Essays and Op-Eds

Fund Schooling, Not Schools

This is the 32nd installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

I read a news report a couple of days back that amazed me. It was about a small village named Maji in the Yunnan province of China. The nearest school lies across the Nujiang river. There is no bridge, though a steel cable runs across.

How do the 500 children of this village get to school? The report states, “They fasten themselves to the cable with a metal carabiner and a rope and slide across the 200-metre wide canyon.” The youngest child, A Qia, is four years old, and makes the crossing by herself. A five-year-old named A Pu has been quoted as saying, “I used to dream of having a bridge, but then I learned that my dream was too expensive.”

My column today is not about bridges—not the kind that go across rivers anyway. It is about education. I never had to cross a canyon using a rope and a metal carabiner to get to school, and if the prospect had come up in my privileged home when I was a kid, I would probably have asked my dad if the metal carabiner was chauffeur-driven. I always took education for granted, the same way I took food for granted, and did not have to worry about where my next meal would come from. Much of India is not so lucky.

Poor people want education for their kids desperately and viscerally. They want their children to have a better life than they did, and they know education is the ticket. And for 60 years they have been cheated. The state has promised them quality education, has collected taxes for that purpose, and has failed.

Studies on the state of education in this country confirm what we see around us. A 2005 study of government schools by Pratham, an NGO, found that 35% of schoolkids surveyed between the ages of seven and 14 failed a reading test involving a simple paragraph, and 41% of them could not subtract or divide. A 2006 study found that half the children who enrol in the first standard drop out before reaching the eighth. A 1999 government report stated that just 53% of the accredited public schools in rural North India were engaged in teaching during surprise visits on school days.

The problem here is not one of funding. The government has thrown enormous amounts of money into education, and continues to do so. The problem here is of choice. Most poor parents across the country have no option but to send their kids to government schools, which, because of the way the incentives are aligned, are often dysfunctional.

The way out of this is to put parents in charge of the money that is supposedly being spent on their children’s education. Parents have much more at stake than the state, and are better equipped to take the right decisions for their children. Milton Friedman first proposed a method of enabling this: education vouchers. Under this system, the state does not directly fund schools, but gives school vouchers to parents. Parents use the vouchers to send their kids to a school of their choice, and the school exchanges vouchers in return for cash from the government. As in any other sector, competition then ensures that schools lift their standards and minimize wastage.

This will give optimum results if competition is allowed to flourish. Right now, it isn’t. A 2001 study by the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) found that it takes 14 licences from four authorities to open a private school in Delhi, a process that can either take years or much under-the-table money. Schools must conform to a number of unnecessary parameters such as government-trained teachers and playgrounds of a specified size. Also, bizarrely, private schools are not allowed to operate for a profit—while many work around this by setting up trusts and suchlike, others are simply scared away.

But won’t private schools be expensive? That’s what I would have thought, given the posh urban schools where my friends and I were educated, but the reality is different. Entrepreneurs in the poorest parts of India, in slums and villages, have started cheap schools with bare bones facilities to fulfil what is obviously a raging demand. And studies have shown that, with survival at stake, these schools use money twice as efficiently as government ones.

In 2005, James Tooley and Pauline Dixon did a study that found that 65% of schoolchildren in Hyderabad’s slums attended private schools instead of free government ones. And last year, CCS conducted a study (pdf link) that revealed that 14% of households in Delhi earning less than Rs5,000 per month chose to send their kids to a private school. Their studies showed that even the poorest of the poor, from maids to autorickshaw-drivers to peons, expressed their preferences clearly, even when they could barely afford it.

There is one clear reason for the miserable state of education in this country: the state has funded schools, not schooling. For India’s sake, that must change.

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I had covered much of this territory in my January Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal Asia, Why India needs school vouchers. For more on school choice, check out Andrew Coulson’s paper, How Markets Affect Quality (pdf link).

Also, my thanks to Shrek for pointing me via email to the China story. I’ve also received many insights about school choice from chatting with Raj Cherubal of CCS and my friend Gautam Bastian. I hope to continue those conversations.

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

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Update: Check out The Amartya Sen Fallacy.

In Defence of Blogging

This is the 31st installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Not a week goes by these days without someone bashing blogs. Last Thursday, the essayist Mukul Kesavan referred disparagingly to how the “masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog”. Just days before that, Robert McCrum wrote in the Observer of how “the democracy of the Web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare”. The Times of India famously (and ironically?) wrote last year that “no one can beat Indian bloggers when it comes to self-obsessed preaching, gossiping and bitching”.

I write a fairly widely read blog, India Uncut, so let me jump to the defence of blogging. Firstly, all these gentlemen are right—but they nevertheless miss the point, as Theodore Sturgeon could have told them. When Sturgeon, a writer of science fiction, was attacked for the rubbish that came out of that genre, he famously came up with what is known today as Sturgeon’s Revelation: “90% of everything is crud.”

Sturgeon’s point was that most attacks against science fiction used “the worst examples of the field for ammunition”. And while he accepted that 90% of science fiction was rubbish, so was 90% of everything else. If one just looked at the crud component of any field, it would be easy to dismiss anything.

