Vivek Kaul
Salman Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger releasing on August 15 is expected to do roaring business. A famous film critic who runs a film trade magazine feels the movie will break new grounds and has the potential to earn more than Rs 200 crore.
Once the film has done the roaring business you will find film critics, analysts and even you and me giving all kinds of reasons for the success.
The film was shot in Turkey, Ireland, Cuba and Iraq, countries that most Indian movies haven’t been shot before.
For once, Katrina wasn’t just arm candy.
Unlike other Salman movies this one really had a story.
Bhai was doing what he does best: beating up the baddies.
The film had an uninterrupted six day long weekend (starting from August 15, the Independence Day to August 20, the day of Eid).
All Salman Khan movies releasing during the Eid weekend do well.
And so on.
But these will be explanations about something that has already happened after it has happened. The film may have worked because of all of these reasons or none of them. We really wouldn’t know.
Lets take the case of the famous painting Mona Lisa to understand this phenomenon in a little more detail. The painting was commissioned by a wealthy silk merchant. He wanted Leonardo da Vinci to paint his wife Lisa Gherardini del Giocindo. By the time da Vinci got around to finishing the painting in 1519, nearly 16 years later, he had moved to France from Italy. Hence, Lisa Giocindo nor her husband ever got around to seeing what has turned out to be most famous painting in the world.
The painting hangs at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Nearly 80% of the 6 million visitors who come to the museum annually, come to see the Mona Lisa. But the interesting thing is that for most of the five centuries of its existence the Mona Lisa was an obscure painting. As Duncan J Watts writes in Everything is Obvious – Once You Know the Answer “for centuries, the Mona Lisa, was a relatively obscure painting languishing in the private residences of kings…even when it was moved to the Louvre after the French revolution, it did not attract as much attention as the works of other artists.”
It was only when an Italian named Vincezo Peruggia stole the painting in 1911 that the painting became famous. Peruggia managed to hide the painting for two years but was arrested while trying to sell it to an Italian museum. The painting came back to the Louvre.
Since then the painting has attracted large crowds. It has also led to a situation where people have explained the reasons behind its popularity. Some have talked about the smile and the novel technique employed by da Vinci to produce so gauzy a finish. Some others about the play of light and so on. As Watts writes “To oversimplify only slightly, the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it is the best, and although it might have taken us a while to figure this out, it was inevitable that we would. And that’s why so any people are puzzled when they first set eyes on the Mona Lisa.”
They wonder what the fuss is all about. As Watts explains “Of course, most of us, when faced with this moment of dissonance, simply shrug our shoulders and assume that somebody wiser than us has seen things that we can’t see…It sounds as if we’re assessing the quality of work of art in terms of its attributes, but in fact we’re doing the opposite – deciding first which painting is the best, and only then inferring from its attributes the metrics of quality.”
A more recent phenomenon is that of Harry Potter which has been a smashing success. But Joanne “Jo” Rowling, better known as J K Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, had a tough time finding a publisher for the series.
In 1995, she finished the first Harry Porter book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury agreed to publish it. The publisher wasn’t really optimistic about the book and the initial print run was 1000 copies, of which 500 were distributed to libraries. The advance Rowling got for the book was £1500. The book and its sequels were a smashing success. According to the Forbes magazine Rowling was the first person become to dollar billionaire by writing books.
Of course after the success of the book many reasons have been pointed about why Harry Potter was successful and was a phenomenon waiting to happen. Michael Maouboussin explains this in a research paper titled Was Harry Potter Inevitable? “Our society often associates success with quality. In a fiercely competitive market, the thinking goes, only the best products rise to the surface. Once a product is a hit, whether a blockbuster movie or a
bestselling book, we readily point to the attributes that make it so appealing..” he writes.
What this basically means is that it is easy to rationalize success once it has happened. But that doesn’t mean that those were the reasons for the success. Mauboussin calls this the halo effect or ‘our proclivity to attach attributes to what has succeeded, solely because of the success. The halo effect creates substantial distortion in our thinking.”
A similar phenomenon is now playing out with E L James’ Fifty Shades of Gray which has outsold Harry Potter. “Sorry Harry, it looks like you’re losing your magic. Erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” outsold all seven Harry Potter books on Amazon.co.uk on Wednesday, making author E.L. James the website’s best-selling writer ever,” wrote the Sunday Times of London recently. A small cottage industry has sprung up trying to analyse the success of this book which many have dubbed as “mummy porn”.
