State Bank of India: Story of its tranformation

Quaternion, September 15, 2005

A Colossus transforms

State Bank of India is a great story of transformation in the making. The implementation of TCS’s centralized banking solution in nearly 14,000 branches of the group will play a major role in it, reports Shivanand Kanavi.


If you ask Arun Kumar Purwar, Chairman, State Bank Group, about Operation Vijay, ("Operation Victory"), you will not get much in return other than a question shot back, "Where did you hear about it? That is still under wraps." But when strategy is being discussed with branch managers, who number in five figures, it would be difficult to keep it a secret. Apparently, it is a plan to transform the banking colossus in a tangible, quantifiable way. "It would be tall talk now. When we are close to achieving the targets, we will talk about it," says he.

Simply put, while the bank's position in Indian banking is unassailable, it wants to be number one in other financial services as well, be it credit cards, mutual funds or investment banking. "We have the fourth largest life insurance company of our country, the third largest merchant bank, the seventh largest mutual fund, the fourth largest credit card company, and the third largest factoring company. We have strategic interests in the credit information business and in an asset reconstruction company. We also run, within the group, 40-plus regional rural banks. Thus, State Bank's presence in the economy - in the financial sector - is very strong," adds Purwar.

Operation Vijay wants to take it to the next level. When stock market analysts call State Bank of India (National Stock Exchange: SBIN) as a 'play' on the Indian economy, in their own frenetic lingo, they are reflecting what SBI stands for. The bank, with its massive network of nearly 14,000 branches, is rivaled by none for its reach,
except a couple of Chinese banks. However the numbers cited by the Chinese are a little suspect because they list points of sales, including extension counters, as branches.

SBI controls an enviable 25% of the entire banking business in the country and services a whopping 100 million accounts. The bank has a wide network of 5,400 automatic teller machines (ATMs) in nearly 1,800 centers, and another 1,000 are being added this year. It includes an ATM at the highest altitude, at over 12,000 ft above sea level, in Leh, Ladakh, south of Tibet. At the other extreme SBI has an ATM on a river boat in Kerala. "Mind you, it is not a cash dispensing machine, but a fully networked ATM," assures Purwar. In January 2004, the total number of transactions from the ATMs was 6 million, and the total money drawn, between $138 million and $149.5 million (Rs 6 billion and Rs 6.5 billion). ATM usage is growing at 12% to 15% per month, according to Purwar. In fact, by Jan 2005, the total number of transactions on ATMs increased to 270 million, and money drawn amounted to over $ 644 million (Rs28 billion).

The largest competing network has less than 2,000 ATMs. Thus market analysts are justified in calling it a proxy for the Indian economy. That is, if the bank is doing well, then the Indian economy is doing well and vice-versa. (See box: The Bank)

The Bank
It is said that three organizations touch vast majority of the people of India: India Post, the Indian Railways and the State Bank of India.
The State Bank of India (established in 1806) is one of the oldest banks in the world and predates many well known names in the banking world: Citibank (established in 1812), Chemical Bank (established in 1823), ANZ (established in 1830), Standard Chartered (established in 1853), HSBC (established in 1865}, and the Bank of America (established in 1874).
Today, the State Bank of India, along with its nine associate banks form the State Bank Group, which does over 25% of all banking business in India through a network of 13,767 branches in India and 54 overseas, and over 5,400 ATMs in India's metros, and urban and rural areas. The group serves over 100 million accounts and, in the last four years, deposits have grown with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% from $72.01 billion (Rs3,514 billion) in 2001 to $115.72 billion (Rs5,061 billion) in 2005. It was the only Indian bank to be listed among the top 100 banks of the world by The Banker in July 2005.
The shares of the banks are listed in the Indian stock exchanges and its global depository receipts are listed in Europe. SBI has a market capitalization of about $10 billion (Rs.441 Billion) on the Indian bourses (as of September 7, 2008). The Government of Indian owns 59.73% of the shares, through the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India. It is the only bank in Asia, other than the Bank of Japan, to have a rating, from international agencies, above the sovereign.
The State Bank is a financial powerhouse with its arms in Insurance, mutual funds, investment banking, etc, and owns:
• SBI Capital Markets Ltd.
• SBI Mutual Fund (a trust)
• SBI Factors and Commercial Services Ltd.
• SBI DFHI Ltd.
• SBI Cards and Payment Services Pvt. Ltd.
• SBI Life Insurance Co Ltd – Banc assurance (Life Insurance)
• SBI Funds Management Pvt. Ltd.

The bank came under pressure in the late 1990s, with the opening up of the economy and competition from private banks. These new banks have no legacy issues, are lean and mean and could build themselves on hitech platforms and thus provide highly competitive services to both corporate and individual customers. But they lack reach and have largely confined themselves to the metros and large cities.

A Bicentennial
This year, SBI began celebrating it 200 years of existence. It traces its origin to the Bank of Calcutta, started in 1806 with the active participation of the British East India Company as a joint stock company. From it founding until 1936, the Bank acted as a central bank and currency issuing authority. In 1809, the bank received it charter and was re-designed as the Bank of Bengal. The Bank of Bombay (founded on April 18, 1840) and the Bank of Madras (founded on July 1, 1843) followed the Bank of Bengal. These three banks remained at the apex of modern banking in India. They came into existence as a result of the compulsions of imperial finance and the felt needs of local European commerce. They were amalgamated as the Imperial Bank of India on January 27, 1921.

When India attained freedom in 1947, the Imperial Bank had deposit of $ 63.273 million (Rs2.751 Billion), a network of 172 branches, and more than 200 sub-offices all over the country.

The commercial banks of the country, including the Imperial Bank of India had, till then, confined their operations to the urban sector and were not equipped to respond to the emergent needs of the rural areas, in order to serve the economy, in general, and the rural sector, in particular, the State Bank of India was created by taking over the Imperial Bank of India and integrating with it the former state-owned or state-associated banks. An Act was passed in Parliament in May 1955, and the State Bank of India was constituted on July1, 1955.
The Bank’s museum in Kolkata is a treasure house for economic historians, with detailed balance sheets and minutes of board meeting dating back two centuries.

"It was clear to us that either we transformed, or perished," says Purwar. But transforming is easier said than done. After all, it had 300,000 employees, systems that were not standardized, and some practices that are peculiarly Indian. The advantages of introducing advanced IT solutions with centralized databases, good networks, 'anytime, anywhere' banking through ATMs and so on, were clear to the leadership. "New technology would lower our transaction costs by 15%-25%," says Purwar. The bank's service level would rise with core banking. Its ability to monitor funds would dramatically improve with management information systems and daily reports. The available funds could thereby be deployed better in the money market, and the NPAs (short for non-performing assets, or bad accounts) could also be tracked in time, and action taken. New financial product-could be developed with what-if analyses, test marketing and deployment in record time. Technology would also enable the bank to enter new businesses and fee based services as the economy entered a low interest rate regime, with decreasing spreads for banks.

When old habits resist change, it takes leadership to drive change. The story is far from over but the signs of change are visible and indicate the potential this institution has. Today, over 4,800 branches are networked in a dedicated network called SBI Connect. Besides data communication, the network has vastly reduced the bank's telecom bills, as all these branches are using Voice Over IP phones for inter-branch communication. Over 5,400 fully networked ATMs in nearly 1,800 centers are bringing modern banking to even small towns and rural areas. Over 5100 branches of the SBI Group have gone live on core banking (a centralized database system). "In Belapur, we have our core banking systems, where over 800 officers are working hard to meet deadlines for the rollout," says Purwar. "A village may not have regular electricity and proper telecommunications, but our branch there will be computerized and connected to core banking," adds he.

And all this has been achieved with no downsizing! The number of branches on core banking in October 2004 was hardly 250. If the number today stands at 4,300, it works out to roughly 400 branches going live per month!

That is a truly amazing number by any standards. No wonder The Banker magazine, in London, honored SBI with its Technology Awards 2005, for the core banking project, and as the Best Outsourcing Project of the Year.

The project was outsourced to TCS as the prime system integrator. TCS developed a customized solution for SBI's needs. The implemented solution includes B@NCS from Financial Network Solutions (FNS), and Eximbills from China Systems interfacing with each other and the existing legacy system.

The building in Belapur, which houses the core banking servers in the data center and training facilities for the bank's staff, also has 300 TCS engineers working day and night.

That is where Krishnan Ramanujam, of TCS, who is the Director of the Core Banking project, sits. The blackboard outside his office tells it all. The numbers scrawled on it seem to change every time you visit him. If you did not know better, you would think he was running an illegal numbers racket out of his office. On closer inspection, however, they look more like the production figures of a shopfloor foreman. In fact, the latter would not be too far from the truth. He runs a virtual factory that is customizing the solution, testing code, fixing bugs, and training. He sits in meetings with SBI officers to set standard operating procedures and suggest any changes, if necessary. After a year and a half of hard toil, he is smiling today. "I have been in several large projects in 14 years at TCS but this has been the most challenging one," he says. What started as a trickle is now a roaring river, with dozens of branches going live every day.

Core banking gives tremendous power to the bank’s leadership to be nimble in the market but it also imposes a lot rigor on the employees. For example, how do you open an account? What information do you need to input? And who double checks each step and signs off? All this seems cumbersome initially, but the people who have used the system for three months and longer are getting the hang of it and enjoying the benefits.

“We are only training the trainers but State Bank’s HR is doing a wonderful job of evangelizing and letting the knowledge percolate through the bank, despite difficult condition,” says Ramanujam. When you are short staffed, it puts tremendous pressure on others if you have to send 25% of the employees for training by turns. But the staff has risen to occasion, and the benefits have ripple effect.

