India’s Planning Commission fixed the poverty-line at Rs. 29 per person per day (around ½ USD at today’s rate) attracting severe criticism that the amount is unreasonably low. The Commission’s Vice Chairperson, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, mounted a spirited defence of the poverty-line in CNN-IBN recently. He argued that the poverty line is used only to measure the trends in poverty over time, and it does not indicate the level of poverty, and so the level of poverty-line does not really matter. In other words, this number is only a benchmark based on which we can find out whether the number of people at that level has gone down or up over time, giving us a clue to how policies over this period have performed. There is a merit to this argument.

Courtesy: The Hindu

He also argued that the number of people below poverty line has gone down over the last five years, and attacked those who criticise this assessment. Specifically, he said that these people are not contributing to an intelligent debate on poverty and are instead just bent on making the political point that poverty has increased with Economic Reforms. I agree with him that there are such people. I also agree that income levels of the poor have gone up, and even though it has gone up only by a small measure, it makes an important difference to people’s lives. My agreement with him stops there.

The level of comparison

In arguing that the level of the line does not matter for comparing over time, he implicitly makes an argument that the trend of income change is the same for all income groups. This is problematic. A low poverty line helps us understand the net change in the number of people who slipped above or below the line – nothing else. It gives us no information about people who are poor by any reasonable standard but are above the poverty line, which is problematic given the number of people about whom this gives us no information. To take an extreme hypothetical example, if the line is fixed at zero, we will estimate that there is zero poverty, and this will be the case every year making the estimates uninteresting and meaningless. While the current level does give us some information, much is missed by keeping the level so absurdly low.

Why revise the benchmark?

His defence of the estimate is all the more problematic if we consider the fact that the criticism is to the revised estimate of the level of poverty made by the Tendulkar Committee. Montek argued that the poverty line is analytically useful only if it is held constant because it enables comparison. If that were the case, why appoint the Tendulkar commission, spend all that money and effort into revising the poverty line? The point of that exercise was to arrive at a more reasonable measure of poverty.

Not any expert’s business

He also argued that the estimate should not be criticised because the measure is not arbitrary and it was arrived at by experts. If the mandate of the ‘experts’ was only to estimate the number of people who are poor based on a level of poverty that was given to them, I would agree with such an exercise. While economists are trained to do that, they have no expertise to arrive at what is a level about which one could deem a person to be not poor. For that matter, no ‘expert’ is qualified to make that judgement. It is an exercise in human values and the only correct way to arrive at the level would be through a public debate by which we can arrive at a broad agreement. The commission and its experts can assist in this process and participate in it, but to say that a group of experts can do it in isolation, and that it should not be criticised is bogus.

The acceptable amount argument

On a related note, after arguing that Rs. 29 figure is not useful as a measure of poverty per se, he goes on to argue that it is a reasonable amount if we see it not as a daily level per individual and instead look at it as a monthly income per family; a cleaver way of arguing that it is an acceptable level. Similarly while arguing that the poverty line is not useful as a level, he emphasised again and again that “poverty” has declined over the last five years. A more accurate statement would be that the number of people making less than Rs. 29 per day in urban areas has gone down over the last five years. It is not surprising given that he states that POVERTY has reduced, after all that way of putting it can help in getting political support for Reforms that he has been a champion of over the years.

Do we need a level?

He has also argued that the poverty line will not be used in order to identify people who are poor for government programs, and that he is happy to use an arbitrary figure for the purpose. In my view, this is nothing but an attempt to distract attention on the level, since public attention to the level will force the commission to revise the poverty line upwards, which will in turn increase the number of people who we estimate to be poor. This will raise demands for greater state engagement in combating poverty, which goes against his politics.

Intelligent apolitical debate

He has argued that we have to have an intelligent debate on the poverty line and we should not compromise intellectually in order to score political points. There are at least two key issues under debate here: what a reasonable level of poverty is, and how poverty has changed over time by this estimation. In my opinion, he has played a useful role in arguing that things have changed for the better over the years. I believe in this and the NSS data backs this claim.

The criticism on the revised estimate poverty by the Tendulkar commission is another part of the debate, where his role has been to confuse the public and attack those who criticise without taking a stand on what this level should be. I believe that his reason for doing so is very political, and has to do with his vision for the role of government in public welfare. Thanks to his politics, while arguing for an intelligent apolitical debate on the issue, he has acted as a master obfuscator himself.