The film actor Rajinikanth is another great example of this. Realms have been written on trying to explain his stupendous success. But as Manu Joseph wrote in the Open “Rajinikanth is another proof that not everything can be analysed just because there is something called analysis. There is no reason why Rajnikanth exists, there is no reason why he did not retire as a Marathi bus conductor, and no reason why he instead became the Superstar who can have theatres go up in flames if he is ever killed at the end of a film. There is nothing in him or in Tamilians that explains his fame. He is the very end of analysis. Some things happen for no reason. And it is no coincidence that the people who really love him are people who do not know that there is a form of employment called analysis.”
To conclude, the explanations people come up with to explain the success are at times largely irrelevant. Watt explains it the best when he says “Ultimately…it may simply not be possible to say why…the Harry Potter books sold more than 350 million copies within 10 years…In the end, the only honest explanation may be the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold because lots of people bought it.” Similarly Ek Tha Tiger will run because a lot of people will watch it.
(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 10,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/what-ek-tha-tiger-has-in-common-with-rajinikanth-harry-potter-413290.html/)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer who can be reached at [email protected])
Firstpost
Raghuram Rajan’s advice isn’t what UPA may want to hear
Vivek Kaul
Every year the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, one of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks in the United States, organizes a symposium at Jackson Hole in the state of Wyoming. The conference of 2005 was to be the last conference attended by Alan Greenspan, the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve of United States, the American central bank.
Hence, the theme for the conference was the legacy of the Greenspan era. One of the economists who had been invited to present a paper at the symposium was the 40 year old Raghuram Govind Rajan, the man who is likely to be the government’s next Chief Economic Advisor.
Rajan is an alumnus of IIT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After doing his PhD at MIT, he had joined the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago (now known as the Booth School of Business). At that point of time Rajan was on leave from the business school and was working as the Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund.
The United States had seen an era of unmatched economic prosperity under Greenspan. Even, the dotcom bust in 2000-2001 hadn’t held America back. Greenspan had managed to get the economy back on track by cutting the Federal Funds Rate to as low as 1% by mid 2003. The low interest rate scenario along with a lot of financial innovation had created a financial system which was slush with money. American banks were falling over one another to lend money. And borrowers were borrowing as much as they could to buy homes, property and real estate. The dotcom bubble of the late 1990s had given away to the real estate bubble.
In a survey of home buyers carried out in Los Angeles in 2005, the prevailing belief was that prices will keep growing at the rate of 22% every year over the next 10 years. This meant that a house which cost a million dollars in 2005 would cost around $7.3million by 2015. Such was the belief in the bubble.
And the belief was not limited to only the people of United States. Banks were equally optimistic that real estate prices will continue to go up. Between 2004 and 2006, banks and other financial institutions playing in the subprime home loan space gave out loans worth $1.7trillion in total. Of this a massive $625billion was lent in 2005, the year Rajan was invited to speak at Jackson Hole.
In its strictest sense a subprime loan was defined as a loan given to an individual with a credit score below 620, who had no assets and was thus unlikely to qualify for a traditional home loan. A credit score is a number calculated on the basis of the borrower’s past record at paying bills and loans of all kinds, the length of his credit history, the kind of loans taken etc. On the basis of the number the lender can get some sort of an idea of what sort of a risk he is taking on by lending to the borrower.
That was the purported idea behind the credit score. In the normal scheme of things, a borrower categorized as “sub-prime” should not have been touched with a bargepole. But those were days when everybody and anybody got a loan.
It was an era of optimism which had been fueled by easy money that was going around in the financial system. The conventional wisdom of the day was that the bull run in property prices would continue forever. The American economy would continue to prosper.
In this environment Raghuram Rajan presented a paper titled “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” In his speech Rajan harped on the fact that the era of easy money would get over soon and would not last forever as the conventional wisdom expected it to.
He said:
The bottom line is that banks are certainly not any less risky than the past despite their better capitalization, and may well be riskier. Moreover, banks now bear only the tip of the iceberg of financial sector risks…the interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full-blown financial crisis
He also suggested in his speech that the incentives of the financial sector were skewed and employees were reaping in rich rewards for making money but were only penalized lightly for losses. In the last paragraph of his speech Rajan said it is at such times that “excesses typically build up. One source of concern is housing prices that are at elevated levels around the globe.”
Rajan’s speech did not go down well with people at the conference. This is not what they wanted to hear. Also in a way Rajan was questioning the credentials of Alan Greenspan who would soon retire spending nearly 18 years as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of United States. He was essentially saying that the Greenspan era was hardly what it was being made out to be.