Despite an environment that was not friendly to computerization in the banking sector for three decades (1960s-80s), SBI has had a tradition of experimenting with new technology. According to Uday Shankar Roy, currently Chief General Manager of SBI, Kolkata who, till recently, headed the core banking project, SBI was one of the first banks globally to use the IBM 1401 mainframe for interoffice transactions an reconciliation, back in the early 1960s. "In the '70s, as load increased, we brought in brand new Burroughs machine, which was cutting edge at the time. Branch computerization started in the ‘80s and '90s, and a clear cut IT strategy was put in place in the late '90s. It started with local area network and branch automation, along with a massive interbranch networking project to connect over 4,000 branches. This laid the ground for taking up core banking two year ago," adds Roy.

Though the B@NCS solution chosen has been implemented elsewhere, the State Bank project involved a scale that was an order of magnitude larger and which demanded a high performance solution. "After all, the largest core banking project implemented in the world so far involves three different systems in different countries and a total of 2,400 branches. Here, it was 9,000 branches of SBI and 5,000 branches of its associate banks, all on one system. Scalability was a prime issue. It was only because we demonstrated it that TCS won, despite tough competition," says Jagdish Bhandari, head of the financial services practice at TCS.

Did they have to change the code significantly to customize it for State Bank's needs? “Of course. It is almost a new package now. The original package had about 3 million lines of code. Now it has 6 million!" says Ramanujam.

Why was such drastic change needed? What were the challenges? The original product, in its basic form, was a simple online transaction processing system, which was scalable. But, in this case, the customer made demands that created conflicts in the system. Basically, scalability depends on the product doing only one or two things in an efficient manner. Secondly, it has to adhere to some basic principles of databases. Scalability and maintainability require that all the information required should be stored at only one place. However if the system is expected to generate reports that involve data from different tables, this pulls down performance of the system. High performance requires normalized databases and puritan view of database design. But that would not meet branch requirements in SBI because such a system would not generate reports in the required format.

An online transaction processing system typically does not have a database designed to suit report generation. However, the branches felt that, unless reports were easily generated, their daily operations would not be complete. Yet even if the system did generate reports, it could still not handle 100 million accounts!

“We had a monumentally difficult time doing the correct tradeoffs,” says Ramanujam.

N chandrasekharan, EVP at TCS and Head, Global Operations adds, “The key to our success were the right design for the database and the program. It was a combination of and in depth knowledge of technology and banking business. We have demonstrated our competence to build large scale high performance systems.”

But at what cost? “Oh, we are building probably the lowest cost system in the world. In China the cost per branch for this technology is $25,000. In other developed countries, it has been $50,000-plus. But, in India, we spent only $11,000-$12,000 per branch. This is a very big advantage to us,” says Purwar.

How was that achieved? It is said that TCS reduced SBI's costs by not going for a mainframe based system. But Ramanujam disagrees. "Cost is not a function of just the hardware or infrastructure that you put in. The total cost involves hardware cost, software cost, maintenance and modification cost, and so on," says he.

"Just like a car. If it costs $11,500 but 'breaks down every 10 days, then we end up spending a lot more. We might as well buy a better car that costs more up front but needs less maintenance. Similarly, if software is poorly designed and cannot make the modifications required in a dynamic business environment, then it will prove expensive. For example, the Finance Minister may declare a new Cash Withdrawal Tax. But if the code cannot quickly absorb it, then it is poorly designed. Moreover, new product introductions should be very quick. In fact, recently, State Bank came up with four new product ideas in record time. One of them was rated as the quickest product that the bank had brought into the market ever.

Subramaniam Ramadorai, CEO & Managing Director, TS says, “The challenges in the implementation of a solution in a large banding group are manifold. It is due to great teamwork and hard work form the SBI and TCS teams that we have, to say, reached a stage of aggressive solution rollout across branches. SBI is truly a ‘bank that the nation banks on.’ We are privileged that it is banking on us for this unique project, which will tremendously impact the operations of the entire SBI group.”

All who doubted the capacity of this giant to change are now watching it transform itself rapidly. When complete, it would make for a great case study in change management for global managers. Clearly, in five years, India will have a new financial powerhouse.

Our aim is to provide ‘Class Banking for the Masses’, proclaims Purwar. That would indeed revolutionize banking in India as never before.
We say Amen.

Dr Keki Gharda: A profile

Eccentric Entrepreneur, a Genius—Dr Keki Gharda

We reproduce Dr Gharda's profile on the occasion of his 80th birthday, which is being celebrated by friends, colleagues and well wishers in the Indian chemical industry on 26th September, 2009

Excerpted from, “India's Technology Leaders” by Shivanand Kanavi, Business India, July 4-17, 1994

Perhaps, the incident that, best sums up Dr Keki Gharda, the leader of Gharda Chemicals, is a story that has become part of Indian chemical industry folklore. In the early 1980s, Dr Gharda was invited to an Monopolies and Restricted Trade Practices Commission’s hearing, which revolved around a multinational's application for a licence to produce isoproturon. Some Indian companies objected to the application for fear that they would not be able to compete. But Dr Gharda, alone, was of the opinion that there was nothing superior about the multinational's technology. To prove his point, he declared that his company would introduce a new, more efficient process within 18 months and compete with the multinational.

Most of the people who comprised the stunned audience that day would not have imagined that Gharda would be able to pull it off. But he did. True to his words, Gharda realised the danger of using the highly toxic isocyanate route in making pesticides, and came out with a process to produce isoproturon, using urea. Today, he is the second largest producer of isoproturon in the world with large exports to Europe, US and the Far East. The superiority of Gharda's process, which is today internationally known as the ‘Indian process’, made even Rhone Poulenc, the European giant which had a monopoly in isoproturon, sweat.

Since then, Gharda Chemicals has become the leading Indian company in technical grade agrochemicals. Cypermethrin - a popular insecticide; cypermethric acid chloride - an intermediate for cypermethrin; anilophos - a herbicide used, for rice, originally discovered by Hoechst though it now uses Gharda's process; chlorpyrifos- a new generation insecticide; and napropamide -- another herbicide, have all made Gharda a power to reckon with in the global agrochemical scene. In the last three years, a number of international agrochemical magazines have written about Gharda and even put him on their cover.

Gharda Chemcals started as a three-men-in- a-garage operation in the late 1960s, in Santacruz, a suburb of Bombay. Dr. Keki Gharda who had returned from the US after a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, joined the faculty of University Department of Chemical Technology (UDCT), Bombay. However, he could not get a permanent teaching position and he turned instead to entrepreurship.

His first success, in the field of dyestuffs, came fast. He synthesized pthalogen blue, a dye that was very popular in the textile industry but had to be imported from Germany. Later azo-dyes provided the bread and butter. However, with the tremendous proliferation of process technology in the small-scale sector, dyestuff manufacturing was no longer attractive, so Gharda changed course midstream into agro-chemicals.

This time it was not as easy. The early 1980s, the years of transition, were difficult. As a plant engineer in Gharda’s Lote factory remarked, “In those days we were literally living hand to mouth. But unlike other industrialists, Dr. Gharda did not retrench any of the R&D staff. The later years vindicated his visionary faith in in-house R&D”.

That vision has helped him to move with the times. When quality and purity were absolutely essential to gain entry into export markets of Europe, Gharda welcomed the challenge. Today, his analytical lab is not only top class but has made a number of original contributions: half a dozen of them (in Fourier Transform Infra Red spectroscopy and in High Pressure Liquid Chromatography) have become part of international standards.

Today, Gharda is going through another round of diversification into bulk drugs and engineering plastics. But why get into bulk drugs when there are so many players already? “While the Indian' bulk drug industry is strong in organic synthesis, they are not so strong in chemical engineering,” answers Gharda. “With our strength in both, we will be more efficient.” In their typical style, Gharda Chemicals are building plants for products that are yet to come out of their R&D.

But this confidence has got him his fair share of detractors. “He is an eccentric,” says an indignant major player in bulk drug manufacture. “He wants to spoil the bulk drug market by driving down the prices.” His anger is partly fuelled by the not-so-polite letter he received from Dr. Gharda, which categorically stated that since Gharda Chemicals is going to enter the bulk drugs market in fluroquinolones at a lower price, the existing competitors might as well quit!

Therein lies the essence of the man. Variously described in the industry as a missionary, a Gandhian, an eccentric, and a spoilsport, he has nevertheless always approached the market in his own unique manner. His strategy is to come out with new products at prices that are at least 20-30 per cent lower than the prevailing ones and hold them at that level for years. Aside from driving the competition out of the market, it even makes giant multinationals wary of him, perhaps one of the reasons why some of them are queuing up to tie up with him.

And he lives by his own rules. For examples, though he has received many awards for novel processes, he has not patented any. He believes that the superiority of technology should be decided in the marketplace rather than in court rooms. He also shies away from breaking up the manufacturing process into a number of stages and carrying these out in different plants to guard his trade secrets, as most of his competitors do. “This will lead to the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. And you would lose the team spirit where you troubleshoot together and learn from each other” he says. “The name of the game is to come up with newer and better processes and products through R&D and always stay a step ahead of the competition.”

Rajiv Motwani Interview Part-2

Rajeev Motwani Unplugged-II
(This interview was conducted by Shivanand Kanavi at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA in July 2002)
For the first part of the interview

see: http://reflections-shivanand.blogspot.com/2009_08_29_archive.html

Rajeev Motwani: The last one year I am spending a lot of time at Google, at least an hour or two every day. In the summer I am spending half my time at Google working on research projects and the next generation. These guys are working on something that I could contribute to and I am happy about it.

Shivanand Kanavi: What is the next generation? People are talking about contextual searches, semantics and all that. Can it be done at all, it all sounds like a wish list.
RM: Science progresses by making up wish lists. They are always unattainable but on a scale of one to hundred if one takes three small steps it is a big thing. How get appearance of semantics and context, without solving the big problems of artificial intelligence.

