Qualitative Education

In a press briefing by HEC Reprted in Dawn July 19th 2003 ( http://www.dawn.com/2003/07/19/nat13.htm ) an official source of Higher Education Commission (HEC) said ``Only three Rawalpindi-Islamabad based private sector universities have the degree-awarding status``. Criteria for establishment of private universities was outlined. For details, please see the detailed report in Dawn.

The report concludes. `` When the HEC chairman, Dr Attaur Rehman, was asked if an institution didn`t meet the above criteria in the given grace period, what would be the status of the degrees issued meanwhile, HE REMAINED QUIET. ``

Tayyab Rashid

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#68 by Tipu on May 31, 2003 10:21am PT

I would say that they are mighty fancy coolies. At one point Infosys had 100 employees who were crorepatis even 3 drivers had earned more than 10 lakh each.

India earned 10 billion this fiscal in software exports. Imagine if Pakistan earned the same would it have to go IMF?

A typical salary for an software professional with about 3 years exp is about 25 to 30 thousand a month. People in the VLSI design earn about 50-80 thousand a month thier managers with typically 8-10 years experience earn in the range of 2 lakh a month and above.

I personally know of many couples with not even professional degrees who take home more than 1lakh rupees a month with less than 6 years of experience If such is the case of coolies I think that coolies have it good. Just let me know how much a mechanical engg. makes in Lahore or Islamabad

#71 by Studebaker on May 31, 2003 9:35pm PT

did any one say that the IT boom was because of India? or the slump is because of Indias failure? anyway we were talking of more than IT.

I didnt get the point of your post.

is India or Indians develop their Industry for pomp? who cares if others are impressed or not. We make money, improve our lives and that is enough.

you may be living in some nook of the world so to speak to not know the statements expressed by the cheifs of major players in the software Industry including microsoft, Intel etc.
Perhaps you did not hear the speach of the Chinese premier who visited Wipros campus, or you did not read the text of the speech of the singapore PM, or of Mahatir Mohammed when they visited the facilities of one or the other major software companies in Bangalore or Hyderabad. Perhaps you did not hear the speaches of the german Ministers in Bangalore.
Let me read out names of some the companies who have their own offices in Bangalore doing software work

BAAN
Motorola
GE
Intel
Cypress Semicondoctor
Philips
Sony
LG
Samsung
BAE
TI
Oracle
IBM
DELL
Compaq
PWC
Siemens
CITICORP
METLIFE
Microsoft
American Data systems (which is the software arm of a 3-4 large US Insurance companies)
Bosch
SAP
Dialmer Benz
Alcatel
National Semicondutor
Broadcom
ABB
ANZ IT
Novell

Im sure I have missed quite a few of the companies. And this is just in Bangalore. Then there is Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Delhi which are major centers. Apart from the smaller setups in Mysore, Calcutta, , even in Baroda, and Manipal which is a small town in costal Karnataka.

These are just centers owned directly by the major known world wide companies all except the last 4 employ in excess of 1000 people each. Exclusive ofshore suppourt/development centers belonging to Toshiba, Hitachi, Nortel, Seagate, Sony, Emerson, each usually employing in excess of 500 people.

Not only that some of the companies have their golbal decision making centers in India for paritcular services eg Citicorps Datawarehousing decision making not just software is located in Bangalore. Seagate not just gives out software development and suppourt work to suppourt its operations but wipro actually develops some of their sofware products.

It is not just software. Bajaj Auto has a automobile design team in Pune which does contract work for Porche design of Italy. In pharma Astra Zenneca does pharma research in Bangalore.

The creative cartoon animation work is also done on a fairly large scale in India. Employing nearly 8-10 thousand creative people mainly in chennai, pune and Hyderabad.
The target is to get at least 20-30 percent of the animiation work from Hollywood and may be later from Japan which is the big consumer of animation movies.



I have been subjected to unsloicted praise from Iranis, Malaysians, Singaporeans, almost every pakistani who I have met of course many Americans.

However all this could be just people being polite or being misled but who the hell cares we get the money thats the bottom line. In fact I would feel it is time for Indian companies to keep a lower profile now and not flaunt themselves so as to avoid scaring workers in other countries.

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#67 by bbabu on May 30, 2003 3:30pm PT

sure the bulk of the IT workers are from the private coleges. However the bulk of the IT entrprenuers are from the premier institutions.

This is not to deride the private colleges and their products Im sure that in coming time more alumini from the private colleges will be captians of the Industry.

Sure the lower classes are not educated enough, sure there liberalisation should have started in 1970ties when India used to export high quality steel to Japan and south Korea and many of Indias industries were among the best in Asia but what the heck is 2 decades in the lifespan of a nation. We made mistakes we learnt and are now moving on.

