Bharat Karnad is an Emeritus Professor in National Security Studies at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi. He was a member of India's first National Security Advisory Board and has authored several books on nuclear weapons and Indian security.
Robert Trumbull Crowley, former Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations for the CIA. Recorded conversations (Conversations With The Crow) near the end of his life:
".. their head expert was fully capable of building a bomb and we knew what he was up to. He was warned several times but what an arrogant prick that one was. Told our people to fuck off and then made it clear that no one would stop him and India from getting nuclear parity"
I've had numerous requests to comment on the conflict in Ukraine, but have been too busy to write anything.
For background on the situation, I highly recommend the discussion in the video below, released March 3 2022.
To save time, just listen to the presentations by Mearsheimer and McGovern, and their final comments at the end of the video. Both present historical details from the last decade or so that will shock people who only pay attention to mainstream Western media. (Also in the discussion: Jack Matlock, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Ted Postol, MIT professor and missile expert.)
Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. I featured another interview with him in an earlier post on the US catastrophe in Afghanistan: Tragedy of Empire / Mostly Sociopaths at the Top.
Corey Washington and I interviewed John Mearsheimer for the original Manifold, but the episode was not released. It's possible that I might release it some time in the future.
While military and diplomatic aspects of the conflict in Ukraine are worthy of attention, far more important are the long term consequences of Western hysteria and economic war on Russia. Tacit support for Russia from China, India, Brazil, Turkey, OPEC states, indeed perhaps the majority of the world population, may presage a new era of multipolarity and hard power confrontation between great powers.
Why do educated citizens of the countries listed above understand the situation better than the typical American or European? Because they are familiar with Western media propaganda and the history of US imperialism. They are much more likely to understand the facts described by Mearsheimer and McGovern about the recent history of NATO, Ukraine, and Russia leading up to this conflict.
PS I'm surprised there isn't more discussion of systemic risks from defaults of highly networked financial entities that are affected by sanctions on Russia.
This looks dangerous -- like the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. Or am I missing some structural reforms that prevent that from happening again? (Maybe the earlier round of sanctions have already decoupled Russia enough...) Or will the central banks that effectively run our economies now simply issue a blanket put, allowing all of our clever money men to go back to sleep? People used to complain about "zombie companies" in some countries with excessive state intervention in their economies. It looks to me like we've had zombie financial markets for some time now...
Of course I think individuals in TW and UKR have every right to vote / fight for the government they want.
But they are not likely to get their way as the issue is much more important to their giant neighbor (RUS, PRC) than to the USA or soft Europeans in Brussels.
They are probably better off negotiating a peaceful coexistence with the nearby great power. Finland "Finlandized" itself and that was probably the best it could do...
What you are seeing right now in UKR is what great power realists like Mearsheimer *predicted* would happen IF the West gave too much hope to UKR without being willing to actually back it up.
Now, you may say that Joe Smith in Iowa *should* want to back up UKR or TW, send his son to fight on the front lines there. But it is not the case and we know that. We also knew it 10-15y ago when NATO expansion mischief got started and Mearsheimer made his early cautionary statements on this, as did Kennan, Nitze, Perry, Sam Nunn -- all the old cold warriors who ACTUALLY DEFEATED USSR and understood things better than today's leaders.
US won't even sanction RUS energy imports to this country... How much pain are we willing to endure for UKR?
We're going to fight this war to the last Ukrainian... If there isn't a negotiated settlement soon UKR will end up like Iraq and Afghanistan -- abandoned by the US and destroyed.
I can predict something very similar for TW, even though I have extended family living there right now. Does that count towards emotional commitment / empathy? I'm descended from KMT military officers on both sides of my family tree!
TW should negotiate for the best deal it can get from PRC and not count on the US to protect it.
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US war hawks want to see PRC blow itself up fighting for TW. The conflict will destroy Asian economies and leave USA largely unscathed (just as WWII did). They don't care about the well-being of ~2-3 billion Asians.
Some of them just can't help themselves and want to see RUS blow itself up fighting in a UKR trap. But this group is very stupid as they are driving RUS into the arms of PRC and that is going to be very bad for USA.
Some US war hawks are smarter than others...
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US to Ukraine, pointing at Russia: "Let's you and him fight."