Related posts

1. PDS does not reach the right people, let’s shift to cash transfers or coupons This is a part of a series of articles on...
2. Books and articles by Jean Dreze: A detailed bibliography (downloadable) This is a reasonably good list of books and articles...
3. Bibliography: Right to food (downloadable) The books and articles here cover many of the key...
4. Corruption in the PDS & will coupons or cash transfer work better? This is a part of a series of articles on...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Delhi and its surrounding areas host thousands of birds, both permanent residents and visitors from Europe, Russia and other areas.  Wetlands, the thickly wooded ridge, old buildings and a variety of other habitats enable hundreds of species of birds to thrive in the area.  The wetlands present one of the most heavenly sights that one gets to see in the grater Delhi area, and it is getting encroached, polluted and destroyed.  This news item by CNN-IBN documents one beautiful wetland that has been given to builders, so that ugly buildings can replace a beautiful habitat for hundreds of birds and other animals.  It will be yet another case of paradise lost.

Link to the CNN-IBN report: http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/222397/up-mayawati-sells-wetlands-to-private-builder.html

For pictures of the birds in places around Delhi: see http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishjaap/ & http://www.flickr.com/photos/49403400@N08/sets/72157624517591791/detail/

Related posts

1. Hunger in the Classroom This article was written after a delightful visit to Karnataka...
2. Corruption in the PDS & will coupons or cash transfer work better? This is a part of a series of articles on...
3. A Message of Hope I wish to share with you a message of hope...
4. Fighting corruption using right to information: Arvind Kejriwal’s talk Good introductory video on using right to information to combat...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

15 Jan 2006

I should not have trusted my ethnography professor.  She convinced me today that good academic writing should make the researcher visible.  By subscribing to this, I have created an existential crisis for myself: Who am I?

I would like to write about my fondness for butter scotch ice cream and denim kurta, or that my grandmother asks me to get married every time I speak to her.  Unfortunately, in academic writing these are interesting but irrelevant details.  I asked myself what could be relevant and one thumb rule comes to mind: I should write only about those things that will influence the reader in how they understand my understanding.  It has to have the potential of giving them some “Ah ha moments” of discovering for themselves new information on the information I share with them.  They should be able to say things like, “Ah ha, he could have missed seeing this being a Brahmin boy”; “it is unlikely that an official discussed these things with an ex-activist”, etc.  A good introduction will make my reader, a co-investigator in my project.

PS: I now have the rule, but the question remains: who am I?

Weighty matters

21 June 2007

I climbed the weighing machine today after two years. I pushed the scales to a familiar position and it remained upright.  I nudged it gently to no avail.  After considerable amount pushing around the scale tilted indicating I was somewhere there – and I had grown a full 20 KGs.  If have been Americanised in any way, it is this, and I seem to have put my deposits just where men in hurry always do – a pot belly.

31 July 2007

Strange things are happening to me.  I reached India 15 days ago and went to a women’s college in Chennai on some work.  I met the head of X department and she immediately called me “sir”.  I am unused to this, that too by a senior person in a hierarchical institution like a college in India.  I begged her to call me Vivek.  “Oh OK Professor Vivek”, she said very sincerely.  Earlier when I moved from place to place even a (low cost) rickshaw wala would not solicit me unless I asked for one.  This time around taxi drivers (the high cost end) rush to me to know where sar wants to go.  I have also had an easy time in getting things done in government offices.  Something seems to have changed.  My friends tell me that I am just the same but for some extra weight. I have been wondering what is happening to me.

I think I got a clue today.  A Panchayat president I interviewed told me sweetly that people listen to her because she’s plump.  Two years and twenty KGs earlier, I would have missed the import of the statement, but now I don’t.  I used to be so thin that I was called a skeleton, stick of a coconut leaf and other colourful adjectives.  Now these adjectives are gone, and I am convinced that my new status is due to my pot belly. I am ok with the status, but I am not sure if I should write about this in my dissertation.  Perhaps I should consult my ethnography professor.

Rose, black & brown

30 Sept 2007

Amma asked me not to spend too much time out in the sun during fieldwork.  She’s worried that I might become darker.  In the darkest person in the family already; after all, Tamil Brahmins tend to be fair complexioned.

