A Corporate Jargon Buster

A CORPORATE JARGON-BUSTER

A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri – July 2015

 

I did two things last year – I joined the corporate sector, and I shifted to Mumbai. Both were pretty big deals! I had never done time in the corporate sector and didn’t even know anyone from there. And as for Mumbai, like most Delhi-wallahs I used to find the city dirty, smelly and intimidating and avoided it to the extent possible.

It’s been OK (so far), and I have been surprised! The corporate sector has not turned out to be overflowing with alpha scumbags pushing and shoving their way to the C-suite, and it has been somewhat comforting to realize that meetings here are as long and unproductive as they were in NGOs and that my skills in being fast asleep or scoring goals in the football world cup and cavorting with supermodels while looking attentive and engaged in the discussion are as much required now as they were earlier. And as for the city, I am slowly discovering that there is more to it than Shiv Sainiks and train commuters; that amidst the high-rises are some beautiful old buildings, that its pavements are walkable and its traffic is chaotic but unaggressive, and that it has its eccentricities (for example, its famous insularity applies as much within as it does outside – for the Colaba-walla, the act of crossing Peddar Road is undertaken with the same reluctance that you and I would go to Bihar, and others use the word ‘sobo’, not particularly politely, to describe the South Mumbaikar).

Anyway – to the purpose of this note! I have noticed that I am not the first migrant from academia, development and consulting to move to the corporate sector, and I will not be the last – there are opportunities here and the salaries are good. Those of you looking to move here will need to adjust to the peculiarities of the sector; the hierarchical mode of functioning, the humungous quantum of email to be dealt with, the working lunch, et al. And one of these is the language of corporate-speak.

This note looks to identify terms and phrases that are ubiquitous here but not heard (by me) elsewhere, and thereby prepare wannabe or recent migrants for linguistic survival. It describes a selected ten from a long list detailed in the table below.

 

The Long List

30,000 feet	Asset light model	Back of the envelope	Bandwidth	Blue sky
Capex	Closing the loop	Curate	Custodian	CXO, C-suite
Dashboard	Deck	Deep dive	Granular	Hardstop
Long list	Messaging Corridor	Non value added activity	Optics	Pitchbook
Playbook	Pushback	Quick wins	SOP	Speaking above one’s pay grade
SPOC	Stretch target	Traction	Vertical	White space

 

 

 

A Short Description of a Select Few

30,000 feet: A higher level view or perspective of a situation, seeing its larger picture and its strategic linkages rather than its details.

Bandwidth: You can’t say ‘piss off, I’m busy’ to someone who is giving you work that you can’t or don’t want to do, you say ‘I have limited bandwidth at the moment’.

Deep dive: The move from 30,000 feet to the details is a deep dive.

Granular: Your lazy minions need to get back to work and put in some rigour and detail into their presentation – you say ‘would you like to bring in some granularity?’

Hard stop: A meeting is meandering on and Real Madrid is going to play FC Barcelona in 30 minutes – you get collective agreement on a hard stop in 15.

Non value added activity: Bumming around the coffee machine, discussing last night’s match, sharing info on the shopping in the vicinity of the office and gossiping about a colleague’s wandering eye, all the useless stuff that makes life in the rabbit warren of junior management bearable, actually constitutes non value added activity.

Pushback: When the company has acquired land from tribal communities for mining or whatever against their will, and there has been an armed insurgency against this in which your executives have been kidnapped and their testicles chopped off, you don’t say ‘Boss, we are in deep shit’ to your reporting officer. You say ‘Sir, there is some pushback from the locals’.

Speaking above one’s pay-grade: This refers to a gaffe that those of us not used to hierarchical structures tend to commit in our early and stupid days in the corporate sector, when we are falsely confident of our own expertise and the openness of higher echelons within the organization to our opinions. We soon figure out that it is hara-kiri to ‘speak above one’s pay grade’.

SPOC: Not from Star Trek but an acronym for Single Point of Contact – when you are taking forward an activity that cuts across departments or divisions, you need a SPOC from each else you will be knee-deep in non-value added activity handling the coordination, for which you are unlikely to have sufficient bandwidth.

White space: I have yet to find an acceptable way to say ‘this is pure and unadulterated bullshit’ in office, or that a ‘monumental f**k up’ has happened, and this constitutes a white space in corporate jargon. Any suggestions?

