Ajit Balakrishnan’s Blog

I chaired a panel at the Digital Media Conference run by CII the trade organization yesterday in Bombay; the panel had some very talented media practitioners on it.

    Screams of pain normally accompany the release of a Consultative Paper by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, but the one on Broadband released last week  has been met with a deafening silence. This worries all of us in the internet industry.

    Is the silence symptomatic of Indian telecom players’ and policy maker’s long standing disinterest in broadband?

    TRAI’s thought on how to make broadband more affordable and better quality mark a revolutionary departure from India’s normal laissez-faire telecom policy stance. It actually proposes an Rs 32,000 crore government initiative to build India’s Information Super Highway. , This, when done,  will impact our economy more,  much more, than even the Golden Quadrangle, that network of highways that is being built to connect our great cities.
   
    This initiative does not come a moment too soon.  For a country that has taken bold new initiatives in expanding education and health care and all aspects of our national infrastructure, we have treated the most important infrastructure of the modern knowledge economy, a broadband infrastructure, with benign neglect. As a result, India’s Broadband record is dismal. Broadband prices in India are the highest in the world (with the exception of Myanmar). India’s broadband connections are a mere 9 million.

    Part of the reason for such benign neglect is an under-appreciation by our policy makers and public about the role of broadband in a modern economy. Talk of building better physical roads or bridges and we can easily imagine what this entails and what benefits that brings. Talk of broadband and many go, ‘Oh, that’s what my teenage son uses to download mp3 music!’

    Broadband is that but it is also much more. Broadband is what will drive electronic commerce which in turn will make our big business more efficient, and allow our small businesses to  reach out to world export markets. It is also what future-oriented companies like Aravind Eye Hospital use to deliver low cost, high quality medical services. It is the backbone on which high quality school and college education can be delivered cost-effectively to our vast population. And it is the base on which eGovernance initiatives rest.

    There is also an ideological misunderstanding behind this benign neglect:  many policy makers and the Indian elite may be read the wrong lessons into India’s massive private-sector lead mobile phone expansion. Why not leave broadband expansion to the private sector and they will do what they did for mobile phones: raise international capital, compete with each other, bring down prices and expand the industry.

    But this, as I said, is a misunderstanding. Broadband infrastructure is like a bridge or an intercity highway: costly to build and on which the financial returns may come only in 15 to 20 years. The mobile-voice businesses get to profitability much sooner and this make private equity capital much more available for mobile voice services and very difficult for broadband data services. If the State does not build it, no one else will.

    How, you may ask, have the US and Europe done it? The answer to this is that by the time internet came around in the mid 1990’s, the high quality copper or fibre infrastructure was already built out. All they needed to do in those countries was to build internet services over the same infrastructure.  In India, there is next to no such infrastructure even today. Somebody has to build it.

    In spite of that head start, many advanced economies are doing even more:  the United States Federal Government has already put our $110 bn in 2004 and $350 bn in 2005 and continue to spend at similar level to bring broadband to America’s rural areas. The national governments of Britain, Australia and Japan have done or are in the middle of similar levels of spending.

Why not leave it to the Mobile Phone companies to offer broadband services through wireless, you may ask. After all, haven’t they bid gigantic amounts for broadband wireless spectrum for this very purpose? The answer to this is that no doubt they will, but because of the very nature of wireless broadband technology, such services will cost Rs 1500 to Rs 2000 a month- excellent for the lap-top toting executive but too expensive for middle class India.

    For broadband to get to the 100 million households who make up 40% of all households in India, we need a service which is priced no more than Rs 200 per month, not Rs 2000 per month. And we need this service with no ifs and no buts: no conditions that limit the amount of data you can download and no conditions on the time of day when you can use it.

    TRAI proposes to get there by 2014, that is, in four years from now.
TRAI’s grand vision is to take broadband fibre right up to 374,000 villages at a cost of Rs 32,000 crore. TRAI estimates that Rs 18,000 crore of this is to be spent on the manual labour of digging trenches and laying the cable and the balance Rs 13,000 crore is the cost of fibre optic cable and telecom equipment. They suggest that the manual labour component be done National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The equipment cost of Rs 13,000 crore, they suggest, be met from the Universal Service Obligation Fund.

     They also propose that a National Fibre Agency be created to execute this massive project. Once this core network is built, private sector companies like Cable Operators, Cyber Cafes and Internet Service Providers can tap into this and create a vibrant reseller market taking the service to consumer homes, schools and offices.

