Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Chair in the name of Prof. H.N. Mahabala at IIT Madras

Mr HR Mohan, President, Computer Society of India (CSI) has told a number of us that a Chair in the name of Prof. H.N. Mahabala is being instituted at IIT Madras, in the field of Computer Science and Technology.  This is an honour that is very well deserved, and all of Prof Mahabala's colleagues including CSI colleagues should rejoice on hearing this news. Congratulations, Prof!

But there is no harm in sharing a “joke” at Prof's expense at this moment, particularly when it is based on a true occurrence. Sometime, about 20 years ago, he and I were on a morning flight from Mumbai to Delhi.  We saw each other in the queue, and so got together to find two seats side by side. The take-off and the breakfast went on well; then came the coffee. Prof HNM took a look at the cup and pressed the "call staff" button. He showed the cup to the lady who turned up and asked "What is this?" Clearly marking the rim of the cup was a lipstick mark! 

The lady did a brilliant job of complaint handling, and asked him with a smile "What are you complaining about, Sir?" Many of us in that row and the next one burst out laughing! 

Srinivasan Ramani

Monday, December 1, 2014

Indian Innovation: “Masala Coke” and “Masala Sprite”


While traveling through the city (Bengaluru), I was surprised to read “Masala Coke” and “Masala Sprite” being advertised through a crudely lettered poster.  

I looked for any news item on the Web on this topic and saw this recipe:

Doesn’t sound bad, does it? However, let me also mention that
tells me that you get 39 grams of sugar in a 12 oz drink! Garam Masala does not reduce sugar content in any way!


Srinivasan Ramani 

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Blaming the developing world for climate change

During a show of the movie ‘Interstellar’, I sat up when there was a reference to an “Indian Air Force Drone”. The hero (Cooper) chases it with his car and shoots it down. He says that these drones carry excellent solar panels, as he proceeds to take out one from the shot-down drone. The whole reference to this drone is in the context of a dying earth facing the consequences of climate change, dramatically picturised through huge dust storms that ruin farming around the world. The only thing left for the human race, according to the script, is interstellar travel to a far-away planet. One of the characters in the movie refers to “six billion people who want everything!” I am quoting from memory, and so the words may be different; but the meaning of this comment was very clear to me. A lot of people in economically better off parts of the world worry about the developing world. With its large population, the developing world will need a lot of resources as its people improve their standards of life. Such large scale consumption, the worriers argue, may tip the world into irreversible climate change. The more developed countries expect the developing world to do with a lot less than what they themselves have and use, but the developing world will not take this lying down. The character making the comment was clearly echoing the sentiments of those who blame this phenomenon for climate change.

I am not going to discuss the merits of the worriers’ case here in this small blog post. I only wish to point the meaning and significance of the hero’s comment, as many participants in an online debate don’t seem to have taken note of this. Visit

Srinivasan Ramani 

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Are punishments for the corrupt bigwigs adequate?


The way Indian society punishes the weak is remarkable. I have heard of an office where a canteen worker was frisked on his way out of the building and found to be carrying three chapattis in his lunch box. He was promptly removed from service! Today’s Times of India carries the story of a CISF constable who was found having Rs 500 on his person. The swiftness with which his case was decided and the big price he paid for his crime are worth discussion in the light of how corrupt netas and babus are treated. 

The CISF constable mentioned above was found to have Rs 500 on him while on duty on August 3, 2008; it was presumed that this 500 must have been earned illegally, since CISF rules require that their constables should not carry more than Rs 20 on them while on duty. On April 10, 2009, he was held guilty of taking illegal gratification and removed from service. Later, authorities took into account his unblemished service record of 16 years and changed the punishment to "compulsory retirement". Visit

In comparison, what do higher level employees of the state get when found corrupt? Suspensions, transfers, or in rare cases stoppage of a few increments! What about corrupt netas? Government permission to prosecute can be denied or delayed. Witnesses can turn hostile or disappear. Those who get convicted despite all this can get bail for long periods. Appeals can keep them out of jail for a few decades. Then, if at all they get finally sentenced during their lifetime, they can get a lenient sentence because of old age. Then they can be let out on parole for some treatment in a five star hospital!  It seems logical to me that if a constable can be fired for Rs 500, bigwigs cheating the nation of a crore should get a minimum of seven years RI. A chain snatcher can get rigorous imprisonment, but netas having a few dozen crores of rupees of illegally acquired wealth seem to qualify for simple imprisonment. Where is justice? 

Mr Fadnavis, CM Maharashtra, saying that Government permission should not be a prerequisite to prosecute the corrupt is a great step forward. We will watch your governance, Mr Fadnavis, to see how you put your brave words into practice and will count how many convictions your government manages to get for those who perpetrated scams!

Srinivasan Ramani
 


Thursday, July 10, 2014

Bullet trains in India: Reality or nightmare for govt?



I have always hoped that with improved technology, railways could serve India far better than airlines for connecting cities within 500 KM of each other. The reduced fuel consumption, reduced emission of green-house gases, etc. could lead to a superior solution to our travel needs. 

However, now we have cost estimates like Rs 63,000 Crores for connecting Mumbai with Ahmadabad by bullet train. The article referred above raises reasonable questions about the logic of this bullet train proposal. It is necessary for railways to throw some light on the possible economics of what is envisaged. Otherwise, the credibility of the railways would be seriously damaged.

I invite readers to do their own calculation of the ticket price, making a few assumptions of their own: return to be expected on the investment, the number of passengers traveling between Ahmedabad and Mumbai in a year, etc. The results would be revealing.