This problem is amplified in blogging’s case. In journalism, for example, there are filters to publishing. Newspapers and magazines have editors who constrain what goes into print, and the limitations of space ensure that a lot of crud gets filtered out.

Blogging, on the other hand, puts the tools of publishing into every individual’s hands. This is tremendously empowering, but it also means that the proportion of crud that gets published is bound to be far higher than in traditional journalism. To judge blogging by the crud is, thus, meaningless.

What about the non-crud? Well, there are so many kinds of non-crud that it’s hard to generalize about them. People blog for different reasons: to filter for interesting content on the Web; to keep an online diary; to keep their friends updated on what they do; to provide different kinds of utilities; to be read by niche audiences they cannot otherwise reach; to push causes they believe in; to comment on what’s going on in the world; and even to act as a watchdog on the supposed watchdogs, big media.

Every reader is likely to find a quality blog that caters to him or her, while journalism, especially in India, increasingly caters to the lowest common denominator. Also, journalists tend to be generalists, and their coverage of specialized subjects is often shallow. In contrast, specialists on every subject blog about their passions, delving into areas and nuances ignored by mainstream media. Economics blogs such as Marginal Revolution and Café Hayek, and the law blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, are excellent examples of this.

Blogging as a medium provides many advantages that journalists and media outlets would do well to consider. One, blogging has immediacy: Reporters are not dependent on the news cycle to get their work out, and can publish it as soon as they write it. Two, blogging provides them flexibility of space. They can blog a single thought in a handful of words without needing to expand it into a publishable piece, or a 6,000-word essay that their newspaper may not have space for.

Three, a blog adds dimensions to a piece, as one can hyperlink within it to other sources of knowledge and argument that enrich the reader’s experience. Four, blogging allows a personal tone that the dictates of a house style in a publication may not. Five, blogging opens you up to a feedback mechanism that newspapers do not provide. I am not just referring to comments, which some high-traffic bloggers avoid because the noise-to-signal ratio gets out of hand, but to the fact that the blogosphere is essentially meritocratic, and rewards excellence and punishes mediocrity virtually in real time.

If bloggers do not provide value to their readers consistently, if they do not respect their readers’ time and write crisply and lucidly, if they treat their blogging as a chore to be dispensed with, they will not be read. The impact on their traffic will be immediate and visible. In newspapers, on the other hand, such real-time feedback from readers hardly exists. For example, if most Mint readers were of the opinion that my weekly column is a waste of space, it would take a lot of time for that opinion to filter in to the editors, if at all. But if it was a blog, there would be no place to hide. The loss in readership would punish me immediately and visibly.

Ouch, I’m out of space. Damn these newspaper columns! I’m off to blog now—would you like to come along?

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives. I’ve written on this subject before in the following pieces: Blogs—The New Journalism.” “Generalising About Bloggers.” “Don’t Think in Categories.”

India’s Cops Get Orwellian

This is the 30th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

I’m a huge fan of irony, and our world is full of it. Earlier this week, papers released by the National Archives in England revealed that “Special Branch police” had monitored George Orwell’s activities for a decade. In other words, Big Brother had been watching the man who would go on to write 1984. Orwell himself was presumably unaware of it – and yet, all too aware of the nature of Big Brother.

If Orwell were brought back from the dead, I presume he’d chuckle and think how little things have changed. He would certainly have been bemused by happenings in India. A few days ago, Mumbai’s police revealed their plans to install keystroke loggers in Mumbai’s cyber cafes, besides imposing licensing requirements on them.

This is done ostensibly to fight terrorism, and here are the implications for you and me. Whenever we surf from a Mumbai cyber café, everything we type will automatically be captured on record. Our email passwords, every message we type, the sites we visit, the pictures we download: everything will be stored in police records, rendering us, effectively, naked in their eyes.

If we buy stuff online, our credit card details will also get saved. Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely. Much as we like to think of governments as benevolent entities that exist to serve us, in reality they comprise individuals with the same human weaknesses as the rest of us, responding to incentives just as we do. The Mumbai police, like all police in India, consists of underpaid people given excessive powers over others, with little accountability. So how do you expect them to behave?

Unless a policeman’s self-interest is perfectly aligned with the public interest, which is not the case in our system of government, it is inevitable that he will feel tempted to use his power for personal gain. It is equally likely that the police, like any other arm of government, will focus on expanding its power, and increasing its control over people, rather than carrying out its tasks, for which it is not accountable in practice. By insisting that cyber cafes in Mumbai need a license from the police, for example, they have opened up a new under-the-table revenue stream.

The government’s rationale (or rationalization) behind this is familiar and silly. Whenever the government wants to restrict freedom, it invokes security, and cops justify this move under the grounds of fighting terrorism. Well, firstly, at a practical level, the cops won’t have the manpower to scrutinize the massive volume of keystroke logs generated everyday, or to figure out what is terrorist code and what is teenage lingo. Secondly, at a moral level, it is simply wrong to deny people of their privacy in this manner.

