Delhi and Beyond

I hope everyone has had as much fun reading the blog as I had managing it.  It was great to get different viewpoints and to have a forum for discussion.  Special thanks to Kishore for making all of it happen.

Before you leave for good, be sure to check out the  ‘Lecturers and Speakers’ link at the top of this page to get access to short bios and essays from the speakers we met on our trip.  Also, if you’re dying for more pictures, be sure to check out Lisa’s Facebook photos and Eric’s Picasa photos.

Filed under: Uncategorized by mike
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Our last supper was curry (as were all our previous ones) and somehow between stashing all of my clothes back in my suitcase while making a tearful goodbye to the green floors and fluorescent lights of the Pamposh Hotel, I managed to finish the food on my plate despite the all too familiar stomach rumbling. From there, we loaded onto the bus, and made our way one last time through the dark streets of Delhi.

As we made our way to the airport, I began to think about all the things that I had learned. I had learned that whenever anyone tells the amount of time that it will take to get anywhere, you must double this amount to get the actual duration of the trip. I learned that though Dr. Gawande holds the title of ‘economist,’ he is in all actuality a very fun person with amazing talents in dancing and singing. I also learned that though there is a lot of hype about India and its growth, from what I saw, the prospects for India are a less optimistic than I had heard. China and India are touted as the two big up-and-comers in the world as far as super powers. I even heard one student say that India’s prospects were so promising, that they would surpass China’s GDP by 2050 or so.

All of this seemed a far cry from what I saw of India. Though India is experiencing 9% growth, it lacks the infrastructure necessary for the growth. Good roads in India are the exception, not the rule. Even on long stretches of rural highway (including toll roads), it was hard to get above 90kmph (about 60mph) because of traffic or construction. While good roads are not necessarily the end-all for growth, they are indicative of greater faults in governance. Education is also not doing well. Only 10% of the population is actually graduating from college (granted this is huge for a population of 1.3 billion) which seems hardly enough to support continued growth at the rate of 9%. There is also no trust in the government system. When asking Indians about problems the country was experiencing (notably Kashmir, but also about problems in general), many people blamed the problems on politicians. The general consensus seemed to be that they create problems where there are no problems. This problem is further exacerbated by the amount of corruption which plagues the Indian government.

Though there is absolutely no doubt that India is commanding a growing importance on the world stage, they currently do not have the infrastructure (notably in government) to support such high levels of growth in the long term. This article is only a summary of what I saw and the views that I received, and therefore completely deficient on empirical evidence, and does not address many other relating factors which should be addressed. I will end on this though. When we got to the Dehli airport and stood in long, seemingly haphazard lines waiting to get on the plane, I felt that this merely added evidence to my conclusion. 10 hours later however, when we had been sitting on the runway at Heathrow for over an hour waiting to get in, I thought that I had maybe made to hasty a judgment about India’s ability to compete with other developing or developed countries.

Filed under: India and China, Infrastructure by jcaulkins
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Mani Shankar Iyer is a member of parliament (MP) and a cabinet minister. His portfolio is wide-ranging – panchayat raj (village-level governance), sports, and youth. This odd looking portfolio actually affects over 700 million people in a variety of ways. A problem with such a portfolio, which is less specific than others (energy, home, defense, foreign affairs, commerce, railway), is that it is very hard for him to argue at cabinet meetings for major increases in his share of budget expenditures. That was evident from his talk — .037% of expenditures go to youth and sports. India has a woeful record in bringing back medals at Olympics.

I was amazed that Alokesh Barua, the organizer of our program, had actually pulled off the feat of getting a minister (let alone an MP w/o an executive portfolio) to give us over an hour of their time during the busy days leading to the Indian budget. I was therefore looking forward to the talk, and Minister Iyer was every bit as entertaining and informative as I had heard he would be (even though his tired eyes betrayed the exhaustion from the 10-hour day of high-level meetings that probably preceded his talk).

I was a little disappointed at the lack of protocol exhibited by the students. Usually in a meeting like this at the Bush School, the tone and expression is different from those reserved for more peer oriented interactions. Would you use “guys” in a conversation with, say, the Treasure Secretary? So lose the “guys”, guys. I also think the students wanted me to give a whole brief on people who we were meeting, which I declined to do. My stock answer to “what are we doing” or “who are we meeting” was “I really don’t know”. My intention was that since we all had the program, we should do our own homework. Maybe I was wrong.

