Three posts on education

1) In the wake of India trying to welcome US-based universities to educate its future generations,
(http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/how-loyal-are-overseas-branch-campuses-to-their-host-countries/32723?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en) here is a report on how loyal are overseas branch campuses are to their host countries? Some points are worth emphasizing:

"A couple of weeks ago, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business announced that it would leave Singapore and shift its Asian operation to Hong Kong. The reasoning seems to be strategic. Its contract with Singapore was concluding in 2015, and Hong Kong offers better access to the rapidly expanding Chinese market. Similarly, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas has signaled that it may be leaving Singapore after its last batch of students complete their study in 2015. In this case, the university couldn’t agree on the student subsidies paid by its host, the government-sponsored Singapore Institute of Technology. And, in the midst of its global expansion, New York University also recently revealed it was closing its Tisch campus on the island nation after it also failed to reach a new financial arrangement with the Singapore government.
...
Within a matter of a few months, three international branch campuses on one island signaled they would be closing or relocating because they didn’t like the financial deal provided by the government. This is virtually unthinkable back home. The University of Chicago is not tempted to relocate to Houston because of Governor Perry’s pitch that business is better in Texas. The University of Nevada at Las Vegas will not be leaving Nevada no matter how much it dislikes the financial arrangement it has with Nevada. And NYU would never have closed its New York campus, even if it didn’t get approval from the city for a controversial expansion in Greenwich Village.
...
International branch campuses, though, seem to have a more flexible sense of place. They are less like a university in a college town and more like a department store in a suburban mall. If the community declines or the market shifts, the university soldiers on; the store has a moving sale."

There you go, in simple English, overseas branches are BIG business ventures for a university. As long as the money cow can be milked, India will be a target for every university in the US and Europe. Which means, India will always be a target for these universities. Thus, it behooves the MHRD and GoI to not loose their senses (which they so far have not) in opening up the education sector. As much as future generations of Indians need to be educated, it is not like the overseas universities are being benevolent, they are just trying to take care of their own bottomline first and foremost. If any philanthropic act accrues in the process, while these universities would like to take credit, only the naive will bestow free credit to them.

 2) William Deresiewicz writes the following in his piece, "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" (http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/#.Uhv4B5JQFgo):

"Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it."

That last line quite caricatures the US and west-based Indian-origin peoples who find fault with most things that is India today and in the past, on both sides of the divide: leftists as well as rightists. When one takes themselves out of India, they should tend to judge less and accepting (in a non-flippant yet resigned-to-fate yet observational sense) of every possible stupidity that India and Indians display. The ones who want change by sitting outside and by influencing the proceedings inside do end up being the proverbial cats that run after their own tail. Quite amusing to watch for a show, not quite funny to have as a pet.

In any case, while admittedly a looong piece, the author belabors and rambles about the simple point that no metric can capture it all. Yet, there has to be a metric, some metric, any metric to measure things, even if incompletely, even if imperfectly, even if idiotically. The criticism of existing measures is not the same as an alternate/candidate metric that will meet these virtues and more. It is just a destructive criticism of things that exist as not meeting the imaginary benchmarks set by the author. A more constructive and far more difficult criticism is to propose a candidate that could be tested for being a useful solution to the problem at hand.

Nepotism and elitism are not new phenomena that have come about with Ivy League universities or their poor Indian copycats. Nepotism has existed ever since man has, every set of peoples end up subdividing themselves till they feel comfortable as a unit. To deny that these do not exist is to whitewash history. Given that these two traits do exist, the current solution is the best till a new one comes up. And when a new better solution is up, people do switch on to that bandwagon till another one turns up. To deride the course of history in the hope of building a better h metric is one, to deride that to endlessly circle around the same point without solving the problem at hand is quite another.

3) Buttressing the above claim that nepotism and elitism exist even in the highest circles, here is a report on how four of the key ideas in Obama's plan to control college costs bear familiar fingerprints (http://chronicle.com/article/4-Key-Ideas-in-Obamas-Plan/141239/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en):

"The president's plan dovetails closely with the agendas of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent $472-million to remake college education in the United States, and of the Lumina Foundation, the largest private foundation devoted solely to higher education. Many features of the president's plan have been advocated, too, in the research and analysis of the New America Foundation's education-policy program." 

There you go, even the only superpower's policies get made in Seattle, Bay Area or Indianapolis. Thank god that the Obama administration did not source ideas from the Heritage Foundation.

Academia, Radicalism, and the Publication Industry

Three small reports on these topics:

1) From Linky:

Cruz’s comments about Harvard echo the claims of other prominent conservative politicians and commentators, who like to assert that faculty lounges are nests of radicalism. But are they?

To answer this question, among others, I analyzed data from surveys and interviews with professors, including a nationally-representative survey of the American professoriate, conducted in 2006 with the sociologist Solon Simmons. My research shows that only about 9 percent of professors are political radicals on the far left, on the basis of their opinions about a wide range of social and political matters, and their self-descriptions (for example, whether they describe themselves as radicals). More common in the professoriate—a left-leaning occupation, to be sure—are progressives, who account for roughly a third of the faculty (and whose redistributionism is more limited in scope), and academics in the center left, who make up an additional 14 percent of professors.

Radical academics, it turns out, are overrepresented not at elite research universities, like Harvard, but at small liberal-arts colleges. Most are concentrated in a handful of social sciences and humanities fields, like mine, sociology (in which radicals are nevertheless in the distinct minority), and in tiny interdisciplinary programs like women’s studies and African-American studies.

But who are academic radicals, and what do they believe? This is a diverse category, encompassing social democrats, radical feminists, radical environmentalists, the occasional postmodernist—and yes, some Marxists. All told, about 43 percent of radical professors say that the term “Marxist” describes them at least somewhat well. (About 5 percent of American professors, over all, consider themselves Marxists.). 

In the course of seven years of research, I never encountered any radical professors who advocated “overthrowing the United States government.” Those who are politically committed to Marxism are profoundly concerned with economic inequality and class, believe that things aren’t going to get much better for people at the bottom of the income ladder unless capitalism in its present form gives way, and harbor some hope that things might eventually change—but are generally pessimistic. Radical academics vote Democratic in national elections, but do so holding their noses, seeing the Democratic Party and President Obama as far too centrist and business-friendly.

While it seems unclear that the specific professors at Harvard to whom Cruz was referring would describe themselves as radicals, it is the case that many radical academics see no point in trying to neatly separate their politics from their scholarship. Their academic analyses and teaching often have a political thrust. This can be a source of great tension not just with conservatives, but also with generally liberal professors who believe that politics, scholarship, and teaching shouldn’t mix.

Layered on top of these tensions are generational differences. The social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s led to an influx of radicals in the social sciences and humanities. Scholars who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s often took issue with the radical intellectual perspectives championed by their predecessors. Today a new generation of scholars, influenced by the Occupy Wall Street movement, appears poised to embrace radicalism once again, in the latest phase of a back-and-forth cycle.

Is it a problem for American higher education that 9 percent of faculty members are political radicals? The answer is that far-left academic radicalism is both a weakness and a strength. Were there no radical professors for conservatives to fulminate against—or had radical academics done more to keep their politics and their work separate—there might well be fewer political attacks on higher education today, and greater public support for colleges and universities. Radical professors in the post-1960s period overestimated how much tolerance there would be for them, and how far the idea of academic freedom could be stretched. Also, some academic radicals, privileging politics over scholarship, have waged unproductive battles against the scientific aspirations of their colleagues.

At the same time, academic radicals in the social sciences and humanities have given us novel and important ways of thinking about society and culture. They have alerted scholars and students to previously unrecognized dynamics of inequality around race, class, gender, and sexuality.

 2) On this count, its de javu time all over again in Tamland. An opinion piece motivated by Linky.

Student protests were last seen in Tamland in the mid- to late-50s and the early 60s on the "National Language" imposition issue. The Central Governments under Nehru and Shastri, both in terms of personal ideologies as well as pushed to the brink by the stalwarts who later dominated the Jan Sangh from what is now UP and Bihar and the aam aadmi on the street in quite a bit of "North India", as well as the local Congress regimes under Rajaji and Bhaktavatsalam badly botched their credibilities by pushing the envelope on the language issue.

Sadly, what that meant for the future of Tamland's electoral politics was that opinions got so badly polarized that there has hardly been a space/say for non-regional parties. And a common-sense perspective will be hard pushed to hope that there will be a say for national parties in Tamland in the near-future. And even more sadly, a Tamland precedent driven regional party culture has spread throughout much of India. While one can argue that this is both good as well as bad, precise answers depend on the issue at hand.

What should be the role of a State Government in foreign policy/diplomacy issues? Should WB get a veto over trade relations with Bangladesh, especially if it harms the milling industry in TN (Linky)? Should TN get a veto over bilateral relations with Sri Lanka, especially when there are ample reports on human rights violations on normal people independent of whether they are (former) members of LTTE or not? Should Bihar, Uttarakhand and UP get a veto over relations with Nepal, because of the Madhesi bonding across the borders? Should the states from the Indian Northeast have a veto over border demarcations on the contested India-Bangladesh border? Should a state (TN) have a say when the Central Government hands over an island (Katchhathheevu) to a neighboring country (Sri Lanka) for the sake of good neighborly relations, especially if it harms the livelihood of a subset of its peoples? Of course, Sarkaria commission recommendations do not study these aspects as these things seemed far from immediate in the mid-80s. Even then, the Sarkaria commission recommendations did not get fully enforced especially when it came to the dreaded misuse of Article 356 and one had to wait for the Supreme Court to have its say on the Bommai case, or in the case or river water tribunal recommendations on inter-state disputes where the Central Government could not enforce its neutral perspective due to political considerations. It is time that the Central Government constitute a new Constitutional panel on what should/can be the say of the various state governments on issues under the Central Government list.