Mid Day quoted an unnamed “National Vice President, People Union for Civil Liberty” as justifying these moves by saying that it was ok “[a]s long as personal computers are not being monitored. If monitoring is restricted to public computers, it is in the interest of security.” By this reasoning, why should the cops not place TV cameras in hotel rooms or record every conversation in every taxi and train? After all, terrorists use hotels and public transport. Are you okay with that?

The ultimate expression of a government’s lust for power lies in a term coined by Orwell in 1984: Thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrimes are thoughts that have been criminalised, and if the technology to detect emotions existed, it is not unlikely that the Indian government would ban hatred. Or, at least, hatred of things that it deems should not be hated. A recent Mid Day report describes how various authorities are trying to get communities on Orkut that are against Pratibha Patil removed. They include communities with names like ‘We hate Pratibha Patil’, ‘We don’t like Pratibha Patil’, ‘Pratibha Patil sucks’, and ‘Pratibha Patil — the puppet’.

I am no fan of the lady myself, and have expressed, in an earlier instalment of this column, my distaste for her views favouring compulsary sterilization of people with heriditory diseases, and her delusions about being able to converse with spirits. Columns appearing in big newspapers are harder to censor, but I fail to see why members of Orkut should be barred from expressing similar emotions.

Earlier this month, a computer engineer based in Bangalore was arrested “after he allegedly uploaded a blasphemous matter [sic] about Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji” on Orkut. Google, which owns Orkut, reportedly collaborated in the matter, providing the engineer’s IP address to the cops. (It is natural for them to go by the law of the land, according to the land they’re in, but they really should get off their “do no evil” high horse.) Technology, while it enables free expression, also provides mechanisms for its suppression. Don’t expect our government not to use it.

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Turbocharging RTI

This is the 29th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

I love the Right to Information (RTI) Act. In theory, it gives me back a little bit of the power that the government has taken from me. Governments are supposed to work for us, and it is apt that people who work in government are called public servants. Yet, over the last 60 years, our government has become our lord and master. How does one bring it back to heel?

On paper, the RTI is one way of doing so. Much of the power of government comes from its opaqueness. If you can’t put your finger on what’s going wrong, you can’t hold it accountable. Garbage not being collected from your neighbourhood? You have no idea whom to contact or what action to take. Your ration card is not being given to you? You don’t know who’s withheld it, or if someone else is using it. For virtually any service that the government is supposed to provide, bribes are often necessary, and there’s little you can do.

The RTI changes that. Information is power, and the RTI allows the common citizen access to most information pertaining to government services. A road has been poorly repaired? You can find out which contractor did the job, which officer approved it, and what action is being taken. Sewers haven’t been made in your neighbourhood? You can find out if your local municipality officials are lying about working on it. By exposing the actions of our government officials, we render them accountable for their inaction. That’s the theory of it.

In practice, I think the RTI is a great tool that isn’t within easy reach of everyone. Yes, yes, I know that it has been made quite user-friendly, and I’ve even attended a workshop on how to file RTI applications. It’s simple enough if you want it enough, and if you care deeply about whatever cause you’re chasing down. But the common citizen is unlikely to take the time to use it, even if it is likely to be of some use to him or her. The reason for that is what public choice theorists call rational ignorance—the costs of chasing down such information, in terms of time spent, are generally greater than the benefit to any one person.

Also, with the RTI as it has worked so far, information remains dispersed. Individuals and NGOs get information on subjects that interest them, but by and large it remains inaccessible to the common Joe. As a taxpayer, I would ideally like all information about how my money is being spent available in one central source, which I can access without any effort. I don’t see why I should have to run after it, no matter how easy that running is. It’s my money, after all.

This is where technology can help. Having won the battles to make RTI a reality, some of the NGOs that have worked so hard to make it happen can now take it to the next level. Here’s how I think the Internet can be used as an enabler.

First up, it would be wonderful if there was a central database, perhaps using a wiki interface, where anyone who got public information using RTI could upload that information. That would mean two things. One, if I am curious about something but wouldn’t necessarily chase it down, I can simply check online if the information has already been dug out by someone else. Two, it prevents duplication, as people don’t file for information someone has already dug up, and officers don’t waste time getting similar information again and again. Just browsing through such a resource should provide so much insight about how the government works. The existence of it should keep our babus on their toes.

Secondly, I’d like to see services that make it easier for you or me to file RTI applications. The Rs10 charge for filing an RTI application with the Central government may be nominal, but who’s got the time to file applications? If there was a service attached to this central database that could file an application on my behalf without my having to do anything more than register (once) and fill up an online form, I might feel more motivated to ask for information. And thus, the database of information would build up, and we would be empowered.

I’ve searched online for such services and wikis, but the RTI blogs and forums that exist don’t cut it for me, and consist of nuggets of information instead of constituting a repository. Friends of mine in various NGOs have mulled such a project, but not actually gotten down to it. For the RTI to work, for it to be used to empower the common citizen instead of activists and NGOs, we need such a service, and I hope someone takes the initiative one of these days.

