In time whats outside of you is inside

This is a story of how things apparently outside  suddenly turn into things affecting you. Many years back a leading Indian company was expanding in Chennai and wanted to buy land. The CFO of the company who used to come on TV every result day thought he was not recognizable by public and came in torn jeans and chappals to negotiate for land. He wanted land in hottest suburb at prices of the back of beyond. His logic was when I can get land at Old Mahabalipuram Road outside Chennai for lower rate. For a company making so much money that fact that it's employees would spend 1 1/2 hours daily  extra had no consequence.  Once this mindset of this company was known to all a clever politician decided to make money out of it. He called them to a western Indian city and gave them lot of land "acquired" from farmers cheaply. So farmers paid for this billionaire promoters' freebie . This company was happy that they got land almost free and started creating 1000s of high paid jobs. It left the housing needs of a large employees -_a huge exogenous jump in the market to the market forces aka wolves many of whom were fronts of politicians. The politician sold the industrial land cheap knowing he could make it up in housing. Instead of buying land for both housing and industrial like Tatas did in Jamshepur this company only minimized what it thought was its "cost" little realizing that other costs will sooner or later be imposed on it. As real estate prices climbed 5x and people bought houses in an haphazard way the higher costs of residential real estate, travel costs, higher cosr of schooling, lost productivity, and health of employees have all been re-imposed back on this clever company and its cohorts through ever increasing wage costs. So much for the clever management ! In the end the politician had the last laugh ! Today a similar situation is prevalent in many CSR activities. CSR honchos want to fund tangible activities that are internal to their span of control little realizing that external things can become internal sooner or later.  The reluctance of the highly evolved corporate leaders to fund  initiatives that appear external to their world but will help manage things that will become internal to them is one such.  Today civic planning of cities is one such area. Government due to its past limitations on hiring and current limitation on tenure, training etc of professional skilled professionals is finding it difficult to solve problems in a manner and a time frame expected by society. When such capacity comes up as think tank/ implementation partner if corporates don't fund them they can expect longer commutes, more frequent traffic jams, higher  costs for their labour due to poor government schools, higher safety costs from city unemployment ... And all of this will fund a way to flow to their P&L.  Choice is the corporates ..

India : A Continent masquerading as a country

India is a continent masquerading as a country. We are a de facto continent though we are de jure only a country.

Most of the world world has not figured this out or at least pretend so. Our population is more than that of Europe. It has as much arable land if not more than Europe. It has more languages than Europe. Its variety of lands and landforms make it one of the geographical diverse "country". The people and their natures, the cuisines are so varied that most foreigners who want to simplify things dont understand India much.

Even if the whole  world is fooled or refuses to see India is a continent we should not be fooled and should base our geopolitical ad economic strategy of the de facto position of continent and negotiate with  the world on these terms.

When we begin to thinking  that we are de facto a country we begin to get many things seriously  wrong.

Let me give an example.

When we compare tourist arrivals into a country  say Spain which with a population of 46.4 million gets 75 millions tourists an year and then compare with  India  which gets about 10 million tourists a year we think Indian tourism is miniscule. But look closer and you will find this

Most of the tourists to Spain are from within Europe. The traffic count into Spain is like adding Tamilians and Kannadigas  going to Tirupati as Tourist arrivals.  If you consider for a moment  Europe as country then arrivals from UK, France , Germany, Italy , Nederlands etc wouldn't count and would substantially reduce tourist arrivals into Spain to about 5-6 million a 90% + reduction if computed on a like to like basis.
 
Thus  comparing foreign tourist arrivals into India  is the most absurd comparison and making comments about state of Indian tourism on that basis is way off the mark. Indian tourism has many challenges and we need to work on them but we should not think our situation is abysmal. It is very healthy.

Now contrast Spain with Tirupati a small temple town  with just one old temple which gets 30-40 million tourist arrivals a year. If Tirupati were a separate country, by the standards of the numerical illiterate elites it would rank very high on the list of tourist countries in the world. There are at least ten temples like this. If one temple can get ranked so high you can imagine how  the rankings would be if we added Katra town - Vaishnodevi, Madurai etc as separate countries in this list.

Singapore gets 16m tourists a year.  So we can safely say that Tirupati town is a bigger tourist attraction than Singapore.

Let me give one more explanation. Lets say the Eurocrats having a wet dream of Europe as a single nation get their dream fulfilled. Now they are one nation and so FIFA asks them to send one team  to the World Cup and gives them money reserved for one team like say Argentina with a population of 43 million. Would it be fair way to share the revenue when Europe brings in say 800 million + audience.  If FIFA share of TV rights was main source of revenue to nurture the game in Europe will a country share be enough to maintain the game in a continent ? When asked this way it is obvious that it isn't.