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William Burns is Biden's CIA Director, and was Ambassador to the Russian Federation. What did he write about Ukraine and NATO expansion? From Peter Beinart's substack:
Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
While the Biden administration claims that Putin bears all the blame for the current Ukraine crisis, Burns makes clear that the US helped lay its foundations. By taking advantage of Russian weakness, he argues, Washington fueled the nationalist resentment that Putin exploits today. Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And he describes the appetite for revenge it fostered among many in Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s final years as Russia’s president. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,” Burns writes, “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
As the Bush administration moved toward opening NATO’s doors to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about a Russian backlash grew even starker. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” Although Burns couldn’t have predicted the specific kind of meddling Putin would employ—either in 2014 when he seized Crimea and fomented a rebellion in Ukraine’s east or today—he warned that the US was helping set in motion the kind of crisis that America faces today. Promise Ukraine membership in NATO, he wrote, and “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”
Were a reporter to read Burns’ quotes to White House press secretary Jen Psaki today, she’d likely accuse them of “parroting Russian talking points.” But Burns is hardly alone. From inside the US government, many officials warned that US policy toward Russia might bring disaster. William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary from 1994 to 1997, almost resigned because of his opposition to NATO expansion. He has since declared that because of its policies in the 1990s, “the United States deserves much of the blame” for the deterioration in relations with Moscow. Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 served as US ambassador to Ukraine, has called Bush’s 2008 decision to declare that Ukraine would eventually join NATO “a real mistake.” Fiona Hill, who gained fame during the Trump impeachment saga, says that as national intelligence officers for Russia and Eurasia she and her colleagues “warned” Bush that “Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”
Oh, there's some historical background to all this? Some context? Wait I'm told every day this crisis just happened because Putin went crazy and wants to rebuild the USSR / Russian Empire.
Who is full of crap? Western governments and media today, or our CIA Director and former Ambassadors and Secretaries of Defense? The whole world ex-USA/EU can see this. It's only Westerners who are brainwashed.
Added March 7 2022: This is a long Chinese analysis of the military aspects of the war so far. They also cite Oryx estimates. Note comparisons near the end of Russian and PLA capabilities.
I certainly sympathize with "Putin bad", "Russia bad place for me to live", "democracy good" sentiments.
But suppose the realistic possible outcomes are:
1. Ukr is dominated by Russia but not destroyed in a war
2. Ukr is dominated by Russia after a brutal war, with its economy destroyed
3. (Low probability) Ukr escapes Russian domination thanks to strong US support (avoiding WWIII).
4. (Low probability) US strongly supports Ukr, leading to MAD, WWIII
To be very definite, suppose that
I. Given actual past US policies of ~2010-2022 probabilities are P(#1) = P(#2) = 45% and P(#3) = 9% and P(#4) = 1%
II. Following advice of Mearsheimer, frmr SecDefs Perry and McNamara, CIA director Burns, etc. etc. we have
P(#1) = 95% P(#2) = 4%, others much less than 1%. [ i.e., this is a counterfactual scenario that, in my opinion, turns out better! ]
I think this is a REALISTIC characterization. You may disagree. Under my assumptions II is better than I.
But this is not primarily a normative or moral discussion... we don't disgree there.
Note, in a standard utilitarian framework P(#4) dominates everything else!
Four recommended discussions, with perspectives largely absent from US media and establishment sources.
1. US, Russia, China, Iran: Geopolitics and Realpolitik, discussed by a former UK diplomat, a professor at Tehran University, and a Brazilian journalist who covers Eurasia, living in Thailand.
2. Carl Zha, Caltech alumnus and China watcher. TikTok, WeChat, Huawei, semiconductors. The insidious role of US intelligence agencies in the tech war. Part 2.
3. Columbia economic historian Adam Tooze: World Order, Then And Now, ChinaTalk Podcast. Among other topics: State Capitalism, or National Socialism? Why Carl Schmitt is widely studied among Chinese intellectuals. The US won the cold war in Europe, but perhaps not in Asia... MoreTooze
4. The New Great Game: Bruno Maçães and diplomat, writer and former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon discuss Asia’s search for a constructive new equilibrium in the wake of growing tensions between China and its neighbours.
Bonus! Energy, Geopolitics, And The New Map: A Book Talk With Daniel Yergin.
Manhattan Institute:
The shale revolution brought about not only an American competitive advantage in the global oil and gas market, but also an entirely new geopolitical dynamic. Energy is the bedrock of every industrial economy, and even minor shifts in production and prices have had resounding impacts on international diplomacy.
Today, the global energy landscape differs drastically from a decade ago. The U.S. now leads the world in oil production thanks to fracking, and the world is reacting. But even as Russia pivots to China, and Middle Eastern producers try to recalibrate, every oil-producing country faces the same questions about the future of energy: Will renewable energy reign? And how will international relationships fare with this new map? These issues will become even more controversial during the presidential campaigns.
Another story in the WSJ on human capital in India. Some readers objected to a related post I made last week, accusing me of Chinese jingoism for pointing out some qualitative differences in Indian and Chinese economic development. Let me say that I have nothing but respect for the many talented Indians I have known in physics and in technology. But it's important to clarify to what extent elite (highly selected) subgroups, such as, e.g., Indians in the US, or IIT graduates, are representative of the broader population upon whom India's continued economic growth depends. It's entirely possible, as the article below suggests, that India's IT and outsourced service industries are starting to experience real human capital limitations.