    Rarely, has a government policy making group set out such a carefully thought-out and visionary plan.
     Let’s give TRAI a hand.
END

Remarks I made at Silicon India’s Start-Up City event in Bangalore in May 2010

Lets try and ‘deconstruct’ the famous research paper that led to the foundation of one of the most famous and valuable companies in the world, Google, and see whether that would lead to insights about how Innovation Systems work.‘The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hyper-Textual Web Search Engine’, by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

First, note that they give their address at a university. This in itself is remarkable. In an earlier era, you would expect an innovation of this kind to emerge from an ‘industrial lab’ like AT&T’s Bell Labs.  Industrial Labs, like those and others maintained by large American, German or British companies were responsible for many, if not most of the innovations in the chemical and electronic industries. Now, the ‘site’ of innovation activity seems to have moved to universities.

Second, note that they are graduate students. That is another feature of contemporary innovation: the locus of innovation is more and more PhD students working on their doctoral dissertations.

Note also that Brin and Page are located in the Computer Science department. In an earlier era their work would have been located in the library science department. The application of techniques of computer science to issues that librarians normally dealt with, itself is interesting. The Page Rank technique that they applied to the problem of deciding which web pages are more valuable than other itself is a technique from bibliometrics: research scientists have known for decades before Brin and Page that a research paper that lots of other research papers refer to is likely to be more valuable than one which a lesser number of people refer to.

Now, look at the people they thank for support in doing this breakthrough work. First, is a list of three industrial companies who donated equipment that they could use for their work: IBM, Intel and Sun. These companies at that time could not possibly have foreseen how the work of these two researchers could help their own businesses. So, such acts of open-minded generosity, are perhaps part of fostering Innovation.

The Brin and Page project itself is part of a larger project: the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project. You can see here that some visionaries, other than Brin and Page, had thought  at that early period to start of a project on Digital Libraries. If  such a master-project had not been in place, one would wonder whether the problem that Brin and Page worked on would have been posed to them.

Finally, look at the financial supporters of the project: the National Science Foundation, a US Federal Government sponsored funding body; the US Defence Advanced Research Project Projects Agency ( DARPA), an agency of the US Department of Defence; the US National Space Administration ( NASA).  Please note the preponderance of State financial support in the project.

Lets tie all this together to see how the US National System
of  Innovation works: large scale US Federal Government financial
support channelled through civil and military agencies, Master Projects
addressing emerging areas and located in Universities where graduate
students and their guides interact to produce breakthroughs.

The notion of a ‘National System of Innovation’ is an
interesting perspective to view the innovation issue. For many of us,
Archimedes leaping out of his bath-tub shouting ‘Eurekha’ or a Newton
thinking up his Theory of Gravitation in a flash on seeing an apple drop
is what innovation is about: a lone innovator accidentally, or in a
flash of genius, hitting on an innovation.

Scholars, more and more, look at the underlying network of universities,
government research and financing bodies and companies and the complex
interactions between them to unravel the puzzle of Innovation.

Nelson’s book National Innovation Systems. A Comparative
Analysis, is a good cross-country survey

My eyes opened at 5 am to the lilting sounds of a Lata Mangeshkar bajan
We jumped out of bed and started the race against time which is a typical day here at Jindal

The one-hour walk through the lush vegetable gardens watching the asparagus, cauliflower, tindli, red pumpkin, brinjal, drumsticks, ridge gourds, bottle gourd, doodhi , turmeric, green chillies, ginger grow ends at the kriya centre.

I was assigned three specific kriya: you lie on your back and warm ghee is dropped into each nostril; you pinch your nose and inhale deeply a few times. Jalneeti comes next: you pour warm salt water through one nostril using a special pot they give you and watch it come out through the other nostril. You then forcefully expel the remaining water by bending down and exhaling. The last kriya for me is to fill two tiny cups with trifula water, close your eyes with this and blink a dozen times.

This brings you to 7 am and the time for a half hour of ‘laughter yoga’; most days I give this a skip and return to our room for an hour of reading.