 

Oh! Shit!

OH! SHIT![1]

By Ajit Chaudhuri

“Toilets are more important than Temples” J. Ramesh in 2012, N. Modi in 2013

One of the myths we grow up with is that Indian Muslims are dirty – they bathe less, they have unclean personal habits, and their habitations are unsanitary compared with other communities in India. Don’t deny it – many of us think it, not just those with Hindu right wing leanings. Even I remember, back in 1986 when I shared a barsati with two friends, one of us Muslim and all three non-religious, his younger brother visited for a day en route to some other destination and decided against having a bath. Two of us smirked, and the third furiously hauled his befuddled brother off into the bathroom.

It was therefore a pleasure to read an econometric paper whose findings contradict this common assumption. Now, I normally give academic papers that use structural equation modelling and multivariate analyses a wide berth, but there was something compelling about this one; the simplicity with which it was written, the sheer force of what it was saying, and the policy implications emanating from its findings. This note attempts to describe the paper ‘Sanitation and Health Externalities: Resolving the Muslim Mortality Paradox’[2].

Indian Muslims are poorer, less educated, and more backward on average than Hindus, which should contribute to them having higher child mortality rates (I will use Ms and Hs to abbreviate for the two communities respectively, and CMR is the number of children dying before their fifth birthday per 1,000 live births). And yet, the CMR for M children is 18 percent lower than for H children across socio-economic categories, a robust and consistent pattern that has been evident since the 1960s. It means, in effect, that an additional 1.7 M children per hundred survive up to age 5. This phenomenon is well documented, does not reconcile with the literature on the importance of income and education in explaining mortality differences, and has therefore been termed ‘the puzzle of the Muslim Child Mortality advantage’.

The paper uses data from three rounds of the National Health and Family Survey (1992/93, 1998/99, and 2005/06), studies mortality rates from birth history information of 310,000 children, and shows that differences in defecation practices between Ms and Hs account for the entire CMR gap.

This is because human shit is particularly dirty – it contains pathogens (bacteria and parasites, such as worms), and open defecation (I will use OD for this one) introduces these pathogens into the environment, into feet, hands, mouths and the water supply, leading to acute and chronic illnesses.

Ms are 40 percent more likely than Hs to use pit latrines or toilets, which serve to safely dispose of excreta. The reason for this is difficult to trace! It could be because of institutional features of the respective religions – the Hadith forbids OD (‘Guard against three things that produce cursing: relieving oneself in watering places, in the middle of the road, and in the shade’[3], something that any modern epidemiologist would parrot), whereas H tradition views excreta as something to be kept away from home (‘Far from his dwelling let him remove his urine and excreta’ – The Law of Manu, chapter 4, verse 151). It could also be that different sanitary practises evolved between the largely segregated H and M communities for purely secular reasons. Either way, H households are more likely to have electricity than to use a toilet, even better off H households, with assets such as motorcycles, opt for OD, and toilets constructed or paid for by the government for Hs tend to remain unused or be re-purposed. The prominence of OD among Hs is not due to affordability.

More importantly, Ms are more likely to have M neighbours who do the same. The defecation practise of a neighbourhood as a whole is far more important than that of a particular household in accounting for mortality rates, to the extent that moving from a locality where everyone ODs to one where no one does is associated with a larger difference in CMR than moving from the bottom to the top twenty percent of the population in terms of wealth. And it is defecation practise that explains the difference in CMR, not idiosyncratic religious or cultural differences between Hs and Ms; Hs living in mainly M villages have lower CMRs than Hs living among other Hs; in places where Ms and Hs have similar OD rates, they also have similar CMRs; and the M advantage reverses in the rare places where Hs have less OD rates than Ms.

The persistence of OD among Hs has been of concern for some time. MK Gandhi famously observed in 1925 that ‘sanitation is more important than independence’, and cultural scholars have associated it with the caste system, where the link between human waste and ‘polluted’ castes reinforces norms that make sanitation problems ignored even by upper caste Hs. Policy makers have recognized the problem, and there are a multitude of government schemes that encourage the building and use of toilets. Thinking politicians from both ends of the political spectrum, as can be seen from the title quote, have also joined in despite the issue not being a vote-catcher.