WSJ: BANGALORE, India—Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore.
"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."
... Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.
But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.
Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.
At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.
... Trying to bridge the widening chasm between job requirements and the skills of graduates, Tata has extended its internal training program. It puts fresh graduates through 72 days of training, double the duration in 1986, says Tata chief executive N. Chandrasekaran. Tata has a special campus in south India where it trains 9,000 recruits at a time, and has plans to bump that up to 10,000.
Wipro runs an even longer, 90-day training program to address what Mr. Govil, the human-resources executive, calls the "inherent inadequacies" in Indian engineering education. The company can train 5,000 employees at once.
Both companies sent teams of employees to India's approximately 3,000 engineering colleges to assess the quality of each before they decided where to focus their campus recruiting efforts. Tata says 300 of the schools made the cut; for Wipro, only 100 did.
Chinese university graduates would probably perform even worse on tasks requiring English-language skills. However, I do think that the strong performance of Shanghai high school students on recent PISA exams (administered in Mandarin) is a reasonable indicator of education levels in China. That is, although Shanghai averages are likely higher than national averages, the rest of the country is probably not that far behind.
A few hundred million (relatively) affluent middle class knowledge workers surrounded by almost a billion slumdogs is not a desirable development outcome. It may in fact be unstable (see below).
The only way I know of to raise the standard of living of a billion people is through the well-traveled (but dirty and energy intensive) path of industrialization and manufacturing. That is how the West, Japan, and Asian Tigers did it, and what China is doing now. Software parks and call centers are wonderful gleaming instantiations of modernity, but only a small fraction of the population in India have the cognitive ability to write code or deliver complex services in English. India optimists are only thinking about the elite minority -- what about the rest of the population?
We have yet to discover a scalable leapfrog to modernity that avoids heavy lifting in favor of bits.
WSJ: ... Ravi Venkatesan, until this week chairman of Microsoft Corp.'s India arm, says his nation is at a crossroads. "We could end up with a rather unstable society, as aspirations are increasing and those left behind are no longer content to live out their lives. You already see anger and expressions of it," he says. "I strongly have a sense we're at a tipping point: There is incredible opportunity but also dark forces. What we do as an elite and as a country in the next couple of years will be very decisive."
... "What has globalization and industrialization done for India?" asks Mr. Venkatesan, Microsoft's former India chairman. "About 400 million people have seen benefits, and 800 million haven't."
Calorie consumption by the bottom 50% of the population has been declining since 1987, according to the 2009-10 economic survey conducted by India's Ministry of Finance, even as those at the top of society struggle with rising obesity. Mainly because of malnutrition, around 46% of children younger than 3 years old are too small for their age, according to UNICEF.
Infrastructure in cities and the countryside remains woefully inadequate: In recent years, China has added, on average, more than 10 times as much power as India to its electricity grid each year.
Data from McKinsey & Co. show that the number of households in the highest-earning income bracket, making more than $34,000 a year, has risen to 2.5 million, from 1 million in 2005. But the ranks of those at the bottom, making less than $3,000 a year, also have grown, to 111 million, from 101 million in 2005.
[Can these figures be correct? There are probably > 2.5 million households in Taiwan making over $34k a year!]
... India's modernization was expected to prompt a mass movement of workers from farms to factory floors—a critical component in the transformation of China, South Korea and other Asian nations. But manufacturing as a share of India's economy stood at 16% in 2009, the same as in 1991, according to the World Bank.
Services have increased dramatically as a proportion of gross domestic product, rising to 55% in 2009, from 45% in 1991, according to the World Bank, becoming the chief engine of India's economic strength. But many of the fastest-growing areas, such as finance and technology, employ relatively few and rely heavily on skilled employees. The entire software and technology-services sector, including call centers and outsourcing, directly employs just 2.5 million workers, a tiny fraction of the overall work force.
See also the interview below.
WSJ: Vineet Nayar, chief executive of software exporter HCL Technologies, dismisses complaints about corruption in India as a distraction, arguing that the real question the country needs to ask is whether it is becoming more or less globally competitive.
“Was India more globally competitive in 1990 or in 2005, or will it be more competitive in 2015?” questions Mr. Nayar. “Are the [current and future] policies of the government more populist or will they make India more competitive in the global arena?”
In a world where consumption patterns in the U.S. and Europe are at an all time low, even as they continue to hit new peaks in emerging markets, and where power bases are shifting from the West to emerging markets like China, Brazil and India, “country competitiveness is very important because you can either be used like China is using India for consumption [of Chinese exports],” says Mr. Nayar. Or you can become an exporter yourself.
And in his opinion, India is at that cusp today: Will it be used for its billion people or will it use its billion people?
