The paradox of reservation for the Christian community

Tamil Nadu minister for higher education, K. Ponmudy, provided someimpressive figuresonthe quantum jump in admission into engineering colleges in the state: "three years ago 32,830 students were admitted through counseling.   This figure had gone up this year to over 78,000."  Among the reasons for the quantum jump he pointed out was the abolition of the common entrance test system.  The number of students of Tamil medium jumped over the last two years from 11,800 to 34,400.  Likewise the number of rural students more than doubled to about 50,000.

Tamil Nadu has been way ahead of other states in offering engineering education.  According to the minister 90,168 students were admitted to the self-financing engineering colleges; these included 11,321 students from other states. In addition there are over 20,000 seats offered by government engineering colleges.

The minister also gave the figure of huge jump in the number of students from minority communities admitted to engineering colleges.  The number of Muslim students registered more than four fold' increase - from 610 in 2005 to 2565 in 2008.  For Christian students the jump was equally impressive from 861 to 2757 in this period due to special quotas of reservation for minority communities.

I am not convinced of the need for reservation for Christian minorities.  Thanks to the missionaries, for close to two centuries, the Christian community has been receiving special attention for education.  The copious flow of foreign money has helped in the rapid spread of hundreds  of educational institutions from the primary to the higher education stage.  Institutions like Loyola College, which has for a number of years attracted meritorious students, later switched gear and have been giving special preferences to students from the Christian community.  This preference also extends to the appointment of teachers; this notwithstanding the character of the Christian institution as a state-aided institution. 

With this widespread literacy one will find a more than proportionate share of people of this community in a vast range of occupations from politics to academics, from the professions to government employment.  This community also seems to enjoy special preference in employment in consular offices and MNCs.

DMK supremo, M. Karunanidhi, facilely decided on special reservation for this community without so much as a debate or discussion. Including the seats won through open competition plus the reservation, the share of the community in higher education seems to be far in excess of its proportion in the population.  In this backdrop is such reservation warranted?

High newsprint prices don’t deter profligate consumption

The Indian Newspaper Society (INS) has expressed concern over the extraordinary jump, of over fifty per cent, in the indigenous  price of newsprint.  INS pointed out that the indigenous capacity has grown, availability of local newsprint is reported to be satisfactory and thus the steep increase cannot be justified.

INS also traces the cause as the current difficulties in import on account of freight increase, transport bottlenecks and other factors.

Since in the free market system consumers cannot do much to tackle the problem of cartelization, the Society suggests newspapers to act in concert to reduce newsprint consumption by twenty per cent in the shortest possible time.

I welcome this sanity that seems overdue.  For years IE has been pointing to the profligacy, especially on the part of flourishing large newspapers, in the matter of consumption of newsprint.  On the lines of US, large Indian newspapers have also been reckless in expanding the number of pages.  This has been  increasingly offset by fat advertisement revenue. One has been witnessing the paradox of increasing number of pages of a daily being offered at heavily subsidized prices.  Times of India, Chennai, for instance offers close to forty pages at Rs.2, Economic Times offers  twenty pages at just Rs.1.50.  The Hindu or Hindustan Times are no exception. The price cannot cover even the cost of newsprint and printing.

But the more serious issue is the DMK-type freebie culture that has been spreading  by the day; today it is common sight to pick up a good variety of newspapers in the metro airports just free.  Whether Times of India, Hindustan Times or The Hindu, these copies are just stacked in thousands in airport lounges. 

With the ostensible purpose of inculcating newspaper reading habits, large newspapers dump their daily editions on school children studying from sixth standard at just a rupee per copy.  Look also at the thousands of copies distributed free in a plethora of seminars organized by industrial associations of some description or the other.

Large newspapers seem to compete with the mushrooming neighbourhood newspapers that are offered free, solely surviving on advertisements.

