Teaching for India

Re: # 49
In Pakistan its the TCF Rahbar Programme run by The Citizen's Foundation. And yes you are right, giving back something to your people remains the most fulfilling experience.

Best of luck Mr. Mani.
I hope we have more people in this part of the world especially, who think like this.

wow!!!...the TFI initiative sounds awesome!..i wonder whether they have such a thing in Pakistan...

Congratulations Mr. Mani...you have a chance to give something back to your country which very few people who go abroad get...

Best of Luck!!!

gorki....
ha ha ha..I have not intended to discuss tyre industry or was not planning to sell Dunlop tyres to the young Sardarji...

My point was, even 80/90 years back ( when most of the Asia was not aware of what heavy industry/organised industry is. What Technical education is), India housed good quality Industry and technical education, which was able to sustain the quality competetive for long time......

http://ccs.in/gdas/?page_id=70

Now, whatever the present industry is manufacturing ( in India), the source of technology is somewhere else....

Regarding IITs, please show me a success story like Google....


If Rakesh is involved in teaching urban poor, that is good. And I stick to my point; 60% literacy rate does not mean, it is horrible (in rural context)....

Rakesh,
Your passion and commitment to help average Indians have better opportunities through education is highly admirable. India, South Asia and the world can and should draw inspiration from your example.

Committed and passionate teachers will help attract more youngsters to schools. But I think school breakfast and lunch programs are needed to provide the necessary impetus for the least advantaged to attend school.
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

universal primary = Universal primary education

Nkg Sahib: You wrote:
“You may not be knowing a company called Dunlop………………Destructive industrial policy by Nehru, wiped out around 50 years of Indian economy and higher education”.

Please review the following data:
...........................................
Madras Rubber Factory, or MRF, is a major manufacturing company located in Chennai, India. MRF is mainly involved in making vehicle tyres. It is India's largest tyre manufacturing company, and among the dozen largest worldwide. It exports to more than 65 countries. Set up in 1946 by a young entrepreneur, K. M. Mammen Mappillai, by 1956, MRF had become the market leader with a 50% share of the tread-rubber market in India. In 1961 the Madras Rubber Factory Private Limited was converted into a public company. The Company was given permission to export tyres having Mansfield trade mark to all world markets except U.S.A. and Canada.
By 1964, MRF had made a progress in the export of tyres. An overseas office at Beirut (Lebanon) was established to develop the export market, and it was amongst India's very first efforts. This year also marked the birth of the now famous MRF Muscleman. In 1967 MRF became the first Indian company to export tyres to USA - the very birthplace of tyre technology. By 1984 Sales crossed INR two billion.
1993 K. M. Mammen Mappillai was awarded the Padmashri Award of National Recognition for his contribution to industry. MRF also became the first tyre company in India to cross the INR 10 billion mark. In addition, the company was voted by the Far Eastern Economic Review, as one of the ten leading Corporate Groups in India and a Leader in Asia, and by readers of the A & M magazine, as one of India's most admired Marketing Companies. The Far Eastern Economic Review Award was presented to MRF for the fourth year in succession in recognition of excellence. 1997 MRF set up a new plant in Pondicherry for the production of radial tyres, and it set up the Arakonam plant in Chennai to produce bicycle tyres and tubes. In 2000 The Company has set up shop in Dubai to target markets in the UAE as part of its export thrust. By 2002 MRF was ranked highest in customer satisfaction along with multinational Bridgestone in a study conducted by JD Power Asia pacific.
AND
Goodyear: Goodyear tyre and Rubber company Akron, Ohio entered the Indian Market in 1922. In 1961: Goodyear India's own manufacturing facility was inaugurated in Ballabgarh, 32 kms from New Delhi .The plant had an investment of US $12million and was commissioned within 12 months. 1965: The Ballabgarh plant was expanded which increased the plant production by 35% 1969-70: The production increased by nearly 100% 1993: Goodyear formed a 50-50 joint venture with South- Asian Tyres Ltd. (SATL) at Aurangabad to manufacture state-of-art radial tyres for car and light truck and bias construction tyres for graders and earthmovers.1996: The first tyre GPS2 radial Passenger was rolled out from Aurangabad plant 1998: SATL becomes a fully owned Goodyear Company 1999: A significant investment was made in the farm tyre manufacturing process. 2002: Goodyear becomes the first tyre manufacturer to roll out tubeless tyres on Indian roads....
……………………………………………………

I hope you enjoyed my quick 15-20 minute research on the tire industry in India (I am no expert but can pull a lot more data to support the growth of industry in India at the time that you claim industry was being decimated by the evil machinations of Nehru.) Thus industries rise and fail due to many conditions and market forces besides the role of any country's political leadership.

