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Father of Green Revolution dies

Justin Gillis — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.

Storied life: Norman Borlaug at Texas A&M University in 1996. Bill Meeks / AP.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M University, where Borlaug had served on the faculty since 1984.

Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was widely described as the father of the broad agricultural movement called the Green Revolution, though decidedly reluctant to accept the title. “A miserable term,” he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance.

Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history. Largely because of his work, countries that had been food deficient, such as Mexico and India, became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains.

“More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize. “We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”

The day the award was announced, Borlaug, vigorous and slender at 56, was working in a wheat field outside Mexico City when his wife, Margaret, drove up to tell him the news. “Someone’s pulling your leg,” he replied, according to one of his biographers, Leon Hesser. Assured that it was true, he kept on working, saying he would celebrate later.

The Green Revolution eventually came under attack from environmental and social critics who said it had created more difficulties than it had solved. Borlaug responded that the real problem was not his agricultural techniques, but the runaway population growth that had made them necessary.

“If the world population continues to increase at the same rate, we will destroy the species,” he declared.

Travelling to Norway, the land of his ancestors, to receive the award, he warned the Nobel audience that the struggle against hunger had not been won.

“We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts,” he said. Twice more in his lifetime, in the 1970s and again in 2008, those words would prove prescient as food shortages and high prices caused global unrest.

His Nobel Prize was the culmination of a storied life in agriculture that began when he was a boy growing up on a farm in Iowa, wondering why plants grew better in some places than others. His was also an unlikely career path, one that began in earnest near the end of World War II, when he walked away from a promising job at DuPont, the chemical company, to take a position in Mexico trying to help farmers improve their crops.

The job was part of an assault on hunger in Mexico that was devised in Manhattan, at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation, with political support in Washington. But it was not a career choice calculated to lead to fame or honour.

On first seeing the situation in Mexico for himself, Borlaug reacted with near despair. Mexican soils were depleted, the crops were ravaged by disease, yields were low and the farmers could not feed themselves, much less improve their lot by selling surplus.

“These places I’ve seen have clubbed my mind—they are so poor and depressing,” he wrote to his wife after his first extended sojourn in the country. “I don’t know what we can do to help these people, but we’ve got to do something.”

The next few years were ones of toil and privation as Borlaug and his colleagues, with scant funds or equipment, set to work improving yields in tropical crop varieties.

He spent countless hours hunched over in the blazing Mexican sun as he manipulated tiny wheat blossoms to cross different strains. To speed up the work, he set up winter and summer operations in far-flung parts of Mexico, logging thousands of miles over poor roads. He battled illness, forded rivers in flood, dodged mudslides and sometimes slept in tents.

He was by then a trained scientist holding a doctoral degree in plant diseases. But as he sought to coax better performance from the wheats of Mexico, he relied on a farm boy’s instinctive feel for the plants and the soil in which they grew. “When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together,” he told another biographer, Lennard Bickel. “They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is a sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget.”

Borlaug’s wife of 69 years, the former Margaret Gibson, died in 2007. He is survived by a sister, Charlotte Borlaug Culbert; a daughter, Jeanie Borlaug Laube; a son, William Borlaug; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Gary H. Toenniessen, director of agricultural programmes for the Rockefeller Foundation, said in an interview that Borlaug’s great achievement was to prove that intensive, modern agriculture could be made to work in the fast-growing developing countries where it was needed most, even on the small farms predominating there.

By Toenniessen’s calculation, about half the world’s population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed by Borlaug and his colleagues of the Green Revolution.

“He knew what it was they needed to do, and he didn’t give up,” Toenniessen said. “He could just see that this was the answer.”

Gerald Jonas and Sarah Wheaton contributed to this story.

The Pais of Manipal -- from village to overseas education

Poornima Mohandas — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:11:00 GMT

Manipal: First, the richest family in town began making over this little-known, barren area tucked among the Western Ghats, adding trees, footpaths, two-laned roads, fountains and verdant lawns. Then, it set its sights on the rest of India and beyond.

In the process, the Pai family has helped make Manipal, 60km north of the port city of Mangalore in Karnataka, synonymous with education.

The booming university town is home to the Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG) which, beginning with the vision of using education to help the poor, today operates one of the most commercial ventures in education. Over the last 50 years, the group has grown from a single primary school to 125,000 students in a multitude of disciplines with campuses in Manipal, Mangalore and Bangalore, Sikkim in the North-East and as far as Dubai, Nepal, Malaysia and Antigua.

MEMG today has an annual revenue of about Rs1,500 crore; aside from that, two trusts run two of its universities—Manipal University and Sikkim Manipal University— that generate about Rs250 crore a year in course fees alone. Under the education business come 30 colleges across eight locations. The group churns out about 800 engineers and 730 doctors year after year with more seats being added.

Private equity firms ICICI Venture and Actis are in the fray to buy a stake worth as much as Rs300 crore in Manipal Universal Learning, the corporate body which has under it the group’s international campuses, the domestic vocational courses and distance learning programmes, TheEconomic Times reported 15 July. That would value the entity at roughly Rs3,500 crore, which may make it the country’s most valuable educational enterprise, the report said.

“We are constantly looking for funds to grow our businesses either through an equity or a debt funding or a combination of the two,” Anand Sudarshan, managing director and CEO of Manipal Education, told Mint. “A deal should be finalized in the next three-four months,” he added, declining to name the funds the company is in talks with.

All in the family

Yet the Pai family and university’s rise has been as rocky as the landscape of Manipal.

Patriarch T.M.A. Pai’s death in 1979 sparked a succession row (and later a family split) between his nephew (Ramesh Pai) and his son (Ramdas Pai); the families’ non-banking finance companies went bust; and most recently, the Medical Council of India asked the Union health ministry to derecognize the group’s flagship, Kasturba Medical College.

The family and the group

Born in 1898, Tonse Madhava Ananta Pai belonged to a lower-middle-class household of Gowd Saraswath Brahmins, a community that migrated to the south of India fearing Christian conversions. Kallianpur, a village some 4km from Manipal, was his home.

He was the only one among five siblings to earn a degree, in medicine from the Madras Medical College. After graduating, he was set on migrating to Hong Kong to make money but his mother held him back, urging him to serve his people. Thus was born T.M.A. Pai’s vision to eradicate poverty by providing education and health care. Alongside his elder brother, Upendra Pai, he started the Canara Industrial and Banking Syndicate Ltd, renamed Syndicate Bank post-nationalization.

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Manipal University’s roots trace back to a humble primary school back in 1942. The Manipal Junior Basic School started with one teacher. Seven years later, T.M.A. Pai entered higher education; the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College affiliated to Madras University in Udupi town started with donations from the town folk and his personal contribution. Some 97 intermediate students, including 10 women, formed the first batch.

After T.M.A. Pai’s death, nephew Ramesh Pai became the registrar of the Academy of General Education, which ran the schools. T.M.A. Pai’s son Ramdas, also a doctor of medicine, took charge of the other educational institutions. The flashpoint to disputes between the cousins and their families came in 1993 when Manipal University got deemed university status and Ramdas Pai was made the chancellor.

After a bitter four-year feud—and public display of dirty linen—the family business was split between the Ramdas Pai and Ramesh Pai factions. The trusts couldn’t be split up because the law doesn’t allow them to be.

“I wish it hadn’t been like that. But even if it (the fight) happened today, the same thing would have unfolded,” says Ramdas Pai, 73, who has been driving the education group for more than three decades and is the chancellor of Manipal University, although semi-retired.

Pro-chancellor H.S. Ballal oversees the university and Pai’s son Ranjan Pai “takes care of building bridges between the corporate side and the university”, said the senior Pai.

Ranjan Pai, heir apparent, “is the most aggressive of them all… He corporatized the education business earning 20% more than cost”, says Ballal.

Corporate structure

The junior Pai set up the entire corporate structure of MEMG, separating Manipal University and Sikkim Manipal University from the rest of the businesses. Under the corporate arm come four main businesses: Manipal Universal Learning, which has in its fold distance education and the international campuses; Manipal Health Systems, which manages the 11 hospitals; Manipal Cure and Care Pvt. Ltd, which provides health check-ups and beauty care; and Stempeutics Research Pvt. Ltd, set up to develop stem cell therapies.

Manipal Cure and Care and Stempeutics are both Ranjan’s creations. Some Rs300 crore is being poured into Manipal Cure and Care to set up 50 health centres across India, with the first two already open in Ahmedabad and Bangalore. And funds are also going into stem cell research to match Ranjan’s enthusiasm.

The corporate structure soon drew private equity. In the latter half of 2006, IDFC Private Equity Fund put Rs90 crore in Manipal Health Systems Pvt. Ltd. Indian private equity player IDFC Private Equity, along with US investment firm Capital Group, pumped Rs300 crore into Manipal Universal Learning, making an initial public offering inevitable.

Before becoming a national brand, the group ventured overseas. Regulations make it easier to set up institutions overseas than in India, says Manipal Education CEO Sudarshan, who has a mandate to expand the education footprint both in India and overseas. Locations are being short-listed for new campuses; Jaipur is next.

“We want to replicate a Manipal in Jaipur,” says Ranjan Pai. Engineering and management institutes are coming up in the Rajasthan capital. West Bengal and Haryana may be next on the radar. Also on hand is a government mandate to set up a university for PIOs, or persons of Indian origin. This should be rolled out in Bangalore in 12-24 months, says Sudarshan.

Melting pot

Walking along the neat footpaths in Manipal are students drawn from as far away as South Korea, Botswana and Trinidad and Tobago. They come to this little town to do their bachelor’s and master’s in medicine, dentistry, pharmaceutical sciences, allied health sciences, engineering, communication, hotel administration, nursing, life sciences or management.

It also draws hordes of wealthy non-resident Indians (NRIs) and students from across the country. Manipal University offers them the option of staying in fully air-conditioned hostels with maids to do one’s laundry. That costs Rs1,06,200 per student a year.

Ashwati Prasad, 34, from Changanassery, in southern Kerala, completed her doctor of medicine, a three-year post-graduate degree in dermatology, venereology and leprology, from Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore in December 2003. “Compared to many government hospitals KMC (Kasturba Medical College) is so much better. Whenever I apply for a job anywhere the name KMC carries weight,” says Prasad, who works as an assistant professor at Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences, a private medical college.

Foong Pan Shan, a 20-year-old medical student from Melaka in Malaysia, has been in Manipal for four months now. “Lecturers are very friendly. They don’t just lecture, they teach us,” she says.

Price to pay

The education, like the hostel accommodation, comes for a price.

The Manipal group pioneered the practice of collecting so-called capitation fees, that is, exorbitant amounts paid upfront for admission to overlook merit. “We collected capitation fees earlier because we needed the funds. But since 1991 when we were granted the university status, we stopped the practice of taking capitation fees,” explains Sudarshan, CEO of Manipal Education.

But the fees for most of the courses are steep; in fact, Manipal’s may well rank among the most expensive colleges in India. “They may have done away with capitation fees but instead they have stepped up the course and hostel fees. I could never afford to send my children to Manipal University either way,” says a disenchanted retired government official in Manipal and long-time associate of the Pai family who did not wish to be named.

Ballal, the pro-chancellor of Manipal University, agrees that it is an expensive institution. “Back in the 1960s I could not afford to study at Kasturba Medical College. I come from a poor family,” says Ballal, who did his medicine at the government-run Mysore Medical College and has been with the Manipal group for 37 years.

Course fees at a government-run college for an MBBS (bachelor of medicine and bachelor of surgery) degree costs around Rs42,000. An MBBS course at Kasturba Medical College costs as much as Rs19.34 lakh, clearly beyond the Indian middle class, leave alone meeting T.M.A. Pai’s vision of serving the poor.

An engineering degree from the Manipal Institute of Technology is comparatively cheaper, with fees pegged at a tad more than Rs6 lakh. An MBA from the TA Pai Institute of Management—named after T.M.A. Pai’s nephew and two-time Union minister—costs Rs6.26 lakh; the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business charges Rs16.5 lakh. These are fees for Indian students; NRI and foreign students at Manipal pay anything from twice to four times this amount.

Says D. Rajasekhar, a professor at Bangalore-based Institute for Social and Economic Change, “While there are many educational institutes that have mushroomed as businesses, groups like Manipal have maintained high quality by reinvesting funds into their business.”

Medical college storm

Despite figuring among India’s top 10 medical colleges for many years, the Medical Council of India (MCI) has locked horns with Kasturba Medical College. MCI has recommended to the Union health ministry that the college be derecognized.

“We have raised issues with their teaching faculty, number of teaching beds and hospital infrastructure,” said a senior MCI official, who did not wish to be named as he is not authorized to speak to the media. Earlier, the MCI had an issue with the large NRI quota that Kasturba Medical College had; many were students who did not get into medical college in their own countries. “Now we are compliant and limit our NRI cum foreign students quota at 15% of a class,” said Sudarshan.

The group, through its corporate structure, has also made some strategic investments in education start-ups: $2.5 million (Rs10.8 crore) in education portal TutorVista.com, a 70% stake in skills assessment firm MeritTrac, and 50% in online varsity U21 Global.

“We made the Tutor-Vista.com investment purely for investment purpose. In both the other cases we are working out synergies with them,” says Ranjan Pai. But what of the original vision—to use education to uplift the poor? Every year, the group spends Rs5 crore on scholarships, for the top 5% in every class.

But Ranjan Pai says he has plans to up this to 30-40%—if only to honour his grandfather’s wish.

Their tests hold up a mirror to the schools and teachers

Aparna Kalra — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:29:00 GMT

Ahmedabad: Their office is not air-conditioned, the stairways are betel-stained and lunch amounts to a Rs60 a thali. But as entrepreneurs Sridhar Rajagopalan and Sudhir Ghodke know all too well from their work with private schools across the country that looks can be deceiving.

Quality check: Sudhir Ghodke (left) and Sridhar Rajagopalan of Educational Initiatives assess how much students are learning in schools.

They, for example, are graduates of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. And their company turned profitable by its second year.

That company, Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd, is holding the hands of hundreds of stressed-out students — ironically, by testing them — and using results to help schools move away from a system of rote learning.

Though experts in education wonder how long it will take before such efforts overhaul an assembly-line education system that encourages mugging, the company has grown to assess half-a-million children, and one government school examination board has contacted it to begin discussions on how to improve quality of learning in middle school.

“We want to create a system where children are learning with understanding. Can we show schools and parents that what children are learning is something they cannot be happy about?” said Rajagopalan, 39, the more talkative of the two.

A third partner, Venkat Krishnan, also an alumnus of IIM-A, is based in Mumbai.

To hold up a mirror to schools, the firm devises tests and sends them to schools. Once students complete tests, the data is collected and sent back to schools, showing teachers exactly where students are going wrong.

The findings are not surprising — students can memorize, but don’t comprehend. Nine-year-olds had trouble calculating the length of a pencil whose starting point is 1cm on a ruler, with the end point at 6cm.

The most common answer is that the length of the pencil is 6cm, instead of 5cm, which is the correct answer. Interviews with children yield why they made this mistake. Most thought that 1cm was the point on the ruler showing the 1cm mark and not the length between zero and 1.

It is this lack of understanding of basic concepts that lays bare the problem in India’s schools. This problem is spoken about anecdotally — often by the time students enter colleges or even the workplace. But Educational Initiatives, because of its tests, has hard data at its disposal, and intends to do something about it before it’s too late.

Driven by data

The tests use multiple choice questions to test a student’s understanding of concepts. A thin, inverted triangle, a cone, a figure with four points, and an open, three-sided maze-like figure are among the multiple choices to the question — which of these is a triangle. Of the 3,811 students tested, only 40% got the right answer. That’s because most students think the inverted, and thin triangle does not look like a triangle at all.

Such findings are mapped on to spreadsheets telling the school how its students performed in concepts in geometry compared with schools tested in the rest of India.