I hope they succeed! And yet, I remember with fondness my own defecation habits in the villages I worked in in western Rajasthan in the early 1990s, in each of which I had my designated spot and time, where the long trek with a lota[4] in hand would enable the building of pressure (or ‘vatavaran nirman’, as we called it), and where we joked about situations when a crow came and tipped the lota over (my favourite – when it happened to a person twice in a row, he washed up before defecating the third time). I also remember my time in the harsh Changthang (eastern Ladakh) winters of 1997 and 1998, when the job had to be done in -30c temperatures every morning, where the task of minimising the exposed surface area without impeding the free fall of matter was arduous, and where discussions on the most important invention of all time unanimously settled on toilet paper. Coming generations of rural extension workers will miss the opportunities that OD provides for building relationships from one of the few things in which we are all on an equal plane.

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[1] Borrowed from the sign on the toilet door at the students’ accommodation ‘Citadel’ in VV Nagar, Gujarat.

[2] By Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, March 2014, available on the Internet.

[3] Mishkat-al-Masabih (a Muslim sacred text), page 76.

[4] The local term for a metal urn that is used to carry water for washing up in the aftermath.

The Cruelest Month

THE CRUELLEST MONTH

Introduction: April, according to TS Elliot in his poem ‘The Wasteland’, is the cruellest month; it breeds lilacs out of the dead land, mixes memory with desire, stirs dull roots with spring rain, and other such things. What he misses is that it is also when another cohort of young graduates set off from the comfort of their campuses into the wild world, just as I did 30 years ago.

What can I tell these kids about the trials and tribulations ahead – the challenges they will face, and the hard choices they will have to make? Not much – the world has changed, and anyway they have to make their own journeys through life. At best, I would sound like that old codger in the film ‘The Graduate’ who extols the virtues of plastic to Dustin Hoffman.

Sadly, the nature of the ‘wannabe guru’ business is such that having nothing relevant to say is at best a minor factor in a decision to go forth and pontificate. I will therefore commemorate April by listing five (academic) papers that I wish I had read before beginning my own professional journey (instead of in my late 40s). I will, however, not exacerbate April’s cruelty by regurgitating the papers for you – instead, I will merely describe why I wish I had read them earlier. Here goes, in no particular order!

1.    Panopticism – Michel Foucault – 1977

This likening of power relations and social control mechanisms in modern institutions to a 19^th century idea of a model prison gave me a creepy feeling at the bottom of my spine – it described my boarding school (not a pleasant place) almost exactly. The idea of power being diffused and ever present, in every person (including the so-called powerless), family and institution, and in every action, would have helped me make sense of some simple but incomprehensible things – like the space you occupy on a ‘charpoy’ at a village meeting being reflective of your status, like the serving order at a family dinner, and like the fact that people who have complete control over you (one’s spouse, the local drug lord, and the Prime Minister of India) being as pathetically prisoners of their circumstances as you are of yours.

An additional dimension to Foucault’s arguments comes from the Czech poet-politician Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in which he analyzes submission and dissent using the parable of the sign ‘Workers of the World Unite’ outside a vegetable store. He sees ideology as something that offers a person the illusion of identity, dignity and morality while making it easier to part with these virtues, and as a veil behind which humans can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to status quo. Required reading for anyone who has to exist among the vocally ideological – no shortage of this type in many professional spheres.

2.    The Use of Knowledge in Society – Frederick von Hayek – 1945

A common trait in my early professional life was that of seeing the devil in market principles and America – and fusing them into one. In those days of cold war politics and Keynesian ideas on the role of the state, Pepsi was as close to pederasty and paedophilia in perception as it would be in a dictionary (though it was acceptable to have Windows open on one’s computer). There was also a deep-seated belief in the nanny state, where everyone had right of access to food, childcare, education, public sector employment, and everything else, with little thought on who would pay. Today, such ideas would belong to Jurassic Park or to left-of-centre think tank bar discussions after a bottle or two have emptied, but they were dominant in the late 1980s.

The importance of Hayek’s paper is that he makes a logical case for market principles at a time when central planning and an overarching state were considered the way to go. He compares centralized decision making systems with anarchic markets in their ability to make efficient use of resources, and says that the beauty of the price system as a signalling device is that it has ‘economy of knowledge’ – individuals need to know very little in order to take the right action. The scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, and without more than a handful of people knowing the cause, results in many people using the material and its products more sparingly. He quotes Alfred Whitehead in saying that ‘it is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.’