But, without digressing, Tamland today is witnessing a student-driven protest time. Independent of whether they have legitimate issues (or not) to protest, and independent of whether they are being supported by anti-nationalist (perceived or real) forces or not, the new reality is that it does not take two to tango. Things do go belly up very quickly and fixing the ground realities and perceptions of angst against the Central Government's inactions take a long time. Further, these are needless issues at this stage in independent India's evolution given the enormity of crises at hand.

What should/could the Central Government do at this stage? Two things: the DMK is not the sole conduit of popular opinion on ground realities in Tamland for the Congress government at the Center. Opening a dialogue with the detested Modi-friend is not only the need of the hour, but also realpolitik. Opening dialogues with no-namers such as Vai Ko, Ramadoss, Seeman, etc., can be done on a need-to basis. But more importantly, opening dialogues with students is not needed to convince them of their futility, but to provide them with a hope that someone from the Central Government is respecting their opinions enough to talk with them. We often get talked to, it is hard for people to talk with. During the height of the language crisis, Nehru sent Indira Gandhi as an ambassador to open a dialogue with the local DMK leaders of that era. And Indira Gandhi did a great job in bringing the DMK to talk with the Center somuchso that the DMK chose to ally with Indira when the situation arose (1971 elections). That the DMK-Congress alliance went belly-up after that is great credit to both sides in the equation.

Without getting too regionally involved in how India chooses to vote at the UN, it is at least incumbent on the Central Government to explain how it has forced/coaxed/encouraged the Government of Sri Lanka to act on perceived human rights violations of Tamils in Sri Lanka, providing a shared vision of dignity and hope within a United Sri Lanka model, reconstruction of demolished temples and villages in the North and the East, etc. How has the Central Government aid announced in 2008 after the end of the War been spent? Any random observer would tend to appreciate the positive role played by the Central Government in this mess, provided they get to see its perspective. As a popular wisdom goes, Good Intentions are not Enough! It is time to talk, to people in Tamland, to the Government of Sri Lanka, to the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and especially to the protesting students in Tamland (independent of their utter stupidity).

3) And finally, from Linky. The report is best read pictorially.

As much as I would like to see the rise of China from a scary-eyed perspective, I would say, "bring it on." My personal experience having reviewed hundreds of papers (if not a thousand and more) that get flooded into the Manuscriptcentral system in EE from China, Korea, Japan, Europe, Australia, India, and even the US has been that most of the papers are junk with stale ideas meant to ensure that the CV gets padded by a few lines this way and that. The new competitiveness that I see from Chinese academics is not a great cause for alarm because of their uber-productivity, but a great cause of alarm for how they flood a system that is already strained at the margins (find three good reviewers for your paper and you will be in the 95th percentile and above in terms of how the review process works). In some of the high eigenfactor score journals, earlier, one could expect profound reviews that makes the author(s) think through their ideas once more. But these days, one should be very happy if at least one reviewer follows your idea deep enough to provide an intelligent response. The simple fact that I get at least a few review requests every week in an area that I have abandoned in all but spirit (and yes, I do accept every single one of them in the vain hope that I will uncover a brilliant idea before it gets published) just tells a random observer how remarkably over-strained the whole system is by the flooding that is CV padding. I pity the IEEE for it has become more of a company culture than a professional association-based community values driven culture --- a sad price to pay for globalizing engineering.

Coming up next: Making sense of the Northeast verdict 

Copycatting the Personal Experience Pathway

After many years of spending time writing (rather, rewriting) papers, presentations and of late, proposals for everything from a 100$ travel award to a 1000$ raise to a 10000$ grant to buy time and some peace to present the next best thing after sliced bread, it is not often that one has the time or the liberty to look back at where and how it all started.

It started without definition or form or goal and in all vagueness that research can be and often is, without any fanfare, remarkableness or preciseness, without any agendas except learning (sadly, a thing of the past now), and definitely without any indication to the odds against than for. It led to knocking on the doors of many a "friend" to ship papers and books, even an email to a someone in California (who later turned out to be an extended relative via marriage) to ship me papers from his days of yore, to pestering the Xerox staff in the Himalayan mess of a clutterbox called the fourth floor of the Old Library building right past Gajendra Circle to get me copies of papers as soon as possible (translated as by the end of the day or two), to running to other Universities (and how they made me feel like IITM was a relative cornucopia in terms of library infrastructure and books) and exploiting the Inter-Library Loan system to the hilt, to exasperating at seeing papers from old journal collections torn by lazy neanderthals who could nt get a photocopy of the paper and had to resort to the meanest and vilest form of abuse in research, and more. Cute little matrix manipulations saw me cycle my way fast and furious to meet my B.Tech advisor one fine day at 8 P.M. after the mess of a mess food only to find his door locked. One thing led to another and the next few days will witness the 11th anniversary of my B.Tech thesis defense -- a borderline open defiance of a post-adolescent presentation to the Committee (some of who know me now by name, some by allusion and hearsay, and some who have not heard at all) with the a priori information and personal conviction that I had slogged and aced through the ordeal in the ocean of undergraduate research. Unlike many in my batch of 90 odd electrical engineering degree-holders, I took the final year project more as a thesis and less as a project even if I did not put in the effort to learn LaTeX to type out the report then. The results were remarkable at least in a personal capacity, even if not revolutionary or even remotely useful in a technological sense and definitely not timely in terms of contributions to that area (it has been cited a good four times since then -- a pass for a first paper I would reckon with the experience I have now).

And more than the running around in the goal of learning and the cute little matrix manipulations that I did when the word matrix did nt mean much more than just a stack of numbers, the process of converting the B.Tech thesis to a published paper in the IEEE Trans. on Sig. Proc. was indeed a bigger ordeal. It saw accusations of "plagiarism" with suggestions to look at similar research published by a star (and his student) in the field just a year before I even knew how a FFT algorithm was implemented on a DSP. While I can laugh it off now, being called out as a plagiarist on your first work when you did nt know that IEEE Xplore existed and did nt have access to it as a B.Tech student lowest on the totem-pole, and when you did nt get the latest editions of the journal without a good six month delay was indeed a catastrophe that "psyches" you out for a while. But if I did shrug off the accusation and write a rebuttal that led to the subsequent publication of the paper (minus what I thought was indeed my cute little trick even if someone else claims it today officially), much of it is owed to where I came from, how I grew up, and what I saw on the way.

I come from a remarkably unremarkable lower middle-class background with no special or extraordinary fondness for education that the Brahmins are expected/believed to have. My mother was a school teacher who later became a Headmistress but this had essentially no deep bearing on me. It did take an extraordinary amount of effort to pay the high-school fees which kept climbing just as my whiskers kept growing showing me in real terms what an exponential function really was. We were happy to have three square meals a day and a ~400 sq. feet roof to live under, and in hindsight I am happy for just that. I did nt know what the JEE was till a few days before the 11th standard began but jumped on it like a mad dog without any rhyme or reason when I learned about it from friends who had been preparing for it at least a year before that, if not more. It would be untrue to explain away the madness to some "merit vs reservations" issue, but perhaps the fact that one would nt need to mug things up may be swayed me a little. Note that I was definitely good at mugging things up if I wanted to: you just have to ask me to repeat the Periodic Table and even today I will not make a mistake in either the Lanthanide or the Actinide series (I did remember the names of elements 92 to 108 or whatever too, the IUPAC changed them way too often for my comfort and I have lost track), nor have a mistake in the gorgeous Kannagi's dialogue to the Sundara Panidyan in Silappadikaaram, nor make a mistake in what conditions a semi-group or a semi-norm need to satisfy.

That aside, I attended coaching classes in 11th standard from people who were labeled as remarkable stars at coaching aspiring minds to success in the JEE. Sadly, I was not up to the mark for their high standards nor belonged to the peer class of elite-men nor was deeply enchanted by the religious worship of these stars nor could afford the Rs. 1000 x 3 (a princely Rs. 200 per course hike from the 11th standard fees) that had to be paid for continuing their classes in the 12th standard. Nor could I afford the newly minted books for JEE coaching and had to live on hand-me-downs of B.Sc. first year books in Chemistry, a 1990 edition of the O.P. Agarwal, and even older versions of the S.L. Loney's for which I am extremely thankful. I did beg and borrow books, tutorial sheets and class notes from many friends who were extremely generous even if irritated by my obnoxious nature of borrowing stuff with no sense or sensibility or rationale. This was the number one lesson in doing good research: beg, borrow, bleat or steal, but get the infrastructure needed to get good results. Lesson two: and be grateful and thankful when it is all said and done and give back. Hoarding knowledge makes no sense when people have stood on the shoulder of giants to see the giant's feet. Tilak's words of "Repression is repression, if it is legal, it must be resisted peacefully. If it is illegal, it must be illegally met" is even more apt for the hoarding knowledge economy that hides behind the cloak and dagger of copyrights, private datasets, intellectual property, etc.

