Ferment Within

Last Friday, I made my way to London to visit a Durga Puja pandal. I reached just in time for the last anjali of the year, and sat through the dashami puja. At the same time, many Rhodes Scholars were in London to express solidarity with protestors in South Africa. They made their way to the South African High Commission and even made the High Commissioner sit with them on the ground and listen to them.

It's been a frequent occurence through the year. As part of the Rhodes Scholar community, I am exposed to a large number of inspirational (and often intimidatingly brilliant) young men and women seeking to disrupt the existing system. There is a revolutionary fervour in the air. There is impatience with status quo. And there is boldness in attacking the system. 

However, my battles have mostly been within. This experience at Oxford has given me the opportunity and the distance to be able to look at my own actions and try to make sense of them. It has given me the opportunity to be critical of thoughts I have had and actions I have undertaken. It is a process that has gained momentum since I read Gandhi's autobiography. Gandhi, a deeply flawed political leader and activist, showed a great deal of self-awareness and honesty. That is something that I seek to replicate.

I was recently asked in a professional conversation what I want to do in life. I said that I wanted to earn enough money, and keep myself professionally excited and engaged. But what I really seek to do is to initiate and contribute to, and to learn from, a conversation about this internal ferment. I want to continue to push myself to be a better and more sensitive human being, and I want people to know about my thoughts (so they can learn) and I want to learn from them so I can advance myself.

I also believe that this kind of clarity will help me be more impactful professionally. At work, I have often found myself face the temptation to confirm to what is common. However, over time I have come to start giving shape to what I believe would be my way of navigating workplaces. I sought to, and at least partially succeeded in, harmonising how I behave in my personal and professional lives.

The Durga Puja in London was my way to reconnect with my cultural heritage. But it was also a way for me to engage with my past and to reflect. The festival will return again next year - reminding us of the circularity of life, the ebb and flow of this mortal existence. The only hope is that the next time it comes around, we'll be in a better place.

Communal Violence and Politics in India

The discussion about communalism has come to the centre stage in national discourse once again. The allegedly beef-related lynching in Dadri, followed by the protest by writers, has raised fears of a saffron - induced surged in communal incidents. The fact that communal riots are driven by political considerations is well - understood. However, there is a large number of bbooks about what increases the probability of communal riots. The book 'Votes and Violence' by Wilkinson was one such book that I happened to read. It is a painstakingly put together econometric analysis of communal incidents in India since independence. The results, while reinforcing certain widely-held beliefs, also discredits other notions that we have.

While researching for my article on Islam for The Indian Opinion, my focus was very much on the question of law and order. Wilkinson's book helped me think through many such issues. Some facts were validated - for example, that communal incidents saw a major spike in the 1990s (coincident with the rapid rise of the BJP). Wilkinson set up several different specifications of his basic model with the probability of riots as the dependent variable. In each such specification, whether there were elections in the next 6 months was a statistically significant independent variable. Using instrumental variables, Wilkinson also argued that economic competition between Hindus and Muslims does not impact communal incidents at all. Evidently, the premiss for a communal conflagration has to be conjured up from nothingness. Hence the freak incidents of the kind we saw in Dadri are either engineered or exploited to create communal tension.

What is interesting, however, is the role of caste - based politics in containing communal riots. When Lalu Prasad talks about 'mandal' (caste) versus 'kamandal' (communal) politics, he is (intentionally or unintentionally) making a very valid point. Communal riots are seen to be more likely in bi-polar states, where political consolidation between two parties reduces the importance of the muslim vote. Caste politics, by fragmenting the Hindu vote, makes the muslim voters more important at the margin, and therefore reduces the likelihood of communal incidents. Law and order is a state subject, but communal riots are no less likely to happen in Congress-ruled states than in other states. There are many other such findings that Wilkinson presents; I would therefore strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in this topic.

Question of technology

Modi's visit to the facebook headquarters generated much debate in India regarding net neutrality in general and facebook's intentions behind the tricoloured display pictures in particular. This subsequently spilled over into an access vs. neutrality debate, and a few branches of the debate reached the technology vs. basic services debate. It is the last one that I seek to talk about in this post.

The trouble with evaluating the impact of most technology - based products is that the major impact happens through externalities. Therefore, if we try to measure the outcomes by the impact on individual households, we will always underestimate the impact of such products. There are also other issues. For example, increased attendance in couchsurfing gatherings has been observed to be positively related to a sense of belonging to the community; and hosting a guest shown to have a positive relationship with trust. However, in case the causal relationship runs in the opposite direction, could products like couchsurfing be making society worse off by segregating between two sections? Ignoring questions about negative consequences, let us focus on the more positive aspects. For example, independent media has often been shown to lead to many positive societal outcomes. However, the impact on the life of the marginal consumer would be quite low due to the externality problem. To add to that, because the consumer may not fully internalise the long - term benefits of these products, making fair comparisons inherently a difficult task.

If we narrow down to products which have immediate returns to consumers, we run into many that impact the middle segments of the population - ones who are significantly more prosperous than the BOP populations, but not wealthy enough to be excluded from other things. Take credit, for instance. Due to asymmetric information (and general risk aversion on the part of lenders), markets left to themselves lead to under-provisioning of credit. Technology, therefore, turns out to be an excellent tool to remove informational barriers. One might argue that access to facebook doesn't have any benefits (thought many will disagree). However, when social media activity becomes a gateway to credit access, facebook can turn into a tool for social empowerment. Companies such as Lenddo are creating a new industry where big data can be unsed to create the next wave of financial inclusion. Removal of informational barriers can also lead to benefits in more traditional goods markets. This is especially true for small producers and traders, for whom access to information (and storage) can often be prohibility expensive. For example, the introduction of mobile phones in the early 2000s was seen to lead to an increase of 8% in the profits of fishermen in Kerala[1]. There were also more wide - ranging benefits, including a 4% reduction in the average price of fish in these areas.

However, we are still talking in the realm of the middle class. What has technology got for the people at the bottom of the pyramid? Can technology reasonably impact the lives of those struggling for food, energy and shelter? Once again, technology as a medium for spreading information can help address some of the very basic issues of survival for large swathes of the population. The Chhattisgarh PDS turnaround was aided by technology, albeit alongside other systemic changes. Something as simple as sending SMS notification to villagers when the PDS truck leaves for the fair price shop can reduce pilferage and increase foodgrain availability to the poor. Having reduced wastage and pilferage from 40-50% to less than 10% in a short span of time, Chhattisgarh has shown that technology can help address the needs of the poor.

In conclusion, if one views technology as an end in itself, the impact may be too diffused and long - term to care about, especially for a country like India with more pressing concerns. However, if one looks at technology as an enabler, and as a disruptor of non - tech sectors, then one can start seeing some of the benefits of technology vis-a-vis other more traditional interventions. At the end of the day, few interventions - including technology - would be effective in a vacuum. It needs to be supported by government will and space for innovation.

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1 - The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance and Welfare in South Indian Fisheries Sector - Robert Jensen (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 122, No. 3 - Aug 2007)