07.09.06
Speech By Dr Arun Shourie at SIBM
14th July 2006 CIT Forum at SIBM
Dr. Mujumdar, Dr. Mudbidri, My dear friends,
I have come to the institution, which I know, when I come to next, will be ranked No.1 in India. I came here several years ago, it is wonderful to see the growth and read Business Today (Business Today, July 16, 2006 BT-AC Nielsen ORG- MARG Study on India’s best B Schools). I am sure, whatever Business Today has written, is an understatement because for all of us, you and your institution symbolize the new India - in your growth, in your innovation, in energy, in excellence and I would hope that others would learn not only these qualities from you, but also learn humility from Dr. Mujumdar. A person who has achieved so much, done so many new things in so many new fields, you would not be able to see it from him. When I met him now, I was reminded of a thing that my father had taught me when I was a little boy, and he (Dr. Mujumdar) personifies that. It has four lines-“ Those trees are haughty and lofty and look down on others which do not have fruit, like the eucalyptus, and those which are laden with fruit like the mango tree in summer, they don’t lift their heads.” Your institution embodies one of my favorite words, which I read a long time back in a futuristic magazine – Imagineering, it means to imagine the future and then engineer it back to reality. It is wonderful to see how one man always imagines what will be required in the future and engineers it back to reality into these wonderful institutions all around us.
Dr. Mujumdar was just telling us now that the government should think beyond IIT’s and IIM’s. Sir, on the contrary, I feel you personify the spirit of thinking independently of governments .You don’t require governmental recognition. It is the excellence of your students and your faculty which will spread the fragrance of excellence all over the country and I would hope for a time when this whole business of universities and deemed universities will go and your institution will be known just by its own name, by its own faculty and by the great achievements of its students who will pass through the institution- that will be a great day and I’m sure that day will come.
The subject that I shall talk about today is “The Future We Have to Face and How We Should Face It” I can speak for however long you want. In our parliament we are accustomed to speaking not by looking at the watch but by looking at the calendar, ‘ its July now so we can talk’! The main point about the future and about our current times is change, it is accelerating change, and it is pervasive change, which affects all aspects.
See the growth of companies and their vanishing away. Of those companies, which 20 years or 40 years ago were the top 10 industrial houses in India, almost the only common name today is TATAs , only one part of Birlas have survived. The companies we hear of today were not there 20 years ago.
From companies to countries! 20 years ago, the Soviet Union was a very great power, it was the 2nd greatest power in the world, but in a moment its gone up in smoke- the whole of Eastern Europe .Similarly the vicissitudes through which companies and countries have gone, if you read Professor Mason, he was one of the authorities on Development Economics in the early 1960’s, he wrote about the 4 great success stories of that time and the first one was Pakistan, which is not so today! There is a very important lesson in it which I shall come back to later; it is not a surety that we will be able to grow in the same manner unless we keep at it. See what is happening now in the central Asian republics, which broke away from the Soviet Union. Today these 5-6 countries- Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan etc., they have all become the center, the focal point of the great international contest between the US, China and Russia, since a lot of oil has been discovered within their limits.
You should see the rise of China. In that very area, (oil exploration) Russia has to subordinate itself as the junior partner of China to keep the United States out. So unless we forge ahead with that kind of dynamism as a country, we shall not be able to hold our head and survive. We are short of oil , we are importing about 70% of our oil needs, while China is importing 30% of its oil. China has therefore forayed into other countries to acquire it. We are trying to do it, but not with the kind of resources that China can deploy.The Chinese president was in the central Asian republics a few months ago he said, “ I will invest 100 Billion Dollars” a 100 billion dollars is a lot of money, but he is investing that in central Asia, he is investing that much in Africa, he is investing that much in Latin America and so the influence they (the Chinese) gather and the challenge that influence poses to our country and the suddenness of this challenge that we face today, we have to see the impact this has. In Kazakhstan, where ONGC, L. N. Mittal and China bid for an oil company, China out-bid us. But more than this, China has acquired 40% of the land area of Kazakhstan for oil exploration. So the point is of the change, accelerating the change, the change which has to be pervasive and that all these things are interconnected.