Srinivasan Ramani

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Tax Exemption for R & D in technology for electric and hybrid cars


An item in the times of India says that this subsidy of Rs 14,000 crores will save Rs 60,000 crores in fossil fuel over six years.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit/rs-14000-crore-subsidy-proposed-for-hybrid-electric-cars/

Times of India’s own counter-view is that the subsidy amounting to Rs 1 lakh for a 32 Lakh car would mean nothing to the consumer.

Clearly, the Govt should not subsidize cars selling more than Rs 5 Lakhs. What we ought to do is to offer a tax exemption for electric and hybrid cars costing less than Rs 5 Lakhs. The focus should not be so much on direct savings, but on stimulating Indian automobile industry to do R & D to create new lines of low-cost vehicles that drastically cut into petrol and gas consumption.  The tax exemption should cover a significant portion of the R & D expenditure.

Srinivasan Ramani

Monday, July 7, 2014

Customer complaint to a Web Designer

Dear Sir/Madam, 

Thanks for your email, but I have a complaint. 

While I was still online and had the ticket displayed by the site nget.irctc.co.in 
I clicked on "print" on the page which showed the ticket I had bought for my sister Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx. The print out came out of the printer and I was amazed that the name was shown as blank.  So, clicked on "print" a second time and got the same result again. I have a suggestion. Please have your web designer look into the possibility that this occurs when one types a name longer than the website expects. It did not accept the typing of the last two letters of her name: Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx. The best solution would be to allow slightly longer names than the website accepts now. 

Thanks, 
Srinivasan Ramani  
Comment No 3 on HCI/Web Design  

Friday, July 4, 2014

Regulating private educational institutions

Ravi Iyer runs an interesting blog titled the

There are interesting discussions on that blog on profit-oriented private sector education. There is a comment on some explosive news from New York Times on a large for-profit higher education institution in the US. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/upshot/corinthian-colleges-is-closing-its-students-may-be-better-off-as-a-result.html?_r=0
There is also comment on a recent Indian report that estimates black money generated in education sector at US$ 8 Billion per year!
CRPCC-education-black-money-corruption
At this level, the Government can dig out more Indian black money locally rather than in Switzerland!
There are also references to older events in India which we cannot afford to forget, such as those reported in the following.

What about government-funded education? Is that as pure as Ganga Jal? What have the politicians done to it? 

Srinivasan Ramani

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Prof V. Rajaraman & Dr Arun Shourie honoured with D Sc (Honoris Causa ) by III/T Kanpur

Prof V. Rajaraman and Dr Arun Shourie were honoured with the award of D Sc (Honoris Causa ) by III/T Kanpur on June 18th, 2014. A link to the video coverage is at iitk.vmukti.com
The actual award presentation of the D Sc’s starts at 1 hour 17 minutes into the video. So fast forward to 1:17, unless you wish to view the whole video.

Srinivasan Ramani



Sunday, June 29, 2014

How well does a college teach its students?

How well does a college teach its students?

A large number of tests and examinations are taken by millions of college graduates in any given year. Indian civil services examinations, Joint Entrance Examinations for NITs, IITs, etc., and medical entrance examinations are a few examples. It should be easy to compute the average marks from a given University-College combination in any such examination/test. For statistical reasons, we may take the number as meaningful only if 50 or more candidates in the examination/test have taken it. Such average numbers for a given institution should be available under the Right to Information Act. The media should publicise these numbers. All colleges sending 50 candidates or more to a public examination can be ranked in relation to others and assigned a Competitive Rank. So, a particular college could have a CR of, say, 214/8215 indicating that its student-average earned it a rank of 214 among 8215 colleges each of which sent 50 candidates or more.

Why? If any student was to consider joining a college for studies, the above-mentioned information would help her decide if that college educates students well enough. Institutions use the marks of a candidate to decide to accept him/her for studies. Similarly, the candidate should be able to access the marks the college gets in public examinations!

Whether a university gives its students a three or four year degree matters less than how well it educates its students in the given period of time. The CR may not be a perfect measure of how good a college is; no single number, or even a set of numbers, can be a perfect measure. I don’t think my school leaving marks was a perfect measure of how good (or bad) I had been as a student! But I have been admitted or refused admission on the basis of that “imperfect measure!” We don’t need perfect measures, reasonably good measures will do!

There is one obvious problem in comparing the performance of colleges - difference in input standards. Are graduates of a college doing well mainly because it admits only those who are in the top 2% of school leavers? Or is it because the teaching there is very good? Will a student not in the top 2% gain any big benefit by getting into that college? 

There is a second problem in comparing the performance of colleges. One department of a college may be very good while another is mediocre. What does the average score of its graduates mean? These problems are only examples that illustrate the need for academic research. They do not damage the basic argument - we need measures of how good colleges are. We need these measures to be available to students and parents.      

This raises the question of a Unique ID for a University-College combination. Let me offer a simple suggestion. Use the PIN code of the headquarters of a university as its Unique ID. Most Universities seem to give their affiliated colleges a “College Code”. Combine the University ID with the College Code with a “-” in between. For instance, Jai Hind College, Mumbai will have the code 400032-88 under this proposal.

What if two universities have headquarters sharing a PIN code such as 400032? I would say, assign 400032A to the older university and 400032B to the next older university sharing that code. But, we may not need to worry too much about this! Bombay University and SNDT University have headquarters very close to each other, but their PIN codes are quite different, as you will see below!
  Bombay University, M. G. Road, Fort, Mumbai-400032
  SNDT University, Nathibai Thackersey Road, New Marine Lines,
  Mumbai-400020


Srinivasan Ramani

Monday, June 16, 2014

Why is it so difficult to get a problem with a computer rectified?