The Honorable Mr. Iyer answered at least 10 questions when Lisa asked about the NREG (see elsewhere in the blog for definition), and all those answers were superb, including the one to Lisa’s question. They were realistic, and would be no different if asked by experts from India, students from India, or students from the US. He has real command over facts and numbers, which may have been fresh in his mind from the budget meetings he has been at during this time. Village level governance is no easy matter, and improving it is even more difficult. But I was surprised at how much participation there has increased among women and people from scheduled castes.

To Erik’s question on oil deals with unsavory regimes in Sudan, the Honorable Mr.Iyer had two answers. The first was that of a realist, and somewhat chastising. His view was that the US cannot do unilaterally when that serves its purpose, and the ask others to behave multilaterally when that suits its purpose. In the area of energy, each country will seek out unilateral contracts. Which means that if the US is not making deals with a country, it opens opportunities for others to makes deals with them. Thus, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Sudan are all areas where India and China are making deals. Iyer’s pun about India learning to be strategic “from the best”, i.e. the US, left a lasting impression. Obviously it is a sentiment shared at the highest level of Indian policymaking.

More than anything, I was happy to see the quality of leadership at the Cabinet level. The Honorable Mr. Iyer is erudite, well selected (he has excellent credentials), extremely well informed, an engaging speaker, and might even be effective in changing things in rural India. Alokesh, thanks, and I hope you can repeat this for us next time.

Filed under: Lectures by kgawande
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In the morning of 10 January we went to the Blind Relief Association of Delhi. This facility, which is mainly a public project funded by the government is most helpful to blind youths and middle aged people of Delhi. An education facility that was established in 1944 trains teachers how to teach blind people who then learn how to make candles, repair electrical appliances, train massage therapists, manufacture simple metals with machines, and make or bind books.

The facility also holds an all boys’ residential school for senior secondary level students of about 200 children and a nursery. The children study languages, which include English and Hindi, play music, dance, study history, play sports and other subjects. For Devin the most interesting part was watching the children who were at the elementary level of school, play music in Hindi.
For me the most interesting part was watching teens play Cricket in the school courtyard. The building itself was established in 1955 in Delhi, which on the one hand seemed like a factory where the metals were made by middle aged laborers and on the other looked like a school where the children would hold class.

The facility also included one healthcare room, and a library, along with a studio in a basement to record books on tape. Most interestingly for Devin was the fact that many of the teachers getting trained were not blind but cared about special education and wanted to make a difference in their community as public servants to the blind. However, the administrators of the school themselves were blind. But for me the most interesting aspect of the school was the IT computer-training program. Here blind students read Braille out of a book and then typed what they read onto word documents. Also, they learn computer programs, notably, Jaws, Windows, MS Office and fax handling. The trip to the Blind Relief Association of Delhi was most fascinating and interesting.

In the afternoon of the same day we took a bus ride to the Teri Institute on the outer portion of Delhi. Teri is a not for profit research and educational institute. Before it became a university it was first a research institute and to this day focuses on such research topics as energy environment policy and technology, environmental biotechnology, regulatory studies of governance, resources and global security, action programs and sustainable development outreach. Their education program offers doctoral and masters studies in the fields of natural resources, environmental studies, and public administration. They noted in their lecture about how their masters in public administration is partnered with the University of Texas at Austin. They pride themselves for having an eco-friendly campus with an interesting concept of building their main living complex in their retreat center.

Both Devin and I found the environmental building quite fascinating. I specifically liked how the buildings’ wastewater was decomposed by phragmytes, a reed plant, in order to fertilize the retreat campuses plants. Devin was most fascinated with an underground tunnel that captured air, cycled it under the building and blew it up through chimneys that either cooled or heated the building. This was made possible by the fact that the air was circulated several meters below the earth in a temperate climate and came up at the right temperature into the building. The entire retreat ground and education the institute offers made for a very interesting trip.

Filed under: Field Trips by Chris Kilmer
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Today was our last day of school in Delhi. Wrapping up our JNU experience
was a professor speaking on the mechanism of microcredit and the impact it
has had on poverty alleviation. Our talk was very relevant, having spent
time in the last two weeks experiencing poverty on the front lines, and
having spent time seeing microfinance work as well.