Given this, Rajan came in for heavy criticism. As he recounts in his book Fault Lines – How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy:
Forecasting at that time did not require tremendous prescience: all I did was connect the dots… I did not, however, foresee the reaction from the normally polite conference audience. I exaggerate only a bit when I say I felt like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions. As I walked away from the podium after being roundly criticized by a number of luminaries (with a few notable exceptions), I felt some unease. It was not caused by the criticism itself…Rather it was because the critics seemed to be ignoring what going on before their eyes.
The criticism notwithstanding Rajan turned out right in the end. And what was interesting that he called it as he saw it. He called spade a spade despite the aura of Alan Greenspan that prevailed.
What this story clearly tells us is that Rajan is not an “on-the-other-hand” economist. There are too many “on-the-other-hand” economists going around, who do not like to take a stand on an issue. As Harry Truman, an American President once famously said “All my economists say, ‘on the one hand… and on the other hand…Someone give me a one-handed economist!”
If news-reports in the media are to be believed the government is in the process of appointing Rajan as the Chief Economic Advisor to replace Kaushik Basu. As far as academic credentials and experience go they don’t come much better than Rajan. Other than having been the Chief Economist of the IMF between September 2003 and January 2007, he is also currently an honorary economic adviser to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The question though is will the plain-speaking Rajan who seems to like to call a spade a space, fit into a government which believes in the idea of a welfare state? In an interview I did for the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) after the release of his book Fault Lines I had asked him “whether India can afford a welfare state?” “Not at the level that politicians want it to. For example, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), if appropriately done it is a short term insurance fix and reduces some of the pressure on the system, which is not a bad thing. But if it comes in the way of the creation of long term capabilities, and if we think NREGS is the answer to the problem of rural stagnation, we have a problem. It’s a short term necessity in some areas. But the longer term fix has to be to open up the rural areas, connect them, education, capacity building, that is the key,” Rajan had replied.
This is a view that is not held by many in the present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. They politicians who run this country have great faith in the NREGS.
Rajan had also written in Fault Lines that “the license permit raj has given away to the raj of the land mafia.” I had asked him to explain this in detail and he had said:
“Earlier…you had to navigate the government for permissions and this was license permit. You needed permission to produce. Now you have to navigate the government for land because in many situations land titles are murky, acquiring the land is difficult, and even after you acquire protecting that land is difficult. So there are entrepreneurs who have access to the power of the government, who basically can do it. And then there are others who can’t. So you have made it a test of who can acquire the land in certain kind of functions than who is the best developer than who is the best manufacturer. Put differently what used to surround the license permit has moved to corruption surrounding land. The central source of wealth today in the whole economy is land and we need to make the land acquisition process transparent.”
In answer to another question Rajan had said:
“The predominant of the sources of mega wealth in India today are not the software billionaires who have made money the hard way by being competitive in a global economy. It is the guys who have access to natural resources or to land or to particular infrastructure permits or licenses. In other words proximity to the government seems to be a big source of wealth. And that is worrisome because it means that those who can access the government who can manage it are in a sense far more powerful than ordinary businessmen. In the long run this leads to decay in the image of businessmen and the whole free enterprise system. It doesn’t show us in good light if we become a country of oligopolies and oligarchs and eventually this could even impinge on democratic right.”
What these answers tell us is that Rajan has clear views on issues that plague India and he is not afraid of putting them forward. But these are things that the current government would not like to hear. Given this, it remains to be seen how effective Rajan’s tenure in the government will turn out to be. The trouble is if he calls a spade a spade, it won’t take much time for the government to marginalize him. If he does not, he won’t be effective anyway.
(The interview originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 8,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/economy/raghuram-rajans-advice-isnt-what-upa-may-want-to-hear-410694.html/)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected] )
What Team Anna can learn from Nirma, Sony, Apple and Ford
Vivek Kaul
The decision by Team Anna to form a political party has become the butt of jokes on the internet. A Facebook friend suggested that they name their party, the Char Anna Party and someone else suggested the name Kejriwal Liberal Party for Democracy (KLPD).
The jokes are clearly in a bad taste and reflect the level of cynicism that has seeped into us. Let me paraphrase lines written by my favourite economist John Kenneth Galbraith (borrowed from his book The Affluent Society) to capture this cynicism. “When Indians see someone agitating for change they enquire almost automatically: “What is there for him?” They suspect that the moral crusades of reformers, do-gooders, liberal politicians, and public servants, all their noble protestations notwithstanding are based ultimately on self interest. “What,” they enquire, “is their gimmick?””