I come from the 1997-2001 IITM batch of electrical engineering, one that was notorious for the repeat JEE after exam papers leaked somewhere in the "North." While many people gave up upon this news and latched on to whatever good engineering programs they could get into, I had no choice but to stick to JEE. This was primarily because I had not paid any attention to TNPCEE and my disdain for it was witnessed by the fact that I started reading Math three hours before the exam with a borrowed book (of course!) that was handed to me at 6 A.M. for the 9:30 A.M. exam. I did my best given that I had no idea how to solve a second-order differential equation (something that the State board syllabus covered, but that was not a part of the JEE). I ended up somewhere in the mid-ranks that fetched me a "free seat" in some no-name college in the outskirts of Madras for which we blew Rs. 6000 (a rather princely sum even in the hope that the financial outlook may be more promising down the line). So back to JEE, it was indeed a blessing in disguise as I had messed up my first take at JEE. My assessment of the leaked JEE was that I would have ended up in Civil Engineering or so and would have climbed eventually to electrical engineering on the back of the first year performance that would have allowed a branch change. It is not often that people get to write two JEEs in a single year and I was not going to clutch at straws when the second opportunity came along. Pepping up by screaming at myself in the bathroom mirror and making myself believe that the world at large can go suck my thumb and what else, I was the essential embodiment of how to channelize all the anger and hatred at the world and "you people" into doing well at the JEE. The twenty minute walk to the Exam hall was done without noticing the face of a single woman (old or young, mediocre or beautiful) and all that overflowing testosterone and adrenaline were focussed on just one task: do well in the Exam(s). While I do not remember much of the Physics (I was chronically too bad in Physics to have done anything but cross the subject cut-off) or the Chemistry exams (just barely moderate given that I did nt get many of the mechanisms right which would have made the exam a spectacular success), I was in a zone of my own in the Math exam. Of the twenty questions, I remember getting 18 definitely right (you just know when you get them right) and at least one partially right. Never ever after have I come close to such a zone in my life and I have had my share of qualifying exams in ECE and Math. Essentially pumped by the Math performance, I did get the AIR of 0316, not too bad for where I started from. Lesson three: do not settle for a pigsty just because you have that available now and here. Never be contented.

I did learn much later that people in my ballpark of the AIR also had very similar overall performances, but nothing as extreme as me where one subject whopped the relative mediocrity of the other two. In some sense, my performance majorized most people's who belonged to approximately the same class. So it was indeed a one point success model that put me at IITM, but I guess I would have stuck back at home and prepared for JEE again given the hopelessness of the no-name college I got admitted into. So in some sense, I was lucky, but I would have manufactured luck anyway if it did nt hit me in 1997. Lesson four: know your strengths very well.

The fact that I sucked really badly at Physics made me feel shameful and I borrowed class notes of JEE from friends at IITM to get to the point of "deserving" to be in an IIT. As one grows old, one realizes that it is easier to pile your plate with things that need to be done, but it is even harder to actually do them and do them all on time. Thus, I am indeed shameful to admit that I still suck at Physics today and I cannot see anything past a free-body diagram of simple mechanical systems even though I am supposed to see and know more, and in fact, feel more. My intuition for Physics is at its infantile best, yet life goes on. I stay away from Physics-related arenas like device physics as much as I can even though the big-picture is more or less clear. Further, I could visualize nothing, so all those Engineering drawing related subjects were bowling me out like what Zak did to Steve Waugh. That essentially decided that I was not getting to be a Circuits man or a Devices fellow, but a Comm nutjob with a growing curiosity for antennas and the like. Lesson five: know your weaknesses even better.

My experiences in IITM are as mundane as anyone else's peppered with fascinating interludes into many esoteric subjects not all of which are describable in words. I have seen my fair share of the smart ones and sadly, I have not been overawed into submission but by two people who were neither AIR 001x's nor doing "research" now. One is an equally lower middle-class rags-to-normalcy story of a non-Madras Tamil Brahmin with no aptitude for slogging in the sciences, but with a remarkable sub-conscious understanding of programming, visualization and basic common sense that will put an AIR 0001 to some shame. Another is a Muslim who comes from the outskirts of Madras with the same socio-economic background and with no formal coaching class training, but with a deep sub-conscious understanding of Physics on an intuitive basis without the need for formulas and high-dimensional logic. Needless to say, I am still in touch with them even though I have lost track of so many of the smart ones. Lesson six: make friends of people you admire and try to learn what makes them tick, even if you are constrained by your own inadequacy.

When folks in my batch were sweating it out to loosen the straitjacket of M.S./Ph.D. that could take five years to a M.S. that could take less than two years and were avoiding a certain Rice U. upon hearsay that a Ph.D. there could take seven years or more, I was one of the first to apply to Rice. And certainly I was disappointed enough to write back to the Graduate Committee Chair (who I know much better now) about how crazy their selection criteria must have been to pick people with lesser CGPA than me and to ignore someone with a stronger enthusiasm level to do research than needed to get in. That pitch did not reverse the decision they made and I am thankful to them for I would nt have seen the wonders of the cheesehead land otherwise. Some say, "come herein and you bleed cardinal and white forever," and that is sadly true for me -- cardinal and white, "Go Red, go!", "Eat shit, F*&! you", green and gold, cant wait to hate the Bears even if I stayed on the wrong side of the Rockford line for three good years, Big Ten madness, waiting for the Pasadena unfolding even if I can see the RB almost everyday, and the closest I have been to a hockey field in live-action in a looong time even if it was with a puck on a rink than with a ball on a field. Lesson seven: screw the free world if it goes one way, pick your way and make the best of what you get and you wont regret it forever even if you can go back to the future. All those years spent butt-freezing in the Lab cranking up the temperature bar would nt have been useful had it not been to just do what I am good at. Lesson eight: know how and when to say "No" to requests that would curtail your freedom to do what had to be done. Lesson nine: and when to say "F!@$# off" when those requests bordered on being illogical.

At the end of the day, if one looks back, if I look back, it was destined that I would nt regret my past. Not because I was some super-human who could do no wrong, but because I learned at IITM from my allies, compatriots, peers and collaborators that a wrong could be corrected by learning from one's mistakes and often from others' mistakes. That hard decisions had to be taken at times and life is essentially a game of chance where the most rational and prepared wins even if the competition is between equally smart people. The key to all this was that most, if not all, of my batchmates were remarkable in being unremarkable, just like me. Most of them came from the same background, some slightly better off than the others, and some poorer than the others. Some more street-smart than others, but with others picking up the essential lessons that makes us who we are today. We learned the techniques, the tool-kits and the tricks from the slightly better off. We made each of us better and equipped to face the vile wide world by just being who we were, we hated each other and in the process we got each other to give it our best shot -- our only shot, we learned to love the things we did and do what we loved even if the process was incomplete, impure and often imbecilish, and we all had a small bridge to cross.

Sadly, the bridge is wide today, and it can only get wider with time.

The IIT Experience is dead, Long Live the IIT Experience...

ISEET or Is It? and Other Mumblings

This one has been cooking for too long, better to get it out half-broken than not.

1) India has a steadily growing middle-class which means a growing aspirational status for many people than can be accommodated by the limited educational resources currently available. Thus, there has been a continuing big problem where the marginally advantaged have been steadily pushing aside the marginally/heavily disadvantaged from the mainstream in terms of education. This is particularly true in the case of urban vs. rural divide, first-tier vs. second-tier cities, South and West vs. North and East, among different caste groupings, across religions, and even between different strata of the middle-class.
2) While in some sense, this is just a mirror of what happened in the historical past where one segment took to certain forms of "education" better than other segments and thus derived socio-economic clout that soon spread to the bandaged political scene disproportionate to their numerical preponderance, and thereby leading to a circle of social conflicts marked by violence from one extreme of verbal/rhetorical to the other of real/symbolic acts, in a time and age of identity politics, social assertion, number-game, etc., this is just asking for too-much trouble from all the parties involved as well as certain extraneous ones.
3) On the part of the MHRD and GoI and the Education Ministries in the various states, while there has been a realization of the enormity of the problem, there has been an incommensurate effort at adding resources. While the MHRD tries to infuse the Foreign Universities Bill, the Opposition has stalemated any further progress in this arena and as is usual, the GoI/MHRD has decided that inaction/back-door action is better than an open combat/debate in the Parliament. On the other hand, adding resources requires infrastructural investment -- an ill that plagues not only education but also every other sphere. Without Quality Control/Assurance in investment, adding resources comes at a grave cost of quality -- an argument that is often anathema to the ears of the disadvantaged who care only about the current and the now than for the overall state of the system. Shri E. Sreedharan puts the conundrum in much better language than I can (Linky):

We have enough engineering colleges, producing about two million engineers per annum. But the best out of the IITs and RECs make a beeline for universities abroad. The next best go for management and prefer to sell soaps and oil rather than doing engineering. The next lot goes to the IT sector, which is very lucrative. There are still large numbers left who, unfortunately, are not of the required quality. That means the level of education, particularly in private colleges, is not up to the required standard. There are a few good private colleges. The remaining are all ‘business’ colleges, which take capitation money and high fees, take students through three to four years and give them a degree. Unfortunately, many of them are deemed universities. This is most unfortunate, and a shame to the nation. We have been so liberal in giving them university status without controlling quality.

