A couple of days ago, a friend remarked that the section focuses too much on “bad news”, and features “no India-related stuff”. To find out whether there is any truth in these beliefs, I decided to analyze all the stories featured in ITN during August 2010.

Around 40% of the stories in ITN do belong to the “bad news” category (disasters, accidents, wars and terrorist attacks). Maybe it’s because Wikipedians depend on the mainstream media outlets, which focus on bad news because it sells. Or maybe, we are just living in turbulent times.

Although I didn’t specifically analyze the time for which each of these stories stayed on the front page, a cursory look suggests that the bad news hogs most of the premium front-page time. This could be because the new updates are continuously posted, as the casualties keep increasing over a period of time.

English Wikipedia Main page “In the news” stories by category (August 2010)

As for the second point, I must admit there wasn’t a single India-related story in the section during August 2010. Not even the “bad news” about the 2010 Leh floods, which left nearly 200 people dead. I would say that August 2010 was more of an exception than a rule — I’ve seen several India-related stories in ITN in the past. Maybe no Indian editors contributed actively to this section during the last month.

English Wikipedia Main page “In the news” stories by country (August 2010)

If we analyze the stories in terms of the continent they’re releated to, we’ll find that the “In the news” section does a decent job of covering stories from all across the world. The order of continents in the list below is same as their order in list of continents by population.

English Wikipedia Main page “In the news” stories by continent (August 2010)

Yeah, I know that World and Sun are not continents. But they’ve to fit somewhere.

Many in the media have expressed shock and dismay at how India, which is often portrayed as one of the world’s most rapidly developing economies, is actually doing worse than the poorest nations of Africa. There are more poor in 8 states of a country than 26 countries of a continent! Time to panic!! Or is it?

Well, the situation isn’t as bad as it seems. India is well on its way to meet its povery reduction goals. The population of the 8 poorest Indian states surpasses that of the 26 poorest African countries by over 100 million. So, it should not be surprising that the number of poor in the Indian states surpasses the same number for African countries by a little over 10 million. In fact, as a percentage of the total population, the number of poor in the 8 Indian states is 69.29%, a figure that is much lower than 81.61% for the 26 African countries. Here are some graphs to give you a perspective.

Population data (2007) taken from UNDP’s Human Development Report 2009 (MPI also uses the data from the same report).

8 poorest states of India (in order of decreasing MPI): Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, West Bengal

26 poorest African countries (in order of decreasing MPI): Niger, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Somalia, Central African Republic, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Angola, Rwanda, Madagascar, Benin, Comoros, Congo, Malawi, Senegal, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mauritania, Chad, Zambia, Gambia, Côte d’Ivoire.

How do you decide what's funny and what's not?

Joel Stein’s article in the TIME magazine, My Own Private India, has ruffled quite a few feathers. There have been a spate of posts by Indian-Americans criticizing the article as racist and offensive. The criticism ranges from well-worded to satirical (such as Kal Penn’s piece) to downright immature (targeting Joel Stein’s Jewish ethnicity). Several non-Indian-Americans have come out in their support, eager to flaunt their anti-racism.

Indians are no strangers to humor based on ethnicity or nationality. Sardarji jokes and jokes about Indians outsmarting dumb Americans continue to be circulated widely among the Indians and the Indian diaspora. Why did the Indian-Americans react so strongly to Stein’s article? Was it just because the joke is on them now? Or is it because the use of the term “dotheads” reminded them of the Dotbusters? Or was there another reason?

Here’s my theory: the Indian-Americans’ reaction to Stein’s article is a reflection of their latent fear that their status as a successful minority community might lead to a backlash someday. They feel it reflects the average American’s perception of the immigrants as a threat to the propsperity of those who arrived earlier.

Ethnic humor is often endearing and entertaining, especially when made by someone belonging to that ethnic group. However, sometimes you don’t know where to draw the line, and the things may go out of hand. The Sikhs know this quite well. Their willingness and ability to poke sheer fun at themselves created an entire genre of jokes: the ubiquitous Sardarji jokes. My ancestors lived in Lahore before moving to Delhi during the Partition of 1947, and consequently my paternal family had ties with many Sikhs. A lot of them cracked Sardarji jokes and the non-Sikhs would often join them: this was not considered offensive at all. But, in the aftermath of Khalistan movement, things were not funny anymore. The Sardarji jokes were often used for harassing the enterprising Sikhs, whose success had created a sense of insecurity among the others. I remember, when I was around 14-year old or so, I once went camping in Mahabaleshwar, where two fellow campers were discussing how stupid Sardars are. I wasn’t sure whether they were serious or just kidding, but being brought up in a family where Sardars are seen as hardworking and honest people, I didn’t feel very comfortable about the conversation. So, I intervened and told them that the Sardars were very intelligent and enterprising people. The young campers, in all seriousness, countered my claim by narrating an incident about two eight-year old Sikh kids who didn’t know all the rules of playing cricket.