My point is this: We can go on digging selective data to support one viewpoint or another but that is neither here or there.
My question is this. What is your point other than that Nehru destroyed every thing that the noble British had built with their hard work and dedication to us foolish natives and that universal primary is a big waste of resources and also that IITs are much hyped but second rate institutions that have served only the United States. (You ignored the IIT alumni study entirely.)

So there, let us say, I get it.
So far so good.
My response still remains the one I made earlier: Nehru is long gone. We can't just blame him and sit tight on our collective behinds 45 years later. Years ago, I read a motivational plaque somewhere saying:]

“Lead, Follow, or get out of the way!”

I think it is very relevant to the current generation of Indian complainers. Nehru has been dead since 1964. You, I and others OTOH are alive and kicking. The country is not his responsibility anymore but certainly our generation can do something other than complain.
What do you suggest we should do besides beating our chests that it is a terrible place?
Should we invite the British in again or do you have any positive suggestions or commitments?

Rakesh Mani is one young man who decided to do something about it. His efforts are to be admired.

What about the others? What about you? Are you ready to do something like him? If so, then it is time to stand up and be counted. Let us others put our money where our mouth is. I stand seriously behind my earlier offer and will match any commitments that you make. Are you game?

BTW: Hindu Sikh may have a point. The much admired Chinese model went through its own version of socialistic experiments before it opened its economy roughly 10 years ahead of India. Believe me it was not a pretty picture. While Nehru’s India stagnated, it did not suffer the ravages of the ‘great leap forward’ It is estimated that between 20-40 million civilians died during this great social experiment (more than the combined total for Hitler and Stalin). I admit that still many things can still go wrong in the Indian growth story but the growth trajectory that he predicts is well within the realm of possible. Only time will tell.
Regards.

#43
contd...
You may not be knowing a company called Dunlop. That was one of the leading brand in rubber products, specialy tyres and industrial V belts. They established research facility in Bandel and graduates from Calcutta University (yeh they had excellent set of professors in Polymar technology etc...) and even Japanese people used to use Dunlop products. This story is more than 80 years old. When we boast of housing the second largest R & D facility for GE ( in Bangalore, JFWTC), the people of Bandel used to do that more than 80/90 years back. Destructive industrial policy by Nehru, wiped out around 50 years of Indian economy and higher education.

Today, whatever success we boast through open economy, it was thriving during British period and even with their imperialistic attitude allowed Tatas/Birlas to grow.

Re: # 41
Hindu Sikh...

I am not getting you; how discipline is related to Nazism?
The political setup (Governor, Viceroy etc...) used to stay away from the matter of education...

Try to google the story of Sir Asutosh Mukherjee ( encounter with British officers) and how Prof Indresan received treatment from a group of visiting MPs...

This was the observation from a professor, who completed his masters in Machester University and grdauation from our college and spent his student days under British rule...
The foundation British Govt. left with us, was enough for us to excell medical, engineering, science and literarure...
We failed to keep even that much with us ( like J C Bose, P C Roy, Satyen Bose etc...)

I think you need to get little bit eduction on History, and how discipline is one of the key aspect of civilised society....I will recomend you read the writings by Swami Vivekananda....What caused india to doom into chaos...


Petent/innovation/research is not linked with money. And BTW, IITs are not starved of fund. You are young kid, you don't know the deficiencies of graduates (even from IITs) india produces. That is due to lack of exposure to industry and lack of interface with industry....This was not the scenario, 70/80 years back. The academcis was at par with Industry.Our Industry started lagging so, the technical education turned into theoritical knowledge...

The entire IIT success story is housed in USA, where the students/engineers bridges the skill gap very easily and the zill to stick to USA (students know the horror waiting in India)....

Can you show some successful IIT tech ventures in India?

