How does India look like !!

Here is the Political Map of India with 28 states and 7 union territories.

(Image source : http://ecimaps.gisserver1.nic.in)
Does it ring a bell... How does it feel to be belonging to the whole country not just to our respective regions...Did we know all the states and their locations...

Lok Sabha Elections India 2014 - Part 4

The calculus of voting in India (2014)

According to data from the 2004 Lok Sabha Elections, the following was the voter turnout distribution according to income:-

The above data gives us an indication of the voter turnout pattern as per income groups. Unfortunately income distribution in India can no longer be categorised into the above three categories. Probably an accurate categorisation would be very poor, poor, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, rich, very rich. Nevertheless statistics reveal that majority of the voter come under the poor/very poor category. Studies so far suggest that voting patterns in India are in direct contradiction to socio-economic characteristics. Why do poor in India turn out in large number to vote ? I am attempting to answer this question with the help of the following points:-
(Some points are taken from published papers)

1. According to surveys, on election day the poor stand in the queue for long hours, even in adverse weather conditions, give up their daily wages to caste their vote. Some even wear new clothes. Across all gender and age groups people turn up to the polling booths to vote. On being asked why, their response was fairly uniform "It is our right". Many said that the election day is one day when they matter. Party workers and politicians come to them seeking votes. This is one day when their citizenship counts, is recognised and acknowledged.
2. Some of the poorer section vote thinking "if we don't vote who knows what might happen? We could lose our homes, ration cards, police would come around our homes and harass us. If we don't vote, we are dead for the state."
3. Basically the motivation for a larger section of the poor to vote is either out of coercion, fear, persuasion, temporary goodies (like Rs. 500 or a bottle of liquor), or illusionary social concepts. However ironically it has also been observed that many of the people from poorer sections are much well informed about their polling station details etc., than the middle class or upper class sections.
4. Poorer sections do perceive elections as a matter of right. Also it gives them a perceived sense of equality with all the sections of the society because voting is the most egalitarian act among all possible modes of political participation. Everyone has to queue up to caste their vote regardless of their class or social status. The rules of election are the same for everyone.
5. The middle class perceive voting as either a civic duty or a means to get access to state resources. Some even think of it as an opportunity to get their voter ids done to use them as address proofs/identity proofs. 
6. For the rich voting is optional. Because it is too insignificant in their socio-economic sphere of experience. They know that they would anyway have to pay bribes to officials to get their job done. So they do not take specific political sides. Rather they patronise all influential political parties equally

In essence, none of the socio-economic classes (rich, poor or middle class) perceive elections and voting as an apparatus for carrying out fundamental changes in social, economic and political spheres of the country for the collective good of the entire population of the country and the world. If properly used, voting is the strongest and the most effective instrument for not only political but also social and economic transformation in a country. Unfortunately today majority of the population(educated or uneducated) of India (and other parts of the world) are completely ignorant of this phenomena.

With this qualitative and quantitative understanding we can derive the plausible voter turnout trend for India (2014) as:-

Let us divide the Socio-Economic classes in India as follows:
VP - very poor ; probability of voting = p1 ; population = N1
P - poor ; probability of voting = p2 ; population = N2
LM - lower middle; probability of voting = p3 ; population = N3
M - middle ; probability of voting = p4 ; population = N4
UM - upper middle ; probability of voting = p5 ; population = N5
R - rich ; probability of voting = p6 ; population = N6
VR - Very rich ; probability of voting = p7 ; population = N7

Hence,
Voter turnout(VT) = p1N1 + p2N1 + p3N3 + p4N4 + p5N5 + p6N6 + p7N7
Here only the first three terms would dominate. The last 4 terms would not be significant.

VT = p1N1 + p2N2 + p3N3

Let us redefine B as
B - sum total of psychological and civil benefits as perceived by the voter of that income group, for each income group, B will have a different value.
B should range between (0 - 1).

C = Psychological cost of voting for that income group
(The tangible economic cost of voting is not taken into consideration because of the dominance of the concept of perceived benefits in comparison to actual tangible benefits, based on the discussions above)

Hence C1, C2, C3 etc. are negligible in lower income groups. But in higher income groups these may not be negligible.

p1 = B1 - C1
p2 = B2 - C2
p3 = B3 - C3

Hence,

VT = B1N1 + B2N2 + B3N3

Note : As of today's scenario in India, B4, B5, B6, B7 are much lesser because the perceived civil and psychological benefits of voting by upper classes is minimal

Hence voter turnout in India today is essentially governed by the above equation.

How do we change the equation ?
Let us call this -
THE LAW OF VOTING :
If properly used, voting is the strongest and the most effective instrument for not only political but also social and economic transformation in a country.