Many Sikhs today feel that tasteless Sardarji jokes have harmed the self-esteem of their kids, who often face ridicule in school or on the playground. The Indian-Americans want to avoid such a situation. Stein might have intended to be humorous, but if they allow one such satirical article to go uncriticized today, it might encourage a hundred such articles in the future. And then, it won’t be funny anymore. There are a lot of nutjobs out there in America, who will bring the word “dothead” back in fashion after reading these articles. If they allow Stein’s lines (“…even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor”) to go unchallenged, their kids might become objects of ridicule in the schools tomorrow, stereotyped as not-so-bright immigrants.

The status of Indian-Americans today is reminiscent of the status of the Sikhs, the Jews and several other minority communities at their pinnacle. Both the Jews and the Sikhs gained prominence as successful minorities. However, in the period following their success, they allowed strong negative stereotypes to be associated with them. These stereotypes later came in handy for the Jew-bashers and the 1984 rioters. Indian-Americans don’t want strong negative stereotypes to be built around them. So, they are actively opposed to even the slightest negative take on their community, even if it’s supposed to be humorous. When an Indian-American writes an article on “How To Date A White Bitch”, it’s all right. But, imagine the furore that will be caused if a White author wrote an article titled “How To Date An Indian-American Bitch”.

Are you one of those who are appalled because I found Joel Stein's article (somewhat) funny?

I know many readers would be appalled at this, but I actually found (at least some parts of) Joel Stein’s article funny. I also found his apology funny (“Also stupidly assumed their emails would follow that Gandhi non-violence thing.”) Stein seems to have tried mellowing down the perceived anti-Indian rhetoric by using some self-deprecatory humor in his article (e.g. “There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.”) I don’t think he wrote like a racist — he was just a little insensitive. Sometimes, you’ve to be a little more considerate about the audience, the context and the times you’re living in. Stein wasn’t considerate enough.

It’s hard to draw a clear line between when we should laugh at ourselves thinking “it’s just a joke!”, and when we should get concerned about others making fun of us. Fifty years down the line, we might be feeling stupid about the knee-jerk overreaction to the Stein’s article or we might be reading a book about how the article was one of the early signs of vehement racism that led to the widespread violence against the Indian-Americans.

• It’s incredibly cool to talk about inclusive growth and the Bottom of the pyramid.
• The urban teledensity has already crossed the mark of 100%
• A better telecom infrastructure will help the villagers gain acccess to mainstream markets, and provide an impetus to the Indian economy.

However, there are several problems, the biggest of which is the huge cost of creating and maintaining telecom infrastructure in the low-income, sparsely populated rural areas. The Government has put in a lot of effort in trying to address this issue. For example, it has provided subsidy support for mobile towers in the rural areas from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).

The telecom infrastructure is a key area in the Government’s Bharat Nirman programme, which is aimed at improving the overall rural infrastructure in the country, at an estimated cost of INR 1,760 billion. While the progress in the areas of electrification, roads and irrigation has not been satisfactory, the rural telecom connectivity has shown considerable improvement, if the government figures for 2009-10 are to be believed. Himachal, Kerala and Punjab have crossed the mark of 40% rural teledensity, along with the North-East- I region (comprising Meghalaya, Mizoram & Tripura), which has shown a growth of 182.9% over the previous year. The so-called BIMARU states of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh have all shown a growth of over 80% in rural teledensity over the previous year.

Growth in rural teledensity in India 2009 to 2010

Rural teledensity in India as on 31 March 2010

The growth of brobadband in India (even in the urban areas) has been quite disappointing: the Government had set a target of 20 million broadband connections by 2010, but as of now, the number remains at 7 million. USOF has also focused largely on mobile services. But, the government claims to have achieved its full target for the year 2009-10 in the area of broadband coverage of the village panchayats. Pondicherry has achieved 100% broadband coverage in the village panchayats, while Kerala is a close second with a figure of 99.8%. Jharkhand is the laggard with a dismal 0.66% broadband coverage.

Broadband Coverage of Village Panchayats in India under Bharat Nirman-II-bar chart

Number of village panchayats in India with broadband coverage

Percentage of village panchayats in India with broadband coverage

Tag Cloud of the names of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers as of 1 January 2009	Tag Cloud of the names of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers as of 1 January 2009 (pairs)
Tag cloud of the names of the Chief Ministers of India (7 June 2010)	Tag cloud of the names of Members of Parliament of the 15th Lok Sabha

As you can see, I wasn’t far off the mark, though I had completely missed out the ubiquitous “Kumar“. “Kumar” and “Singh” are quite common as both middle names and last names, and are often used together (e.g. “Shilendra Kumar Singh“). These two were clear winners, leaving the other words far behind. The others among the top include “Agrawal” (if we include the variants such as Aggarwal and Agarwal), “Chandra”, “Gupta“, “Prasad”, “Sharma“, “Patil“, “Patel“, “Yadav“, “Reddy“, “Lal”, “Ashok”, “Krishna”, “Jain”, “Meena”, “Mishra“, “Mohan”, “Sinha”, “Ram”, “Joshi” etc.

Well, let’s leave alone the places in the remote parts of the country for a moment. Let’s talk about Agra, arguably the first place that most people think of when someone says “Tourism in India”.

