Author: Rajesh Jain

I have loved long train rides ever since I can remember. Business travel necessitates flights, so the joy of sitting in a train and letting the world go by has been all but forgotten. On a train ride like this, one isn’t worried about take-off queues, connecting flights and being late for meetings. And with Abhishek around, it was even more fun. The three-tier berths were just perfect for the 6 year-old to go up and down, and across.

Sleeping in the train on the upper berth can be easy or difficult with the rhythmic motion of the train. I have never had a problem sleeping. On the way back, I woke up at Ratlam. I last passed through Ratlam in the summer of 1986 en route to Delhi for the Himankan trip while I was in IIT. It was almost exactly 25 years ago.

I came out on the platform to see the hustle-bustle of a typical  junction that never seems to  run out of trains to service. I was pleasantly surprised to see the railway staff wearing “Clean Train” jackets get in and do a terrific job cleaning the toilets, removing the garbage, sweeping the floor, and wiping the windows.

Continued tomorrow.

I went to Nageshwar recently with Bhavana and Abhishek, and Bhavana’s parents. We spent the day at the Jain temple. Nageshwar is in Rajasthan, on its border of Madhya Pradesh. The nearest train station is Vikramgarh Alot, which is about 10 kms away. Nageshwar itself is primarily the temple complex and a small village. There isn’t much else to do in the neighbourhood. It is, as we would put it, in Bharat.

We took the Mumbai-Jaipur “superfast” express. The 734 kms distance is covered in just over 11 hours, giving an average of 65 kms an hour. That presumably is good enough to qualify for the ‘superfast’ tag. The train ride was excellent – very comfortable in the three-tier, AC sleeper compartment. Get in the train in the evening, and arrive at the destination the next morning.

We spent just about 12 hours in Nageshwar. There wasn’t much of a crowd the day we went, but it does attract hordes on weekends and purnima days. The dharamshalas are very well done, and quite comfortable for a short stay. The weather was as good as it gets – nice and cool, given that Nageshwar is about 450 metres above mean sea level. A light drizzle reminded one of the monsoon season.

Continued tomorrow.

From a post two years ago, written just after the UPA 2 government had been elected:

The verdict is in. A new United Progressive Alliance government is expected to take charge of India next month. With it comes the promise of a change for the better. The new government has the opportunity – and the challenge – to outline a bold vision for India, a vision that fires up the imagination of its people and the vitality of its entrepreneurs.

The new government has to credibly signal its commitment to addressing the major challenges facing India and enlist the support of the private sector in creating innovations for achieving goals that are big, visionary and bold. In the past, whenever allowed the freedom to do so, the Indian corporate sector has risen to the occasion and helped India’s development. It is time once again for the Indian government to present corporate India with a set of truly transformational challenges.

Here is a small set of inter-related broad areas where change is urgently needed and which, with proper government support, Indian entrepreneurs and corporations will eagerly participate in.