At 7.45 or so a man comes in with an ice-cold mud pack for my abdomen and eyes and this is for 15 minutes

8 am is the time for a massage of which they have a great variety. Kairali, where two burly men massage you with long sweeping strokes with oil infused with ayurvedic  herbs; ‘powder massage’ where talc is poured over you and a vibrating gadget is held against your skin; deep tissue where strong  fingers press deep into your skin; one where a neem-haldi-alovera paste is applied all over your body after which you stand in the sun for half an hour;  a hot stone massage where your oiled body is massaged with hot stones; salt-oil massage where a mixture of coarse salt and oil is rubbed all over your body. I may have missed a few in this recounting.

This takes you to 9 am and time for an hour of yoga. You can do this privately in your own room with a personal instructor or in a group class. On earlier visits to Jindal I had used the group class so this time I tried the personal trainer route. I have been doing yoga for 20 years or so but when you do yoga on your own you tend to drift into incorrect poses. The yoga instructors at Jindal have a sharp eye and corrected many of my slightly askew poses.

If you have wondered so far where food comes into all this, 11.30 is when you get the first of the two meals for the day. My lot for the first 6 days was a cup of soup, a slice each of papaya and water melon and a glass of soya milk. It sounds very little, but after the first day, I found it more than adequate and often had problems finishing the second fruit slice. For the second half of our stay, two small bowls of salad were added to my meal. You get an identical meal for ‘dinner’ at 5.30 in the evening but more on that later.

At all points in your stay here they refer to you as a ‘patient’ and the things you do (or what they do to you) are called ‘treatments’. On your first day here your blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol levels are checked. They work hard to preserve a hospital metaphor and stress that it is not a resort or a fat farm though many ‘patients’ are clearly obese and suffer from obesity related illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure. . ‘Patients’ seem to be drawn mostly from the Delhi area with a smattering of westerners and Chinese woman and a woman from Africa. They have many different price levels for the stay part ranging from free for people who cannot afford it to $ 300 a day for those who want that kind of luxury. The ‘treatments’ and the diet however are more or less the same for all.

You are free to nap or read till 2 pm

The afternoon schedule has many optional items you can choose based on advice from the doctor. The options range from acupuncture, physiotherapy (mainly colon hydrotherapy), advanced yoga, aerobics, weight-training, yoga for the eyes, etc. The colon hydrotherapy made me feel light footed and good. I did amble over to the gym and pump iron for half an hour on most days; you need this because the skimpy <1000 calories a day diet may lose muscle instead of fat.

Dinner is at 6 pm and for me was the same as lunch, a bowl of soup and two slices of fruit. .

By 8 pm older Hindi devotional songs comes wafting over the sound system and on most days I drift off into deep sleep thankful that Renu dragged me here.

    For the last two years, its been a ritual for me to lock myself in a room for a week-end and read through the vast output of our faculty during the year. I get immense pleasure  from this and in sharing  with you today what I discovered I hope you will get a similar pleasure. The scale and width of the issues that our faculty have tackled is immense.

For example, why do some alliances between Indian and international firms succeed and others fail? Prof BN Srivastava, of our Behavioral Sciences group, in a paper presented at the Academy of Management meeting in Chicago in August 2009, titled Positive Organizational Scholarship: A Cross-Cultural Perspective from Five Nations used the Positive Organizational Scholarship approach to study this issue and concluded that success is based on the quality of the connection. The quality of connection, in turn, depends on  the emotional capacity to withstand both negative and positive experiences, resilience or capacity of the person to bend and withstand strain and to function in a variety of circumstances,  and the relationship’s generativity and openness to new ideas and influences and the ability to deflect the pressures that shut the generative processes.

We have of late observed the phenomenon of foreigners being hired for top management positions in Indian firms. Prof Rajiv Kumar of our Behavioral Sciences group studied the circumstances under which Indian companies hired such foreign talent and developed twelve propositions about this phenomenon. The desire to learn  superior execution skills from these ‘foreign nurtured talent’, getting their help in managing overseas subsidiaries particularly in dealing with the external environment are two examples of these propositions. He also notes that the Indian companies who hired such managers are ones that have global ambitions in growth and technical excellence. His paper, Foreign Nurtured Talent in Indian Business Houses was accepted for the 10th International Human Resource Management Conference held at Santa Fe, New Mexico in June, 2009.