The cynicism comes largely from the way things have evolved in the sixty five years of independence where the political parties have taken us for a royal ride. Given this the skepticism that prevails at the decision of Team Anna to form a political party isn’t surprising. Take the case of Justice Markandey Katju, who asked CNN-IBN “Which caste will this political party represent? Because unless you represent one caste, you won’t get votes…Whether you are honest or meritorious nobody bothers. People see your caste or religion. You may thump your chest and say you are very honest but you will get no votes.”
Former Supreme Court justice N. Santosh Hegde said “Personally, am not in favour of Annaji floating a political party and contesting elections, which is an expensive affair and requires huge resources in terms of funds and cadres.”
Some other experts and observers have expressed their pessimism at the chances of success of the political party being launched by Team Anna. Questions are being raised. Where will they get the money to fight elections from? How will they choose their candidates? What if Team Anna candidates win elections and start behaving like other politicians?
All valid questions. But I remain optimistic despite the fact that things look bleak at this moment for Team Anna’s political party.
I look at Team Anna’s political party as a disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen, a professor of strategy at the Harvard Business School is the man who coined this phrase. He defines it as “These are innovations that transform an existing market or create a new one by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility and affordability. It is initially formed in a narrow foothold market that appears unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents.”
An excellent example of a home grown disruptive innovation is Nirma detergent. Karsanbhai Patel, who used to work as a chemist in the Geology & Mining Department of the Gujarat government, introduced Nirma detergent in 1969.
He first started selling it at Rs 3.50 per kg. At that point of time Hindustan Lever Ltd’s (now Hindustan Unilever) Surf retailed for Rs 15 per kg. The lowest-priced detergent used to sell at Rs 13.50 per kg. The price point at which Nirma sold made it accessible to consumers, who till then really couldn’t afford the luxury of washing their clothes using a detergent and had to use soap instead.
If Karsanbhai Patel had thought at the very beginning that Hindustan Lever would crush his small detergent, he would have never gotten around launching it. The same applies to Team Anna’s political party as well. They will never know what lies in store for them unless they get around launching the party and running it for the next few years.
Getting back to Nirma, the logical question to ask is who should have introduced a product like Nirma? The answer is Hindustan Lever, the company which through the launch of Surf detergent, pioneered the concept of bucket wash in India. But they did not. Even after the launch of Nirma, for a very long time they continued to ignore Nirma, primarily because the price point at which Nirma sold was too low for Hindustan Lever to even think about. And by the time the MBAs at Hindustan Lever woke up, Nirma had already established itself as a pan-India brand. But, to their credit they were able to launch the ‘Wheel’ brand, which competed with Nirma directly.
At times the biggest players in the market are immune to the opportunity that is waiting to be exploited. A great example is that of Kodak which invented the digital camera but did not commercialize it for a very long time thinking that the digital camera would eat into its photo film business. The company recently filed for bankruptcy.
Ted Turner’s CNN was the first 24-hour news channel. Who should have really seen the opportunity? The BBC. But they remained blind to the opportunity and handed over a big market to CNN on a platter.
Along similar lines, maybe there is an opportunity for a political party in India which fields honest candidates who work towards eradicating corruption and does not work along narrow caste or regional lines. Maybe the Indian voter now wants to go beyond voting along the lines of caste or region. Maybe he did not have an option until now. And now that he has an option he might just want to exercise it.
While there is a huge maybe but the thing is we will never know the answers unless Team Anna’s political party gets around to fighting a few elections.
The other thing that works to the advantage of disruptive innovators is the fact that the major players in the market ignore them initially and do not take them as a big enough force that deserves attention.
A great example is the Apple personal computer. As Clayton Christensen told me in an interview I carried out for the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) a few years back “Apple made a wise decision and first sold the personal computer as a toy for children. Children had been non-consumers of computers and did not care that the product was not as good as the existing mainframe and minicomputers. Over time Apple and the other PC companies improved the PC so it could handle more complicated tasks. And ultimately the PC has transformed the market by allowing many people to benefit from its simplicity, affordability, and convenience relative to the minicomputer.”
Before the personal computer was introduced, the biggest computer available was called the minicomputer. “But minicomputers cost well over $200,000, and required an engineering degree to operate. The leading minicomputer company was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which during the 1970s and 1980s, was one of the most admired companies in the world economy,” write Clayton Christensen, Michael B Horn and Curtis W Johnson in Disrupting Class —How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.
But even then DEC did not realise the importance of the personal computer. “None of DEC’s customers could even use a personal computer for the first 10 years it was on the market because it wasn’t good enough for the problems they needed to solve. That meant that more carefully DEC listened to its best customers, the less signal they got that the personal computer mattered — because in fact it didn’t — to those customers,” the authors explain.
