Author: R A Mashelkar
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 26, 2003
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=30275
Introduction: From launching satellites
to cracking illiteracy: a nation held back by self-doubt
India has the reputation of being
a thinking nation. Indian minds are great minds. But what about our mindsets?
That is a matter of concern. We are perennially in a state of self-doubt.
Let me take an example from science
and technology (S&T). We keep asking as to whether Indian S&T has
delivered. We do not realise India has achieved so much with so little.
Our overall S&T budget in 2002-03
was less than $ 3 billion. Pfizer's R&D budget was over $ 5 billion.
For a national budget that was smaller than the budget of a single company,
India has achieved so much.
Take our space programme. Its R&D
budget was $ 450 million last year. The R&D budget for General Motors
was around $ 7 billion. What has our space programme achieved? Today, we
design, develop, test and fabricate our own satellite launches. We have
moved from one sophisticated launching vehicle to another, from ASLV to
PSLV to GSLV.
We have launched 35 satellites,
14 geo-stationary. Not only do we launch our own satellites but also those
of countries such as Germany and South Korea. And all this for a budget
just seven per cent that of a single company in the United States..
I remember being part of a committee
that reviewed scientific facilities in South Africa in 1997. Visiting a
satellite tracking centre outside Pretoria, I asked, ''Tell me, which is
the best satellite image you get?'' They showed me the imagery they claimed
had the finest resolution. Those pictures were taken from the satellite
IRS-1C. I am proud to say the I in IRS-1C stood for India.
Move beyond S&T and come back
to the theme that India does so much for so little. Only 50 per cent of
our children go to school, only 30 per cent of those go to the 10th standard,
and only 40 per cent of that final figure pass. That makes it six per cent
of all children, as against, say, South Korea's 70 per cent.
At six per cent, we are talking
of the tip of the iceberg. But what does that tip deliver? Last year, we
exported $ 9.7 billion worth of software. Do you know how many contributed
to this? Only 50,000 software engineers. That is 0.05 per cent of our population
contributed to almost 10 per cent of our exports. The tip of the iceberg
can deliver so much. What would happen if the entire iceberg were lifted?
Once again defeatism holds us back.
Sheer statistics stare us in the face. In the primary school age-group,
almost 80 million children are either not enrolled or are in schools but
are not learning. This constitutes 50 per cent of our potentially school
going children. Should we give up?
Pratham, a very innovative education
initiative launched by the corporate world, believes this problem can be
solved. That too by spending Rs 100 to educate one child per year. Beginning
in the slums of Mumbai, Pratham has responded to this challenge by serving
over a million primary school children across India.
We can deal with 80 million children,
one may argue, but what about 200 million adults who cannot read and write?
We reinforce our doubts by saying illiteracy is reducing at only 1.5 per
cent per anum. We can then point to the constraints of trained teachers,
and conventional methods of learning from the alphabet to words. These
require 200 hours of instruction. The conclusion? We will need 20 years
to attain 95 per cent literacy. But then there are some who are born optimists.
They include the doyen f Indian IT, F.C Kohli. He has developed the computer-based
functional literacy (CBFL) method. It focuses on the reading ability. It
is based on the theories of cognition, language and communication.
In this method, the scripted graphic
patterns and images are recognised through a combination of auditory and
visual experiences by using computers. The method emphasises learning words
rather than the alphabet. While the focus is on reading, it acts as a trigger
for people to learn to write on their own.
Based on the CBFL method, Kohli's
team has developed innovative methodologies using IT and computers to build
reading capability. This experiment was first conducted in Medak near Hyderabad.
Without a trained teacher, the women learners started reading a newspaper
in Telugu in eight to 10 weeks.
Kohli's team developed these lessons
to run on Intel 486s and earlier versions of Pentium PCs modified for multimedia.There
are around 200 million such obsolete PCs in the world. By using them, the
cost of making one person literate would be less than Rs 100. With CBFL,
Kohli says he can increase literacy to 90-95 per cent in three to five
years.
It is amazing how much human capital
resides in the submerged part of the Indian iceberg. What do global giants
like General Electric and Motorola have in common with a humble tiffin
delivery network comprising 3,500 dabbawallas, who deliver 1.5 lakh lunch
boxes in Mumbai each day?
The dabbawallas have the six sigma
rating or efficiency rating of 99.999999, one error in one million transactions.
This rating is that of Forbes.
Now, these are largely illiterate
dabbawallas. Their secret lies in a coding system devised over the years.
Each dabba is marked in indelible ink with an alphanumeric code of about
10 characters. The dabbawalla business model is a case study in management
institutes.
We are a peculiar country. When
challenged, denied a technology, we perform. Remember how India reacted
to the denial of supercomputers in the 1980s? The Cray XMP-1205 was an
American machine we needed for weather forecasting. It was not available
for a variety of reasons.
But Indian scientists were challenged.
They used massively parallel processing computing technology to create
a supercomputer. Within three years and the $ 10 million C-DAC was given,
the PARAM supercomputer was delivered.
I remember reading Washington Post
at the time. ''Angry India does it,'' it said. If only we were permanently
angry!
(The author is director-general,
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. This is an edited version
of his address at the 2003 Delhi University convocation)