Today we cannot think of medicine, without very high precision, high quality research in pharmaceutical companies. We cannot expect the pharmaceutical companies to stay without going in for Biotechnology, but Biotechnology is not without Information Technology, or without great Electronics, because of the great microscopes that are required and how can we go into electronics unless we build Fabs. In India we had one Fab, it burned down in 1989 in Mohali, Chandigarh. Since then, we have been struggling to keep it up, in the next 2 years each of these require 3-4 billion dollars and China is making not one but six of them. So, you see if you go ahead, let us say we want to be ahead in medicine, we have to be therefore ahead in Biotechnology, in IT, therefore we need to be ahead in Hardware not only Software, we also have to be ahead in making Fabs. In making Fabs we should have that kind of resource that we can deploy 30-40 billion dollars in 2 years for just 1 set of products. And if we falter in one, then we shall not be able to go ahead in others, as the link of the chain has been broken. This just doesn’t mean we cannot go ahead in medicine but it has consequences for national security. The time has gone when great armies could cross international borders. Unless you are America and the other country you have is very small!!
Now if we read Chinese strategic writing, to give you one example, they say that look here, one of the features of all modernizing economies is their progressive integration. Take the National power grid. If you have villages each run their own bio gas plants, if you destroy five villages the sixth is not affected. But, if it is the integrated national power grid and you interrupt it at one place it has a cascading effect all over. So they say, we should acquire the power to hurl what they call the assassin’s mace at the acupuncture points of other societies, one point by which you can paralyze a large part of the body. So within 3-4 seconds one morning we should be able to disrupt Air Traffic Control, National Power Grid, Financial Transactions, Water Supply, Rail Traffic and Communications. Now if this happens suddenly one morning and we haven’t built firewalls or we have been dependent on the hardware for this integrated network, as we are today, if we lack in any field, we will not endanger our competitiveness in one field of activity but we will endanger our very existence in national security.
The point is that others are acquiring that capacity; we cannot compare ourselves to Bangladesh, Pakistan or Nepal. They present threats, but of a different kind. A China type threat -it’s a scale, it’s base, focus, its pervasiveness -those are the things we have to worry about. They are not going to slow down, because we have not been able to solve our internal problems or because our governments are not up to the mark, because our legislatures are paralyzed, or because our courts take too much time. They have many problems too. China has many problems but those problems are not going to solve our problems, they have a view about India, that is what they call, “ Claw Of The Crab”. The crab is the US, which is trying to contain China with its claws. The claws of the crab are South Korea, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Vietnam and India to contain it. Hence each of these claws must be contained in it’s own region. So , India should be kept busy here and kept surrounded. They have made Pakistan an ally, completely militarized Tibet, they have entered into an Arms Pact with Bangladesh and Myanmar, as you know, is a dependency of China. They are clearly pursuing a particular line while we just drug ourselves with opium.“ no no hindi-chini bhai bhai, no no confidence building measures with somebody”, we keep thwarting excellence, by this idiotic notion that people will be admitted by birth and not by excellence then naturally you will see a situation where we will be endangering not only our exports or one management practice but our vital existence as a whole.
The second point to remember is that if the things are not changing and we lag behind in an activity for two years, no problem, because things have not changed, but when things are changing so rapidly, so pervasively if we fall behind once it’s almost impossible to catch up.
In India socialism had completely sat upon the countries genius and weighed it down and we lost a generation and a half in that. I remember when I wrote in the mid 1960’s my doctoral thesis against this license quota, permit raj, I was condemned as capitalist monger, World Bank agent and what crap is this (what was written in the thesis). Today those people, who in those times were drafting socialist speeches for their ministers as chief economic advisor, are today known as reformers, liberalizers. The point is we lost a generation and a half, a weak and uneducated political class could not do the right and the obvious thing till a breakdown in 1991 gave it the courage at last to do the right things in reform. But that was 1991-92, China began its reform under Deng in 1978.In 1978, in most of the spheres we were better off than China. So it is very difficult to catch up once we slip in this whole sphere. Today in electronics industry, for eg. fans. Today you will see many of our manufacturers are really becoming traders in Chinese goods, the brand name of that fan in India is an Indian name but it is manufactured in China, as we have not been able to keep up in electronics and that has consequences for laptops, desktops, servers etc.