That DEC could generate a gross profit of $112,500 when selling a minicomputer and $300,000 while selling the much bigger ‘mainframe’ also didn’t help. In comparison, the $800 margin on the personal computer looked quite pale.
Another example is Sony. “In 1955, Sony introduced the first battery-powered, pocket transistor radio. In comparison with the big RCA tabletop radios, the Sony pocket radio was tiny and static laced. But Sony chose to sell to its transistor radio to non-consumers – teenagers who could not afford big tabletop radio. It allowed teenagers to listen to music out of earshot of their parents because it was portable. And although the reception and fidelity weren’t great, it was far better than their alternative, which was no radio at all,” write Christensen, Horn and Johnson. Sony went onto to come up with other great disruptive innovations like the Walkman and the CDMan. But did not see the rise of MP3 players.
The point is that incumbents are so clued in to their business that it is very difficult for them to see the rise of a new category.
So what is the learning here for Team Anna? The learning is that their political party may not take the nation by storm all at once. They might appeal only to a section of the voters initially, probably the urban middle class, like Apple PCs had appealed to children and Sony radios to teenagers. So the Team Anna political party is likely to start off with a limited appeal and if that is the case the bigger political parties will not give them much weight initially. Chances are if they stay true to their cause their popularity might gradually go up over the years, as has been the case with disruptive innovators in business. The fact that political parties might ignore them might turn out to be their biggest strength in the years to come.
Any disruption does not come as an immediate shift. As the authors write, “Disruption rarely arrives as an abrupt shift in reality; for a decade, the personal computer did not affect DEC’s growth or profits.” Similarly, the Team Anna political party isn’t going to take India by storm overnight. It will need time.
Business is littered with examples of companies that did not spot a new opportunity that they should have and allowed smaller entrepreneurial starts up to grow big. The only minicomputer company that successfully made the transition to being a personal computer company was IBM. “They set up a separate organisation in Florida, the mission of which was to create and sell a personal computer as successfully as possible. This organisation had to figure out its own sales channel, it had its own engineers, and it was unencumbered by the existing organization,” said Christensen.
But even IBM wasn’t convinced about the personal computer and that is why it handed over the rights of the operating system to Microsoft on a platter. Even disruptive innovators get disrupted. Microsoft did not see the rise of email and it’s still trying to correct that mistake through the launch of Outlook.com. It didn’t see the rise of search engines either. Nokia did not see the rise of smart phones. Google did not see the rise of social media. And Facebook will not see the rise of something else.
Team Anna is a disruptive innovation which can disrupt the model of the existing political parties in India. There are three things that can happen with this disruptive innovation. The Team Anna political party tries for a few years and doesn’t go anywhere. That doesn’t harm us in anyway. The Team Anna political party fights elections and is able to build a major presence in the country and stays true to its cause. That benefits all of us. The Team Anna political party fights elections and its candidates win. But these candidates and the party turn out to be as corrupt as the other political parties that are already there. While this will be disappointing but then one more corrupt political party is not going to make things more difficult for the citizens of this country in anyway. We are used to it by now.
Given these reasons the Team Anna political party deserves a chance and should not be viewed with the cynicism and skepticism which seems to be cropping up.
(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 4,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/politics/what-team-anna-can-learn-from-nirma-sony-apple-and-ford-404843.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])
Why food prices will continue to remain high in the coming years
Vivek Kaul
Buried somewhere in the Reserve Bank of India‘s first quarter review of monetary policy released yesterday is the following paragraph:
The stickiness in inflation, despite the significant growth slowdown, was largely on account of high primary food inflation, which was in double-digits during Q1 of 2012-13 due to an unusual spike in vegetable prices and sustained high inflation in protein items.
In simple English what this means is that despite economic growth slowing down inflation continued to remain high because of high food inflation. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has not seen the last of food inflation and there are several reasons why food inflation will continue to remain high in the days to come.
Below average rainfall: The immediate reason for the food prices continuing to remain is the below average rainfall this monsoon season. As the RBI said in the first quarter review of monetary policy:
During the ongoing monsoon season, rainfall up to July 25, 2012 was 22 per cent below its long period average (LPA). The Reserve Bank’s production weighted rainfall index (PWRI) showed an even higher deficit of 24 per cent. Further, the distribution of rainfall was very uneven, with the North-West region registering the highest deficit of about 39 per cent of LPA. If the rainfall deficiency persists, agricultural production could be adversely impacted.
The availability of water can make a huge difference to the agricultural output in India. Areas fed by canals form only around 40% of the total arable land in India. The remaining 60% are dependent on rains. With deficient rains this year the current khareef crop is likely to be impacted with production not being enough to meet demand. This will lead to food prices going up in the days to come.