A few decades ago the newspaper Sakal from Pune took up the issue to the court requesting a price page schedule for newspapers.  Unfortunately the court rejected the plaint.  I feel such a restraint is much needed to put an end to the profligacy of newsprint consumption, especially on the part of large newspapers.  At the height of the war between Hindustan Times and Times of India to expand readership, these two large newspapers offered their editions at just a rupee each.  With the commission they offered to the vendors plus the value of waste papers realisation was estimated around Rs.1.04; there was thus no need for the vendors to exert selling the edition to the consumer.  Thousands of copies just found their way to merchants dealing in waste paper.  Claims of circulation thus became unreliable.

One does not witness such ingenuous practices adopted by a large newspaper like New York Times which prices its edition at $ 1.50.

Most newspapers, including Indian, also offer their editions free over the internet. 

The suggestion of INS for voluntary restraint may not have many takers among the large newspapers that have built their fortunes through fat ad revenues and are bound to persist in their profligacy. 

US presidential elections – Hockey-mom takes on charismatic Obama
I was in the US through July and August.  The TV networks provided a rich coverage of the Beijing Olympics 2008 followed by the conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties for the nomination of candidates for the posts of President and Vice President in the elections scheduled for 4 November.  What grand events these were!  The Democratic convention held at Denver during August, 2008 attracted an estimated 80,000 strong delegates.  Star speakers included former President Bill Clinton and his wife Senator Hillary Clinton, who contested closely for nomination, Vice Presidential candidate senator J.Biden, Presidential candidate Barrack Obama besides several other leading lights of the Democratic party.  Obama, who is credited with a lot of community work as Senator in the state of Illinois along with his wife Michelle have been illustrious lawyers. 

Obama was hardly known four years ago when he was a relatively a raw speaker at the Democratic convention.  His rise has been meteoric.  The first candidate to contest for Presidency from the black community, Obama started the campaign in early 2007 way ahead of other contestants.  He was systematic.  He was articulate and quickly earned a reputation for efficient organization and for his charisma.  It was not that easy to take on Hillary Clinton; the long drawn contest was tough and drew the best of both the candidates.  Ultimately Clinton conceded and at the Democratic convention she appealed to vote for Obama and the latter made a meticulously perfect and eloquent address that coincided with the fortieth death anniversary of Martin Luther King, the apostle for black rights through Gandhian non- violent methods.  Like Gandhi, King was also a victim of assassination.

Democratic candidates were a good combination of youth (Obama is 46) and experience  (Biden 72).  The latter brings with him rich experience in foreign affairs.

The Republican Party convention held at Minneapolis,  was expected to be a more modest event.  It was also affected by the build up of the furious hurricane Gustav that was threatening a repeat of the disaster that visited the state of Louisiana by hurricane Katrina three years ago.  Senator McCain (72), a veteran of the Vietnam war who suffered as a prisoner of war for more than five years, was considered a valiant hero.  The senator is also known for his experience in foreign affairs. Contrary to expectations, McCain opted to select a relatively unknown candidate, Sarah Palin (44), the Governor of the largest state of Arizona in the west.  It turned out to be a master stroke.  Though the days preceding the convention were thick with stories on the unfamiliarity of Palin to Washington’s ways and on her personal life as a mother of five children including a just four-month old and the advanced stage of pregnancy of her unwed eldest daughter (18)  studying in the school, Palin carried the day at the convention. Through an evocative address she won instant appeal especially from the women delegates.  Her unfamiliarity with the ways of Washington was brushed aside; like our Jayalalitha, Palin also did not give much weightage to the power of media.

McCain’s choice has put a big challenge to the Democrats.  All the hype created by Hillary Clinton as the first woman to contest for the highest office seems to help Palin.  Powerful women groups seem to go gung-ho  over Palin being one among the hockey moms, a family woman caring for children, as the chief executive of the largest state with a flourishing oil economy and with strong conservative views (Palin opted to deliver her fifth child despite his being afflicted with down syndrome). The McCain-Palin combination seems to have intensified competition from the Republican party which earlier seemed to suffer the anti-incumbency factor and the unpopularity of President Bush.  The master stroke of McCain in opting and picking up Palin seems to have impressed substantially the chance for Republicans.