REPLY NKG U SAID how indiscipline creeped into these centres of excellence as soon as British people left, and how much Congress was instrumental in this process....

sir, yesterday i reada bit of mein kampf and i must say this comment of yours very spookily sounds alot like hitler when he talked of the indiscipline that cae into germany when the marxists came(just read the chapter the race and the people, you will know what i mean).........i am astounded that you do nt even know the reason why iits and for that matter aiims has less no of patents.....just compare the budgets mit and iit d get,, harvard and aiims get ....your answer will pop up.....
you are highly misplaced in ur assumption that india has retrogressed over the last 60 yrs .No . its just that other countries have left us behind..THe chief reason: they opened their economies and ours was shut by mrs gandhi.....but things are improving now,,just visit dilli, you will be astounded by the furious speed of construction that goes on there, just look at its metro ( better than the ny subway), just visit the jamnagar refinery of reliance, you will be left awestruck(the most efficient and biggest refinery on earth)
india is exactly TEN YRS behind china.. that is in 2019 , india will most provbabl;y be where china is today
19th century-europe's
20th century----america's
21 st century-----india and china's


have hope, OUR TIME(AND OUR NOBELISTS) WILL ALSO COME

REPLY NKG U SAID how indiscipline creeped into these centres of excellence as soon as British people left, and how much Congress was instrumental in this process....

sir, yesterday i reada bit of mein kampf and i must say this comment of yours very spookily sounds alot like hitler when he talked of the indiscipline that cae into germany when the marxists came(just read the chapter the race and the people, you will know what i mean).........i am astounded that you do nt even know the reason why iits and for that matter aiims has less no of patents.....just compare the budgets mit and iit d get,, harvard and aiims get ....your answer will pop up.....
you are highly misplaced in ur assumption that india has retrogressed over the last 60 yrs .No . its just that other countries have left us behind..THe chief reason: they opened their economies and ours was shut by mrs gandhi.....but things are improving now,,just visit dilli, you will be astounded by the furious speed of construction that goes on there, just look at its metro ( better than the ny subway), just visit the jamnagar refinery of reliance, you will be left awestruck(the most efficient and biggest refinery on earth)
india is exactly TEN YRS behind china.. that is in 2019 , india will most provbabl;y be where china is today
19th century-europe's
20th century----america's
21 st century-----india and china's


have hope, OUR TIME(AND OUR NOBELISTS) WILL ALSO COME

Students Aiding Village Empowerment [SAVE.ca] is an Ottawa-based Youth organizations.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0vfPXKLEcE

[I know the parents of the opening narrator]

Gorki...
The IITs are excellent graduate schools; but it failed to bring scientific and technical autonomy for India. This is largely due to higher education policy, Nehru have adopted. How much patents IITs publish /year...
Semiconductor (Soid State) fully developed after WWII. What are we in that area? In almost all areas of technolgy, India is still dependent of foreign, specialy western contribution....
A country producing father of microwave engineering ( J C Bose) have to imort Radar technology from Israel!!!!! Is that the sign of progress?

If you compare the Place of India (in the area of higher education) at 1947 in Asia and now, we have slided several places from other Asian countries. Now we are little better than Bangladesh and Afghanistan and may be little better than Pakistan and Srilanka....

Nehru introduced beaurocratic and political intervention in Higher Education, which was not there pre-1947 era...

The college, I have graduated from (BESU) is 160 years old. Some of the senior professors ( most of them now expired) have witnessed, how indiscipline creeped into these centres of excellence as soon as British people left, and how much Congress was instrumental in this process....

Hindu_sikh:

I am quite aware of the "brain gain" and indeed wrote an outline for a project on that theme 25 years ago. But it's like the Hindi movies when, after an accident, someone regains the memory that he or she had lost. Yes, the credit does go to the accident ;).

Re the story of the second generation NRIs going back, that is heartwarming. In fact this is happening a lot more with the Chinese ex-pats than with Indians.

But my hope is that by the time you finish your medical program, the opportunities in India would be so rewarding and challenging that you wouldn't think of leaving India, except for the purpose of sightseeing and attending professional conferences.

gorky:

I received your pm and have sent a response.

I found that study of IIT very interesting. There should be more studies like this, and I had once wanted to do a case study of my own class which graduated from a higher secondary school during mid-fifties. I would have found it more illuminating if the cohorts had been separated in at least two segments - those graduating before and after 1990. In the one case that your summary did so, I was not surprised to find that 80% of the companies started by these graduates in India were after 1990.

While considering the success of these graduates -or that of IIMs= one should also keep in mind that the screening process ensured that these people formed the creme de la creme of the student population and therefore probably would have ended up in a leadership position no matter what they did.