The second point is several long-term trends that are going to affect India and the world in your lifetime and probably mine - the exhaustion of natural resources or non-renewable resources. Demographic trends, the ecological footprint of this pattern of development, technological advancement, all these trends can be converted into opportunities, but if we don’t take these steps to convert them into opportunities they can just completely swamp us. One of our greatest advantages as a country is that we are the youngest population in the world Almost 60% of our population is less than 35 years. Even in the case of China, because of the 1 child policy it is an aging population. Japan, Europe, Russia are declining and aging populations. You know Russia has 11 times zones, St. Petersburg is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok, so large but its population is less than Pakistan now and declining. In the case of Europe it is declining at the rate of almost 1% per year if they don’t make up by immigrants. This has consequences in maintaining land armies, work force and in many other areas, but this is an opportunity for us, if we can solve their problems, for e.g. the care of the elderly in Japan is in a terrible condition, even though their families haven’t broken up, as in the West. Therefore, a great opportunity for us to provide great nursing facilities exists. Similarly the great number of opportunities for professionals in Europe and America are affected by this one factor, demographic change. The same thing comes about for ecological footprints, as you know pollution of various kinds, hence environmental remediation can be a very big business opportunity provided we make the microbes which can break the oil spills and others don’t develop it, hence we will be able to solve our own problem and will be able to market something and create a business opportunity for ourselves.
The demand for oil is increasing at 2 bbpd per year and the production is going down by 4 bbpd per year, so you need to discover a new Saudi Arabia every 3 years. It shows the great problem that is swelling and we with blinders are becoming more and more dependent on fossil fuels, in all our production and all our power generation, in all our transportation and automobiles and on the other side it shows a great opportunity for alternate fuels and in research for bio diesel, solar power etc. Each of these very big trends are converting to very big problems but these can be changed into very big opportunities, but if we don’t convert it, we will be sunk.
You say, ‘young population’, the other side of it is that, many people are entering the labor force and that many jobs have to be created and hence we have to create 80 million jobs in the next 4 years. You can be sure that these jobs can come from the things which we need to do and are doing to good effect, the high end services and the precision required in Bharat Forge is such that it has to be a CAD/CAM process and that it cannot provide the old kind of massive employment, so we have to do a lot of infrastructure development, a lot of agriculture, in agriculture we have to do new things and not only cereals, so that single fact of young population which is an opportunity also means a great problem of 80 million jobs which can’t be created by the things we do, but which we have shown we can do to good effect in the last few years.
India should be like Symbiosis, to be always be doing new things, thinking of new things and carrying them through and in all this 2 points must be remembered. To do these things it is not only enough to be better than what we were yesterday, very often satisfied that we have improved. For example, our custom procedures used to take 3 weeks but now take 7 days, it is not enough, in any of these things ,we have to be better than our competitors can be, in the time it will take us to improve our ways, not only what China and Vietnam are today but if I have to catch up to their methods and it is going to take me five years. Then I better know where will they be in five years from now. I have to be better than today and there is nothing automatic in the life of countries. Nobody from outside shall come to do this and neither God shall do it because he must have something else to do, and God should do more! - As there is so much suffering in the world but nobody else is going to come. So the point is that we must learn from other countries the shooting stars that came and disappeared. In India there are two races, and how we should attend to these races, I shall come to that. Today in India you find a very creative society, since the dead hand of the government has been lifted, because of these reforms. Pune personifies it, Bangalore, Mangalore personify it today, Mysore tomorrow, Hyderabad, Chennai all these cities personify a creative society. But, on the other side you have a scaffolding of the state, which is being hollowed by termites, which is the political class. So will this structure come down or will this society get fed up and put pressure on the political and bureaucratic class to improve its pace, that is a big open question, it is a race.
Similarly there is a race between you people, your faculty that is the middle class, the class of professional entrepreneurs who are making the new India and the political class that is stalking the old India to keep itself in power, as in caste. None of you think of caste but the politician thinks which caste can I promote to become a leader, a PM, a deputy PM, it’s a race. And it is not a settled race and apart for what we shall be doing we must be attending to these races in our lives. In meeting all this, one of the points to remember for all of us is that our professions will change even in our generation. But in my parents’ generation entering into a profession was like entering into a marriage it was like the rest of your life, now even entering a marriage doesn’t mean it’s for life. New professions are coming up, if I see even media when I used to work in newspaper fifteen years ago and today is a completely transformed place for the good in many ways and existing professions are completely wiped out. And over that you know the half life of any technology is 36 months, the half life of a product 6-18 months, we used to have landlines, we had queues for them we had to wait 5-6 years for them and it was a great revolution when the PCOs were set up. Then everybody acquired mobiles and you don’t go to a PCO for making a call, so if I had set my life on a PCO then I must reinvent myself into whatever- a computer information technology outlet. But now mobiles are there, but now with VOIP, when you can have almost free calls. Who will need a mobile? now skype has come on mobiles, what will Airtel, Tata, Reliance will do for tomorrow who have sunk 2000 crores in the infrastructure for this mobile telephony. It shall now be free, in the next 4-5 years mobile telephony will be absolutely free in the West hence we can expect the same in India in 6-7 years. And the other side, we shall have to depend on our own resources as the state shall not have enough resources, energy or commitment to take care of the fall out of such change.
