A Failed Education

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re:#101 by tahmed32
tahmed sahib,
Please read my post again. I never said our doctors are better than yours. All go thr` screening tests (FMGEMS, FLEX, USMLE etc) which are very competitive. So, all doctors selected for residency slots have a basic minimum standard. All i said was: Indian doctors in the residency program i was in outperformed Pakis. That is all. Let us leave it at that.
Sridhar

#99 by pmishra2

Alas, the Chief of Hyprocrites (pmishra2) is predictable as ever. Unable to stomach an objective analysis, he opts for the knee-jerk approach: closing your eyes and pretending that everyone has disappeared... HEHEHE

I take it from your inane response, that you have no answer to the CIO report. It seems you have not shaken out of your habit of yawning loudly yet :))

faisaluno #97: Thanks for the link. I have been following some of that regularly.

Zia Chishti is an out and out brilliant guy. And apparently very patriotic. I have followed his company, Aligh Tech., closely. He was voted out of the CEO position of his own company, because he refused to move the offices from Pakistan after Sep 11. I would say he is the most brilliant and succesful Pakistani in our group of thirty something expatriates. He rang the bell at the stock exchange in New York, the day his company IPOed

Interestingly, did you know, People magazine voted him one of the 40 most eligible bachelors in USA, along with people like Tiger Woods and Ben Aflack.

http://extratv.warnerbros.com/reframe.html?http://extratv.warnerbros.com/dailynews/extraspin/06_01/06_20a.html

As the article mentions, his father was an American professor who converted to Islam, and then married his mother, who was a Pakistani student in the USA, at that time. Then he died, so his mom brought him to Lahore, where he grew up.

If I get a chance I will try to meet him on my next trip to Pakistan. He was a self-made multi-millionaire at the age of 30. He is only 32 now.

hey arjun_m:

so you finally get something right. and a cruel blow as well. such shame in being a taxi driver. such shame.

#91 by rsridhar

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If your school education sucks, can you hope for a bright student going on to do a PhD?
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God knows how you arrived at this conclusion!! Pakistan`s problem is low enrolment, not its textbooks.

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There is this penchant about comparing Indian and Pak educational systems. I am sorry to say but there is really no comparison.
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I am sorry to say, it is only you who is comparing educational systems. I am only comparing literacy rates and enrolment statistics. India has a 10% lead in these statistics. There are unfortunately no publications that can objectively compare two curricula or educational systems. I would appreciate it if you could produce an official publication that suggests that Pakistani textbooks and course structure in primary schools, high schools and college are inferior to India. Otherwise I would have to assume that you are telling us more than you really know :))

++
When i was in residency, the quality of residents from Pak was O.K but nothing great.
++

At Wharton, I scored better than most Indian students and got better job offers. Does that mean all Indians are dumb, and all Pakistanis are A-graders?? During my few years of experience, I have met quite a large number of Indian slackers and also many Indian over-achievers.

During our last project, we hired an Indian IT professional who had twice my experience. He had worked 3 years in India before joining our company in the U.S. Naturally, we had high expectations from him. He worked with us for 3 months, complained all the time, spent half the day in discussions and team meetings, drew up a dozen documents, delivered nothing and switched to another project. We were in panic mode but luckily found a Russian chap who not only met the deadlines, he also helped us with the Pre-sales effort for the next project. That Indian chap has now been laid off despite billing 5% lower than the Russian.

Would I generalize this experience to all Indians?? Probably not.

HisFradulence strikes again !!! Pointing to some ultra-generic article about outsourcing we learn about Pakistan`s great strengths in IT:

* Strength: Government incentives


Good show ! I strongly encourage you to push outsourcing based on this strength. This is going to be the killer advantage for you over the indians. When they are deadlines for complex projects, you can send Musharraf and some commandos in!! (govt incentive!)

I suggest you take a look at *serious* publications such as those from Gartner or McKinsey on outsourcing. Don`t waste our time with some low-level publications run by people who probably think that Phillipines and Pakistan must be next to each other because they start with a P. That sort of thing only plays well in Pakistan. Elsewhere it is a flop.