4) TN is a good case in point for the quality vs. quantity conundrum (See Linky). While TN produces a huge number of engineering graduates (both from in-state and from out-of-state), < 10% of its graduates are "employable" in the IT Services sector (Fig. 9), < 1% in the IT Product sector (Fig. 11), and a comparable fraction is employable in KPO/BPO/Hardware Networking sectors. In fact, Madras ranks the lowest among the studied Tier-1 metros in terms of employable engineering graduates in the IT arena (Fig. 14). This is not an affirmation of Delhi's (ranked 1) educational capabilities, but just a reflection of the sad fact that there are fewer engineering seats available in the North, which in turn forces people to migrate down South where the engineering seats are aplenty. What else should one expect when only 3.39% of the college teachers in TN can clear the NET/SET? (Linky). Even granted that the Aspiring Minds report concerns the IT sector and not core engineering, and segment-by-segment statistics are unavailable which makes extrapolation of known facts a risky proposition, and the NET/SET are just another bunch of examinations, one broad trend is that quantity degrades quality in the long-run.
5) Even within the highly selective IITs, degradation in student quality are obvious to the faculty and alumni (which has to be suitably weighted for perception bias). If a core benchmark for student quality is the percentage of retaineeship of students in core engineering areas, the number has been steadily going down over the last two decades. While this in itself is just a reflection of the growth of opportunities in non-core engineering disciplines in India and for Indian students abroad, the health of an institution cannot be sustained by watching such a huge percentage eject itself out of core engineering jobs so quickly.
6) There have been many attempts at figuring out the "root-causes" for such a woe. The easily identified one is the system of coaching classes that aid in preparation for JEE which themselves are in business only because the JEE has become so advanced that studying from a First Year B.Sc text is essential to get the extra "edge" over other candidates. While blaming the coaching classes is a cop-out on many levels, the one thing that can be attributed to them is that they induce, incubate and inculcate a stupor of "follow-the-herd" peer culture (much earlier than was possible with the old system of non-coaching classes). While this again has to be called out as a sociological problem of the current generation and the enormous parental pressures that lead to a make-or-break attitude, rather than as a problem of the coaching class system, the very fact that the JEE cannot be dumbed down beyond a certain level means that the vestige of the coaching classes have to be broken. The stupor of coaching classes (conveniently called "coasting") leads to a lethargy of the student population in the campuses that lead to poor learning skills and backlogs that have a cyclic effect when the student reaches the B.Tech Project stage, where poor knowledge and background coupled with a poor work habit spell doom for many a "bright" student who was on the "top of the world", not so-long back.
7) The statistically brilliant faculty analyzing the "root-causes" of this woe have identified a strong correlation between performance in the Board Examinations (High School Leaving Certificate Exams of the various tripes) and performance in the first year or so in IITs. Thus, there has been a clamor call for introducing a metric that identifies the performance in the Board Examinations and at the same time breaking the backbone of the coaching class system.

8) This is where the ISEET (which the IITs call the JEE Main/JEE Advanced) proposal fits in. The ISEET was proposed by the T. Ramasami Committee and was seen as a replacement for the original JEE and has since then been pushed back a bit by the "autonomy"-minded IITs (Linky). In short, the ISEET is a single-point break system so poorly engineered that no real system constructed with such a design could be provably fail-safe and guaranteed to inch along year by year only till an utterly massive disaster calls for a sweeping disbanding of everything ISEET-related.
9) Specifically, the JEE Main (which is nothing but a glorification of the Board Examinations normalized on a percentile score to make them all appear equal) and the JEE Advanced (which is the current JEE) will share 50% equal weightage in ranking students for seats in the IIT. Any sensible watcher of education matters will realize that "equalizing" across different Boards in India is a thoughtless exercise because different Boards have very different standards/syllabi/assessment/statistics and even sociological agenda (as is the case in TN). Further, the middle-ranks of the JEE are all separated by very slim margins and tie-breaks are broken using the hardest exam (usually Physics/Math) in that order. When the JEE Main corrupts this tie-break, it is the branch of engineering that one could possibly enrol in that is at stake. While it can be reasonably argued that what is the big difference between slim pickings, it is indeed an important factor in a collegial system such as IITs where tiering of students becomes immensely easy. Needless to say, such divisions are not needed for the health of the system. To top it all, to try to make it an all-India standard for entry into not only the NITs, but also IISER and other institutions calls for another one of those comments on one-point failure mode relevant.
10) One can safely conclude that given the grave problems facing engineering output in India today, the solutions engineered are even more brain-dead than the current crop of graduates that the envisioned solutions intend to fix. Neither are we going to see less brain-dead graduates nor are we going to see less brain-dead solutions. We will see more rhetorical flourishes and grand-standing that obviates, obfuscates and ignores the presence of gargantuan problems such as the convenient divorcing of rural India from the educational mainstream, quality vs. quantity, democracy vs. elitism, inter-connecting the STEM library facilities in the top-notch educational institutions, incubating quality in newly laid-out institutions, etc.

Onwards!

Two education related statistics (Pakistan, India and China)

On adult literacy levels in Pakistan over the years, from the article by Anne Goujon and Asif Wazir of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis:
Year -- No education -- Primary Incomplete -- Primary Complete -- Lower Secondary -- Upper Secondary -- Higher Education Qualified (first Male, then Female -- all numbers in percentages)

1972 M 68 03 10 14 03 02
1972 F 92 01 03 03 01 01

1981 M 66 -- 12 16 03 03
1981 F 88 -- 05 05 01 01

1998 M 48 06 12 24 05 06
1998 F 74 04 07 10 03 03

2005 M 34 05 15 29 08 09
2005 F 64 03 11 13 04 05

Observations:
1) From the above data, the percentage of literates in Pakistan is growing (in both males and females) over the years -- which should not be very surprising. Every country makes progress on literacy levels if you give them enough time.
2) But this is not how to read the above statistics. To me, the differential in literacy between males and females is a clear indicator of the level of violence in that society (see related posts: Linky 1 and Linky 2). In Pakistan, the illiteracy differential between females and males in Pakistan is 24% in 1972, 22% in 1981, 26% in 1998 and 30% in 2005.
3) From their more detailed paper (Linky), the literacy differential between males and females is 7% in 1951, 19% in 1961, 8% in 1972, 19% in 1981, 23% in 1998, 24% in 2004 and 24% in 2009. On both extremes (illiteracy differential as well as literacy differential), Pakistan is in pakistan (aka deep do-do) and the level of violence is consequently very much explainable.
4) Breaking these figures into provincial statistics from p. 13 of Linky, we have the following differential literacy rates:

Year Punjab Sindh NWFP Baluchistan
1972 19% 19.9% 18.4% 10.5%
1981 20% 18.1% 19.3% 10.9%
1998 22.1% 19.72% 32.57% 21.5%
2004 21.3% 19.80% 38.15% 26.41%

5) Clearly, Punjab and Sindh have stabilized in terms of differential literacy rates and if my hypothesis is correct, then the violence levels in Punjab and Sindh should be pretty much consistent from 1970 and up. Either this trend was not recognized before or the hypothesis of literacy differentials correlating to violence is not completely capturing the picture or the data is being fudged somewhere.
6) On the other hand, NWFP and Baluchistan see a massive jump in the differential literacy rates in the post-Soviet/Taliban setting. While the revolution in Iran (1979) marks the turning point in terms of an upshot for worldwide terrorism trends, the violence level in the neighborhood is slow by a good 10 years. This is not explainable. While terrorism/revolutionary activities spills over very quickly into the neighborhood, why is there a lag in Pakistan? Was it that the CIA arming of mujahideen also come with caveats that prevented a quick Talibanization of the Pakistani mindset?

Salary for higher ed in India, following up from Linky. Some comments from Linky:
1) Two countries -- China and India -- have been the focus of many global education watchers in recent years as they have moved rapidly to expand capacity and expertise in their university systems. The study shows India holding its own in international faculty salary comparisons (factoring in cost of living), but not China. This reality has led Chinese universities, Altbach noted, to offer very high Western-style salaries, to a very small number of academics (typically Chinese expats recruited home). The numbers are such a small share of the total Chinese academic labor pool that they don't influence the Chinese totals, he said, but without these deviations from salary norms, China couldn't attract those researchers. India, in contrast, does not permit universities to deviate from salary norms for superstars.
2) Another area where the countries differ is in the difference between entry-level salaries (averages for assistant professors) and those at the top of their fields (full professors). Across all 28 countries studied, the average ratio of the senior salary average to the junior salary average was 2.06 to 1 (factoring in the PPP). The gaps between senior and junior pay levels were greatest in China (4.3 to 1) and smallest in Norway (1.3 to 1). Western European nations generally had low ratios.
3) Monthly Average Salaries of Public Higher Education Faculty, Using U.S. PPP Dollars

Country -- Entry Level Pay -- Average Pay -- Top Pay

Armenia $405 $538 $665
Russia 433 617 910
China 259 720 1,107
Ethiopia 864 1,207 1,580
Kazakhstan 1,037 1,553 2,304
Latvia 1,087 1,785 2,654
Mexico 1,336 1,941 2,730
Czech Republic 1,655 2,495 3,967
Turkey 2,173 2,597 3,898
Colombia 1,965 2,702 4,058
Brazil 1,858 3,179 4,550
Japan 2,897 3,473 4,604
France 1,973 3,484 4,775
Argentina 3,151 3,755 4,385
Malaysia 2,824 4,628 7,864
Nigeria 2,758 4,629 6,229
Israel 3,525 4,747 6,377
Norway 4,491 4,940 5,847
Germany 4,885 5,141 6,383
Netherlands 3,472 5,313 7,123
Australia 3,930 5,713 7,499
United Kingdom 4,077 5,943 8,369
Saudi Arabia 3,457 6,002 8,524
United States 4,950 6,054 7,358
India 3,954 6,070 7,433
South Africa 3,927 6,531 9,330
Italy 3,525 6,955 9,118
Canada 5,733 7,196 9,485

Comment on LTTE and some other general comments

Precedent or "You got what you deserved": There is much consternation on Government of India's stance to vote against Sri Lanka at the UNHCR. While the vote led to an alignment of interests between human rights-peddlers of the free world and India, it comes amidst the drama of the U-turn on the "13th amendment and beyond" (Linky). Any Indian in his/her rightful mind would not argue twice when the Government of India takes the onus to speak the same forked tongue that statesmen from abroad indulge in, innit?!