3.    Power: A Radical View – Steven Lukes – 1974

A common tool of analysis from the 1980s onwards was ‘participatory rural appraisal’ or PRA – going into villages for short durations in teams and conducting a series of exercises (village mapping, wealth ranking, chapatti diagrams, activity mapping, etc.) that resulted in a village plan. ‘This is what the village has decided for itself,’ was the common refrain after a PRA, ‘as per its own needs and priorities. This plan has a people’s mandate.’

Though a user of its techniques, I was never quite comfortable with the legitimacy that PRA ascribed to its planning outputs, and I did not know why – until I read up on Steven Luke’s concept of the three dimensions of power.

Creating spaces to speak on a level footing and providing information to participants, as PRA requires, addresses only Luke’s first dimension. It does not address the fact that there are hidden power equations in such spaces that constrain or enable the expression of particular viewpoints. The tenants’ expression of satisfaction in arrangements with local landlords may have less to do with their perceptions of fairness and justice and more with their wanting to continue to live and their interest in the continued virtue of their women – but no PRA will capture this second, hidden, dimension.

The greatest form of domination, according to Lukes, is ‘the power to prevent people from having grievances by shaping their perceptions so that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial.’ This third dimension explains things that otherwise confound, such as – why do women participate in the killing of girl children, or think it is OK for their husbands to beat them? Or, why do Hindu ceremonies require Brahmins to be fed?

4.    The Logic of Power – Mancur Olsen – 2000

What is this beast called government, which the philosopher Thomas Hobbes likened to a twisted sea monster and a gatekeeper of hell in his book ‘Leviathan’ in 1651? How did it come about? Why do we need it? What would happen if it didn’t exist? Would life be ‘nasty, brutal and short’ in its absence? Though not among those who spent happy years of unemployment studying for civil service exams, I have always been fascinated by these questions.

The simplest, and most potent, explanation of government is from this essay by Olsen. He likens it to a stationary bandit, one who has acquired a monopoly over theft in a given area and whose interests thereby have changed dramatically. He will not bother to steal any more, and will demand a hafta from his victims instead. He will reduce the percentage of hafta so that his victims retain incentives to produce and trade, and may even spend some of his takings on public goods that benefit his victims, like education and health, and make them more productive. He will become the government, and the hafta tax. Government, therefore, arises because of the rational self-interest of those who can organize the greatest capacity for violence.

5.    Representation, Citizenship and the Public Domain in Democratic Decentralization – Jesse C. Ribot – 2007

Some common questions we in the NGO sector faced back in the 1990s were – who has given you the right to do what you are doing? And, who are you accountable to? That we had no answers did not trouble us – we were confident that we did ‘good’ work, for which donor agencies gave us money, and who was anybody to question our intentions anyway in a free country? I for one balked only when the international charity I worked for began to claim that it was speaking for India’s poor at various international development forums. How did an organization that was accountable to a board consisting of three old white men take on the responsibility of representing India’s 300 million plus poor? Certainly, nobody from the 300 million had a say in this.

My argument against such acts of delusion, and for a rational role for NGOs in the development space, would have been better for a reading of Ribot’s paper. Democracy requires strong institutions to pay dividends, as everyone tells us in this season of elections. Ribot is considerably more specific; he says that these institutions should be democratic, and for them to be democratic they have to be representative – accountable to people, and equipped with the power to make policy and to convert policy into practise. People should ‘belong’ to such institutions by virtue of residence and not ethnicity, religion, linguistic affinity or any other identity or interest-based identifiers. And these institutions should retain substantial powers in the public political space, where citizens feel able and entitled to influence authorities.

‘Good’ public institutions, therefore, are not merely those that do good work. They also strengthen democracy by being representative of society, by enabling citizenship, and by enhancing the public domain.

ON NATURAL LAW

ON NATURAL LAW

Ajit Chaudhuri – January 2014

Does a man have the right to beat his wife? A group of women panchayat representatives and a delegation of visiting (male) Afghan district assembly members discussed the question at a meeting in Rajasthan, and there was unanimity in the opinion that a) a man did and b) under certain conditions, it was also perfectly OK to do so – because this complied with natural laws. Well, not quite unanimity! The interpreter at this discussion, who happened to be me, suggested that Indian law did not recognize this so-called right. I was shushed with a pointed reminder of my mandate to translate and not interfere.