The high points addressed were issues faced by traditional credit/lending
institutions, namely the problems of asymmetric information and moral
hazard. Asymmetric information refers to the fact that a bank is unable to
tell the difference between risky and non-risky borrowers, while moral
hazard refers to the inability of a bank to control a borrower’s actions
once loans have been given. We discussed how through group lending, these
two problems are solved, as village groups will know by virtue of
relationships who are the safe borrowers, and will know what other group
members are doing with their money.

It was refreshing to hear from an academic who is attempting to follow
through on some impact studies of microcredit: to date, most of the
microcredit enterprises we have heard from have been unable to discuss the
grander, long-term effect of microcredit on poverty alleviation as a whole.
The main point of impact studies though, is that general points of
development that microfinance or microcredit is intended to help are by
definition difficult to capture in a statistical study.

Following this presentation, we were able to hear from the chair of the
department about the banking system in India. He took us through what
happened in the sector upon liberalization of the system in the early 90s,
and the difficulties facing the financing sector in the present day.
Outlined in the presentation were the ways that Indian savers tend to keep
their money. Namely, only 5% of the population is involved in the stock
market, while savings are split between bank deposits and physical savings,
namely gold. An interesting point brought out in the discussion was that
gold markets are affected by the Indian monsoon season – when there is an
agricultural boom in India, farmers are more likely to buy more gold, which
causes the price of gold to increase.

Following these interesting lectures, we went to lunch with Preethi Sahai of
Basix, which Alejandra will discuss in a subsequent blog entry.

Filed under: Lectures by lmoorman
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One of the most enjoyable and insightful parts of this trip has been the travels to our destinations along our journey here in India. Unlike the US and other developed countries, where streets are often used solely for transport, the streets in India are multi-use zones. Along with hectic transport, the streets and their perimeters are a place for residence, commerce, showering, even public urination. The streets also feature cows, monkeys, dogs, elephants, water buffalo, goats and camels.

The most significant thing I have seen in India thus far has been on the streets. While leaving Delhi Saturday morning en route to Agra, the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, I saw something so memorable, yet so quickly I could not capture a photo. As we drove along in medium-volume traffic, I saw a man in a median divider, standing still, his hands in a low prayer position across his chest. His bike rested precariously against his the rear of his legs, in the path of fast-moving traffic. As our bus clipped along, my sight stayed with him as far as possible, watching him as he held this position, eyes closed, standing still like a minar.

After moving on I struggled to understand why he may have been standing in such a delicate situation so calmly—what drove him to pray at that moment? The trust he placed in others on the road was immense. This brief but portending sight summed up India, particularly Delhi, in an instant. The juxtaposed life here can be calm and frenetic, secure and precarious at once and in the same moment, counterintuitive, as Narenda Jadhav writes in Untouchables, like wanting to go to Heaven but not wanting to die. At this point on January 13 I’ve been subsumed by this outlook as well, wanting to return to the US, but not wanting to leave India.

Filed under: General by afigueroa
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On December 9, Indivar Kamtekar gave a historical interpretation of India’s colonial past and its ensuing relationship with Great Britain. Dr. Kamtekar attempted to view Indian history from another lens that questioned the history fed to the populous since the country gained ins independence. Often, nationalism is a conduit to state building; however, nationalism becomes a tool of the political elite to ensure their stay in office by pitting India against its former colonial presence. Dr. Kamtekar posited the theory that the history of India is a dichotomy between nationalism and imperialism. Indian historians have developed nationalistic myths that created an atmosphere of skepticism to the outside world, which shaped the path of the nation and its foreign policy. In a sense, these historians are justified in creating a national myth in order to establish legitimacy for the country, as well as emphasized the struggle between nationalism and imperialism in an attempt to pit good against evil.

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Filed under: History by egunn
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On Tuesday morning January 8^th, we met with Rajesh Rajagopalan to discuss the US-India Nuclear agreement (Erik Waters and Tim Kenyon posed with him after his talk). Unfortunately we were a little behind schedule, so our meeting had to be cut short. But for me however, it was one of the more interesting topics I have heard here yet – and this despite our numbers being reduced by nearly 50% for the day due to some internal disagreements with the India food/water/air/weather. Mr. Rajapalan first gave us a brief overview of the agreement as it currently exists. It should be noted that this agreement was signed by President George W. Bush of the United States and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, 2005, however the deal has not yet gone into effect as both nations are still waiting domestic approval. The deal marks a significant warming of U.S.-Indian relations which has not always been close. Under the terms of the deal the United States will provide assistance to India’s civilian nuclear energy program, as well as expand cooperation in other energy areas and satellite technology. The deal will bring India’s civilian nuclear programs under the International Atomic Energy Association’s (IAEA) safeguards. India will still be able to continue with its weapons-related program with eight nuclear reactors outside of IAEA safeguards, however, India has agreed to maintain its current moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.