Hero-ization of SL for putting down the LTTE: There is a dramatic heroization of the Government of Sri Lanka's efforts in defeating the LTTE militarily. Needless to say, while this was a great showcase for military pursuit against an unconventional status-quoist enemy, this was not an extreme exception by any means. In India, we have put down unconventional rebels with considerable venom over the years: Khalistani terror, Mizo National Front, etc. come to the forefront right away. As the border has been sealed, even J&K is slowly but considerably steadily moving to being a zone of peace where even borderline human rights violations get the short shrift of the people these days. Even as we speak, UPDS, ATTF and NLFT are in the long process of being coerced and socially and politically co-opted into accepting the path of democracy while a long-drawn battle on the NSCN-IM is unfolding at a politically glacial pace, but not so glacial for the counter-terror industry.

Further to speak, all this hero-ization business will fall by the wayside with the introduction of one silly statistic (see Footnote 1) from counter-terror literature: from 1970 to 1997, 74.72% of the world's terrorist groups lasted less than 1 year, 14.77% lasted between 1 and 5 years, 4.62% between 6 and 10 years, an equal 4.62% between 11 and 20 years and only 1.26% over 20 years. In other words, only 1 in 100 terrorist groups lasted longer than a generation and around 3 in 4 fell within a year. While that statistic can be read either way depending on your choice, it just speaks enormous amounts on how the writ of the State shall eventually prevail no matter what. Lo and behold, a terrorist group does indeed win "freedom", it has to morph overnight into becoming a legitimate Government (as happened in East Timor) and put the house in order. In other words, there are no permanent terrorist groups in the world, only permanent strifes in one form or the other.

More to speak, Sri Lanka does nt fit within the theme of one of the most deadliest places on earth even when the LTTE ran amok liberally in the North and East of Sri Lanka. That distinction goes to Latin America as FARC, Shining Path (or Sendero Luminoso as they called themselves), ELN, FMLN and other leftist inspired groups ran riot. The glory days of FARC and Shining Path are long since gone as Project Colombia has put down the narco industry quite badly. Even ETA and IRA were far more deadlier than LTTE and needless to say, both have been put down more or less. All this makes this dramatic hero-ization of the valor of the Sri Lankan army a moot point in some vague sense. Sure, many a soldier must have died valorously for his country and homeland, but to make it a tale of the day might be a theme for the naive.

Elsewhere, hockey group in the Olympics: India is clubbed with Germany, Netherlands, South Korea (the winner in the second leg of the qualifiers), New Zealand and Belgium at the London Games. Of these five matches, three are not-so-bad at all. Despite the high ranking of some of these opponents, wins should be the normative course against New Zealand, Belgium and South Korea. A draw against Germany should take us through to the semi-finals. Of course, for the Indian team conjuring up a draw or a defeat in the last minute is also not so abnormal, so take that bad omen with a punch of rum and salt!

Exasperated, but then what else is anew? Elsewhere, the developmental squad sent to Pakistan is loaded with players from one or two regions yet again. This time it is the turn of Coorg/Karnataka and Punjab. While some of the members in that squad are well entitled to even be in the National team, some are just baggages or rather unproven commodities with a big claim to a big-ticket exposure trip. This is the same incident that was seen at the Johor Bahru junior tournament where players from Punjab were stacked up, most of whom who took part in the WSH event have been let go and a new bucketload of prospects have been picked. A very professional way in which HI handles the junior leg of the sport. But that should not be surprising given that even worser treatment is meted out to coaches such as Mukesh Kumar and regular players like Sandeep Singh and Sardara Singh for playing in the Belgian league early last year.

Hostage taking incident in Orissa: The interlocutors for the Italians taken hostage by the Maoists are arrested Politburo member Narayan Sanyal, Dandapani Mohanty and Biswapriya Kanungo. D. Mohanty was an interlocutor in the Vineel Krishna hostage incident (along with Prof. Haragopal and late R.S. Rao).

And finally: Another series of silly statistics that puts down endless ululates (often me included!) on how the Indian academic market pays peanuts for its Professoriate. India has consistently ranked in the top 10 on paychecks adjusted PPP-wise (Linky) and is much better than even the US. Only Nigeria and Ethiopia best India on the ratio of monthly academic salary at public universities to the GDP per capita per month metric (Linky). India is one of the three countries to have housing projects mandated by law (Linky) and other supplementary benefits best the "poor pay" (Linky). All this confirms my long-held belief that NRIs who are gainfully employed in the education industry do not return to India not because of poor pay, but because the ecosystem of peer excellence has not reached critical mass, YET. When the critical mass is reached, the trickle shall become a deluge, needless to say.

Footnote 1: While this data is not exactly complete, it is not an unrepresentative sampling either.

Is India anti-science?

A few weeks back, the Prime Minister had made this remark on R&D in India: (Linky)

As publicly funded R&D was now “skewed” in favour of fundamental research, it would be easier to attract industrial funds to applied research. “A set of principles should be formulated to push such funding and to drive PPPs in R&D,” Dr. Singh said inaugurating the 99th annual session of the Indian Science Congress here.

“We must aim to increase the total R&D spending as a percentage of GDP to 2 per cent by the end of XII Plan [period] from the current level of 0.9 per cent. This can be achieved only if industry, which contributes about one-third of the total R&D expenditure today, increases its contribution significantly. I believe that public sector undertakings, especially in the energy sector, should play a major role in this expansion."

Independent of how much funding the GoI/MHRD/DST or any other funding agency in India puts in for fundamental or applied research, much of this funding will go through a leaky bucket unless there are enough people downstream to catch this source of money. That is, we need more people doing fundamental as well as applied research in India today. This is done in the US by the world's biggest employer, the U.S. Department of Defense (LInky) which intentionally employs more people in researchy/semi-researchy/contractual job profiles for many years -- an example that we can dearly ape in major part with minimal effort.

For that, we need role models to mould people into science and technology related areas instead of making the coming generations flock to art-sy arenas with more interest than to do the hard grind of research. On this topic, a recent report by a Professor at IISc (Linky) asks the rhetorical question: Is there nothing in this country of substance beyond Bollywood, cricket and politicians? The author further makes the remark that:

But more seriously, if young minds do not opt for science, where are the role models? Several scientists quietly work day and night, unseen and unsung. The Nobel Prize will not descend from the heaven, unless an appropriate environment is created and the role of scientists is appreciated. No technology comes without a risk and any one technology will not solve all our problems. But unbridled activism against science and scientists will only lead us to miss out on technology options. We need to give S&T a chance to deliver.

If the recent edition of the Padma awards (Linky) is any standard to go by in terms of creating role models in STEM fields, we have a scary battle on our hands to meet the PM's clamor call for more fundamental and applied research in India. For those who are impatient to click the link, here is the verdict (Science and Engineering, Literature and Education, Trade and Industry, Medicine, Arts, Total Awards):

Padma Vibhushan: 0 - 0 - 0 - 1 - 3 - 5
Padma Bhushan: 2 - 5 - 2 - 3 - 9 - 27
Padma Shri: 8 - 9 - 5 - 9 - 22 - 77

If the awards list are an indication, we are a nation of artists, theatrics, dramatists, playwrights, and litterateurs. So one should expect India to be anti-science too.

Updates (October 12, 2010)

1) BD minister visit

Amid recent diplomatic breakthrough on trade issues with India, a Bangladesh business delegation led by Commerce Minister Faruk Khan will leave here New Delhi on 20 October on a four-day visit aiming at closer, mutually beneficial economic ties. Discussions during the visit are likely to dominate a number of issues including formal inauguration of border `hat’ (market), removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers, duty-free access to Indian market, further reduction of the number of items from India’s negative list, Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and investment, officials said. Meanwhile, a number of deals relating to investment, border `hat’ and removal of trade barriers are likely to be inked during the visit. Leaders of the FBCCI, BGMEA, DCCI, BKMEA, MCCI, CCCI, IBCCI and other business bodies are included in the 22-member delegation who will visit New Delhi.

