W’end Links: Ms Sherawat, Karunanidhi & an unsual Church

Timeless post by Varnam on why Thiru Karunanidhi and Mallika Sherawat are closer than you think.

Atanu Dey writes about a creative way to fund 50 new IITs.

And an unusual group that brings together the secular and the sacred on the US presidential election trail.

Brief excerpts from all the articles below.

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*** Excerpts from The Genetic Distance between Karunanidhi and Mallika Sherawat ***

Some Aryan invasion/migration theories are highly entertaining. One fascinating version originates in Central Asia around the middle of the fourth millennium B.C.E when an “unknown disturbance” triggered a cluster of Indo-European tribes on a trip across the continent. This group of nomadic people, wandered around, looking for a place where there is sun, water and grass for their cattle. They reached India, around 1500 – 1200 B.C.E,  “forgot” about their wanderings through Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan, and hence did not write anything about it in the vedas[1]

This Aryan migration theory created two groups of people — the Aryans who came from Central Asia and Dravidians, the people who were already in India.  In our diverse nation, these Aryans helped bring  up new differences.  Thus Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi still talks about the Aryan-Dravidian battles and Marxist historians write about the light skinned IE speakers over powering the dark skinned Dravidian speakers. Also, we have been told that the concept of caste groups came  with the Aryans while  tribals were the original inhabitants of the country.  These Aryans also helped historians to categorically state that the vedas were composed not by Indians, but by the Central Asians.

If these theories were true, shouldn’t there should be scientific evidence to back it up? Shouldn’t we see a genetic difference between caste and tribal groups and between Indo-European and Dravidian speakers? Also, shouldn’t there be genetic markers which show Central Asian incursion into India around the 1500 – 1200 B.C.E time frame? In fact some genetic studies have shown relatively small genetic distance between Indians and West Eurasians and this has been used as proof of Aryan migration, but recent studies tell a different story.

…Genetic studies involving both paternal and maternal lineages were conducted on the Indian population. The studies also involved comparing large number of Indian samples against data from West/East/Southeast/Central Asia, Europe and the Near East for genetic distance.

Both studies  reveal that Southern castes and tribes are  similar to each other and their gene pool is related to the castes of North India. It was  not possible to confirm any difference between the caste and tribal pools and find any clean delineation between the Dravidian and IE speakers.  Besides this, there was neither a north-south gradient nor a language based gradient which means that dark skinned Dravidian Karunanidhi and fair skinned Indo-European speaking Mallika Sherawat  are not genetically distant.

…some western-Eurasian maternal DNA groups were found among Indian populations providing evidence of this connection. Investigating the time frame when this group of Indians branched off from the Western Europeans, a date of 9300 +/- 3000 years before present was found which is interesting because this is no where close to the dates (1500 – 1200 B.C.E) of the massive Aryan migration/invasion proposed by  proponents of the Aryan theory.[3]

This time frame of 9300 +/ 3000 years has historical significance. The earliest South Asian farming community  in Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in the region of Baluchistan, is dated between 7000 – 5500 B.C.E. Mehrgarh, which is in the company of other early settlements like Çatalhöyük ,Jarmo, and Jericho, was five times larger than the site at Çatalhöyük and  two millenia before the Sumerians settled in Babylon, Mehrgarh had a  population of 20,000 people which was slightly less only than Egypt which had around 30,000 people at the same time.[4] The data provided by genetic evidence coincides with the theory that there is cultural continuity from the settlements of Mehrgarh in 6000 B.C.E. to the Harappan Civilization [4].

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*** Excerpts from On IITs, PanIIT, and the Funding of 50 New IITs ***

It’s coming up to that time of the year again when a very large group of completely self-absorbed people with very inflated egos gather to congratulate themselves on how astonishingly amazing they are and how they are the almighty’s gift to humanity, if not the entire creation.