This is not the first time that I have come across natural laws being evoked as a justification for the obnoxious; khap panchayats do so regularly when they issue fatwas against young lovers from the same sub-caste, as did feudal lords demanding the first night with the bride in all weddings in their fiefdoms (I’m not making this up – the practise was prevalent, for example, in Khurki block, Garwha district, Jharkhand, until the naxalites took control of this area). The Indian Supreme Court too did so recently while making gay sex illegal.

What are natural laws, and where did they come from?  The early thinking on natural laws was that they came from one of two sources – they were either coined in heaven, or they were based upon the adage that ‘might is right’.

The religious approach suggested that certain practices were acceptable or not ultimately because God had ordained them so. Needless to add, different religions had different conceptions of natural laws, and therefore different principles for deciding on matters of right and wrong in society. It followed that people of one faith, because of their specific natural laws, had no obligation to treat people of others in a morally correct way – a belief that enabled and justified terrible acts by ‘good’ people. Many terrorists, for example, are religious types who justify their acts under natural laws, just as many ordinary, honest, tax paying, and church-going citizens of Nazi Germany were comfortable with the regime’s treatment of Jewish, Slavic and gypsy communities. This line of thinking was also convenient for Europeans during their early encounters with indigenous populations in the Americas and Asia.

The ‘might is right’ argument saw natural laws as the outcome of acts of will by the powerful over the weak that brought about equilibrium in the social, economic and political food chains of life. The meek, under this approach, may not inherit the earth as the Bible suggests, but principles of obedience and obsequiousness to those above them in pecking orders enables survival.

This leads to the question – why should we observe such laws? If I am inclined towards having sex with someone of my own gender, should I not do so because my religion forbids it under the ‘natural laws’ doctrine? If someone bigger than me wants me, do I have to turn around and spread as ordained in the ‘might is right’ argument? This, apparently, is among philosophy’s most enduring problems. As all parents know, ‘do it because God says so’ and ‘do it because I will otherwise kick your butt/curtail your outings/cut your pocket money’ does not make the most compelling basis for the actions of children and, at least in my case, invariably results in a raised middle finger waived in my face (though, I must admit, they don’t dare try the latter with their mother).

I would like, at this stage, to introduce to you a 17^th century Dutch philosopher called Hugo Grotius – a remarkable man who led an interesting life; he was, inter alia, a leading politician, a prison escapee, a refugee and a shipwreck survivor, doing all this while maintaining a wife and seven children. As the Governor of Rotterdam in 1613, he led a Dutch delegation to secure the freedom of two ships seized by an English fleet in the seas near Greenland on the grounds of trespassing. Grotius’s arguments eventually came to form an integral component of today’s international law of the sea; at that time, however, the English were considerably more powerful than the Dutch and they neither returned the cargo nor conceded the legal points. He also wrote two classics of which the first, “On the Law of War and Peace” discusses the causes of war, the origins of property rights, and the case for state formation.

Grotius also managed to rescue the concept of natural law from the tyranny of religion and power. He suggested that the source of natural laws is human nature’s desire for peace and order, which manifests itself in two essential properties – the desire for self-preservation, and the need for society. Two things are therefore imperative for a person’s successful existence; one, s/he should engage in the reasonable pursuit of self-interest, and two, s/he should abstain from taking what belongs to others. He added two more principles – that, three, evil deeds must be corrected and four, good deeds must be recompensed. Grotius proceeds to build up laws governing both individual behaviour and the conduct of nations from these four tenets.

To return to the original question on the right, under natural laws, of people to do obnoxious things, I argue that it depends upon the basis for the existence of natural laws under which the justification is made. The system of patriarchy, which would be considered natural law in most religious and all power doctrines, does provide justification for wife-beating under certain and all conditions respectively – and therefore the women panchayat representatives and Afghan delegates may not have been wrong to shush me up. But the same under Grotius’s rationalization, and under most liberal legal doctrines, is a despicable act of bullying that has no basis in any natural law.