His whatever #86,

I am not encouraging anyone to insult anything. However if I wish to express an opinion, however offensive it might be, I should be allowed to express it. This is how progress happens. Do u think in your heart of hearts that it is ok to stone a woman to death especially if she was raped ? Do you agree with this principle ?

The problem with Hadood and other laws is that they were formulated 1400 years ago. Even if those laws were good at the time they were enunciated but they were for Bedouins. World has gone ahead. Laws need to be debated before they are enacted. If the laws are bad then they need to be abrogated. If you can`t even discuss the efficacy of your legal system that was handed to you 1400 years ago then you are in a sorry state.

rsridhar #91 I do not wish to jump into this ``my country is better than yours`` contest between individuals who have all escaped the miserable conditions in their respective countries to come to the US. However, I must say that your statements that pakistani doctors in the US are not as good as Indian reflects a very subjective and biased viewpoint. While not a doctor myself, I have a brother and a brother in law who are both in the US (both products of pakistan education) and both have done better than the average doctor by any standard. One is a full professor at a major US medical college in addition to heading his own medical group. The other left the US in the late 80`s to practice in Pakistan for several years - and yet when he returned a few years ago had no problem joining a successful practice. I say this not to boast (I find the boastful talk that has been going on on this board to reflect very poorly on the education of those concerned), but just to point out that you are merely biased against your fellow colleagues in the US just because they happen to be from pakistan.

But dont mind me. Please carry on with the pissing contest.

[........``CE approves plan to make Lahore IT hub of Asia``....What happened? .......

....And BTW, Lahore already has become the hub of IT in Pakistan. .....]

Lahore was the hub of IT industries much before Musharraf`s speech. The IT industry has been one of the biggest employers of poor minorities on the outskirts of Lahore. There were even reports of bonded and child labor in IT industry, called bhattas in Lahore. Adobe was traded widely is surrounding Lahore much before Adobe Systems at NASDAQ. The shares were called ITtaN in panjabi language and we had phrases like ``IT wattay da vaer``....:-))

hisexcellency/romair:

following is link to a profile of a pakistani startup does has done very well (i had posted this link few weeks back as well). company raised around $8-10mn in the first round of funding in part by issuing stock in pak worth rs. 10 each. since then, the stock price has gone to Rs 26.00. heard from my friend (hbs mba) who works for these guys that company has almost completed another round of funding by arranging $26mn from ifc and commonwealth development bank. also heard from my friend that mush was scheduled to meet the ceo a couple of weeks back. and i can put you in touch with my friend if you guys want to learn more about the challanges these guys have faced in operating out of pakistan as well well as their outlook for the future.

http://www.pseb.org.pk/News/FindingOppor.cfm

re: Arun Shourie`s article
This article has some relevance, so i am posting it here in full.
Url: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=29672


``When sky is the limit



Arun Shourie




The problems that have bedevilled Japanese banks are well known — the quicksand of ‘‘directed lending’’, NPAs, and the rest — as is the way these problems have been at the heart of Japan’s inability to pull itself out of the trough for over a decade. The Long Term Credit Bank of Japan, the giant LTCB, followed the same trajectory as other banks, except that it has suddenly, in just two years, shot out of the pack.

LTCB was established in 1952. It was one of the principal financiers of Japan’s phenomenal industrialisation after World War II. As the 1990s rolled on, its troubles became deeper and deeper. It went bankrupt. To prevent the collapse from bringing down other parts of the banking sector, the Government had no alternative but to nationalise the bank. That was in 1998.


The bank continued to haemorrhage. Soon, in June 2000, it had to be sold to a consortium of international investors. That was a thunderclap for Japan — this was the largest organisation that had to be sold to foreigners. The bank was renamed the Shinsei Bank.

In just two years, it has turned around, even as others are still in the morass of old problems. It turns out that Indian professionals — a thousand of them from Nucleus Software Exports, Mphasis, Polaris, i-Flex Solutions and Wipro — have played a crucial role in transforming the bank: they are the ones who have completely re-engineered the bank’s processes, they are the ones who have reorganised the bank’s operations around a completely new, modern business model.