The last few days have been a bit of a mess. I could not easily access some bank-provided information. The technical staff of the bank's customer-care center went beyond what such centers usually do – they called me back on the phone and told me do a number of things that I usually get CCleaner to do for me; like emptying the Internet cache, the Recycle Bin, etc. I did that and got some relief, but soon was invoking CCleaner three times a day – several websites were playing hard-to-get. The system said problems in resolving host name or something like that. I used a bandwidth tester and found that I was getting good download (16 Mbps) and upload (0.7 Mbps) speeds. 

I asked the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) call center, and its staff told me to clear the DNS cache. It didn’t help much. When I called them again, they guided me through an elaborate modem reconfiguration, using a configuration wizard. That worsened the situation - the modem stopped working and displayed a warning red light. There was another call, and another reconfiguration, which did not help either. It was quite late at night and I gave up. Then this morning I called again and did a third reconfiguration – using a land line speaker phone, with my wife helping by writing down IDs and passwords etc. By now I had discovered a discrepancy in an ID I was to enter. One operator had told me to type in something like 2797453892_ab and another wanted me to type something like  2797453892_ab@blahbroadband.in May be the system accepts either version, or may be one of them is wrong. It is OK if Ramani spends an extra 45 minutes in redoing something! Doesn't hurt the ISP’s revenue, and certainly not the call center’s! However, let me say one thing - every one I contacted over the phone was sincere, intelligent and articulate. 

The last person I had called also made an unsuccessful try with the specified standard procedure; he concluded by promising that a higher level technician would call me. This did happen two or three hours later. Meanwhile I had taken my laptop and modem to the shop that had sold me the modem. They pointed to a button at the back and said I ought to press it when these things happen and that it is a reset button. There is a hole next to this button and I asked if I should use a pin to reset the modem. They said no, the button will do. Forgive them for they knew not what they were saying! I had pressed that button whenever the ISP’s call center staff had asked me to reset the modem. I had told them the modem’s make and model number but they felt a small button next to the big (on/off) button was probably the right reset control. Now that I had the modem unconstrained by four cables, and in bright light, I could recognize that the label Reset was just below the hole and the label Wlan was the one below the button.

It was my lunch time, and my lunch had been put on a plate set on a small table behind my swivel chair.  I swung around and got a bite into a bit of chapatti. Just then came the call from the senior technician; he told me to forget the configuration wizard and do manual configuring. I started on that with all earnestness.  He told me to use the ID that looked like 2797453892_ab@blahbroadband.in  I did not have to do a hard reset at all. Another forty five minutes later, I seemed to be out of my problems, except for the difficulty in resolving host names. The gentleman had kindly stayed on the line till he got an all clear. He helped me replace in the modem's table URLS of the primary and secondary DNS servers by URLs of two other servers. May be the old servers had got overloaded; the new servers worked better. I thanked the gentleman warmly and swung around to my lunch. The chapattis had developed rigor mortis, but I was hungry enough for the fight!

All this reminded me of my telling, many years ago, a former boss of mine that the PC/Laptop interface was too complex for the majority of Indian users. He stared at me and had said “What is the problem? I have no trouble with my Laptop interface"! 

India has approximately 15 million broadband subscribers with fixed line connections. Soon the country is going to take broadband in big measure to villages. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Govt-kickstarts-work-on-broadband-connectivity-to-villages/articleshow/36502839.cms
Are we going to dump the system complexity I suffered from today on millions of villagers in 250,000 villages to be covered?

It appears to me that necessity requires that India and China should lead the world in designing simple interfaces for web access devices and computers.  However, this is a peculiar world – where the need for something is highest, usually the ability to pay for further development is relatively low. So, the needy usually have to make do with hand-me-down technology.

I feel that there ought to be a balance between adopting technology that works somewhere else, and working towards technology more suited to us.

Srinivasan Ramani
Making computer interfaces more suitable for human use.
Comment No. 2 on Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Friday, June 13, 2014

Growing up with the Computer Society of India! (posted on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of CSI)


Be careful if the CSI President invites you to a lunch, particularly if it is early in his term of office!  

It was sometime in 1974; I was working as a researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. The telephone rang, and a voice said that Mr F C Kohli from TCS would like to speak to me. It was an invitation to lunch. Kohli had either taken over or was soon to take over as President, CSI. We agreed on a date and time. The lunch would be at the Oberoi, within walking distance of Kohli’s office.

It was a good lunch – and to cut a long story short – Kohli knew how to recruit people! I accepted his invitation to serve as Chairman, CSI Publications Committee, before the lunch was over. Dr Mathai Joseph, as Editor, was bringing out the CSI Journal. Prof DVR Vithal was visiting TIFR at that time, and was very much involved with CSI. Among other things, he was handling the budget and accounts of CSI publications. I somehow got the feeling that Mathai and Vithal were in the know Of Kohli’s plans! It was a pleasure to work with the two of them and learnt how to run CSI publications on peanuts!

Mr Raizada, who lived in Delhi, was the Editor of the CSI Newsletter at that time. I noticed something special about him the first time I met him – a rare zest for life. Relaxed and smiling, he enjoyed meeting with friends and colleagues. He took pleasure in every job well-done. I would visit him on CSI business whenever I went to Delhi. He was always an excellent host. Mr Parthasarathy was the Co-Editor of the Newsletter. The three of us decided to rename the Newsletter. What better name than “Communications of the CSI”? That name has lasted to this day. Raizada passed away a few years later. Looking back, I feel he had known that he did not have long to live.

