The Politics of Agriculture in India

Having worked on three projects in the area of agriculture spread through the country, i could not help noticing the condundrum that is our country.

It is acknowledged that over 70% of India's population depends on agriculture. That should make them the largest votebank that exists in the country. Politicians should be bending backwards to make them happy. But that is not what is happening. The politician and the bureaucrat get together and support traders. So a farmer HAS to sell in specified markets at prices often rigged by the traders. Support prices are announced way after harvest, leading to distress sales by the farmer (who has no holding capacity) and a windfall for the trader who sells to the FCI. Imports are made late after the consumer is fleeced by the trader and when there is a bumper crop, export is not opened until the traders mop up the market at dirt cheap prices and then sell at higher profits in export markets.

In a span to one year, if I can spot the trend how is it that the farmers have not? Or if they have, why are they not protesting more vociferously? I do not buy the argument that the illiterate farmer in India cannot distinguish between good and bad. They have always managed to get rid of any politician that they wanted to. Bureaucracy is tougher.

So why is the Indian farmer suffering instead of making the politicians suffer? They are making rational choices in their crop selection, so why not in policy makers? Why has farmer leaders have limited circle of power? Why has no body managed to get all farmers and farming communities into a single powerful platform?

Opportunity and Moral Fibre

Very recently, a senior leader of a national political party blamed another party which has been in power for the majority of time in this country for having corrupted the system so much, that his party members also have become corrupt. In most circles, persons with such high ‘external locus of control’ are looked at as losers. Being able to take responsibility for your actions is imperative for growth. I believe in holding my own destiny. I believe in doing what you know is right. I believe in having morals.

Moral fibre comes from within. It is then built by the family and society we live in. Some people don’t have corrupt impulses, some people control such impulses and some give way to the impulses. In the same situation of being homeless after a natural disaster, some would share the food they found with others so all are a little nourished, some may want more food than was their quota but hold themselves back bearing with their hunger and still others grab food meant for others.

Take two simple examples. While I had used private couriers to send documents, I had never sent gifts. The first time that I did, I did not know I had to attach a list of contents and sure enough some small toys I had put in – worth maybe Rs. 50 did not reach the addressee. Some tapes of classical music in the same package did. Clearly, there was someone at the courier service, waiting for the opportunity to meet a rookie like I, had no qualms about opening my package, removing what he wanted and sending forward what he did not want. An honest courier would have made me make the list, sign it and then have collected the package for delivery. On the other hand, when a neighbour’s kid threw out a ball, a construction worker working on an under-construction building picked it up, rang the bell and gave it back – saying, “my kid’s asleep. If he had seen it he would cry to return it since he does not have one. Could you please be careful while playing with the ball?” Whose child is likely to be taught right from wrong? Whose child is likely to grow up honest? Multiply the sums involved by a million and the issue remains still the same.

The true test of moral fibre is opportunity. Everybody can call themselves honest if they have never had the opportunity to steal. It is only when you are exposed to the opportunity to steal will your true values stand out. The fact that everybody who has the opportunity does not use it to benefit his partisan needs, is the only reason that the society still survives as a society. That the one who restrains himself is looked upto and the one who indulged himself is denigrated cannot be held against people.

Look all around you. Whom do you respect? You may at some level admire the skill and guts with which a corrupt person functions, but do you respect them? To be respected you need to be worthy of the respect. You need to be seen respecting those with morals. You need to have morals. You need to take yourself beyond avarice and above temptation, how ever hard that may be. You need to be able to believe in yourself to be able to provide yourself all that you want, through honest means. You need to respect yourself.

You also need to reject from your fold those you know to be corrupt. You need to stand for a society that takes action against the corrupt. You need to take action against the corrupt.

Elitism in Academic Institutions

A couple of years ago, the government made moves to remove what it called “elitism” in academic institutions. I began to wonder if such a thing existed, especially in the graduate and post graduate level. As some one who went to a definitely non-elitist school and then to “elitist” one, I thought it would be good to look at the concept closer. In this article, I ask and answer several questions that arose in my mind. I look at all elitism that is possible in an academic environment.