And they have done it all in record time, and with record economy: the new, transformed retail bank has been launched within one year instead of the anticipated three; implementation costs have been 90 per cent less than estimated; a range of new financial products has been launched that are better than what competitors are giving; hardware too has been drastically downsized. When I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago to open an Indian IT fair, the success of these professionals in rehabilitating the Shinsei Bank was the talk of the banking and IT community in Japan.

What is it that Indians could bring to this task that, say, Chinese software firms could not? The Indians could not just write software for different functions and transactions that the staff of the bank had to perform — the Chinese too could have done this: China also has a very large software industry that today caters to its domestic IT market, a market which is many times that in India.

The Indians could bring to bear on the task expertise in a host of other domains — for instance, knowledge of financial markets, of modern commercial banking, of accountancy — and thereby provide not just software but complete solutions, from software to hardware to completely new business models.

Similarly, high-end Indian garment industry can avail of not just cheaper labour. In addition it can tap into our fashion designers. Is it any surprise then that Wal-Mart sources $1 billion worth of goods — that is, half of its apparel — from India? That GAP sources $500-600 million from India? That Hilfiger sources $100 million?

The point is the successes we have encountered above are not fortuitous. India has a score of strengths that others do not.

Cost is one of them. Nor is it a marginal advantage. Indeed, the difference between the cost at which we can provide services and many commodities of comparable quality and what those cost in the developed world is so vast that, should those firms and economies shut themselves out from our supplies, they are the ones who will be severely disadvantaged, they are the ones who will be making themselves un-competitive.

• Indian IT firms provide world-class services at one-tenth what the same services would cost in the United States.

• An MBA costs about $5,000 in India. In the US, an MBA costs around $120,000.

• Developing a new automobile model in the US costs about $1 billion. Indica and Scorpio have been designed, developed and produced totally in India. They have been acclaimed abroad, and found to be up to international standards. The cost of designing them? Less than half what the design would cost in the US.

• In an important address — you will find it in FICCI’s publication, Unleashing India’s True Potential: CEO’s Vision of the Future — M.S. Banga, chairman, Hindustan Lever, reports results of inquiries that the company made. In spite of high power costs, high interest rates, it found that the capital costs of setting up plants in India to produce an item like toothpaste for Levers worldwide were just 35 per cent of what its sister companies in the US and Europe would have to spend. And the conversion costs were just 15 per cent. In tea bags they were just a quarter of what they would be in the US.

Sourcing already accounts for about half of Hindustan Lever’s exports of Rs 1,500 crore a year. But Banga surmised, by being just the hub from which Levers’ units worldwide would source their requirements of such goods, Hindustan Lever could build up a business of $1 billion a year — that is Rs 5,000 thousand crore a year. Moreover, as it would be marketing directly to these companies, it would save on the costs of reaching, winning, retaining the individual customer.

• Surgery: Arvind Netralaya performs a cataract operation, including the cost of the lens, for $12; that very operation costs about $1,500 in the US. A bypass surgery in India costs around Rs 40,000; in the US it can cost anything upwards of Rs 6 lakhs. The cost of open-heart surgery in the UK or the US can be anywhere between Rs 15 lakhs and Rs 35 lakhs as against Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakhs in the best of hospitals in India. The cost differentials in more complicated surgeries — liver and kidney transplants, etc — are even higher.

Brains are another strength — far, far more important than material resources in several sunrise activities. Most would have been surprised to read recent accounts in magazines such as Business World of India being looked upon as a research hub by company after choosy company. FICCI’s list includes:

• Over 70 MNCs, including Delphi, Eli Lilly, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, Heinz and DaimlerChrysler, have set up R&D facilities in India in the past five years. Together with laboratories set up before 1997, 100 of the Fortune 500 have set up R&D facilities in India. By contrast, only 33 of the Business Week 1000 companies have R&D centres in China.