SK: Machine translation itself is big issue.
RM: Yes but a lot that one can do before you get there which is in the direction of context and semantics. Google has 50 plus PhDs among about 300 people. A lot of them good Stanford PhDs a lot of them do machine learning, artificial intelligence, systems, algorithms… everything. I am enjoying it.

SK: Is there any competition for Google?
RM: There is always competition. Once when I was interviewed by TIME magazine, when Google was just being set up as a company and the PR people at the Google said it would be good if you talk to the journalists. I said Ok but I did not know that you have to talk to them differently. You have to be careful with them. In the end while they were packing up they said by the way is there any competition to Google? I said ‘the biggest competition to Google is Google itself. There is always arrogance of youth. One forgets that just as they were 21 year old at one time when 30-40 search engines existed and they started with a shoe string budget. (I know it because I was one of the contributors.) With less than $50,000 dollars they started this, which has become so big. They did not know that they have no right to do what they were doing and succeed.’ They put all of that in the article in TIME.

SK: That is anyway good advice.
RM: The problem with being young, I was there once, is that you always believe that you can do whatever that you set out to do. Usually you are wrong but some people turn out to be right and go on to change the world. Someone will figure out a better way of doing things than us. That is why Google is hiring all these smart PhDs. They are doing a good job so far. But I will never underestimate the PhDs that are coming out. But you need to be very smart to do better because it is a non trivial thing to do better than Google.

SK: If the next step is understanding the question and then searching for the answer then the machine should be able to first understand the question. When we don’t have that how are we going to go ahead. Then there are people who are talking about an Indian language Google!
RM: Even what Google is doing now, which is very shallow semantics, in Indian languages is a very big thing. Without trying to build it from scratch can you do in other languages what you have done in English, that itself is a big challenge and there enough people in Google working on that. It is hard for various other reasons also. Google claims it has 2 billion pages. I don’t know how many they have, but let us say they have 20 billion pages. Each page has 1000 words and if you are getting a billion queries a day, then you have to search through a trillion words a billion times a day. Can you imagine the scale of that! You might have the best technology that understands the semantics and context and all that but how do you build a machine that does it billion times trillion every day! I have seen other people who have shown to me that they can come up with better answers than Google if they are given 100 web pages. If they are given 10,000 pages they take an hour and if they get a billion then they are never going to do it. So the greatness of Google is not just technology, understanding the structure etc but doing it in 0.2 sec regardless of the query.

SK: Does the answer lie in quantum search algorithms?
RM: That is still science fiction. Even if you were able to make them work, making tens of thousands of machines work with each other is a different ball game. There are pure system problems and not AI or search algorithms. Storing, indexing, searching and then when thousands of queries come each second you have to make them all happy by giving the answer in 0.2 seconds. If you take 0.5 seconds then they are not happy. They are not paying for it but they are unhappy then they may not come back and what keeps Google’s business model going is that millions keep coming back.

SK: It is a great project no doubt. People are talking about building Universal Digital Library. But if you have scanned and built a large digital library finally you need to search out the relevant information. It is back to Library Science! The digital library is supposed to be one great spin off of the Internet technology.
RM: Yes. I used to go to Stanford library on the average twice a day. I have not set my foot in the library since ’96. Everything I do sitting on my machine here. That is the difference it has done to my life. Everything is on the web, unless it is some paper written 50 years ago and is only in hard copy. If that is the case then I should go and do something else anyway.

SK: Besides Google what is provoking you intellectually?
RM: I get bored too soon in everything I do in life. The new thing in my life is the start-up work partly motivated by what I saw happening in Google. I invest in companies, I mentor companies, I sit on board, the whole business side of it. That has its own challenges. It stretches different parts of your brain. It is a strange mix of common sense and technology. I have invested in software companies, box companies, security, chip companies, storage and search everything. I have become a start-up junkie right now.

Talk: India and the Digital Revolution

I delivered a talk on "India and the Digital Revolution" at the Institution of Engineers (India) Dharwad Centre on Aug 21, 2009 and greatly enjoyed interacting with the audience. Below are a couple of reports that appeared in the press and blogs......

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/City/Hubli/Taking-a-peek-into-digital-field/articleshow/4946374.cms

Taking a peek into digital field
TNN 29 August 2009,
DHARWAD: India contributed significantly to the digital revolution in the 90s, though it did miss electronic revolution in the 60s, said Shivanand Kanavi, vice-president (special projects), Tata Consultancy Services (Mumbai).
Delivering a special lecture at the Institution of Engineers' local centre here, he narrated the comforts achieved because of digital revolution in the fields of industry, trade, transportation, education, banking sectors, administration, medicine and communication, and others.
"The digital revolution provided global platform for research and development," he said, and highlighted its impact on society through media and entertainment. He made remarks about the contributions of Indians to the digital field.
The lecture was followed by an interaction with audience in which questions of common concern like opportunities for youngsters, future scope in chip technology, etc, were answered.
Local centre chairman Mahesh Hiremath, Prof. Ramesh Chakrasali and honorary secretary prof. Mrityunjaya Kappali were present.



http://reportingweb.blogspot.com
Saturday, August 22, 2009
India and Digital Revolution: A Talk by Mr. Shivanand Kanavi, VP, Special projects, TCS
The Institution of Engineers, India ( IEI), Dharwad Local chapter organized a talk on "India and Digital Revolution" by Mr. Shivanand Kanavi, Vice President, Special Projects, TCS. Mumbai, on 21st August, 2009 at Balekundary, Hall. Mr. Kanavi has an illustrious career which took him to different domains such as research at IIT, teaching, Business Journalism at Business India. He joined TCS in 2004.
The topic of talk " India and Digital Revolution" was a very thoughtful choice and Kanavi did a great justice to it. His talk composed of two parts- first dealing with the technological underpinnings of digital revolution and its impact on India and second part was about Indians who contributed heavily in shaping digital revolution. The impact of digital revolution in India was termed " fall out" by the presenter and he listed the following as the main areas that benefited Indian- people, market, business.
Indian IT
Chip Design
Telecommunication
Global Platform for R & D
Centre for Engineering Design
Media and entertainment
Governance
The root of all positive impact of digital revolution is due to advancements in telecommunication. The developments made it possible to separate design and fabrication functions and get them done anywhere in the world. The Indian talent took this opportunity very well and now "India strategy" is central theme to any major business in the west.
The chip technology has become ubiquitous in its spread and virtually every tool that we use today contains a number of special purpose chips. For instance, a modern day car has a number of chips for steering control, wheel etc. Companies such as Texas Instruments ( TI) are doing a lot of R & D work and chip design in India a lot of cutting edge work by GE and others is being done in aerospace technologies in India and so on.
Historically India had missed earlier revolutions - Industrial ( due to British rule ) and electronic revolution - however, the telecommunication industry made us to catch up and join the revolution in later stage. 80% of the mobile sets used world wide use DSP technology designed by TI. GE has established a R & D centre in Bangalore that contributes upto 40% research work in aircraft engine design.
The design and development of Ferrari used in Formula -1 is designed by TCS. Tata's Nano project proved that with just one fourth of research budget allocated in the west, one can design and deliver a car from concept to market.The contribution of ISRO towards making India a strong player in world is very great.Starting from its SITE program for distance education in 70's, ISRO has technologically supported Indian march including introduction of nation wide colour broadcasting during ASIAN games in 1982.
The devlopments in digital technology have made a great contribution in changing the way government runs it services. The land record computerization has resulted easing of many services. The use of IT in central government departments such as company affairs has enabled them to handle data of more that 6,00,000 companies very efficiently and in a timely manner. The IT use in passport issuance has greatly simplied the very process and it will be possible to get passport within three days of police clearance.
Similar changes have been planned for judiciary, medical departments. Digital library is planned as solution to reach wider learning audience.
Implementing DEMAT mode of shares and computerized transcations in stock market is another example of IT in action. The NSE in India is one of the busiest stock exchange in the world and its systems have been built using economic hardware and software components. The Role of IT in banking is still more stupendous- SBI with more than 14,000 branches has been successfully using IT to serve its customers in every nook and corner of the nation.
The Indian railways took the path of computerization without resorting to massive lay off in the ‘80s and its success has brought a sea change in the public perception of computerization. In summary IT has been playing a pivotal role in Indian current development context.
The second part of the talk was profiles of some perosnalities that contributed in the making of digital revolution. The list included J C Bose, Amar Bose of Bose System fame, Raj Reddy, Praveen Chaudhary, Arun Netravali, F. C Kohli, Abhay Bhushan and many more.
Shivanand Kanavi's talk was one of the most informative and inspiring talk that I had heard in the recent past. Thanks Sir

Rajeev Motwani: Interview 2002

Rajeev Motwani unplugged

(Excerpts appeared in India Abroad, Aug 7, 2009)

Shivanand Kanavi, interviewed Rajeev Motwani in July 2002, while researching for his book, Sand to Silicon: The amazing story of digital technology. Here are the edited excerpts:


SK: Tell me about your childhood and growing up and the influences that shaped you.