I reached the village for fieldwork and had a conversation with a passerby.  He asked me to go and meet his friend who knows a lot on my topic, and telephoned his friend generously to say that I am coming.  Not knowing how to introduce me he thought for a while and then said, “a rose complexioned young man will come to meet you”.  I have now come a full circle.  I am rose complexioned where I do my fieldwork, black for my parents and brown for the American government.  Who indeed am I?

Ps. I think I told you this before, I should not have trusted my ethnography professor.

Disciplinary approach

Feb 2009

I went to a dissertation defence this afternoon.  My friend was candid and bold.  To many questions he answered candidly that he wanted to try a few things, but did not do so because it is not the norm in political science.  He said, “My hands are tied”.  I do not want to bind my hands, but academic culture may require me to write things in a particular way.  I am glad to be in the social science programme, unattached to any discipline so that I do not have to tie my hands.

Making the researcher visible

20 Oct 2009

A lot of people I met talked about communist, Dalit and other village level movements again and again. I also find reflections of these types of movements in many villages.  I guess these must have had a lot of impact. I am not too sure what other movements might have had an impact in the state…I guess I will never know all of them.

My fieldwork reflected five forms of collection action repeatedly giving me a reason to believe that these are among the major forms that had an impact on collective action in Tamil Nadu.

The following five forms of collective action had a significant impact in shaping institutional changes in Tamil Nadu.

Related posts

1. On narrowing focus for dissertation proposal One of the biggest challenges in writing a proposal is...
2. Mind-maps for organising the layout of a chapter, article or dissertation Mind maps can help us contend with different ways of...
3. Dissertation troubles & the importance of knowing oneself Ph.D. is a long haul & often a tiresome journey....
4. Lantern & the sea: a dream to make dissertation writing fun This is the fourth post I am writing today when...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

After watching a news report on the appalling number of schools in India without even a building to house it in, I saw an advertisement mentioning “My classroom has no walls, I have no ceiling”.  I would have thought that it were a fundraising advertisement to build schools, but for the white smiling face in the ad.  It turns out in this strange world that classrooms without walls can also be sold as an opportunity.

Related posts

1. Best international news programmes: A list An effort to build a list of good international news...
2. Understanding UID through “radio tags” “Do you want to wear an anklet or do you...
3. Obama’s worrisome idioms: In reaction to his Berlin speech I was impressed with Obama’s talk on race during the...
4. Developments in Hindi cinema: Will the big kill the good? As big budget movies with huge marketing costs become popular...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

We are used ventriloquists doing their routine with a variety of puppets.  Here are a few videos that redefine ventriloquism as most of us know it.  It is totally awesome.

Magic drawing board

Click here to view the embedded video.

The magic chimp with the little girl

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Mask

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ventriloquism meets technology

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts

1. Nothing as entertaining as extremism In a world that is deeply worried about extremism I...
2. American war par da song by Jayashree Eisenhover in a memorable speech talked of the danger of...
3. Frust444rat4ion Frustration is all about small things Frustration 4444i4s a4l444l44 4a4bou4t...
4. Dis-concert in Madras A little note on how Hariprasad Chaurasia’s concert left me...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I am sorry to disappoint you in case you came here for some gossip on our friends, Bill & Melinda.  This article is about two bizarre structures, one in Delhi and one in Los Angeles.  The front gate of the Delhi School of Economics is massive and ornate, and it is supported by pillars that hold the massive gate on either side. It is said that the two pillars are called truth and knowledge.  What is special about these gates is that they have never been opened, and people have been forced to use the rear entrance to access the school for decades.  Several theories exist on why it has never been opened, and none of them is well established.

One theory is that the founder of the school – VKRV Rao – had declared that the gate should only be opened when someone from the school gets a Nobel Prize.  When Amartya Sen got his Nobel in 1997 there was much excitement on whether the gate will be finally opened.  I went Bombay that year and visited the headquarters of several Indian companies.  I was able to meet many top officials without prior appointments just because I was from the Delhi School of Economics, for everyone wanted to know if the gate be opened now.  All that Amartya’s Nobel did was to open some gates for me to meet them; the front gate continued to be closed.

A more colourful theory is that the pillars on which the massive gates rest have a poor foundation and they will crash if the gates are budged.  In the Delhi School of Economics, truth and knowledge have a poor foundation. No one that I know of has bothered on the question of whether the massive gate might land on someone even without someone trying to open it – with an earth quake for example.  Stories are said, life moves on, and nothing really gets done about a bizarre structure.