Rural India is eating better: The various social schemes being run by the current United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government have put more money into the hands of rural India. The income of rural India has more than doubled in the last five years. One thing that seems to have happened because of this is that people are eating better than before. Economists are of the opinion that as income of people rises above the subsistence level of $1000 per year, a substantial portion of the new money is spent on food. People eat more and better quality food. At the same time they also move from cereal based diets to more protein based diets. In major parts of the world this means that people start consuming more meat. But India has a lot of vegetarians and hence consumption of other high protein food items like dal, milk and other dairy based products has gone up, pushing their prices up. This is likely to continue in the months and years to come given the social commitment of the current UPA government. If the proposed Right to Food Act goes through you could see a further increase in food prices.
The Japan syndrome: As a densely populated country industrialises, the area under agriculture tends to go down. This phenomenon was first observed in Japan, and has since then been observed in South Korea, Taiwan, and very recently China. As Lester R Brown points out in Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures “First, as a country industrialises and modernises cropland is used for industrial and residential development. As automobile ownership spreads, the construction of roads, highways, and parking lots…takes valuable land away from agriculture…. Secondly as rapid industrialisation pulls labour out of the countryside, it often leads to less double cropping, a practice that depends on quickly harvesting one grain crop once its ripe and immediately preparing the seedbed for the next crop…Third, as incomes rise, diets diversify, generating demand for more fruits and vegetables. This in turn leads farmers to shift land from grain to these more profitable high-value crops.”
This is a long term phenomenon which is clearly playing out in India right now. Just drive around towards the outer limits of the city you live in and you will realize that what was once agricultural land has been taken over to build malls, apartments, offices etc. This leaves less area to grow vegetables, cereals and other crops, pushing up their prices in turn. Depleting aquifers: A huge amount of increase in the irrigation of crops across the gangetic plane, India’s agricultural heartland have substantially depleted the aquifers or the underground water tables. As a report by DWS Investments points out “Dramatic increases in the irrigation of crops across northern India have substantially depleted the region’s groundwater. Between April 2002 and August 2008, aquifers lost a total of more than 54 cubic kilometers per year. That decrease in groundwater is even more than double the capacity of India’s largest reservoir.”
While this data is around four years old there is no reason to believe that the situation could have improved in the last four years. It could only have got worse. This is something that Brown agrees with in his book Outgrowing the Earth. He writes “the extensive overpumping of aquifers in India will deprive farmers of irrigation water and will also reduce grain production”.
Climate change also threatens food security: As the following table points out Indian agriculture has very low productivity when it comes to other parts of the world. Even Bangladesh does better than us when it comes to producing rice.
Comparing productivity of Indian agriculture with the world (kg/ha)
Country Paddy Country Wheat Country Maize
World 4,223 World 2,829 World 5,010
Bangladesh 4,012 China 4,608 Agentina 7,666
Brazil 3,826 Egypt 6,478 Canada 8,511
China 6,422 France 6,256 China 5,151
India 3,303 India 2,704 India 2,440
Indonesia 4,705 Italy 3,568 Italy 9,144
Japan 6,511 Spain 3,470 Turkey 6,838
USA 8,092 United Kingdom0 7,225 USA 9,458
Source: Agriculture Statistics at a Glance /Kotak GameChanger Report
Even this production is threatened now because of rising global temperature which beyond a certain point tends to reduce the amount of crop produced. As Lester Brown told me in an interview I did for the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) a few years back “For each degree celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, farmers can expect a 10% decline in wheat, rice, and corn yields. Since 1970, the earth’s average surface temperature has increased by 0.6 degrees Celsius, or roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit.”
As the earth’s temperature rises it has led to glaciers melting. “Nowhere is this of more concern than in Asia. It is the ice melt from glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau that sustain the major rivers of India and China, and the irrigation systems that depend on them, during the dry season. In Asia, both wheat and rice fields depend on this water. China is the world’s leading wheat producer. India is No 2 (The US is third.) These two countries also dominate the world rice harvest. Whatever happens to the wheat and rice harvests in these two population giants will affect food prices everywhere. Indeed, the projected melting of the glaciers on which these two countries depend presents the most massive threat to food security humanity has ever faced,” said Brown.