Years rolled by, and terms of office came to an end. I took the responsibility of Editorship of the Journal from Mathai. What I enjoyed most in this work was learning about printing technology of that time, and learning those mysterious notations editors used to correct and mark up the proof pages that the press would give us. Promoting submissions, writing polite regret-messages to authors who sent in papers that referees did not approve of, and coaxing advertisers were other parts of the work. The best part was in recognizing budding talent and encouraging Ph D students or young professionals to write the first papers in their careers.

Let me get back to my fascination with typesetting. The pages were manually typeset by a letter-press operator. The letters, cast in lead, lay in trays on the type-setting machine. We would go to the press near Sassoon docks to give the matter to be typeset and to collect the proof pages. I proudly recall these memories of that bygone era.  The pen would jump out of my pocket when anything looked like a manuscript or proof came in sight. I was not very popular with the typesetters, as I usually wanted them to go to a second or third round of corrections and “improvement” of layout. It would have been different if there had been a PC and a WYSIWIG editor on my table, but this was in the seventies! Anyway the cup of tea that was available round the clock in the nearby Indian Express canteen was pretty good compensation for the absence of WYSIWIG and all that. Even today, if you write me a letter, my pen jumps out and I would be editing your letter as I read it! The real victims of my proof-editing zeal were my poor colleagues and students whose Ph D work was supervised by me! How much they wished that CSI had not made me such a zealous editor! A couple of them started helping me in carrying my editorial responsibilities with CSI publications and are now as dangerous with their corrections and mark-ups as I have ever been. Chandrasekar and Anjaneyulu! Let me get even with you guys for the editing you did on my occasional writings!  

Technology changed rapidly – photo-typesetting machines took over the work of typesetting very soon. In a decade I saw the number of magazines in the market grow up tenfold or more. Then came the PC-like machines from Apple – it was a complete rout of the old technology. It is a pity that CSI publications have not carried an article describing this revolution and its impact on the life of thousands of typesetters who were displaced by the new technology. Experience and skill in a respected occupation were suddenly devalued. Kids in jeans replaced a generation of respected craftsmen. I wish someone had made a movie of the change that all this brought in – a Naya Daur of information technology, if you are old enough to remember the film that Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala had featured in!
I never did guess at that time what price I was going to pay for that lunch at the Chambers. It involved over twenty five years of work for CSI on and off in various capacities. I was “recruited” again by an incoming President, Dr P P Gupta, who followed Kohli as CSI President. That was 1976 I think. Some of us at TIFR[1] had been working on part-time courses for professionals in computing who did not have a formal qualification in this area. We were inspired by the ideals of the (British) Open University: affordable, continuing education, flexibility, and emphasis on quality. Mr P Sadanandan, Dr S P Mudur and I, working with a number of other NCSDCT colleagues were active in running part-time courses. Other colleagues at TIFR contributed, by sharing the load of teaching and administration. This was at a time when opportunities were very limited for doing a full time university degree programme in India in the field of computing. So, when Gupta asked me to suggest new activities CSI could start, I had the pleasure of working with Sadanandan and Mudur to create a proposal for a scheme to be called National Standard Tests in Programming Competence (NSTPC). This was sometime during 77-78. The three of us took turns at serving as Coordinators over the first few years as the NSTPC took off as a significant CSI activity. This program earned CSI credibility in the education area; the tests were taken by tens of thousands over the years. For instance, by 1977-78, the number of test takers per year had climbed to 2589, though only 819 qualified that year. Members enjoyed going through serious learning even years after they had left college. Many of them proudly continue to list those certificates in their CV’s on the Web even today. Dept. of Electronics of the Government of India had by that time started giving significant grants to the NSTPC activity and its scale of operations went up rapidly[2]

I think it was at the 13th Annual Convention of Computer Society of India, 1978, in what is now Kolkata – there were visiting IFIP colleagues. We were discussing possible activities of joint interest. I had been nominated earlier that year the CSI Representative to the IFIP Technical Committee No 6 dealing with Computer Networking. I suggested an International Conference on Computer Networking to be held in India. With Gupta’s support, this became a reality in 1980, in the form of Networks-80[3], perhaps the first international conference held in India in the computer field.

Why should anyone get involved with conferences? I would like to share the story of what came out of this conference. Gupta agreed to be the Organizing Chair, and I was Program Chair. However, everyone involved realized that Computer Networks was a technology with significant socio-economic value. Its potential had to be demonstrated – we requested Mr Hemant Sonawala to be Exhibitions Chair. Ambitious plans were made. In one of the brainstorming sessions held in this context, the three of us cooked up a proposal to have a multi-city demo of a futuristic railway passenger ticket reservation system. This was selected as one example of an application which, over the years, could make a contribution to the quality of life of millions of people. Sonawala offered to lend a mini-computer from Digital Equipment Corporation, and the National Centre for Software Development and Computing Techniques (NCSDCT) offered to implement the demo. Sadanandan was then Head of the Database Group at NCSDCT. The team under his leadership took on this responsibility. Sonawala and I went off to meet the Railway Board Chairman to request Railway’s cooperation and participation in the conference. He agreed readily. The Posts and Telegraph Dept. agreed to provide data-connectivity over leased lines between Ahmedabad, Bombay and Delhi. The project went on well and we got more or less ready to demo the three-city system. But unfortunately, the Railway Board Chairman who had been enthusiastic about the project reached his retirement date, and we got derailed! The new officers we met had a new priority – movement of something like 400 million tons a year of freight. One of them made a memorable comment which illustrated the value people placed on the customers’ convenience as a justification for computerization. “Have you seen a railway seat go empty?”, he asked. “If A does not go, some B will go; We have been asked by the Govt to focus on freight capacity utilization”.