The other gate rests in between a square in downtown Los Angeles.  I saw this first during my guided tour of the opera house, in front of which the gate stands.  The guide told us when the gate was built, by whom and an assorted set of statistics about it.  He told us that it was a symbolic gate, and the artist meant for it to be open at all times as a sign that anyone is welcome to that space.  The gate stands by itself and it is neither an entry nor an exit to anywhere, and it is an ornate nothingness in the middle of the square.  I am not sure how many will get the symbolism of the open gate for welcomeness, unless told by a guide. I am reminded time and again that art should not be evaluated for its aesthetic alone, but let me add that it is not a gate that captures the eye.  It is one bizarre structure in all.

The two gates are bizarre but with a difference.  The gate in India is a mystery.  No one knows why it exists, why it is never opened, and it unleashes the creativity of many a story teller even when it was never meant to do so.  The other, a piece of art, has authoritative stories about it and there is no doubt on when, where, how, who and other questions.  The creativity of the artist is what matters and we are mere consumers of that creativity, unless of course, a blog post is written on the irony of it all!

Related posts

1. Gift of the Magi 2.0 O. Henri's Gift of the Magi rewritten in the Web...
2. The umbrella Joie de vie could just be another name for Jubeet....
3. Four Dollar Hair-cut Haircuts are expensive in the US.  The shops near the...
4. Playthings by Tagore Tagore wrote a beautiful poem called “Playthings” that I was...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Unlike a lot of people, writing does not come to me naturally.  It has been a slow and difficult learning process, and I had to contend with massive writing project as I started the dissertation.  As it turned out, writing the dissertation was fun, but not always.  It took me an year and a half to write the dissertation after the fieldwork, and in the process, it helped me to know what other writers had gone through.  A lot of that advice came from the committee and from my peers at the University, and some of it came from webcasts on the art of writing.

These talks helped me reflect on writing: why I write, how to write, and what one goes through as a writer.  It helped me anticipate that I will have to re-write again and again, and that there will be days when I will get stuck staring at a blank page or a half-written paragraph.  It is not that these talks ensured that I did not get stuck, but it helped to know that it happens.  More  than anything else, they helped me remember that writing can be fun; something that a lot of us in the run to finish a long project forget.

Click on the list icon that looks like a stack of cards in the bottom to see the entire list of videos, or you can always visit my YouTube channel here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts

1. Mind-maps for organising the layout of a chapter, article or dissertation Mind maps can help us contend with different ways of...
2. Making subjectivity visible: Sections from my dissertation My pot belly, being 'rosy complexioned' and other stories from...
3. Right to information call centre in Bihar: Video clip It looks like Government of Bihar has launched a Right...
4. Webcast of interview with Amartya Sen: Reflections on theory in social sciences Many talks and interviews with well known people are now...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

One challenge that I faced while writing my dissertation was that every time I started a new chapter, I had to deal with multiple ways of organising it. For example, there were times when I could have narrated my story village by village. Alternatively, I could have organized the layout based on themes or chronology of events that would cut across each village. There was merit in organising the chapter in each of these methods. This is a challenge that a writer would face no matter what one writes: be it a story, a journal article, a movie script, a dissertation or any book for that matter.

If organising a chapter or a journal article is challenging, planning an entire book or a dissertation can be absolutely daunting. Sometimes, the author is forced to stick to some broad outlines that are enforced by the publisher or by the University that forces the decision on us. Most dissertations have an introduction wherein we are asked to describe the issue we’re working on, provide literature review, argue that this work is distinguished, discuss the research methods, et cetera. Such guidelines are certainly helpful in expediting our work, by making the decision of organising on our behalf. But even these broad outlines will never leave us without a choice of different ways of organising that which we are writing, at least in the two or three chapters that are left to us.

While the challenge of organising the layout cannot be wished away or mechanically solved, I found it useful to try out different possible layouts by putting each on a mind map. To continue with the previous example, I would start a mind map with three nodes: chronological, thematic and village-by-village. Under each of these nodes, I would attempt to narrate the story by putting the basic arguments together as a tree.

This process forces us to think about how exactly we would narrate the story, and in the process we would be able to identify the merits and pitfalls of each of these layouts. In the process of doing it, we also create a detailed outline that can be extremely helpful during the process of writing. Visualising arguments in different ways can also help us discover a new form of organising that is more logical and effective.