I have a little problem with calling Nehru visionary because of the IITs [he maybe so for some other reasons]. If Nehru had been buried instead of cremated, he would be turning in his grave if he knew that the graduates produced by institutions created by him ended up as code coolies (even bosses) for MNCs whom he hated so much that he created an Industrial Policy to keep them at bay. Some vision!

mitra, to make matters easier, i am pasting anand's essay.the last para is esp relevant



By Anand Giridharadas
Thursday, November 20, 2008

VERLA, India: 'What are Papa and I doing here?"

These words, instant-messaged by my mother in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep-ocean cables and came to me in the village where I'm now living, in the country that she left.

It was five years ago that I left America to come live and work in India. Now, in our family and among our Indian-American friends, other children of immigrants are exploring motherland opportunities. The idea is spreading virally through émigré households across the West.

Which raises a heart-stirring question: If our parents left India and trudged westward for us, if they manufactured from scratch a new life there for us, if they slogged, saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, then what does it mean when we choose to migrate to the place they forsook?

If we are here, what are they doing there?

They came of age in the 1970s, when the "there" seemed paved with possibility and the "here" seemed paved with potholes. As a young trainee, my father felt frustrated in companies that awarded roles based on age, not achievement. He looked at his bosses, 20 years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he didn't want to spend his life becoming them.

My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of the best schools in Washington.

It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.

My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.

Perhaps it was the survivalism born of scarcity: the fierce pushing to get off the plane, the miserliness even of the rich, the obsession with doctors and engineers and the neglect of all others. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Perhaps it was the culture shock of servitude: a child's horror at reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India.

My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities.

But history bends, and sometimes swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.

India, having fruitlessly pursued command economics, tried something new: it liberalized, privatized, globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.

America, meanwhile, floundered. In a short blink of history came 9/11, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, emerging economies, rogue nuclear nations, climate change, dwindling oil, a financial crisis.

Pessimism crept into the sunniest nation. A vast majority saw America going astray. Books heralded a "Post-American World."

"In the U.S., there's a crisis of confidence," said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, the Indian software giant, and author of a forthcoming book, "Imagining India."

"In India," he added, "for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of optimism about the future, a sense that our children's futures can be better than ours if we try hard enough."

My love for my birth country never flickered. But these new times piqued my interest in my ancestral land. Many of us, the stepchildren of India, felt its change of spirit, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.

At first we felt confused by India's formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. We wondered what the newspapers meant when they said "INSAT-4CR in orbit, DTH to get a boost."

Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to "S&M conferences," only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing.

Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for a man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting.

We learned new expressions: "He is on tour" (means: He is traveling. Doesn't mean: He has joined U2); "What is your native place?" (means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn't mean: What hospital delivered you?); "Two minutes" (means: An hour. Doesn't mean: Two minutes).

We tried to reinvent ourselves, as our parents had, but now in reverse. Some studied Hindi, others yoga. Some visited the Ganges to find themselves; others tried days-long Vipassana meditations.

Many of us who shunned Indian clothes in youth began wearing kurtas and chappals, saris and churidars. There was a sad truth in this: We waited for our heritage to become cool to the world before we draped its colors and textures on our own backs.

We learned how to make friends here, and that to make friends requires befriending families. We learned to love here: men found fondness for the elusive Indian woman; women surprised themselves in succumbing to chauvinistic, mother-spoiled men.

We forged dual-use accents. We spoke in foreign accents by default. But when it came to arguing with accountants or ordering takeout kebabs, we went sing-song Indian.

We gravitated to work specially suited to us. If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida's phrase, there is also emerging what might be called the fusion class: people well positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.

India's second-generation returnees have built boutiques fusing Indian fabrics with Western cuts, founded companies that train a new generation to work in Western companies, become deal makers in investment firms that need to speak equally to Wall Street and Dalal Street, mixed albums that combine throbbing tabla with Western melodies.

Our parents' generation helped India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.

Countries like India once fretted about a "brain drain." We are learning now that "brain circulation," as some call it, may be more apt.

India was not exporting brains, but investing them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.

Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts.

dost mittar , reply 30, you should read anand giridhsrdas's archived column in the nyt where he touched upon this issue....according to him, this brain drain was beneficikal to india in all ways.....please read the article..it is beaautiful