We should not forget this when BCCI negotiates its fair share of fees with ICC. Even if we are a de jure country we have to nurture the game on a continent basis because thats exactly what we are. Needless to say the TV rights have such high value only because we bring continent size audiences and continent sized value of TV audiences. Our share of ICC revenues thus cannot be country sized. If ICC indeed wants to take continent size audiences and pay us country sized amounts of TV rights then we should send them a team from a country sized area like say Mumbai which is bigger than Australia.

The Great Swimmers of Cooumville

I am going to tell you an interesting story about a town called Cooumville, its river and its folks.

There was a clean river flowing through the city. They had an annual swimming contest in the river. Everyone from the world wanted to contest and the local swimmers could not win the races due to competition. So a few cunning locals who had a special skill of swimmimg in sewage quietly found a pliant  mayor and brough him to their side and requested him to start letting sewage water into the river. While these few locals swimming ability was not the best no one could beat them in swimming in sewage charged water. Over time the mayor realized that letting sewage into the river also saved a lot of money for the city and  he duly pocketed all the sewage plant money and let the entire sewage into the river. The net result was that the chosen locals who were the only ones could swim in sewage began winning all the Cooumville races.

As the population and economy of Cooumville expanded the races became prestigious. The winners of the races were now global superstars. The locals came to dominate and win the races.  The swimmers started buying cricket teams, actresses vied to marry them and  their opinion was sought by media on all issues. Ivy league management schools came to study the utter dominance of the few local families in these races. Case studies and books came to be written about the Cooumville technique, the unique approach and the philosophy of swimming. 

Many professors built careers on specializing in giving gyan about the Cooumville way and why these few Cooumville swimmers won all races in Cooumville.

A lot of time had passed and the next generation of swimmers from these families came in to the field. They enjoyed the stardom and fruits of victory but since they had seen better having been trained abroad etc they wondered why the river had to have sewage water mixed in it. They developed an aversion to the old Mayor who did not want to improve the river. So in the next election the backed this unknown tea seller who lived on the banks of the river who had taken a vow to clean the river. These scions thought that if they could clean the river they could continue to win and have a good life instead of swimming in the stench. The good life they had seen in their overseas education and travels had opened their eyes to better life.

The elections came and the tea seller won the elections. The public anger at the old Mayor and the old gen of Cooumville swimmers who had defiled the river played not an insignificant part in carrying the tea seller comfortably to the Mayor seat.

The new mayor set about his work briskly and began cleaning the river in right earnest.  As the sewage started going to waste treatment plants the river began to clean up and slowly swimming in sewage no longer was enough to win the races. Locals who could swim started doing well too. The word started getting  around that this was going to be no longer about swimming in sewage. The few families of Cooumville swimmers now began to have some serious doubts on the wisom of cleaning the river but it was too late. The public loved the new Mayor who soon cleaned the river thus ending the era of the Cooumville sewage swimmers who forgot that their real skill was swimming in sewage ...

Sounds familiar ? :)

Krishna or his army

Some of the intractable problems sometimes dont require resources to be solved. They are misallocation of resources masquerading as shortage of resources. They require wise, intelligent and practical people to be on your side. Throwing resources  at problems when these are not yet available sufficiently is like carrying water in a bucket with a hole.

India has the capability to  develop a new model of helping poorer countries. Most of the developmental finance institutors don't understand mixed economies such as India where modern, traditional, everything coexists. They also cannot solve endemic problems that connect poverty and corrupt politics because they are intertwined problems and solving political problems is out of syllabus for them ! 

India has found unique solutions to its problems using its common sense and these can be offered to these countries to progressive leaders. Our solutions such as Aadhaar, EESL - LED , Direct Benefit ransfer Schemes, Soil health programme, NSDL for tax administration. GST roll out, demonetization, Electricity reform, water management, AMUL and Operation Flood and many others. In the next few years as we reform schooling we can add more domains to this stack which can collectively  be called the Good Governance Stack (GGS or maybe better called the "Vikastack"). Unlike developmental  institutions we would have working models with technology and partners who can go and implement and solve them. 

India should also set up OPEC like organisation to extract fair price for agricultural produce which has been suppressed by West. Ex for teas with Sri Lanka and Kenya. Spices Board should lead efforts to develop better prices by working with Sri Lanka and African countries.

India masquerades as a country but in reality is a continent. It is the  project which  Europe tried and failed but India has succeeded. So the GGS/Vikastack  which is being tested across various types of regions - hilly, river deltas, desert/arid, populated metros  provides significant advantage over theoretical models of Western educated technocrats. In this the cunningness of our some of our citizens and their fetish to break and bend rules comes as a great advantage as it makes our systems far more robust than systems coming from countries where citizens tend to obey the law without much thought.