Confusing? I have a simpler explanation of natural laws from a rather more modern philosopher, my 13-year-old son. “Anything that has a basis in nature, and is therefore not questioned in any society or culture, is a natural law,” he told me, “like parents taking care of their children.” Not entirely coincidentally, the little squirt was negotiating a raise in his monthly allowance at that time.

Wicked Problems

WICKED PROBLEMS

Ajit Chaudhuri

‘The specific problems we face cannot be solved using the same patterns of thought that were used to create them.’ Einstein

Most of us know that the Indian education system is in a mess! At the higher end, my experience at the London School of Economics in 2001 was that, while British higher education needed Indians (we are among the few willing to pay for an education), it has to factor in the fact that the only real skill we have is that of rote learning. A comment I heard during my more recent visit to a tech hub in the US, was that, if a computer game required a character to jump two summersaults instead of three, they would call in the Indians to make the change. But the decision to change would be taken by an American. And, from my stints on interview panels gauging entry into management school, it was clear that many young engineers had fewer skills than my neighbours’ servants and drivers, and earned correspondingly lower salaries.

And yet, it is the problems at the other end that I have grappled with over the years – the difficulties that most Indian children face in getting access to a primary school, staying in them, and gaining an education – reflected in the pathetic state of many schools in the public education system, the absconding teachers, the large student to teacher ratios, and the multiple age groups in the same room being taught simultaneously by a single teacher. I don’t need to throw statistics around to support my case, our literacy rates are well known, as is the fact that many government teachers utilize their time to run shops and money-lending businesses. The various NGOs that I have worked in and supported have tried many things – all sorts of alternatives to formal schools, as well as bridge courses, remedial centres and placing additional teachers to get formal schools to work better. I used to think; if only we could get schools up and running in every village and locality, get teachers to actually teach, and get parents to send their children to school instead of into carpet factories or off to rear goats, we could address this problem. Why did I grapple? Because it is a problem worth addressing – no country without vast oil reserves has transformed itself from poor to rich without decentralized governance and universal elementary education, and we don’t have oil. And if we do not address it, we will not derive the advantages of demographic dividend that a young population is supposed to bring to an economy.

It was therefore a depressing experience to attend a recent development conference at Glocal University in Saharanpur (UP, on 25^th and 26^th October 2013) that focussed upon health and education in UP, and to sit in on two excellent presentations on the state of education in the country. The first was by Prof. Willima Wadhwa of the University of California and of the Indian Statistical Institute, who explored myths and realities regarding the right to education. The second was by Prof. Pankaj Jain of Gyanshala, who talked about education policy options. Prof. Jain, may I add, had been a professor at IRMA in the 1980s and I had been among his less illustrious students. Prof. Wadhwa pointed to the fact that children in grade 5 did not have the competencies of those required in grade 2 (she is the head of Pratham’s ASER programme that conducts the tests that make these observations). She also suggested that there is no evidence for the common presumption that private schools are better than government schools in terms of learning outcomes – the differences are attributable to selection biases (private schools attract those from better-off homes with better-educated parents, and do not give admission to those they deem unsuitable) and non-school factors.

Prof. Jain exploded some more myths – he said that everything that can possibly be tried has already been tried. Teacher education norms in India match world standards, teacher-training and support norms are considerably higher than world standards, and India is already a world leader in providing incentives (free meals, books, etc.) for children to attend schools.

He said that a major problem in India is that teachers are heavily overpaid, and I am going to expound on this because the most quarrelsome of my siblings is a teacher, as is my best friend (and both are on this reading list), and I need to protect myself. In an OECD country, a teacher with 15 years of experience earns at the per capita income of the country, whereas in India s/he earns at seven times the per capita income. Great, you would say, teachers are critical elements of society and nurture future generations, what is wrong in respecting them by paying them well? Well, most of the cost of education is teachers’ salaries, and if these are high the natural outcome is fewer teachers or else state bankruptcy. The public education system cannot therefore implement any civilized norm on student to teacher ratios simply because the number of teachers required to maintain such a norm would drive the country bankrupt. The right to education act, which requires public, private and informal schooling institutions to maintain acceptable student to teacher ratios and teachers’ salaries at par with heavily overpaid and underworked government teachers is an example of wishy-washy policy making. It is simply not possible to meet both these requirements simultaneously. It is also not possible for government teachers’ salaries to be reigned in, or allowed to inflate away; they have powerful public sector unions to protect their interests, and are also a huge source of bribes into the political system – if anything, the problem will only get worse with the new pay commission for public servants.

