Boogaleeboo posted:

Wait, seriously, you just noticed that now?

Dusz posted:

Oh it was very easy to notice, I'm just pointing it out to the people skimming through who haven't been enlightened as to who you are yet (although to be fair, it's really obvious).

Boogaleeboo posted:

Wait, seriously, you just noticed that now?

Does *nobody* read their own posts or the posts of other people in D&D?

Boogaleeboo posted:

Yes, it was obvious when I said it and then when I reminded someone else that I said it a few posts later. It's not so much any more obvious when you immediately bring it up again as it is a sign you may be operating under serious short term memory less. Much like whatever major malfunction keeps you from answering those 3 simple questions. And yet you think you are maintaining dignity in the thread so far?

OwlBot 2000 posted:

Dusz posted:

I think this is relevant because it's an important concept when discussing India.

Typo posted:

Or more to the point, it's pretty the lowest common denominator debate in D&D. You can pretty much apply it to discussing any social/political/economics issue, it's something where everyone can get awfully excited and grind their political axes without any specialized knowledge on the actual country being discussed.

OwlBot 2000 posted:

I'm surprised at the dearth of Indian goons, at least in D&D. The only person who seems to have any deep first-hand of India is Yiggy, whom I hope will return and enlighten us further on India's situation and history. How much is the shift in tech support from India to the Philippines hurting India, in quantitative terms?

Anarkii posted:

This thread's premise is pretty disturbing, and I can't even start responding to some of the comments. The "only solution" is more indians getting educated abroad? Holy poo poo, are you real? Our higher education system is so far better than anything in US/Europe that such comments are ridiculous.

Anarkii posted:

Holy poo poo, are you real? Our higher education system is so far better than anything in US/Europe that such comments are ridiculous.

Business Standard posted:

link

After ranking, reputation of Indian institutes takes a beating
IITs & IISc do not figure in the latest Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings
3/6/14

The Times Higher Education's World Reputation Rankings 2014 saw Harvard University taking the first place, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, University of Cambridge and University of Oxford being ranked second, third, fourth and fifth, respectively. In the Asia-Pacific region, Australia loses ground with now five top 100 representatives in 2014, down from six in 2013.

...

While Times Higher Education Rankings does not rank institutions below 100, it has revealed that the Indian Institute of Science continues to be the most highly rated university in India, though it has seen its position drop from around 130th place to just below 200 in the world. IIT Bombay has also dropped to the 210-220 group, while IIT, Delhi and IIT, Kanpur both now feature just below 250th position in the world.

The Times of India posted:

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Poor quality of higher education a concern: Jamir
2/26/14

BHUBANESWAR: Governor and chancellor of state universities SC Jamir on Tuesday expressed concern over the poor quality of higher education in the country.

"Quality of education in our universities is obviously an area in which our higher education system lags behind. It is quite disheartening that none of the Indian universities finds a place in the top 200 universities in the world," the governor said, while addressing the 88th All-India Vice-chancellors' Conference at KIIT University. Over 500 VCs and university administrators are attending the three-day meet.

Jamir said if rankings and grading were any indictor of quality, Indian institutes of higher learning had a long way to go. "Expansion without quality improvement serves little purpose. We have to place more emphasis on quality," he said.

Saying shortage of quality teachers was a big problem, the chancellor asked the VCs to think about ways and means to address the issue. Jamir emphasized on moral education and said the VCs should strive to inculcate moral values among faculty members, students and staff. Jamir said the universities should focus more on research and promote an environment conducive to creativity and innovation.

The Daily Mail India posted:

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PM's woe over higher education as he admits 'it has hit a new low'

2/5/13

With Indian universities repeatedly failing to figure among the top 200 educational institutions of the world, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged in a candid speech that the quality of higher education in India leaves much to be desired.

Calling for an "over-riding emphasis on quality" at the conference of vice chancellors of central universities organised by President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Singh admitted that the unprecedented growth in higher education could be happening without any commensurate improvement in quality.

"We must recognise that too many of our higher educational institutions are simply not up to the mark.

"Too many of them have simply not kept abreast with the rapid changes that have taken place in the world around us in recent years, still producing graduates in subjects that the job market no longer requires," he said.