China today, by the pace of economic change, has a floating population of 120-140 million people. They are dislodged from the countryside and roaming city to city in the look out for jobs. In India, there will be new kinds of professions’ new kinds of trade, because of the WTO regime and the dislocation it will cause, there will be floods of human beings and what will happen as a consequence ? Other ways will have to be found. But what if the state of India then, has neither the ability nor the resources to deal with the consequences in this way. Therefore, I treasure institution like yours, when I read in different magazines like Business Today, of the new work we are doing, to equip society even our class- the middle class, for the future we have to completely reinvent everything. I shall give you one example of education, so much of our traditional education, not in your institution, but as a system of education in the whole of India, even up to graduate and post graduate level is of imparting education to a child and seeing how much he has retained, but when you can ask the information off the wall, today you can google anything and tomorrow you won’t have to type because there will be voice recognition, day after tomorrow it will not be voice recognition on your laptop but in your building, you just ask the question and the question will come on your screen, in such a situation, what would be gained by an education system whose main thrust is to impart information? The education system should be one which will teach me to ask questions which those devices cannot answer. How to immerse myself in new experiences especially for our teachers. See the kind of controversies that are coming up, how should the history textbooks be written. Was Guru Tegh Bhadurji a dacoit or not - on this the parliament is paralyzed. Now we are embroiled in a controversy on caste in the educational system. Is it what is going to equip me in the future? So, are our teachers prepared for this and how will they assess a student? If you see in the big type of examinations like UPSC etc. why have we gone into a multiple choice kind of pattern, because of the ease of assessment, if I have to read 400,000 essays I can’t, neither can the body of examiners, so I set multiple questions. Even the evaluation of student will be easy.
Even if you see the standards of education outside your institution, the mushrooming numbers of these, each minister gives these figures- ‘the largest scientific manpower in the world, these are a very important asset of India’, but, see the standards of education in India ( and we call ourselves the IT superpower and in many ways we are in the world). The fact is we are producing 30 IT Ph. D.s in a year, in natural sciences we are producing only 3000 in a year and that is not a way to be a super power, and then the standards of those Ph.D.s! There is an inverse snobbery in India, many of these big writers, commentators say what’s with this higher education, it is more important for general primary education and the higher standards of education are dismissed as if it is just a concern of the elite. But the fact is that most of the societies are made by the elite, that doesn’t mean others are not important but nanotechnology cannot be done by the so called masses, it will a very microscopic and nanoscopic minority in the country which will do it. So to pay attention to the standards of higher education and multiply this is the first lesson.
The Second lesson for the education system and for each of us, is to acquire not just one skill but multiple skills. Take the ageing population in Japan, we can provide nursing, then you need to have Nursing, English and as well as Japanese training. I have found in my life it is advantageous to have 2-3 professions which you should be pursuing in your life.
There were 3 editors in India who were dismissed from their jobs Mr. Pran Chopra of Statesmen, Mr. George Vergheese of Hindustan Times and myself in Indian Express. But there is only one editor who was dismissed not only once but twice, and that is me! And I’m still surviving. I have 3 professions, first the ministry, which I get without asking and is taken away without asking, it is not like this that I sit at home and start crying. So one should have multiple skills and multiple professions going on at the same time because of the pace and whirl of change. Second, is to acquire, and for institutions to impart to us, not just the skills but the meta skills through which other things can be acquired. Not information but the information about how can I locate that information quickly, so the emphasis is on meta skills in this way. Thirdly, continuous upgradation in whatever sphere we are, this way will cause the requirements to change overnight. The fourth feature is to aim at excellence which your institution has come to symbolize and to aim for this excellence in whatever assignment you get later on in life, because one of the good things that has happened in the new India, in the new companies is a compulsion to be excellent, but in other professions like journalism, government service and politics ,it is so easy to get by with mediocrity that it is very necessary to have an inner compulsion and drive to excel. In journalism I see in 2-3 years and especially in government service people just don’t read a book. They do absolutely minimal work and when work for a day is done lets go to the coffee house! I rarely meet a government servant and never a politician who’s reading, so this inner drive that you must carry forward from your institution symbolizing excellence that you in spite of your circumstances, in spite of the atmosphere, not being so demanding that you will excel. Because time flies, it’s not that you just will be swamped by personal, or job or company which is aiming for that excellence, but our lives fly and in the end just watching television as an old person is a sad way to go. So we should be doing things and keep doing them in an excellent manner.