RM: One of the shaping influences was that my father was in the Army and that meant not being in one place for too long, not more than 2 years. My parents were great believers in education so where ever we were they sent me to the best possible school available. All of them were missionary schools and had many inspiring teachers. I also always wanted to be a mathematician or a scientist at any rate. Then I decided that I did not want to be an Einstein but wanted to be a Gauss. That was because I was an avid reader and I used to read a lot of books. My parents had given me a lot of ten great scientists, 5 great mathematicians kind of popular science books and biographies which were very inspiring. I was not reading about other kind of heroes. That is what I wanted to become. Fortunately I was good at Maths. I also did not graduate from school. I used to study in St Columbus, Delhi, where they had just switched from 11 to 10+2 and IITs gave us permission to join them after 11th without completing 10+2. It was just for that year. I did have problems when getting permanent residence here because I had a PhD but did not have a school certificate.
IIT Kanpur at that time had for the first time an undergraduate program in computer science B.Tech. I really wanted to be a mathematician and I did not have any idea what a computer was. My parents were hesitant because they did not know how a mathematician would make money and support a family. Basically I was forced to do Computer Science. I then realized that Computer Science was very closely related to mathematics. Some of the faculty in IIT Kanpur were also a shaping influence for me. One of the people who really influenced me was Kesav Nori. At that time there was Prof Rajaraman, R.Shankar, Sahasrabuddhe, Somnath Biswas, Kesav Nori, Harish Karnik to name a few. I could not have constructed a better environment for doing computer science in India. It was an amazing confluence of people.

SK: But they already had a masters programme for a long time.

RM: Nori had just come back from Europe. He stayed for a year or so and taught the first course in programming. He was a wonderful teacher and used to tell great stories. We started out programming on comp cards, which you probably remember but most other people don’t. That time we used to work on DEC machines and Vac machines with a terminal. We then had to use a login and a password. Nori could have made up random passwords, or give names of flowers but instead he gave names of famous computer scientists as passwords. Somebody had Don Knuth as password (who is down the hall).
I went and did research to see who these guys were. Bob Floyd was my password. He was also at Stanford and passed away recently. He was one of the mentors of this field called analysis of algorithms. He also did the early work on randomized algorithms. I ended up eventually did some work on randomized algorithms. The very first chapter of my book on randomized algorithms was on Floyd’s algorithm. It is hard to believe that because he was my password this happened. But there must have been some connection! That was the wonderful thing about Nori who was a very inspiring person. He did more than just teaching. He created such a wonderful ecosystem and developed a personal connection with his students.

There are a lot of very good schools not only in the US but elsewhere. Going by what I have seen in this country and going by what I have learnt out there, definitely IIT Kanpur was one of the top five schools in computer science education.
I finished all that. Everybody else was coming to the US for PhD or Masters or whatever. Actually I did not want to come here for reasons I don’t quite understand now. I remember getting a job at DCM Data Products because getting visas at that time (1983) was a big problem. I was then interviewed at Wipro by the top three guys. It was a small outfit then.

SK: Was it Ashok Narasimhan?

RM: It could have been. I met Ashok Narasimhan last year when he was doing a company called July Systems which I was considering investing in, but he did not remember me. The interviewer said we would love to give you a job looking at your track record but isn’t every one with your kind of back ground going to the US on a scholarship? So have you applied to US? I said yes I have an offer from Berkley. He asked do you have a scholarship? I said yes but I am not sure if I will get a visa. He said I did my MBA from Stanford and believe me you would want to go there.
If you come back we will give you a job.

Berkley was very different from Stanford. It was a very politically oriented university. You could call it the JNU of the US because it was highly politically charged. Ronald Reagan was the president then. So then for 3 years I had a blast. Did not do any work and fully enjoyed the environment. My advisor was Richard Carp, who won the Turing award – which is like the Nobel Prize in computer science in 1985-86, when I had finished those 3 years. It was then that I thought that I was not doing anything and letting this man down. So from then on I worked really hard and was quite productive for the next two years.

SK: What did you work on?

RM: My PhD thesis was on randomized or probabilistic analysis of problems in optimization. Problems in network flows, graph matchings and so on. These are general formulations of a large class of problems.

SK: Traffic problems?

RM: Yes traffic problems or network routing. Routers on network, are basically implementing matching algorithms in some form, that is at the micro level. At the macro level flow of packets on networks. My advisor, Dick Carp was a pioneer in that field. These problems were hard and so I was trying to find a heuristic faster and better solution to get the right optimal value. So that was what my thesis on.

SK: People in the telecom sector had used such things.

RM: The technique itself had been used to some degree. In fact pioneered by Carp. Called NP- completeness. It says that some problems are essentially impossible to solve. They cannot be solved exactly. So the question is if you can solve the problem approximately with some assumptions such that the instance of the problem or the input is randomly distributed with known distribution. That’s what I was trying to do.

SK: Why random? Connection with Gauss again?

RM: Well the reason being that once you assume that there is distribution, then you can give some structure to the problem and you can use some probabilistic techniques to say that on a certain fraction of the inputs I’m still going to get screwed up but if I bound the fraction on which I wont perform well and with a typical example I will get a good solution. This is a problem with the theory of algorithms as it exists. In those days everything was taken from the worst case point of view which means that if I want to route a flow on a network I can always construct an example where you are unable to route the flow and perform badly. But the real flows patterns that emerge are not the worst case patterns. They have some niceness to it and things do get routed. Randomness is a way of capturing that by saying that in distribution there is a probability that you will get bad flows but many times you will also get good flows and that is good enough.

So I was doing all this and was about to graduate and was wondering what to do next. To go back to India or stay in the US because again other people made the decisions for me, Don Knuth, one of the founding fathers of comp science, also one of Nori’s passwords, came over to meet my advisor and told him that they wanted to hire someone young for algorithms at Stanford. So Carp suggested my name. I was then invited by Knuth at Stanford for lunch during a dinner hosted for him at Berkley. I was wondering why this great man wants to have lunch with me. So I went to Stanford and met him at a restaurant near the church at the quad. He then told me to be with Stanford for a year and see if they liked me and vice versa after which if things worked out well they would hire me.
For the first year I was a visiting faculty. I did not want that job as I was getting better offers and permanent jobs at other places but since it was an offer by Knuth it was hard to turn down. It’s the same as Einstein inviting you to Princeton for a job. So then I came and taught at Stanford and started some courses and had a very good time.
I was then given a permanent offer at Stanford as they liked what they saw. It was 3 – 4 months after I finished my 1 year at Stanford that I was to get married. My wife was shifting from LA to Berkley. Then we saw that Stanford was a good place and decided to stay in Stanford.

SK: What have been your major research interests here at Stanford?

RM: Teaching has been a major preoccupation first of all. I enjoy teaching. The reason I was in Stanford was that there were many faculty retiring like Don Knuth and so they needed someone to fill in and walk in their footsteps. So since so many people were retiring or leaving there was a vacuum created here. Also there were a lot of courses to be taught. I ended up teaching all these courses. I even made my own courses like topography and algorithms and complexity theory. I did not get enough sleep as I did not know a lot of these areas but I did learn a lot through teaching these things. I am a perfectionist and still get nervous to talk before a class till today. I get nervous, what if someone asks me a question and I find myself unable to answer it. So for this reason I always over prepare.
So this nervousness has taught me more than what I learnt as a student. I now have worked in many different areas and it broadened me up. I have the tendency of getting bored very easily and so if I stay in one area too long I quickly move over to another area. My threshold of working in one particular area is about 5 years.
Some of the non obvious areas are robotics. I was inspired by Jean Claude Latombe from France who was in this Dept. He told me that there were a lot of algorithms in robotics which are needed to plan the actions of the robot. Robots in a generic sense could include cars and or any mechanism which has to plan a motion to move about. It’s like the human body wanting to get up from this chair and walk to the door. It may seem like a triggered action but there are a lot of complexities and degree of freedom involved. In the human body itself every joint in the body gives a degree of freedom. Each can be controlled independently by setting the angle of each joint to accomplish the task. The reason why humans have this degree of freedom is for them to operate in the real world and do a lot of things. The control of these degrees of motions becomes very high. Although we live in a three dimensional world, the robotic movements and freedom work in a higher dimensional surrounding. So if you send a space craft to Mars, then you have to be sure by planning intelligence that it goes the right way without hitting anything along the path. This requires very high dimensional planning. It is like having a starting point A and end point B in space, and moving from A to B without being hit by any obstacles. The same task would be easier with 2 points on the table. So the space that we are talking about is not the physical space but the space of complex possible motions.

SK: There are constraint surfaces?

RM: They become very complex constraint surfaces in high dimensional geometry. I learnt this space for a few months and realized that this problem could be solved through randomization. It is very hard to plan motion in high dimensional complex places while it is very easy to pick a random point in space and figure out if it is going to hit any obstacle in space or if it is a free part of space.
If you pick many random points it is very easy to sample but very hard to find a free point in that space. If you find many free points, then you hook them together and make a path. The path may not be the smoothest but you can smooth it later. So that was the fundamental idea we used. But to realize this and analyse it, apply it and turn it into real systems is a lot of work and I worked for 5 years on this space, putting high dimension geometry and randomization together. Jean Claude was a systems guy while I was the theoretical guy. So the students implemented some of these things and these were used at places like GM in their robot assembly lines.
None of these things were used in isolation. The actual robots do many things and one of the techniques they use is this. They have many softwares running them. That was the first time I did something mathematical but practical. I suddenly realised that I could operate in the real world after seeing the robots move and perform using my algorithms. I could now move over from the paper pencil world. I credit Stanford for creating an environment where people in different areas can work together – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So I spend one third of my time in doing my work in a theoretical and mathematical way and then I collaborate with people. I may collaborate with someone in networking or databases or compilers and use my skills to solve their problems. But I need them to use my mathematical problems to solve the real world problems. It has been a good synergy so far.
I got the Godel prize for my theoretical work. It was a very theoretical work. In science it is said that one guy stands on the shoulders of another and another on his and so on. The guy on top gets the prize. In my case I was on the tip of the pyramid and so got the prize. Everyone forgets the pyramid. In my case we had worked and come up with excellent results before my paper which we used and leveraged to prove what we proved. We proved that you take a mathematical theorem then there is a way of writing the proof of that theorem and there is a way to easily verify for correctness. Verify correctness means for eg - Take the theorem and the proof and probe the proof in 7 places, read what is written there and then give an answer if the proof is correct or incorrect. The answer would be correct to as high a probability as you want. Random sampling of 7 places. Irrespective of the length of the proof. They would work for any given proof provided it is in a specific format and a particular mathematical language.