First question to answer is “what is elitist”. Some of the synonyms provided for the word by Microsoft include exclusive, discriminatory, selective, restricted, limited, superior and snobby. I did not search further and decided to go with that.

Next question is “are the IITs and IIMs elitist”. If I take the definition as given by the synonyms, yes it is but the exclusivity or selection or limitation is based on intellectual and managerial ability and not on economic, caste, religion, region or any other parameter that a politician understands well and employs to identify his target segment. The process of selection is far as I can see do not go out of the way to exclude anybody on the basis of anything but their ability to crack the JEE or CAT and ability to handle an interview and GD.

Walk through the campus of any IIT or an IIM – the first thing that strikes you is that the students all look similar. When I visited IIMA six years after passing out, I thought if I kind of screwed up my eyes I could actually see my batch all over again. Later with some friends, I mentioned this and everybody agreed they had noticed the same thing. We even joked that the Profs probably have dies (like an assembly line) and every body chosen needs to fit into at least one of these. But the IITs don’t see their students until they join the institute. So how does the phenomenon happen? The only common factor here is possibly the above average intelligence and ambition. The other invisible factor is the social structure one is brought up in.

Take two women’s colleges in Delhi. Both get students from similar backgrounds, both are popular hunting grounds for the guys, both have much more academic discipline than the co-ed Hindu College I went to. Yet, in the three batches I saw at IIMA, one was well represented and the other never. It is not that girls at one college were incapable to getting to an IIM, a lot of them did not even try. The same college has several illuminaries in the political, activism and literary fields. The point is, if your school or college does not have the environment that encourages you to take the toughest exams in the country, you may not contemplate trying. If you don’t know people who have taken these exams, if you don’t know people who can tell how they did it, you need enormous amounts of awareness, intelligence and ambition to be able to make it to these institutions. It is not the institutions that stop people from applying or joining but the fear of competition. The elitism is then simply based on being able to take on the pressure of proving yourself.

After starting naukri.com, I came across thousands of resumes. I did not research them but a pattern seemed to emerge that I privately called the TamBram Cutting Edge. The Tamilian Brahmins seem to be right at the cutting edge of the most happening intellectually challenging careers. About 15 years ago, a Tamil magazine had lamented that once upon a time the Civil Services was dominated by Tamilians and today they make up hardly a fraction. But at IIMA and later I realized that Tamilians are obvious way ahead of the others. As the sheen of an IAS job was wearing away, they had taken to MBBS, B.Tech, C.A and MBA courses with a vengeance. In my batch at IIMA, about 20% of the students and 30% of the girls were Tamil Speaking, most of us from middle class families. You have to agree that’s a lot in a country that has over 30 languages. In 1997-98, when companies were starting to implement SAP and needed Chartered Accountants trained in SAP, the only resumes I saw were of TamBrams. When I commented on this, my non-TamBram friends said, they were not surprised since the TamBram Diaspora was either setting the trend or spotting the trend faster than the others. But if they are found in large numbers in IITs and IIMs and also other places, is possible to call all these institutions as elitist or discriminatory. If there are more applications from Chennai than from Patna for the CAT and the reverse for the Civil Services Exam, are the institutions responsible for the same?

At IIMA, I remember a Sunday morning breakfast conversation, when a classmate, male of course, propounded a theory that the institute set a minimum limit on the number of girls to take in. He went on and on and on until I said, if there was a limit is was possibly an upper limit to ensure that guys like him got in. We all laughed and went our ways. But when I see how many girls apply and how many make it, I think the ratio is higher than the boys. As much as I would love to see more girls there, I don’t find enough girls in my neighbourhood or social circles even wanting to prepare for the CAT. Again, I would hold the parents and schools and colleges that did not build the ambition in these girls to try for these spots responsible rather than the institution.

