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

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

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! 

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

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

This article was triggered by  two articles in the Hindu Newspaper
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/privatising-professional-education/article5984119.ece ,
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/the-case-against-privatisation-of-education/article5995071.ece
and Ravi Iyer’s blog post
http://eklavyasai.blogspot.in/2014/05/recent-articles-in-hindu-arguing-for.html

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

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