• The scale of these operations also tells the tale. Just four years ago, Intel had a mere 10 persons working in India; today it has over 1,000. GE’s John F Welch Technology Center in Bangalore is the company’s largest outside the US. With an investment of $60 million, it employs 1,600 researchers. GE’s R&D centre in China by contrast employs only 100.

The Indian centre devotes 20 per cent of its resources to fundamental research having a five to 10 year horizon in areas like nanotechnology, hydrogen energy, photonics and advanced propulsion. With 17 clinical trials (10 of them global), the Eli Lilly research facility at Gurgaon is its largest in Asia and the third largest in the world.

• GE Medical in Bangalore has developed a high resolution-imaging machine for angiography to meet GE’s entire global requirement. It has also developed a portable ultrasound scanner that is exported around the world from Bangalore.

• Two-thirds of GE Plastics’ 300-member research team in India is doing fundamental research on molecules. GE Plastics has contributed to the development of a family of polycarbonates of engineering plastics that are being used in auto headlamps and CDs. It has also developed heat resistant monomers for applications in aircraft bodies and high-end medical equipment.

• GE Motors India has developed an almost noiseless motor for GE’s most sophisticated washing machine lines in the US; it is the sole sourcing point for a million of these motors every year.

• Monsanto has been in India for over 50 years. After examining China and India, it set up its first non-US research facility in Bangalore in 1998. This facility is responsible for Monsanto’s R&D for Asia. The company is researching ‘‘promoters’’ — accelerators that improve crop productivity.

• Whirlpool’s Pune Research Lab develops refrigerators and air conditioners for Asia (including China) and Australia. Forty per cent of this facility’s resources are devoted to its core research on global projects.

• The DaimlerChrysler Research Centre in Bangalore is engaged in fundamental and applied research in avionics, simulation and software development.

• HP Labs India has built a prototype that can scan handwritten mail through a small handheld device instead of a scanner. It has also built the prototype of a computer for unsophisticated users.

You can extend the list many times over by just following our business newspapers and magazines for a week. Moreover, while youthful professionals and entrepreneurs have been adding these sinews, the most far-reaching structural change has taken place:

• The proportion living below the poverty line has fallen from 36 per cent to 27 per cent.

• The balance of power between state and society in the economic sphere has been overturned: the dismantling of the licence-quota raj, the transfer of power to regulators in one sector after another.

Indeed, not a week passes and there is yet another advance in economic management. One reason these changes do not get adequate notice is that, many of the structures having been set up, the improvements are now in the details. Those who are acquainted with economic policy and administration know that each of these improvements will have far-reaching consequences as the years go by. But as the improvements are in the details, most of us miss their significance.

As a result of such steps, many of the handicaps that hobbled our entrepreneurs have been eased in the past few years. Initiatives in different, seemingly distant fields have reached fruition. And the effect is not additive, it is multiplicative:

• The turnaround time in our ports used to be eight to 10 days; it is now four-and-a-half days.

• As recently as 1999, our telecom infrastructure could provide a bandwidth of only 155 Mbps; today it is able to provide terabit capacity, that is, 75,000 times what could be provided just four years ago. Within a year or so, as the fibre optic network being laid by various enterprises gets in place, it will not matter whether your office is in San Jose, California or in any of 300 cities in India.

• Till the other day we used to be in awe of the rate of expansion of mobile phones in China — a million a month. In the past two months these have increased in India by almost 1.5 million a month.

• Long distance telephone tariffs have fallen by two-thirds in five years.

• Tariffs for data transmission have fallen by 80 per cent in three years.

• The work done by the far-sighted people who set up what seemed at that time such an esoteric institution, one oriented to the rich elite, the National Institute of Design has borne fruit. Today graduates of that fine institution help design cell phones, CAT-scan and MRI machines ...

Other handicaps too have been eased. Interest rates have come down drastically, foreign exchange restrictions for business purposes are as good as non-existent ...