I would like to go further and give you two further suggestions for meeting the future. India today requires not just that we should be excellent in our own profession, but India in general , outside this institution, there is an assault on excellence as such, so we have to be the lobby for the ideology of excellence. In India today because of the political and bureaucratic classes we have a situation today, that standards are being dismissed as elitist, even Supreme Court decisions are being seen as a conspiracy, mediocrity has become the norm, in which intimidation has become the argument, in which assault has become proof. I can assault you, therefore I’m right. Now if we listen to several politicians of today, if you talk to them about this today they’ll reply it is elitist and this means that we must work beyond our professions. Bring the world to India so that India realizes what it has to face.
So my final plea to all is that as you grow in your professions and your professions demand 24 hours a day, you devote yourselves to one public issue, one public institution, work at it for 1-3-5-10 years till you are recognized as the authority on that subject all over the country, till you have actually made a difference to the functioning of one institution in one place and it is possible to do that. I saw my father die at 94 years, he was a retired government servant and till the previous evening he was working and with just a ballpoint pen and blank sheets of paper. Our PIL is because of him; our Consumer litigations are because of him. Just one person sitting cross legged writing in his lap.The Supreme Court judges would say, “ when he comes to our court we stand up and he never comes to us with a problem but with a solution . We tell him, ‘ Shourie Saab, what is the order to dictate today?’”- because he would have worked out the last detail of the solution and it will always be in the interest of the general society and not anyone in particular. So if a 94 year old person can do that so can we, it is not a switch, public life in India to which you must devote yourself and I don’t mean politics I mean public discourse, on any issue you pick up, for e.g. better routing system of the public transport in a city. If you read Gandhiji’s writings, he would have a long writing on how to improve the third class compartment in railways, nature cure etc. Why can’t you and I sit down and identify the 10-12 herbs, which we can grow in our veranda, which help us in fighting common ailments. You can do it; we have a small movement that everyone grows these plants in their houses. It concerns me no more than it concerns the average citizens and you should work on that, the rule of that is, it is not a switch that you can turn on and it will start glowing. There is a passage in the Dhammapada, it is said to us by the Buddha but it applies to the case of policies of institutions the phrase is “ As the silver smith removes the impurities from silver so does the wise man from himself, one by one little by little and again and again”. To work with such patience and always excel and remember the proud name of the institution and devote ourselves to one public issue one public organization- and you will make India better equipped to face the future , which we have to face together.
Mr Arun Shourie – a profile
Born in Jalandhar, he studied at Modern School, Barakhamba and St. Stephen’s in Delhi. He is the son of renowned consumer activist and retired ICS officer, Shri H. D. Shourie. He obtained his doctorate in Economics from Syracuse University in the United States. He has been an economist with the World Bank, a consultant to the Planning Commission, India and the editor of the Indian Express.
He briefly worked with the Tata group for a period of three months before joining the World Bank’s young Professionals Programme in 1966. He then served as an economist with the World Bank for over a decade (1967-78) and during that stint he worked as a consultant to the Indian Planning Commission.
Arun Shourie is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He has been a member of the Rajya Sabha and also held the office of the Minister of Disinvestment, Communication and Information Technology in the Government of India under Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s prime ministership. In a poll of India’s top 100 CEOs in February 2004 he was ranked the most outstanding minister of Mr.Vajpayee’s government.
He is an acclaimed writer. His writings have gained him a considerable following, around the country, as well as several national and international honours. Among these are the Padma Bhushan, the Magsaysay Award, the Dadabhai Naoroji Award, the Astor Award, the K.S. Hegde Award and the International Editor of the Year Award. The Federation of Indian Publishers recently conferred The Freedom to Publish Award on him.
Contributed by Sonal Mehta