Schools such as Ryan International School in Mayur Vihar, Delhi; Amity International School in Saket, Delhi; Arya Vidya Mandir in Bandra (West), Mumbai; La Martiniere for Boys, Kolkata; and Presidency School, Bangalore, have subscribed to these tests.

Schools — and more importantly, teachers — then get help and training to change their method of teaching.

Ghodke, 38, has a group of school principals whom he regularly taps for discussions. The latest input: Teachers need help on an almost daily basis.

So Ghodke, who began teaching an 11-year-old neighbour math after knowing her fear of the subject, has devised teacher sheets, each explaining why students chose the wrong answer, and how to teach concepts such as geometrical shapes.

For example, in the triangle question, students choose the maze-like figure simply because its three sides are equal. Teachers are advised to give cardboard cut-outs of various triangles, thin, fat, equilateral, or obtuse, so that children can feel these shapes.

Teacher sheets

The teacher sheets have begun reaching nearly 300 schools, which have registered in advance for the assessment, at the rate of four or five a week, explaining concepts, clearing misconceptions.

Ghodke and his team are converting principals. “I think they have put their finger on the pulse of what is wrong with schools,” said Jyotsna Brar, principal of Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, who journeyed to Ahmedabad earlier this year to attend a forum of 40 principals organized by the company.

“Lot of teaching that is happening is that teachers are teaching to a test. When kids say they have cracked an exam, it means they have understood the pattern. They mug and reproduce according to the pattern. Ask a question not on the pattern and they cannot answer it,” said Brar.

Welham, a residential school where students pay an annual fee of Rs1.85 lakh not including the cost of uniforms and books, has recently joined Educational Initiatives’ flock, which now includes half-a-million students in 3,000 private schools. It has asked the company to assess 421 middle school students in August this year, at the cost of Rs300-500 per student; depending on how many subjects they are tested for. The cost will be passed on to parents.

The school will get detailed data on where students are going wrong, backed by teacher training as part of the package. Schools that want more specialized subject-wise training are charged.

It is teacher training that experts such as Krishna Kumar, child advocate and director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, or NCERT, consider vital to any educational reform.

“Teacher training is the cow dung no one wants to touch,” said Kumar, who changed school curriculum to make it more application-oriented in 2005 and feels that “a big assessment market” is opening-up in India, and merely concentrating there will not make a difference to education.

Others say there is no dearth of teacher training institutes due to a recent relaxation of rules by the government-run statutory body which oversees them; but many of them offer dubious quality of training.

“A large number of these are running out of one room,” said Amit Kaushik, director at SRF Foundation, which runs the well-known Shri Ram Schools in Delhi. The foundation has recently introduced a course for pre-primary teachers.

NCERT’s Kumar wants elite institutes such as Indian Institutes of Management to get into teacher education. He also wants companies to empower teachers to devise their own tests.

Educational Initiatives says it is stepping in that direction. It wants to start a teacher helpline where any teacher can send a question to the company’s research team, asking for help in how to explain the concept behind it. Ultimately, the company is aiming that teachers can help each other by posting their questions online and how they explain it. Its teacher sheets will also include views on how to teach a particular concept or lesson.

Venture funding

The company is getting serious venture capital to help its efforts. In March, it received funding from venture capital firms Bangalore-based Footprint Ventures, and Maryland, US-headquartered Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Chennai-based IFMR Trust, a private trust, invested in the firm through a dedicated fund. Gautam Thapar, chairman of the publically traded Ballarpur Industries Ltd, a paper manufacturer, also invested in his personal capacity. Details of amounts invested were not disclosed.

“We want to make an impact. We always felt money will follow, and it did,” said Rajagopalan, who says he gains strength from an annual 10-day session in Vipasana, or looking inward, a Buddhist way of meditation that seeks silence from practitioners.

Educational Initiatives, a privately held company, has made a profit since 2002. Rajagopalan did not disclose sales or revenue figures, or any other financial details of the company. However, a simple calculation of the amount charged per assessment multiplied by the number of students who have been tested puts the number at Rs20 crore.

This is not the first venture in which the trio have collaborated. Rajagopalan, Ghodke and Krishnan left high-paying jobs in Tata IBM, ITW Signode India Ltd and Sony Entertainment Television, respectively, to start Eklavya, a school in Ahmedabad in 1996, backed by an entrepreneur.

But they soon realized that opening one “model” school will not make even a small dent in the life of an average school-going child.

Still, Educational Initiatives faces a number of challenges in its quest to make an impact on education in India. One is reaching poor schools, another involves making a difference in the ultimate evaluation in a school student’s life: the board examinations.

Board exams

The Central Board of Secondary Education prodded by reformers such as Krishna Kumar, changed a portion of its assessment this year for 8,000 schools to include problems involving higher-order thinking. Predictably, scores have come down.

Earlier this year, the board invited Rajagopalan to discuss how students can learn better in middle school, especially in math and science. He gave them a summary of the company’s findings which it sends to schools. Nothing will move in a hurry, but it was a first step, says Rajagopalan.

The other challenge is equally tough: to assess government-run schools, which cater largely to children of poor parents, have little voice and a low quality of education.

For this, Educational Initiatives, which draws 30-35% of its revenue from its work in government schools, or what it calls large-scale assessment, signs contracts with organizations such as United Nations Children’s Fund, Azim Premji Foundation (named for the founder of Wipro Ltd), and more recently, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc.

In Andhra Pradesh, for instance, Educational Initiatives is involved in a random evaluation study which assesses the efficiency of school inputs and teacher incentives in improving quality of education.

Most of the funds for the study are from the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, India’s scheme to put every child in school.

In May, Educational Initiatives signed a Rs6.2 crore contract with Google to conduct a study to gauge levels of student learning in classes IV, VI and VIII in 21 states to identify learning gaps.

Experts generally laud Educational Initiatives’ assessments as well-designed. On Mint’s request, Jishnu Das, a World Bank economist who co-authored and released a study in June this year testing secondary school students in Orissa and Rajasthan on math achievements, evaluated an Educational Initiatives’ assessment of students in 142 private schools in five metros in 2006. He said Educational Initiatives has performed the task of showing that India cannot be complacent about quality of schooling in either private or government-run schools. But what the country needs to debate is whether to further improve the quality of schooling in private schools, or whether to focus on the 18 million 14-year-olds who are either not enrolled or failing to meet the lowest international benchmark if in school.

“Whichever way the debate goes, it is clear that more studies of this sort and careful benchmarking of our performance on a global scale are critical to any reform of our educational system,” said Das, whose study showed that students in Orissa and Rajasthan rank below 43 of the 51 countries for which internationally comparable data exists.

Rajagopalan and his associates are keen to be part of any reforms. These days they find themselves turning down a lot of work — devising questions for Shah Rukh Khan’s new show, Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hai, was one such job.

The company says it has its hands full and its quest is a continuing one, to understand student understanding based on these assessments. “Student learning is a complicated affair,” said Rajagopalan.

“It is not easy to teach fractions to a class VI student.”

Learning by doing: fun school with a price tag

Jeetha D’Silva and Aparna Kalra — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:59:00 GMT

Mumbai: The task seemed impossible. Lina Ashar had to teach English to a bunch of mostly male 14- to 16-year-olds, many of whom belonged to poor families in which conflict and abuse were routine. That was way back in 1989, when she lived in Australia.

No classroom boredom: Lina Ashar of Kangaroo Kids at a group school in Mumbai. A child who has to study in a restricted environment cannot be faulted for not enjoying learning, she says. (Photograph by Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint)`

Relying on her instinct, she set aside the works of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and taught her students by getting them to croon the lyrics, “We don’t need no education”, from Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall.

“Yeats was so far removed from the reality of their lives that I had to find some other way to get them connected to learning the language,” recalls Ashar, now 44. “Almost instinctively, I knew what would work and what wouldn’t.”

That instinct was at play again when, in India some years later, Ashar founded Kangaroo Kids Education Ltd, which went on to become a franchise-driven chain of expensive schools that focuses on “learning by doing.”

Kangaroo Kids runs 60-odd preschools and Billabong High schools— so named in a nod to Ashar’s Australian links. More than 13,000 children of well-heeled parents, including leading sports and film personalities such as the actor Pooja Bedi and former models Marc and Waluscha Robinson, are taught in the schools.

Ashar says her exposure to a multiplicity of cultures helped her win success as an education entrepreneur.

Ashar’s father, a textile businessman who traces his roots to Jamkambali in Gujarat, took his family to Africa and Europe before settling down in Australia.

The second of three children, Ashar spent her early childhood in Tanzania and Kenya and did her primary schooling in England. She moved to Australia with her family in 1973 when she was 9 and went on to acquire a degree in education from Melbourne’s Victoria College.

Eye opener

While at the university, Ashar took a one-year sabbatical and came to India, and landed a teaching job at a leading school in suburban Mumbai, an experience that she says was an eye-opener.

She realized the school—like most in the country—followed a straitjacketed curriculum, leaving children no room for creativity.

This was vastly different from the milieu in which she herself had studied, one in which teachers used the flexibility of the system to enliven the classroom, she says.

“A child who has to study in a restricted environment cannot be faulted for not enjoying learning,” says Ashar, who went back to Australia to complete her degree with a resolve that she would one day return to India to work in the field of education, set up an institution where learning would be fun and not drudgery.

That opportunity came in 1993. Ashar started her first preschool in a 650 sq. ft Mumbai apartment gifted by her father, against the backdrop of a city in the throes of communal tension following the Babri Masjid demolition and the subsequent serial bomb blasts that rocked the city.

The school had 10 students and one teacher, besides Ashar. But as word spread, the number of students grew. “I think what worked is that parents saw a difference in their children—cognitively and emotionally,” she says.

Over time, enquiries started coming in from people who wanted to join hands with Kangaroo Kids and replicate the model across the country. The company now has requests from overseas—Maldives, Kuwait and Oman, for example—for schools to be set up there.

Setting standards

Vikas Phadnis, director for sales and marketing at EuroKids International Pvt. Ltd, another leading chain of preschools with a pan-India presence, credits Ashar with having defined quality standards in the preschool segment.

“When she started out, no standards or organized players were there. She has brought about a change in quality almost single-handedly,” he says.

Shekhar Ravjiani, a Bollywood music composer who sent his five-year-old daughter Bipasha to a Kangaroo Kids preschool, says she is happy there.

“What I like about the school is that the children don’t feel pressurized. With education, there is a lot of art and music,” he says.

There’s a price to pay, a lot by Indian standards. A parent whose son attends class III at Billabong High International School, Juhu, said the family pays Rs 53,000 in annual fees, besides Rs 11,000 for extra-curricular activities and Rs3,000 for the uniform. School transport costs extra.

Ashar says the biggest drawback of the conventional education system is that it does not take into account the different learning styles of children. There are visual learners who learn through images, mind maps, demonstrations and body language.

Auditory learners grasp lessons through the spoken word and kinesthetics through doing and interacting.

“Learning has to be made a cool thing,” says Ashar, who sports designer labels including Prada sunglasses or Dolce and Gabbana eyeglasses.

At the Billabong High International School in Santacruz, in suburban Mumbai, where Bipasha’s parents plan to send her next, students dressed in bright blue and yellow uniforms study in air-conditioned classrooms.

It has 24 students in each class, compared with 40 to a class in many private schools and 60 found often in government schools.

Rama Murarka, principal of the school, says: “Here the entire thrust is to ensure that the child is exposed to all-round development, without compromising on discipline.”

Competition and critics

Ashar has no lack of competitors and critics, even within her stronghold of Mumbai.

In 2006, one of her franchisees, the Rustom Kerawalla Foundation, with which she launched the first Billabong High school in the suburb of Goregaon, split from Kangaroo Kids and set up another chain called Vibgyor.

Kerawalla accuses Ashar of selling him a plagiarized curriculum and alleges deficiency in the supply of services including teacher training, and a general ignorance of rules such as how to set up a school that can earn an ICSE (Indian Certificate of Secondary Education) affiliation.

“A lot of things went wrong,” said Kerawalla, who owned and managed three schools with Ashar providing the academic support and brand name. Kerawalla, a hotelier who now runs four schools independently, is in arbitration proceedings with Ashar. Both sides have claimed damages.

Ashar refutes the allegations, saying that the company has its own team of over 50 people working on curriculum development and adds that these issues have been sorted out. She says she’s learnt from the experience and moved on.

World of movies, malls

Education experts have more fundamental problems with elite schools such as the ones promoted by Ashar as well as the parents who send their children there.

“I call these parents the progeny-exporting community,” said Yash Pal, a professor and astrophysicist, who contributed to the preparation of a report that set in motion a revamp of school curriculum by the National Council of Educational Research and Training in 2005.

Elite schools “distance education from what is outside, never entangling with real issues and problems,” Yash Pal said. “They encourage kids to remain in a make-believe world of movies and malls.”

Ashar has plans that may appease critics. She recently hired a chief executive, former World Health Organization consultant Paul Solomon, to steer the company and is set to start a new project called Brainworks that will open no-frills schools teaching children from middle-income classes the same course material as at its more elite affiliates.

Brainworks is targeting a segment of the population that wants good education for their children but finds cost a limiting factor, according to Ashar.

Fees for the Brainworks pre-school, which includes a creche facility, will range from Rs18,000-30,000 per year (depending on the real estate cost in the area) and will cater to children in the age group of newborns to six years. At the lower end, the new schools will charge Rs1,500 a month, still a lot by Indian standards, but more parents will be able to afford this fee.

And Kangaroo Kids is experimenting with a different strategy to expand. It will no longer award franchises and will only enter joint ventures that will be partly funded by Kangaroo Kids, ensuring the company has a say in the running of each school that uses its name and stricter controls on the quality of education imparted there.

“You cannot have a McDonaldization of education,” says Ashar.

jeetha.d@livemint.com

Career Launcher’s Narayanan hopes to rewrite the education playbook

Aruna Viswanatha — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:32:00 GMT

New Delhi/Indore: Satya Narayanan R. never sits still. In a meeting, he takes notes, pen running furiously across the page, head nodding vigorously in agreement. If there’s no pen at hand, his fingers are running through his thick, black, wavy hair, or tapping the sides of his knees as a makeshift tabla. Occasionally, he tips his chair back far enough that it looks like he’s about the fall.

Nervous energy has fuelled a way of life for Narayanan, chairman of test-preparatory empire Career Launcher India Ltd. After starting a company that counselled business school applicants more than a decade ago and building it up to a Rs70 crore business, he’s on a new mission.

Seeking ideas: When Career Launcher’s Satya Narayanan wanted to take the company into the mainline education space, he brought in a consultant and polled his staff for their suggestions.(Photo: Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint)

“We have 40,000 schools in India with no children that come to school,” says Narayanan, whose workplace wardrobe includes sea green kurtas and chappals, striped yellow polo shirts with running sneakers. “Parents have chosen to take them out. Can you imagine what is happening?”

For Narayanan, who loves all things to do with education, training and leadership, the solution is simple: just give him the schools.

Career Launcher started moving into so-called mainline education—preschools, grade schools and business schools—a year ago. Now it hopes to turn its five schools into 250 over the next few years, and rewrite the education playbook along the way.

A big piece of that plan is to build on the national curriculum framework published by the government in 2005, which shifted the focus of Indian education from memorizing content to understanding it. Career Launcher’s schools, too, focus on social skills as much as academics, particularly at the junior grades.

At the company’s Indus World School in Indore, for example, which goes up to class VI, everyone pitches in to help one of their classmates. Vedehi, a lower kindergarten student, wasn’t feeling well. Her eyes and her stomach hurt, and she thought she had a fever. “My ma and papa didn’t give me medicine,” she says as she clutches her feet with her hands and squeezes her eyebrows together. “That’s why I’m sad,” she tells her classmates. What should she do?