“And there, unfortunately, my answer is that we are becoming less competitive with every passing day because of lack of investment in critical segments like skill development,” he said.
... “The only real raw material we have is people,” he went on. “If you convert people into consumers, we’ll become Africa. If you convert people into labor productivity, we’ll become America. We are at a cusp between America and Africa right now.”
I found the comment below interesting. Currently I think the effective population of India for producing elite brainpower (i.e., comparing to a reference population with average IQ = 100 and access to first world education and training) is roughly 100 million. For China this number might be 300+ million, but we don't feel their presence in the West as strongly because of language barriers and because of the ability of the Chinese economy to absorb many of the high achievers domestically. (Despite all the Chinese scientists and engineers emigrating to the West there are just as many staying at home to develop a continent-sized economy with a space program, high speed trains, tech and defense industry, etc.) Both the China and India numbers should increase drastically in another generation, although see below for challenges confronting India.
See these related posts, or click the India label below.
Background: I come from Southern India, high achiever, made a pile as they would say, so broadening my attention to study these subjects to understand the cause of our underdevelopment and what we can do about it. I only have experience with Southern India, where I live and travel extensively; I also get to travel the world extensively so I can give detailed comparisons. While I obviously do want to help my country, I am of the "Face Reality As It Is" persuasion, so I don't worry about political correctness of any discussion here.
First, the good news: thanks to better nutrition, I have witnessed IQ go up substantially in the past 30 years. The typical South Indian immigrant you see in the US today (and they do seem to come mostly from the South these days) comes from a vastly lower social scale than the one you saw 40 years ago. The typical immigrant has parents or grandparents who would not be able to function well in Western society, because they lack the cognitive skills. So the Flynn effect seems very visible to me, from my vantage point in South India.
Second, there are even more gains to be had. Malnutrition is slowly going away in the South, but in the North, it is still very very prevalent - we are talking more than 50% of kids malnourished.
Third, a pacific temperament and a traditional respect for authority keeps lower IQ populations from the pervasive social breakdown you see in the US in similarly situated communities. Families are staying intact; if that changes in India in any large scale, I would write India off, because collectively, we Indians are still too dumb to handle "sophisticated" mating behavior (though I think even the Swedish men stay together with their mates to support their kids, in spite of the promiscuous reputation of their society) - I hope our Hindu Gods literally save us on this one!
Now the bad news. Democracy empowers the dumb, probably true everywhere, but truer in India. The elected need to be skillful at manipulating the dumb, so they tend to be smarter than those electing them. Still, all this manipulating exacts a toll. One of the manipulating they do is jobs-for-dumb-constituents, which begets appallingly bad government, particularly at local levels.
This has all sort of bad effects. With such bad local governance, much of India looks like an ungoverned mess - your senses get physically assaulted in almost any urban space in India, disgusting levels of filth and squalor. This is the result of the utter inability to plan, explained by the IQ of those in charge at local levels.
This is more serious than even that. As India urbanizes, we risk going back on Flynn effect, because poor sanitation leads to *urban* malnutrition - not lack of food, but gastrointestinal illness among kids - which lowers IQ. So not having functional lower levels of government puts India's progress at risk. This, I attribute, directly to democracy.
Given these two opposing forces, which was is it going to go? I believe the good edges out the bad, but that would be a hard case to make when you see the filth.
Only good news I can gather is that London and Hong Kong and so on were extremely filthy at a point in their development too.
Below is a partial breakdown by nationality of applicants to our PhD program in physics. I chose 2007 because that is the last year I was on the admissions committee. Here is a post I wrote then, which characterizes the applicant pool: Graduate admissions, human capital and globalization. Our target for each year is about 15 incoming students.
At bottom are some figures I first blogged about in 2004 (if you know of more recent data, please tell me). They indicate that already by the late 1990s there were more Asian students staying at home to do their graduate work than coming to the US. Yet, as the 2007 numbers show, Asia is our largest source of applicants. Related posts.
2007:
china 158
usa 75
india 19
nepal 2
sri lanka 2
taiwan 3
korea 4
indian 3
new zealand 1
germany 1
colombia 1
egypt 2
bangladesh 1
japan 2
iraq 1
pakistani 1
eritrea 1
...Overall, the U.S. share of world S&E PhDs will fall to about 15% by 2010. Within the US, moreover, international students have come to earn an increasing proportion of S&E PhDs. In 1966, US-born males accounted for 71% of science and engineering PhDs awarded; 6% were awarded to US-born females; and 23% were awarded to the foreign-born. In 2000, 36% of S&E PhDs went to U.S.-born males, 25% to U.S.-born females and 39% to the foreign-born. 8 Looking among the S&E fields, in 2002, international students received 19.5% of all doctorates awarded in the social and behavioral sciences, 18.0% in the life sciences, 35.4% in the physical sciences, and 58.7% in engineering.