We have seen the film industries in Hollywood or Bollywood where In independent business elements like studios, producers, directors, actors, technical personnel create a temporary network structure, which is project-based  and inter-organizational in a “system of recurrent ties among the various major participants who usually work under short-term contracts for single films”. Economists have been baffled why they continue this so-called network organization structure even though it has been demonstrated that the transaction costs of such a structure are far higher than a hierarchically or purely market oriented structure. Since networked structures are increasingly evident across many industries, Professor Amit Jyoti Sen of Behavioural Sciences Group with a doctoral candidate, Apalak Khatua, proposed a framework `for understanding the circumstances under which such network structures emerge and their paper, Inside the Interorganisational Network, accepted for Association of Heterodox Economics Conference at Kingston University, Kingston-on Thames, UK, July, 2009.

Outsourcing is what has driven India’s emergence as a global economic giant, yet little organization theory has developed to understand the many different organization forms these outsourcing firms take. In a study of sixty such firms, Professor Leena Chatterjee of Behavioural Sciences Group and Kirti Sharda, a doctoral candidate at that time, proposed five dominant types: Clear Eyed Strategists, Adapting Professionals, Focalizing Artisans, Conservative Controllers and Overambitious Associates. Their paper Configurations of Outsourcing Firms and Performance: Exploring  Organizational Gestalts was presented at the 2009 Academy of Management Meeting held in Chicago during August, 2009.

Businesses have, since the 1990’s gained great benefit from the Business Process Re-engineering movement. Re-engineering  involves a re-configuartion of “core processes” that “set of interrelated activities, decisions, information, and material flows, which together determine the competitive success of the company.” Is it possible to apply such a tool to governmental processes where what is ‘core’ and what is not is often under dispute, the concept of “value” and “value-adding process” are difficult to measure.   Professor Priya Seetharaman  of our MIS Group and Prof Raghabendra Chattopadhyay of the Public Policy Group, based on their study of West Bengal Panchayats, propose a system of ‘process channeling’ in their paper Process Reengineering in Government Institutions: Walking A Tightrope, presented  at the 5th Annual International Conference on Public Administration, 2009 held at Chengdu, China during October, 2009. This , incidentally is a great example of researchers from two different groups, MIS and Public Policy, collaborating on a common research project.

Algorithm-based recommendation systems are all the rage nowadays be it on Social Networking sites where you are recommended people you may like or in eCommerce sites where products are suggested for you. These face a continuous challenge in improving the quality of their recommendation. A paper entitled  by Professor Ambuj Mahanti of Management Information Systems Group has proposed such an improvement in his paper , Improving Prediction accuracy in Trust-aware Recommender Systems,  was presented at the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in Kauai, USA in January, 2010.

In another paper, also in the broad area of machine learning, Professor Uttam Kumar Sarkar of MIS Group, and his associates used mathematical techniques to locate interesting patterns in the reporting of adverse effects of pharmaceutical products using the US FDA data and presented their findings at the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics conference at Prague, Czech Republic in August, 2009.

Prof Debasis Saha of the MIS Group devised a new protocol to improve the efficiency of Wave Division Multiplexed Optical Networks, and the paper describing this work titled, An Intelligent Destination Initiated Reservation Protocol for Wavelength Management in WDM Optical Networks was presented at the 12th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology held Republic of Korea, in February, 2010.

Prof Debasis Saha and his collaborators presented a second paper, this one describing a new technique for improving the quality of service when a local area wireless network and a 3G network operate together presented their paper, An Improved WLAN-first Access Scheme for UMTS/WLAN Interworking System, at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland in March,2010.
Profs Subir Bhattacharya,  Rahul Roy and others from the MIS group used a Systems Dynamic modeling to evaluate the future of Software-as-Service as a business model and presented their paper Quo Vadis, SAS, at the International Conference of Information Management at Chengdu, China, April, 2010.

Prof Subir Bhattacharya and his co-worker devised a solution for a specific type of financial portfolio selction and presented a paper on this at the Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, Bangalore August, 2009. This paper is an early example where people from the MIS faculty used the facilities at our new Financial Lab and I hope we will see many more such cross-functional research endeavours.
Prof Anup Sen and his collaborator thought up an improvement to the so-called ‘greedy algorithm’  a way of quickly getting an approximate result, and presented their paper at Sixth International Conference on Autonomic and  Autonomous Systems, March 2010 - Cancun, Mexico, and has been subsequently published by IEEE proceedings.