“Drink water, you can share mine,” one offers.

“What about Pepsi?” another asks.

“Don’t go out in the sun,” a third proposes.

It was a “quality circle time” (QCT) session, a tactic repeated in classrooms throughout the school on a daily basis. The idea is to build communication skills and empathy, and teach the students how to solve problems together and then, eventually, themselves.

During the so-called “QCTs”, kids as young as four or five discuss everything from fights between children to troubles at home and offer any advice they might have. When another boy in Vedehi’s class said his mother was always getting so angry with him, for example, his classmates advised him to listen to her more, and suggested he might be watching too much television, or eating too much chocolate.

Other efforts to build emotional intelligence include “mailboxes” where the students leave notes for each other. (“Dear Saumy”, writes Manvi, in another Indus World School class. “I happy with you because you share scekpen.” She means sketch pen.)

The school prizes itself on being unconventional, and different from traditional Indian education. Buildings are colourful, open and airy, students don’t take formal exams, classes sit in circles rather than rows, and children often get to choose what they want to do and how they want to do it.

The teachers and administration love to point out the differences in their style of doing things. At an annual day for parents at the end of the school year, one class even acted out Rabindranath Tagore’s Tota Kahini, a satire on Indian schools that puts the academic world and the real world on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Parents have voiced some concern about the atypical nature of the school—if there’s no numerical assessment, wondered one, what would happen if students need to transfer schools?—but for the most part, they are responding favourably. Sukhwinder and Gurmeet, who have two daughters at the Indus school, say thanks to its focus on social development, their daughters show a newfound confidence. “Now they are comfortable talking with outsiders about whatever they watch on TV, and what they do at school,” says Gurmeet.

Now that Career Launcher has a few successful schools off the ground, Narayanan hopes to do more than just scale up the existing model. At Indore and other similar schools, fees are about Rs40,000 a year and most parents are professionals. He also hopes to create a similar network of low-cost schools that can charge as little as Rs100-150 per month. How to do that, though, is still an open question.

“Reaching out to the ‘base of pyramid’,” says Parth Shah who heads the Centre for Civil Society’s school choice campaign, which provides the poor with vouchers to pay for school, “can you figure out a way to deliver quality education? That’s the challenge that companies like Career Launcher” face.

The company started testing out a public-private partnership model in a set of vocational schools. One of the company’s most recent projects on the vocational front was to team up with retail firms and their recruiters. The course trains potential sales clerks for three weeks in hopes that they can get one of the thousands of new positions around the country. The catch though, is that retailers wouldn’t pay for the course; the trainees would.

Narayanan orchestrated a system that left retailers outside the equation. He called on a microfinance group to loan Rs3,600 to each trainee so that they could afford the course. Once the sales clerk was hired, the bank would get the loan back over one year, spread over monthly instalments. Why not ask retailers to finance the trainings? Narayanan sums his reasoning up succinctly: “I don’t want to be a vendor to Reliance.”

He hopes to do similar things in secondary education, and scoffs at the idea that low-cost schools, with students that can only afford several hundred rupees per month, might not be a financially feasible enterprise. “A 60-year-old will say that and a 40-year-old will say that,” he says, “but a 20-year-old will not.”

The 37-year-old Narayanan grew up in Hyderabad and went to college at St Stephen’s in Delhi. He started out his career in education after graduating from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Bangalore and serving a brief stint with pharmaceutical company Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. His first line of business was the “personality development programme”, where he would coach prospective business school candidates on the art of handling the interview.

It wasn’t a natural choice for Narayanan, who says he never even spoke to an audience before he started the company. “In my two years at IIM, I didn’t say a word,” he says. But the field wasn’t crowded, since no other company focused on business school admissions at the time, and the price was right. “I just took four printouts,” he says, “and started the company.”

Some 10 years later, in 2005, Career Launcher grew into a 300-person, Rs50 crore firm, and Narayanan thought about which direction to take next. He was interested in moving into mainline education—“if someone gave me a few lakh rupees in 1993, I would have started schools”. But he wasn’t sure if, suddenly, he was putting his personal interests above the organization’s.

Narayanan described the possible conflicts in this way: While education has positive associations for most people (pink flowers come to his mind), test prep usually conjures up more sinister motivations (“the guy with long nails”, he says.)

Other people see him as a good person to bridge that divide. “I think Satya is a new and very exciting breed of entrepreneurs,” says James Tooley, a professor of education at Newcastle University that studies private education in India. “His approach to education as a business—he has a very broad focus on education, from getting people careers to thinking about low-cost private schools—I think he’s really there at the cutting edge.”

When Narayanan wanted to move Career Launcher into the education space, he brought in a consultant and polled his staff: If you visualize 31 March 2010, what does the company look like? What do we need to do to get to Rs500 crore? After considering, and discarding, many of the suggestions that came in, including films, shoes and book stores, the company settled on a few key areas. “It has to be about a person, her dreams, her talent,” he says. And so Career Launcher chose to continue the school route.

Land, and more specifically its price, turned out to be the biggest hurdle. More than Rs20-30 lakh per acre wasn’t viable for Career Launcher, so the company settled on the relatively cheaper cities of Hyderabad and Indore for its first pilot schools.

As Narayanan and other education reform advocates try to create a model for large-scale, low-cost private education, they float ideas such as running schools in two shifts, renting out the school’s infrastructure to community events, and bringing in corporate sponsors to provide things such as computers. The key, they agree, might also be in the government and its bulging inventory of unused educational infrastructure.

A business school was a long-term plan, but once Career Launcher won a lottery to lease a site in Noida, it decided to proceed. “This tail called land begins to wag the dog,” Narayanan says. The Indus World School of Business will open for its first class of around 60 undergraduate and 60 graduate students in July.

Instead of getting government approval, it went straight to the business sector to get company buy-in. Around two dozen firms, including Google Inc., AztraZeneca Plc. and Nokia Corp., have signed on with promises of internships and recruitment.

Career Launcher doesn’t expect to see any return on its Rs100 crore investment in the business school for another few years. “We want to make sure we focus more on Saraswati than one Lakshmi,” Narayanan says. He expects the test prep business to grow at 30-40% per year, and vocational schools to catch up to test prep. The firm’s mainline education efforts, he expects, will start paying back only in 2012. The national coaching industry pulls in an estimated Rs500 crore per year.

Narayanan divides his Career Launcher work into a few key areas, and spends a portion of each week on the company’s core test prep business, its secondary schools and its new business school. But he prefers to work on the edges of the company rather than in the thick of things, pushing the limits of what the company can do outwards.

It’s the rest of this “unemployed time”, as he refers to it, where he prefers to be, bringing his deputies along to constantly replace whatever he was doing the week before. “It’s like a management school in action,” he says.

Narayanan seems almost compulsively blunt. He named a business leadership talent search as the hunt for the next “tycoon”, and decries the phrase “child labour” as a “Western concept”. (“The best way to learn geometry is by doing a bit of masonry,” he explains.)

When a potential business partner asks for Career Launcher to buy back his investment a few years down the line, Narayanan tells him that if they went into business together, it would have to be “like a Hindu marriage”, without a “pre-nup”. When he thinks about the difficulties of cracking government support, he envisions a brighter future. “I’ve got 250 future IAS officers sitting in my classes,” he says, “I’ll be the biggest mafia don.”

As always, we welcome your suggestions of businesses and people to profile in this series. Do write to us at feedback@livemint.com

Educomp capitalizes on need for online lessons in schools

Aparna Kalra and Nesil Staney — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:37:00 GMT

New Delhi / Mumbai: Avi Verma, 10 years old but looking small for his age and seated on the last bench of the class, is sketching a germinating seed. He is trying hard to keep pace with other students as they are bombarded with strange terms: cotyledon, embryo and photosynthesis.

Big dreams: Educomp Solutions CMD Shantanu Prakash. His company’s stock gained 323.7% in the last fiscal year. (Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint)

Then his teacher, Suchita Joon, shows a three-dimensional seed on a large plasma screen. At the click of a mouse, the seed germinates and grows a root and a shoot. In a pop quiz, Joon gets quick responses from students who almost out-shout each other. Verma, sitting next to the huge bag full of books he lugs to school everyday, hesitates to raise his hand. But, he says, he understands.

The wired classroom in the privately-owned Bal Bharti Public School in Delhi is a far cry from most classrooms in India—chalk and blackboards, benches and desks. Its upgrade and modernization, and of those in poor schools, are the reasons behind the success of billionaire Shantanu Prakash, owner of publicly-listed Educomp Solutions Ltd.

His company fills a market need, selling online lessons, as well as the hardware to run them, to schools. In a fiercely competitive education system, these modules sell well for their ability to help students who learn in different ways, including backbenchers such as Verma.

“When students see something, they are able to retain it,” said Joon, who has taught for 18 years—the last three with the aid of Educomp’s live classes. “Retention” is an important part of the Indian schools system which has long believed in testing students on memory rather than analysis.

Prakash’s company has wired classrooms in 655 private schools. More importantly, it has won lucrative contracts from eight state governments for various computer-related activities in schools. A single such contract—to provide computer education in secondary schools in Haryana—was valued at Rs18.3 crore. These contracts have given the company heft and made it a darling of the stock market, even as some of India’s largest companies witnessed the lion share of their market capitalization wiped out by the ongoing bearishness in the bourses.

Educomp, capitalized at Rs7,048 crore on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), is bigger than other listed firms focused on education such as information technology trainers NIIT Ltd and Aptech Ltd, as well as satellite-based education services provider Everonn Systems India Ltd.

High performer

That’s not all. Purely from an investor perspective, Educomp counts among one of the best performing stocks in Indian equity markets. Its stock gained a huge 323.7% in the last fiscal year. NIIT and Everonn gained around 20% each, Aptech stock added about 5%.

The soaring stock has made Prakash—and his company— draw attention, something he claims he does not relish.

“In this country, having a high profile does not work,” said a young-looking Prakash, 43, before he almost runs out of the room to do a live programme for NTDV Profit, a television network. A newspaper once described his rise as one from “penury”.

Prakash laughs this one off. “I came from a middle-class, privileged family,” said the alumnus of Delhi Public School, Shri Ram College of Commerce and the country’s elite business school, the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

Pressure on the child has increased. There are no easy answers...

Shantanu PrakashCMD, Educomp Solutions LtdPrakash and wife Anjilee’s personal wealth from their equity holding alone in Educomp is estimated at Rs3,947 crore.

“Educomp has an edge over some of its competitors that are focused on (a) niche such as IT education, ” said Nimesh Mistry, an analyst at UK-based Man Group Plc.’s Indian brokerage arm.

Some IT trainers, such as NIIT, are now entering other segments in education, said another analyst who tracks the education sector for a domestic brokerage.

Apart from being a content provider, Educomp’s “infrastructure installation business gives added strength to its business,” said a Mumbai-based portfolio fund manager of a mutual fund, who does not wish to be named, as Educomp is part of his portfolio.

Educomp informed BSE in May that it plans to raise $500 million (about Rs2,130 crore) through a securities float in foreign markets or a qualified institutional placement of its shares for funding its business expansion in India.

Prakash has no illusions about his company’s role. He is clear that it serves the present system of education, geared to get higher scores. “Pressure on the child has increased,” he said. “There are no easy answers for this.”

One of his two children is in a school that encourages alternative education and an open, questioning environment. Prakash requested that the school not be named to avoid focus on his children, citing the kidnapping of the son of the chief executive of Adobe Systems Ltd in 2006.

His company is now opening schools, ambitiously called “Millennium Schools”, in tie-ups with real estate companies such as Ansal Properties and Infrastructure Ltd, or charitable trusts.

Three schools—one in Chennai and two in Bangalore—are up and running. While the trusts provide funds, hire teachers and run the school administration, Educomp supplies the management, trains the teachers and provides the online lessons. All this, he says, helps improve the quality of learning.

Ansal API will provide the land for these schools within the townships that they build. It is clear that Prakash has caught the imagination of his clients, the schools. A press conference called by Educomp had Shyama Chona, the former principal of Delhi Public School, RK Puram, an elite school, as a special invitee.

S.C. Baveja, principal of Bal Bharti School, who has seen the school grow in the 20 years he has been, says his school uses the plasma screens for functions such as trasmitting a news bulletin read out by students.

Ground reality

Prakash says his learning systems are useful in poor state-run schools which are short of teachers. “Government schools sometimes don’t have teachers at all, so students sit in front of the computer and learn,” said Prakash, whose company earned 33-35% of its revenue in 2007-08 from contracts with state governments to wire-up their schools.

But, an official of the Haryana government is critical of the performance of Prakash’s company. Haryana signed a contract with Educomp in July last year to provide computer education in 716 schools. “We floated a tender and their bid was lowest. In retrospect, it was not realistic. They took longer, six months longer, than it should have taken,” said Anurag Rastogi, the top bureaucrat responsible for school education in Haryana.

Rastogi said he now expects Educomp to be ready with the faculty and network needed for the computer-based training in all the schools in the current academic session. It is also not clear how much the company is benefiting poor schools.

At a senior secondary school for 400 boys in Gurgaon, Haryana, the principal and teachers made a push to recollect if their school had anything to do with Educomp, repeatedly referring instead to Edusat, the government-run lessons on satellite. They finally showed this reporter into a computer room where only one in seven computers work.

“There are two trainers from Educomp but they have not come in today, maybe because of the rain,” said Bhushan Sachdeva, a teacher. “The course material has not yet arrived.” The school also had mass absenteeism of students—a problem of state-run schools where students reach from far-flung villages—on that rain-soaked day.

A press release from Educomp issued in May 2007 promises: “Under the agreement Educomp will provide general computer education as per prescribed syllabus, impart basic computer training to teachers, provide bilingual books/courseware, provide two faculties in each school, maintain an MIS ( manager of the information System).”

Another nearby school for girls, which has 1,500 students, has a clean, well-lit computer laboratory with 63 computers. But these are donated by a non-government organization. The school declined computer educators from Educomp, recalled principal Pushpa Mehta, as it already has trainers. “We got some books from Educomp which we distributed among the students,” she said.

It is these contracts with the government which add value to Educomp’s share price.

Saurabh Sood, a friend who has known Prakash since school and worked with him in a separate venture—the pair sold educational supplies to schools—for a brief period after both graduated from college, noted that Prakash’s company has seen rapid growth in the last three years.

“Four things happened. The economy grew, schools were willing to spend more, parents were willing to spend, plus the education cess meant government budget on education expanded,” said Sood. “Everyone wanted to eat wheat, and there was only one shop in town.”

The government has set aside Rs6,000 crore in 2007-12 for introducing IT in schools, up nearly seven-and-a-half times from Rs800 crore in 2002-07. Prakash’s company will also benefit.

Sood said Prakash persisted with his business plans, working away since his company’s inception 14 years ago, even when naysayers said that anything to do with schools would not work. “His success came after 15 years of work,” he said.

Prakash himself maintains that his decision to run an education company was “part vision and part accident”. He said that since his own education had been in first-rated institutions, he chose this field.

Now, his dreams are big. He wants to make his company a global one. Educomp acquired Singapore-based AsknLearn, a company which provides e-learning platforms to 150 schools. It has also bought a 51% stake in Learning.com, a US-based company selling web-based curriculum to schools, besides signing two joint ventures with Singapore-listed Raffles Education Corp.; one to provide higher education programmes in India, the second to sell Educomp’s products to schools in China.

Prakash is also in a hurry to open more schools in India. To them, he will not only sell online lessons, but also textbooks and lesson plans. And of course, those plasma screens showing germinating seeds.

(This is second in the Education Czars: A Mint Series on the New Entrepreneurs. The first in the series was on Amity Group and is available online at ww.livemint.com/eczars.htm )

(As always, we welcome your suggestions of businesses and people to profile in this series. Do write to us at feedback@livemint.com)

(aparna.k@livemint.com)

Controversies dog Amity but students keep streaming in

Aparna Kalra — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:55:00 GMT

Noida: It is about 4pm, the lane outside Amity University is packed with students’ cars, tiny Marutis to shiny four-wheel drives.