Public limited companies are required to make certain essential information available to their shareholders, and even if they weren’t mandated to do so, the pressures of competition would make them. Our government, a monopoly, feels no such competition; our bureaucrats are entrenched in their lordships. It is time to take charge and show them who’s the boss.

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Dear Navjot Sidhu and Hu Jintao

This is the 28th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Dear Navjot Sidhu

Recently on a television show, I am told, you criticised the Indian Cricket League (ICL), and the players signing up with it, on the grounds that “they are in it for the money.” You found this reprehensible, clearly feeling that the profit motive was a bad thing. I wish to congratulate you on your beliefs. They were once shared by no less than Jawaharlal Nehru, who described “profit” as “a dirty word.” Indeed, I have heard that when he got angry at someone, he would abuse him or her by shouting, “You, you… you Profit!” But that could be apocryphal.

Mr Sidhu, allow me to express how much I admire your values. Shunning profit, as you surely do if your actions mirror your words, takes immense fortitude. You are always smartly dressed, with your turban matching your tie, despite buying clothes only from people who manufacture and sell them as a social service. When you eat out with your better half, who is also named Navjot and is therefore the better Navjot, you only eat at restaurants that were not begun to make a profit, but to help needy diners like yourself. Indeed, you buy no goods or services manufactured with the profit motive, and I really must ask you sometime where you shop. You also clearly accept absolutely no money for the entertainment you provide us on television, which is very kind of you. Your magnanimity has moved me.

I also admire how, being a man of principle, you do not allow reality to distort your beliefs. The BCCI has just announced a massive raise for its players, as well as greater prize money in domestic tournaments. This is clearly because they have felt the heat of competition that the ICL provides. It is good for the players, who now have more options, and will earn more money no matter what they choose. It is also wonderful for us cricket viewers, who also have more choice. But you have seen through these narrow, selfish considerations, and have stuck to the principle of profit being a bad thing, regardless of its consequences. Wow. It takes great conviction to stick to one’s beliefs in the face of reality, and I applaud you for doing so.

That is all for now. To my great shame, I need to now write a column for profit, and am not capable of the renunciation you clearly practise. I look forward to seeing you again on television, it is always a profitable experience for me.

Oops.

Yours sincerely

Amit Varma

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Dear Hu Jintao

Hao du yu du? I write to you today both to congratulate you and to express a complaint. I shall begin with the complaint, which is, in a sense, a compliment, for it could be made about few totalitarian leaders. I sincerely hope you will not take it amiss, or I will be in trouble after I die.

Recently while surfing the evil capitalist website of the exploitative Reuters Newsweek, I came upon the news that your government has “banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.” The report went on to state: “‘According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is ‘an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.’”

My complaint is this: I make my living as a writer, and one of the genres I like to try my hand at, no doubt with great ineptness, is satire. But with this move of yours, you have made satire redundant. What manner of satire can match this reality? What can I ever write again without looking at that news item and saying, “Aw, but I can’t be as good as Hu.” And you weren’t even trying!

My complaint is a minor quibble compared to the admiration that gushes out of me. For long, people have protested at the “fatal conceit” that the state can control the economy, and fulfil the needs of its citizens. History has shown that prosperity and freedom go hand in hand, a notion that was a threat to you – until now.

You have now made a magnificent conceptual leap that renders any opposition futile. The earthly domains may be hard to control directly, but by regulating the heavens, you have finished all resistance. Who will dare to fight against you when they know that it is not just their life at stake, but also their afterlife. As that popular Hindi song goes, “Bachke tu jaayegi kahaan.”

Indeed, I hope with all my earthly heart that the Indian government follows your example, and outlaws all unauthorized reincarnation, or even ascents to heaven in those religions that have them. I will apply for the job of the babu granting reincarnation licenses. People will pay anything for a suitable afterlife, and there is surely much money to be made there. That is a heavenly prospect.

Yours sincerely

Amit Varma

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives. I’d earlier blogged about the reincarnation story here.

A Business Proposal

This is the 27th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Hello dear! Myself Ram Chander Misra, politician from India, bringing business proposal for your kind perusal. I have been politician for more than 30 years now, and have worked in all major parties. I am currently holding important ministry portfolio, and handling many crores of funds for social welfare scheme. Indeed, many thousands of crores of rupees. Which comes to many BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, dear. And this is where I need your help.

First, dear, let me tell you something about Indian government. Government of India is existing on the basis that it will help poor people of India. This it can only do if there are poor people in India. Thus, it is important to keep people in India poor. This is for their own good, dear, for how can we help them otherwise?

Government of India does this with very ingenuous method that is tried and tested through centuries. First, it taxes them vigorously, both their earnings and spendings, promising to spend their money back on them. But for every 100 rupees that we take, only 15 are spent as they should. I will come back to what happens to the rest, dear, because it CONCERNS YOU.

Government of India also puts restrictions on free trade, so that people cannot get rich on their own easily. You see, dear, people think that government is their servant, but it is other way around. Individual exists only to enrich government, and has only freedoms that we grant. We ministers in government control everything.