Prof  Rajesh Babu analyses the dilemma of protecting ‘traditional knowledge’ and recommends a way to do that under the existing TRIPs/WTO regime and presented his paper, International Protection of IPRs in Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, at the International Conference on The Challenging issues under WTO at Koh Samui, Thailand, October 2009

The increasing demand for internet connectivity has resulted in access points sprouting up everywhere: in parks, shopping malls, restaurants, etc. Efficient algorithms are needed to connect wireless nodes such as a Laptop or a Mobile Phone evenly to the many Access Points available. Prof Uttam Sarkar of the MIS Group along with his co-author proposed a new algorithm to do this using the emerging 802.21 standard and their paper, Balancing Load of APs by Concurrent Association of Every Wireless Node with Many APs, was presented at the 5th International Conference on Networking and Services in Valencia, Spain in April, 2009.

Prof Asim Pal and others devised a new algorithm for improving the co-ordination mechanisms in e-market Supply Chains and presented their paper, Cooperative Game for Multi-Agent Collaborative Planning, at the International Conference on Operations Research at Hong Kong in March 2010.
To round off the rich work in our MIS Group, Prof Asim Pal, used game-theoretic concepts in another problem area, that of detecting so-called ‘sybils’, pseudonymous entities, that launch malicious attacks on computer networks and his paper, A Discriminatory Rewarding Mechanism for Sybil Detection with Applications to Tor, was accepted  at the ICCCIS 2010 at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil  in March, 2010

We have all watched in amazement as international commodity prices doubled between 2005 and 2008 and then in a six month period halved to a level that wiped out all the increases. How did this violent fluctuation affect the lives of the 400 plus million people in the Asia Pacific region whose lives are dependant on agriculture. Did the price increase benefit them as producers and since they are also commodity consumers, did it hurt them? Prof Parthprathim Pal of the Economics Group studied this issue and drew some policy implication for developing countries for the ongoing WTO negotiations. His paper, Commodity Price Movements and Their Impact on Human Development: Evidence from Asia and Policy Options, was presented at the 9th International Working Group on Gender and Macroeconomics conference, at Bard College, New York in July 2009.

Neo-classical economic theory postulates that growth rates between countries should ultimately converge because technology, capital and other supply side factors can, in today’s world, freely move around from country to country, but putting this theory to test has posed formidable methodological problems. Prof. Manisha Chakrabarty of our Economics Group and her co-authors presented a paper proposing some methodological solutions to this at the Tenth Islamic Countries Conference on Statistical Sciences at American University of Cairo, Egypt in December 2009.

Basing promotion and compensation decision on a rational and formal Performance Appraisal system is seen as a hallmark of professional and modern companies and is generally believed to be free of political and power and control issues. How does it fare in the Indian corporate situation which is believed to be relatively more paternalistic and relationship oriented than in other cultures?    Prof Amit Diman of our Human Resources Group devised an instrument for measuring the appraises perception of Performance Appraisal Politics and his paper, Performance Appraisal Politics from Appraisee’s perspective: Exploration in Indian Context was presented at the Academy of Management conference held at Chicago in Ausust, 2009.

Industrial Relations theory has largely been a creation of the Anglo-Saxon industrial experience. How does it fit the new paradigm in India in which an old formal economy of heavy industry and public sector enterprises, co-exists today with the new formal economy of IT and Financial Services and the massive informal economy of casual labour and petty trade which forms the majority of Indian employment? Prof Debashish Bhattacharjee and his co-author undertook a sweeping study of both the historical evolution of Employment Relations in India from 1947 right down to the effects of the Global Recession of 2008 as well as an equally magisterial look at how the Indian academic tradition of Industrial Relations has gradually transformed itself into the Human Resource Management movement. His paper, Comparative Industrial Relations Narratives and their Relevance to India, was presented at the 15th Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association meeting in Sydney, Australia in August, 2009.

Our newly formed Public Policy and Management Group has kicked off to a great start.
Profs Bhaskar Chakrabarti and Raghabendra Chattopadhay addressed the problem of developing the right measures for judging the effectiveness of Local Government Bodies and presented their paper, Administrative Reforms for Local Governments in Rural West Bengal at the Annual Conference of the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration, at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil d August, 2009.

The same team presented two other papers, Village Forums or Development Councils: People’s participation in decision-making in rural West Bengal and Local Governments in rural West Bengal, and their Coordination with Line Departments at the Commonwealth Local Government Conference in the Bahamas in May 2009  and a third paper titled, Decentralization of Irrigation Management in India: Problems of Participation and the role of Water User Associations together with Suman Nath at 5th Annual International Conference on Public Administration, in Chengdu, China October, 2009.

