Is this development? - 1

Is this development-1?

Having visited India reasonably frequently over the years, I have indeed seen the new, high-rise buildings, the new cars on the crowded roads, the plentiful restaurants thronging with people on all days of the week, and the already undisciplined traffic growing more so over time. But all that did not stop me from feeling even more shocked and stunned, when I arrived in Chennai this time over. For a start, the airport terminal is quite orderly, though a bit dank and somewhat decrepit – surprising since I heard that it had just been recently renovated and refurbished.

Then you come out, and the chaos outside envelops you. The air is humid. Even at 2:00am, it is hot. Walking to the parking lot is an event in itself. Concrete slabs, meant to designate pathways, are strewn without any logic, becoming obstructions. A zig-zag walk eventually takes you to the car. Side-walks often block and hinder people pushing luggage carts laden with heavy suitcases. Soon the obstacle path becomes impossible, and you decide to leave the cart and grab your suitcases to walk the rest of the way to the car.

Once on the street, you realize that it is difficult to move, as you are in the middle of a traffic jam. A flyover is being constructed just outside the airport, and traffic is chaotically dispersed by a clearly ill-qualified policeman. For the next three to five kilometers, the traffic is snarled, and progress is slow. It takes almost an hour to cover about 10 kilometers, at that time of the night! You fitfully go to sleep, listening to dogs barking on the street, heavy trucks unloading gravel and other construction materials, making a racket regardless of the time of the day.

Venturing out the next morning, the chaos, din and traffic stuns me, as always. All roads are typically packed with scooters and bicycles, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, buses, trucks, cars of all sizes, and occasional bullock-carts. Nobody follows any rules. The focus of everybody seems to get marginally ahead of the vehicle ahead. Everybody avoids eye-contact. Yet there are very few accidents. More people seem to have great reflexes. They get very close to other vehicles, but just keep off from touching. Touching another vehicle is taboo. You touch, and it is almost like you have opened the steam vent. The traffic stops, and everything comes to a halt, despite the minor nature of the accident. Everybody jumps at you, harangues you, yells and screams. If it is an auto-rickshaw that you have hit (or merely touched), you can only get off by paying a small ‘repair fee’ to the auto guy. If a bigger vehicle, especially a private vehicle as much as touches a smaller vehicle or a public vehicle, it is almost the unwritten assumption that the bigger or private vehicle is at fault. It is almost as if the society, out on the streets, is jumping, and attacking the private display of wealth or at least well-being. Street and traffic battles seem to become proxy battles between classes. The sheer venom and lack of grace makes one wonder at this “civilization” or lack thereof…Who is to be blamed? The lack of proper infrastructure, inadequate urban and transportation planning, corruption at various levels of the city government – all of these share the blame.

The roads are narrow, often ill-designed. Encroachments from vendors and roadside dwellers make them even narrower. Pot holes and construction ditches are the prevalent theme. These ditches are dug by utility workers belonging to the drainage and sewerage department, electricity department, private telecom companies, installing new FDDI lines, etc. The ditches, once dug, are left uncovered for long stretches of time. Rain water collects, stagnates, putrefies, and stinks. Stray animals congregate to scavenge, for the ditches become huge garbage bins or open-air toilets for everybody. The multi-modal traffic in the streets gets even more chaotic. And the cycle continues.

Public buses are packed to the brim. These state-run buses ply often impossibly tortuous routes and seem to be designed to compete and stifle any competition that might come from the federal-government-run metro trains servicing Chennai on two separate lines. The trains often run empty, because the bus routes hardly if ever, touch the train stations. And the train stations hardly provide any facilities for parking cars, motorcycles, etc. They all seem to be humongous, hollow, empty edifices built with no sense of architecture, design or utility in mind. They remain mostly completely unused even by the homeless!

In every street and neighborhood, commercial and residential complexes are intermixed. And of course, there is no parking whatsoever. To get around the parking problem, most cars owners with drivers get off at their destination, which could a shop, a home, or a theater – often in the middle of the road, oblivious to the traffic that they have stopped by their actions. Then the driver pulls away, often to “park” the car at an illegal spot, to wait until the owner summons him by mobile phone. The owner has thus successfully insulated and shielded himself or herself from contact from the “outside” world – the world of crowds, conflict and squalor all around, by first traveling in an air-conditioned car, and secondly by employing a driver who then becomes the gentrified layer through with this outside world is negotiated with.