SK: What makes you say that the whole is correct?

RM: That is probably too hard to explain. The basic idea is that of an error correcting code. The code takes a sentence or a sequence of bits, 0’s and 1’s and replaces it by a slightly longer string of 0’s and 1’s , but there is some redundancy built into it.

SK: It is like writing a checksum.

RM: It is exactly like writing a checksum. I am giving a very simple example.
There are ways of error correcting where you rewrite small bits of the whole thing. It may not even look like the original thing but from that you can extract the original message. So take a proof of a mathematical theorem and write it in an error correcting code. If there are a large no of errors then by random sampling of a few points in that I will detect that there a large no of errors. So I will dismiss the group as nonsense if there are a large no of errors. But if there are small no of errors then I can correct it because I know there is a correct version of this. So after sampling it if I find the number of errors to be small then I know that there is a good proof somewhere.

SK: So it is an existence theorem?

RM: It is random verifier. We over simplified it in this discussion, however the implications are important. Sometimes in mathematics you do things just for the sheer elegance of it and after we wrote this paper I learnt that Intel had a problem with pentium2. When you multiply 2 specific numbers on that p2 chip which was being used in all the desktops and laptops, the answer was wrong. An overflow perhaps. I got a call from Intel to ask me if there was any way they could use the verification technology. But it was not possible as I was a purely mathematical abstract trained whereas they needed a real system with 10 million gates on it where you had to do some checking. Very hard to translate it to this. But this did show the possibility of verifying errors in a complex system by doing a small amount of work. But it required the system to be written in a certain code which was the catch.
There is a wonderful mathematical theorem, I am quite proud of it, it is a combined effort of a lot of people in our field, and is one of the deeper pieces of mathematics which has been done in modern day computer science.
It turned out that implications of this are much more profound than the statement itself. It goes back to the motion of optimization problems we were discussing earlier where we were talking about the flow algorithms where we couldn’t get an exact answer because you can show that in a “polynomial” amount of time which is a measure of efficiency in computer science, one could not get an the exact answer. In my thesis I had looked at one particular way of getting around the problem which was to assume that the problem input itself was randomly distributed. And I was not faced with the bad cases alone but was faced with a distribution of cases; some good some bad. But on the average I would do ok. There is also some other way of tackling hard optimization problems which is to say that I still guarantee you the right answer but the right answer won’t be the optimal answer. So if you are trying to route the maximum no of circuits through your network, I will not route 100% routing but will route 95% and to get 100% is an impossible computation. So these are called “approximation algorithms”.
So for some large class of problems we faced, using this theorem we had the possibility of reaching an approximate answer but for some problems reaching the approximate answer was also not possible. That was one of the bigger breakthroughs in comp science. Carp and Cook from Berkley in 1971 came up with the theory of NP-completeness, which tries to describe why some problems can only be solved by reaching the approximate answer and not the optimum answer. Twenty years later as a consequence of this we said that for large subset of their problems not only is it not possible to get the optimal answer but also hard to get the approximate answer which means that there is no use trying to even solve these problems.
In science you have the family tree where people are followed by their advisors, juniors or siblings. Where each person follows up on another’s work thereby expanding it. Like the musical schools in India, where the Gharanas pass on the knowledge from one generation to the next. I have been a beneficiary in that kind of a system. To me it all came together very nicely. No one knows what happened underneath to build it up. A lot of people contributed to it. I was at the tip, a small part of it, towards the end point.
That has been my mathematical pinnacle. After that it has been downhill all the way (laughs). So I did this and robotics and compiler optimization. I did PLIW compiler optimization and then Pfizer wanted to fund research on computational drug design. And while finishing the work on random motion planning in robots we realised that molecules and robots actually behave in a very similar way.
What is a molecule? One model of molecule which we learn in chemistry in high school is atoms are like balls bound together by bonds thereby making a molecule. So for eg. a protein molecule which has about 30, 50 thousand atoms has to fold and form a shape for another protein molecule to come and bind on that fold. The place where it binds has the activity.

SK: They are called pharmacophores.

RM: Yes. This is basically drug design. It is all about figures folding and matching like a lock and key mechanism. We said we know how things fold, we know how degrees of freedom are created in high dimensional space. Let’s throw it at this problem. So Pfizer funded this research which went on for 2 – 3 years and we came up with software based on our theory and we added some new theory. On a particular approach, the project being called RAPID (Randomized Pharmacophore Identification for Drug Design). It went very well. I learnt a lot. It was an intriguing experience. I had to go back and learn my high school chemistry and biology and the other fun stuff. And the software that we made is being used by Pfizer labs for their drug design. Of course the problem is complex and needs more than one software. So due to confidentiality issues they didn’t tell us how our software was used or what drugs were made from it but you feel you have made a contribution to society instead of just doing formal mathematics which is hard to justify. It felt like we contributed to social welfare through mathematics.

SK: These techniques are mostly used by medicinal chemists. They have an intuition as to which molecules to use and how the binding would take place.

RM: Now they have a tool wherein they can enhance their intuition, do away with some things and focus on what they really want, which is what we allow them to do.

SK: It can be applied to catalysis and designing chemzymes as well right?

RM: Yes. We never got into that because by then the world wide web was coming up and I just got sucked into that. There was this guy Jeff Ullman, another one of the grand old men of computer science, who retired this year. He was in the office next to me and was in database. I was talking to him and a new student – Sergey Brin, and I remember at that time we were using Mosaic, and we were looking at the web and I was sitting there and thinking that we could randomize the web in some way because that was going to grow and become big and randomness was going to be important; though I did not know how and why. So I thought about doing random walks on the web and there was this problem of crawling on the web. At that time a search engine called Inktomi had just come out of Berkley. Excite and Yahoo had come out from Stanford so we had seen the first signs of all of this.
I remember going to Inktomi and searching for the word Inktomi and it could not find itself. I don’t know if that is still true but at that time if you went to Inktomi and typed in the word it said no results found. My Godelian past induced me to do these self referential queries but what amazed me was that this is a simple thing that people screw up on. So in the context of all this I was listening to some people from IBM talk on Data mining and Ullman had just introduced me to some problems in databases. I broke them down with a student and was getting pretty excited about the concept of databases. Ullman took me for this talk on data mining which sounded very interesting to me. So Sergey and Ullman and we decided to do some data mining on the web because it sounded like a nice mix. We then formed this research group called Midas which stood for Mining Data At Stanford. We did a lot of good work on data mining. Then there was this guy called Larry Page who wasn’t really a part of the Midas group but was a friend of Sergey and would show up for these meetings. He was working on this very cool idea of doing random walks on the web.
When I understood what the World Wide Web would look like, I knew I had to somehow force randomness into it. When Larry showed us what he was doing, it was like a complete epiphany, we thought it was absolutely the right thing to do. So Sergey got involved and it became a sub group inside Midas. I was really a good sounding board for Sergey and Larry and I could relate to what they were doing through randomness. They then created a search engine called Backrub. It was running as a search engine from Stanford just like Yahoo ran till the traffic got big and the IT guys sent it off the campus. So these 2 guys would come to the office and say “hey we need some more disc space”. They were completely non respectful of me, which was a wonderful thing. They treated me like an equal. These 21 year old guys were demanding things from me. They needed more disc space because it’s getting bigger. So we need more disc and more money. There are still pictures around the building of how they used to use Legos, to create a box inside which the discs were being put. These discs were those cheap ones bought from the back of a truck and were generating a lot of heat. So they put it in Legos to allow for air circulation.
For me it was a fun research project. We had a lot of ideas which we shared. At some point this thing started getting very serious and we wanted a better name for this than Backrub. So somebody came up with the name Google. Google means 10 raised to the power of 100. It is actually spelt as GOOGOL but somebody miss spelt it and that’s how the search engine got its name. Of course the official story is we deliberately spelt it that way but my guess is we miss spelt it.
So Google started and pretty soon everybody in the world was using Google. The results were much better than all the other search engines going around. It was by word of mouth like I tell my brother to use it, he would tell his wife, the wife would tell her kids and so on. At some point these guys said we want to start a company. Everybody said it was not worth it. There were 37 search engines already there. How would you raise money? How would you form the company? But they decided to do it and they did it. There were some big names which supported the company. Andy Bechtolsheim, an ex Stanford guy who along with Vinod Khosla had founded the Sun Microsystems, put in a little bit of money. They managed to raise a million dollars. They started the company and it was right here in the university avenue. It used to be on my drive home so I used to go and hang out with these guys. It used to be wonderful.

Then they took over the world!

Right now the other search engines don’t even compare and I remember people who I don’t want to name saying why do you need another search engine? Today it is the only search engine people use. Now it is a company of 500 people or more doing hundreds of millions of searches every day, generating revenue. One of the few companies which in today’s economic conditions is not only surviving but also growing. Feels like I was part of a little bit of history and contributed to that history.

SK: Can you explain in simple words, the concept of search engines? How has it evolved?

RM: There was this thing called Information Retrieval which was used for document management. Consider your desktop machine. So let’s say you are writing chapters of a book and chapters of others books. And there are thousands of documents. Each document is just a document of English words. This could be more related to encyclopedias and newspapers articles and Reuters news feeds and so on. So you have all these documents with you and somebody comes to you and asks you a question. Can you answer that question or at least point to the right document that answers that question?
All of this was unattainable. So it reduced down to can you at least show me the document that contains the same words that are there in the question? If I said, “what kind of yeast should I use to make bread?” Ideally you would like it to come back with the answer. But you can’t do that. You could though at least find the document that uses the word bread and yeast and hope that has something to do with the question. That was the field of information retrieval. When the web evolved it became pretty clear that there was going to be a tremendous information explosion.