Prof Manish Thakur, of the Public Policy Group did one of the few academic studies available on India’s giant National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. He points out that the value of this  scheme should not be judged merely by the preset targets they achieve but also by how they mobilize the poor  and also sets in motion the consolidation of a constellation of interests which for years to come will help the poor articulate their collective rights. His paper, Public Policy Interventions and Social Inclusion, was presented at 5th Annual International Conference on Public Administration, 2009 held at Chengdu, China in Oct 2009.

In his paper, Social Welfare through Business: Study of Home Based Ayah Service for the Aged, Professor Kalyan Sankar Mandal of the Public Policy Group presents an example of how a business can contribute to social welfare. This paper was presented at the 9th Conference of Asia-Pacific Sociological Association at Bali, Indonesia in June, 2009.

Prof Mandal also took a look at the prospect of private sector initiatives helping out in the gigantic task of improving primary school quality in his paper, Towards Universalising Primary Education: A Business Solution presented at the International Conference on Primary Education held at Hong Kong, November 2009.

Last year, the film Slumdog Millionaire, poignantly portrayed the despairing lives of people in our great cities. India now has over 35 such metropolitan areas each with a population of over 1 million. Over a 100 million Indians now live in such metropolitan settings and they live in unequal access to health care and education. Prof Annapurna Shaw of our Public Policy Group studies what she calls “place inequalities” at the metropolitan level in her paper, Metropolitan Governance and Social Inequality in India which was presented at the conference on Metropolitan Inequality and Governance in International Perspective held at University of Southern Californea, Los Angeles in January 2009 and at the 105th meeting the Association of American Geographers at Las Vegas on March  2009.

In a rare look at India’s Small and Medium industrial companies who collectively produce 40% of the industrial output of our country, Prof BB Chakrabarti, presented a paper titled, Capital Structure of SME’s –a Puzzle that Merits Attention: The Case of India, based on a ten-year data set of 1300 such companies and presented at the West Lake International Conference on Small & Medium Business held at Hangzhou, China in  October, 2009.  What is exciting about this paper is that it was produced collaboratively with a business organization, Bitscrape Solutions and is hopefully a sign of more such collaborations that will come in the future.

Banks wooing all of us through SMS barrages on our mobile phone, television advertising, and advertising in newspapers and billboards is a feature of India’s new landscape of a hyper competitive consumer banking scene. Yet , there are few studies on how do Indian consumers judge service quality of banks. Prof. Koushiki Choudhury of Marketing Group took a shot at this and her paper, Exploring the Dimensionality of Service Quality: An Application of TOPSIS, was presented at the 4th International Conference on Services Management at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, U.K. May, 2009.

Complete flexibility in allocating products to manufacturing capacity based on realized demand is the holy grail of modern manufacturing. However, this kind of ‘total flexibility’ where all plants can produce all products can be a costly solution. Could there be an optimum combination of plants and products that maximizes the ability to meet demand and at the same time minimizes various types of costs? Prof. Ashis K Chatterjee of Operations Management Group demonstrates how this can be modeled and his paper, Benefits of Partial Product Flexibility, was presented at the 23rd European Conference on Operational Research, Bonn, Germany in July, 2009.

Signaling a new class of studies where our professors collaborate with those of international universities, Prof Rahul Mukherjee of our Operations Management Group, collaborated with Prof Hong Chang of Chosun University, Korea in presenting a paper, Highest Posterior Density Regions Based on Empirical-Type Likelihoods: Role of Data-Dependent Priors, at New Zealand Statistical Association Conference at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in  September, 2009.  This paper has since been accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference.

Prof Saibal Chattopadhyay, of the Operations Management Group also presented a paper, Exponential Clinical Trials: Sequential Comparison under Asymmetric Penalty at the same New Zealand Conference.

Professor Bodhibrata Nag’s book titled “Optimal Design of Timetables for Large Railways: a framework to maximise schedule robustness and minimise resource deployment, using a multi-objective mathematical model” has been published by VDM Verlagsservicegesellschaft mbH, Germany in February 2010.

Dealing with the demand uncertainties of short life cycle products such as fashion goods have always posed a challenge.  Prof Balram Avitatthur, of our Operations Management Group with his co-authors, developed a mathematical model to do deal with the associated procurement and transportation discount structures and this paper has been accepted for publication in The International Journal of Production Economics, from Elsevier.