With the GRACE OF GOD, few Indians have fought against this arrangement, and as a result, government has grown and grown. You may not believe the large sums of money at our disposal, so let me give you examples. My favourite example is the almost Rs12,000 crore that goes into Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. See irony: First we are preventing employment from coming up by strangling industry with licence and inspection raj, and labour laws, and by making sure 60% of country is stuck in agriculture, when the figure in developed countries is closer to 5%. Then we are taking money from them to give them jobs!

Our education sector is also a problem, and we ensure that it remains that way by making sure that most parents do not have choices. With licensing laws and requirements, dear, we make sure that private schools are difficult to start and expensive to maintain. Many private schools operate illegally and at low cost, and many parents, even in slums, prefer to pay for them than send their child to a free public school. But most Indians LOOK TO THE GOVERNMENT to provide education, and for that we are spending Rs10,000 crore in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, and almost Rs9000 crore for Prarambhik Siksha Kosh.

I could go on, dear, through every sector of the economy, but you get the point. We are given almost Rs50,000 crore to spend on our eight flagship schemes, which amounts to more than 12 billion dollars. The total funds available to us amount to twice this amount, or 25 BILLION DOLLARS. This is lot of money, even for people used to squandering, and this is where I NEED YOUR HELP.

You see, dear, the amounts I have mentioned above are just for one year, and I have been a minister for many. Me and my esteemed colleagues have accumulated wealth amounting to HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, some of which still lies in government accounts, though for all practical purposes it is ours only.

I live beyond my means, with many houses and cars that that my minister’s salary could not have provided, but most Indians overlook such small riches. They think corruption is disease of system, not realising the corruption is OXYGEN of system. You give one group of individuals power over another group, what to expect? But even then, to suddenly withdraw billions of dollars of wealth will draw attention. The media, especially, might bother. (We are trying to throttle them with broadcasting bill, but that will take time.)

So, dear, here is what I propose. If you are willing to help me, we can withdraw these VAST RICHES, and prevent them from going waste. Or even, God forbid, from being spent on Indian people. All you have to do is form a company, and I will transfer 10 BILLION DOLLARS to your account under development project. We can later share the money, with 40% to you and 60% to me. I will take care of all paperwork, such as licenses, caste certificates to get you preferential treatment, and so on. Details of the nominal fees for this will be sent later. If all goes well, you shall become my REGULAR PARTNER in drawing out the money of the Indian people.

The blessings of God and the Indian people are with you, for this system has been DEMOCRATICALLY APPROVED. Please reply at earliest.

Yours in expectance of shared riches

Ram Chander Misra

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

The Republic of Apathy

This essay of mine was published today in the Independence Day special issue of Lounge, the weekend edition of Mint, as “Those Songs of Freedom.”

Just thinking of it sends a chill up my spine. On 12 March 1930, at the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, 79 men went for a walk. For 23 days they marched, covering four districts, 48 villages, 400 kilometres. On the way they picked up thousands of other ordinary people, animated by a cause so much bigger than themselves. Then, on 6 April, by the sea at the coastal village of Dandi, Mahatma Gandhi picked up a handful of salty earth and said, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.” 

The empire shook. The purpose of Gandhi’s march was to protest the oppressive and unfair salt tax, and across the country people joined the battle. They made their own salt. They bought illegal salt. That year, 60,000 Indians were arrested during these protests. The Salt Law was not repealed. And yet, “the first stage in … the final struggle of freedom,” as Gandhi described it, had made an impact.

More than 77 years have passed. We have been free of the British empire for 60 of them. If we were to get inside a time machine, go back to 1930, pull in some of the men and women who marched to Dandi, and bring them to this present time, how would they react? Would they think that they were finally in the India that they had fought to achieve? 

Or would they set off on another walk?

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The story of our freedom struggle was not the story of a Gandhi here or a Nehru there – it was about millions of people who rose up because they wanted to be masters of their own destiny. The British empire was naturally the focus of that struggle, and when we were rid of them in 1947, the relief must have been enormous. The tragedy is that for most Indians, political independence was freedom enough. What else was there to fight for?

Well, plenty. The oppressive empire from a continent away was gradually replaced by an oppressive, omnipresent state, and we did not protest. The lack of economic freedom kept India poor for decades, and we did not protest. Personal freedoms were routinely denied to us, and we did not protest.  In parts of our country people are treated worse than the British treated us, and we do not protest. As a nation, we stopped caring for freedom once we gained independence.

It is ironic that we celebrate the Dandi March so much. The taxes that weigh us down today are no less unjust that the infamous salt tax being protested then. Do some math: Calculate the percentage of your income that you pay as tax. Then apply that figure to a year, and see how many months it comes to. (For example, 25% tax would come to three months.) For that much time every year, you work not for yourself, but for the government. Add to that an approximation of the other taxes that you pay – everything you buy is taxed, so you are taxed not just while earning money, but also while spending it. You might just find that your ‘tax-freedom day,” when you actually start working for yourself, comes in May every year, or even later. Do taxes not cause a kind of part-time slavery, then?