The PanIIT 2008 site declares: “IIT Alumni 2008 Global Conference is being held at IIT Madras, from 19th to 21st December. With 3000 alumni participants from around the globe, a galaxy of eminent speakers, and selected sponsors who are leaders in their industry, the 2008 Global Conference will be the most impressive ever. The focus this year is to inspire IITians to innovate and transform India.” [Emphasis added.]

Really very impressive. Especially the globe and galaxy bits, and the eminent speakers. Shilpa Shetty and Hema Malini are eminent speakers. Not impressed, are you? Well, then consider this. Not only will Prof Amartya Sen be there, but the “Nobel Laureate has rescheduled his busy schedule to make time for us”.

Now are you impressed? Do you have any idea what it means when a NL flies in to attend even though it means major disruption of his other engagements? What on earth could be more important than the annual PanIIT circus?

Now that I am done with expressing my disgust with the organization and its c-j antics, it is time to move on to more substantial and important matters. It has to do with gratitude, credit constraints, education, fairness, development, and India.

…The full cost of a decent 4-year technical education today is around Rs 20 lakhs (or around US$ 45,000.) That’s a conservative estimate. So in today’s nominal rupees, the full cost of educating 300,000 engineers is Rs 6,000,000 lakhs (or US$ 13.5 billion.) The IITs do charge some fees but those fees have been a small fraction of the true cost of education. It is reasonable to peg the total subsidy to be of the order of the estimated Rs 6 million lakhs. The objective of this exercise is to get a feel for the total transfer of resources from the general public to reasonably well-to-do upper segment of society.

That subsidy is a pure transfer or a grant, not a loan. The beneficiary is not required to return, either directly or indirectly, the money spent. There’s only an expectation that the return will be indirect. Moreover, not everyone has an equal chance of getting the subsidy. To get into an IIT, you have to have an excellent school education, for otherwise you fail in the intense competition for admission. Therefore you must be from a family with means much above average. Therefore the subsidy is targeted at the already fortunate.

It is also important to explicitly state that the opportunity cost of the spending is the foregone opportunity to use the same resources for the education of the segment of the population which is too poor to even afford basic education. It can be argued that primary education is more of a public good than tertiary education. We will not go into that here as I have argued that case elsewhere on this blog. For now I will merely note that the spending on higher education when the lower levels are not adequately funded is regressive and harmful in the long run.

It is reasonable to argue that the public spending on elite technical education does have some positive returns on investment. The graduates of IITs have made a name for themselves in India and abroad. It is a respected “brand” and India gains in the reflected glory of those IITians who have made billions such as Vinod Khosla, Desh Deshpande, and others. Without the subsidy, many of these worthies would not have been as successful.

The counter-argument is also very simple. The benefits of any spending have to be considered not in isolation but relative to those conjectural benefits that would have accrued from alternative uses of the resources. What would have been the benefit of subsidizing three million technicians instead who would have gone on to become highly productive factory employees? Or subsidizing 30 million fully literate and numerate people whose 100 million descendants would also have been literate as a consequence?

The Proposal

This should have been done a long time ago. It could have been done but then of all sad words of pen or tongue, the saddest of all are “it might have been,” as the man said. They who made the rules were simply not smart enough, and it had to wait till I articulated it (he said modestly.)

Imagine this. Someone has demonstrated preparedness and aptitude for elite tertiary education. The full cost is Rs 20 lakhs. The person does not have the money. Give him a loan for the full cost of the 4-year education, with the understanding that the payback period start four years after graduation and last for four years. The payback will include the principal and the interest. (We neglect inflation in this exercise for now as it does not alter the basic argument.)

This means that the first payback occurs eight years after the loan is issued. So there has to be sufficient resources to give loans to the entire batch of students for the first eight years of the existence of the educational institution. The money required for Year 9 will be the money paid back by those who attended in Year 1.