Indian media and policymakers are fond of pointing to India’s youthful population and the demographic dividend.  Prof Janakirman Moorthy looks beyond to the year 2050 when India will have three times more people in the 60+ age group than we have now and tries to draw some implications of this. His paper on this phenomenon was accepted as a book chapter in The Silver Market Phenomenon Business Opportunities in an Era of Demographic Change, Edited by Florian Kohlbacher, and Cornelius Herstatt. Prof Moorthy also contributed , Cross-National Logo Evaluation Analysis: An Individual-Level Approach, to the September 2009 issue of the international journal, Marketing Science, and an article titled, Buying behaviour of consumers for food products in an emerging economy  to the British Food Journal’s  second issue of 2010.

Prof Jacob Vakkayil, co-authored a chapter titled, Conflict Management and Resolution in the book, Doing Business in India, published by Routledge.

He also contributed a paper, Dynamics of Multiple Memories, Reflections from an Enquiry, to the Sage journal, Journal of Management Enquiry. I found it one of the most valuable ruminations I have read in recent years about one of the frontier challenges in the new knowledge economy. Companies try all sorts of methods to capture as organizational Memory what they learn as they go along in business: project documents are stored in databases, case studies are caused ot be written, white papers and best practice documents are created, reviewed by gate-keepers and stored. These are then used in knowledge-sharing sessions. Yet, to new entrants all this seem like just another training session. Knowledge Management efforts in many companies lead only to disappointment. Jacob, then wonders what is the nature of Organization Memory? Is it one or is there a plurality of memories? Are organizational memories messier and more improvised than we think? Are local, relational memories more effective than global ones? Are there communities of practice with two strands, one inside the organization and the other extending beyond into other organizations? Are there tentative, nebulous memories which are more real than the grand schemes of long-term storage and retrieval?

I found these reflections on the very nature of knowledge breathtakingly inspiring and I feel it deserves to be heard beyond the confines of a Sage management journal.

And it is also a fitting book-end to my review today of the exciting intellectual effort going on at IIM Calcutta. I hope you got as much pleasure in listening to this recounting as I did in preparing this summary.

END

Here is one of the videos:
…and here is my speech at the start of the event:

    Take a look at the picture on the screen; some of you who are longtime, loyal readers of India Abroad will recognize that as the very first issue of our paper. That was in 1970, nearly forty years ago.
   
    When you look at the contents you will recognize how much some things have changed in one way and how they remain the same in other ways.For example, that was the year that the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty was signed by 43 countries, but notably not by India. And, you will remember that event started a long period of estrangement between India and the United States which was turned around completely recently, again hinging on the nuclear issue.
   
    1970 was also when the north tower of the World Trade Center was completed and thus could claim to be the tallest building in the world. And forty years later, not far from where I stand today and speak to you, a reconstruction effort is going on that same site.
1970 was also the year that the US and World economy was starting recover from the 1969 recession, and a similar effort is under way as I speak.

    India Abroad has been reporting and analyzing and interpreting the tumultuous events of the past four decades, the first three decades under the able guidance of its founder Gopal Raju and the last ten years under ours.

    The India Abroad Person of the Year Award is now in its eighth year and a glance at the winners over these years will tell you how far India and America and the relationships between our two countries has evolved and how rich and diverse is the talent that Indian Americans bring to this country.

    Swati Dandekar, who was the first winner, was an Iowa State Representative; Sonal Shah, who was the next winner, was a social activist and has, as we predicted, gone on to bigger things in government; Mohini Bhardwaj, who won the following year, completed the unbroken run of women award winners.

    It took Bobby Jindal to break that run of women awardees but women returned in the following two years: Indra Nooyi, the PepsiCo chief, in 2007 followed by Mira Nair, the filmmaker in 2008.
    Fareed Zakaria, the journalist, was the winner last year.

    See what a rich diversity of talent Indian Americans bring to life in America: Social activists, political leaders, business leaders, and creative professionals like filmmakers and novelists and journalists!
    Who will be the winners this year? What talents will they showcase? What new directions will they get us to think in their acceptance speeches?
    I, for one, can’t wait to hear.
    Thank you for coming today and enjoy the evening.
END

Sunderban, in Bengali, means ‘Beautiful Forest’.