SK: Initially you had to give some key words for every web page and it would search only those keywords?

RM: Even now it is still the same. It goes through the entire document and indexes the entire document. The computer helps to solve the scale of the problem which is huge. There are billions of web pages, each having thousands of words on the average. So there are trillions of words. So what you do is create an index that is trillion big and when you come along and say yeast and bread you find all the documents on the web that contain yeast and bread. It turns out millions of pages containing yeast and bread which is of no use to you. So people come up with this rule where if the document contains the word yeast 7 times and the word bread 3 times, then that is a score of ten, so give me the highest score document. I am just simplifying the rules of information retrieval but they have even more complex ones. For eg the word bread is very common and can be found in many places but the word yeast is uncommon so you start doing weighting and the other heuristics. None of this required rocket science, none of this is very deep.

It was library science. Not computer or mathematical science. So the old search engines like Alta Vista, Inktomi and so on, to a large extent this is what they are doing today too. The problem they were solving, the key secret sauce was the scale. They were able to harness a lot of memory and solve these problems on a large scale. So instead of building indexes of thousands of words they could build indexes of trillions of words and search through it very quickly. They just put a lot of horse power behind it but not any science. There were a few small ones which were exceptions but this is generally what search engines are doing today.
What Google changed was the following
It actually started looking at the structure of the web. The basic structure we noticed was that it’s a collection of documents. These documents talk to each another. The reason is the hyperlink. Without the hyperlink, the web would have been useless. When you click on it, it takes you to another document. It is like this document saying “hey, look at that other document”. Now if I create a web page and make the effort to point to your webpage, there is some meaning and connection between my webpage and your webpage. The content here and there should be related in some form. This was the basic insight in Google. Instead of looking inside the webpage or the words inside it, look at how the web pages talk to each other, how they talk about each other how they point to each other. So that was the basic insight and everything else was built around that insight.
One of the key things they did was coming up with this ranking function. So if you went and queried on yeast and bread what I would like to do is go to the most authoritative page on the web which talks about yeast and bread. So if there is a yeast or bread makers association of America, then presumably theirs is the most authoritative page on how to make bread out of yeast.
You do use yeast in a bread right? Don’t want to get that wrong. (laughs)
So the question was how to find the most authoritative page on a certain topic? Here is a simple basic idea that underlies that notion. The notion is – Look at the structure of the web. Secondly how to we convert this structure to a ranking scale? This goes back to the random walking I was talking about earlier. Suppose you are at my web page. There are 5 links out of my web page. You are a surfer. What did you do as a surfer. When we first surfed the web, we went to a page, clicked on it and found it magical. That clicking led to another page, and so I look at that and click and go to another page. And so now you are surfing. Suppose you are surfing at random. Let us say my page has 7 links. You randomly clicked on one of those 7 links. You reached the next page which had 3 links and clicked on one of those at random and it took you somewhere and so forth. After a while you will be on a random page on the web. Suppose you surf long enough, you do it a million or billion times, you will be distributed somewhere on the web. You could be on any page. The question is what is the probability that you are sitting on a particular webpage?

SK: It’s a graph theoretic problem.

RM: Yes it is. This is called doing your random walk on the graph which excited me about all these things. Turns out the probability distribution is not unique. There is a different probability being on different pages. Quite obviously if every page in the world points out to my web page then the chances of ending up on my page are very high because wherever you are there is some probability that you will come here. Nobody points to me or if one guy points to me then it is very unlikely. On the other hand if the important pages in the world point to me, then you are likely to end up at my page. But what are important pages? Those are the pages to which other important pages point. So this logic of circularity or flow is what led to the notion of page rank. Ranking of pages is Google’s secret sauce. So they came up with those and discovered that this is the right thing to do.

In hindsight I came up with the estimation of the random web surfer that there was a purely mathematical thing of eigenvectors and matrices etc. Now on a query on yeast and bread, what we do is look at all pages that contain yeast and bread , find the page with the highest rank or score which has the word yeast and bread and we say that must be your answer and it is usually right. Google got so cocky on this, that it has ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. So if you give a query and hit that button, it takes you to a page. That page has the right answer.

Book Review: Curfewed Night

Peerless
A reaction to "Curfewed Night" By Basharat Peer, (Random House India, 2009)
Shivanand Kanavi
(See: http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/an-example-to-emulate-for-indian-journalists/)

Basharat Peer’s “Curfewed Night” is a welcome first-person account of Kashmir of the last two decades. Peer’s book is lyrical, intense, partisan and cynical in varied proportions at the same time.

A simple linear narrative of events since the 1980s as seen by a Kashmiri boy (the author), Curfewed Night will help in educating the vast mass of Indian people who are distant from Kashmir in every way, who are not activists of the human rights movement, and who are the chief target of the Indian State’s one-sided propaganda about what’s been happening in Kashmir in the last two decades.

The book begins at the beginning that is the author’s childhood. This part is lyrical and at times cute. It could have been the retold story of any articulate, sensitive boy from any Indian village to any urban or exotic audience. Then comes teenage and the romance of the Azadi movement; the blind fury and brutality of the security forces clearly reflecting their hate and an occupationist attitude towards the Kashmiris.

Peer tells the story of the emergence of the struggle of Kashmiri youth, armed and trained across the Line of Control (LoC) by our friendly neighbours and the impact of all this on their friends and families. The author’s own brief inner turmoil to cross or not to cross the LoC, the romance of a sexy AK-47, and the pressure from the family to follow a more traditional middle-class road and, above all, a concern for self-preservation, are all conveyed very convincingly.

Then comes the life of a self-exiled student and later of a young journalist in the 1990s, with a longing to tell the “untold story of Kashmir”; the evolution of the author with exposure to a normal life and ‘freedom from searches’; exhaustion setting in about indigenous militancy with no hope of a quick victory and so on, seems a little rushed.

Peer then gives us an invaluable, authentic picture of the emergence of jihadis from Pakistan equipped with laptops and satellite phones ready to unleash terror, where the random victims are not necessarily military targets, while a hapless population caught in the cross fire continues to grieve over the loss of a generation.

Peer excels when he brings out journalistic gems like the story of the ikhwanis, turncoat militants who became a part of Indian counter-insurgency; chameleon-like careerists who smoothly switch roles between militant, reformed militant and politician, a cryptic hint of the alienation of separatist politicians from the ordinary aggrieved Kashmiris; or the schizophrenia of a swaggering para-military officer who unexpectedly melts in a media room when Peer starts recalling the life he spent in Delhi.

Despite these excellent points, however, there are some rough edges and glaring lacunae as well.

Peer’s style is very uneven and varies between the raw and the sophisticated. It is possible that the account has been written over a long period of time during which the writer himself has evolved. However, that does not absolve the responsibility of the publisher’s editorial team to play their role, which is more than spell checking.

Peer completely omits the Kargil war and is similarly silent about the Indo-Pak peace yatra that started with the Lahore bus trip by Atal Behari Vajpayee and has gone through its yo-yo moments.

These are glaring blemishes to ignore, especially from a trained journalist.

Peer stumbles often in maintaining distance and some circumspection regarding his own emotions and concerns. For example, there is too much shock expressed when a youth who is dandily throwing grenades and sniping armymen gets killed in an encounter.

Surely, Peer did not expect such elements to be given a medal by the army?

I am sure the militant himself was mentally ready for “shahadat”, even though youth are prone to feel temporarily invincible in the early stages of any insurgency. The fact of the matter is in such armed insurgencies there are very few armed men surviving till the end game (say in PLO or IRA).

Peer also exhibits a casual disdain for the changes that are occurring in India in the last two decades and rubbishes them with the label of a discredited “India Shining”, an affliction of many a blinkered anti-establishment writer.

In fact there is every reason to believe that these changes are also occurring at least in Srinagar and Jammu if not in rural J&K, albeit in a small way, and that is affecting the attitude of a section of Kashmiri youth (mostly born post-Gawakadal) who want to move on.

The fact that despite the hysteria of the Amarnath agitation in Jammu and Srinagar, the prime movers of the agitation on both sides viz BJP and PDP did not win either Srinagar or Jammu seats in the general election says something. There are long queues for recruitment into new BPOs opening up in Jammu and Srinagar.

Then again, the recent prolonged strikes in Srinagar post-Shopian and a suicidal destruction of the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris engaged in the tourist trade, tells us not to get carried away too much and that the old is still very much alive.

On the whole, Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night is a welcome addition to contemporary history, written with passion and pathos.
It is surprising that we have so few of these in India (at least in the English language). Why don’t we have more such attempts to tell the story of Manipur, Nagaland, Narmada valley, the jungles of Orissa/ Chhattisgarh/ Jharkhand, Dharavi, Emergency, Amritsar ‘84, Delhi ‘84, Mumbai ‘93 or Gujarat 2002 in print or in film?

Why don’t we have our Norma Rae, Erin Brokovich or My heart lies buried at Wounded Knee? An Amu (Delhi 1984) or a Parzania (Gujarat 2002) are not enough.

Hopefully, more writers will follow Peer’s lead.

Interview: Kamala Sankaran

Peepul ke Neeche—Conversations

British Colonialism and the Indian legal system

What were the contours of legal system in India in the pre-colonial times and how did British colonialism alter it to its detriment has great relevance today. After all the system that is in practice today is part of our colonial legacy. Shivanand Kanavi explored this important subject in this conversation with Dr. Kamala Sankaran, who teaches at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.

SK: Let us explore how colonialism changed the judicial system in India and what impact it had on the people. Even today we see big disconnect between people and the legal system. Empirically we can see it in the discontent that a large number of people have that they do not get justice or it is delivered too late that at times the person dies before he gets it. All kinds of explanations are given regarding this eg. paucity of judges, courts etc. But the system itself seems flawed. It is notable that one of the demands of people in Swat, Pakistan for several decades has been the establishment of Nizam a Adil system of courts rather than the British system mainly because of the inordinate delay in the latter. Why do people in the subcontinent feel alienated by the British system, what needs to be done?