"It is a sobering thought for us that not one Indian university figures in the top 200 universities of the world today."

Human resource development minister M.M. Pallam Raju, minister of state for HRD Shashi Tharoor, and National Innovation Council head Sam Pitroda were present at the conference, as well as 40 vice-chancellors of central universities.

The PM was not the only critic of the higher education system at the meeting. Mukherjee, too, observed that the standard of higher education was declining in the country.

Last year, India was the only BRICS nation that did not have a single university among the top 200 on the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) list - the most reputed global rankings of institutes for higher education.
The performance was no different in the World University Rankings published by Times Higher Education.

Despite widespread criticism, the HRD ministry (then under Kapil Sibal), along with premier institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), had dismissed the rankings saying their assessment parameters were irrelevant in the Indian context.

For the PM, however, the rankings are a wake-up call. Pointing out flaws such as "unnecessary rigidity" in the higher education system, Singh said it is high time that central institutions took the lead in changing this.
The heads of central universities later brainstormed on improving the quality of faculty, effective use of the National Knowledge Network and improvement of the visitor-university interface.

"What the PM has said is absolutely correct. Most of us who have observed changes in the higher education sector over past five to seven years have also been saying the same thing. But my question is, what are we doing about this situation?" asked former Indian Institute of Science (IISc) director Goverdhan Mehta.

According to Sanjay Dhande, former director of IIT-Kanpur, introducing a system of accountability is the only way things could change for the better.

"There is a lot of inertia in academia at present and accountability of educational institutions to the government and society is very weak," he said, adding that change will come only with accountability.

The Economic Times Blogs posted:

link

Transparency for a Change in Higher Education
8/31/12

Indian higher education system has expanded at a break-neck speed. Nearly 20,000 colleges were added between 2000-01 and 2010-11 and the number of students enrolled doubled from nearly 8.4 million to 17 million in this decade, according to the University Grants Commission (UGC).

However, this much needed expansion came at the expense of quality. The number of seats remaining vacant in some disciplines like engineering, underemployment and unemployment among educated youth and incessant desire to collect more degrees for advancing career are some of the indicators of the inadequate quality of education imparted. In addition, we continue to hear cases of malpractices and corruption among regulators and institutions in compromising standards.

Minister Kapil Sibal has attempted to bring a change by proposing a dozen legislative bills including The Higher Education and Research Bill, 2011 and The Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Educational Institutions, 2010. Unfortunately, most are still far from seeing the light of the day. Even if they get enacted, I do not see major qualitative changes in Indian higher education. The reason is that they are still not addressing the fundamental weakness of the system—lack of transparency.

The policy reform directions are seriously limited by its political approach of using control as the way of assuring quality rather than using transparency for empowering students and fostering competition.

One specific recommendation to achieve goals of transparency is to mandate high standards of data disclosures by institutions on institutional performance and feed this data to an easy-to-use national database for students to make informed choice.

...

In contrast, there is no availability of parallel information of institutional performance for higher education institutions. This results in all sorts of academic, financial, regulatory and marketing malpractices.

The Economist posted:

link
A Billion Brains
A better education system calls for more than money
9/29/12

CLIP ON A harness, lift your legs and hurtle down a wire towards the sharp corners of a 15th-century Rajasthani fort. As you whizz, you might have a few niggling doubts. Was the zip-wire serviced by someone who knew what he was doing? Is the safety adviser any good? Who is trained in first aid?

Fortunately the staff in Neemrana, a tourist spot some 130km south-west of Delhi, are on the ball. Raj Kumar, the lead instructor of Flying Fox, has an impressive (if not entirely relevant) qualification as a Master of Philosophy in ancient Indian history. “I had planned to do my PhD, but this opportunity came along,” he says. The outfit’s British owner-manager, Jonathan Walter, explains that getting and keeping reliable workers is his greatest headache. The problem is not so much the onerous labour laws but finding skilled people. To deal with foreigners his staff need good English; for Indian customers they need social skills to cajole the reluctant into the walk up the hill.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that skilled workers are becoming scarce. The man in charge of building a university, also in Neemrana, says he had extreme difficulty recruiting the ten types of masons he needed to work on his campus. A manager overseeing hotel construction near Delhi’s airport says good plumbers, carpenters and electricians are like gold-dust.

A survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors estimates that in 2010 India had just over 500,000 civil engineers when it needed nearly 4m, and 45,000 architects when it needed 366,000. It predicts that by 2020 the cumulative shortfall of core professionals involved in the building trade could be in the tens of millions.

The shortages extend far beyond the construction industry. The editor of a new magazine, the Caravan, says finding skilled staff is next to impossible because local education is “extremely bad”. A manufacturer moans that even if you find capable staff, they quickly flit off to the next job.

Even some low-skilled labour is in short supply. An agent in Chandigarh for an engineering company says that sales of tractors, rice transplanters and harvesters are booming in Punjab because fewer casual labourers are migrating from Bihar. Even poorer farmers now buy machines to share.

Generally, though, the shortage is of people who are literate, trained and ready to work. The basics are improving. The national literacy rate is up from 52% in 1991 to 74%, according to the census. But gains beyond that are coming far too slowly.

...

Found wanting

Education in engineering, for example, supposedly a great Indian strength, is not what it might be. The country produces over 500,000 engineering graduates a year. Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based company that assesses students’ employability, surveyed 55,000 of them last year and found that not even 3% were ready to be taken on by IT firms without extra training. And even identifying people for further training might not be easy. According to the survey only 17% of the graduates had basic skills. Some 92% of the graduates were deficient in programming or algorithms, 78% struggled in English and 56% lacked analytical skills. “There is a long way to go before engineering graduates in India become employable,” the survey concluded.

That sounds glum—until you realise that it also means India produces around 100,000 engineering graduates a year who could soon be working in its IT firms and beyond. Some pockets of higher education work well, notably the publicly run institutes of technology and of management, on the back of which the country’s IT sector flourishes.

...

Anarkii posted:

Our higher education system is so far better than anything in US/Europe that such comments are ridiculous.

ronya posted:

Indian universities are comparatively much worse at research or undergraduate education, but I am not really sure either of those are actually appropriate for a situation like India, which needs to process vast amounts of students with comparatively little resources.

NYTimes Op-Ed posted:

link

Why India’s Economy Is Stumbling
By ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN
8/31/13

WASHINGTON — FOR the past three decades, the Indian economy has grown impressively, at an average annual rate of 6.4 percent. From 2002 to 2011, when the average rate was 7.7 percent, India seemed to be closing in on China — unstoppable, and engaged in a second “tryst with destiny,” to borrow Jawaharlal Nehru’s phrase. The economic potential of its vast population, expected to be the world’s largest by the middle of the next decade, appeared to be unleashed as India jettisoned the stifling central planning and economic controls bequeathed it by Mr. Nehru and the nation’s other socialist founders.

But India’s self-confidence has been shaken. Growth has slowed to 4.4 percent a year; the rupee is in free fall, resulting in higher prices for imported goods; and the specter of a potential crisis, brought on by rising inflation and crippling budget deficits, looms.

To some extent, India has been just another victim of the ebb and flow of global finance, which it embraced too enthusiastically. The threat (or promise) of tighter monetary policies at the Federal Reserve and a resurgent American economy threaten to suck capital, and economic dynamism, out of many emerging-market economies.

But India’s problems have deep and stubborn origins of the country’s own making.

The current government, which took office in 2004, has made two fundamental errors. First, it assumed that growth was on autopilot and failed to address serious structural problems. Second, flush with revenues, it began major redistribution programs, neglecting their consequences: higher fiscal and trade deficits.

Structural problems were inherent in India’s unusual model of economic development, which relied on a limited pool of skilled labor rather than an abundant supply of cheap, unskilled, semiliterate labor. This meant that India specialized in call centers, writing software for European companies and providing back-office services for American health insurers and law firms and the like, rather than in a manufacturing model. Other economies that have developed successfully — Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and China — relied in their early years on manufacturing, which provided more jobs for the poor.

Two decades of double-digit growth in pay for skilled labor have caused wages to rise and have chipped away at India’s competitive advantage. Countries like the Philippines have emerged as attractive alternatives for outsourcing. India’s higher-education system is not generating enough talent to meet the demand for higher skills. Worst of all, India is failing to make full use of the estimated one million low-skilled workers who enter the job market every month.