This NYTimes article starkly illustrates the gap between rich and poor in India. It depicts a gated high-rise community with its own water, power, security and health systems, surrounded by slums from which are drawn the 2.2 servants per affluent occupant family. The high-rise is visible in the background of the picture above (slideshow).
Many of the relatively few Indians who enjoy first-world living standards, including the family in the article, do so as a consequence of globalization.
...“Things have gotten better for the lucky class,” Mrs. Chand, 36, said one day, as she fixed lunch in full view of Chakkarpur, the shantytown where one of her two maids, Shefali Das, lives. “Otherwise, it is still a fight.”
When the power goes out, the lights of Hamilton Court bathe Chakkarpur in a dusky glow. Under the open sky, across the street from the tower, Mrs. Das’s sons take cold bucket baths each day. The slum is as much a product of the new India as Hamilton Court, the opportunities of this new city drawing hundreds of thousands from the hungry hinterlands.
...For those with the right skills, the good times have been very good. Mr. Chand, 34, a business school graduate who runs the regional operations for an American manufacturing firm, has seen his salary grow eightfold in the last five years, which is not unusual for upper class Indians like him.
The Chands are typical of Hamilton Court residents: Well-traveled young professionals, some returnees to India after years abroad, grateful for the conveniences. Some of them are also the first in their families to live so comfortably.
...Mrs. Chand, a doctor who decided to stay home to raise her children, trained in a government hospital. Her other maid told her recently that her own daughter had given birth at home, down there in the slum.
Sometimes, Mrs. Chand said, she thinks of opening a clinic there. But she also said she understood that there was little that she, or anyone, could do. “Two worlds,” she observed, “just across the street.”
The following Bloomberg article describes a recent World Bank study. The results are amazingly consistent with an estimate I mentioned in a previous post, that the "effective" first-world population of India in human capital terms might be around 100 million (4 high performers for every 10 in the US).
The study links the results of a test given to 6,000 teenagers in two states -- Rajasthan in western India and Orissa in the east -- to students' performance on the same exam in 51 other countries.
The researchers conclude that mathematical abilities of India's 14-year-olds vary widely between the worst and the best students.
If other states are similar to the ones studied then it would mean that 17 million Indian students don't meet the lowest international benchmark of ``some basic mathematical knowledge.'' That's 22 times the corresponding figure for the U.S.
At the same time, the depth of India's math talent -- those whose test scores are considered to be of an advanced level -- is also significant. ``For every 10 top performers in the U.S., there are four in India,'' the World Bank economists say. That's 100,000 students, or more than any European country.
This latter group is supplying the bulk of India's scientific, technical, managerial and entrepreneurial talent and is responsible for the country's growing clout in the global knowledge economy.
I recently came across this interesting web site maintained by Kamal Sinha, an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Bombay alum who has worked at Mitsubishi in Japan and in Silicon Valley.
It has been widely claimed (e.g., CBS Sixty Minutes) that IITs are the most selective universities in the world -- each year about 300k applicants compete for about 4000 spots. To enter the most competitive (e.g., EECS) departments, applicants must score amongst the top few hundred! I know several theoretical physicists in the US who were "toppers" on the IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Exam), including one who placed first in all of India his year ("first ranker")! Perhaps ironically, the first ranker didn't attend IIT -- he chose Caltech instead.
Despite the hype (see below) Sinha seems to think IIT is roughly comparable to other elite national universities like University of Tokyo, Seoul National University or Taiwan National University. Note he estimates the effective population base (the number of people who have access to first world educational resources in K-12) of India as only comparable to that of Japan (about 125 million; see here for a similar estimate by a well-known physicist). The estimates that lead to the conclusion that IIT is the most competitive in the world usually normalize to the entire Indian population of nearly 1 billion. I would say that China's effective population (in this sense) is around 200-300 million people (and growing rapidly), so perhaps Beida (Beijing University) and Tsinghua are the most competitive universities in the world.
I'd be interested in the opinions of other IIT graduates! Here is some detailed discussion of the JEE exam by an IIT-Kanpur professor (link provided by a commenter). The professor suggests that the test is too hard: beyond the first few hundred or thousand rankers, noise dominates signal (i.e., even many admitted students have very low absolute scores, in which luck may have played a role).
Hype:
"This is IIT Bombay. Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of this school in India." (Lesley Stahl, co-anchor on CBS 60 Minutes)
"And it's hard to think of anything like IIT anywhere in the world. It is a very unique institution." (Bill Gates, Microsoft)
"Per capita, IIT has produced more millionaires than any other undergraduate institution." (Salon Magazine)
Admission to IITs is extremely difficult. Only the top 2 percent of the applicants are admitted and to get into a decent department, about half a percent is a reasonable corresponding figure. Here I will explore whether IITs are the hardest school to get into and later I will check if high selectivity results in higher quality. "Hard" facts will be supplied when they become available.