Interestingly, this paradigm of erecting human shields is prevalent even in the apartments and houses. Every apartment or house has a “watchman” who filters access to the building, loudly exhorts the municipal garbage cleaners to do their jobs, makes sure garbage is not deposited in front of the buildings, etc. Owners are often happy to transfer their responsibilities to him. There are these human layers everywhere. They seem to compensate for the lack of infrastructure and planning that is the chief cause of the confusion, madness and chaos of living in any metro in India.

The looming education crisis

Every year India graduates about 350,000 engineers, technologists and managers. This is what we hear all the time from the media. These graduates, if one were to believe some of the media hype, especially in the U.S., are all highly talented, quantitatively gifted, fluent in the English language, and ready to take on the world. Unfortunately, this is not exactly the truth!

An industry organization claims that of these, only about 15% to 20% of the graduates are really employable! The rest are just not prepared to enter a global market. One solution to the problem, initiated by the industry, is to have the graduates go through a “finishing school” which will teach them soft skills, as well as refurbish their technical skills in order to bring them on par with the requirements. These finishing schools are slowly becoming the rage here. They offer several courses each averaging six months. Entrepreneurs and even educational institutions are getting into the act. Imagine spending four years in an engineering school, and just after you graduate, enter one of these finishing schools either at your own college or at another college, in order to bring your skills (both soft and hard) up to speed and make you employable! What’s the problem here?

It turns out that the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) can accommodate only about eight or ten thousand students each year, which means that the rest of the aspiring managers and engineers go to private schools. Again, the top private schools, few and far between, select only about one thousand students, leaving the rest to attend under-staffed, ill-staffed and ill-equipped colleges and universities. Other than the elite engineering and business schools, plus a smattering of private elite institutions, much of the newly started private schools function as business ventures, whose inputs consist of students who have not made it to the top schools, perhaps because they are not adequately qualified in the first place, or perhaps because they hail from predominantly rural areas served by inadequate schools. These students often pay exorbitant fees to study at colleges that do not even have adequately qualified faculty or facilities. I visited one of these up-and-coming universities recently, where I was requested to be the external examiner of students’ projects. I found the students to be sharp, fluent in English, and with good communication skills. But what struck me immediately was the appalling quality of the faculty! Many could not communicate properly in English, the language of instruction, and most were not proficient in research. And they even offered a Ph.D. program in Management!

While there are many systemic problems in this scenario, the most critical is the lack of adequate faculty in Indian higher education. A full professor in India gets about $15,000 as his/her annual salary. Research is not required in most universities, except the IITs and IIMs. Research infrastructure and assistance is often non-existent. Faculty travel to conferences is often unheard of. Even in the IITs, the best technical school in the country, faculty cannot easily travel abroad to attend an international conference. I heard from one faculty at IIT that the institute provides a very paltry $100 towards registration fees, and some minimal assistance towards lodging, even to faculty whose papers have been accepted at international conferences in other countries! And added to that, each faculty is governed by rules which prevent him from getting even that assistance more than once every two years!

Clearly, in this system, no faculty is encouraged to do any quality research or attend international meetings to exchange new ideas. The only recourse is for the research performers to attend local conferences once a year, as permitted by the institute’s rules, where they end up meeting the same bunch of researchers year after year. Given that the average starting salary of each successful graduate from the elite institutions is around $22,000, why would anybody opt for a career in academics? What is the incentive for losing so much in life? This has led to a situation where there is hardly any qualified faculty to teach the legions of professional that India needs in the coming years, to continue its explosive growth. Already, many Indian IT companies are looking at countries like China and the Philippines, due to the shortage of adequately qualified graduates in India. Thus, it is a vicious cycle: less faculty pay leads to a shortage of faculty, which leads to inadequate research and training at universities and colleges, which in turn produces students who are not capable of filling the available positions in industry.

If the situation has to change, it should happen at the level of the faculty salaries. Increasing salaries and opportunities to travel abroad for research purposes would attract more qualified people to consider academics as a career choice. It may even attract many qualified and talented faculty of Indian descent who currently work in developed countries around the globe. This will lead to better training, which will then result in employable graduates. The quality of research will also improve. But is anybody listening?

I heard that a “Pay Commission” has been set up to look into the salaries of government employees (the faculty are government employees). But the bad news is that the commission is only looking about a paltry raise of 20% or 30% to the existing salaries. Such a hike will still keep the faculty salaries well below even a starting graduate’s salary, and thus will not change anything from the present.

Rather bleak, I will say.