Hi there!

Thanks for visiting. I plan to add links to news and issue related to security, privacy, access to knowledge and public policy in this blog.

As a start, here is an article on Oct 30 NY Times on how the Internet is gradually bypassing the U.S. - an issue that has relevance to security the world over, and especially to the U.S.:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html?sq=internet%20bypass&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1220112161-qlRrmUdOaJlOl3S0IMwXAA

-RS

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.

The IIT Madras MBA selection process and other musings

Within a month after my arrival at IIT Madras, the HoD (Head of the Department), Dr. LS Ganesh requested me to participate in the process to select the 2007-2009 batch of MA students. This meant that I had to travel to one of the selection centers, namely New Delhi, with a small team of colleagues from the department.

For the benefit of those at Quinnipiac University who are reading this, the selection into the top twenty business schools in India is extremely competitive. IIT, which is a rather new entrant to the business field is still rated among the top fifteen business schools by virtue of its reputation as a very high quality technical school. After all, much has been said about the student selection process at the IIT of India. I will briefly discuss it here... In short, about 250,000 *self-selected* students apply, and take a very tough technical exam for which they have prepared for at least three years! Finally, when the dust settles, about three thousand very lucky students are selected based on this exam, to pursue engineering programs in one of the seven IITs strewn around the country.

Each IIT campus is a little world on to itself, wit residences for students, faculty and staff, banks, recreation centers, shopping centers, parks, schools for kids, community centers, libraries, etc. The lucky students then go to live here for the next four to five years, taught by pretty well qualified faculty, about a third of whom have their PhDs from predominantly western universities like those from US, UK, Germany, France, etc.

I say *pretty well qualified faculty* because with such stringent selection standards, why would the smart students even need the faculty?!

Anyway, in addition to the technical programs, the IITs also have newly established management programs, and ours is one of those, started in 2004. But just in three years, the IIT Madras daeprtment of management studies (DoMS) has established itself very well in the business community. And true to the practice in India, IITs have gone ahead and devised their own entrance exam for MBA aspirants, even though there are plenty of *management entrance exams* being conducted already by institutes such as the Indian Institute of Management, Xavier Labor Relations Institute, etc. Apparently the IITs want to maintain their uniqueness!

So about 50,000 students take the IITs' MBA selection exam, out of which finally about 300 students get into the programs.

This year, IIT Madras decided to call only those students with the top one thousand ranks for interviews! Approximately, about a thousand or so students are called based on their examination scores, out of which about 350 are selected - 0.7 percent!!!

So imagine my surprise when, upon interviewing some of these prospective students in New Delhi, I noticed that many of them lacked fluency in English! Much has been said about India's competitive advantage due to its population's English skills. However, not much has been siad about how correct and fluent these skills are, especially at the conversational level! And these were the top students in the country! Was something wrong with this picture?

Anyway, we finally selected about sixty students, and these have joined the program since.

More later, about the IIT exam preparation, and the looming crisis in education, etc.

Starting to teach at IIT - The students, the courses, and the IIT system

The Students at IIT-Madras

Exactly a week after our arrival in Chennai, I started teaching my first course to the first-year MBA students at IIT. The course was “Management Information Systems” – a generic course required of all MBA students. I had taught this course a few times at Quinnipiac over the last few years. I had taken an “IT Strategy” approach in teaching this course, as the students at QU found that MIS fundamentals taught without context or clear examples of the IT scene around. I decided to take a similar approach here at IIT. I noticed that textbooks were not used by professors in general. The mode of teaching was typically lectures augmented by lecture notes. Assessment methods consist of quizzes, exams, presentations, projects and “attendance!” Students were graded on how regularly they attended classes! This reminded me of my own undergraduate days in India eons ago! Apparently, the same system continued to this day!

Of course, I dispensed with that system of grading right away, and announced to the class that attendance was not my concern – rather, it was their problem, especially since there was not going to be any text book that they could use to catch up with the classes. For the course, I used a textbook I had brought from the US – Corporate Information Systems and Strategy by Applegate, Austin and McFarlan (Harvard Business School professors). It was certainly rather intimidating to stare at a class of sixty one at eight in the morning! But I was also impressed that they all made it at that time to the class.

The students apparently found my teaching methodology “different” and “interesting.” I used lectures, audio files, videos, and movies. The course was case-study based, and I started assigning student to groups…and soon found out that these Indian students had the same hassles and reservations about working in groups as their counterparts in the US! Clearly, there were freeloaders here, too!

However, as the course started proceeding in earnest, I started noticing that the students were all incredibly well informed about the subject, and about trends in IT in the US. They also clearly were more aware of the world than their US counterparts. The students were also enthusiastic to a fault. They had no problems about attending classes at odd hours, since they all stayed on campus! Apparently some faculty members even scheduled examinations from 10:00pm until 12:00 midnight, and scheduled extra lectures on Sunday mornings! Talking of extra lectures, students were happy to come to extra classroom sessions at any time of the day or night! This was quite an odd experience to me. Of course, I did not schedule any extra classes, which went very well, too, with the students.

Talking of their work…the students prepared and presented their assigned cases with great depth. I could clearly see that they went deep into the issues and had researched their cases thoroughly, looking at library materials, company reports, web based information, and newspaper reports. The presentations were always more than what I would normally expect (and get) in US classrooms. I began to wonder if the best way to get results in the US was simply to push the students more?...Was I not pushing them enough?

The downside of teaching at IIT is that one can say ‘goodbye’ to small class sizes. The classes were typically sixty to sixty-five students. Class assessment was a chore indeed, what with grading the quizzes, exams, projects, etc. And to top it, there was no course management system at IIT-M! Apparently, IIT had a copy of Blackboard which was used only by the continuing education department to prepare and deliver courses.