This brings me to my topic for the month – problems that defy solution, problems wherein scientific-rational approaches cannot be applied because of lack of a clear problem definition, incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements, and differing perspectives of stakeholders, problems such as ‘how to withdraw from Afghanistan’, ‘how to sort out Indian education’ and ‘how to complete a PhD in three years and remain sane and solvent’. 

A 1973 paper by Rittel and Webber termed these as ‘wicked problems’, with ‘wicked’ meaning resistant to solution rather than anything evil, and contrasted them with relatively tame ‘solvable’ problems in mathematics, chess and puzzle solving. They said that complex interdependencies within wicked problems result in efforts to solve one aspect of it revealing or creating other problems. They also said that ‘the search for scientific bases for confronting such problems is bound to fail because they cannot be definitively described, and as the policies that respond to these problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false it makes no sense to talk about optimal solutions’.

The issue of global warming brought about a new superlative category, that of the ‘super wicked problem’ (yes, I know, it sounds like the buses on Indian roads, with categories like deluxe, super deluxe, super luxury, etc., applied liberally to old clangers), with the additional characteristics of time running out, no central authority, and those seeking to solve the problem also causing it.

And finally, we have a situation where every problem interacts with other problems and is therefore part of a set of inter-related problems, a system of problems, or what is termed as a ‘mess’. How do we know that we are in a mess? According to Robert Horn, a mess has the following characteristics –

1.    There is no unique, ‘correct’ view of the problem – there are differing views and contradictory solutions.

2.    Most of the problems identified are connected to other problems.

3.    Data is uncertain and missing.

4.    There are multiple value conflicts at play, as also ideological, political, economic and cultural constraints.

5.    There is often a-logical, illogical or multi-valued thinking around the problems, with uncertainty, ambiguity, and great resistance to change.

6.    There are numerous possible intervention points.

7.    The problem solvers are out of contact with the problems and their potential solutions.

I would like to conclude with some thoughts for the policy advocacy industry within the Indian development sector, which often complains that Indian policy makers are impervious to their pleas and suggestions. It may be that they see you as just another donor-funded special interest group with no accountability and a limited mandate, and treat your views accordingly. Alternatively, it may be that your clear cut and articulate solutions to well defined problems do not recognize the chain of complex interdependencies between problems, and therefore do not make sense to those who have to live with the outcomes of policy suggestions. Because, after all, the reality of development is that most issues fall within the categories of wicked problems, super-wicked problems and messes, whether in India or anywhere else in the world.

Some additional reading for those with an interest in wicked problems:

Horn, Robert; 2001; Knowledge Mapping for Complex Social Messes; presentation to “Foundations in the Knowledge Economy” at the David and Lucille Packard Foundation on 16^th July

Levin, K., B. Cashore, S. Bernstein, G. Auld; 2012; Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Future Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change; Policy Sciences 45(2), 123-152

Rittel, Horst W.J and Melvin M. Webber; 1973; Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning; Policy Sciences 4(2), 155-169

Monopoly of Force

MONOPOLY OF FORCE

By Ajit Chaudhuri – September 2013

Some years ago, I was involved in supplying rice to villages along the Manipur-Mizoram border during a famine. The cheapest way was to lift rice in Imphal and transport it by truck along National Highway 150 to Tipaimukh – but from Churachandpur onwards there were ten roadblocks on the way, where different insurgent groups would stop the trucks and demand bags for themselves. Our protestations, that this was a relief effort and being done via the church, were to no avail – the rice is lifted from a government warehouse, we were told (the buggers actually checked the papers), and the levy had to be paid. Our attempts to organize ‘safe passage’ with the insurgents’ bosses were futile as well, there was no common high command and we would have had to hold ten parallel sets of negotiations – well beyond our ability to coordinate. We ended up using the more expensive option of supplying by boat along the Barak River from Silchar and Lakhipur – only two insurgents’ check posts on the river, both removable for the day if we informed the local Assam Rifles battalion of impending movements beforehand. “Bloody hell,” I remember thinking, “where the #@%%#@ is the #@%%#@ government?”

