Re-view and Re-search

Every fifth of September, schools and colleges across India pause to honour their teachers. Corridors fill with hand-made cards and marigold garlands, senior students borrow a formal shirt or a saree so that they may teach a class in imitation of those who once taught them, and felicitation programmes recall the familiar words of Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on the dignity of the calling. Having stood before classrooms for more than a decade, I have been on the receiving end of that affection, and I remain grateful for it. Yet as the applause settles and the auditorium empties, I keep returning to a question that the celebration tends to leave untouched. While we are so generous in praising what teachers do for students and for society, how carefully are we looking at the conditions in which they are asked to do it? Let me begin with the matter that is least comfortable to raise in polite company, which is money. There exists in this country a well-developed architecture of pay commissi...

This week, the Panama Canal Authority announced something that sounds counter-intuitive at first. One of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the man-made shortcut that lets ships avoid the long and expensive voyage around the southern tip of South America, is about to start allowing fewer ships through. From the 3rd of September, the number of vessels permitted each day drops from 36 to 34, and from 15th September, it falls further to 32. The reason has nothing to do with congestion at the locks or any dispute among the operators. The canal is simply running short of rain. How does a canal run short of rain? The Panama Canal, for all its engineering brilliance, does not float its ships on seawater. It depends on fresh water stored in two large artificial lakes, and those lakes are drying out because Central America is caught in a severe drought. Honduras, just up the isthmus, has already declared a drought alert across roughly 80 per cent of its territory. And behind that drought ...

On cathedral thinking: building for a skyline you won't see, and why it is at once the most tempting instinct in a strategy or a statute and the easiest one to fake. When Natarajan Chandrasekaran announced he would step down as Chairman of Tata Sons, the business papers reached, almost by reflex, for a phrase he had made his own: Cathedral Thinking . Chandra, as he is popularly known, did not coin the term. He borrowed it from philosopher Roman Krznaric, who uses it to summon the medieval masons of Europe, the ones who cut the first stones for cathedrals they knew they would never see finished. They were building for strangers. For descendants they would never meet. Leave the boardroom there, as this write-up is not about the developments at Tata Sons. It is about the phrase, which is far too useful to belong to any one chairman. Cathedral thinking is one of the most attractive instincts in public life, and one of the easiest to counterfeit. The trouble is that the counterfeit look...

Sometime in the late 1890s, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto was, so the story goes, pottering about in his garden when he noticed something odd. A handful of pea pods were yielding the bulk of his peas, while the majority of the plants were, frankly, freeloaders. Whether the peas were the real trigger or merely a nice anecdote that grew in the retelling, what Pareto did document rigorously was far more consequential. Roughly 80 per cent of the land in Italy, he found, was owned by about 20 per cent of the population. He then looked and found the same lopsidedness in wealth distribution in other countries and centuries. The rich were few, and the wealth was concentrated. For decades, this remained little more than a footnote in economics. It took a quality-management engineer, Joseph Juran, to lift the observation out of the ledger books and turn it into a rule of thumb for everything. Juran christened it the "Pareto Principle" and gave us that lovely phrase, the ...

Stewart Willis, the Former Executive Director of New Economics Foundation, a UK based think-tank which is propagating a new model of wealth creation based on equality, diversity and economic stability, wrote an article for World Economic Forum (WEF), highlighting five measures of growth namely; g ood jobs, well being, environment, fairness and health which are better than Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In his article (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/five-measures-of-growth-that-are-better-than-gdp/), Stewart likens GDP to a speedometer in an automobile, which only reflects the speed at which the vehicle is moving, but will not give you an indication of anything else. He says that New Economics Foundation likens these five parameters to a dashboard of a car which you can glance at for an overall picture, and can even deep dive into individual parameters if the need arises. While reading this article, the only country that came to my mind was the beautiful Kingdom of Bhutan,...

This week I read two books. First, " To The Brink and Back - India's 1991 Story " by Jairam Ramesh. The book was written around the 25th anniversary of the Liberalisation policy initiated by the Government of India in 1991. Jairam Ramesh who was working with the Planning Commission (appointed by Dr Manmohan Singh himself) was brought into the prime minister’s office (PMO) as a special appointee to facilitate communication between the Prime Minister and Finance Minister. The author had a vantage point to what transpired in those critical days of the Indian economy. The book gives a peek into the political and economic situation during the key months of June to August 1991 when India unveiled its policy of opening the doors to foreign investments and also devaluing the currency to make its exports more competitive. While everyone is aware of these often narated facts the novelty of the book lies in the focus on the partnership between prime minister Narsimha Rao and ...