We set out  from Calcutta at 8 am with good friends Pradeep and Bonani Kakkar and drove three  hours to the embarkation point, Godkhali, on Basanti Island where the fair motor launch ML Sundari was waiting for us                                                                                                                                                                   Its upper deck had plastic chairs for us to lounge around and the lower deck had three bunks, each to sleep two.

Mangroves are woody plants and shrub that inhabit the upper intertidal zones of saltwater and gets its name from the Spanish word “mangal” and the English word “grove”. They protect coastal areas from erosion, storm surge (especially during hurricanes) and tsunamis- the mangrove’s massive root system efficiently dissipates wave energy.
The mangrove ecosystem forms an intricate submerged mesh of root that offers a quiet marine window to host young organisms like barnacles, algae, oysters, sea sponges and bryozoans that require a hard surface for anchoring and filter feeding. Shrimps live in the muddy rooted bottom. Mangrove crabs feed on mangrove leaves, adding nutrients to the mangove muds for other bottom feeders. Export of the carbon fixed in mangroves is important in coastal food webs.
 
We cruised down the Bidya river about two hours to the next island ,Sajnekali; this is where you get a  permit and take on board a mandatory forest guard for the journey into the Sunderban. Foreign visitors must present their passports and visas here.

On our way we saw a large estuarine crocodile

sunning itself. What is distinctive aboiut the Sunderban is that the only plant life that can exist here is what adapts to brackish (=salt )water, which essentially means the mangrove.
    The Indian part of the Sunderban covers nearly 8,000 square kms. Very few of the many hundred islands in the Sunderban have potable water and for that reason human habitation has  been possible on only a few of them.
    We next cruised to the Dhobanki Reserve Forest, about two hours down the Matla River. We perched on top of a look-out point trying to get a glimpse of some tiger. Leading up to the look-out point were two channels, about 40 feet wide designed to get a clear view without which it would have been impossibloe to see into the thick mangrove growth. We saw deer and expected the tiger to be not far behind; we heard the alarm call of the deer, which we  were told was a signal for the tiger beingin the neghborhood…but the tiger did not put in an appearance.

That evening, the ML Sundari anchored mid-river near Jharkahali; we opened out a bottle of vodka and contemplated the quiet night scene.

The dinner menu was roti, bekti fish curry and vegetables cooked Bengali style.We slept on the ML Sundari that night.

The next morning we returned to Dhobanki and waited for a sight of a tiger. We heard several alarm calls by the deer but no tiger. We then headed to Sudankali and waited for a  tiger, but we still got no sight of one.

We did see a  Monitor Lizard, which is about 10 feet long from nose to end of the tail. and we did see a wild boar.

Back on the Matla River, towards evening, we saw several dolphin’s coverting in the setting sun. That point is the confluence of several rivers and this point is called  Low Banki. We saw a group of about forty Adjutant Storks, birds named for their military bearing. We also spotted four different types of King Fisher birds and a couple of white-bellied Sea Eagles.

We slept that night at a charming thatched roof hotel at Bali Tiger Camp on Bali Island. This island has fresh water and hence supports human habitation.

Amitav Ghosh’s book, The Hungry Tide, is a useful accompaniment on this trip as it is set here in the Sunderban and is fact-filled.

Our trip was organized by HelpTourism and is great value for money.

ENDNOTE:
Soon after our return to Bombay, I got this note from Pradeep on a report that appeared in Times of India Calcutta a few days ago which he says,”sent a cold shiver down my back; it could have been us…we were pretty close to the bank when we slept on the boat.”

I am reproducing the story here at the risk of scaring off other visitors to the Sunderban:.

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Kannur ( or Cannanore) is my hometown and where I lived till fifteen. We still go back every year and spend new Year’s eve there away from the partying of Bombay. One of my favorite things to do in Kannur is to walk on the 10 kilometer stretch of beach down the road from our home. Its a good setting to take stock of the year gone by and think up things-to-do for the upcoming year. I took this photo on my cellphone camera, strolling down the beach, this past new year’s eve, a day that marked not just the end of a year but also a tumultous decade. You can see two of my fellow Kannur citizens whiling their time away fishing

I got this mail from Gerson Da Cunha of Agni:

 The election mechanism in the land has to depend on staff from a variety of other departments whose careers do not depend on performance at election time.  This explains some of the problems, but not all.  Training of such “visitors” must be taken much more seriously by them as well as the election authorities in the State.  They will be aware of other ways in which the citizen can be better served, an issue that is given an undesirably low priority, well below the convenience of the administration.”