It is not my case that taxes are unnecessary. We need a government to maintain law and order, to protect individual rights and so on, but our government is a bloated beast that goes far beyond that. Rajiv Gandhi once said that only 15 paise of every rupee that the government spent reached its intended recepient, and the planning commission later found him to be optimistic. More than 90% of our taxes are probably wasted – middle-class people like the readers of this article may not feel the pinch (unless we fantasize about what we could have done with that money), but think of our maidservants and sabzi sellers, whose every purchase feels the weight of government greed. The salt tax Gandhi protested was no worse.

Freedom for a country should mean every person being free to live their lives as they please, as long as they do not interfere with the similar freedoms of others. But our mai-baap state has long treated us as subjects, not citizens, and these freedoms have been denied to us. 

Take trade, for example. When two people make a transaction, they only do so because both are better off. Prosperity is the result of a chain of such win-win transactions between people profiting by fulfilling each other’s needs. But Jawaharlal Nehru once described profit as a “dirty word”, and gave in to the fatal conceit, to use Friedrich Hayek’s phrase, of imagining that the economy, and the lives of people, could be planned. 

Given India’s natural strengths, we should have excelled in labour-intensive manufacture and been a manufacturing superpower, but the license-and-inspection raj and our labour laws did not allow that to happen. The draconian restrictions on economic freedom introduced by Nehru and strengthened by Indira Gandhi meant that entrenched big businesses were protected from competition, and cronies of the government enriched themselves. Despite some liberalisation, most of these shackles still exist, and much of our country remains poor.

The benefits of economic freedom are unintuitive, and popular outrage has rarely been expressed on its behalf. But what about personal freedom? The Indian Penal Code, drafted by our imperial overlords in the 19th century to keep us natives in place, and tailored on Victorian morality, is filled with archaic laws that should have been repealed 60 years ago. Section 377 effectively outlaws homosexuality. Section 295(a), that makes it illegal to “outrage religious feelings,” is routinely used by bigots, from all religions, to stifle free expression. It is filled with laws that criminalise the act of giving offence, outlaw victimless crimes and treat women as the property of men.

Our constitution, written by freedom fighters, allows caveats to free speech like “public order” and “decency and morality” that are open to the interpretation of babus and judges. This has led to a culture of censorship and banning that spreads across the arts, as if Indian adults are in a special class of imbecility, and must be told what to think. Perhaps that is indeed so, for why else would we not feel aggrieved at that notion?

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In some parts of the country, remote from our cities and our consciousness, the government treats the people as the empire once treated us. Do you remember a photograph from three years ago, of a group of Manipuri women outside the entrance of the Kangla Fort, which was occupied by the Indian army? They were protesting the gang rape and murder of a 32-year-old woman named Thangjam Manorama, who had been picked up from her house in the middle of the night by the army. Frustrated that no one cared to listen to them, that the law-and-order mechanism existed only for the rich and powerful, 12 of these women stripped naked, and held in front of them a banner that said, “Indian Army, Rape Us.”

I suspect had that image been taken in 1930, and had that banner said “British Army, Rape Us,” it would have been one of the defining images of our struggle for freedom. Today, no one cares. Across the country, law and order is a joke, and our government fattens itself on the sweat of a billion people. Free speech is endangered, and censorship thrives. Honest men wishing to start a business that will fulfil the needs of others – as all businesses must in order to survive – find themselves having to deal with licenses and inspectors.

The price of freedom, it is often said, is eternal vigilance. We let our guard down 60 years ago. Perhaps it’s time to fight back?

What Indian Cricket Needs

This is the 26th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

The mandarins at the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) must be delighted. As the third Test between India and England gets under way today, India stand poised to win the series, already 1-0 up. This, the BCCI babus are surely telling themselves, will take the pressure off them.

After India’s early exit in the World Cup, immense scrutiny was directed at the cricket board. Such scrutiny is common—the Indian team often goes through crises—and the same solutions are advanced each time. “‘Corporatize’ BCCI,” say some, “hire a CEO.” “Do away with the regional system of selectors,” say others. Editorialists demand increased investment in domestic cricket, while some get micro and simply want to “punish the senior players and give youngsters a chance”.

All these sound splendid, but they treat the symptom, not the disease. The problem with BCCI lies not in its actions or omissions, but in its incentives. The tragedy of Indian cricket is that, at the moment, the incentives of BCCI office bearers are not aligned towards ensuring the good health of Indian cricket. Instead, they are aligned towards ensuring their own continuance in power. These two don’t often lead in the same direction.

How does a BCCI president come to power? What he has done or promises to do for the good of Indian cricket is irrelevant. He is voted to power by the many state and regional boards in BCCI, and to get their votes, he has to look after their interests. This could include, for example, promising one-day internationals to small centres, which ensures that touring teams, and the hapless journalists following them, criss-cross the country playing a seven-match one-day series that consists of more travel and less play.