Let’s do the arithmetic. Take, IITI. That is, IIT Imaginary. It teaches 1,000 students. Cost per year, Rs 5 lakhs per student. For eight years, total cost (8 x 5 x 1000=) Rs 40,000 lakhs. That’s the total investment required. From then on, each batch will receive a loan from the amount of the loan repaid from the batch eight years previous to it. The IITI is totally self-supporting.

If this scheme had been followed, the total money required to initiate the loan process for the 7 IITs would have been around Rs 200,000 lakhs. Compare that to the Rs 6,000,000 lakhs spent so far. In other words, the same resources would have made possible not 7 but 200 IITs. It would have meant that India would have been graduating 200,000 IIT graduates each year. The mind boggles, doesn’t it?

Not Too Late

It is never too late to do the right thing. Let’s assume that there are 200,000 living IITians today. Let each of them chip in Rs 10 lakhs in partial repayment of the cost of their IIT education. That would net Rs 2,000,000 lakhs (or US$ 4.5 billion). That’s a lot of money in the aggregate but is not an unreasonable amount for the average employed IITian. Remember, they are not credit constrained. They can take a loan, if needed.

With that money, you could pay for the educational loans of 400,000 student-years (at Rs 5 lakhs per student per year.) In other words, you could give educational loans to 50,000 students a year and do so for eight years. From Year 9 onwards, the loans recovered from the old students will keep the system going indefinitely.

In other words, you could fund the operational expenses for 50 new IITs (each of them with 1,000 students). What about the startup costs of infrastructure? That could be part of the public expenditure and could even be funded by high net worth individuals and institutions.

If we got started today with this scheme, one can imagine that the 50 new IITs can start operating in 2010, and from 2018 onwards, it would be totally self-financing, and graduating 50,000 graduates a year from year 2014 onwards.

India’s immense and young population can become its greatest asset provided that we can figure out a way of educating its population. India does need to have a large number of highly qualified engineers and technologists. It can be done provided there is political will and the smarts to properly allocate resources using good policies.

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*** Excerpts from An unconventional Church ***

…So there I was in a downtown bar, discussing indie bands over my pint with a crowd of studenty-looking twentysomethings.

The talk turned to the election. Religion and party politics shouldn’t mix, someone said. Church leaders who urged their congregations to back conservative candidates were abusing their position, another drinker agreed.

And then I remembered. These people were Southern Baptist evangelicals – supposedly the most partisan and right-wing of all American religious groups. What was going on?

The Journey isn’t your typical church, to be fair. Its website proclaims a mission to reach out to “punk rockers, grandmothers, [and] construction workers” alike. And as part of its strategy to persuade young people that a love of alt-rock and alcohol is compatible with Christianity, it holds regular informal meetings in this ale house I visited.

…In Britain, we tend to be cynical about anyone who tries to marry popular culture with faith. I come from a country where “trendy vicar” is a term of derision (and one which was regularly lobbed at guitar-strumming Roman Catholic convert Tony Blair).

But Darrin genuinely seemed equally at ease in both worlds. And in a county where religious belief is so widespread, it’s hardly surprising that young Americans might look for a connection between the secular and the sacred.

He told me how he had found his faith as a teenager when, during one week, he was suspended from high school for fighting, kicked off his football team for drinking, and led to believe that he might have got his girlfriend pregnant.

He’d set up the Journey appeal to people like his younger self. Six years on, over 2,000 people were now attending regularly.

…Richie Cook, a 22-year-old Bright Eyes fan, agreed wholeheartedly. He had felt alienated from conventional churches when he studied for a theology degree at university.

“I met people living Christian lives who were secretive and hypocritical and…” he searched for the right word. “Mean, to be blunt.

“I didn’t want anything to do with Christianity. But I couldn’t get away from the fact that I believed in God.”

After discovering the Journey, he said he’d finally found a home in the church. “I do care more about social justice and issues that deal with how it affects people,” he said. “That’s what motivates me.”

He wasn’t the only one. Kristin Guilliams, 28, a paediatric neurologist was still making up her mind about how to vote.

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