Inside the sprawling campus, almost a mini-city in itself, Atul Chauhan, 35, sits in his new office behind a desk dominated by four computer monitors. Each displays coloured line graphs and bar charts—data on the education empire set up by his father, Ashok Chauhan, which includes playschools, regular schools, graduate schools and this university.

Going places: Atul Chauhan at the Amity University campus in Noida. Amity now plans campuses overseas — in the US, the UK, Mauritius, Singapore and Dubai. (Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint)

At the last count, the Amity Group had 50,000 students enrolled at its various campuses across the country, paying tuition fees from Rs28,000 per annum for Amity International School to Rs5 lakh for a two-year postgraduation course in business administration at Amity University.

The multiple screens and the programmes they list before Chauhan symbolize Amity’s journey from a backyard college with 120 students about 13 years ago to a private university created by a legislation passed by the Uttar Pradesh assembly. On an average day, this three-year-old university in the suburb of New Delhi sees 200 students lining up for admission to classrooms filled with aspiration, fuelling the education boom.

But Amity’s climb has been a rocky and controversial one. In many circles, its brand name is uttered as the lowest common denominator, the “safe” option for students who cannot get in anywhere else.

Still, some education experts don’t entirely agree with the characterization, saying some courses are highly regarded and are as competitive as those of top-notch institutions. The university also has sparred publicly with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the government-run regulator of private engineering and business colleges, which itself has faced accusations of corruption. Meanwhile, the Chauhans have been dogged by charges of fraud in Germany that led to an international search warrant against Ashok Chauhan.

And yet so great has become the hunger for education in India that Amity and the Chauhans still manage to lure students. In many ways, their success is rooted in the failure of state-run universities to keep pace with the demand for education and the arrival of a new breed of students who are willing and able to pay more for degrees that long have been subsidized.

Young and aspiring

“Amity admissions are very, very hi-tech. We get all the statistics,” Chauhan said, changing the graphs on the screen. “This year we have so far interviewed 8,000, we have 120,000 applying. I can even see how many calls came—how the call centre is functioning. Last one month, 122,000 students have taken the career test”.

The career test on Amity’s website asks questions to judge a personality type, and suggests career options for individuals taking the test. (This reporter, for instance, was found to be “highly principled” but “dislikes dealing with details”, making her better suited for jobs in counselling, music, art and medicine.)

Jeans-clad students mill outside Chauhan’s office, as if to physically embody the statistics. On the porch, young people form a riot of colour—sitting on steps, in groups and huddles. The university offers 130 programmes, from fine arts to nanotechnology, microbial science to rural management. The rush of students also stems from the fact that Amity advertises—it spends a few crore annually on ads and marketing—something state-run universities and top-tier schools simply do not do.

“Amity advertises pretty heavily. I was in Zambia and my parents came across this advertisement. I wanted to study in India and nothing else was coming up, Amity was just there,” said Ritika Passi, a 20-year-old pursuing a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Amity University. She lived in the hostel on campus for a year, paying Rs1.2 lakh annually, plus Rs45,000 as hostel fees, but moved out to live with her parents who are in India now.

Another student in the same programme admits he chose the university by default because his board examination scores were low. “My marks weren’t very high to apply to Delhi University,” said Ankur Agha, 20.

It is this expansion of the higher education market to accommodate greater numbers that Amity has exploited. In a country where only 11.6% people in the age group of 18-24 get enrolled in a college, a mid-March report from brokerage house CLSA Asia Pacific estimates that students would spend $40 billion (Rs1.7 trillion) on education in 2008. The report predicts that this figure would touch $68 billion by 2012. A big chunk of this—$7 billion—will be spent on private professional colleges.

Rocky road

The road for the Chauhans—first father Ashok, and now son Atul—has required them to pull out political connections and move court in a highly publicized scrap with AICTE, the controversial regulator for private colleges. In 2005, the regulator cancelled Amity’s licence to offer a postgraduation course in business, a development which made headlines.

Chauhan is reluctant to speak about the spat. According to online youth magazine Jam, which reported on the incident, students had moved court asking Amity to refund fees as it no longer had the regulator’s approval.

Jam, which also rates colleges, had sent a reporter to the old Amity campus, different from the one that now houses the private university, in December 2005. In an account later verified to Mint by Jam editor Rashmi Bansal, the reporter found different courses being conducted in the same building. For instance, a wing on one floor that was meant for Bachelor of Business Administration, or BBA, classes (as indicated by a large signboard) had many different types of MBA classes going on. Class 3 schoolchildren from the Amity International School were being taught in classrooms that still had MBA (General) printed on the door. The Amity Business School classes, which are supposed to be held in the D and H blocks, were instead being held in J block belonging to Amity International School.

Thus, it appeared, AICTE was accurate in observing facilities and infrastructure intended for AICTE-approved courses were being utilized for other unapproved courses.

But, observers say this is the way a number of private colleges start operations in India. They share land and buildings, which require heavy spending, with a school or with another college before their brand gets established. This is something the regulatory body considers illegal.

The Chauhans, who launched a long court battle against AICTE, remember the period as painful.

“We have moved on,” says Chauhan, referring to Amity University’s current status as a 60-acre private university, among just 15 other private universities in India. Neither Jam’s Bansal nor her reporters have visited the new location of the university.

The Chauhan family, which includes younger brother Aseem Chauhan and their mother, runs the university through a charitable trust, which according to Indian laws is not allowed to make any profit.

Chauhan says the family sticks to this rule, but their wealth is clear. The 32-member family includes Ashok Chauhan’s brothers—he was born into a family of seven siblings—and Atul’s young cousins and their children. Together, they own a row of houses in Defence Colony, one of New Delhi’s posh neighbourhoods. They are known to be very religious, beginning their day with a family puja.

Chauhan, an alumnus of the London School of Economics and University College, said even as the family settled in Germany in the 1980s, his father dreamed about setting-up schools and colleges in India. After graduating from Meerut University, now called Choudhary Charan Singh University, Ashok Chauhan had moved to Germany in the early 1970s on a scholarship of the German government.

“We were children, we were sitting on the bed and it was snowing outside, when he told us. He keeps diaries. He even made us think of a name and finally wrote down Amity,” said Chauhan referring to his father.

Ashok Chauhan declined to meet with Mint. He remains an elusive and controversial figure, with charges still pending against him in Germany, where he ran a plastics and petrochemicals business.

In an email interview with Mint, Doris Möller-Scheu, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor in Frankfurt, confirmed that Ashok Chauhan was charged with fraud in 2000.

“He is suspected of having given five promissory notes as a security in order to obtain a credit of €1.5 million (about Rs10 crore at the current exchange rate) from two banks in 1994. Later these promissory notes were dishonoured, because the drawees were insolvent,” she said, adding that the prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt sought his extradition from India. But the Delhi high court rejected the request in 2005.

Son Chauhan terms the charges as small. He says they have been but blown out of proportion by people who want to blackmail and extort money from the Amity Group. He, however, did not say who these people are.

Global pioneers

Despite the questions, observers say the Chauhans’ mark on the growth of private education in India is undeniable.

“The dark side exists but he (Ashok Chauhan) has put money in education,” said Premchand Palety, who heads the Centre for Forecasting and Research, an organization which rates business schools. Palety also writes an education column for Mint. “Amity Law School is respected. Their business school at one time went very high because of a good dean. They charge very high fees but placements are above average. The engineering schools are average.”

Students, and faculty, say the university is changing rapidly—and mostly for the better. “Teaching could be better but some teachers were excellent,” said Dipanjan Banerjee, 23, a 2008 batch student of Amity’s two-year management programme in marketing. Banerjee was recruited on-campus by Satyam Computer Services Ltd, the country’s fourth biggest software services provider by revenue.

One of the teachers who left a favourable impression on him, Mamta Mohan, the leader of the programme, gets paid Rs60,000 a month; a component of it—Rs20,000—is variable and is paid to Mohan for her extra work in designing syllabi for new programmes, such as the one on retail.

“Our faculty are a mix of those from other institutes, plus from corporate sector. Recently, I got a CV for a teaching post from a young man who is in sales and is 2005 batch (graduate) from IIM-Bangalore,” said Mohan, who has been with Amity for six years.

With its brand steadily attracting students, Amity now plans campuses overseas—in the US, the UK, Mauritius, Singapore and Dubai. “We can give students option of doing one semester in Singapore,” says Chauhan. “These days education is global so they need to give them a global experience.”

(Education Czars: A Mint Series on the New Entrepreneurs will continue over the next few months and the profiles will also be available online at www.livemint.com/eczars.htm

As always, we welcome your suggestions of businesses and people to profile in this series. Do write to us atfeedback@livemint.com)

Priya Basu | She lobbies governments to ensure the poor have a chance

Rana Rosen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:12:00 GMT

Mumbai: Most mornings, Priya Basu travels to the other side of the world from her office in Washington, DC.

The World Bank’s lead economist for South Asia rarely ventures out of a long conference room with a red mahogany table and light blue suede chair at the bank’s Pennsylvania Avenue office, but a bank of video cameras beams her to Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and it beams faces and voices from these countries to Washington. The discussions usually revolve around ways to negotiate with governments or devising programmes to alleviate poverty.

In November, Basu steered a $600 million (about Rs2,359 crore then) loan to India through the bank’s board, the largest loan for a single project in the bank’s history in India. The funds will help restructure India’s cooperative banking sector with the ultimate goal of helping the poor gain access to loans.

That sort of achievement broadly fits in with what the four-year-old Basu saw herself doing when she grew up. She wanted to be the country’s prime minister and when her father asked her why, she replied that she wanted to change things. “I don’t like the fact that my nanny, who is looking after me, lives in a little room and she doesn’t live with us in the house. Why is she poor and why are we rich?”

Economics of development: The World Bank’s Priya Basu. Not looking her age has been a problem, she says. “I would turn up (at meetings) and they would look at me and say, ‘Where is the World Bank?’” (Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint)

Basu admits that her desire to be prime minister might have been influenced by stories and pictures of Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, who came to power in the year she was born and was the inspiration for her name. Still, much of what Basu does today has to do with fundamental realities related to wealth, its distribution, and why the poor stay poor.

The 40-year old deals with all this from a barewalled office, #10-143 at the Bank’s headquarters. Outside her door are seven clocks set to local times in the bank’s seven South Asia offices. There’s usually a cup of coffee to her left, and a bottle of Gatorade to the right. There are two bookshelves in her office—a small one stuffed with seemingly every book on developmental economics and a large one that is, oddly, empty.

Developmental economics is something in whish Basu is interested—very interested. She has worked in the area in India, Indonesia (after the East Asian economic crisis of 1997), and Russia (towards the end of its own economic crisis of the late 1990s).

The World Bank is a US-based international institution that advises and provides loans to governments to fund development projects. The bank is often criticized for promoting privatization in all cases and attaching pro-market guarantees to loans, but Basu claims that it has a strong role to play in the ecosystem of development work. And finding hard solutions.

Growing up on solutions

“I was growing up in a setting where I was made aware from a young age that there are problems, but there are solutions as well,” says Basu. “I come from a background where three generations of women have been involved in social work or social reform.” In 1927, her great-grandmother founded a well-known non-governmental organization that works with deprived women, the All India Women’s Conference; her mother, once a professor of history at Delhi University, still runs the NGO. “I grew up hearing about the problems women had living in unequal societies,” she said. “And I grew up with stories about how my mother’s NGO helped these women.”

Basu’s husband, author and journalist Edward Luce, notes her family lived in a modest home in Delhi and “they are very much public servants and public intellectuals, the combination of idealism.” He adds that this is where Basu “probably... got her priorities and outlook.” Basu’s father was a civil servant from the 1960s to the 1990s, and was dedicated to India’s socialist vision, causing a debate within their family as Basu and her mother were all for the economic reforms India adopted starting 1991.

Basu’s father and elder sister are both economists. Basu studied economics at Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College and then at England’s Oxford University. She stayed on at Oxford to do more focused study on development economics, and eventually got her doctorate. She did a stint in the emerging markets group of ING Barings Investment Bank in London. And then went on to be an economist at the International Monetary Fund, or IMF. There she worked on the Philippines and Turkey desks out of Washington before she moved to the Asian Development Bank in Manila, where she worked on the China desk and stayed in the Philippines for more than two years until it was time to move to Geneva for a position at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

In 1998, she joined the World Bank as part of the young professionals programme, and worked across countries until she moved back to India, to Delhi, in 2001.

Still, “defining success is difficult,” says Basu, modestly. In the long-term, she adds, she would like to see improvements in how the poor live. In the short term, she accepts, success means influencing governments to create policies and take on projects that will ultimately help the poor.

She’s had some of both kinds of success. In 2003, the bank conducted a survey in India with the National Council of Applied Economic Research to study the rural poor’s access to loans and other banking products. The survey showed that more than 87% couldn’t borrow from a bank and more than 70% didn’t have a bank account. The government, according to Basu, sat up and took notice of the fact that public sector banks were not reaching the poor. “We got their ear, and gradually we began to see changes in policy on rural finance,” Basu says. “They changed the rules for microfinance, for example. They introduced a number of reforms that... (made it) easier for microfinance institutions to set up operations (and) to borrow from commercial banks and so on.” Later, the government announced an initiative to revamp the entire rural credit cooperative system in India, and asked for a billion dollar loan from the World Bank. Part of this is what Basu recently helped secure.

“So we see gradually some of our ideas percolate into policy. And then policy resulting in initiatives for which they have come to the bank,” she says. That, she adds, “makes me feel that I have been heard.”

Sphere of influence

There have been other such achievements, such as a $120 million project of the bank in association with the Small Industries Development Bank of India that helped 1,100 small and medium businesses across 10 states get access to finance and better market information.

Basu says such projects keep her feet on the ground in India, although she moved to Washington in 2006. “India is a very important country for the bank. And a lot of the work that gets done gets done from India rather than from Washington,” she adds.

The travelling doesn’t leave her much time as evident from the boxes waiting to be unpacked in her office.

Niraj Verma, a senior financial specialist for the Bank in Delhi who worked with Basu, says that Basu “ can work very easily across borders.”

Basu had other problems though. “In India, one difficulty that I faced that I hadn’t really faced in other countries working for the World Bank was the fact that I was a woman. The fact that I was Indian. And the fact that I looked young. I look younger than I am,” she says of her early days with the World Bank in India. “I would turn up (at meetings) and they would look at me and say ‘where is the World Bank?’”

Still, she persevered. On most days, Basu says she can’t get herself to stop working. Most days, she has to tell herself to leave office. Sometimes, she ends up not listening. “There is just so much to be done,” she says.

(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

Kiran Seth | Without playing a note, he makes music touch the lives of many

Priyanka P. Narain — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:38:00 GMT

New Delhi: Awispy mathematics professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, Kiran Seth refuses to buy a mobile phone, insists on driving a 1985 Maruti and pushes students to hang on to some old-world ways too, like giving more of themselves to others. He’s a simple man with a big idea—to spread Indian music, heritage and culture to youth across the country.

Lessons for life: The IIT professor’s Spic Macay has taught volunteers not just how to appreciate music, but also how to get along with other people.

For nearly 30 years, Seth’s group, the Society for Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth (known as Spic Macay), has exposed generations of Indian students to culture—dance, music and yoga—through conventions, baithaks, camps, lectures and musical fests in cities and second-tier towns in every state in India. The volunteer-driven organization largely draws on the passion of young people and their desire to become a part of something bigger than themselves. Every few years, old students graduate and new ones arrive with new ideas, new energy and lots of commitment.

