Book Review: Art & Science of Managing Public Risks

 

Talking about disaster management

BOOK REVIEW SHIVANAND KANAVI Art and Science of Managing Public Risks Author:V S Ramamurthy, Dinesh K Srivastava, Shailesh Nayak Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Pages: 412 Price: ₹ 4,015 The three authors are senior scientists. Shailesh Nayak is a geologist who was also the secretary of the Department of Earth Sciences and has been deeply involved in India´s Antarctic projects. He played a key role in rolling out, in record time, a Tsunami Warning System for the Indian Ocean Region after the 2004 tsunami. V S Ramamurthy, a nuclear scientist, has had a long innings as secretary, Department of Science and Technology and has grappled with the issue of improving communication between scientists, policy planners, media and the public to promote rational rather than kneejerk solutions to key issues in scientific policy. Dinesh K Srivastava is a distinguished nuclear physicist, former director of the ambitious Variable Energy Cyclotron in Kolkata, and is deeply interested in climate change. Ashutosh Sharma of IIT Kanpur, an Infosys Prize winner in Chemical Sciences and also a former secretary, Department of Science and Technology, has written a scholarly and lyrical preface to the book. When such senior scientists venture into public policy, policymakers would do well to listen carefully. In fact, Art and Science of Managing Public Risks should be made compulsory reading to policymakers and disaster managers. It is perhaps the most exhaustive and comprehensive compendium of disasters of various types. The authors´ concerns range over both natural and manmade disasters. For example, it talks about climate disasters, cyclones, cloudbursts, landslides, flash floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. It also tackles infectious diseases and epidemics such as plagues, polio, smallpox, malaria, TB, dengue, cholera, and Covid19. In industrial accidents, the book covers coal mine collapses, accidents in oil and gas fields, dam failures, transport and chemical accidents, the Bhopal gas tragedy, harm from pesticides and insecticides. The authors have also dealt with the fact that every technology developed by man so far has pros and cons when the costs and benefits are tallied over the life cycle of the project. So how should policy choices be made and why? How should the risks be communicated to policy makers and communities and through what channels and modus operandi? The authors have taken the same approach in the discussion on nuclear power and safety issues involved and with genetically modified (GM) crops and the fears and upsides, as the transgenic mustard debate has shown in an edible oil hungry India. Then there are developmental issues such as pollution, urban waste management, ewaste, biomedical waste management and so on. The book also discusses the nature of risk communication, dialogue and debate regarding policy choices. The authors conclude that the formulations of government policies are extremely vulnerable to public perceptions. Moreover, risk perceptions are highly individualistic; consequently, risk communication could be complex. The traditional forms of risk communication are often inadequate and ineffective. The authors argue that communication should be in the form of dialogue and not debate and should lead towards a consensus. Importantly, they point out that there is no alternative for governments to taking the public into confidence and empowering them with reliable information. “Humanity has always been vulnerable to a wide spectrum of public risks, such as natural disasters and infectious diseases. The recent developments in science & technology, while providing tools to manage public risks of different kinds, have also broadened the spectrum of public risks that we have to face,” they write. Across the world, they add, “governments as custodians of public good are expected to also hold the responsibility of managing public risks. With more and more countries opting for democratic forms of governance, we also see that formulation of government policies on managing public risks are highly vulnerable to public perceptions.” A classic example of differing risk perceptions from the last three decades is the GM foods. While farmers are eager to benefit from the many advantages of modern biotechnology and move on to Green Revolution 2.0, experts and nongovernmental organisations are divided in their opinions, resulting in the policy becoming a victim of procrastination at great cost to the nation. For example, Bt Cotton and Bt Brinjal have finally entered production legally or illegally; now, there is a prolonged evaluation of Dhara Mustard 11, when we are in dire need of better and more oilseed production. The authors have briefly mentioned the National Disaster Management Act and the agency created to handle disasters in India. One wishes that they had critically examined this law and made recommendations to make it more effective. (The reviewer is adjunct faculty at NIAS, Bengaluru. skanavi@gmail.com )

 

 

Book Review: Just Aspire by Ajai Chowdhry

 

 

A soft tale of hardware (appeared in Business Standard, June 21, 2023 )