I immediately created ‘blogspots’ on the web, thanks to Google, and published all my lecture notes, syllabi, and cases. The students loved this access to notes, etc. I was surprised the CMSs had not made their way into the most technological insitutte in the country!

A ‘unique’ feature at the department of management studies was that a semester was divided into quarters lasting seven weeks. Each course was worth two credits. And each faculty was required to teach six credits per semester, which basically meant three two-credit courses. I felt right from the start that this was a cop-out. My problem was that there was not much of a difference in the preparation required for a two versus a three- credit course, and thus this amounted to rushing through a three credit course in seven weeks. Thus this resulted in more course preparation and higher teaching load (as there were sixty students).

I spoke to many faculty members about this, since this course load would not typically enable them to develop a strong research agenda required in such a prestigious school. Everybody I spoke to agreed that the teaching load was high indeed, but that they could do nothing about the system which was set when the department was carved out from the humanities and sciences department about three years ago. Of course, the students are happy because they get more courses. But this does affect the research productivity of the faculty!

More on the IIT system later…

Initial impressions, tasting the bureaucracy and some notes on the residential population

Even before we landed in Chennai, I had contacted the Head of the Department of Management Studies at IIT Madras to see if we could be provided with faculty accommodation within the idyllic IIT campus (more on the campus later). Very soon I got definite indications that there was a housing shortage at the IIT campus, and I should not hope for much by way of housing.

So, on the day we arrived in Chennai (December 29th), I called the Estate Officer at IIT, and was asked to come to the campus to inspect a single-bedroom apartment. This was what was termed as the "D-1" type apartment alloted to junior faculty and staff. Ramya, Rajani and I went, saw the place - a crumbling, aging, unpainted characterless apartment set right on the street. The 'view' from the porch was a clothesline belonging to the apartment across, and some stagnant pools of water. It wasn't too difficult to dismiss this house. The interesting thing was that this apartment's rent was as high as the much fancier, 3+ bedroom apartments occupied by senior, seasoned faculty at IIT. Apparently, these were always occupied, and nobody ever vacated them. The result was an acute shortage of accommodations for incoming faculty, especially visiting faculty. It did not matter that I was a 'full professor' and was thus a 'senior' member. Visiting professors were fairly low on IIT's totem pole! Later I heard from some faculty that the prevailing sentiment at IIT was that being given a visiting faculty position was a big deal, and was often considered a favor to the visitors... and thus, small things such as accommodation was not to be expected! Interestingly, all the apartments were rented out for the same INR 9000 (approximately $225) per month, regardless of whether you were 'allotted' a single-bedroom or a 3+ bedroom apartment!

How's that for an egalitarian, social-system of housing?! The type of apartment you got was strictly based on your rank, and not your ability to pay. Thus, even if you were willing to pay, you were simply not eligible for certain types of accommodation, based on your rank. The 'rank,' again, was computed by your title, the number of years spent at IIT, and whatever else. I later heard that the apartments were all maintained by a government engineering department, which operated on its own schedule (i.e maintenance was spotty and even tardy at times). But without fail, all the professors I spoke to were happy to stay within the campus, with easy access to the departments. There are shopping centers inside the campus, and the woods that make up much of the campus certainly provide an idyllic, academic setting, what with its wildlife such as monkeys, deer, etc.). Given the general chaos that pervades much of Chennai outside the campus, I guess I couldn't blame them for putting up with some inconveniences in order to stay on campus.

The IIT campus is thus almost fully residential, for faculty, staff and students. About 6000 students atudy at IIT, from fields ranging from engineering to sciences and humanities. There are about 400 faculty members, and probably about 15,000 staff members who make life easier for the students and faculty. Almost all the students live on campus, and thus are available to the faculty at any time. This makes for some strange course schedules - such as having a class meeting at 7:00am on a Saturday, or having an exam scheduled between 10:00pm and midnight, on a Sunday night! This, in essence, seemed to be based on the ancient Indian system of Gurukula, where students pretty much took up accommodations with their teacher, usually a sage, and was at his beck and call at any time of the day. Combine this old notion with the modern, high-tech concept of a wired campus, mobile phones and SMS-based communications, and a professor could schedule a 'gurukula-style' class at any time of the daya and night, with barely an hour's notice! This definitely won't happen in the U.S., I thought.

The year at IIT Madras - Recollections-1

June 11, 2007. I had wanted to maintain a web log during the entire course of our stay here in India, but somehow never got around to it until now. Hopefully, I will be able to recollect some of the salient aspects of my life and experiences in these last few months, and continue to record my thoughts during the rest of my stay in India, too.

I cannot believe that it is 5 months since Ramya, Rajani and I, with our aging husky-shepherd mix faithfully in tow arrived in Chennai, India. We were going to live in in India for the next 12 months at least! My feelings were one of apprehension, concern and resignation, filled with a mild element of curiosity. I had taken a leave of absence from my employer in the US, Quinnipiac University, in Hamden, CT. I was going to spend the year as a visiting professor of information systems at the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, located at Chennai.

The trip's mission? Ostensibly to be of assistance to my aging parents, to help them move to a newer house, and to see if India might figure in as the next stop in my, and Ramya's professionnal careers. Somewhere along, Ramya and I also thought that a year in India might be a good way to introduce Rajani to the land of her people, to her grand-parents, uncles and aunts.

In the posts that follow, I'll try to maintain a semblance of chronology in recounting and recording some of my experiences at IIT and Chennai, India. Till then, adios.