One unanticipated way in this process helped me was that the mind map presented me with a broken down set of topics that I had to write on, and I could focus on one little task at a time when I wrote, instead of trying to relate to the entire book or dissertation or a chapter at any given point of time. Thinking of the dissertation on the whole can be daunting, and the demotivation that comes with it makes us postpone the writing work. Tools like these can help us by putting us back on the track by breaking the daunting giant into manageable little parts.

Related posts

1. On narrowing focus for dissertation proposal One of the biggest challenges in writing a proposal is...
2. My dissertation question When it comes to provision of basic amenities India performs...
3. Toothpaste, hair oil, and democracy A recent survey says that Dalits of Uttar Pradesh have...
4. From fractions to millions: Getting more people to challenge corruption using mobile phones An initiative to use mobile phones to combat corruption in...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

My first experiment with Microsoft’s Photosynth software that creates one large image stitched out of nearly 50 photos.  A view of one of the most beautiful parts of Stanford.  For best results, expand this to full view.

The synth may not work in FB.  If you are unable to view this in this page, click here.

Related posts

1. Sex or salt? First attempt at creating a cartoon strip.  Click to see...
2. Puppy surveillance My cousin had left Pepsi – a lab and Spicey...
3. Vivek goes shopping Remembering my own “Westside story”...
4. The importance of a pot belly A Panchayat president I interviewed recently told me sweetly that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

During my last visit to India, I participated in a few meetings on questions such as strengthening the right information act, the role of the PDS, and other social issues. In all these meetings there was a vigorous debate on how mobile phones could be used on each of these issues given the rapid spread of mobiles in rural India. Despite periodic discussion about the use of technology, I did not hear viable ideas among my activist friends. I believe that this is in part because most of them are not advanced users of technology, and they have definitely not indulged in creating any application based on mobile phones. Consequently, they do not have the technical imagination on what could be done and what the limitations of technology are, even when there is a feeling that technology could be put to good use for the causes that they pursue.

While that remains the case with seasoned activists, many new initiatives have come from those who are savvier with technology. These interesting initiatives including an online bulletin board that could be accessed via mobile phones, mobile phone interface between underserved groups and medical professionals, monitoring of elections, platforms for civic complaints, et cetera.

While the applications per se are simple, the process of creating and deploying these applications is made a lot more complex by the fact that they have to deal with telephone operators to get short codes and other infrastructure, negotiate better deals with these operators for getting good rates, get servers (the location of the servers is sensitive since calls/SMS I typically initiated from these locations, and thus they have implications for cost), and deal with a lot of other technical issues that are in some sense peripheral to the project.

In addition to these technical issues, there will now be legal issues including a recent law that permits a maximum of 100 SMSes per SIM card per day. Dealing with all these issues, along with the cost of commercial providers makes mobile based social projects a costly one to undertake, that can be demotivating for most people who wish to take it up.

Given the context where a number of activists are thinking about the use of mobile phones for social causes, and the context in which a number of young people are taking imaginative initiatives, it would be useful to have a foundation that could offer basic mobile-based services on the cloud for public services applications. Such a foundation could accelerate innovations in mobile based applications by reducing the costs of creating such systems.

I imagine that such a service will offer servers that could be used to send and receive SMS messages and voice messages, a set of phone numbers that could be used around India, built in modules for surveys, mass messaging and other common uses. Finally, it should also offer an API for those who wish to build applications based on their need. The foundation can also negotiate good rates with telephone companies and train users on the legal issues.

Services such as Twillio in the US offer many of these capacities on ready-made basis, and services such as SMS-Gupshup have started providing some of these in the Indian context. These are mainly commercial providers, and so they costs are substantial. Public service websites like Kiirti.org provide some services for free, but they do not offer a facility for others to create applications using the website. Google’s SMS channel is a good resource, but it does not allow for customized messages. Thanks to these limitations, there remains the need for a platform with broad based capabilities; I believe that it will go a long way in fostering innovation in using mobile phones for social causes.

Related posts

1. From fractions to millions: Getting more people to challenge corruption using mobile phones An initiative to use mobile phones to combat corruption in...
2. Creating a Yelp for the government In 2004 website called yelp.com was created to help people...
3. Politics, technology & accountability I Is accountability a political problem on which technology cannot have...
4. Understanding Tamil Nadu’s commitment to public services: An institutional perspective My doctoral dissertation on the question of why Tamil Nadu...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.