While we had one setback, we had several other successes. Several international experts agreed to present papers. Companies like British Telecom agreed to set up demos. Prestel, which incorporated ideas related to real-time information dissemination and online transactions was their show-piece; it was an early precursor of the Internet. Remember, this was in 1980[4]. An international link connected a few Prestel terminals at the President Hotel in Bombay to the London Prestel Network. Their demos showed how you could read up online on bank loans, apply for one, and select your flights from an airline site to go to London. An enthusiastic student who manned the demo added you could also find a date online, so that you won’t be lonely when you got to London!

The NCSDCT team from the Database Group mentioned above demonstrated an email system it had developed. Mr V. S. Rao, one of the members of Sadanandan team, had done the lead work on this system; as far as I know, it was the first email system that was designed and implemented in India.
There were a number of papers covering a variety of topics. It created a community of researchers and professionals in this area. From then on, any conference in computer networks anywhere in the world would have a set of Indians reporting work being done in India in this field.   

This conference cost about Rs 4 lakhs if I remember right. The revenue was Rs 3.5 Lakhs or so. At the end of the Conference, we had another meeting – Gupta, Sonawala, myself, and a number of colleagues from the Computer Maintenance Corporation Ltd[5] who had participated in the Conference. Gupta briefly mentioned the shortfall of Rs 50,000 and added that CMC would take care of that. But, he said “we should focus today on how we can use what we have learnt to earn Rs 150 Crores for CMC over the next few years”. What is the connection between Rs 50,000 and Rs 150 Crores I did not understand, but we enthusiastically agreed that what we had learnt at that conference was worth quite a lot! The first suggestion was that a proposal should be prepared for submission to the Railways to implement the passenger reservation system. This suggestion was received well, and CMC won an order to implement a reservation system for the Northern Railway as a first step. The good thing about our democracy is if you get to do some good in one of the four regions, it is enough. The representatives of the people will ensure that all four corners are soon covered by your system. A CMC team, working out of their R & D Labs in Hyderabad, did an impressive job of designing and implementing the system and had covered all four regions of India within a few years.

Gupta also got deeply interested in creating an all-India data network, IndoNet. The timing was not right. The telecom monopoly of that time was not ready to let a company, even a public sector company, deal with new communication technologies. The regulatory environment was not conducive for such a move.
However, the Networks-80 conference left an indelible mark on the Indian scene. A variety of computer and network applications were thought of in the following years and implemented. The great success of the Railway Passenger Reservation system made everyone understand the benefits of the technology. Those who had been sceptical about banking applications changed their minds. The rest is history!
CSI’s cooperation with IFIP continued to develop under the leadership of Maj Gen Balasubramanian. I was involved in running a series of a bi-annual Networks conference. An honour bestowed on me by IFIP and CSI was my appointment as an IFIP Trustee for a term.

When I handed over the Networks Conference Series, it was to Prof SV Raghavan, who served over several years, running an excellent series of Networks Conferences.

One of the results of Networks 80 was that I became a confident conference organizer, ever willing to take on another big conference. I think it was the CSI Annual Convention in 1987 in Mumbai. Sonawala was the Organizing Chair and I was Program Chair. The two biggest hotels in Bombay were not big enough to hold the Convention. Sonawala suggested that we put up a huge geodesic dome in the oval maidan! This temporary facility was in addition to renting space at the two big hotels, because everything could not be fitted under the dome! Sonawala cheerfully went ahead with his plan and delivered the goods!  The audience was well over 1,000 during several sessions.

The International Conference of Very Large Databases (VLDB) was held in India for the first time with the cooperation of CSI in 1996 in Mumbai. My colleague Sadanandan took the key responsibility for this.

The South East Asia Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC) is a forum of national Information Technology professional societies in the Asia Pacific region. I had the pleasure of serving as Vice-President and later as President of the SEARC during 1997 and 1998, as a representative of CSI. We held the SEARCC Conference in 1997 in Delhi. I had the pleasure of working with Kohli again in organizing this conference. Mr Vandrewala of TCS was the conference chair. A special event I remember from this Conference was the Micro Mouse Competition that encouraged young participants to show off their competitive skills in robotics.  
The International Conference on Visual Computing (ICVC) was held by CSI and IFIP-TC5 in Goa in 1999. My colleague Mudur played the key role in this Conference.

Exposure to colleagues worldwide through international conferences gave me a number of other opportunities such as working with the International Council for Computer Cooperation (ICCC). This was a link developed in 1980, the year in which we had held the Networks 80 Conference. I served as Executive Vice President of ICCC during 1997-2002 and as President, ICCC during 2002-2004.
Let me start to conclude. Membership of CSI, and working as a volunteer of the Society were enjoyable and valuable. They created for me life-long working relationships with great professionals. I learnt as much technically and administratively from CSI as I did from colleges, institutes, etc. that I had attended. CSI experience brought me professional recognition in a variety of ways, making me President CSI during 1996-1998. CSI was bustling with activity even then; our student activities, conferences and publications were already something to be proud of. I remember in particular the very well organized Annual Convention and the excellent Student Convention, both of which were held in Bangalore in 1998.

I will end on a lighter note. What not to do in CSI? Don’t agree to run for President without knowing who else could be in the running! You might end up running against highly deserving colleagues unintentionally. You could have decades of CSI experience, and still be a political innocent!