On the other side is the fact that the developed world will increasingly require services and personnel from a country such as India. We are the ones who have to be swift enough to prepare for and grab the opportunities:

• Various studies conclude (you will find them summarised in the All India Management Association’s India’s New Opportunity - 2020) that the workforce of developed countries will fall short by 32 to 39 million by 2020. In the US alone the shortfall is expected to be between 8.2 and 14.3 million.

• The proportion of the aged to persons in working age is shooting up precipitously in developed countries from Germany to Japan.

Such developments provide excellent opportunities for India — for services that have to be provided in situ such as nursing and care for the elderly, for services such as surgery that can be provided to residents of those countries upon their coming here. In fact, there are opportunities in a host of new services of an even higher order, and ones that exist not in the future but right now:

• Higher, specially medical and engineering education: educating an MBA to world standards costs $9000 in India; in the US that degree of education costs $30,000.

• Editing, composing, formatting text, from books to newspapers: a sub-editor costs an American paper $25,000; in India an excellent substitute can be employed for $5,200. The editor of an Indian paper told the proprietor of a leading British paper the other day he could edit the latter’s paper for merely the amount that the latter’s publication spent on renting the space occupied by sub-editors in the publication.

• Printing and binding books: Hong Kong and Singapore, which had taken a leap in this regard, have become high-cost centres.

• India has exactly the same order of cost-cum-competence advantage in professions like law, accountancy, design, engineering, tax consultancy, financial services of all kinds.

• In software itself, though there have been the most conspicuous successes, the field is limited only by our imagination — in that IT fair in Tokyo that I mentioned, I saw fine text-to-voice software that has been developed by a small software unit in Lucknow. It was receiving excellent reception in Japan. It can be used to quickly produce audio versions of books upon books for the visually impaired.

Thus, on the one side the opportunities are unlimited; on the other we have incomparable advantages for grasping them. But as has been said, ‘‘When opportunity knocks, some complain about the noise.’’

Software engineers or cyber coolies? runs the headline of a newspaper feature. In the US a software engineer earns $21 an hour, in India even the leading companies pay him only $2, runs the text. Is this not exploitation? it asks.

Now a salary of Rs 100 an hour is excellent for someone living and working in India. Why throw away the advantage? Look at it the other way. China has accumulated its huge pile of foreign exchange reserves — over $280 billion — not by high-technology exports. It has accumulated them by flooding the world with low-technology items — leather, leather products, garments, toys ... And it has used the advantage of lower cost — and perfectly disciplined labour — to the hilt.

China’s achievement we gape at: ‘‘How have they become the manufacturing hub of the world?’’ we ask. But our advantage — in some senses the very same advantage China has put to such good use — we want to throw away.

Keep these foreign accounting firms out, proclaim our accountants at a high-profile function. They have been involved in frauds abroad. On that reasoning, shouldn’t we bar our own accounting firms also? After all, frauds in our banks, in our stock markets, the way so many of our firms that have run up NPAs are then able to extract bail-out packages from financial institutions, could such things have happened if our accounting firms had been doing their job?

And there is the other point: we want their accountants and lawyers to be kept out, but they must open their doors to our IT professionals! As the title of one of Jairam Ramesh’s monographs ran, Yankee Go Home — But Take Me with You!

Why not look upon the opportunities positively? Why not institute courses in our law colleges on Germany’s legal system, in the accounting systems of the US and thereby capture the markets there? Why not multiply the number of nurses we train, and have them learn Japanese? Why not enable private firms to open world-class universities in India, and thereby become educators to the world?``
Also, read an interesting discussion going on in this thread about India`s IT potential:
``http://forums.com.com/group/zd.News.Talkback/zdnn/tb.tpt/@thread@214688@forward@1@D-,D@ALL/@article@214688?EXP=ALL&VWM=hr&ROS=1&PAGETP=2100&NODEID=1104&SHOST=netscape.com.com``

Sridhar

re:article # 95 by our FM
``In another ten years, us Pakistanis (in my age group) will be VPs and have large companies of our own, since in North America, being Indian or Pakistani or Phillipino etc. doesn`t make too much of a difference.``
Reality check:
This is what is happening:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_4-9-2003_pg7_7

AND is probably the result of this:

http://www.nation.com.pk/daily/Sep-2003/3/EDITOR/op1.asp
Sridhar

HisExcellency #93: Thanks for the info. The article is interesting.