UW-M – meaningful collaboration
On 27 August I participated in the Farmers Day event organized by the Agricultural Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  The university has a strong natural sciences department that does a lot of research on agricultural productivity improvements, animal husbandry and related issues.  UW-M has over 3000 acres of farms for experimentation near Madison.  At the top class laboratory, research scientists test hundreds of samples of soil every week and offer invaluable advice on corrections needed to enrich these.

Experts from the university explain to visiting farmers on 50 years of continuous research on corn and soyabean and the optimum and balanced use of fertilizers.  These are based on the empirical data compiled over the last five decades.

Dr John Peters, soil expert (who visited the Agriculture Consultancy Management Foundation earlier this year) stressed the importance of proper analysis of the soil and the optimum use of fertilizer.

The latter assumes enormous importance in the context of the humongous increase in the price of chemical fertilizers in recent months.   A lot of efforts was therefore, needed on optimizing the use of fertilizers, avoiding wastage and ensuring the highest output per unit of fertilizer applied.  Senior scientists of the university with their rich experience, interacted with farmers providing clarifications and answers to variety of issues raised by the farmers.

Unfortunately, such intense interaction between the academics and the farmers, is not widely experienced in India.  I have come across such interactions in a few agricultural universities like Punjab, Haryana and Pant Nagar (Uttrakhand).  These universities have been modeled on the land grant universities of US and have adopted several of their successful research and extension practices.   Even now several thousand farmers flock to the Punjab Agriculture University to the Kisan Melas  organized at the beginning of the kharif and rabi seasons.  Sadly such close interaction between the farmers and the academics is not widely seen in most other agri universities.  Extension work used to be at its zenith in 1960s to 1980s and made rich contributions to continuous and steep increase in agriculture production.  But these tapered of.  The stagnation in agriculture witnessed in the 1990s right up to 2007 with food production stuck at 200-210 million tonnes is largely the result of this neglect. 

Dr K Shapiro, a renowned professor on agricultural and applied economics and director of the Asian Partnership Initiative and his team of energetic colleagues are keen to involve in collaborative programmes with several Asian countries.  UW-M has established close linkages with China for a few years now.  When I met him at Madison in April 2007, Shapiro and his colleague, Dr. Aseem Ansari, expressed interest in establishing such a bridgehead with Indian universities.  They worked to set up the Khorana Programme of Scientific Exchange.  The programme is named after Har Gobind Khorana, a Nobel laureate who was a member of the UW faculty during 1960-70 and won the Nobel prize for physics/medicine in 1968 for interpretations of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis. 

The Khorana programme has as its objective to provide Indian and US students with international experience, contribute to Indian rural development and increased interaction between the Indian and US scientific communities in academics and the private sector.

In just less than a year Shapiro and his team had given excellent shape to realise the objectives of the programme.  They are working closely with Agriculture Consultancy Management Foundation, Mahindra & Mahindra, Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust and Tasty Bite. 

The academic exchange programme provides undergraduate summer research internships in India and Wisconsin, Ph.D research fellowships and post-doctoral fellowships, faculty collaborative research, rural development cooperation, technology transfer, entrepreneurship short term courses and industry internships.  In 2008 it offered such fellowships to fourteen under grad students from the IITs (Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee), JNU, Aligarh Muslim University and Punjab Agriculture University and provided these nine weeks of research internships.   ACMF is working with UW-M to offer joint fellowships under the Khorana programme.

UW-M with over a century of innovation and discovery, is the leader in R&D.  In 2006 the R&D spend of this single university amounted to a whopping $ 830 million (Rs. 3818 crore).  John Hopkins topped the ten American universities with reported R&D spend of $ 1499 million, but this included $709 million defense research mainly under a US Navy contract.  If this is excluded, UW-M was the leader in such research and is ahead of such renowned universities like UCLA, University of Michigan, UCSF, Stanford… UW-M Research Park hosts 114 companies and derives much funding by private corporates, alumni and the US government.

Thus the summer research internship for under grads spread over 10-12 weeks will provide rich experience to do research with international lab teams, join top US under-grads on MSF-REV programme and learn about technology transfer.

The jump-start made by Khorana programme is to be followed through vigorous collaboration with Indian institutions on a variety of development programmes.  Institutions of higher learning in India should look to opportunities for colaboration for mutual benefit.