Extremely low Acceptance Rate?
Having results of a single entrance examination determine whether one would be accepted or not is a common feature among the educational institutions in East Asian countries. I worked in Japan for six years and therefore being somewhat familiar with them will compare Japanese figures with that of IITs. All figures ae based on certain assumptions.
Selective Admissions in Japan
While it might not make the CBS news, Tokyo University, or Todai, an abbreviated form of Tokyo Daigaku is the place Japanese moms start thinking of to send their children for undergraduate studies before they are even born. There are 8 national universities like the Tokyo university, Todai being the most coveted one, and a few prestigious private schools like the Keio and Waseda, and these are the schools where almost every graduating school senior hopes to get into. Among technical schools Tokyo Institute of Technology (part of those 8 national universities) leads the pack. Each year news of a few students committing suicide on failing to secure admission into one of these schools is not uncommon.
Tokyo University admits fewer than 1500. My guess is that all the top private universities and the eight national universities combined admit fewer than 15000 applicants. How many students applied for these seats? About one and a half million which is about the total number of graduating seniors. Means about one percent!
Applicant Pool Size
'Wait a minute' I can hear you saying. Unlike in Japan where almost everyone takes the test to get into an an university, in India not everybody applies to IITs. Most of the applicants who take the JEE are quite good, there being a self-selection process. In response I will point out that if we compare the potential applicant pools, the following factors stand out:
IIT JEE is taken mostly by middle class applicants from urban areas with total population about 125 million. Japan has about same population with lower percentage of test-takers compared to that of India because of lower birth rates. There almost all eligible seniors take the test to get into these prestigious universities, meaning the potential applicant pools are almost equal.
Engineering schools like Tokyo Institute of Technlogy and various engineering departments in other universities are more selective than the average department. Assume those to be twice as selective.
IITs accept about 3500 of applicants. Given the above assumptions it is about (15000/2)/3500 = two times more selective than the average engineering department in these Japanese universities.
Take Tokyo University for comparision. An overwhelming majority of the grduating seniors choose Todai as their first choice. This means that Tokyo University is about twice (3500/1500) as selective as the IITs and more likely at least four times as selective than the IITs when engineering departments are compared.
Quality of Potential Applicant Pools
Japanese seniors in schools perform near the top in international tests in sciences and mathematics. (Seniors from Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore perform equally well.) Indians are not included in most comparison studies but there seems to be some evidence that the average Indian students would have performed near the average, probably somewhat below it. Moreover, after graduation many Japanese students take time off to study for the entrance exam and their dedication has to be seen to be believed. It leads me to believe that their potential applicant pool of of higher quality.
Other Asian Countries like Korea, Singapore, Hongkong, China?
It may be assumed that the student quality and the selection rates are similar to that in Japan, if not better. Means it appears that IITs, however difficult they are to get into, could be overshadowed by institutions in neighboring countries with more difficult admission standards.
There is a difference though. While graduates of universities like Tokyo are quietly working hard to bring their countries up to top and compete with the West, India with its population of a billion or so, through its IIT and other engineering college graduates, seems destined to become a country where the developed world can chooose its low-cost subcontractors to do the jobs they don't want to do or have a shortage of workers.
Admissions in the USA
While it seems true that admission rate at IITs is less than even the most selective US school like the CalTech, it does not mean IIT recruits students of higher caliber. In a country like the USA, educational resources were well developed and the enrollment capacity for engineering majors is kept about the same as the number of seniors intending to enter those programs, if not more. It means less desparation. Moreover, there are lot of top-notch schools schools of about equal caliber which decreases their selectivity figures. My guess is that the top 50 engineering schools in the USA exceed IITs in almost all respect and another 100 or so other schools are not far behind.
Our seminar speaker yesterday was A.P. Balachandran, a distinguished theorist from Syracuse University. During lunch I asked him what the effective population of India was for producing technical and scientific talent. That is, what fraction of the population has access to educational opportunites equivalent to those in advanced countries. I asked whether the number might be 300 million, but he replied it might be closer to 100 million. If so, we can look forward to a rapid increase in the number of Indian scientists and engineers in the next generation, as their economy continues to develop. It's scary to think that we currently only feel the effect of 10% of their population! The literacy rate in India is only about 60% at the moment.
Thanks to a correspondent who sent me the link. I get the New Yorker in the mail, but strangely the last issue or two seem not to have arrived!
I think the main advantage India has over China is linguistic: thanks to their colonial history and the similarity between Hindi and English (both Indo-European languages with lots of cognates), it is much easier for Indians to operate comfortably in the lingua franca of business and science. While the elite of Indian science and engineering are fantastic, the article below points out that depth is still somewhat lacking. I suspect this is less true for China -- university-trained engineers there are relatively close to world standards.