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[1] In an autonomous unit named National Centre for Software Development and Computing Techniques. This was headed by Professor R Narasimhan, who is no stranger to the Computer Society of India.
[2] In the late nineties,  the Government decided to take over the operation by setting up a Society named DOEACC. Still later this has morphed into the National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELIT).
[3] Proceedings of Networks 80 was published by North-Holland in 1981 as "Data Communication and Computer Networks" edited by S. Ramani 
[4] India was to see its first Internet connection in 1988.
[5] It soon became CMC Ltd., to indicate that it had become a total services company.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Web Design – Comment 1: Good Filenames on Bank Statements

Who am I? I seem to be primarily a “Victim of Bad Web Design” as I suffer a lot from badly designed web pages, email attachments etc. I have hesitated to write about this on this blog – does it not increase the diversity of the topics covered? Today I decided to go ahead.  No point in starting a separate blog. I will get better attention to the comment by putting it into my main blog. Besides, most people who come to a blog post are anyway those who do a Web search for an appropriate keyword.

My pain today is from a bank which seems to label statements with what looks like a 20 digit random number! I am sure that there is some structure in the number, but it does not clearly indicate which bank or card provider sent it. I had downloaded it and deleted the email because I keep my inbox clean. Like many other users, I do not rename the downloaded file immediately or file it into the correct folder. I believe it is in the User’s Bill of Rights that he does not have to be very systematic person. On the other hand, the Bill of Rights says that those who design communications to be sent to a few hundred thousand users need to be very thoughtful professionals. Then only they can serve a large user group properly. 

Today’s pain arises because I look at a file with a name that looks something like “31783476586145984_982375.PDF” in my “downloads” folder. I cannot open it because it asks for a password; which password I don’t know because I have forgotten the company that sent the file as an attachment to its email. That email has been deleted and I cannot even find it in the trash folder. The trash must have been emptied after file was downloaded and the email deleted. You can say it is my fault! I don’t deny it, but is it wrong to ask that designers should give proper titles to files? Are designers involved? Or is some banker writing his own software after 2:30 PM when customers are not allowed into his branch?

Finally, is it too much to say that the problem would not have existed if the file name had been FLY_BY_76586145984_982375.PDF? I would have guessed that it had come from the Fly by Night Bank Ltd!


Srinivasan Ramani 

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Kota’s dream factories – Coaching Classes for the IIT Entrance Exam

I posted a brief note on this topic a couple of days ago http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2014/05/coaching-classes-and-iit-joint-entrance.html
The current blog post is a follow-up note referring to an excellent cover story from the Business Today describing the Rs 1700 Crore coaching industry synonymous with the city of Kota. 
http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/kota-coaching-institutes-brand-iit/1/194170.html The article is a year old – it is dated May 2013 – but remains very relevant. There are a few very good photographs conveying something about the city as seen by the student. It is a city of one million people. The average temperature can exceed 40 deg C in summer. The severe competition takes its own toll – the article mentions eleven psychiatrists practicing in the city. About a dozen students commit suicide every year despite this.

The current practice of the IIT Entrance Exams is that you are eliminated from the competition if you are not in the top 20 percent of those taking your school board exam.

All this tells us something about the harsh reality of growing up in India. Getting into the IIT is only part of the story. A small fraction of those who get in do so with their own handicaps – socio-economic ones, poor mastery over English which is the medium of instruction, diverse interests not aligned with the institutes’ curriculum, to list some. I heard in one IIT that typically about 10% of the students fail in calculus in their first year. I wish that something can be done to make the students’ life happier and more successful.


Srinivasan Ramani

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Coaching Classes and the IIT Joint Entrance Examination

I have heard disparaging remarks on and off about the coaching class industry “preparing students” for the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) entrance exams, but recently I heard some positive remarks. It is fair I report them. They came as a pleasant surprise to me.
The comments were from an IIT Director and an IIT Dean.  They pointed out that good coaching classes usually work with very good students only. I am not quoting them verbatim, but will report what was my take away from our discussion. The following words are my own. Obviously, the coaching classes give the students supplementary education and make them work hard.  Schools do not necessarily expose their students to face the type of questions the Joint Entrance Exam uses. So, we should not be surprised if coaching classes impart some problem solving skills over and above what most schools do. 

The learned professors said that coaching classes often hire IIT graduates to teach and pay them very well. They turn up at the IITs for campus interviews!

In conclusion, the Director mentioned that his son as well as the Dean’s son had gone to coaching classes.

Srinivasan Ramani

Friday, May 16, 2014

Air Pollution kills!

I had traveled twice into West Bengal during the last six months or so. I would fly into Kolkata and drive down to Kharagpur. On both occasions, I was amazed and frightened by the amount of smoke one sees arising from fires lit on either side of the highway in the open fields. Air pollution is no longer an urban problem only. Thoughtless burning of agricultural waste in India could very well be a significant contributor to global warming, apart from being a cause of a number of health problems. 

Meanwhile, in our apartment building in Bangalore, we have been fighting fires being set every year to wild plant growth in a neighboring plot of Government land. So, three of us from the building worked to create a petition on the site Change.org (links given below). We need your help to get it off the ground. Will you take 30 seconds to sign it right now? You can sign our petition by clicking here.

The petition reads as follows: 

To: The Chief Minister of Karnataka, Shri Siddaramaiah,


Please ban burning of garbage and garden/hospital waste within city limits all over Karnataka, particularly by Government offices, parks and hospitals. Such burning endangers the health of millions." 