That also explains the zonal system of selection. Every region wants its pound of flesh, and each zonal selector effectively represents an interest group. Whenever a squad of 15 players has to be picked, around 10 are often automatic inclusions, with the remaining selections subject to give-and-take. Note that a zonal selector does not lose his job if he does not select the best possible team, which is subjective anyway. But he is certainly out of his post if he doesn’t look after the interests of his zone.

Doing away with the zonal system of selectors changes nothing, for the same pressures will remain, even if they manifest differently. Similarly, having a CEO and a corporate set-up will also be a superficial change as long as the state boards continue to call the shots. So, what’s the solution?

Consider who BCCI is accountable to. It is not a government body, so it is not accountable to the government and, by extension, to taxpayers. It is not a public limited company, and does not have to answer to some vast body of shareholders. Besides the regional boards that are its constituents, it is accountable to its customers, to you and me. BCCI provides a service, and we have the power to vote with our wallets if they mess up. Well, they are messing up. So, why haven’t we voted with our wallets so far? Because we don’t have enough choices.

BCCI has a monopoly on the Indian cricket team, and regional representative cricket, and if we devote eyeball-time to watching India play cricket, we are perforce filling the coffers of BCCI. If cricket as a sport faced competition from other sports or pastimes, that could force BCCI to get its act together, but years will pass before anything poses a credible threat to cricket in India, if at all. We are a captive audience.

That is why I look towards Subhash Chandra’s venture, the Indian Cricket League (ICL), with great hope. I am immensely skeptical about anything that the Zee Group does, and I do not think a league with just retired superstars and domestic wannabes is sustainable. But the ICL represents a threat to BCCI’s monopoly over Indian cricket-watching audiences, and that is a good thing.

BCCI will, of course, try to protect its turf with a combination of strong-arm tactics, legal measures and inducements to its players. But if it finds that it is having to split the cricket pie in India, it will have to reform itself. The impetus for change might well come from its regional constituents, who may find that the ODIs they cherish and battle for are no longer so lucrative.

In other countries and other sports, a particular sporting body might have a monopoly over the national team, but there are local league systems that offer alternative employment to players and quality sports programming for viewers. English soccer players, for example, earn much more playing in the Premier League than for their country. It would be wonderful for both cricketers and cricket lovers if such options were available in India. Even if the ICL doesn’t succeed, it is clear that BCCI feels threatened by it, and it shows the way to others. That is good for us—and good for cricket.

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Mommy-Daddy, go away!

This is the 25th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

One of my favourite quotes about politics is this one from David Boaz: “Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult.”

This was said in an American context, and the liberals referred to are the Leftist ‘liberals’ of America, not the classical liberals who believe in individual freedom. It would be tempting to apply this quote to India, and to point to the religious right, with their moral policing and disregard for free speech, as the Daddy among us, and the socialist left, with their belief in big government and fantasies of a welfare state, as the Mommy.

But the truth is more complex and much sadder. Our government, regardless of the political party in charge, has always tried to play the role of both Mommy and Daddy. Like infants, we acquiesce.

As a Daddy, the state tries to regulate our personal behaviour. It assumes that we aren’t old enough to make our decisions, and that Daddy must make them on our behalf. This is all for our own good, and Daddy knows best what’s good for us. We are not mature enough.

This applies to the entertainment we take in. Censorship is classic Daddygiri. Daddy assumes that all of us have impressionable minds, get easily influenced, and cannot weigh things for ourselves. Things like sex and violence will corrupt the nation of a billion people, where children are presumably mass-produced in stork factories. (Note that if actual children had to be ‘protected’ from adult films, certification would suffice, instead of outright censorship.)

The health ministry, led by uber-Papa Anbumani Ramadoss, even banned smoking scenes in films a couple of years ago. (Film-makers are allowed to depict murder, though, as that is presumably less injurious to health.)  Of course, censorship applies not just to sex and violence, but also to ideas, as Anand Patwardhan’s travails illustrate.

All moral policing is Daddygiri, for any responsible Daddy must ensure that you get up to no mischief in your bedroom. The Indian Penal Code is full of it, with the worst of its laws being Section 377, which bars “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” This effectively makes homosexuality illegal, and the law is routinely used by cops to harrass gay people, as if they are juvenile delinquents and not responsible adults trying to live their lives as they wish.

Most licenses, when they require government approval, are examples of Daddygiri. In their classic book, Law, Liberty and Livelihood, Parth Shah and Naveen Mandava pointed out: “Entrepreneurs can expect to go through 11 steps to launch a business over 89 days on average, at a cost equal to 49.5% of gross national income per capita.” It’s 89 days here, but two in Australia, and eight in Singapore. Besides the costs it imposes, this Daddygiri is also morally wrong – if people want to start a business satisfying the needs of other people, which is the only way a business can survive, why does the government have to come in the way?