Seth, 57, who has watched students come and go, says even those who grew up listening to Bollywood and Bon Jovi are enchanted by the masters such as Allauddin Dagar, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Ustad Shahid Parvez, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain. “They connect to something that is their own.”

And that is the goal.

Hunching over the formica table in his small office at IIT-Delhi, Seth tries to find the words to describe the magic of music under the stars, of men in kurtas and women in sarees, evenings laden with the smell of flowers. Those who have been part of the movement say the exposure to such scenes and the music sensitizes them.

“You feel deeply and experience life in a very intimate way,” said S. Jamuar, a volunteer and IIT student. After attending a few concerts, fellow IITian Anoop Kundal said the music opened him up: “I began hearing things I had not noticed before. When it rained, I heard the raindrops on leaves outside my room.”

Stacks of pamphlets, posters, drawings and plans for upcoming concerts surround Seth. The phone keeps ringing and student-volunteers drift in and out, clarifying details, logistics and strategy for the next convention. His own passion for music stems from his days as a wannabe drummer—in the US, of all places, where he was smitten by Indian classical music. He was at Columbia University, studying engineering when he saw an advertisement in the Village Voice, a New York newspaper, that announced the dhrupad experts, Ustad Aminuddin Dagar and Ustad Fariduddin Dagar, playing at the Brooklyn Academy. “My friends seemed to know a lot about it. I went too, you know, to check out the girls. I remember, they sang Poojan Chali Mahadev in Raag Malkauns. It blew me,” he recalls. “I cannot forget that evening… It was so moving, so, inspiring…and I thought that if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.”

After graduation, he went to work for Bell Labs, the research wing of AT&T, in New York. Then he was offered a professorship at IIT. “I thought let’s check it out and see how it goes, ” he says.

He never left.

In a sense, IIT has always represented home to Seth. His father, V.R. Bhojraj Seth, was the first professor at the IIT- Kharagpur campus, the first IIT set up by the government to train engineers and scientists in a newly independent India. Seth remembers his neighbours were representatives from the UN who had come to help establish the institute. “There were trees and snakes,” he recalls. Home life was dominated by intellectual conversations and discussions about complex math with students and professors; the only memory of music is his mother occasionally singing bhajans.

Still, he does not find it odd that music became so important to him later. “Music is like the mathematics my father taught and I teach,” he says. “They both explore something deep inside you. It is a very liberating experience.”

The feeling attracts students and volunteers. Shalini Vatsa, an actress from Patna, recalls the responsibility thrust upon her as a teenager, to deal with big-name artists and the logistics of organizing a festival. “There was a lot of challenge to it. There were no cell -phones, just one phone to share among 500 girls in the hostel where I lived,” she said. “I had to work with other students who were also young and vulnerable.”

She would complain to Seth about mischief-makers troubling her. His response: “We never reject anyone.”

The group’s 200 chapters run 1,000 events every year, and have earned the support of many classical artists, who charge lower honorarium. Funding comes from sponsorships and government grants.

There are challenges. Trying to run a movement that draws on the energy of student-volunteers alone without an organized structure means Seth is constantly on edge. He says when old students move on, a new set has to be eased into the vision and process again.

Spic Macay, which relies on Seth as torchbearer, has not found its next line of leaders. Without them, it will be hard to make the movement outlast its people. And yet, the new leaders must not hammer the concept into an organized hierarchical structure. Seth says his movement is a fluid idea that draws on the vision of the young. “Which means that the next person must also be equally open and passionate as Kiran. He must be in it for the music and the students,” Jamuar says.

The learning is not just in listening to performances, say those involved. It is in the process—of organizing, meeting and getting along with many other people—and developing leadership skills for life. For many, it has also forged lasting friendships. Vatsa explains, “It takes a lot out of you. You are barely sleeping, travelling with so many others, trying to work with such different kind of people. So those who tend to be drawn to a movement like this are usually very giving people.”

Seth says that for the moment, he is putting worries on hold. “This movement began with a premise: everyone has something to give. It was about bringing classical music to the youth, but also bringing out something within them,” he says. “I have always told all my students: Experiment. Live your life. Try everything. But hold on to your yoga, your meditation, and your values. They will anchor you as you discover yourself.”

Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we are running through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

GS Gul Mohammed | He uses mussel power for local development

Ajayan — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:26:00 GMT

Padanna, Kerala: He took a fancy to shrimps, watching them swirl through water on a moonlit night.

That was nearly 20 years ago. Today, at 60, G.S. Gul Mohammed is a pioneer in mussel farming and his work here has helped offer livelihood to 3,500 farmers, including 2,500 women.

India produces around 11,000 tonnes of mussels every year and about three-fourths of them—nearly 7,500 tonnes—come from the venture that Mohammed initiated in 1996—Green Mussels Farmers Society, which has attracted farmers in Padanna and surrounding villages.

Memories of Mohammed’s hometown Padanna, with its backwaters, drew him back to India in 1990, after he had spent some 20 years managing a construction firm in Dubai soon after graduating with a commerce degree.

When he decided to move back to Padanna, as luck would have it, a local entrepreneur, who was into shrimp farming, was selling out because of low yields. Mohammed used his savings to acquire the two ponds, added two more and started shrimp farming.

The going was smooth up until 1996 when an infection that left white spots on the shrimp forced him to abandon the shrimp business. Though dejected, Mohammed was unwilling to leave the waters and instead took to crab cultivation. Crabs, he says, shed their shells at regular intervals in sea water leading to a reduction in their flesh and weight. However, allowed to grow in fresh water with less salinity for a month, the shells get hardened and the crabs fetch as much as Rs280 a kg—four-and-a-half times the price they would have fetched earlier.

Mohammed experimented and began using waste from the abattoirs, or slaughterhouses, in the neighbourhood as crab feed. He collected the waste dumped in the backwaters, cleaned it and used the layer of oil from the fat, which formed on the top after boiling, as crab food.

It was an experiment, but one that paid rich dividends, recalls Mohammed. But greed got the better of him and he bought soft-shelled crabs worth Rs3 lakh from Chennai and dropped them in his ponds. But the east coast crabs did not adapt well in Kerala waters and Mohammed saw his money go down the drain.

Still, the entrepreneur in him did not lose hope. Mohammed knocked on the doors of the government agency, Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, which was into mussel breeding. The institute agreed to despatch a team of scientists to inspect the waters to check whether mussels could be bred in Mohammed’s backyard, on the condition that he would bear all the expenses. But he didn’t have to actually shell out any money because the condition was imposed by the institute only to test his intentions.

To breed mussels, Mohammed followed an innovative method that helped grow mussels in a record two-and-a-half months—much lower than their normal gestation period of five-six months. Indeed, in countries such as Spain, where mussel farming is very popular, it takes 6-24 months for mussels to grow.

The method: Small ropes are wound around a strong string. On this, a few mussels seeds are left and cloth tied round it. Around 600 such strings, knotted to a raft, are left hanging 5-6m down in the water. In a few days, these seeds stick on to the ropes and the cloth wound around disintegrates into the water. Feeding on the little organisms in it, these mussel seeds grow to a large size in a relatively short time.

Mohammed’s first harvest was a tonne of mussels. And when Anwar Hashim, a leading seafood exporter and managing director of Abad Fisheries in Kochi, complained that it was not sufficient quantity for export, Mohammed mooted the idea of getting other farmers involved. “I have done some work, but cannot meet the export demand alone,” he says. “Why not get the local people involved? I gave it serious thought and a few days later met the people in the area and explained to them the prospects of mussels farming.” The audience was hard to convince. If the business has tremendous prospects, Mohammed himself should take it up in a big way, they said.

Only a handful of people, including some women, initially came forward. But, today, 3,500 people work with Mohammed. Last year, his total mussel production was 7,000 tonnes.

Mohammed’s business has not been without troubles. The European Union (EU) banned import of Indian mussels in 1999. The EU was not happy with the water quality, which affects the breed of mussels.

When Mohammed got the government trade promotion body Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) to test the water, it showed that the water was contaminated because the villagers around did not have toilets and human excreta was left in the water bodies. While there have been improvements since then, India still continues to be banned from exporting mussels to Europe. This also forced Mohammed to go after the domestic market.

While mussels is a sought-after dish in Kannur and Kozhikode districts of Kerala, it was not popular even in the neighbouring areas. So, he told the local farmers to carry the mussels on bicycles to nearby villages. For the first two weeks, the response was poor. But slowly, people began to accept it and now, during harvest time, trucks line up to carry mussels.

Mohammed’s Green Mussels Farmers Society is formed by farmers from four nearby villages—Padanna, Valiyaparamba, Cheruvathur and Trikaripur. But the society’s success has had a fallout as mussel farming, extending to more than 25 sq. km, has reached near saturation. What used to take two-and-a-half months for one harvest has steadily climbed to almost five months. The culprit: a shortage of phytoplankton, an organism in the water that mussels feed on, which is getting depleted by extensive mussel farming.

But that crisis has opened up a new front, some 30km into the sea. While the raft, coir and other expenses are around Rs25,000 for fishing in the backwaters of Kerala that yield around 7 tonnes of mussels per year, the cost would more than double to around Rs60,000 for a similar raft put out in the sea. But the raft can be used for five or six years and the mussel yield could potentially double, which means the profits can be higher. Another advantage of farming in the sea is that the salinity of the water dips only during the monsoons.

Meanwhile, Mohammed’s innovative zeal continues in other areas as well. For instance, he has motivated local farmers for sea bass farming in cages and also carrageen algae cultivation. Soft drink makers buy the dried algae and pay Rs10 per kg; some women are earning as much as Rs5,000 a month from algae alone. Carbohydrate extracted from carrageen is used as a thickening agent in cold drinks.

The society is also looking at promoting tourism through homestays. Mohammed took the lead by building five huts, including a floating one. Now some of the farmers have begun adding a few rooms to their houses where tourists can stay and watch the farming process.

Over time, life appears to have changed for the people in these villages. Geeta, a local graduate, who just goes by her first name, has not attempted to take up any other job. She concentrates on mussel culture, which fetches her a steady income. Sumathy, who also goes by her first name, plans to renovate her house so that she can offer homestays to tourists. MPEDA continues to monitor the water quality at regular intervals and is hoping that it would lead to getting an all-clear from the EU for exports to resume.

None of Mohammed’s four sons are involved in his activities. While three of them work in the IT and financial sectors, his fourth son is studying engineering. “Life has not been smooth all along,” he says. “First, I lost money in crab culture. The farmers found it difficult to find a market for mussels and put all the blame on me. My family was upset and advised me to get out of this, but I knew for sure that those were temporary blips and one has to face these if one wants to help the community,” he says.

“I have no regrets.”

(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world, a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

H R Nagendra | Making yoga relevant to today’s world

Shoba Narayan — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:39:00 GMT

Karnataka: The man clad in a white dhoti and shirt is unprepossessing as he walks towards the stage. The audience in the vast auditorium barely notices him as he walks barefoot and ascends to the podium. Then he begins talking. In fluent engineer’s English mixed with choice Sanskrit words, the man explains esoteric concepts from the Vedas: he talks about spirituality, karma yoga, about being detached and experiencing the silence within. “Anandamaya kosha,” he calls it and it is blissful, he says.
The fidgeting audience—primarily students from India and abroad—sits up and takes notice. Something in the man’s confident tone and the seeming ease with which he makes abstract concepts accessible is compelling. “He sounds like he knows what he is talking about,” says one dreadlocked student from Germany sitting amid a group of young Japanese women clad in salwar-kameezes.
Religion is a touchy subject in India. The continent is home to most of the world’s great religions, yet veers from religious tolerance to intolerance with every swing of the pendulum. For every Gandhi, there is a Godhra; for every Abdul Kalam there is a Abdul Wahid Kashmiri; for every secular Hindu, there is an RSS fundamentalist. To focus on India’s spiritual heritage without getting enmeshed in its religious skin is a tough balancing act but the man on stage does it deftly.
Finally, a monk clad in orange robes introduces the man. He is H.R. Nagendra, vice-chancellor of Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (Svyasa) University.
In spite of its long unwieldy name, this university is engaged in cutting-edge research on yoga and how it affects the human body. In collaboration with Johns Hopkins, Harvard Medical School and other top institutions, Svyasa is engaged in clinical trials on how yoga can be used to deal with modern-day ailments such as asthma, allergies, cholesterol, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Svyasa offers masters and PhD degrees which link yoga to the physical sciences, management studies, life sciences, humanities and yes, spirituality. This marriage of science and yoga makes sense, given Nagendra’s background. After getting his ME and PhD in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, he worked at the University of British Columbia, Nasa Marshall Space Flight Centre and the Harvard University Engineering Sciences Laboratory where he was consultant for three years before returning to India via Imperial College, London.
Even though he is steeped in science and thinks with the dispassionate rigour of an engineer, Nagendra says he was always attracted to mysticism.
“It seemed to me that every scientist I admired—ranging from Einstein to Newton—turned to mysticism later in life,” he said. “There are many things that science cannot explain.”
Still Nagendra had no desire to be a religious quack. When he established Prashanti Kuteeram, the sprawling campus of the university in the early 1980s, about a two-hour drive from Bangalore, he was very clear about his goal. “Then as now, my goal is to make yoga relevant to today’s world.”
Yoga has become a global juggernaut, attracting everyone from supermodels to super-yogis who seek their share of the pie. Christy Turlington, who once walked the ramp, now makes a living through yoga. Her line of yoga products includes mats, clothes and even a skincare line named Sundari based on Ayurveda. Other gurus have branched off into their own version of yoga, ranging from the new-age but chic Jivamukhti Yoga Centre in downtown Manhattan to the sweat-inducing Bikram Yoga to aerobic Power Yoga to Baba Ramdev’s yoga.
A recent trend is Christian yoga, which seeks to subsume the physical benefits of yoga into the religious umbrella of Christianity. Purists argue that yoga’s popularity has taken it further and further away from the ancient truths that were its foundation.
Nagendra is both purist and not. On the one hand, he studied Sanskrit for five years just so he could read Patanjali and other Vedic texts in their original form. When asked what his favorite text is, he says, “The Upanishads… for their wisdom.” Yet, he is remarkably tolerant with respect to how people adapt yoga to suit their lives. “He is a visionary,” says Shamanthakamani Narendran, a pediatrician who also has a PhD in yoga sciences from Bangalore University. “He has got this vision that yoga is the science of the future and he is working hard to make that happen.”
Right from the beginning, Nagendra viewed yoga as a “tool” that people could use to cope with the stresses of modern life. Rather than simply pay lip service to this idea, he sought to establish yoga’s benefits through rigorous controlled scientific trials.
Asthma, for instance, is one area that his institution has had particular success with partly because of its location. Bangalore’s high altitude and high levels of pollen through the Parthenium weed have made its citizens prone to allergies and asthma. At Prashanti Kuteeram, asthmatics are taught breathing techniques (pranayama), meditation and yoga asanas. They are monitored against a control group, which doesn’t practice yoga, and the results analyzed. Over the years, says Nagendra, tens of thousands of people have been subjected to such clinical trials and through them the clear benefits of yoga in the control of asthma has been established.
Svyasa (www.svyasa.org) publishes papers about this in scientific journals. It has also developed modules that can help the average person cope with an asthma attack without nebulizers, inhalers and medication.
Another module that Svyasa has developed with great success is to use yoga to reduce stress among executives. Busy corporate executives require two things from any project they undertake: they want to see results in the shortest time possible, says Nagendra with a rueful smile. To that end, his university has developed weekend workshops which teach relaxation and concentration techniques in simple user-friendly modules.
They aren’t short cuts, he stresses. They are more like the synopsis of a research paper. The one-minute relaxation technique borrows heavily from the savasana (corpse pose). Similarly, pranayama (breathing techniques) help executives relax before an important presentation. Many of India’s large companies, including the TVS group and ONGC, have sent their senior executives for training. “Earlier, I used to have a lot of anger and argue with my colleagues and juniors,” said one. “After taking the programme, I find that I am able to control my anger.”
While Nagendra relishes the practical benefits that yoga confers on companies and other practitioners, his own and interest veers much deeper. He comes into his own when he talks of Indian mystics—people like Adi Shankara who were “masters of their mind,” as he says. They were fully in control, lived extremely creative and useful lives and accomplished great things. Similarly Swami Vivekananda is his other role model with respect to making Indian philosophy accessible to the West. “We have to use the best of the East and the West,” says Nagendra often. “Western systems combined with Eastern philosophy.”
Another branch of Svyasa is Aroghyadhama which treats numerous ailments through holistic techniques. It is run by Nagendra’s sister, R. Nagarathna, a physician trained in the UK.
What next for Nagendra? More studies, more clinical trials, he says. More collaborations with universities and hospitals abroad to use yoga for the greater good. This incremental approach seems to suit him. He is, after all, an engineer by training even if he is a mystic at heart.
(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we are running through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

