”
• Too much information: from The Economist. “Derek Dean and Caroline Webb of McKinsey urge businesses to embrace three principles to deal with data overload: find time to focus, filter out noise and forget about work when you can.”
• You are the Ad: from Technology Review. “Facebook has emerged from a privacy scandal to become online advertising’s next great hope. Its goal: turning us all into marketers.”
• India’s society, China’s state: by Ashok Malik. “India and China can learn from each other’s models. China needs to consider political liberalisation. India needs to reflect on its governance.”

This new book was recommended to me by a friend at our Book Club meeting recently. It doesn’t necessarily have answers on how to eliminate poverty, but provides a framework on how to go about finding solutions. The authors give results of many experiments and field trials done globally to see how the poor make decisions, which can work as inputs for anti-poverty programmes.

From the description: “Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.”

Also see the website – www.pooreconomics.com.