If you are not a genius, these institutions can be very hard on your egos. Most of the students who join these institutions have “led the pack” all their lives. Suddenly there are 150 others, who are all bright and as used to being considered the smartest around as you were. Then you realize that not everybody (and possibly you) can be top 10 (the relative grading ensures that). The first two terms are spent just coping with this realization for a lot of people. Some cope and some don’t. Every few batches there are cases of a person cracking up and leaving the institute. Even amongst those who stay and complete the course, some realize that if they work very hard they may reach close to the top. Some decide it is not worth it. Even with the students who joined the reserved seats (whom you recognized from their CAT roll number and not always otherwise), there was no discrimination in terms of interactions or grading. There have been people of all backgrounds detained for non-performance. If there were group projects to be done, groups would be made based on intellectual capabilities and friendships that made for good grades and easy work sharing. Some logical elitism here but definitely not institutionalized.

I think I have answered my own question on what kind of elitism these institutions have. Based on intelligence, ambition, perseverance and not much else. That leads me to the next question “Are such institutions required”? My unequivocal answer is yes.

At school level, children hardly ever get to choose their own schools. Their parents decide the school and therefore the future course of your life. If your school does not believe sports are important in life, and you did not pick up a tennis racquet until you were twenty, you may never discover if you could have been playing against Steffi Graf. The same logic works academically also. Schools need to be able to identify student’s strengths and build people’s ambitions based on it. A schoolmate of mine took science (that is practically mandatory if you are considered bright). Today he is a successful copywriter in an ad agency. When we met recently he said our English teacher had told him that he would do better if he took languages and social sciences but he refused and struggled with the science subjects and often thinks of her now with respect. What we needed in the school was elitism not based on marks but on strengths. What we needed was a system which by class 10 would help a person identify what (s)he is really good at and make the choice of subjects a reflection of choice and not necessity.

In the school I attended, which was government funded, I also saw economic elitism. Until I was in class 8, I had classmates who came from all parts of Delhi - the slums to government colonies to Saket to Greater Kailash. By class 10 most of those who came from slums were gone. There may have been bright students from amongst them, but I don’t think the school had any scholarships or even counseling sessions with their parents to retain them in school. By class 12, the separation was complete – Science and commerce sections had 90% of the middle and upper middle class students and the reverse in arts. At naukri, two out of three peons who trained themselves using the office computers to become data entry operators were from other branches of my school. One of them is now comfortable with programming and modifies programs to manage the billing system if IT is too busy to handle it. This is what got me thinking about my school and its format. Obviously with the right incentive and environment, he would have done well academically and who knows may have cracked the JEE. If the school had been based on intellectual elitism, the school would have identified him and helped him grow. A school system that depends completely on marks and not on the IQ of a person, will be based on economic elitism. And mind you, all this happened in a school in the heart of Delhi, literally. Can we expect any better from the interiors of the country where there are hardly any schools, teachers, or teachers who teach at the schools?

At college level, when you choose your college or subject again your own socio-economic circle makes a lot of difference. Most people today, thanks to annual published surveys on colleges country wide, know the top two or three colleges in the metros. But how does a person who does not live in Delhi, know which are the good colleges in Delhi for a degree in Mathematics. He asks someone he knows who lives in Delhi. I know someone who joined a fairly useless college in South Delhi when she could have joined the best, simply because the Uncle who lived in Delhi told the parents that the best colleges are too far away and this is good enough for all of us. I am sure that a few of the students from the college she joined have done well for themselves and few from the best have failed in their careers or lives. While an individual can independently achieve his targets, if he sets his mind to it; but his targets get higher if he is surrounded by people of equal or higher intellect. You need competition to grow. Roger Bannister could not break the four-minute barrier to complete a mile until he positioned someone close to the end whom he had to overtake, and then could he break the barrier.