Giving a new meaning to public service

Jeetha D’Silva — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:56:00 GMT

In the mid-1980s, Gadchiroli, dubbed the most “backward” place in Maharashtra, appeared to hit a very elusive goal for much of the rest of the country: it had the best record in the state for family planning targets.
In reality, the district was a public health disaster. Statistics that showed a slowing population growth simply masked a grim truth—the district had an exceedingly high child mortality rate.
The Union government now plans to replicate the ‘home-based neonatal care’ model developed by Abhay Bang and his wife
Starkly, more than one in 10 babies born in Gadchiroli would not make it past their first birthdays as a mortality rate of 121 for every 1,000 live births marked this district in south-eastern Maharashtra.
Today, this rate in Gadchiroli has plummeted to less than 30, far below the national average of 58. The credit for this transformation goes to two doctors, Abhay and Rani Bang, who gave up opportunities to pursue lucrative careers after graduating from the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, and came here instead.
“We believed that children here didn’t have to wait till circumstances improved for them to have a better chance at survival,” says Abhay Bang.
For as long as anyone could remember, the people of Gadchiroli followed rudimentary birthing practices, which partly contributed to the high mortality rates. Soap or disinfectants were never used. A sickle was used to cut the umbilical cord and a paste of mud and oil was applied on the stump. Cold water would be poured on newborns to make them cry. Breastfeeding would be initiated after three days because villagers here believed the initial milk to be impure.Such was the Gadchiroli the Bangs came to in 1986.
In 1950, Dr Abhay was born to parents who believed in the Gandhian welfare movement known as Sarvodaya. “I spent my early childhood in Gandhi’s Sevagram ashram, in the company of luminaries like Acharya Vinoba Bhave,” says Dr Abhay, referring to the man who is considered the spiritual successor of Gandhi. “These influences have shaped me to a large extent.”
One of his earliest defining moments was a conversation with his elder brother Ashok as they cycled through the countryside in Wardha. “We have to decide what we want to do with our lives,” Ashok said.
After a 10-minute discussi-on, the two concluded that the country’s main needs were food and health care—and chose their vocations accordingly. While the older brother went on to study agricultural sciences, Dr Abhay took up medicine. He graduated from Nagpur University and enrolled at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) at Chandigarh for his medical degree. There, he was agitated to see the government spending significant sums of money to train doctors—only to lose them to the US.
Disillusioned, Dr Abhay left the institute, despite being a topper, and started an organization called Medico Friend Circle to engage medical professionals in working for the poor in rural India.
He eventually returned to Nagpur University to complete his postgraduation—and met his future wife.
Rani Chary hailed from an Iyengar family and was inspired to pursue medicine by following in the footsteps of her father, who was a general physician. The youngest of five children, Rani’s parents had big dreams for her. She, however, was drawn to the idea of working with the rural poor.
“My family initially resisted the idea,” she recalls. “My father wanted me to go abroad and study and probably look at practising in a big city.”
After she completing her training as a gynaecologist, the two doctors got married. Even their marriage was shorn of any extravagance. “We had a very simple ceremony. We didn’t even have rice thrown because Abhay thought it would not be right when so many people don’t have food to eat,” recalls Dr Rani. The couple moved to Wardha to join Chetna Vikas, another non-profit organization started by Dr Abhay’s family.
Dr Rani took to the Gandhian life wholeheartedly, including wearing khadi, which she continues to do even today.
The doctor couple began working in the villages in Wardha district, beginning a period of intense education about the realities of life in rural India. During this period, they realized that their training as clinicians was inadequate to address larger health-care issues as they had no grounding in community health or research. “To develop sustainable solutions, we had to adopt a community-based approach. This necessitated conducting research, based on which we could develop new knowledge and practical, replicable public health models,” says Dr Abhay.
They left India and enrolled at Johns Hopkins, one of the best public health institutes in the world, to acquire these skills and degrees in public health.
And then they chose to return.
They picked Gadchiroli, a largely tribal district that subsists mostly on forest products such as bamboo, tendu leaves (used in making bidis) and firewood, about 175km from Nagpur. According to the Bangs, they chose Gadchiroli because it was the most backward region in the state: “It is best to go where the need is greatest,” Dr Abhay says.
They moved to the district with their two sons, Anand and Amrut, at that time six years and six months old, respectively.
The two doctors were convinced that they could reduce the burden of child deaths even in this limited resource setting. Through research, they identified the main causes for infant mortality in the region and devised a strategy of home-based neonatal care to address them. The strategy involved teaching dais (traditional birth attendants) and village health workers to conduct deliveries, care for newborns, diagnose and treat illnesses, including pneumonia, the leading cause of deaths among children.
Today, when the health workers set out to make calls, they carry with them a medical kit that contains iron and calcium tablets, ointments, artificial nipples and medicines for respiratory tract infections. Sometimes they even carry a device called a “breath counter”, developed by Dr Abhay, which is used to diagnose pneumonia. The dais’ accuracy in pneumonia diagnosis is as high as 82%.
It took the Bangs more than five years to bring down the infant mortality rates through research and implementation of their findings. A subsequent project implemented in other districts of Maharashtra saw infant mortality rates drop to 33 in less than three years.
The workers are as efficient as most trained paramedics, using disinfectant, gloves and sterilized scissors for deliveries. They can even perform vaginal examinations, diagnose and treat some gynaecological diseases, and give injections—commendable considering most of them cannot even read.
The success of this effort, which came to be called the “Gadchiroli model”, has earned acclaim for the doctors and their organization, the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health, better known as SEARCH. In fact, the government now plans to replicate the “home-based neonatal care” model to bring down infant mortality rates across the country. The model involves a standard protocol in which the village health workers receive training.
In its latest annual report, the ministry of health and family welfare cites Bangs’ work: “The Government of India has recently approved the implementation of home-based newborn care (HBNC), based on the Gadchiroli model, where appreciable decline in infant mortality rates has been documented on the basis of work done by SEARCH.”
The project will be piloted in two districts each in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Bihar. Accredited social health activists will be trained on aspects of newborn care, including injecting antibiotics for diseases such as sepsis and pneumonia. The government hopes that this will reduce infant mortality rates from the current level of 64 per 1,000 live births in rural India to 27 per 1,000 births by 2015. The average infant mortality rate for the country is 58 per 1,000 births.
Other developing countries, too, have shown an interest in replicating the model developed by the Bangs.
Last November, key decision makers from African countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar visited Gadchiroli to study the pioneering work that the two doctors have done on newborn care. The African continent has a high burden of infant mortality, with more than one million babies dying within the first month of birth. With SEARCH’s help, many of these countries are now working on developing their own programmes to reduce infant mortality.
Though the two doctors are best known for their work on infant mortality, their contribution spans various aspects of community health. Dr Rani led the first study to identify the burden of gynaecological diseases among rural women and they have also been involved in conducting de-addiction programmes in rural Maharashtra, where alcoholism is rampant. They set up the only hospital and research centre, called Shodhgram (meaning research village), on the outskirts of the tribal region. The 20-bed hospital, with its cluster of single-level, hut-like structures, looks like a cross between a Gandhian ashram and a tribal village.
At the gates of Shodhgram is a temple of the tribal goddess Danteshwari and the hospital itself is called Maa Danteshwari Dawakhana.
The architecture of the hospital building resembles a tribal house; living chambers surround an open space and verandas traverse the chambers.
“People here are indebted to the doctors and to SEARCH, especially those who have survived snake bites due to the treatment provided at the hospital and those that have been cured from alcohol addiction through the de-addiction programmes,” says Tushar Khorgade, a local who has been working with SEARCH for more than a decade.
According to Khorgade, the most significant change has been that now even the traditional doctors from the tribal regions contact the hospital for medical help.
For their work, the Bangs have received awards from the non-profit Save the Children and the MacArthur Foundation, among many other recognitions. Besides the public accolades, the doctors have inspired countless young medical professionals.
“Their pioneering work in infant mortality has been instrumental in bringing this issue to light. They have also demonstrated that such major issues can be dealt with efficiently with the right inputs,” says Dhananjay Kakde, project officer at Sathi, a non-profit that focuses on healthcare research and advocacy for the well being of the disadvantaged people, including the rural poor. “What’s most important is that they have shown this works in reality and not just in some academic research.”
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we are running through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Anushka Ravishankar | She writes stories that children can read just for pure fun

Rasul Bailay — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Fifteen years ago, Anushka Ravishankar went looking for some Indian children’s books for her then six-year-old daughter. She couldn’t find any of the kind she wanted.
So Ravishankar, now 46, did what she thought any good parent would do: She
Write stuff: This software programmer-turned-editor, with 17 titles to her credit, has taught many Indian children how to rhyme.
wrote them herself. “There was a dearth of Indian children’s writers so I decided to write them myself,” Ravishankar says. She adds that this doesn’t necessarily mean that all stories you write “for your children” are good stories.
Ravishankar’s stories, most written in verse form with the sort of metre and rhyme that would make Dr Seuss proud, were good. From Alphabets are Amazing Animals toExcuse Me, Is This India?, Ravishankar’s books of nonsense verse have become popular with several generations of children.
With 17 children’s books to her credit, Ravishankar—she should not be confused with Anoushka Shankar, the sitar-playing daughter of Pandit Ravi Shankar—is among the best known Indian children’s writers in the business.
The children’s section of most large bookstores is usually filled with books written by foreign authors. There are not too many Indian authors specializing in fiction for young children, the four- to eight-year-olds who are beginning to read on their own and need whatever they are reading to have a certain cadence and metre to retain their interest. And the few Indian books available for such children are published by small firms, with their production quality leaving a lot to be desired .
Aniyan Nair, head of operations and marketing at bookstore chain Crossword Bookstores Ltd, says the children’s books at his stores are “predominantly by foreign authors.”
“We need to have more writers and publishers (and) encourage more writers to come into the genre,” Nair adds.
Ravishankar’s books aren’t inexpensive. They cost anywhere between Rs150 and Rs350. And they are printed on good paper and, sometimes, hardbound. Most of her books are published by Tara Publishing, a Chennai-based publishing house that has made a name for itself in the area of children’s literature.
“The work she has produced for us is world class... She is one of the most important writers for us,” says Gita Wolf, publisher of Tara. “I think she is one of the most innovative and talented children’s book writers... She will take her definite place in world literature,” she adds.
Ravishankar was born and grew up in Nashik and went to college in Pune. She graduated in mathematics from the city’s Fergusson College in 1981.
“I was always interested in writing, though I started with bad poetry,” she says.
It was while she was in college that she was exposed to the nonsense verse of Lewis Carrol, Edward Lear and Edward Gorey. “I completely got hooked,” she says.
After completing her post-graduation in operational research, she took up a job as a software programmer in a Nashik-based company but it became difficult for her to continue to work after the birth of her daughter. That gave her time to write.
She sent a few stories she had written for her daughter to a children’s comic magazine called Tinkle. Two of the stories won a contest organized by the magazine and the publisher offered Ravishankar a job. Ravishankar’s daughter was still young, though, and she could only freelance for Tinkle.
Ravishankar’s family moved to Chennai in 1996 when her husband took up a job in the city. She was immediately hired as an editor by Tara Publishing, a company that had been founded in 1994 with the objective of producing good quality children’s books. Ravishankar decided to publish some of her own stories.
Then, she authored Tiger On A Tree, a book of nonsense verse that was published in the US, and translated into Japanese, Korean and French. The book won the Star of Excellence award from France’s National Union of Culture and Libraries in 1999.
Nonsense verse doesn’t have much of a following in India, says Ravishankar. Tiger On A Tree sold only about 2,500 copies in the country whereas the book sold 10,000 copies in the US and 7,000 in France. “People think it’s a genre for children. It’s not... Anyone can enjoy it,” she adds. “Children are more open to that, that’s why children enjoy nonsense much,” adds Ravishankar. “As you grow older… you lose the ability to accept nonsense.”
Ravishankar may be a name in the field of children’s fiction, but that doesn’t mean she is a well-known figure in the country. A Chennai newspaper once carried news of the launch of one of her books along with a picture of Anoushka Shankar. The next day, the paper carried a clarification.
Ravishankar, now an associate editor at the Indian arm of children’s books publisher Scholastic, a firm known for publishing the Harry Potter series in the US, says that children in India are conditioned to read more as a learning exercise and very rarely they read something for just pure fun.
“They are also so brainwashed …If you ask children they will say we read this because we learn this,” she adds. “They don’t understand that you just read for fun.”
Ravishankar says this is one reason why she writes stories that are fun to read. “I don’t write to teach or moralize anything,” she says. “You could end up finding messages but consciously I have never tried to do that.” In the process, she has also taught countless Indian children (and their parents) how to rhyme—even if it is only nonsense.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Vivek Bhatia | His invention is reducing road fatalities

Sudha Menon — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:49:00 GMT

Like with so many others, Vivek Bhatia’s life chan-ged after a friend and his family were killed in an accident on the way back from Tirupati, a temple town in South India. In a few days, Bhatia’s friend was just another statistic, another casualty of sleeping at the wheel.
His sense of loss made Bhatia decide to do something. The result was a device that’s already saving thousands of li-ves and has the potential to save millions across the world. The product is called No Nap.
As no-fuss as its name, No Nap is a tiny battery operated device that fits behind the ear and wakes up drivers who are in the danger of dozing off at the wheel. The device is now sold across the US and Europe where millions undertake long commutes on high-speed freeways. At $20 a piece, delivered at the doorstep (and an extra piece free with every purchase, reducing the effective cost to $10; in India, the product retails for Rs90), No Nap is inexpensive. And it works.
Hailing from Indore, Bhatia, 47, is the father of two school-going children and an unlikely businessman. He looks more like a salaried man than someone who set out to be a businessman at the age of 30.
Yet, that’s what the electronics engineer, now based in Pune, did after quitting his job at Swastik Rubber in 1985. With a capital of just Rs2 lakh, and a little help from college friends, Bhatia, convinced that a sleep-preventing device could reduce road accidents, set out to develop the product he had in mind. It took him two years. “There is nothing hi-tech about No Nap. The ba-tteries are imported from China wholesale, and the plastic sourced from a local small enterprise,” says Bhatia, downplaying the technology behind his invention.
To drivers, however, there could be nothing more valuable. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the US says more than 100,000 crashes are caused by drivers falling asleep, resulting in an estimated 40,000 injuries and 1,550 deaths a year. These statistics do not take into account the fact that many crashes caused by drivers falling asleep aren’t reported as such.
Night shift workers, long distance commuters and people with sleep disorders are all potential users of the device. As are, closer home in India, truck and taxi drivers.
The science behind No Nap is based on the fact that the head of a person who is ready to doze off slumps forward a few times before the person goes to sleep. The moment this happens, No Nap sets off a piercing whistle. The mercury inside the device makes contact with the battery every time a person slumps forward, completing an electrical circuit and setting off the alarm.
With little money to advertise or market the product, Bhatia used his fascination of the Internet to good effect. Advertising on Yahoo got enough enquiries and orders to start full-fledged production. No Nap buyers now exist across the world. Some 5,000 units sell in the US each month; and 3,000 in India, parts of Europe, Israel and Sri Lanka.
Bhatia rues the fact that the Indian market has not responded more warmly to his product. “People have told me that with cattle, cyclists, jay-walking…there is little chance of falling asleep while driving in India,” he says.
Pune’s former deputy commissioner of police N.M. Kundetkar has been using the device for more than a year and recommends it strongly. Kundetkar makes regular trips from Pune to the Karnataka border and says very often his driver becomes drowsy during night drives. “I think it is better to take preventive action and No Nap does just that,” he says.
In many ways, the Bhatia household is the quintessential Indian small business. Most evenings find Bhatia busy on his computer, responding to orders and pitching it to organizations.
And his wife Madhu spends her mornings packing and couriering the product to customers. Bhatia himself visits the small workshop on the city’s outskirts that assembles the product each morning.
Companies such as Raymond, Hindustan Unilever, Axles India, Wheels India, Eastern Coalfields and a few from the Tata group have bought the device for their fleet operators. As has Wipro BPO, which bought 700 units for drivers on the late shift.
Bhatia has also pitched the product to Indian Railways and the armed forces. The railway ministry bought a dozen No Naps and is believed to be keen to equip its engine drivers with the product, but is yet to place an order.
Bhatia, meanwhile, is thinking up other ways to popularize the product, such as tying up with petroleum firms to stock it at their outlets along highways. “At Rs90 a unit, it is a device which should be a part of every car owner’s kit since it can save lives.” Despite counsel from friends, Bhatia is yet to patent No Nap because he says that if it is “copied, it will save more lives”.
Meanwhile, some customers have discovered innovative uses for the device. Students in the US use it to keep awake while studying. And aspiring ballroom dancer Robert Buckely from the US wrote to Bhatia saying he uses it to keep his posture upright.
(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