I am sometimes asked ‘what is India like?’ by someone from the twitter generation (they expect deep insights and sage advice in one sentence). I usually say that India is a country where, if you figure out that something applies, you soon also figure out that the opposite too applies just as much.

One of the many things this applies to is in our attitudes to government. We abuse the thieves and criminals masquerading as lawmakers in parliament and state legislative assemblies (to those who don’t like the tone of this sentence – 1,448 of India’s 4,835 MPs and State legislators have declared criminal cases against them, of which 641 of them face serious charges like murder, rape and kidnapping, according to the Association for Democratic Reforms and quoted from an article entitled ‘The Political Overlords of a Violent Underclass’ by Rajrishi Singhal in The Hindu of 3^rd September 2013) and their lackeys sitting in the administration. We also expect the government to do something about anything and everything that happens to us – and if the price of onions rises, or a river bursts its banks and sweeps away a bunch of illegally and badly built hotels, or the Taliban kill an Indian writer in some god-forsaken corner of Afghanistan, it is somehow the government’s fault. And this schizophrenia lies within all of us – we hate it, we demand it, we circumvent it, we look up to it, we moan and groan about it, and we depend upon it.

What is this beast called government, which the philosopher Thomas Hobbes likened to a twisted sea monster and a gatekeeper of hell in his book ‘Leviathan’ in 1651? Why do we need it? What would happen if it didn’t exist? And why does it bring about such a range of emotions within the citizenry? The simplest and most potent explanation of government comes from the essay ‘The Logic of Power’ by Mancur Olsen in his book ‘Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships’ in 2000, and this is the topic of this note. I propose to outline his key arguments here.

Societies, he says, are most likely to prosper when there are clear incentives to produce, and to reap gains from social cooperation through specialization and trade. They are least likely to prosper when there are stronger incentives to ‘take’ than to ‘make’, when there are more gains from predation than production. In anarchies, where life is famously ‘nasty, brutal and short’ (according to Hobbes in ‘Leviathan’), and kleptocracies where those in power seize most assets for themselves, there is little production and few gains from social cooperation through specialization and trade. Olsen suggests that, to determine where a society would fall between these two extremes, one must understand the logic of power. Power, and especially government power, is the capacity to bring about compulsory compliance (whether you agree with a law is irrelevant to the fact that you have to obey it, and the less said about paying taxes the better), and this is best understood via the logic of force.

He uses the metaphor of the stationary bandit. Theft makes society worse off – it produces nothing, reduces rewards from production and investment, and induces a diversion of resources towards locks, police, judges and prisons. But the overall loss to society from his theft is not a deterrent to the individual criminal or the roving bandit – he bears a small proportion of it, compared with all the loss for opportunities to steal that he forgoes. He has a ‘narrow stake’ in the society he is stealing from, and it is rational for him to ignore the damage he does to it. Anarchy is a situation wherein there are many such roving bandits in society, and therefore few incentives to produce and trade.

Now imagine a situation where a roving bandit becomes strong enough to monopolize theft, i.e. to take hold of a given territory, and to keep other bandits out. The power to monopolize theft, and the related ability to monopolize force in a given area, changes incentives dramatically – the roving bandit becomes a stationary bandit. He acquires an ‘encompassing interest’ in his domain – it is now rational for him to reduce the percentage he takes from each victim of theft, so that the victims retain incentives to produce and trade. He even has an incentive to spend some of his takings from theft, which he now calls tax, on public goods that benefit his victims (education, health, infrastructure, etc.) and make them more productive, at least up to the point the last dollar spent equals his share of the resultant increase in output.

Governments, therefore, arise because of the rational self-interest of those who can organize the greatest capacity for violence. The acquisition of monopoly of force, and the resultant move from a roving to a stationary bandit and change in nomenclature of theft to tax, is key to this process. Everything else – administration, justice, representation, issues of legitimacy, caring for the old and sick, poverty alleviation, etc. – comes much later. This is why PM Manmohan Singh rates naxalism as the greatest threat to India, greater than China, terrorism and corruption – it challenges the government’s monopoly of force. And this is what then-PM Vajpayee was referring to in 2002 when he reminded a certain current prime ministerial hopeful to observe raj-dharma.

To conclude, Olsen’s analysis is suspected to be tongue-in-cheek and has elements of irony to it. And yet, seeing the government as a stationary bandit explains much of its actions – and also many of our attitudes to it.