Assam Tribune adds this: Linky

Khan said, a MoU and a related deal on border haat modalities were to be signed during his visit, paving ways for launching the makeshift frontier bazaars initially at two points of the 4,156 kilometres of the porous borders of the two countries. Bangladesh’s imports from India in 2008-2009 were USD 2.841 billion and exports to India were USD 276.58 million. Total bilateral trade in stood at USD 3.117 billion. According the draft an individual will not be able to trade above USD 50 at the bazaar using both Bangladeshi and Indian currencies while farm and home made items produced in 10 kilometre radius of border bazaar will be allowed to trade in the haats, to be set up within 75 meters of the frontier. Items to be traded at the bazaars included farm products, handicrafts, horticulture, fresh and dry fish, wooden and cane furniture, utensils, farming tools and home-made clothing such as lunghi, gamcha would be eligible for border trading.

A committee comprising government officials and representatives of border guards of both the countries would run and oversee the operations of the haats. He said the bilateral trade and economy were likely to dominate the talks with his Indian counterpart Anand Sharma while Bangladesh would reiterate its call for waiving duty and removal of non-tariff barriers on its apparel exports. It will also be relaxing a universal Indian ban on cotton export for Bangladesh and reconsidering a decision on stamping seals on jute bags from the country. “We expect all the outstanding bilateral trade related issues will be resolved during the meeting in the light of the joint communiqué issued during our Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s visit to India,” in January this year, Khan said.

Bangladesh has been asking India either to give 61 products duty-free access or a complete duty waiver to all garments products. Under a 2008 bilateral trade agreement India allowed duty-free access of eight million pieces of garment products but the business sources said almost 70 per cent of the quantity was already exported and the rests were expected to be exhausted by the year-end. The minister’s comments came as officials earlier this week said the two countries finalised the modus operandi of the border haats after months of talks with Indian officials as New Delhi agreed not to impose local tax on trading in the borders by the concerned Indian state governments. A commerce ministry official said the differences on issue of taxation delayed the inking of the agreement though the two countries earlier hammered out the draft deal in mid May last in Dhaka in line with a Dhaka-New Delhi deal reached during Sheikh Hasina’s maiden India tour.

According to the negotiated draft of the proposed agreement, trading at the border markets will not be taxed or levied or fall under the foreign trade policies and laws of the two countries as they would initially sat once a week. The official said two such haats would be set up in the first phase - one in northeastern Sunamganj and another in northwestern Kurigram along India’s Meghalaya frontier. He said several clauses were incorporated in the draft agreement in an effort to keep cross-border smugglers away from the facilities and prevent money laundering. Months after Bangladesh’s 1971 independence, the two countries had launched border trading in April 1972 but the authorities were forced to cancel the haats a year later due to rampant smuggling along the border areas. Former Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty two years ago suggested launching of small border trade centres at designated frontier villages on pilot project basis under the supervision of paramilitary frontier guards of the two countries.

2) Meanwhile, Wow, Linky

The process for repatriation of top insurgent leaders from Tripura who had taken shelter on Bangladeshi soil was on, outgoing state police chief Pranay Sahay said today and praised "proactive" steps by the neighbouring country against the extremists. "Now it is clear that two chiefs of two insurgent outfits - Ranjit Debbarma of All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) and Biswamohan Debbarma of National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) are in Bangladesh. The process for handing them over to the security forces is on," Director General of Tripura Police said.

And further, Linky

"In Bangladesh, in view of the crackdown by the security forces of that country against the northeast India militants, the camps of Tripura terrorists have been reduced to 18 now from 45 in 2003."

3) FICN in E. Champaran Linky

Proximity to the Nepal border has made East Champaran notorious for criminal activities. Smuggling of fake currency notes from across the border is rampant in this part of the state. The colloquial expression regarding the authenticity of currency notes of bigger denomination is “Gandhi ji asli, ki nakli hai?”
...
According to Intelligence Bureau sources, after the notification of the elections in this part of the state, consignments of fake currencies have started reaching sensitive parts of East Champaran, West Champaran and Sheohar through porous borders near Raxaul, Valmikinagar, Bela (Bairgania) and Sikta.

4) What next in Burma? Linky

Once the elections are over, the parliament must be convened within 90 days from the date of the election. The president will be elected in a joint session of both the lower and upper houses and two vice-presidents will be elected from the unsuccessful presidential aspirants. One of the vice-president is likely to be from the ethnic groups. Future plans of Senior General Than Shwe have not been revealed. Will he continue to influence from within as President or as a Minister Mentor (like Lee Kuan Yew) or as an advisor from outside like Ne Win till his death? Despite manoeuvring to keep his loyal subordinates in power in key posts and precluding by law powers for the new government to try the military for any of its past actions, he must be apprehensive of the future.

Only time can tell as to how strong the opposition will be. Despite an alliance, more than one opposition party will be contesting the same seats, which will result in splitting the votes for the opposition and benefit the regime backed parties. With the predictions so far favouring the two proxy parties of the regime (USDP and NUP) and with all odds in their favour, the combined opposition must be considered successful even if it gains 25 per cent of the seats. Even with all her charisma and popularity, the future of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party NLD is not very bright. The party, beleaguered over the years, now disbanded by law and with a faction contesting in the election against the party’s policy of boycotting, has an uphill task to regain the confidence of the people and resurface as a political force. But she cannot be written off.

Even though hopes of democratization may not materialise in the real sense of the term, most analysts are of the opinion that this transition will help in a more equitable economy and areas hitherto neglected such as agriculture, education and health will receive attention through better budget allocations. The hopes of the ethnic groups for more autonomy or a federal type of government might have been dashed but the formation of the regional assemblies after the elections will help the ethnic groups in achieving a sense of participation in local governance with some economic benefits for their region and betterment of their own culture, language, education etc.

Many nations are waiting eagerly to lift the sanctions after elections and take advantage of the energy and natural resources that provide economic opportunities in Myanmar in spite of all the hue and cry on the human rights record of the country. The saving grace will be that there will be a functional legislature in Myanmar irrespective of the fact that bulk of the law makers will be military personnel in civil attire.

5) Patricia Mukhim writes on the woes that befall the NEHU Linky
6) Seems like the recent kidnap by GNLA has pitted GNLA against the Khasi and Jaintia outfits Linky

Outlawed A’chik National Volunteers Council (ANVC), a powerful rebel group in Meghalaya, Thursday offered its assistance to rescue the abducted transport official. “We are ready to assist the state police in their operation to rescue the official if the government sought for our assitance,” ANVC spokesperson Torik Jangning Marak said.

7) Not too keen on the CWG, but this is some news Linky

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is expected to be the chief guest at the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi on October 14. State-owned weekly Sunday Observer said in a report that the invitation to Mr. Rajapaksa was intended to signal New Delhi's support for Sri Lanka's bid to host the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

Updates (Oct 10, 2010)

1) Linky

Chaibasa police today apprehended a senior Maoist leader, Nalla Bhikshapati, said to be an expert in handling explosives, with the IG (operation) describing the arrest as a follow-up of the recent high-intensity operations in the forests of Saranda. According to the police, explosives and a camera were recovered from his possession. Known variously as Madhavji, Subhashji and Raviji, Bhikshapati was a member of the Central Technical Committee of CPI (Maoist) and was well-known among cadres for his ability to handle explosives. Bhikshapati also trained cadres and had been based in Jharkhand for the last two years, making the dense forests of Saranda, Latehar and Parasnath his domains. Sources said the rebel joined the Maoist fold in 1991. He had been arrested earlier and spent considerable time in Hyderabad jail. According to IG (operations) and police spokesman R.K. Mallick, Bhikshapati is a resident of Tatikaila village under Dharma Sagar police station in Warrangal district of Andhra Pradesh.

Before shifting to Jharkhand he worked for the rebel outfit in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, apart from Andhra Pradesh. Mallick said 25 gelatin sticks, 10 detonators, two boosters and flash camera were recovered from him. “Nalla Bhikshpati’s arrest is an outcome of our follow-up actions after the Saranda operations. He is a prize catch,” the senior police officer said, refusing to reveal where and when the arrest took place. The CRPF and state police had jointly carried out anti-naxalite operation in Saranda forest in late September. The forces had destroyed several Maoist camps during the operations which left several rebels dead. Forces engaged in anti-naxalite operations have achieved remarkable success in their mission. However, police officers said the on-going operation is a ‘virtual war’.

Meanwhile, SATP reports

IBN Live reports on October 8 that the Government has approved in principle the creation of an agency similar to the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) for developing road infrastructure in Naxal [Left Wing Extremism]-affected States. BRO is an organisation under the Defence Ministry tasked to build roads in the border areas for allowing swift movement of men and machinery there.

Meanwhile, four months after the decision to set up Unified Commands in four Naxal-affected States, the proposal is yet to take off even though the Union Government has provided a panel of retired Major Generals to head these. Sources said the Defence Ministry had furnished a list of retired Major Generals to the Home Ministry which has forwarded it to Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal. The States are, however, yet to take any action on this.

2) PhD stipend increase

The HRD ministry has increased PhD scholarships with effect from April this year in a move aimed at encouraging more students to take up research. Students pursuing PhD under the new regulations in research institutes and universities will get Rs 16,000 a month for the first two years, up from Rs 12,000. For the next three years, they will get Rs 18,000 per month, an increase from Rs 14,000, according to a notification. But the hike comes with a rider — for the first time, grant of fellowships will be linked to performance.

3) Talks with ULFA Linky

The Sonitpur District and Sessions Court today granted the bail of ULFA ideologue and adviser Bhimkanta Buragohain alias mama. The bail petition was pending till yesterday owing to objection shown by the Assam Government. Counsel for the Ulfa ideologue, Dulumoni Sinha, said Buragohain would be released from Tezpur jail after submission of two bail bonds of Rs 25,000 each. “However, Buragohain is likely to be released from jail only after the Puja vacations, as there is a strike by judicial employees from tomorrow,” said Sinha.