Ashish Bose | The man who coined the term ‘Bimaru’

K.P. Narayana Kumar — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 19:45:00 GMT

Ashish Bose believes the laws of economics will conquer racism.
The prominent demographer and professor’s theory rests on supply and demand: Developed countries need migrants in large numbers as their youth populations shrink.
“Germany may not like Turkish labour and Japan may not want any foreigners, but soon these two and other nations such as Norway, Sweden and France will have to become tolerant of migrant workers as they will have too many old people,” Bose says.
India, he maintains, has the most to gain with more than half of its population under age 25.
For the record, Bose is a young 76. He climbs 15 rungs of a steep staircase to an open terrace, unsupported, deftly carrying a tray of beer glasses in one hand.
Ashish Bose has studied various economic and sociological phenomena for five decades, reducing massive populations into decimal points, then classifying and comparing them and presenting his findings to the government. He segregates data on people into tables, all part of his effort to better understand man and woman, urban and rural, dwellers of hills and seas.
However, when he talks of poverty, Bose does not rattle off numbers. Instead, he turns empathetic, offering anecdotes from his long field trips into India’s most remote corners.
“The primary health centre (PHC) in India is the greatest symbol of how little things have changed for the poor in India,” he says. “Even today, after 60 years, the condition of PHCs is the same. No doctors, nurses, medical equipment and people walking for miles to get substandard treatment. It is the greatest failure of the Indian state.”
Bluntness defines Bose. (“I am not impressed by China as there is no freedom in that country,” he says.)
It was in the early 1980s that Bose made headlines by calling a spade a spade. Indian academicians tend to be politically correct and avoid terms that could insult a community or large groups of people.
But in a one-page synopsis submitted to the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, Bose blamed the “Bimaru” states for India’s burgeoning population. The now well-known acronym stands for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. However, the term had an uncanny resemblance to the Hindi word bimar, which means sick—and implied that these states also were.
Back then, Bose was employed by the population research centre at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi. The professor’s stark description of these states demonstrated his concern for the demographic explosion in the cow belt and his need to ensure that Gandhi, who requested the report, digested his account quickly.
The paper argued that if India wanted to control its population, the government would need to focus on the states in the North as these four states accounted for more than 40% of India’s population.
Although many politicians belonging to these states reacted angrily, Bimaru continues to be used in government lexicon when describing development failures in these states.
Policymakers say Bose’s paper still has contemporary relevance.
“The purpose of academic research is to spur action on the part of the government,” Planning Commission member Anwar-ul-Hoda said in an interview with Mint six months ago. He added that the role of academics is to be honest, not necessarily sensitive. “And the concept of Bimaru is having a desired effect on our planning process to this day because we have started addressing inequities between states.”
Despite such efforts, the differences in economic and population growth rates between Bimaru and other Indian states sharpened in the 1990s.
In 2005-06, literacy rates in UP and Bihar were 56.28% and 47%, respectively, compared with Kerala’s 90.86%. Similarly, the average annual growth rate of population is 2.30% in Uttar Pradesh and 2.50% in Bihar, compared with Kerala’s 0.90%.
The professor also says that Orissa, given its falling standards, would now fit in snugly into the infamous acronym.
“You know, in French, a word ending with ‘ou’ would still be pronounced ‘u’ and Bimarou would not be out of place,” he says. “And one of my colleague’s children, after hearing us discuss how poor the indicators were in Orissa, told her teacher in class that Bimaru included Orissa.”
“Rajiv Gandhi believed in getting the data first for tackling any problem and he would also check the quality of data that was supplied to him,” remembers Bose 20 years later.
Born in Kolhapur in Maharashtra as the son of a tutor, Bose excelled in his studies and in his matriculate examination.
His interest in population studies began at Allahabad University where he challenged his lecturer on Malthus’ population theory. He won a medal from the university for proving the lecturer wrong.
In the mid-1950s, Bose joined the just-started Delhi School of Economics, under the leadership of V.K.R.V. Rao.
His Ph.d. dissertation examined urbanization in India at a time that few predicted the scale and size of India’s cities—and their problems.
He draws liberally from a reservoir of travel tales and shares the most memorable: a trip to Uttar Pradesh in the late 1960s.
A bull rammed into the jeep carrying the team of demographers in a remote part of the state and the animal was killed. The villagers—armed with lathis—closed in on the jeep and were ready to lynch the academicians. It took the intervention of a police officer-turned-sadhu and a Bengali district magistrate whose name Bose used (falsely insisting he was a relative) to save their lives.
One of Bose’s pet concerns is the plight of rural women. Bose says that classifying rural women as marginal workers in the census is a great injustice.
“In the hills where the men have migrated to the cities, the women perform all the agricultural tasks and they work from dawn to dusk. They should be accounted as full-time workers,” he says.
Apart from the people he stumbles upon, Bose says one of the greatest joys of his profession was the intellectual company. His more famous colleagues from the Institute of Economic Growth include P.N. Dhar (who became Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary), C.H. Hanumantha Rao (of the Planning Commission) and Manmohan Singh, who went on to become Prime Minister.
The professor describes Singh as a good human being, someone with whom he has shared adventures abroad.
“Once Dr Singh and I were in Paris to attend a conference when his suitcase got stolen at the airport. The next day the French police retrieved the bag,” Bose says. “The thieves had discarded the bag when all they found in it was the economist’s ready-to-wear turban.”
Long walks in the remote hamlets of the Himalayas, the jungles of the North-East and the plains of the South have perhaps contributed to Bose’s robust health—mental and physical. The professor’s companions at home include his wife Manjula and their dog Polly; Bose says the pup “adopted” them as they mourned the death of their prized Dalmatians.
“Come on, let me show you my ideation room,” Bose says suddenly.
The room amounts to a hut erected on the terrace. It is the professor’s getaway from the world of numbers, as well as his yoga room. Until his eyes got affected recently, he routinely used to offer shirshaasan demonstrations, standing on his head.
“Old people should never retire. That is where so many of the elderly go wrong,” Bose says. “They should continue to work.”
(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

Sunil Gulati: This economics professor controls US soccer

Melissa A. Bell — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 04:38:00 GMT

Too many students have crowded outside his closed office door and Sunil Gulati cannot concentrate through the noise.
The sign-up sheet for a Thursday lunch with the professor has quickly filled and the queue of 22 students clustered around his office door want to know if he’ll schedule another meal.
“Okay, okay,” he calms the crowd. “We’ll see what wecan do.”
Gulati has had a lot of practice of late trying to calm clamorous crowds angling for his attention.
Sunil Gulati was named president of the United States Soccer Federation in March 2006
Named president of the United States Soccer Federation in March 2006, he has been trying to translate his vision for the team into reality, while contending with pressure from colleagues, players and fans. And the road has been anything but smooth.
Just six months after Gulati’s accession, the US national soccer team made an appearance at the World Cup in Germany, highly ranked and under intense media scrutiny. But Gulati watched from the stands with great disappointment as the team suffered a quick defeat in the first round.
“I’m so upset!” one blogger lamented on worldcupblog.org. Another poster on fifaworldcup.com said, “This only proves and tells the world that they do not have a place in the highest level of football.”
It was a disconcerting start for Gulati. A few months later, the professor settles into his small office in the economics department at Columbia University, and shrugs off the loss with a philosophical, “What can you do?”
How a young man born in Allahabad 47 years ago, who never played professional football, ended up heading the US federation underscores a passion for the sport that Gulati has cultivated his whole life.
His family moved to a small Connecticut town from India when he was three years old and Gulati grew up playing soccer. He participated and coached youth leagues throughout his college years. As a Columbia graduate student, the sport was far from a national obsession, and so, the organization of the entire league was essentially managed off spreadsheets from his Apple Mac.
As the league grew, Gulati worked in almost every capacity, in accounting, managing, assisting, and coaching. Still, his parents were uncertain how this interest in soccer would affect his career path.
“They thought I was kind of spinning my wheels, doing this crazy sports thing,” Gulati recalls. But he was allowed the indulgence as he moved on to a “real” career: as an economics professor at Columbia and as an economic adviser at the World Bank. “I wasn’t a renegade. I always had a day job.”
A year ago, few on campus even knew that the professor, whose passion for teaching has earned him plenty of student fans, cared for soccer. Columbia’s online student newspaper, Bwog.com, regularly tracks his quippy one-liners in his economics class: “You’re supposed to do something for the people you love on Valentine’s Day. And, of course, I love you all very much. So I decided to give you the quiz on pink paperinstead!”
Says John Klopfer, an economics major at Columbia: “Some people detest his showmanship. Nonetheless, it is that same showmanship that makes his class so popular and convinces many students to take it who have no plans to major in economics.”
Gulati does have detractors, however. The ex-US national soccer coach, Bruce Arena, said Gulati was a “superfan” who ran for president to “be around the world of bigwigs at Fifa (the international federation of football)”.
The remark came immediately after Gulati’s swift dismissal of Arena after the disappointment at the World Cup. An apology quickly followed, but Gulati disregards the apology: “Besides my 8-year-old, you’re not allowed to trash me and apologize the next day.”
He also received flack for the highly secretive, seven-month search for a new head coach, which quickly ended after the first choice, former German national coach Jurgen Klinsmann, turned down the job. The federation hired an interim coach in his place, Bob Bradley, most recently with the Chivas USA club. The press criticized Gulati for the lack of resolution and the time the national team spent without any proper direction.
Gulati is quick to remind his detractors that he has long-reaching goals and needs the time to see them play out.
“It is very much a labour of love,” he remarks.
Although Gulati has his work cut out for him with a team that ranked 29th on the world stage as of April, Jim Morehouse, the communications director for USSF, says Gulati is perfectly positioned for the role of president because of his participation in the sport and the federation through the years, saying, “Quite literally, he has done it all.”
In 1994, Gulati helped bring the World Cup to the US, a major coup for the young man who was working as an assistant to the president at the federation. His parents flew from Connecticut to watch games in Michigan. For the first time, he says, they began to see the crazy sports thing as an actual accomplishment, adding, “It’s safe to say now they’re big soccer fans.”
Gulati has been integral to the growth of the sport in a country dominated by other sports. Like India, where cricket dominates sport talk, US sports fans do not embrace soccer like they do to football, baseball and basketball.
“I’m obsessively passionate. If you’re not passionate about something, it’s going to be a long 50-year career,” he advises his economic students.
His primary goal for his tenure is to help bring about a national recognition for his sport on the levels of football and baseball. He hopes interest garnered by players such as soccer star David Beckham, who recently moved to the Los Angeles Galaxy team, will draw more fans to the sport he loves.
He also wants the World Cup to come back to the states, a new woman’s professional league by 2008.
Gulati has a lot to prove, but he’s not intimidated by the task. “It’s just the beginning of my term,” he says. “Check back with me in two years.”
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by e-mail to interview@livemint.com

Amitabh Pandey | The man who made rail reservation hassle-free

K.P. Narayana Kumar — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:21:00 GMT

Anyone who has access to a computer and an Internet connection can buy a railway ticket online in India.
That wasn’t always the case: in the past, travellers would stand in serpentine queues and tolerate booking clerks who were impatient at best, and rude otherwise.
The man responsible for the change, now a senior executive at travel firm Thomas Cook India’s Mumbai office, is a bordering-on-the-portly, middle-aged bespectacled practitioner of tai chi, Amitabh Pandey.
The one-time economics teacher isn’t the kind of man anybody would associate with the creation of India’s biggest e-commerce site—with tickets worth Rs350 crore being booked on it in 2006-07, irctc.com, the Indian Railways’ online booking site is a shoo-in for that distinction—but it was Pandey who initiated the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corp.’s foray into online ticketing five years ago. That ‘start-up’ has now grown into an organization selling four million tickets a year on average. That’s still a fraction of the six billion people who travel by train in Indian every year, but with the country having a mere 21.1 million Internet users, it is easy to see where the problem lies.
Encouraged by the success of its online sales efforts, last year IRCTC started allowing users to print out their e-tickets. The ease of booking and printing tickets online will encourage more people to do so and “make e-commerce more popular”, says Rohit Verma, the head of the Internet division of Aptech Computer Education. He adds that this is similar to what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Indian Railways moved to computerized reservations: “Railways helped popularize computers in India... as the public saw that the new machine could be trusted.”
The man who played a role in changing how millions of Indians travel was once a lecturer of economics at New Delhi’s Venkateshwara College. In 1983, he gave up teaching and joined the Indian Railways Traffic Service—jobs in the railways were much sought after in those days; they were secure and came with plentiful perks. He served in most divisions in North and East India. And in 2001, he was named group general manager (IT services), IRCTC.
Pandey, who opted out of the railways last year to join Thomas Cook as head of e-business, recalls that around that time Indian Railways had offered its newly created subsidiary IRCTC the catering and ticketing businesses. Pandey says M.N. Chopra, managing director, IRCTC, asked him what he wanted to do.
“Catering was just not my cup of tea and so I said I wanted to focus on ticketing instead. And the Internet boom was visible everywhere and it was obvious that this was a service that had to be offered,” says Pandey. “It was an idea whose time had come.”
IRCTC pitched the online ticketing idea to the Railway Board, and Pandey says some of the members of the board, the top decision-making body in the railways, including R.K. Thoopal, then member, traffic, were enthused by it.
“They were excited with the project and the only thing that they were worried about was bearing liability of any losses in the eventuality of the software going haywire,” he adds. “But once we assured the board that IRCTC would make advance payments to railways for release of tickets to sell online, they were satisfied.”
Pandey says everyone was convinced that allowing people to buy tickets online “would earn railways tremendous goodwill even if there might be no money to be made immediately.”
The Railway Board cleared IRCTC’s proposal for a pilot project within a week.
In many ways, Pandey is an atypical Internet entrepreneur: he isn’t a techie and admits that he belongs to “that generation of people who had to learn computers quite late in life.”
“Even now I cannot operate the computer with the ease with which my son can,” he says.
Still, it was his fascination for computers that played a role in his opting for the Internet project. He was 38 when he first handled one and has been hooked ever since.
IRCTC floated a global tender to identify a technological partner and finally decided on a US firm, Broadvision Inc. The challenge facing the two companies was integrating the existing public reservation system (PRS) with the new module that could be accessed by customers through the Internet.
The PRS had served the railways for well over 20 years and was considered a secure and reliable system. The system has servers in five big cities across the country which can be accessed from clients (or dumb terminals) at reservation centres across India.
When the reservation clerk enters details from the reservation form on to the system, he or she is actually initiating a dialogue between his terminal and the server to ascertain ticket availability. The challenge in taking this online was to ensure that this system would be able to answer any query posed by the Internet-based system.
“This was fairly tedious work as we had to integrate two systems that were built in different eras,” says Pandey.
Bugs were another major problem that took time to resolve. The system was finally launched on 1 January 2002. “Initially people were scared of making online payments as they were not sure that they would be reimbursed if the transaction was to go wrong,” says Pandey. IRCTC instituted a strict reimbursement policy and customers were promptly repaid. “The word slowly spread and more people began to tell others that this online system worked and that they would get back their money for sure if they did not get their ticket,” adds Pandey.
The courier industry in India had matured by then and Pandey says its reliability (tickets are delivered through private couriers) too played a role in ensuring that the project was a success.
Every year since 2002, IRCTC has seen the number of tickets booked online double. And like the perfect start-up, IRCTC relied only on word-of-mouth publicity. “Our marketing budget was almost zero,” says Pandey. Soon all the major banks in the country offered tie-ups by making available a link to their Internet banking system which would allow purchase of railway tickets from IRCTC. A prepaid cash card started by the Zee group, too, has met with some success. It reduces the risk of making payments through credit cards as these special cards have funds only to a limited amount.
“The online system would have reached a critical mass only when it handles at least around 20% of total number of tickets sold by the railways,” says Pandey.
With the online ticketing efforts of IRCTC succeeding, Pandey decided to move on and joined Thomas Cook because he craves the “adrenalin (charge) of running a new project.” His experience at IRCTC has put him among the few successful e-commerce entrepreneurs in India, and Pandey is a veritable treasure trove of insights on how things work online.
The e-commerce universe in India, he says, is male-dominated. When IRCTC conducted a survey of customers who had used the Internet to book tickets, the results showed that more than 90% of the clients were men.
“It is quite natural,” says Pandey trying to explain why there were more male customers. “More men have picked up computer skills than women in India and further more they are usually the decision makers at home,” he adds. That’s the kind of knowledge that will stand him in good stead in his new assignment.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Avinash Dixit | India’s future Nobel winner in economics?