You may get a complex after being surrounded by people who are smarter than you but you will also come out smarter. But what is in it for the smartest guy in the group? That is why in a mixed IQ group, the higher IQ guys join together. Only then do they get the stimulation and growth that they need. That is why the old adage, tell me your friends and I will tell you who you are. That is why the institutions of higher learning try and identify the best brains and put them together. That is what a test like JEE and CAT try and do. Which is why doing away with these tests is actually detrimental to the country. In order to improve the education standard at the higher levels, interaction of the faculty of the best schools and the other schools should be encouraged, so that the knowledge that is transferred is improved. Having one good teacher here and one there or one good student here and one there will not raise the standards. In order to be able to compete with the best, you have to be with the best.

Next question, will increasing the number of seats in all these institutions make the country one of smarter people. The answer I believe is no. Let me hypothetically and very simplistically define my position. I do so with no malice towards any institute and with some deference and loyalty to mine. There were 3 IIMs with 100 odd seats in each until 1985. People who got into IIM Lucknow that year, would have otherwise gone to other B-Schools. Let’s say IIML had not started that year but those 50 seats were increased at IIMA. (Let’s also agree that there has existed a ranking of these institutions forever. When I first heard of an IIM, I was in class 8 and a cousin who had just finished his B.Tech from IIT, Madras told me the place to go to next, was IIMA) So instead of 150 seats being offered at IIMA, 200 would have been offered. Lets say 220 offer letters went out. Since IIMA is ranked the best in the country, most of those offered would have accepted the same. So the IIM ranked last would have taken the people who joined IIML. Further down, some B-school at the bottom of the totem pole, would have got students, that it last year believed were not management material. The students in that school will get an opportunity to learn business management, but will still not get the excitement and learning that they may get, arguing in an IIM classroom. Their MBA degree may get them a better job than they may have otherwise got, but not necessarily. Companies today ask for a C grade MBA for field sales staff positions, which twenty years ago, a non-professional graduate was considered capable of handling.

Will decreasing fees get more people to join these colleges and get smarter? I don’t think so. If institutions are clearly defined as intellectually challenging, followed by a high probability of a successful career, people make an effort to stretch their pocket as much as possible. Look at the hierarchy one sees in the choice of an Engineering School. The high priority schools are not the most expensive - IITs, RECs, some select University Colleges like in Bombay, Delhi or Banaras. Somewhere down the line parents and children take a call whether the Jhumri Talaiya University engineering degree that costs Rs. X is better or the Private College A in Bangalore costing Rs. NX better. Nobody who can afford NX goes to JhTU if PCA is considered better and everybody who can afford NX competes and only some of them make it to PCA. So the elitism continues to be intellectual at one level or the other. People join places that are tougher to get into and tougher to complete, because it gives them better dividends, whether or not it costs them more. In fact, people are willing to pay higher fees at a tougher college, for the privilege of being practically tortured. What else explains people paying close to 40 lakhs to do a one year MBA at INSEAD. Imagine the stress of a two year program condensed into one!!

Is it possible to create new institutions of high standards? Yes it is. It is not essential to destroy an existing institution to do so. You need to provide the best infrastructure, which will attract the best brains amongst the students and faculty. That would improve the research done at those institutions as well as opportunities to explore for the students. Most universities in the country are crying for funds. Governments should devote more time, energy and funds into making one or more of them magnets for talent. Take for example, the Allahabad University. I am told (I was too young to see and understand) from a center of excellence in the early 20^th century, by the 1970s following delayed exams and other such issues, employers in their advertisement would clearly say “persons with Allahabad University degrees need not apply”. Today, it is definitely not a scholar’s pilgrimage. A good university in Allahabad would serve all of UP and may be even further.

I think people in general see through motives behind such moves and not surprisingly the minister who propounded the need to remove elitism was shown what people thought of it, in the very next poll. India is a country that has admired intellect since time immemorial. The focus needs to be on raising the standards of all institutions rather than diluting existing standards.