I regularly attend the Gartner Global conference on IT. Apparently their CEO is a very young guy, who is the (twin? ) brother of Clinton`s ex-press secretary, Fliescher. I attended the one in Florida, last year. Chambers, Fiona, Dell, McNealy, Ballmer etc. were keynote speakers. My main interest was in the off-shore development. I had a chance to do some 1-1 sessions with a couple of Gartner researchers, who specifically specialize in off-shore development, and travel all over the world evaluating these companies. They have met the people who run the companies in India, Pakistan, Russia etc. Following is the information I was given:

- India is obviously the leader in off-shore dev
- The problems mentioned with India were:
- Potential war with Pakistan
- Too much concentration on the technical side (with CMM etc.) and not enough concentration on the marketing side

- The countries mentioned after India were Phillipines, Russia etc. Basically, the ones mentioned in the article

- I specifically asked them about Pakistani companies
- They told me they had gone to Pakistan and met the people there
- They were quite impressed with the steps Pakistan govt. had taken in IT over the past two years or so
- They said they were going to put Pakistan on their slides (appearing on a Gartner slide is a huge achievement) before Sep 11, as an up and comer. However, after Sep 11, they could not do so, due to the heightened security situation, under which Pakistan had lost contracts
- They were quite impressed with the Pakistanis running the IT companies

The success of IT in a country in my opinion, depends on a few entreprenuers, and a few good educational institutions. Stanford and Berkely, Packard, Jobs etc.= Silicon Valley. My guess is that India`s success is based on IITs (at least three or four of them) plus Premji, Tata, and the Infosys and Satyam guys. All my Indian IT friends I discuss this with, tell me, that the software side succeeded because the Indian govt. beaurecracy couldn`t figure it out. While the hardware side didn`t succeed as much, because the govt. figured it out and taxed it to weakness

In Pakistan, it will require, first and foremost teaching faculty. Which will result in good colleges. Which will produce potential entreprenuers. One or two of them just have to hit it big. But they will face much tougher competition, than the Indians faced, because they don`t have first mover advantage.

From the reports I get, Pakistan has (had) the fourth highest no. of H-1 visas in the USA, after India, China, and Canada. For every nine Indian IT professionals in USA, there is one Pakistani (matches about the population ratio).

The other advantage that Indians have in the international market is that, it got there ten to fifteen years ahead of Pakistanis. You will find a lot of Indians in their fifties and late forties in the US market. You will hardly find any Pakistani in his fifties, and even very few in their forties in the US IT industry. The biggest group is in the thirties now (the group that I belong to). All of us have now reached the Director level in comapanies, and are new entreprenuers. Indians went through this stage ten years ago. In another ten years, us Pakistanis (in my age group) will be VPs and have large companies of our own, since in North America, being Indian or Pakistani or Phillipino etc. doesn`t make too much of a difference. Hence we will have access to the same resources and employees as Indians. That is when Pakistani companies will get real access to the international markets, like the Indians got, through their expatriates.

All said and done though, India is way ahead of Pakistan in IT. India is entering Test cricket, we are at club cricket about to enter first-class cricket. This is primarily due to the large no. of Indians, their early entry, and older educational institutions. Pakistan should learn from the Indian mistakes and be able to avoid them, since there is an example available. As long as we can stay at a 1 to 10 ratio, it is good enough.

The successfull Indians in US IT industry are an impressive lot. No doubt about it. I have met, worked with, or heard quite a few of them. Very successful, and very humble. Completely different from much of the muck from India that shows up on this site (no offence to our Indian colleagues on this site :-)).

The Pakistani IT success stories in the USA are an equally impressive lot. Though they are much fewer in number and at a more begining stage at the moment.

Unfortunately, with the return of, ``democracy,`` Pakistani S&T and education ministries will go back to the hands of uneducated feudals again.