The economic transformation of India is one of the great business storiea of our time. As stifling government regulations have been lifted entrepreneurship has flourished, and the country has becom a high-powered center for information technology and pharmaceuticals. Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro are powerful global players, while Western firms like G.E and I.B.M. now have major research facilities in India employing thousands. India’s seemingly endless flow of young, motivated engineers, scientists, and managers offering developed-world skills at developing-world wages is held to be putting American jobs at risk, and the country is frequently heralded as “the next economic superpower.
But India has run into a surprising hitch on its way to superpower status: its inexhaustible supply of workers is becoming exhausted. Although India has one of the youngest workforces on the planet, the head of Infosys said recently that there was an “acute shortage of skilled manpower,” and a study by Hewitt Associates projects that this year salaries for skilled workers will rise fourteen and a half per cent, a sure sign that demand for skilled labor is outstripping supply.
How is this possible in a country that every year produces two and a half million college graduates and four hundred thousand engineers? Start with the fact that just ten per cent of Indians get any kind of post-secondary education, compared with some fifty per cent who do in the U.S. Moreover, of that ten per cent, the vast majority go to one of India’s seventeen thousand colleges, many of which are closer to community colleges than to four-year institutions. India does have more than three hundred universities, but a recent survey by the London Times Higher Education Supplement put only two of them among the top hundred in the world. Many Indian graduates therefore enter the workforce with a low level of skills. A current study led by Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University, has found that if you define “engineer” by U.S. standards, India produces just a hundred and seventy thousand engineers a year, not four hundred thousand. Infosys says that, of 1.3 million applicants for jobs last year, it found only two per cent acceptable.
There was a time when many economists believed that post-secondary education didn’t have much impact on economic growth. The really important educational gains, they thought, came from giving rudimentary skills to large numbers of people (which India still needs to do—at least thirty per cent of the population is illiterate). They believed that, in economic terms, society got a very low rate of return on its investment in higher education. But lately that assumption has been overturned, and the social rate of return on investment in university education in India has been calculated at an impressive nine or ten per cent. In other words, every dollar India puts into higher education creates value for the economy as a whole. Yet India spends roughly three and a half per cent of its G.D.P. on education, significantly below the percentage spent by the U.S., even though India’s population is much younger, and spending on education should be proportionately higher. ...
Indian software engineer Nimbupani writes about his experience as an expat living in Shanghai. He provides some comparative insight on Indian (messy, but democratic) and Chinese (authoritarian, but sometimes very efficient) development models. (See here for related IHT article.) The parts I like best are the small observations; since I know Shanghai they really tell me more about India by comparison. I hope he continues to blog from Shanghai!
Personally, I don't see how India can improve its GDP per capita unless birth rates come down significantly. There will undoubtedly be an upper class of hundreds of millions of affluent, well-educated Indians (and that alone will have a big impact on the rest of the world), but I don't see how things will get better for the average Indians in the villages unless significant changes are made. In China rural people are leaving the farms and heading for the cities, one of the greatest human migrations of all time. This is made possible by manufacturing. While software development and other higher end activities (which have fueled India's development recently) provide much better jobs, they cannot absorb hundreds of millions of low-skill people from the countryside. On the other hand, who knows how stable China is, under the surface.
Let me start with introducing my self, I am an Indian, professionally Process Consultant (six sigma Black Belt) who got a job offer from a Shanghai based company to work on to improve processes of their client in Shanghai. When i told this to my parents, reaction was China..why what will u eat there..how will you sustain, people(from India) usually go to US, UK but China..nnnnaa..Even i was confused..but offer was good, not v good in terms of money but the exposure and as a value add, yes it was worth making an attempt. So i made up my mind, ok i will go, which was not easy ...
One of the costliest city in world, best city of China, more like Mumbai in india, crime rate was low compare to other international cities, language will be a problem, one of the best airport in world, business city of world with lot of skyscrapers..and indian knowledge of china - they are small, hard working, stubborn, dominating, not friendly, difficult to strive there.
But let me tell you Shanghai and China its not as we see them in India..
This is what I can tell you about Shanghai from Shanghai,
About Infrastructure: It is rightly said they have have one of the best airports in world, international airport at New delhi is very small as compared to what they have in Shanghai, in fact in terms of infrastructure they are very advanced, the government here has invested a lot in infrastructure, not only in major cities like Shanghai but even in small towns, even public transport, traffic management, day to day work, its smooth not as complicated as in india, I cant find a car in India without a scratch but here one scratch means a big thing.. They have excellent and still expanding Subway(metro in india) covering Shanghai. Taxi service covers whole of Shanghai, simply day to day work in not complicated.