In his book Just Aspire, Ajai Chowdhry tells an autobiographical tale that starts in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Nope, nothing like Zero Dark Thirty -- that 2012 Oscar and Golden Globe winner, about the US commando operation against Osama Bin Laden. This story starts with a well settled family in verdant Abbottabad in the hills near Kashmir, the starting point for many a trek into Hindu Kush and Karakoram. Mr Chowdhry´s father was a well known, well t odo lawyer, secretary of the District Congress Committee and an Urdu poet who also organised and patronised many a mushaira. The partition of the subcontinent upended the family, which had been well integrated in Abbottabad and had cultured neighbours of all communities. Arriving in Delhi as refugees from the communal violence, Chowdhry senior´s organisational skill sets and knowledge of law got him involved in the government´s refugee resettlement programme. His efforts were quickly recognised and he was absorbed in the bureaucracy and tasked to persuade some of the Rajputana princes to sign the Instrument of Accession to the Indian Union. After completing that assignment, he joined the newly formed Indian Administrative Service and was sent off to Central India as commissioner of Bundelkhand and Baghelkhand. Mr Chowdhry is naturally nostalgic about his early childhood in a large colonial bungalow fit for a sahib with a tiger cub as a pet. Eventually the Chowdhrys settled in Jabalpur. Mr Chowdhry is eloquent about his childhood, school and college days in Jabalpur. After graduating in the newly introduced electronics and telecommunication engineering, in Jabalpur Engineering College, he found he was more attracted to marketing electronics rather than working the public sector telecom organisations and joined DCM Data Products as a sales executive. That began a lifetime in marketing electronic products, starting with clunky and expensive electronic calculators. Mr Chowdhry´s hard work and ingenuity in selling these bulky machines paid off. For example, while everyone was targeting academic institutions he found that chemists in sugar mills needed a quick calculation of the sucrose content in the cane and the final sugar recovery in the production process. Persuaded by him, they found this new gadget really handy and started convincing their managements to buy them. Mr Chowdhry had spotted this opportunity and visited literally every sugar mill in rural Maharashtra to achieve his sales target. Similarly, he found that irrigation engineers in Maharashtra needed quick calculations to release water to farmers and successfully targeted them too. When PCs were two decades away and only a handful of large companies in the government and private sector could afford mainframes, these calculators, especially the programmable kind, were very useful for fairly complex and quick calculations. This reviewer used one of these DCM Data Products´s programmable calculators for tedious and complex calculations while doing research in theoretical physics at IIT Bombay in the 1970s, yielding results worthy of publishing in peer reviewed international journals of physics. Mr Chowdhry´s tales of marketing advanced tech products hold a major lesson for today´s marketing executives. If you are diligent and observant, then you can find opportunities in surprising corners and even in remote and rural India. Though he was doing well in DCM, he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug in his 20s, which was unusual in 1976. So he struck out with his seniors and mentors, Shiv Nadar and Arjun Malhotra from DCM Data Products, to found what went on to become one of the leaders of the Indian IT industry, HCL. HCL (then known as Hindustan Computers Ltd) was then into producing and marketing hardware starting with microcomputers and then PCs and so on. Since the components and PCBs and later motherboards were not being made in India most people were importing them from Singapore. Some were accused of screwdriver technology, profiting from high protective tariffs, and some of even using the grey market. After his first assignment in selling microcomputers in Tamil Nadu, Mr Chowdhry was sent to another frontier, Singapore. Shiv Nadar of HCL had taken the bold decision to establish a unit in Singapore, named appropriately as Far East Computers to make and sell hardware there. Mr Chowdhry made that a success, spending his time gaining valuable international experience in the highly competitive markets of South East Asia. His tales of the social life of an expat in Singapore in the 1980s are charmingly narrated. In 1994, he became the chief executive officer of HCL Info Systems in India. Within a few years as telecom policy changed in 2002 making mobile telephony more lucrative, Mr Chowdhry´s long relationship with Nokia came in handy in persuading the Finnish multinational to make and sell affordable mobile phones in India. HCL took the lead in selling those phones via their marketing network. Overall, the book is a good read and the blemishes are few and far between. It lacks an index, for one and a few events are not dated. The reader will be disappointed if he expects an analysis of the history of the hardware industry in India, its challenges and the future from a veteran. The author also has a penchant for long quotations from various favourite management gurus. It may have been more exciting and instructive to young executives reading the book if he had drawn anecdotes and lessons from his own extensive marketing experience in India and abroad. The reviewer is adjunct faculty at NIAS, Bengaluru and former VP of TCS. skanavi@gmail.com BOOK REVIEW SHIVANAND KANAVI Just Aspire: Notes on Technology, Entrepreneurship & the Future Author: Ajai Chowdhry Publisher: HarperCollins Pages: 252 Price: ₹ 599