KS: A good starting point is to look at what existed in India before the British came. It is difficult to simplify this since India is a complex region. Even before the Mughal rule there was in many parts of the country a shastra based system and a system based on custom or vyavahara which was based on the life experience of people, how they dealt with norms and the systems and institutions they had created. On top of that you have another system of institutions which were created with the advent of Mughal rule in India covering vast areas of India. Even this allowed plurality of systems. So what marked India before the colonial intervention is plurality of legal systems and institutions. One of the significant effects of colonialism was the imposition of uniformity. Pluralism was considered antithetical to a neat and orderly centralized system. It has its origins in the philosophy of British, based on the notion of an Austinian state where a single monarch or a power had all power and was indivisible. All powers devolved from top down. That was the structure of the modern nation state that the British were familiar with. So there was centralization of legislative authority and executive authority. So just seeing a region with multiple states was itself a shock to them having come from a unitary one. On top of it to have multiple legal systems where different castes and religions had their own institutions was quite alien to them. So one of the things they tried to bring is certainty and uniformity in the law; certainty and uniformity in judicial and legal institutions they created. That homogenization itself was a major shock to Indians. The judicial system is one part of the legal system. So let me confine myself to that.

SK: What is the difference between the two?

KS: I am using the terms in the sense that a legal system would involve all the laws, norms, standards that are laid down to determine what is right or wrong; correct or incorrect. It would also involve all that goes to enforce the legality that is the courts, police, jails etc. whereas judicial system is a part and parcel of the legal system. When the British came to India I think they realized that there was already a fairly well developed dispute resolution system of various types in different geographical regions. We know that when the British came to India around 1600 they chose not to immediately displace the local institutions if they could. Their strategy in India was different from their strategy in North America, or in parts of Africa or in Australia. Those they considered as res nullis (belongs to no one, belongs to those who find it first) countries, where there was an absence of a legal system – even though there were indigenous people in those lands. The Anglo-Saxon law in toto could be inflicted on all those people. In India they already knew was an advanced civilization with many institutions and laws in place. So they tread fairly cautiously. You can see it very clearly from 1600 to 1773 when the Regulating Act came into being. In 1726 they had the first charter which allowed courts to be set up in the three presidencies. The courts setup soon after the first factory was setup in Surat, were dispensing justice to only Englishmen and adjudicating on principles of equity, justice and good conscience which those colonial civil servants could well understand. In 1726 they decided that English law as adapted to Indian conditions could directly applied. In 1773 after the battle of Plassey, the entry of Warren Hastings in 1772 and the Regulation Act of 1773 they very clearly stated that with regard to personal matters pertaining to Hindus and Mohammedans, the English law would not apply but that it would for other aspects like property, commerce etc. They did setup the courts in civil jurisdiction. That is quite significant. The battle of Plassey won the British the diwani and not the nizamat. (Diwani is the civil administration and nizamat dealt with the criminal jurisdiction as well as the army in each subah. This was part of Mughal administration. To the best of my understanding it meant ‘he who had the purse would not have the army and vice versa’, which prevented any threat arising to the central order from the subahs.) The British won the diwani, they had the right to collect revenue but they did not have the right to dispense criminal justice. For a long time the nizamat continued to be at Murshidabad while the diwani was in Calcutta. The merger of the two took place later. There are legal historians who have shown how the nizamat steadily crumbled in power. Diwani adalat mainly dealt with disputes arising out of revenue. Very soon Warren Hastings was followed by Cornwallis with his permanent settlement and collection of revenue was of utmost importance to the colonial administration. In the diwani adalats that the British introduced the provision that if you were not able to pay the land revenue then you could sell a part of your land to pay it. Over a period of time nizamat adalats or fouzdari adalats came under British purview.
You asked what impact the British judicial system had. They set up these specialized courts manned by people trained in law with independent judges. That itself was a cultural shock for people of India because till that time if you look at the existing dispute resolution systems, typically at the village level, one had the panchayat system. Panchas would be notables who would be known locally. They were not ‘elected’ as we understand today. By the modern yardstick they would not be ‘independent’ as they would be members of the community. The idea of an independent judge is comes from Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and it requires that the judge’s mind is a tabula rasa, a clean slate, with respect to the dispute and he only allows his mind to register that which is relevant to the dispute. The medium by which the judge appreciates the facts or the evidence is through the two lawyers representing either side. What they bring into the court largely determines the final outcome. So the relevancy of who should be allowed to address the court and complex rules of evidence concerning who could step into witness box and address the court, on what matters can be addressed became very important. So important unless one’s own eye or ears have seen/heard the transaction one could not testify and one could testify only with regard to that particular transaction. Whereas in the panchayat which was held in the open anybody who had even fringe knowledge could speak. They did not have to go through this filter of ‘is this relevant, are you worthy’. Therefore you had a sense of participation and anybody could speak. With this system one had a judge who was not known to the parties, which was seen as virtue in the English system but was alien to Indians. Language of course it goes without saying was English and one had to hire a lawyer and I am not going into that.

SK: This also creates the scope for the judge to let a case drop on technical grounds that the lawyer did not present the right thing or in the right way, even if the judge can see the right and wrong himself.

KS: That is true. There is very limited power of the judge to take judicial notice of certain things but his knowledge was as good or as bad as that of the lawyer who presents before him or her. There was also no ‘her’, so I might as well confine it to ‘him’! Thus, in all these areas: the choice of the judge; who could testify, regarding what they could testify; the location of the court. I am not romanticizing it but it was more participatory. There had very strict rules of relevancy. (Many of these continue till today). If a person had behaved in a similar manner in a previous transaction it could be ruled as an irrelevant fact unless you could construct an organic connection. Secondly they had these rules against hearsay. That meant that only a person who had directly seen or witnessed a particular event could have the right to speak. If you had heard it from your wife that she saw something and she was unable to come then your testimony would be hit by the rule against hearsay. Thus only a small group of people would have the capacity to address the court and other who may have accompanied the party to the court because they had knowledge about related matters would have been considered irrelevant, and that would create the perception that you were not being heard. People were priced out, they could not understand the language. Therefore these courts with their very specialized rules of evidence manned by very technical judges, and where you would have to place your full faith in the vakeel who alone would be the voice that would speak in the court, made the system inaccessible to Indians.
Look at the court buildings of the British. They built the supreme court of Calcutta, a grand structure many steps from the ground, where the judge (s) would sit high upon a bench, whereas earlier the panchas would sit on the ground etc. The whole geography and architecture of the court system alienated people. The form of decision making was also entirely different: the judgment was in the form of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Whereas the panchayats always negotiated, with no clear winner or loser, you are willing to find a mid-ground so that all could save face. People were used to that system where you would not lose everything but some form of justice would be done. So that you did not have a win-lose but a win-win.

SK: You were heard.

KS: Yes you were heard and the solution framed gave a lot of discretion to the decision makers to decide what would best serve the ends of justice. So long as their decision was not out of sync with vyavahara that was practiced they had a whole range of flexibility. In today’s parlance of alternative dispute resolution systems, panchayats had many desirable features. In contrast, for the British, the certainty of law that it was fixed before the dispute came into being was seen as a major virtue. So it needed a black and white text, written and published, which gave it stability and majesty.

In India if you take the law applicable to the Hindus one had shastras, the shruti and the smriti, which constituted the shastric sources of law. They were constantly subjected to interpretation by commentators, glossators etc. Then you also had vyavahara which varied from the shastras and varied in time and regionally. The vyavahara could override shastras also. In different parts of the country the usages developed and these were taken to be the law. For example regarding women’s rights to property. Even if some of the shastras did not permit it, in large parts of India women did own property so that was vyavahara, as for example in the south, east. So British found different practices in different parts of India and that went against their homogenous conception of law. So in 1773 Warren Hastings organized for the documentation in black and white of what the law is.

SK: Was this the Gentoo code?

KS: Yes that was Halhed’s ‘A Code of Gentoo Law’ that he translated and complied in 1776. Sir William Jones also translated some important Islamic texts. Earlier, the panchas had the freedom to fashion their remedies, had freedom to look at the exigencies of the situation, etc but once you were confronted with a law in black and white: for every contingency, the consequence was determined; there was far less flexibility. Interpretation was not given importance. All this contributed to the alienation.

When the British came they took the policy of “not interfering” with Hindu and Mohammedan law but it was only a lip service. In order to understand what was Hindu and Muslim law, the British decided to translate and codify it, it became fixed, and further, these were privileged over the vyavahara. They also started codification of other branches of law. While they had a so called ‘hands off’ approach to personal law, as for law regarding property, contracts they did not see readymade codes in place. They decided that those are the areas where they would themselves codify the law.

We should not forget that the period when Warren Hastings and Cornwallis were in India was also the period of the emergence of utilitarianism in England. James Mill, Jeremy Bentham etc were also great codifiers in their own right. It accelerated the codification of Indian law. The utilitarians believed that the body of common law developing in England was inadequate to deal with poverty thrown up by industrialization in England itself. They were great promoters of Poor Laws providing some benefits to working class in whatever way. The big laboratory for codification was India. The first Law Commission was setup in India in 1834 and the second Law Commission in 1853 and the main job of these commissions was prepare the codes. The amorphous body of English Common Law by which I mean the body of case law with various principles which was never codified in England itself was done for the first time in India.
You would be surprised to know that Indian codification went back to England in certain cases to assist in their codification nearly a century later. Thus, India was a major laboratory for codification for the British. They then used it to export it to all other colonies including the home country itself. For example the Trust Act was first codified in India and then went back to England. They codified the law relating to contracts, sale of goods, transfer of property, trusts and of course criminal law. In the Mughal courts they had their own criminal law and all that changed after 1858.