The Ulfa ideologue has been lodged in Tezpur jail, barring a few days in Guwahati central jail, since December 2003. He was apprehended by the Royal Bhutan army during Operation All Clear in Bhutan in December 2003 and handed over to the Indian army later that month.

4) Bangladesh RMG sector Linky

Bangladesh is enjoying the benefits of the EU decision to withdraw zero-tariff from Sri Lanka, among other factors now boosting garment exports. Sri Lanka was supposed to enjoy the Generalised System of Preferences Plus (GSP+) status from the European Union, but it was withdrawn for the country's poor human rights record after its crushing of Tamil resistance. The EU intends to make the formal move at the end of this month. The GSP+ status gives 16 poor nations preferential access to the EU in return for strict commitments on a wide variety of social and rights issues.

Exports of readymade garments (RMG) blew past the state's target in the first two months of the current fiscal year, according to the latest data from the state-owned Export Promotion Bureau (EPB). Bangladesh exported knitwear worth $1.6 billion against the $1.21 billion target in July and August, 31 percent up over the same period a year earlier. During the same period, the country exported woven garments worth $1.31 billion against a target of $1.12 billion, up 17 percent from last year.

Ahsan Kabir Khan, managing director of Interfab Shirt Manufacturing Ltd, cited two reasons for the strong orders coming to Bangladesh, including recovery from the global recession. "In the last year, buyers followed a conservative strategy in purchasing RMG products, and this year the actual business is returning," Khan said. Second is the ongoing shift of orders from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and China to Bangladesh, he added. Orders, which were supposed to go to Sri Lanka, are now coming to Bangladesh, he said. China has been suffering from shortages of low-wage workers, and Pakistan has faced widespread flooding, Khan said. Part of the rise reflects the competitive level of RMG here. "We're now taking shipments against orders which were placed earlier. This might be a cause for exceeding the target," said a Spanish buyer requesting anonymity. But it is also true that many more international buyers are now placing orders in Bangladesh for its cheap prices, he added.

5) GNLA surrender Linky

The Garo National Liberation Army, a rebel group operating in Meghalaya, suffered a major setback when one its key leaders surrendered with a huge cache of arms and ammunition, a police official said on Friday. Mansrang M Sangma, founder member of GNLA, surrendered on Oct 6 before Sylvester Nongtynger, police chief of East Garo Hills district, in the wake of the ongoing combing operation code-named 'Operation Durama'. "It is a major setback for the GNLA and we are expecting more rebels to surrender," Nongtynger told IANS.

6) Glacier melting in China Linky

The average area of glaciers in western China might shrink by 27.2% by 2050 because of global warming, damaging crop production and worsening droughts, according to a report released at the UN climate talks in north China's Tianjin Municipality. The "Climate Changes and Poverty - Case Study in China" report was jointly released by organizations including the Institute of Environment and Social and Sustainable Development in Agriculture with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Xinhua quoted the report as saying that forecasts of glacier recession patterns, summer temperatures and precipitation showed that the average glacier area in western China might be reduced by 27.2% by 2050. Ocean glaciers, affected by wet airflow from the oceans, would shrink by 52.5%, and Asian continental glaciers, formed in the continental climate would shrink by 24.4%. The report warned that glacier shrinkage would also threaten China's agriculture sector and further stated that overall crop production capacity would drop by 5 to 10% by 2030 due to global warming, especially in wheat, rice and corn, and the impact would worsen after 2050.

7) The following is on the art of mathematical deception, little else needs to be said, but a plug could do Linky

Podcast: Proof and Consequences
Fake numbers are everywhere. Al Gore avoided inconvenient data in An Inconvenient Truth, and a made-up a number started the anti-Communist "red scare" in the 1950s. Quaker Oats uses fake numbers to “prove” that a few oatmeal breakfasts will lower your cholesterol, and Louis Farrakhan “proved” his Million Man March was a million strong. We may consider ourselves clever consumers of oatmeal and information, but just how well do we tell the difference between sound mathematics and deceptive data? Host Steven Cherry talks with author Charles Seife about his new book, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception.

Review of Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers"

Disclaimer: Can reveal the plot of the book in some detail.

AS: Malcolm Gladwell is a son of Jamaican parents with mixed heritage (often derisively known as coming from a "mulatto" background). His father was a mathematician and his mother was a school teacher. While growing up, he enjoyed certain societal advantages (peculiar to Jamaica) and certain critical coincidences that made him who he is today. In the book titled "Outliers," Gladwell goes on to propound a theory of how genius is NOT all inspiration, and how happenstances, however unimportant and queer they may have been, play a critical and sometimes unacknowledged role in the success story behind successes.

Review: Half-way through the book, my feelings for the book and the theory in it can only be described as 'awe-inspiring.' Despite such a glorious beginning, the book left me feeling too insipid to recommend it with glorious approval. Nevertheless, the book is a gripping page-turner, and surely the NY Times thinks so too.

The book starts by explaining how individual successes cannot be attributed to smartness alone and how the environment in which the people endure and inure themselves in is equally, if not more, important. The plot starts by studying the case histories of ice hockey players, IQ geniuses, chess players, music geniuses, software afficianados, hostile takeover attorneys (this, that, you name it) in brief detail and making us feel ashamed by our own petty imperfections. Yet in the midst of all this pomp and glory, the book pulls the curtains apart and describes in further (eerie!) detail as to how these success stories fruitioned in the first place. In some sense, for a fatalist and an imperfectionist such as me, this makes perfect sense!! Not only does the theory of how geniuses could have been planted on this morbid earth by the act of nature alone sound too vain, but it also adds a sense of Fairness and Justice in the way things are, however mean such a Fairness may be.

Critical to this book is the gripping tale of how the hoi polloi tend to miss the loads of hidden perspiration behind success stories. Whether this perspiration is nourished by "luck", happenstances, sheer hard work, curious coincidences or otherwise is immaterial though. The bottomline remains that every success story has a root cause that can "logically" and coherently explain why successes indeed become successes. After this initial introduction to individuals' success stories, Gladwell takes it one step ahead and pursues the same idea to organizations and entities. To Math students in the KIPP Program, to Korean Air, to himself, etc. And that is where the generalizations get a bit hard to believe.

For example, in identifying Math students, he makes the curious case that Math stalwartness is in some sense related to how much you work hard. While I can believe that as a statement and a general one at that, I somehow do not buy his logical conclusion that this hard working theme "explains" why "Asian" students end up being very successful in Math. Of course, by "Asian," Gladwell means the Orient. While it may be completely true that on average, the "Asian" students may fare better in Math all the way through the end of high school in comparison with their American counterparts, applying the same logic to outliers in Math is utterly unwarranted.

Any cursory observation of top-ranked Math programs will show the curious composition of graduate students. While there are certain patterns in the Statistics community and even within sub-fields of mathematics easily explained by Gladwell's idea of "concerted cultivation," making a grand case for it based on Orient vs. Occident does not gel well with observed phenomena. It also does not explain why the successful performance of the "Asians" as witnessed by the high school performances not translate in a per-capita sense to higher education.

The reality may be closer to the following: Math erudition (at least at the higher level) is complicated to explain. It is a curious mix of inspiration, perspiration, starting at the right age, at the right time, on the right problem standing on the shoulders of the right person, etc. Math is a team contest howmuchever someone convinces it to be otherwise. Same is true for most academic pursuits. People stand on the shoulders of giants and sometime can see a bit further ahead. Sometime that job is made easier by low-pass filtering existing information and sieving and winnowing facts from data. Sometime that job is made easier by presenting existing information in a form that is as compressed as possible and is malleable to conversion from one form to another. Sometime that job is eased by what people call serendipity or subconscious focussing. To allocate some grand theories about "Asian" uniqueness is as abstruse as trying to fit a theory to a reality where no theory may be deemed right. It is hard to extrapolate prejudices and individual virtues into one of a collective whole, even if such a collectivization makes perfect sense from a socio-psychological and heuristic viewpoint.

To paraphrase, every success is unique, has its own justifications, has a logic. However, this logic may not always fit a firm, yet easily exposable pattern. The problem, as far as I can tell, comes from trying to fit a single simple (however well-intentioned) theory to curious anecdotes that are rather complicated in reality. Gladwell's nuances make a good credible theory, but his convincing lacks the sucker punch beyond a few tales he regales. I would like his theory to be true, but any theory needs to stand on facts, and not on rhetoric.

Updates

Sorry for the delay in the regular telecast...
1) Soft loan to BD Linky

Indo-Bangladesh relations have been put on a new, but potentially stronger footing, with the inking of a US$ 1 billion worth of a loan agreement between New Delhi and Dhaka occasioned by the visit of Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to Dhaka. It has a 20-year repayment period on a rate of interest at 1.75 percent which in the commercial category is considered to be rather moderate. As to the opposition BNP's pointer that multilateral financing agencies could be approached, their soft-term loans with only a service charge are usually difficult to obtain, particularly in the present global financial clime, and for the types of projects specified in the loan agreement signed with India, according to experts.
...
It is noteworthy that credit repayment period is 20 years with a 5-year grace period but no time-frame has been indicated for the implementation of the projects, although we assume that it will be time-bound. It involves a massive test of engineering that will have to blend the interests of both sides. Since it is a tied loan, equipment and materials will be supplied by India. We believe joint implementing agencies and oversight bodies would be needed to ensure that project implementation is manifestly beneficial to both sides. The question of maintenance ought to figure as a vital planning component.