About people: they are very friendly, they do everything to ensure that they are able to help you even majority do not understand English, although you may some time feel little annoyed but overall its not an hindrance. They don't cheat and not as often as you see in India, at least i have not seen. They are not stubborn, they are polite, but in general they speak loudly and some time it annoys me but its a different culture all together, while eating, lot of noise during chewing, personally it annoys me but some in India have same habbit.
About food: if you love Non veg and Sea food you will love it here, In india i occasionally had Chicken, but here i have tried everything pork, chicken, fish, beef, prawn, crab, small octopus look like thing also, and recently I saw a dish it was like gel but that gel like thing was made up by freezing blood of Chicken and duck, i was not able to try that..and after 3 months, I have finalized on following food- chicken, fish, vegetable, tofu (paneer without fat) as priority dish :). In vegetables they have stems of sea plants, v healthy, generally Chinese food is low in fat as compared to india food. We do have some Indian restaurant and we go their occasionally as we cook food at home, it reminds how difficult it was finding out wheat flour and then getting a 5 kg pack..:))
Overall it's a great place and indian democratic government needs to learn a lot about how to build up infrastructure as this is what drives economy and standard of living, for example, in delhi, we get exhausted by the time we reach work place and home because of traffic and jams and small issues..which is loss of national energy...
Also last but not the least, women are safe here, no teasing and they wear what they want( in terms of fashion they are v advanced), not like india, where everyone is worried about women in their family, however not realizing doing the same act on street. Bottom line its safe...
Another nice review in the Economist. I think it was Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr who suggested that every PhD awarded in the US come with a green card attached.
IN A speech at Harvard University in 1943 Winston Churchill observed that “the empires of the future will be empires of the mind.” He might have added that the battles of the future will be battles for talent. To be sure, the old battles for natural resources are still with us. But they are being supplemented by new ones for talent—not just among companies (which are competing for “human resources”) but also among countries (which fret about the “balance of brains” as well as the “balance of power”).
The war for talent is at its fiercest in high-tech industries. The arrival of an aggressive new superpower—Google—has made it bloodier still. The company has assembled a formidable hiring machine to help it find the people it needs. It has also experimented with clever new recruiting tools, such as billboards featuring complicated mathematical problems. Other tech giants have responded by supercharging their own talent machines (Yahoo! has hired a constellation of academic stars) and suing people who suddenly leave.
...Alan Eustace, a vice-president of Google, told the Wall Street Journal that in his view one top-notch engineer is worth “300 times or more than the average”. Bill Gates says that “if it weren't for 20 key people, Microsoft wouldn't be the company it is today.”
Reversing the brain drain. 20m Indians living abroad generate income equivalent to 35% of India's GDP, making them almost 20 times more productive than their counterparts at home!
Half the Americans who won Nobel prizes in physics in the past seven years were born abroad. More than half the people with PhDs working in America are immigrants. A quarter of Silicon Valley companies were started by Indians and Chinese. Intel, Sun Microsystems and Google were all founded or co-founded by immigrants. But now India and China are sucking back their expats, and America's European competitors have woken up to the importance of retaining their talent.
...Some of the best prospects in the competition for talent are émigrés—people who have gone abroad to make their fortune but still feel the tug of their home country. Both China and India are now trying to emulate Ireland's success in wooing back the diaspora, but China is trying harder. In 1987 the Communist Party's general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, described China's brain drain as “storing brain power overseas”. Officials from every level of government have been raiding the store since, as part of a policy of “strengthening the country through human talent”.
They have introduced a mind-boggling range of enticements, from bigger apartments to access to the best schools, from chauffeur-driven cars to fancy titles. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has established a programme of generous fellowships for expats—the “hundred talents programme”. Beijing has an office in Silicon Valley, and Shanghai has established a “human talent market”. China is littered with shiny new edifices labelled “returning-student entrepreneurial building”.
All this coincides with a change in the flow of people. For decades returnees were rare. The numbers began to shoot up in 2000, when the bursting of the Silicon Valley bubble coincided with rapid growth in China. Despite doubts about the quality of some of these people, there is growing evidence that China is going in the same direction as South Korea and Taiwan—first tempting back the diaspora (see chart 4) and then beginning to compete for global talent.
India has taken a different approach. The government has relied as much on the goodwill of prominent businesspeople as it has on the wisdom of bureaucrats; it has also cast its net wider, focusing not just on luring back expats but also on putting the wealth and wisdom of the diaspora to work on behalf of the mother country. There are an estimated 20m Indians living abroad, generating an annual income equal to 35% of India's gross domestic product. The Indian government is doing what it can, in its haphazard way, to let them participate in the Indian boom, making it easier for them to invest back home and streamlining visa procedures. There is a special visa for “people of Indian origin”.