#66 by Studebaker on May 30, 2003 1:27pm PT

Sure im realistic. Im dont care if USA is a hathi, mara hua or not. If India is bigger at somepoint in future that is sufficient.

Being a realist also I understand that the way to succeed is not by berating yoursleves. A bit of optimism and good cheer is the basis on which things are started.

While we need to recongise our weakness we also need to acknowledege our strengths and build on them. a bit of positive propaganda does help (im not saying it is a substitute for hard work). while many on this board talk endlessly about American qualities I prefer to learn from them and not talk about it while berating themselves or their people for lack of some thing or the other. I dont see what is it that these people have in mind. If you want to change some thing the question you should ask yourselves is what have you done to change things. If you have not done anything positive towards that end then berating your people and their efforts is not going to put one on a morally better platform. In the end the people who make the efforts will surge ahead and the chestbeaters will be left with nothing.

Take a look at this

http://www.goodnewsindia.com/homepage.php

and this

http://www.goodnewsindia.com/Pages/content/economy/aavishkaar.html

if 10 people on this forum wether pakistanis or Indians put 10% of their annual income, time and efforts into any activity like this (which by the way impacts our countries in a sigificant manner)then he would have made a great difference towards the existing situation and many times over than just talking about how backward our communites are.

even in non economic activites people can put their effort, money and time where they mouth is. People like Tahamed talk about the mullahs, army, people, socitey as if they are helpless and some one from the sky should come and correct the situation.
Why cant tahamed collect 1 lakh dollars and sponsor or set up a madarssa in pakistan where the new genreration of intelligent, moderate and socially responsible mullas are brought up. He can do it, it is a small amount and all resourses are available and as he keeps claiming that people are fed up of the mullah/ army brigade(interestingly he does not mention the feduals to whom he probably belongs in all likelyhood) then he should have a very good respose and suppourt of common people in pakistan. But does this thougth stirke him? no he praises the americans to no end, calls for western imperialism but does he learn anything from the socitey he praises so much and exthorts others to praise that of Individual action? No instead he yearns for them bieng their master. Well he will get them to be his master others fortunately have different plans.

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ali87 #65

`` I think you forget that before bangalore happened the foundations of the success were laid by Nehru in the govt subsidised technical colleges and other graduate colleges. If India had stuck to the wisdom dispensed by the west ie to ignore higher education in favour of primary education we would not have had the IT boom.``

The Center/State govt provide funds for few universities - IIT, IISc, Anna, REC. Bulk of the IT grads are trained by pvt colleges and institutes.

Primary education and health care needs to be emphaised more. Indian workers could not build high quality cars to the standards of Honda Accord
because lot of the lower classes are not well educated.

For all the hoopla about higher education there are limited scope for going post graduate education.

I have to disagree with you. The liberalization should have started in the mid 1970s. I can see income levels being double or triple of current levels. There is no reason software boom could not have started in the early to mid-1980s.

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#62 by rsridhar on May 29, 2003 10:08pm PT
or one could read the Lee Kuans book from third wold to first world``. I havent but hope to.

I think what people mean by dictatorsh`ip is some level of unified action. which is preferable to the chaos of incompetents.

However one should not ignore social issues some times they take priotity.

What is possible for singapore may not be suitable for India. Since Singapore is small and cannot in any way be a big player Its intrests lie in promoting foregin firms. However India cannot follow the same path at least in toto.

I think you forget that before bangalore happened the foundations of the success were laid by Nehru in the govt subsidised technical colleges and other graduate colleges. If India had stuck to the wisdom dispensed by the west ie to ignore higher education in favour of primary education we would not have had the IT boom.
The public sector has in no small part played a important role as a bank for qualified and diciplined personnal to many of the sunrise sectors of Indian economy, some of them are the Chip design and hardware design sector, the pharma sector and to some extent the software sector for eg Infosys intital learnign and product development was in collabration and for Canara bank for thier Bancs 2000 product which even now constitues a sizeable chunk of their income and certainly at one point of time was their main activity. Most of the pharma firms in the bulk drugs are filled by ex employes of govt sector IDPL. Similarly Motorola intitally recurited heavily from BEL(bharat electronics which has a semicondoctor fab and a card design unit) and the govt owned semiconductor complex.
British Aerospace which has a software operations in collabration with HAL depended to a large extent on ex ISRO people. Many of the hyderabad based companies with exception of Satyam are heavily staffed as well as owned by people from CMC ie the computer maintainance corporation of India. whic was a govt avtar of the IBM which was kicked out in seventies.

even as recently as 3 years back companies like Wipro, Infosys etc who had kept small teams of Data warehousing people doing nothing and learnign no practical stuff they got a boost only when the got the small datawarehousing contract from SEBI initated project in BSE in its daily settlement data that to shared by 4 companies. After this thier datawarehousing practices have started getting their first customers.