• Education: India needs a radically different education system as the current one is dysfunctional and largely irrelevant in the modern context. In a world of rapid and accelerating change, the foundational skill is to learn how to learn. The education system has to produce life-long learners, which the current setup does not permit. Fortunately, a radical re-engineering is possible through the use of powerful tools presented by the revolution in information and communications technologies. To achieve this, institutional reform of the type that encourages private sector participation in education is necessary.
• Energy: Any economic activity, like all processes in the universe, depends on energy. Today’s developed nations achieved their level of prosperity on cheap fossil fuels, an opportunity not available to India’s 1.2 billion people. Fortunately, India is large enough to be able to leapfrog the fossil fuel stage by investing in the development and use of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. The required investment cannot be raised without leadership which convincingly articulates the vision.
• Urbanization: India’s economic future depends on India’s success at urbanizing its immense rural population. No economy has achieved even middle-income status without being mostly urban. What India needs is to make its agriculture more productive. The labor released from agriculture has to be provided training and opportunities in manufacturing and services sectors. It is important to distinguish between the development of rural areas and that of rural populations. The former is neither necessary nor sufficient for development; the latter is indispensable and can be achieved most effectively by urbanizing them. This challenge is the creation of new, livable cities that would lead the urbanization of the population needed for India’s transition to an industrialized economy.
• Transportation: India is a large country with a large population. For the economy to prosper, people and goods have to be efficiently moved over large distances. India is approximately ten times as densely populated as the US. It therefore cannot afford the solution that works for the US for transporting people, namely, air travel. What India needs is a land-based system and more specifically a rail-based transportation system, both for goods and people. The technology exists for super-efficient, super-fast rail systems. India has to seriously invest in that and replace the century-old current railway system. Furthermore, within cities, India needs to have an efficient public transit system and not take the unsustainable, car-centered approach.
• Digital Infrastructure: Although India has one of the world’s cheapest and extensive mobile networks for voice communications, its data networks are quite inadequate. India needs to make serious and large investments to upgrade its digital wireline and wireless networks to create a high-speed, ubiquitous envelope of data connectivity across the nation. This is what will spur the creation of the next-generation of entrepreneurial outfits creating world-leading applications and services for the domestic market.
• Governance: India has to make judicious use of its financial capital. The problem is that the current leaky system does not allow the most effective and efficient use of those resources. What is needed is to leverage technology in better governance though citizen participation. Technology can enable citizen oversight of public spending and enforce accountability. Innovations such as smart national ID cards and eVoting can increase participation in democratic processes.

India has a limited window of opportunity for getting its policies right so it can participate successfully in a globally very competitive world. It missed many previous opportunities but cannot afford to miss this one. The time has come for government and corporate India to come together to Think Big and drive the disruptive innovations that India so urgently needs to move rapidly up the development ladder.

This week’s links:

• Who will pay for Mobile Data? Michael Mace “talks about the forecasted growth of wireless data, and why I think growth won’t continue the way most people are expecting.  That creates some big challenges for mobile data companies, but also some fantastic opportunities.” (via Anish)
• Obama vs. ATMs: Why Technology Doesn’t Destroy Jobs: by Russell Boberts in Wall Street Journal.”Doing more with less is what economic growth is all about.”
• The Angry Birds story: from Forbes. “It took Rovio nearly eight years and 51 tries to lay this golden egg.”
• Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops: from Wired. “Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction.”
• Economist special report on China: “China’s continued economic success is under threat from a resurgence of the state and its resistance to further reform.”

An informed, united voting class is the only force that can change the course of India. It has the power to force the political parties to put up better candidates, and then send good people to Parliament. The hope is that these good people will stay good when they go to Delhi and make policies that are right. It doesn’t matter which party they belong to.

This is not an impossible situation to imagine. In fact, I cannot see any other. Given India’s political system, it will take decades for a new party to be created and attain any sort of power. And even then there is no guarantee that it will not surrender itself to special interests. Our best hope is to work within the current system and with the political parties we have. We need to change the basis of competition – with our votes.

This is the movement that India needs – one that uses the power of information and votes to transform India. This is what some of us need to start working towards. Tens who can mobilise hundreds can in a thousand days change the future of a billion.

We need to understand that change in India can only happen through the ballot box. We cannot think of overthrowing governments  through  coups like some of our neighbours have done in the past. We cannot have military intervention. We have only one instrument in our hands – our vote. That vote has been so far exercised without adequate thought or understanding of its power.  That is what needs to change.

Two elements need to be combined to change India’s political and policy future. The first is the need for awareness – people need to understand that we are on the wrong track. Some of this has started to seep into public consciousness, but the reasons and solutions are not clear. What is needed are neighbourhood “networks and conversations” to educate people. We don’t necessarily need mass media to support us – and they are unlikely to, since the government remains the richest advertiser.

The second element is to aggregate citizens together into votebanks. This is the idea of United Voters of India, proposed by Atanu Dey. Parties have their diehard supporters – we don’t need to bother about them. What we need to focus on are the ones in the centre (undecided) and those on the margins (less convinced supporters of specific political parties). This is the segment that can swing the election.

Continued tomorrow.

So, it is a difficult situation we find ourselves in. There are still many who care about the future, and who do not want British Raj 2.0 to continue. Change is always brought about by a few – an ordinary few who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to do something they believe in.