Here's why it's important:
The Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 provides authority to State Governments to ban burning of any material if it is likely to cause air pollution.
Despite this, burning of garden waste continues in most cities of India. Government offices, institutions and hospitals have vast areas of open urban land under their control, and are the most prominent garden waste burners. Municipality/ Corporation workers entrusted with sweeping and collecting of waste including garden waste set fire to heaps of garbage. Municipal parks also burn garden waste. Many hospitals burn hospital waste carelessly, creating dangerous pollution. The smelly smoke arising from fires of hospital waste gives an indication of the toxic fumes that are released.  The problem is particularly acute in places such as Bangalore, due to the added burdens of high population density and vehicular pollution.
The dangers of air pollution are well known. A News Release from the World Health Organization dated 25 March 2014 is titled “7 million premature deaths annually linked to air pollution”. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/   It goes on to give the estimate that one in eight deaths world-wide are due to air pollution.
We urge you to prohibit the burning of garden waste as well as garbage within city limits, and make this a cognizable offence with immediate effect.  Please empower fire stations to enforce the no-burning rule and file First Information Reports. This is a simple measure that will improve the quality of life in our cities and reduce healthcare costs.  Please instruct government offices, institutions and parks to implement composting of garden waste. 

Srinivasan Ramani               Meera Joshi                   Amla Sirsi
You can sign our petition by clicking here. Thanks! 

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Velocity of Doing Business in India

Deccan Herald dated May 14, 2014 carries, at least on its Bangalore Edition, a thought provoking article by Shemin Joy titled “ LS polls: Why does this carnival take so long?” Why indeed? It is not as if one little unit of some police force has to travel to all constituencies one after another. Law and order is a state responsibility. Each state has its own police force. The Central Government has para-military units in all regions. What is so centralized - The Election Commission?

We cannot paralyze the Government for months in the name of a long election. All decision making comes to a halt. This time, we almost failed even to ensure that the retiring army chief would have a successor appointed in time. I believe that citizens should demand that the next nation-wide election should take no more than ten days. Economists should estimate the loss to this year’s GDP because the Government was paralyzed for so long.

I will touch upon two other examples that show how we suffer from inefficiency. The RBI had asked all credit card companies some time ago to ensure that customers used their PINs when carrying out transactions. In addition most credit companies have introduced chip-cards to improve security. Now, it is difficult to do credit card transactions anywhere in India without using the PIN. For months, most shops, petrol bunks, etc. have been wasting their staff time and customer’s time by collecting signatures on charge slips. Only one bank prints out charge slips saying “Signature Not Required”.  I don’t think they have any special exemption. They have used common sense to figure out that charge slip signatures are not properly scrutinized in any case. Using the PIN and a chip card to validate a transaction is a far sounder proposition. But most banks have “played safe” which is a game in which Indian companies excel. Who cares for peoples’ time and their productivity? I have grave doubts how thoroughly signatures on card slips are checked. Almost any scribble gets accepted! What use is it?

Lastly, a bank website wasted my time and their bank’s staff time today because of poor design of their webpage and transaction handling. I introduced a new beneficiary for a funds transfer a couple of days ago. It took 12 hours for this beneficiary to be “enabled”, for whatever it is worth. When I tried to do a funds transfer, I got a vague message like “Transaction not carried out. Contact bank branch”. I called the relationship manager and asked him. He asked me to try again after sometime. He also suggested I might try splitting the transaction and sending a smaller amount first. I tried this. His suggestions did not work. I went to the bank branch. The staff member who attended to my complaint made me log in on his PC and show him what happens. I did this. He asked another colleague of his. The colleague took some time to remember that for a new beneficiary there is a special limit to the amount that can be sent in the two days after he is registered. I had not seen any such limit mentioned. Instead of saying “Transaction not carried out. Contact bank branch”, why can’t their website tell me the rule about a special limit for the first two days? The colleague said that the warning must be somewhere, and searched for it going back and forth. Yes it was there in small print on the page which must have been presented to me when I registered the new beneficiary, in an innocuous form near the bottom of the page. I confess I had failed to notice the small print at that time, but in online transactions, one expects a well-designed transaction to warn you about limits you exceed as and when you do the transaction. How this bank manages with millions of customers I don’t know. Perhaps it is not a problem because other banks’ transaction design is no better!  In any case, they all use software only from two or three software vendors! A well-designed website seems to be no differentiator
 for the banks!
Before computerization, there was “work study” which examined how employees and customers carried out their tasks from the point of view of simplifying their work and increasing their productivity. Work study pointed out where waste of time occurred and where there was a need for improvement. Occasionally, we now hear about Information Technology (IT) Audit. I wonder if IT Audit honestly worries about the sufferings of the bank’s customers!

Srinivasan Ramani



Monday, May 12, 2014

Why no student complains that he has been compelled to pay an “illegal fee”!


However, my article here is not a direct comment on the three articles mentioned above. The common issue being discussed is privatization of higher education; but since my comments are in a specific direction of their own, I decided to post this as a stand-alone article.  

I have always been disturbed to hear about malpractices and tax evasion in many private educational institutions. If you ask your acquaintances who have got admission in "good" institutions, you will find that about 50% have paid "voluntary" or involuntary "donations" or "capitation fees". It has always puzzled me that they don’t blow the whistle even after they complete their studies and are safe from retaliation by their institutions. In fact, they don’t seem to harbor any negative feelings about such institutions after they pass out. Usually no one will testify in any court case against “their” institutions initiated by any government department.

Only recently, I understood why this is case. The students and their families feel that the denial of educational opportunity of the type or quality they desire is the worst form of cruelty. For many, it is the denial of right to live their lives in a form acceptable to them – the only life that they are going to live. That is why some of them commit suicide when denied the education they want.  No wonder that paying money, even to an extent it becomes a major burden on their families is the lesser evil. Another reason is that those who take capitation fees don’t look any worse than the politicians who mismanage and exploit public institutions. In fact, many of those who run “profitable” educational institutions are the same politicians!