Manufacturing requires transparent rules and reliable infrastructure. India is deficient in both. High-profile scandals over the allocation of mobile broadband spectrum, coal and land have undermined confidence in the government. If land cannot be easily acquired and coal supplies easily guaranteed, the private sector will shy away from investing in the power grid. Irregular electricity holds back investments in factories.

India’s panoply of regulations, including inflexible labor laws, discourages companies from expanding. As they grow, large Indian businesses prefer to substitute machines for unskilled labor. During China’s three-decade boom (1978-2010), manufacturing accounted for about 34 percent of China’s economy. In India, this number peaked at 17 percent in 1995 and is now around 14 percent.

In fairness, poverty has sharply declined over the last three decades, to about 20 percent from around 50 percent. But since the greatest beneficiaries were the highly skilled and talented, the Indian public has demanded that growth be more inclusive. Democratic and competitive politics have compelled politicians to address this challenge, and revenues from buoyant growth provided the means to do so.

Thus, India provided guarantees of rural employment and kept up subsidies to the poor for food, power, fuel and fertilizer. The subsidies consume as much as 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, but corruption and inefficient administration have meant that the most needy often don’t reap the benefits.

Meanwhile, rural subsidies have pushed up wages, contributing to double-digit inflation. India’s fiscal deficit amounts to about 9 percent of gross domestic product (compared with structural deficits of around 2.5 percent in the United States and 1.9 percent in the European Union). To hedge against inflation and general uncertainty, consumers have furiously acquired gold, rendering the country reliant on foreign capital to finance its trade deficit.

Economic stability can be restored through major reforms to cut inefficient spending and raise taxes, thereby pruning the deficit and taming inflation. The economist Raghuram G. Rajan, who just left the University of Chicago to run India’s central bank, has his work cut out for him. So do Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, also an economist, and the governing party, the Indian National Congress. These steps need not come at the expense of the poor. For example, India is implementing an ambitious biometric identification scheme that will allow targeted cash transfers to replace inefficient welfare programs.

India can still become a manufacturing powerhouse, if it makes major upgrades to its roads, ports and power systems and reforms its labor laws and business regulations. But the country is in pre-election mode until early next year. Elections increase pressures to spend and delay reform. So India’s weakness and turbulence may persist for some time yet.

Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at both the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development, is the author of “Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance.”

ronya posted:

As a warning, let me point out that this forum of (largely) Americans is liable to interpret the "we can't find trained workers domestically" claim in the American frame, i.e., in the context of a society with 99% literacy and very high internal labour mobility, and considerable political agitation over skilled guest worker labour. So they do not find the claim persuasive, even in the context of other countries. Such is the luxury of being a superpower.

Myself, I would point to the prevalence of rote assessment and endemic cheating, particularly outside of the handful of top colleges, the highly obscurantist governance/funding practices of Indian higher ed institutions, the extremely dubious proliferation of quasi-private colleges in an education-industry environment with extremely weak and corrupt regulation, etc.

Churning out semi-skilled workers who can speak English and follow fixed instructions is not exactly ideal as outcomes go, for higher ed investment, but to be frank India is not investing very much in that higher ed anyway. And the answer to "but this would not work for a model that requires a pool of skilled labour" is "that model was wrong anyway; you need to mobilize your half of your labour force still stuck in agriculture, not coddle your small bourgeoisie".

Anarkii posted:

Our higher education system is so far better than anything in US/Europe that such comments are ridiculous.

quote:

This wife may come as a surprise to some: Modi has repeatedly said that his lack of family makes him an ideal politician. "I am single, who will I be corrupt for?" he told a campaign rally in February. He had previously told his own biographer that he enjoyed "loneliness."