Cars and people are competing for grains: As the price of oil keeps going up, the world has started to look for alternate sources of fuel to run cars and other forms of transport around the world. One such fuel is ethanol which is made from corn and sugarcane in different parts of the world. In Brazil, a lot of cars run on ethanol, which is produced using sugarcane. So if oil prices go up, ethanol becomes more viable as an alternate fuel. And this pushes up the price of ethanol input, i.e. sugarcane. With lesser sugarcane available to produce sugar, the price of sugar also goes up. The United States uses corn to make ethanol. So oil prices going up leads to corn prices going up as well. As Brown put it “If the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will simply move the commodity into the energy economy. If the price of oil jumps to $100 a barrel, the price of grain will follow it upward. If oil goes to $200, grain will follow. From an agricultural vantage point, the world’s appetite for crop-based fuels is insatiable. The grain required to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year. If the entire US grain harvest were to be converted to ethanol, it would satisfy at most 18% of US auto fuel needs.”
Given these reasons the food prices are likely to remain high in the months and years to come. And the Reserve Bank of India can fiddle around with the interest rates as much as it wants to, but there is no way it can control food prices.
(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 2,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/economy/why-food-prices-will-continue-to-rise-in-the-coming-years-400532.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])
The Indian Media and its Main Azaad Hoon syndrome
Vivek Kaul
We all have our favourite Amitabh Bachchan movies. Most people who grew up in the seventies feel that Deewar was his best performance. The eighties lot likes to talk about Agneepath which was released in 1990. Some others talk about his comic timing in Amar Akbar Anthony and Chupke Chupke. The women admire his rather innocent performance in Anand. A dear friend of mine refuses to see the Don movies starring Shahrukh Khan on the premise that nobody could play Don like Bachchan had.
More recently the audience found him rather endearing in Paa, where he played a reel life son to his real life son Abhishek Bachchan.
My favourite Amitabh Bachchan movie is a rather unknown one which came and went at the end of the eighties. Unlike Agneepath which was later recognized as a classic, the movie still hasn’t found the audience that I feel it deserves. And unlike other late eighty Bachchan duds like Prakash Mehra’s Jadugar, Ketan Desai’s Toofan and Manmohan Desai’s Ganga Jamuna Saraswati, I haven’t seen it play on any of the movie channels, either.
The movie was called Main Azaad Hoon and it hit the movie screens in 1989. This Tinnu Anand directed film was a copy of the 1941 Hollywood movie Meet John Doe directed by Frank Capra. (The Wikipedia entry of Main Azaad Hoon calls it a remake of Meet John Doe but that’s something I am really not sure of. In the late 1980s nobody officially bought remake rights in Bollywood, they just copied from wherever they wanted to). The movie also has my favourite Bachchan song “kitne bazoo kitne sir, gin le dushman dhyan se, haare ga wo har baazi jo khele hum jee jaan se”, one of the last songs that Kaifi Azmi wrote.
Main Azaad Hoon starts with Shabana Azmi who plays the role of a female journalist called Subhashini. She writes a column in which she reproduces a letter from someone she calls Azaad. Azaad, writes Subhashini, is going to commit suicide on January 26, from the highest building in the city.
The twist is that there is no Azaad. It is just a figment of Subhashini’s imagination. The newspaper has a new owner and he has asked the editor to fire Subhashini. Subhashini on the last day of her work writes the letter from Azaad just for the lark of it.
The story improves the circulation of the newspaper dramatically. The newspaper owner has political ambitions of his own, asks Subhashini to stay back and keep the Azaad story going. This requires Subhashini to catch hold of someone who can play Azaad.
She gets hold of unemployed youth who has landed up in the city and doesn’t even have money to buy food. Reluctantly that man with no name agrees to play the role of Azaad just once, for a few rupees. But his first performance as Azaad is a huge hit with the people who have come to hear him and he is persuaded to keep going.
So the story evolves. In a rather tragic end Azaad does commit suicide on January 26, as Subhashini had written in her column. (Here is where the copy was different from the original. In Meet John Doe, Gary Cooper who plays John Doe, is persuaded not to jump).
The movie obviously bombed at the box office. A story of a newspaper journalist and an owner keeping a false story going to bid up the circulation of the newspaper as well as push the political ambitions of the newspaper owner, was probably 20 years ahead of its time. Also those were the days when Amitabh Bachchan beat up the villains to solve all the problems in the world. And here was committing suicide like a coward. This was a sure-shot recipe for disaster. And the movie sank in the theatres on the very first day of its release.
But the story of Main Azaad Hoon in which a journalist writes about an individual who does not exist and keeps the story going when the circulation of the paper goes through the roof, is very relevant in the times that we live in.
This is an era where the pressure on journalists and editors who work for newspapers and primarily television channels to get exclusive news and to break news before anyone else does is huge. The pressure is so huge that at times decent behaviour does not have any place in the profession.