Here are the 14 projects, a coup if one reads it carefully: Linky

1) The first project is on procurement of six high-powered dredgers at $71.69 million. Of the dredgers, one will be used for dredging at Mongla Port while three for Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority and two for Bangladesh Water Development Board.
2) The second project is related to construction of an internal container river port at Ashuganj at a cost of $36.23 million. Bangladesh and India have recently signed an agreement under which Ashuganj in Bangladesh and Silghat in India have been declared ports of call.
3) The third project is to buy 10 broad gauge locomotive engines worth $31.55 million for Bangladesh Railway.
4) The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh projects are also related to Bangladesh Railway. Some 125 broad gauge passenger coaches will be bought at a cost of $53.63 million under the fourth project,
5) while 60 tank wagons for fuel oil transportation and two break vans at a cost of $8.85 million under the fifth project.
6) The sixth one is on buying 50 metre gauge flat wagons and five break vans at a cost of $4.55 million for Bangladesh Railway.
7) Under the seventh project, two railway bridges -- 2nd Bhairab Bridge and 2nd Titas Bridge -- will be constructed, which will cost $120 million.
8) The next five projects are related with road transport. The eighth one is to buy 300 double-decker buses for Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC) at an estimated amount of $29.65 million.
9) Under the ninth project, 50 articulated buses would be bought for BRTC at a cost of $6.12 million.
10) The 10th one is related to development of road communications for a land port. Under the project, Sarail-Brahmanbaria-Sultanpur-Akhaura-Senarbadi road will be constructed at a cost of $33.82 million.
11) The 11th project is for construction of an overpass at Jurain rail crossing and a flyover at Malibagh rail crossing in Dhaka. These will cost $31.44 million.
12) Project number 12 is purely on connectivity between Bangladesh and India. Under this project, a road will be constructed between Ramgarh and Sabroom [Tripura's southern border town] at a cost of $14.53 million.
13) An amount of $150.86 million will be spent for the 13th project, which is for setting up power gridline between India and Bangladesh. Under the project, a 400KV grid inter-connection between Bheramara of Bangladesh and Baharamapur of India will be set up.
14) The 14th project has four sub projects related to capacity building of Bangladesh Standard and Testing Institute (BSTI). Laboratories will be set up at a cost of $8.92 million to test foods, cement, brick and gold.

To snuff out the BNP whinefest, Facts in loans
2) Linky

Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi often claims on the floor of the State Assembly and at public meetings that he has been able to get more Central funds than what the former AGP government could get under six heads — the State Annual Plans, Central sector schemes, Centrally sponsored schemes, Non-Lapsable Pool of Resources (NLPR), Special Plans, and Schemes under the North Eastern Council (NEC). The vocal Chief Minister, however, stops short of making public the huge amount of sanctioned Central funds that his government has forfeited due to its failure to submit utilization certificates to the Centre on time. The failure on the part of the government to submit the utilization certificates of funds meant for various schemes points to the fact that funds received by the State Government have not been properly utilized. The Gogoi government had to forfeit a whopping Rs 19214.66-crore sanctioned funds against the six Central schemes from fiscal 2006-07 to fiscal 2009-10 due to its failure to submit their utilization certificates on time.

3) Maoist menace expands in Bihar Linky

The Maoists are expanding their base in Bihar. Confined to the south till a few years ago, Naxalites have now started making their presence felt in the northern parts of the state. Muzaffarpur, Sitamarhi and Sheohar districts are their new bastions. The Maoists have allegedly organised kangaroo courts in several hamlets in these districts.
...
So far, almost 16 police stations of the Tirhut range under Muzaffarpur, Sitamarhi and Sheohar districts are facing Maoist problems. The rebels have been sneaking into the Indian territory from Nepal and carrying out subversive activities en route to Sheohar. Pandey has directed the senior superintendent of police of Muzaffarpur and superintendents of police of other Red-hit districts to conduct searches at random to flush Maoists out of their hideouts.
...
To prevent the influx of Maoists from Nepal, jawans of Sashastra Seema Bal have been deployed in the camps and outposts at Piprakothi and Sursand in Sitamarhi district.

4)

Indian Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh Monday objected to calling the native tribals of Andaman and Nicobar “primitive tribes” even as their decreasing numbers continue to be a major concern. “We must stop using the term primitive, use the term original inhabitants,” Ramesh said while replying to supplementaries in the Rajya Sabha. Great Andamanese, Onges, Jarawas, Sentinelese and Shompens are the identified tribes from the islands. “They are away from the mainstream. They are original Negroids who migrated from Africa, how the local administration saves them is a challenge,” Ramesh said.

The right term from the official A&N Gazetteer is "autochthonous people." More on the geopol history of the Islands chain later. [As I speak, I am re-holding Kiran Dhingra's gazetteer on an ILL. The book's summary on matters of interest requires a separate post. This would follow-up on the Coco Islands saga.]
5) Manipur blockade Linky

Leaders of the United Naga Council (UNC) and the All Naga Students’ Association (ANSAM) did not turn up for scheduled tripartite talks with the Manipur Government and Central Government representatives here on Saturday. After a meeting of the State cabinet on Wednesday, it was decided that a ministerial team would be sent to Senapati district to negotiate with the Naga leaders. The three-member team consists of TN Haokip, Minister of Tourism, N Biren Singh, Minister of Sports and DD Thaisii, Minister of Tribal Development, along with Naveen Verma, Joint Secretary (Northeast).

Verma said that all the demands raised by the Naga groups are in the domain of the State Government. The UNC had presented a four-point charter to the Central Government, which included the issues of alleged suppression of their rights by the Manipur State government, the issue of killing of Naga student during the protests, the withdrawal of Section 144 from Naga areas and revoking the Wanted tag on their leaders. Disappointed with the central government's failure to address their demands, the UNC imposed a 20-day economic blockade along the national highway leading to the landlocked Manipur, bordering Myanmar, since Wednesday. UNC activists burned tyres and blocked National Highway-39, disrupting vehicular traffic for a while. The blockade has been called on NH-39 (Imphal-Dimapur) and NH-53 (Imphal-Jiribam). Paramilitary personnel from the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force and the India Reserve Battalion (IRB) have been deployed on both the highways.

6) Border fencing Linky

Badaruddin Ajmal, AIUDF supremo and MP from Dhubri, put a question to Union Home Minister of State at Lok Sabha on July 27. He wanted to know if any proposal was received by his Ministry to seal Indo-Bangla border to prevent influx of Bangladeshis. Mullapalli Ramchandran, Union Minister of State for Home, said no such proposal has come from any political party. Now, it is wonder of wonders that after years of agitation on the issue by AASU, NESO and various political parties, visits of Union Home Ministry officials for on the spot study of border management, the reply from the minister of state exposes not only lack of seriousness on the part of the Centre but also its callous attitude. If after spending crores of rupees from the public exchequer on border fencing and roads and also review of the progress so far made in their implementation, the reply from the Union Home Ministry was just shocking and surprising.

Perhaps, the Ministry is also ignorant of the Assam Accord of 1985. One of the important clauses of the Accord clearly stipulates completion of the barbed wire fencing and sealing of the border all along the state’s part of the international border with Bangladesh for which deadline has been extended several times. AASU, AGP and BJP leaders reacting to the statement of Mullapalli Ramchandra described it ‘quite inexplicable.’ It is the responsibility of the Centre to ensure that fencing and sealing of the border is completed expeditiously considering the unabated influx of Bangladeshis through long stretches of porous border. Political parties fighting for the cause can only help the Centre and the State on implementation of the fencing and roads. Kiriti Bhushan Purkayastha, BJP district president, reminded more than a decade back, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former Prime Minister and Uma Bharati, former party leader, led human chains of thousands of people at Karimganj and Dhubri sectors, demanding sealing of border. Does any political party send proposal on it, he asked?

7) India-ASEAN FTA Linky

Trade ministers from India and the ten south-east Asian nations will meet in Vietnam later this month to speed up negotiations so that an agreement could be signed on services during the India-ASEAN summit in October. “The two sides (India and ASEAN) are keen to liberalise the trade in services and investment. Ministers will meet on August 26 and 27 to give a fillip to the talks,” a Commerce Department official told PTI. After signing a free trade pact in goods last August, India and ASEAN are engaged in talks to widen the agreement to include services and investments at the earliest. Indian officials had earlier indicated that the negotiations would be wrapped up by end of this month.

The official, however, admitted the pace of talks is slow as there are some differences. “ASEAN members are not ready to liberalise services where India has interest,” he said, adding that some of them are apprehensive that India, which is the world’s second fastest growing economy, would end up dominating their markets.

8) Who has heard the term "turf war" before?
HRD, law, health ministries in tussle over higher education control Linky

Three different versions of the same bill regarding the regulation of higher education in India have been drafted by the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry, health ministry and law ministry. As the law and health ministries battle to have the regulatory control over higher education under their respective fields, the HRD ministry is working to bring education in these fields under its own jurisdiction. The issue has now been taken up to the Prime Minister's office in order to help solve the tussle.