#59 by Paigham on May 29, 2003 11:28am PT


it is not necessary to make MIT less it is sufficient to make Indians orginasations better then theoritacly MIT can remain where it is and Indian orginastions can zoom past it. Just theory mind you.

However that MIT had to eat humble pie and still continue to woo India is important change in trend. That Indans are not too dependent onMIT and are asking for the bang for their buck illustrates where they have reached. that they came trumphs in negotiatiting a favourable contract which benifits them even in this case is also in thier favour. That MIT has climbed down on the rethoric and wants to participate still indicates that it sees benifits with associtating with Indian programme ie not the other way round.

you couldnt get the obvious message is also significant.

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re: dictatorship and economic development
Some people in this forum think that Pak can make progress under a determined dictator. Someone said that Pak has to just achieve 6-8% growth rate (how did he come up with that magic figure?) to become a developed nation.
If economic development were a buffalo and Mushy the dictator had a stick in his hand, he can literally drive this buffalo towards its goal. The problem is: neither is development a buffalo nor is Mushy with a stick. That is to say: he is not in control of the economy. The IMF is dictating terms to him and he is just being a loyal client.

How did Singapore become a prosperous country, up from a per capita income of about $ 500 in the 60s to $30,000 today? One can visit the internet and look at the story. The basic thing is: it set itself (after it split up from Malaysia) to becoming a manufacturing base. It invited foreign companies, relaxed visas for professionals and once the manufacturing bases were well set, it went in for technology transfer. I have put it in a simplistic way.
Singapore is a very closed economy. And Lee Kwan Yew was a tyrant when he came to pushing for development. Singapore is not as diverse as India or Pak and the model cannot be applied, certainly not to India. Lee Kwan Yew was a benign tyrant. How many benign dictators have Pak had? Every Paki dictator has filled his own coffers. A more detail analysis of the Singapore miracle can be read in this article:
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe20010626/an2.html

In both Indian and Pak contests, what both countries have are: talented English speaking technocrats and professionals. Something like a Bangalore model is very much possible in Pak. It has to open up its economy and invite foreign players and use the local talents. This will result in job boom as well as big names coming into that country. Azim Premji would have no problems investing in Pak if there is a market there for him. Thus, a mutally beneficial climate can be created, where market forces take over from the politicians (and dictators) and dictate terms to them. Any talk of war then will sound nonsensical. India will hesitate to attack Pak which houses companies in which Tatas and Wipro have a stake.
But are development and dictarorship compatible?
Pak`s experiment shows, they are not.
Here is an interesting article on how freedom is closely related to development:
http://www.freeworldacademy.com/globalleader/realworld.htm#2
Excerpts:
1. ``85% of the world wealth is concentrated in free countries.
Whatever the region or the culture, every country with a GDP per capita above 4 000 $ is a free country``
{the author includes India as an exception}.

2. ``With the exception of China, all countries ruled by dictatorships cannot even be included in graphs because their value is too insignificant.

The lowest GDP per capita are found in countries that have suffered or are still suffering from dictatorships.``

3. ``Why would the degree of freedom explain the levels of development?
It is because freedom is closely related to knowledge and therefore also to technical progress, which is the source of economic power.``
{my comments: We see this in the Bangalore model, where a high level of knowledge base (Bangalore has more technical institutes than the whole of Pakistan), technical expertise have achieved high growth (see Url: http://www.sulekha.com/redirectnh.asp?cid=310194)}.

4. ``Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China are part of the same culture, but their respective GDP per inhabitant are $13 200 , $26 000 and $780.`` {my comments: Mainland China is still very poor, contrary to what some Pakis in Chowk may like to believe}

5. Finally, the punch line in this article (chowk`s FM may take note):

``Some scholar say that Dictatorship is essential in order to achieve development. They say that Dictatorships are preferable to corrupted ``Middle class`` democracy !!
This theory is both criminal and absurd, as shown by the previous explanations.
It is clear that the real connection is the following:

Freedom–Knowledge–Technical progress–Development.

Global leaders have to repeat again and again this golden rule.``

I like the last line. I think it is something to always remember.
Sridhar

re:#48 by sameerJB
You are right about the self-confidence of a lay american. But, this kind of training is ingrained in their culture. Kids are taught to take care of themselves and to speak out for themselves at every level. However,academic training in schools is better and tougher in India (you have to compare 2 schools of similar standards here). Many Indian parenta in US get school texts from India because they think the standard is too lax in US. But there is more creativity and more emphasis on ``thinking`` and ``doing it oneself``, things lacking in the Desi schools.

I do not agree that British rule was good for India. They did build some infrastructure (like the Railways and Postal service) out of necessity but their rule was economically ruinous for India.
Sridhar