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:39:00 GMT

Avinash Kamalakar Dixit likes to play a game or two—even as he teaches game theory to his students at Princeton University.
There is an old Princeton tradition that Dixit uses to bring to life what can sometimes be an esoteric and math-heavy subject. Students at that university thank a teacher with a polite and brief round of applause when he finishes a course with them. From that comes the “applause auction”, which is now part of the folklore of economics. Dixit pays anything between $20 and $50 to the student who claps last. So there is an incentive to keep the applause going. Most students drop out of the game after 15-20 minutes, says Dixit. The record is four and a half hours. Often, there is more than one student in the running for the prize, sometimes as many as five or six.
These students learn to compete and collaborate among themselves, and how people and organizations do so is the central quest of game theory.
But, Dixit’s contribution to game theory—the science of strategy—goes far beyond this strikingly original way of teaching it.
He is widely recognized as one of its great theoreticians, on par with the likes of the polymath mathematician John von Neumann and the troubled genius John Nash, whose battles with his inner demons were portrayed by Russell Crowe on the screen in A Beautiful Mind (Dixit believes that “a lot of game theory is wonderfully illustrated in films”).
Besides game theory, Dixit has made seminal contributions to other branches of economics—international trade, organizational theory, growth and development, and what is called new institutional economics.
“My research agenda is opportunistic. I work in a rather unsystematic manner and pursue various issues that I find interesting at that point of time,” says Dixit, who was in town to give the second P.R. Brahmananda Memorial Lecture in Mumbai, hosted by the Reserve Bank of India.
Dixit is one of a trio of Indians who stand on the highest peak of academic economics.
One of them, Amartya Sen, has already won the Nobel Prize. And the names of the other two—Jagdish Bhagwati and Dixit—are inevitably tossed in the air when the new Nobel season starts every year.
Yet, in 2003, Dixit and Bhagwati wrote a letter to The Economist in response to another letter there that said that either of them was more deserving of the prize than Paul Krugman. They publicly disagreed with that claim, an indication of their modesty and intellectual honesty. Even as it is notoriously unpredictible, many believe that Dixit will win the Nobel Prize some day.
Dixit says he came to economics via mathematics. “I enjoyed math, but more of the applied variety. It was used a lot in physics, which I studied. But a couple of people pointed me towards economics.”
Born in Mumbai in 1944, Dixit studied at St. Xavier’s College before heading to Cambridge en route to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he took up economics and where he was taught by two of the most accomplished post-war economists—Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow.
He made his mark there, in more ways than one. Stanley Fischer, former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund and now the governor of Bank of Israel, once told an interviewer that Dixit used to finish the daily crossword in The London Times in 10 seconds.
“I did develop this habit to do the crossword during lunch or certain seminars. But the time needed was closer to 15 minutes,” he says, with a soft laugh.
After teaching stints at the University of California, Berkeley and Balliol College, Oxford, and the University of Warwick, Dixit joined Princeton in 1981.
One of the issues that Dixit has been increasingly working on in recent years is institutional economics, as part of a growing band of economists who believe that there is more to development than dry and technical issues such as investments and productivity.
Institutions matter, which means that concerns like secure property rights and respect for commercial contracts should be at the centre stage of the development debate, rather than at the periphery.
Does he think that Indian economists have ignored institutional factors?
“India is not special,” says Dixit. “The importance of getting institutions right has been recognized in the world only over the past 10 years.”
So does India have the institutions to help rapid development? “I don’t know enough. I am trying to find out by talking to people,” says Dixit, modestly.
He does offer an example. When people realize that they cannot depend on the courts for justice when someone reneges on a contract, they depend on organized crime to help them out. “People tell me this happens in India as well,” says Dixit.
In April 2005, the otherwise non-controversial economist lobbed a hand grenade down the corridors of the World Bank. In a speech, Dixit pointed out that the research in economics is ambiguous and confusing, with high-quality economists disagreeing with each other even on the most basic issues. “Faced with all these contradictions and shifts, I can identify only one consistent policy prescription. It is the quality Napoleon valued most in his generals, namely luck,” he told his audience. “It was written deliberately to provoke people in the World Bank to be more skeptical, not to take research at face value and be sensitive to the context of place and time,” says Dixit.
In short, there is no magic recipe for development.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Srikanth Nadhamuni | He’s helping change the rules of governance among civic bodies

K. Raghu — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:34:00 GMT

The rocky town of Ramanagaram, a 50km drive west of Bangalore, became famous in the mid-seventies when it became the backdrop for Sholay, one of Bollywood’s biggest hits, as the fictional village of Ramgarh that psychopath bandit Gabbar Singh reigned over.
Three decades later, Ramanagaram is in the limelight again, this time for an experiment that could change rules in governance among urban bodies across India. Using a specially built geographical information system or GIS, a technique that combines maps and satellite images with computers, the town municipality has opened up its doors to its citizenry.
Details of any property—tax receipts, ownership history or exact surveyed area—can be accessed on the town’s website, civic complaints logged in either online or through phone, the progress of municipality projects monitored, and accounts of the municipality be looked up.
Leading this change is a technocrat, Srikanth Nadhamuni, 44, who matches Sholay protagonist Amitabh Bachchan in height and baritone, and his eGovernments Foundation, a not-for-profit trust that builds and offers free software to help manage municipalities. With modules that can be customized in local languages, the software enables birth and death registration, property tax, accounts, ward works and complaints. And 64 urban bodies, including the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and 53 urban bodies in Karnataka, run it.
The benefit: the software allows municipalities and local governments to grow their property tax collections. This improves the finances of the local body, and the money can be used in efforts to improve civic infrastructure. And everything happens in a transparent rules-driven fashion.
The foundation, started in 2003 and funded by Nandan M. Nilekani, chief executive officer of Infosys Technologies, is effecting a slow change in the way governments operate.
“Most of the problems we face in India is due to poor governance. Lack of governance is what is holding our country back,” says Nadhamuni, a key member of the design team that built Intel’s Pentium processor. He then worked with Silicon Graphics and WebMD in Silicon Valley. Parts of his American work-life remains with him: he prefers using his laptop computer as his virtual office and is yet to come to terms with text messaging on cellphones—not so common in the US—instead preferring to make calls in answer to such messages. Nischal, his 12-year-old son, finds this amusing, says Nadhamuni.
An engineering graduate from National Institute of Engineering in Mysore, whose famous alumni include Infosys chairman and chief mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy, Nadhamuni went on to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Louisiana University. Schoolmates remember him as an energetic organizer.
“He’s got the ability to bring people and hold them together,” says Anya Saini, Nadhamuni’s classmate in Mysore from kindergarten to high school, before she moved on to study medicine. He’s regrouped his school classmates after nearly two decades on his return, she says.
At Sun Microsystems, where he met his wife Sunita, Nadhamuni was also known for his outside-of-work activism. He was part of “Indians for Collective Action”, a group that raised funds for charity and worked with non-government agencies in India.
“I had the luxury to look at India from outside and understand the complexity of issues here. But I also realized the problems were so huge that what NGOs could do is just a drop in the ocean,” says Nadhamuni who, in 2002, left the corporate race and moved back to India, a defining moment in his life that, he claims, was inspired by the couple’s role model Mahatma Gandhi. Sunita is now the chief executive at Arghyam, a not-for-profit trust headed by Nilekani’s wife Rohini that works to provide sustainable water for the people.
At a meeting of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, a now-defunct public-private partnership initiative formed to address civic issues in Bangalore, Nadhamuni met Nilekani—a votary of urbanization—to work out ways to help millions of Indians come out of poverty. “Our minds matched. We knew the problems. Urban areas occupy just 3% of the land, contribute 55% to India’s gross domestic product, but the municipalities’ revenue is a paltry 0.66% of the GDP,” says Nadhamuni. Three out of every four people who own properties in New Delhi, for instance, do not pay tax (on property), while property tax is the biggest source of revenue that global cities run on.
With more than Rs10 crore from Nilekani, the largely volunteer-driven eGovernments Foundation—half of the 600-odd volunteers are from the US, including urban planners, GIS and transportation experts—built the software, largely based on open source architecture.
“Everything is recorded in the system and in real time. It is all public data,” says Nadhamuni of the software that has been integrated with the back-end systems of the municipalities to ensure that there is little room for error through human interaction. eGovernments Foundation is being supported by the World Bank to implement the software to automate all the 167 cities in Karnataka.
Nilaya Mitash, former additional secretary for urban development in the Karnataka government, says tax collections in municipalities are clearly on the upswing after the implementation of software, which makes targeting defaulters easy. Mahadevapura, a suburb in east Bangalore, for instance, has seen its property taxes double to Rs10 crore in 2006 from the previous year.
“It’s a silent revolution and results will be there to be seen in the next three to four years,” says Mitash, an Indian Administrative Service officer who’s currently managing director of Rajiv Gandhi Rural Housing Corp. Ltd, a company promoted by the Karnataka government to promote housing for the poor.
Other results are emerging from the implementation as well. Nearly 1.14 lakh complaints—the largest number on how street lights don’t work—have been registered and handled on the software for Karnataka and the number is growing as citizens become aware of the power of software. “The citizen will be empowered as more transparency sets in,” predicts S. Sadagopan, director of the International Institute of Information Technology, one of the biggest advocates of the use of computers in government and a director of the eGovernments Foundation.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Harshwardhan Gupta | A designer you just can’t bet against

Sudha Menon — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:30:00 GMT

Quick-fingered casino employees in the US will soon have reason to hate India’s Harshwardhan Gupta. The engineer from Pune is designing a machine that will stop them from slipping a few notes from the collection box on their tables as it is being transferred to the in-house treasury.
It’s hard to visualise anyone hating Gupta, a balding, bordering-on-portly 52-year-old who looks as if the word avuncular was made for him. Over the past 25 years, the graduate of mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, has built a reputation for himself building machines (machine design, the discipline is called).
From his small office, which is part of his Pune flat, Gupta designs machines that can be used for a range of applications across several industries—from textiles to consumer products and from pharmaceuticals to soap-making.
The machine he is building for casinos has been commissioned by an American firm. It was happy enough with the result for its patent application to list Gupta as a co-inventor.
In a world rapidly becoming obsessed with computers and computing, Gupta is the rare mechanically-minded inventor. He admits to being obsessed with machines even as a child.
Among the various machines he has designed are: the world’s first machine that can manufacture sophisticated three-layered tropical blister packs (used for drugs such as aspirin), alu-alu blister packs that have aluminium on the top and bottom, and conventional PVC blister packs and a balloon folding machine (for CNC Custom, a US firm, and he designed this over phone and email and took just six weeks).
In 1999, Gupta designed a high-speed blister packaging machine for Precision Gears that would allow pharma firms to pack as many as 3,000 tablets/min. Companies such as Cipla, Cadilla, Johnson & Johnson and Burroughs Wellcome bought the machine that helped speed up operations. Besides, it cost a mere Rs9 lakh, in comparison to German firm IWKA’s machine that cost double.
Gupta is now working with one of North India’s largest soap makers to develop a soap-making machine that can produce 400 cakes of soap a minute and produce such novelties as translucent soap.
Works of art
Gupta was an enthusiastic painter when he was young. Today, he says, his machines are his art. The new generation of engineers and designers have mastered various computer-aided design (CAD) platforms, he adds, but have not learnt to use their heads.
“Isn’t it a shame that after using pressure cookers over half a century in this country, we haven’t been able to design a handle that does not come loose every few weeks?” he asks.
“The core of good design is in completely understanding the client’s technology, asking him for a wish list and delivering a solution that will pre-empt future needs too,” says Gupta.
In 1996, Core Parenterals, then one of Asia’s largest makers of intravenous fluids realized that manually stacking and destacking heavy trays filled with IV fluid bottles into large sterilizers slowed down operations considerably. Gupta was called in by Pharmalab India, the machine manufacturer which was contracted by Core for the job. He designed an automated ‘Tray Robo’ that vertically stacked the trays onto trolleys that rolled into the sterilizers.
For Core Parenterals it meant lesser time lost on the production line and for Pharmalab it resulted in an order not just for the machine but also for the trolleys that Gupta had designed. While working on this project, Gupta also designed modular steel conveyors for transporting the IV bottles which are even now being sold by Pharmalab to pharma and food companies.
“He (Gupta) is a genius with an amazing ability to translate what is merely a concept and requirement in the client’s mind into the perfect design. He is a man ahead of his times because many of the concepts and manufacturing processes he spoke to us almost a decade ago are what is extensively being used today,” says Umesh Shah, managing director, Pharmalab India.
Creating designers
The praise doesn’t affect Gupta who is worried that India isn’t doing enough to create designers. At the heart of this process lies the ability to design machines and the country isn’t doing enough of that. Gupta says machine design isn’t taught well at any of the engineering colleges in the country, not even in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
Sure, he adds, students are taught how to design elements that go into machines but they have no idea how to design the whole.
To address this deficiency, Gupta, with the assistance of wife Nandini who runs an engineering and design placement agency, has started offering short-term courses on machine design called ‘Design of Design’.
That’s apt for someone who could well be considered a designer of designers.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com