At the same time whenever issues came about taxes owed to the state arising out of Permanent Settlement, huge amount of litigation came up in Bengal, Bihar and Awadh in the Calcutta court. This required that property be put on the market for sale to recover the revenue. This in turn required the tweaking of traditional Hindu and Muslim Laws. Property was personal and private and its alienation was very difficult in pre-British times. The capacity of the karta of the Hindu undivided family to alienate was greatly assisted by the British courts. The body of Hindu law l law, really became a modified one, now referred to as the Anglo-Hindu law and Anglo-Muslim law because these were not the pure Hindu law and Muslim law that existed before the British times. The right to alienate served the British colonial interests. The doctrine of lapse also went against the older theory of kingship that existed in India but it was upheld by the Privy Council. The rights of zamindar, the duties of the zamindar - all these changed.

In areas which were not strictly personal law as understood by the British they felt free to legislate. After 1858 over the next 30 years they carried out a lot of legislation. For example, in 1860 they legislated the Indian Penal Code, the Societies Registration Act and little later in 1867 the Press and Registration of Books Act. British knew from their experience of the trade unions in their country that when the trade union movement shifted from an early Luddite position to a more advanced one, the organization of workers to fight for their rights became very important. Organisation was power, so the law declared that a group of people cannot form an organisation unless they are registered with the state. The British had done that in UK some dacades earlier.
SK: Plus they had seen organization among Indians in 1857.

KS: Yes, plus the power of propaganda, and so they found the need to enact the Press and Registration of Books Act. The three laws they brought in immediately after 1857 were these - to criminalise any kind of action against the state. The Criminal Procedure and Civil Procedure codes (1872) were then brought in. It is said that procedures are handmaids for justice, which is no doubt true. Instead of the ad hocism of court procedure in pre-British times, this was systematized. Once you have a centralized administration you cannot have panchayats in different areas doing things in their own way. The rules were created by a centralized power.

SK: What are procedures?

KS: In the civil side, for example, broadly that you must hear both the parties - that the other side must have a chance to file its written statement following the filing of the plaint; that the parties must exchange documents - so documents become very important, supplying the list of witnesses etc. The procedure becomes long drawn and each time the judge must decide what is relevant/irrelevant. The judge has to frame issues on which alone he will focus his mind and give a decision. In the criminal side there must be a FIR, there must be an offence under which you are charged, then you must be tried, who could be called as witness etc.

Broadly the laws of the 1860s were very much geared towards consolidating the colonial state; in the 1870s and 1880s it was consolidating the empire and hence the laws relating to contracts, sale of goods, trusts, telegraphs etc, which assisted the building of the economic empire. The other law that helped in the consolidation of the empire was the Land Acquisition Act (1894), which gave the power of eminent domain to the state to acquire land.

SK: Did the power of eminent domain not exist in the state in pre-British times?

KS: I do not think it existed in this far reaching form. The power of the state to levy a maximum of one third share of the produce existed but that you could completely dispossess somebody’s property to hand over to a third person does not seems to have been broadly practiced. Of course in times of war, etc requisitioning would have happened. But the British took it to new heights of acquiring land for all the major projects that the empire required like railways, industry etc. The irony is that they would acquire land in the name of the public interest and then hand it over to a private party also. The Telegraph Act was passed, the postal system was setup, a monopoly was created in communications. All this helped the empire.

Then came the legislation relating to the setting up of companies and regulating conditions in factories. I also want to mention the Workman’s Breach of Contract Act (1859). It enabled them to provide labour to serve the purposes of the British Empire the world over through indentured labour. They needed labour in the West Indies, Malaya, Sri Lanka, Africa etc. Agents would go to the villages and recruit. May be they did not capture and kidnap as was done for the slave trade in Africa but short of that everything else was done. Recruited workers were sent away on this major voyage. As Marx said the modern worker was ‘free’ in a double sense. He is ‘free’ from all property and he is ‘free’ to enter or not to enter into a wage contract. But in India the worker was not free to choose his employer. He would be criminally charged with breach of contract if he tried to abandon his employment and employer.

Thus the changes in the law between 1850’s to 1890’s consolidated the British colonial state in India. It disempowered the people. There were also laws that consolidated the economic might of the empire. This set the stage for rapid industrialization of India.

SK: What about the Arms Act (1878)?

KS: The main effect of that was to disarm the people by prohibiting the carrying of arms without a ‘licence’. In the American constitution the right to bear and carry arms has been seen as a residual right that people retain which has still not been taken away. But the British colonial theory never recognized this right. The British constitutional theory was based on the Austinian notion of a centralized authority which has all sovereign power and a subject has only those powers that are given back to him/her. The notion of an inherent liberty by virtue of being a human which were recognised by the French and American constitutions were not accepted in India. You only had the rights given to you by the crown. The colonial state formation had been a disempowering process.

SK: What about militias and Yeomen rising up to assist the state when there is a serious external threat?

KS: That may have existed in feudal times but as the modern nation state emerged, the sole monopoly and prerogative to inflict violence exists with the state. The right of the people to resort to violence would be a lawless act as you would “taking the law into your own hands”. In a very limited way the right of private defence was recognized. When somebody attacked you, you could use equal force to repel that person. But that could be done in a purely reactive way, not independently.

SK: You mentioned that they purportedly stayed away from the Hindu and Muslim Law but what was their attitude towards the huge mass of adivasis who belonged to neither? How did they interact with them their rights, customs, forms of state etc?

KS: As British territory increased (many princely states had far more progressive legislations than British India) as they came in contact with tribal communities. They just dealt with them using their full military might and colonial laws. For example they took over forests as crown property and created reserved forests, protected forests etc. Forest dwellers then became intruders who did not have any legal rights because they did not have systems of private property ownership which other communities may have had. It was a complete takeover of the natural resources.

SK: It was akin to what they did with Native Indians and Aborigines elsewhere.

KS: Yes.

SK: Clearly British intervention changed things fundamentally especially regarding conception of property rights but what happened during the earlier interventions by the Turks, Pathans, Mughals etc. How did they deal with the existing system?

KS: I am unable to answer this question fully but the existence of pluralism in many parts of India, even after the advent of these rulers indicates that much of the earlier legal regimes continued with some changes. It was certainly not the kind of seismic shift seen under the British.

SK: Could you speak about the colonial roots of Indian labour law?

KS: Who has the right to be a worker and employed is determined by the employers and that is something that labour law recognises. That is why it is not worker friendly. For example when capitalism and colonialism wanted expansion of employment they would drag persons away and compel them to work. One had the slavery system as practiced in Africa where literally a net was thrown over captured slaves and they were dragged off. In India they were not so crude (slavery had been abolished in England) but in every state there would be agents, jamadars, sardars who would go village to village recruiting workers. They were completely regulated by the British state because they wanted labour for plantations in India and for the whole empire. At that time you had to work and breaking out of your employment was considered a criminal act. However when the recession struck as in the 1890’s or in 1920’s labour law shifted away from trying to get more workers and recognized the inherent right of the employer to lay off or dismiss. Suddenly the contract of employment becomes a contract freely entered into with a free exit. So the job security that workers wanted has never been recognized. To the extent that workers are organized and have won some rights, there is some amount of redundancy and retrenchment compensation. So the inevitable is only postponed for a period in order that the worker can go out and look for another job. Labour law has this aspect that it accommodates the cycles of capitalism. Today we are told that labour law is inflexible and we need an exit policy and that is the problem with Indian industry. That is not always so. Problems with Indian industry have very little to do with the labour law.

SK: The impact of colonialism on Indian society is a fascinating subject as much of it lingers on to this day as a colonial legacy. We will continue this later too. Thank you.

Notes:
John Austin: John Austin (1790-1859) is considered by many to be the creator of the school of analytical jurisprudence, as well as, more specifically, the approach to law known as “legal positivism.” His work “Province of Jurisprudence Determined” (1832) had a far reaching impact. He greatly influenced his associates, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. According to 20th century theorists like H L A Hart, “Austin's influence on the development of England of [Jurisprudence] has been greater than that of any other writer”.
Sadr Dīwānī Adālat:
In Mughal and British India, a high court of civil and revenue jurisdiction. It was instituted by Warren Hastings, the British governor-general, in 1772. It sat in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was the final court of appeal in civil matters; it consisted of the governor-general and two members of his council.
This high civil court, like its counterpart for criminal jurisdiction—the Sadr Nizāmat Adālat—was abolished after the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, and its powers and jurisdiction were transferred to new high courts of judicature set up by the Indian High Courts Act of 1861.
(From http://www.ghadar.in/, Excerpts of this interview appeared in the quarterly magazine Ghadar Jari Hai--The Revolt Continues, Vol III, No. 1&2, Jan-June 2009)

Obit: Rajeev Motwani

I have just learned of the tragic death of Rajeev, at his home in Palo Alto on June 5, 2009.
It is shocking to say the least.
In my interactions with him I found him brilliant, child like, with a great sense of humour and genuine regard for people who helped him and inspired him in his life.
He was very good at explaining complex things in a simple manner.
From a theoretical computer scientist he had started calling him self a "start-up junkie", because of his enthusiasm in mentoring new entrepreneurs.
He was a classmate of Sharukh Khan, the Indian film star, in school and had great respect for him.
In his self effacing style he would say, 'that guy (Sharukh) is brilliant and will be the No.1 in anything he takes up'. Pushing into background his own remarkable intellectual achievements.
My heartfelt condolences to his family.
shivanand

See the brief profile I had written about him in 2004 at:
http://reflections-shivanand.blogspot.com/2007/08/rajiv-motwani.html