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Filed under: Nukes by tkenyon
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Monday, January 7, 2008, included a scheduled field trip to see micro financing in action. The trip took longer than expected, the driver did take some wrong turns and had to turn around, but the delay was mainly due to the horrendous traffic. The area had apparently experienced tremendous growth, but it was hard to tell what was new and what was old. The most overwhelming feature was the pollution, it was everywhere. There was so much trash; open sewage flowed down both sides of the street, in one area it had pooled making a thick mucky mess with bicycles and motorbikes cutting through it. Right next to this a shopkeeper set-up shop and was selling beautifully colored fabrics. He had chosen this location not because it was a prime spot, but because it is the only spot available. Small approximately 5 by 12 foot shops line all the roads, selling almost anything imaginable. There were people everywhere, the roads were packed beyond capacity, this was India’s infamous, chaotic, traffic. When the streets got too narrow we exited the bus and set out on foot.

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Filed under: Microfinance by jhall
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(note: Julie Curry also contributed on this post)

On the afternoon of January 2nd, we had the pleasure of speaking with Brigadier Arun Sahgal (ret.) about India’s perspectives on Asian security. While most of the MPIA student’s eyes immediately glossed over at the mere mention of the word security, a few of us suddenly sat up in our chairs. “Yes, finally something relevant to what actually goes on in the world” we though. This statement of course is said in jest to our economics friends who claim that those of us interested in international security really only create threats to justify our jobs – so it goes both way. In all seriousness, Brigadier Sahgal provided us with an overview of the current security environment within Asia which he claimed was in a state of flux and was of a great concern to India. His main question was if India would ultimately work with the “Axis of Democracies” (United States, Australia, South Korea, and others) or the “Eurasian Block” (Russia and China).

Basically it boiled down to whether India would ally itself the other democracies in the region or with the rising regional powers. He claimed that, as of yet, India does not have a stated strategic plan. India has long maintained a third way approach to international affairs, aligning itself fully with neither the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and it appeared it would choose to maintain this approach to international affairs if it can. Currently the greatest challenge to India’s strategic efforts within Asia is China. China has done its best to encircle India both within Central Asia – especially through its support for Pakistan – and in the India Ocean. Brigadier Sahgal stated that this has created a situation whereby India is essentially surrounded by potentially hostile states aligned with China. However, he claimed this is not the greatest threat facing India.

Terrorists and insurgents from Afghanistan and Pakistan pose the greatest security risk to India according to Sahgal. Neighboring states giving sanctuary to extremists and fundamentalist ideologues has hindered India’s ability to combat terrorism. Terrorism and insurgency from across the border in the west and the Naxalites in the east and various left-wing armed militaries of a caste or sectarian nature are a serious domestic concern. There are other security concerns for India stemming from their ongoing border disputes with China and Pakistan. However, India believes any military conflict over these disputes will only result in small scale skirmishes along the borders. Our as our econ friends might say, the presence of positive economic indicators has increased the opportunity cost of fighting a conventional war to the point of diminishing returns…or something like that.

Three fundamental views of international security remain of importance to India and exist as a possible and probable future guide for India’s foreign policy. First, India values fundamental freedom, democracy and economic vitality. Second, India will continue to pursue regional security and stability. Finally, it places a distinct perspective on geography, history, culture and a world vision which emphasizes soft rather than hard power.

In what was the most interesting part of the talk for us, we were able to speak with Brigadier Sahgal over some cookies and tea. When asked about whether the military or local police handle terrorists caught inside the country, we were given a high tech visual assessment with left over tea spoons. Basically, they set up several security zones and count on half the insurgents to be caught within the five zones so by the time they make it far enough inside the country, Indian authorities only have to deal with half. Then they “take care” of the rest because they are “very good at it”. Hard to believe this is all declassified. Our personally favorite comment was that India’s media is not nearly as smart as the United States, thus India is able to get away with a lot more than we are. Thanks Liberal biased media! Just kidding.

Filed under: Lectures by tkenyon
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