25 years ago, India went through a similar sort of change on the same issue – corruption. VP Singh resigned from the Rajiv Gandhi government, launched a crusade on the single issue of corruption, got together the anti-Congress, left and right forces, and went on to become PM by 1989. The same Congress led by Rajiv Gandhi who in 1984 had got over 400 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha ended up with less than 200 in 1989.

Of course, corruption did not end with the election of 1989. If anything, it has become more brazen and multiplied in magnitude. The corrupt have also got smarter. Even as we talk about Swiss bank accounts, it will be most surprising if we find a single name in there from the people we know and who rank amongst the most corrupt. Only the naïve can expect that we will actually be able to corner to taint the corrupt.

Continued tomorrow.

I, like many others, believe that our economic policies are flawed. It is quite amazing how much damage these policies can do. For example, as Niranjan Rajadhyaksha explained in an article in Mint recently, NREGA has put Indian on an inflation treadmill. And the coming Food Security Bill is going to make the situation even worse. No one in the government seems to have an idea about what to do with inflation other than keep raising interest rates.

This situation is not new. We have been singularly unfortunate in our choice of leadership and the resulting economic policies since Independence. With most governments focused on extraction and exploitation of the economy and an electoral system which needs votes, it becomes quite clear that the maximum votes are with the poor. So, policies have generally been directed on short-term measures to give the poor some handouts so they vote and stay poor.

Talk to people in the know and they will tell you about the tens of thousands of crores amassed by our top politicians. Not surprisingly, that greed is insatiable. Politics intersects with many sectors of the economy given the deep government controls that still exist – and each control is an opportunity to extract rent and loot the economy.

For the most part, Middle India has not bothered. It doesn’t vote in large numbers, and it helps quite helpless in doing anything. And so, it is business as usual for those in the power ecosystem.

Continued tomorrow.

It is an interesting time to be in India and follow the political games that are being played out. The sentiment that is now on the increase is ABC – Anything But Congress. Luckily for the Congress, national elections are not due for another three years. At the same time, while this should have helped the BJP, the primary opposition party, the reality is that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of wave in its favour. We are in what I can only think of as a “None of the Above” situation.

With this background, it becomes easier to put in perspective what is happening. Since the BJP hasn’t been able to capitalise on the ABC environment, this has only emboldened the Congress because in India, the default vote for the most part stays with the Congress. As a result, instead of us getting into a positive feedback loop of improving governance, we are now in a negative spiral with complete lack of leadership and absolute silence.

2014 is still a long way out. Fasting for specific objectives seems to be in vogue, even though the efforts only result in failure. Corruption for the most part continues unabated. Decision-making has ground to a halt. The economy is running on auto-pilot. And in this, the 20^th year of liberalisation of the Indian economy, commentators have started talking of going back to the 1970s with the populist policies.

That this is not the way a country should be governed is quite clear. What is not so clear is how we get ourselves out of this situation.

Continued tomorrow.

I wrote this a couple years ago:

 During the elections, I was struck by the lack of databases and real-world linkages. Such tools could be great assets for both campaigning and direct marketing. I think of this as a “mirror world”– a virtual replica of the real world along multiple dimensions:

• start with maps
• add a layer of establishments (buildings, schools, retail outlets, roads, etc.)
• overlay this with the voter database that one can get from the Election Commissio. The voter database has names of people, their addresses, gender and age.
• add the actual voting numbers based on the data published from the EC post-election (can also incorporate historical data to get trends; need to take into account the delimitation)
• integrate the socio-demographic and development data that is available from census, various government sites (and collated by independent companies)
• finally, buy contacts lists of people with information of their digital identity (email IDs, mobile numbers)
• this database can then be continuously updated based on user interactions, thus enhancing people profiles

The work to be done needs to be done at 3 levels:

• data acquisition
• software development for ingesting the data
• creating analytics tools on the data for decision-making

Such a database would be a very powerful marketing tool. For example, a new multiplex can now reach out to people within a 5 kilometre radius via email or SMS (provided people are not registered on the Do Not Call registry). There are many such applications that I can think of.