When you search for “Agra” in Google, the internet giant throws agra.nic.in up at you. “Welcome at Officiald [sic] Website of Agra”, declares the title.

You ignore the typo, and head over to agra.nic.in, which has been designed by National Informatics Centre (NIC) (“the premier ICT organisation of Govt of India”). NIC has often been the target of severe criticism for poor design (example) and poor security (example), so it has put up a disclaimer in the footer to do some CYA: “Site designed and hosted by National Informatics Centre. Site contents owned, maintained and updated by respective departments. NIC does not take any responsibility regarding website contents.”

If you’re using Internet Explorer (IE), you’ll be lucky enough to be redirected to agra.nic.in/def.asp.

Why IE, did you ask? Because they use VBScript on my internets in 2010!

If you’re using Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari or any other sane browser, you’ll end up staring at a page with no content between the header and the footer.

Now, if you’re a tourist, you’ll inevitably click on the “Tourism” link in the header. If you are using IE, and if “Tourism” is the first link you clicked, you’ll end up at Touristn.htm, a page with badly formatted maroon-colored text. If not, you’ll land up at tourist.htm, a page with badly formatted maroon-colored text and missing images.

Sadly, agra.nic.in is just one of the several hundred horribly-designed district websites designed and hosted by NIC. Maybe the NIC folks who have designed the Web Ratna winning websites should create a common template for all the district websites, and save the nation the embarrassment of having such disgraceful websites.

To develop a culture of collaborative learning in its schools, the Government of Kerala has launched schoolwiki.in under the aegis of its IT@School project. The website was made accessible for the schools in Kerala yesterday on the Kerala Piravi Dinam.

schoolwiki.in, a part of the Kerala's IT@School project

Unlike the Karnataka Knowledge Commission, which decided to spend Rs. 2 crore in duplicating efforts of Kannada-language Wikipedia, the IT@School folks have decided to use their resources for more useful things. The schoolwiki.in website doesn’t aim to create yet another Malaylam Wikipedia; in fact, it links to Malayalam-language editions of the Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiquote. It aims to create a comprehensive knowledge database of all the schools in Kerala, plus a repository of the educational contents prepared by the teachers and the outcomes of academic group activities of the students.

The schools can edit the wiki to enter details such as information about the school, statistics, alumni listings, websites and blogs, clubs and student groups, class magazines, images and videos. The best part is that the students in Standard 8, 9 and 10 will contribute to the schoolwiki.in in form of school newsletter (Pradeshika patram), local encyclopedia (Nadodi Vijnanakoshan), “My Village” pages (Ente Nadu), under the guidance of Malayalam language teachers.

Isn’t that a great way of helping the students learn the value of collaboration and teamwork in the Internet age, and at the same time enhance their ICT skills? Hopefully, other states will follow the suit.

The management education at SPJIMR largely revolves around understanding – most of the tests are open book/open laptop, and don’t require any rote learning. The Mumbai University exams were an altogether different experience: “mugging up” was an absolute necessity, a vast majority of the student ‘projects’ were farce, and the syllabus was completely outdated.

Today, I was going through an article by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, which speaks about two initiatives taken by the Government to tackle the primary challenges being faced by the Indian education system: (1) revamping an outdated curriculum and (2) upgrading the faculty.

While making the curriculum up-to-date and ‘upgrading’ the existing faculty are necessary, I believe that the primary challenges are two other inter-related issues:

1. Ensuring good quality of education amid the exponential increase in the number of educational institutes
2. Attracting bright minds to the teaching profession

With incompetent regulatory bodies like AICTE (which is mired in controversy and corruption) at helm, the increase in the number of educational institutes (esp. MBA and engineering colleges) over the past decade has not resulted in a proportional increase in quality of education. On the contrary, the number of ‘accredited degree mills’ has increased significantly.

There are a number of colleges (esp. MBA institutes) that charge lakhs of rupees as fee, and as a result have excellent infrastructure to showcase. These institutes have great-looking brochures that boast about the quality of education and rich academic experience on the offer. But, the truth is that the academic standards in most of these colleges are pathetic, to say the least. What’s the reason?

First, there is lack of good faculty: teaching, as an occupation, is not the primary choice for vast majority of the bright Indian students. Most of these students prefer taking up MNC jobs, which promise them a good salary and a higher standard of living. Many of those who are interested in teaching end up teaching in coaching classes, which offer them better salaries. Those belonging the academically inclined and research-oriented minority, are forced to limit themselves to the the top Indian institutes or the renowned foreign universities, where they get respect and money for what they do, in addition to good students and a wide range of opportunities.

This has become a vicious cycle: Because the salaries in most colleges are not good, these colleges attract incompetent faculty. Because the faculty is incompetent, the students are incompetent. Because both faculty and students are incompetent, the colleges do not have a sound reputation. Because the students are bad and the colleges are not reputed, the competent academics stay away from these institutes, paving way for incompetent faculty members who are ready to work at low salaries.

Issues like caste-based reservations only add to the problem.

The main challenge that India faces is ensuring that the bright minds in the nation have incentives (monetary or otherwise) to pick up teaching as a profession. This will automatically result in a better education system.