Policy makers should take all this into account. Government spending on education will never be enough to give quality education to all those who desire it. Students with expectations of a good education will not be willing to accept “no admission” as an alternative! It is their life! They won’t give it up for anything, not even for preventing malpractices and tax fraud in educational institutions.  The right to life and liberty cannot be a reality without the right to education. The country has recognized the right to education of the children of those who cannot afford to pay fees, but the right is equally important to those whose parents are willing to spend one third or more of their life savings to give them a good education.  We all know middle class parents who never bought an apartment or a house, but were willing to spend money out of their provident fund for their childrens’ education.

A related issue is the way many state governments “fix” the fees that private institutions can charge for education. This automatically limits what the institution can do to set high standards. In some states the problem has been “solved”, with the robber barons of education getting control over the state’s decision-making machinery one way or another!  Politicians have also “solved” this problem in another way - anyone can spend a million rupees per year or even more abroad to get the education he/she wants.  The same politicians will not allow any foreign university to function here with any degree of freedom.

What is the solution? I believe that very liberal tax concessions should be given to large public limited companies and to individuals to set up big endowments to set up and support not-for-profit educational institutions without controlling them. Secondly, credible third party evaluation of the quality of education in different institutions should be made available to students. In many countries, student evaluation through credible websites provides such information. Many employers have their own prioritized lists of institutions they go to for campus recruitment. It will be a public service if they publish these lists.

Lastly, educational loans are very important in any modern economy. It is not surprising that the US President Obama keeps referring to educational loans. India has played around with the idea, but has not used it to achieve any big impact so far. See my article on this topic:
http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2013/07/bank-loans-for-students-non-starter.html

I understand that banks in India would love to lend money to students, but the problem is one of risk in collecting the money back. Even a small percentage of defaults makes the loans expensive. Here is where the Government can step in – offering the banks a guarantee on repayment of the loan, in return for a legal commitment on the part of the student to repay the Government if he fails to pay the bank. I would propose that the Income Tax Department should collect a certain percent of the taxable income of the borrower along with the tax to recover the defaulted loan with interest over a period of time. Given a Government guarantee on loan repayment, bank loans to students should be far more affordable.

Srinivasan Ramani

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Information Technology Products versus Services


The earnings per head in IT product companies are usually very impressive.  This raises the question if engineering education in India should give greater attention to IT products, hardware and software. A related question is that of startup companies. Indians living in the US are very much interested in startups. Many of them have created very successful companies and have, thereby, created impressive wealth.

Yet another issue is of professionals of Indian origin who reach the position of CEOs in major global companies. The recent cases of Satya Nadella http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella at Microsoft and Rajeev Suri at Nokia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Suri  are interesting. Interestingly, both had studied engineering at the Manipal Institute of Technology.

I will discuss here what institutes of technology and engineering should do to improve the chances of their graduates being successful in product oriented and entrepreneurial activities. Professionals of Indian origin who get to head major companies usually have two degrees – a B.E. or B. Tech. and an M. B. A. Not surprising, as high level management and/or entrepreneurial work requires expertise in technology as well as in management, but you don’t always need a degree to give you that expertise. The Wikipedia article on Rajeev Suri says specifically, “
He is one of those rare top corporate executives who have achieved heights without pursuing any MBA/PG degree”.

Skipping a P. G. degree and/or an M. B. A. at a mediocre institution is a wise thing. You could be earning a good salary during those years that others waste there! Besides, if you know what you want to do, you can start implementing your ideas earlier instead studying miscellaneous subjects! However, if you skip P. G. education, don't fall from the frying pan into the fire!  Be careful not to take up a dead-end job in which there is no opportunity to learn! The salary does matter, but what you are likely to learn in a company matters more!

Another dimension is passion. People who do well with products and startups are often those who pick up ideas and work on them over years with a high degree of passion. They struggle, take risks, and learn on the job. They learn to work with others and to convince influential persons that it is worth betting on their projects. If the persons to be convinced are those that manage venture capital, the budding entrepreneur needs some knowledge about business in addition to his/her knowledge in technology.

One “good thing” about the Indian environment is said to be the respect young people have for older and senior professionals; but these young people who go on to spend a year or two in the US environment usually lose that “good thing”! By all means, respect the elderly professionals, but that does not mean you have to respect only their ideas. In general question every idea including your own, before you commit to them.  
What does all this mean for education? Let me articulate a few suggestions:  
  1. What you teach in your institution has to be chosen very carefully. Courses not reviewed for their significance and utility for a long time are great wasters of young peoples’ energies. They make fools of the teachers who are compelled to teach them merely “because it is the university requirement”.
  2. Project oriented courses are valuable. Usually in such courses, small teams dream up project ideas and implement them, learning any new technology required on the job. The teacher acts as a facilitator.
  3. Some courses related to business knowledge are valuable. Some of these courses are sometimes scoffed at as “soft courses”. Many teachers would prefer to teach courses with significant mathematical background instead. Evaluation becomes easier with such courses. The teacher can show off his/her mastery. However, management and entrepreneurial activity often demand varied types of knowledge.
  4. Bad teaching of a “soft course” can be disastrous. It is usually worse than bad teaching of a course with a mathematical background. Soft courses are best taught by very good teachers. Mediocre teachers should stay away from them.

If you want your students to become good entrepreneurs and/or top managers, you need to plan for it. Institutions and teachers need autonomy for this. If such autonomy is available to you, use it! Effective use of autonomy makes all the difference!  


Srinivasan Ramani