India should offer this as help to poor African countries and countries such as Afghanistan to rapidly pull them out of their endemic problems.   Since corruption and bad politics are intertwined we should identify  new age politicians who want to change the destiny of their nations using their own resources.  Swami Vivekanand said that all poverty is spiritual and in a way we will cure them of their spiritual poverty and will help them develop their country using the resources saved from waste or plunder. This way we will develop a deep civilisational friendship instead of them developing resentment arising from pushing them into economic  slavery like China is doing to Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

PS

I urge  you to read this example in Corporate charity which highlights the above concept.

When Toyota offered Kaizen as help

The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a different idea.

Instead of a check, it offered kaizen.

A Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement,” kaizen is a main ingredient in Toyota’s business model and a key to its success, the company says. It is an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance. Put more simply, it is about thinking outside the box and making small changes to generate big results.

Toyota’s emphasis on efficiency proved transformative for the Food Bank.

The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a different idea.

Instead of a check, it offered kaizen.

A Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement,” kaizen is a main ingredient in Toyota’s business model and a key to its success, the company says. It is an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance. Put more simply, it is about thinking outside the box and making small changes to generate big results.

Toyota’s emphasis on efficiency proved transformative for the Food Bank.

Jobs ..thither ?

Lot of discussion these days revolve around where the jobs for the next generation will come from.

While it definitely appears as though the growth in easy jobs and careers that drove the economy may be coming to an end it is not true that job growth is coming to an end. There are massive unsolved problems and unmet demands that exist both within India and outside India and fulfilling them will provide massive impetus to job creation in the years to come.

Here are some massive job creation opportunities

1. Fruits & fruit based products - mangoes, lichis etc are eaten only  by a very small portion of the population typically well off. As the nation gets richer more people will want to consume these products.  Alternately growing more and making these products affordable could vastly expand these markets.

2. Pure food- herbs and spices . today shortfall in production is made up by adulteration in a legal or illegal manner which keeps prices down. As consumption goes up and adulteration becomes difficult this will lead to sudden spikes in prices.

3. Temple tourism and Temple economy is a very huge part of the Indian economy and can be a even bigger part. It is and will be recession free sector and  its demand arises from need for spiritual tune -up. This can provide demand for infrastructure, services and revive arts. It also has potential for pan global tourism. It is also very people intensive.

An immediate doubling of rail passenger capacity will greatly aid this process.
Rebuilding temple towns especially a 2-2 kms area around temples using modern management techniques will help increase traffic that temples can handle. It will also modernize and beautify  these areas and change the entire experience

4. Vegetarian delicacies - India is a continent with areas with different climate . This provides inputs of a very varied nature and has lead to development of tens if not 100s of cuisines of very different nature. The much reviled  caste system  has also expanded the variety of foods made. This is a global opportunity for showcasing through tourism and exporting processed foods. For political reasons our vegetarian cuisine  heritage is not getting showcased in the correct manner and this is a massive opportunity loss especially when we compare how countries like Germany are proudly becoming leaders in vegetarianism

5. Getting water table up again- free electricity has led to over exploitation of water table. Water bodies have not been maintained properly. There is one time work in capturing all tge rain eater and charging tge earth so that water table rises up. There is continuous work in maintaining these water bodies.

6. Green products - India is energy short and has does not have too many friends inrye energy surplus world. There is needless antagonism to India due to its Hindu civilizational roots. We need to develop a very low carbon foot print in relation to our GDP. The solutions like LED need to expanded into fans  ACs, public transport systems. As we drive high adoption rates in India we can shrink our carbon footprint to GDP and  we can export these tested and proven solutions to many countries. This brings us to our next point

7.Quality movement & water tight GST - if we can ensure a water tight GST evasion as a a strategy of business will collapse and efficiency and quality movement will become tge only viable strategy for a very large number of businesses . at that stage these. Businesses will find that they will make very good profits domestically and the absorption of their cost base by domestic operations will allow them to export and make substantial profits leading to good gains in margins. This will allow them to reinvest quality, design, R&D and further climb the value chain. The  Indian consumer base of 1.26 billion is a very large one and will allow for low level of  fixed costs also.

8. Tree based economy -  there is massive unmet demand for sandalwood. It is not grown due to poor law and order. This should be fixed and a grower coop like Amul should be set up and house to house growing encouraged. This has potential to completely change economic fortunes of families over 25 Years. Instead of investment products people can plant sandal wood trees to fund children education and marriages.