Mommy, as it happens, is no better than Daddy. Mommy does not believe that its tiny tots can take care of themselves, and thus gets up to all kinds of strange behaviour. If she finds that Ram is better off than Shyam, she takes 20 rupees from Ram and gives three of those to Shyam. (Don’t ask about the other 17.) She also takes one rupee from Shyam. All our social welfare schemes, such as the ruinous National Employment Guarantee Bill, run in this manner. Rajiv Gandhi once said that only 15% of such spending reaches its intended recepient, but such wastage is not the only problem. Exorbitant taxes act as a disincentive to work and business, and harm the economy.

All protectionist laws are Mommy behaviour. Tariffs and subsidies coddle favoured groups and act as a barrier to competition, thus reducing our choices while raising the price we pay. Mumbai’s rent control act, which reduces the supply of real estate and drives up rents, is Mommy behaviour. Our labour laws are Mommy behaviour. (Indeed, they’re Daddy behaviour as well, from another perspective.)

Not surprisingly, this mai-baap way of functioning has much popular support. Many of us like the idea of a benevolent Mommy, not noticing the manner in which this Mommygiri harms the family. Daddygiri also has much support because many of us disapprove of the behaviour of others, and would like such behaviour to be regulated. As far as I’m concerned, I think of myself as an adult, capable of making my own choices, responsible for my actions, and extending the same courtesy to others.

What about you?

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Will cricket decline in India?

This is the 24th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

As the first Test between India and England moved towards a finish earlier this week, one of my friends announced that he was singing Raga Malhar. This is a legendary raga that is supposed to draw rain from the sky. And indeed, rain fell. If causation could be established, my friend would be a national hero, for millions wanted precipitation.

Like most Indian men, I’m crazy about cricket. Like unrequited love, this passion often seems futile and self-defeating. It’s also mysterious. Why do we invest so much time and energy into following this sport and no other? Why is it the only sport that Indians excel at (relative to others, of course)? In a globalized world, can cricket survive?

Cricket is unique among sports in the amount of time it demands from its followers. In no other sport is a match played over five days. Even one-day cricket requires up to six times the investment a game of football needs. Given the amount of cricket played these days, to follow India’s international matches could take up the productive hours of up to three months of your year. Over a lifetime, if you live till 88, that could be 22 years of watching 22 men run around in flannels or pajamas. Are we crazy?

Until a decade-and-a-half ago, Indians had the time. In the pre-liberalized years, what options did we have for entertaining ourselves? Cricket and Bollywood—whose films were longer than the Western norm, you will notice—were all that Indians had for entertainment. Television was state-run crap (note the tautology), the Internet didn’t exist, there were few malls to hang out at, and so on.

Two interesting trends began in the 1990s, when we began to globalize and satellite TV spread across the country. One, fewer people in the big cities played cricket seriously. Kids in Mumbai and Delhi had many more options for their time, and a young man in Thane now had better things to do than rush off to Shivaji Park at 6 am for nets. The decline of cricket in Mumbai was a natural consequence.

Two, kids in the small towns, who didn’t have so many ways of entertaining themselves, were exposed to the nuances of the game via satellite television, where the best commentators shared their gyan on matches across the world. Their opportunities expanded as these towns became more prosperous. The result of this is the deluge of talented players from the smaller towns over the last few years.

My guess is that viewership for cricket follows the same patterns. People in bigger cities have less free time and more to do in it, a phenomenon that is bound to spread to smaller centres. Eventually, as cricket has declined in Mumbai, it might decline in India as well.

But there is a counterpoint to this. Sport is more than pastime or entertainment—it is also a means of validating national pride. We will always follow a sport in which we excel. And although Indian cricket may seem to be in decline—I shudder to think what the team will look like after Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar retire —we will always do better at cricket than any other sport.

Why are we so good at cricket, to begin with? Part of why we took up the sport is historical circumstance, but leave that aside. The main reason why cricket is suited to Indians, and one that many will find politically incorrect, is genes. People across the world come from different genetic stocks, and are constrained by biology. This is reflected in sports. The odds will always be against a white or brown man winning the 100m sprint at the Olympics, and Africans will always do better than Asians in long-distance running.

Indians, I believe, are genetically disadvantaged when it comes to sports in which pure strength, speed or endurance play a decisive role. We tend to do well only in sports that place a premium on skill—cricket is a classic example. Even within cricket, we’ve been more famous for our batsmen than our bowlers, and for our spinners than our fast bowlers. Even our fast bowlers rely more on skill—swinging and seaming the ball—than on sheer pace, where fast-twitch muscles come into play. Of course, there are variations within the country, where many different genetic stocks exist.

Indeed, this is why Indians declined in hockey, as astroturf reduced the premium placed on pure skill. Ditto tennis, where the sublime skills of Ramesh Krishnan would be useless in this era of the power game. In cricket, even though the speed and fitness required at the highest level of the game has increased, it is unlikely to go beyond the natural capacity of Indians.

And thus, by biology and circumstance feeding on each other, we are bound to cricket. I don’t bemoan this —if Rahul Dravid can get his mojo back, and play as he did when he was last in England, it will all seem worthwhile again. And my friend won’t have to sing Raga Malhar.

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Also check out an essay in which I’d touched on this subject, “Do We Really Love Cricket?”