The most recent example is that of Gagan Narang winning the bronze model in the London Olympics. The news channels were waiting at his home as his parents watched him shoot. As soon as he won all hell broke loose and every television journalist wanted his father to answer the “aap kaisa mehsoos kar rahe hain” question.
The pushing and shoving could be seen “live” across all the television channels. Several journalists could be heard shouting at the top of their voices trying to attract the attention of Narang senior to their questions. It is an entirely different issue that none of the journalists present had anything different to ask other than “aap kaisa mehsoos kar rahe hain?”But everybody wanted an exclusive none the less. For all those who watch television news regularly, this shouldn’t come across as a surprise.
Another recent case where the media reported wrongly in order to keep a story hot and get you, me and everyone else, emotionally involved, was the case of the Bhattacharya kids in Norway. Arnab Goswami of Times Now caught onto to the story and kept shouting at the top of his voice like his normally does, and turned it into an issue of national importance.
Abhigyan and Aishwarya, children of Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya, had been put under foster care by the Norway government under the aegis of its Child Welfare Service (CWS). Goswami with almost no research of why this had been done presented a one sided picture of the entire story blaming the Norwegian authorities all along. Once Arnab was at it, others had to follow suit or risk losing their TRPs (television rating points).
As The Hindu wrote “It (the television media) gave the impression that the Bhattacharya children were separated from their parents only because they were not well-dressed, slept along with their parents and not in separate beds, were fed by hand, and so on. They saw in the action what they called a “cultural bias” or “cultural discrimination.” The other side — the real issue of universal child rights — was totally ignored.”
But that as The Hindu later found out was not really the case. It sent its Europe correspondent to investigate the case and the truth that emerged was much more complicated than the way it was being presented on television.
“After reviewing the files and interviewing the family as well as CWS officials, the picture that emerges is a complex one that defies easy pigeonholing. The strains of negotiating a foreign culture and environment are evident — both for the Bhattacharyas and for the Norwegian authorities — but the fact that the family needed assistance is undeniable. The parents have said they themselves approached the kindergarten for help when the older child showed autism-like symptoms, now diagnosed as Attachment Disorder. The mother, too, said she was suffering from post-partum depression and was unable to cope in the Norwegian cold, with a husband who worked long hours. Though littered with cultural misunderstandings and even insensitivity, all the reports submitted by care personnel working independently of each other saw a problem in the mother’s refusal to admit the seriousness of the boy’s condition or to accept help,” the paper wrote in an editorial on March 20.
But if Goswami and others of his ilk had presented both the sides, the story wouldn’t be “sexy” enough to drive the TRPs. It wouldn’t have got all of us, the emotional fools that we are, emotionally involved.
To give Goswami and the television channels their due they did play a huge role in helping the family unite and ensuring that the kids came back to their parents. But the same cannot be said about the Guwahati molestation case. The truth that seems to be coming out in this case is that Gaurav Jyoti Neog, the reporter of the news channel News Live, which broke the story, may have instigated the molestation in the first place.
As the newsmagazine Tehelka reports in its latest cover story “The raw footage shows the other girl being chased by a group of boys. Someone shouts: “Catch her, make her naked, make her naked, catch her.” This voice is strikingly similar to the voice the channel admits belongs to Gaurav. (The authenticity could only be proved by a forensic examination, but ex facie it does appear to be Gaurav’s) This can be deduced from the circumstances around the clippings. In a situation where there is a lot of noise in the background, it is likely that the most audible voice will be of the person holding the phone. Also, most of the people voice matches the earlier male voice that News Live had itself identified as belonging to Gaurav.”(you can read the complete story here)
What Goswami and his channel did was not very different from what the other news channels do all the time though the degrees vary. The point I am trying to make is that when the race for TRPs is so strong once in a while we will have situations where reporters and editors will try and create news out of nothing. The character played by Shabana Azmi did that in Main Azaad Hoon. And the same thing seems to have happened with Gaurav Neog and News Live in Assam. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Some experts have asked for increased government role in policing the media. But the thing is that most of the regional television news channels are run by politicians or people acting as fronts for these politicians. Given this situation an increased role for the government in policing the media might lead to the politicians favouring their own channels over others. The News Life Channel which is now accused of instigating the molestation in Guwahati is promoted by the Health Minister of Assam and run by his wife.
In this scenario the only way out for the television channels is to behave more responsibly and not to create news and crisis when none exist. Also they need to realize that shouting at the top of their voices doesn’t tend to increase the importance of the issue. Now only if Mr Goswami were listening!
(A slightly different version of the article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 31,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/india/the-indian-media-and-its-main-azaad-hoon-syndrome-398743.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])