9. Afforestation - converting of wastelands into woods and forests could be a very large employment programme. BAIF has run a wadi programme for many years in Maharashtra doing this.

10. Circular economy / Waste recycling till we reach 100%  waste recycling : There are jobs in waste management in collecting segregating recreating  products from waste. If suitable laws are made and investments made in outreach programmes to change the mindset of people this can be a huge employer.

11. Bio-waste fertilizers : Indian soils are now seriously carbon deficit because nitrogen fertilizers were sold way below cost and farmers didn't have awareness of their soil health. If we can create bio waste based fertilizers that will drive up carbon in soil it can be a large occupation .

11. Holistic health treatments: Western medicine has serious limitations. Traditional medicines and therapies offer global opportunities for creating jobs for Indians

12 Flower based and honey based alcohols  essentially non grain based alcohols -mahua flowers could be a good start. India had a wise tradition of never using grains to make alcohol as it would affect food security of the weakest  and poorest. This is very different from Western model. Many alcoholic beverages were created using honey flowers. Recreating this and marketing them globally will create new industries.

13. Non gluten product exports such as jawar, bajra, and ragi. Gluten allergy is rising due to lifestyles. India offers many raw materials that can afford people to eat the foods they like without worrying about gluten allergy. This is a massive export opportunity.

14. Sports leagues to target sports which require ekagrata and have a lot of global money such as golf, tennis. One will provide high financial returns  and raise India's standing among world citizens and among a particular set of population

15.Sports leagues which will have lot of domestic attraction such as archery due to traditional affinity for such sports. This will entertain the masses in sports to which they can have access  at low cost and can hope to excel and become superstars.

16 Governance stack : India is rapidly developing a governance stack which can transform a poor country rapidly. IMF, World bank may have many ideas by they  do not have such tested working solutions especially ones tested in a country which is actually a very diverse continent. Solutions includes Aadhaar, Direct benefit transfer, Passport Seva Kendra, Energy  efficient devices through ESSL, Soil health mapping, NSDL for tax administration, world class stock exchanges, IRCTC. We should sell them to African countries especially to  new political formations which want to reduce corruption, improve delivery and use the money saved for infrastructure instead of going with begging bowl to hostile foreign powers.

17. Creation a workforce with education and skills to tap the above areas.

A moebius strip called Vikaste

The 2017 Uttar Pradesh election saw huge debates on whether caste was the driving force or Vikas (development). Many argue vehemently that it is one or the other. This is like making a moebius strip from paper with different colour on both sides and asking what is the colour of the outer layer ? It is not a case of one or the other. It is both.

The truth is Vikas as represented by the building of a modern economy is the current requirement  of a very large number of people and Vikaste is the new class of people who demand growth of a modern economy because their interests lie entirely in that.

Caste, despite all the negatives heaped upon, it is a more flexible institution than it's critics. That's why it has survived and will survive. It allows for death of old ones and creation of new ones much as how you would clean up you address book on your phone. Professions are one of the important  glue that kept castes running. With industrialization, artisanal production is almost dead and many professions no longer exist or even if they do they are very small or negligible and in many cases unremunerative ex Potter blacksmith, well making etc. Trade jobs haven't which defined the castes been taken over by industries. In such situations, the original caste as a collective bargaining device has no meaning as reservations and  government jobs touch a very small as % of population and are just political tokenism.

In some states the economic transition is well underway but the social transformation wasn't but in 2017 UP elections people have realized that since their old castes no longer represent any economic interest and their true economic interest lies in the building of new modern  economy rapidly. People have realized that if your career prospects are sales man at a Bata or a Pantaloon showroom or at a  factory making shoes or apparel  or as entrepreneurs feeding into the modern industrial system then it doesn't matter what is your  historical caste. .. that's just what is called Kali perungaya dabba in Tamil (empty asoefatida box). It has lot of smell and nothing of substance inside.

The unemployed chamar, kumbhar and  brahmin have realized that their real caste is now Vikaste ...ie the caste which can only benefit from building a modern economy rapidly by building good infrastructure providing law and order, skilling the population with skills relevant to the modern economy.

We should all welcome Vikaste because it means a genuine negotiation between various groups as reflected by their current interest and standing in society ! In such a situation the negotiation is likely to be very meaningful as the government and political formations can't fool them with "social empowerment" slogans which people have realized have meant little to most.

Vikaste is that beautiful mathematical point on the moebius strip when one side becomes the other and when  development becomes a new caste or a new caste which stands for development is born. Whichever way you look at it, it is an inflection point which could change the trajectory of the India.

Day is not far when many in the country will start saying my caste is Vikaste and till then pundits who refuse to understand moebius strips will remain confused as to whether it is Vikas or caste !