To those who've been following Modi's campaign, however, this isn't so much of a shock. Rumors about Modi's marriage have been around for a long time: As far back as 2009, journalists were trying to interview Jashodaben Chimanlal Modi, a retired school teacher who was said to be Modi's wife. Earlier this year, when it became clear that Modi was likely to be India's next leader, Jashodaben gave an interview to the Indian Express where she said explained that she bore no grudge against her husband for keeping her secret, explaining that it was part of his "destiny."
...
What led Modi away, it seems, was the teachings of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a strict Hindu organization that is reported to require a vow of celibacy. Modi's time with the RSS eventually led to his leadership of India's second largest political party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and his Hindu nationalism is seen as one key aspect of his popularity, though it's also a key sticking point for his opponents, who accuse him of failing to prevent the 2002 massacre of nearly 2,000 Muslims.
...
To Modi's critics his refusal to acknowledge his wife of almost 50 years is a sign of his lack of respect for women. According to various media reports, Jashodaben lives in a one bedroom house and reportedly received a government salary of Rs 14,000 ($233) before she retired. She says she has never remarried after her first experience" "If a man can't take care of his wife, how can he take care of the country?" Congress Party national spokesman Rashid Alvi reportedly said.

SpannerX posted:

Well, how about this? this guy says that women who have sex before marriage... should be hung. Yeah, that's appropriate. So let off the rapists but hang the woman? What the absolute gently caress?

Nckdictator posted:

Yeah, that's pretty horrible. Also the fact that he's a socialist party leader is hilariously depressing.

Frosted Flake posted:

Cool let's all sit on our hands. There is nothing Indians can learn from Western society.

Rhonyn Peacemaker posted:

It comes down to cultural superiority/inferiority.

India is trying to throw off cultural influences and become their own master, only to find that the influences of their past and continuing influences from the present have shifted the power away from themselves. They will never be a first rate world power and because of the deep socioeconomic issues, as well as the deep cultural issues present in the country, they have more or less lost the right to keep their seat at the dinner table.

They need a good war, civil or otherwise, to reduce the overall population, and expose people to what it means to be free. Show them what it means to truly fight for something. Meanwhile, dam the Ganges, strip-mine as much in the way of natural resources out of the area, and setup massive block-housing with indoor plumbing.

You cannot be a world power when people poo poo in the streets.

Looking at you Philippines.

If it isn't a civil war, then it needs to be an external act of aggression, maybe China determining there is mineral wealth in the northern part of India or somesuch. Something to reduce both populations by a large number. This is called a mutually beneficial situation.

Rhonyn Peacemaker posted:

It comes down to cultural superiority/inferiority.

India is trying to throw off cultural influences and become their own master, only to find that the influences of their past and continuing influences from the present have shifted the power away from themselves. They will never be a first rate world power and because of the deep socioeconomic issues, as well as the deep cultural issues present in the country, they have more or less lost the right to keep their seat at the dinner table.

They need a good war, civil or otherwise, to reduce the overall population, and expose people to what it means to be free. Show them what it means to truly fight for something. Meanwhile, dam the Ganges, strip-mine as much in the way of natural resources out of the area, and setup massive block-housing with indoor plumbing.

You cannot be a world power when people poo poo in the streets.

Looking at you Philippines.

If it isn't a civil war, then it needs to be an external act of aggression, maybe China determining there is mineral wealth in the northern part of India or somesuch. Something to reduce both populations by a large number. This is called a mutually beneficial situation.

Thundercracker posted:

Show me an instance of Western powers trying to educate a people they see as a problem, and in need of a solution that didn't turn into a complete shitshow.

Fallom posted:

The Western powers themselves are a pretty solid example of a group of countries that educated their people past the point of gang raping the village witch and incinerating her in the backyard of the police station.

New Division posted:

It's one thing to provide education for members of your own culture, and a fairly different thing to try and 'educate' another culture. That's before you consider the fact that providing 'education' for subordinated cultures has been a historical feature of every empire ever, and was often involved cruelty and repression towards the subordinate culture.

Fallom posted:

The Western powers themselves are a pretty solid example of a group of countries that educated their people past the point of gang raping the village witch and incinerating her in the backyard of the police station.

Rhonyn Peacemaker posted:

Sometimes you need to march the poor and under-educated off to a war for god and/or country to ensure that the education and cultural change takes root. It allows things to change back home so that when the fighting stops, the changes have happened.

This would only benefit India in the long run. Unfortunately no one wants to make the hard choices and recognize that humans are a renewable resource.

A little war, some contested territory, conventional warfare in a province or two, maybe with an aggressive neighbor, and a peace treaty that changes a boarder here, a little there, and the status quo remains largely the same, except the population is now 30% lighter and the average literacy in the country just increased by 20-odd percentage points.