If people of all socio-economic classes (especially the upper classes) are made aware of the Law of Voting, then their perceived psychological and civil benefits of voting would increase much more than those of the lower socio-economic groups, because the higher socio-economic group is more educated, intellectually more mature and has access to more resources.
So the equation above would change to,

VT = B1N1 + B2N2 + B3N3 + B4N4 + B5N5 + B6N6 + B7N7
(B4 to B7) would then start contributing significantly

The advantage of the above would be that these perceived civil and psychological benefits would then actually become real and tangible benefits that each section of the society (lower to upper socio-economic groups) would start enjoying equally. Consequently N1 to N3 numbers would start reducing and N4 to N7 numbers would start increasing, bringing the society towards more harmonious indices of social and economic prosperity and well being.

Though right now N4 to N7 numbers are less, but their role and responsibility  in establishing a sound political governance is much higher, because majority of the population in these groups (N4 to N7) are intellectually better equipped to render sound rational judgement in terms of electing the suitable political party for running the governance machinery of this country. Also N4 to N7 can act as better watchmen to keep a watch on the moves of the government which would act as a deterrent for all political parties in terms of good governance.

Lok Sabha Elections India 2014 - Part 3

Let us look at the historical data related to Lok-Sabha elections till now. The table below shows the statistics of voter turnout.

(Data source : Election Commission of India)
If the above data is plotted we see the following graph:-

From the above trend we can conclude that the marginal increase in voter turnout is because of the increase in population. However this increase in voter turnout is not at all proportional to the growth in population.

Let us now look at another interesting phenomena. The following table indicates the income distribution trend in India in the last 35 years.

If we plot this data we get

Here the income denominator is denominated in USD per day. If we just manipulate this data with respect to the INR-USD conversion rate in 2010, we get the following :-

(Informally quoting here : all data source from Wordbank database)
Here the figures map to monthly income in INR of the Indian population.
We can clearly see that even today the percentage of Indian population who earn more that Rs.6753 is so negligible. And we also see that the vast majority of Indians live on a monthly income of less that Rs.1689 per month. Is this social justice ? Has India really progressed ? Are we getting fooled by the data published by the planning commission ? What are we doing as citizens of India to change the systems in the country ? Is this human development ?
These questions will haunt us for many decades now.

Let us now look at the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) data in India.
Note here that a CPI = 100 implies no corruption and a CPI = 0 implies maximum corruption.

(Data source - Transparency International) 
We can see a that the corruption level has nearly remained the same in the last 20 years. A marginal shift may be attributed to computerisation in many areas leading to a very marginal decrease in corruption. It nearly remains the same.
With all this data we are nearly ready to analyse election statistics and trends.
In the next post we do just that...

Lok Sabha Elections India 2014 - Part 2

On the economics of democracy
My limited know-how of Micro and Macro Economics leads me to believe that social structures cannot develop in isolation. Economics is a rational phenomena. If one studies the world events, one would come to the conclusion that economics is a great leveller. Illegal businesses collapse because of the same phenomena that formed the ideology of those businesses. Similarly irrational social structures also collapse on account of the same forces that led them to build those structures in the first place. The rational study of political and social systems can only be done in the backdrop of economic phenomena. With this premise let us have a look at the economic aspects of democracy.

The calculus of voting:-
A political treatise was written by Anthony Downs in 1957 titled "An Economic Theory of Democracy". In his treatise Downs presented a rational calculus of voting.
It predicts that a citizen would turn out to vote if:

                                          pB + D > C

B - benefits that the voter will personally receive only if the voter's candidate of   choice wins the election (instrumental value of voting)
D - captures the intrinsic satisfaction that the voter receives from the act of voting itself, regardless of who wins the elections (immanent value of voting)
C - represents all the costs, i.e., sum of all the personal costs of voting, both direct costs in terms of time and energy it takes to make the trip to the polls on the day of the election as well as the time and energy one invests beforehand in learning about the issues and the candidates, and the opportunity costs in terms of forgone wages etc.
p - the probability that one's vote will be decisive in the sense that it either makes of breaks a tie in one candidate's favour

The model predicts that if pB + D < C citizens will abstain from voting and if pB + D = C, they will be indifferent.

p turns out to be very very small because there are millions of voters. Hence Down concludes that a voter who is able to make rational choice would vote as long as D > C, which would happen in quite less number of cases.

Down's hypothesis was later developed by Riker and Ordeshook (1968,1973).
Riker and Ordeshook (1968) shifted the attention of modern political scientists from explaining why people don't vote to explaining why they do. Rational choice appears to predict unrealistically low levels of outcome.
They propose :-

                                   R = PB - C + D

R - the reward an individual voter receives from one's act of voting
B - the differential benefit, that an individual voter receives from the success of his more preferred candidate over his less preferred one
P - the probability that the citizen will, by voting, bring about the benefit, B,
C - the cost to the individual of the act of voting
D - psychological and civil benefit of voting

Here P can matter, because as the race gets closer to a tie, voters perceive that their vote has a much higher probability of affecting the outcome. As your candidate's vote share approaches 50% P increases.

The calculus of voting in India today (2014)
Let us now analyse/predict the voter turnout phenomena to our current Lok Sabha pre-election scenario. In order to do so we need to look at the historical trends of various factors. Lets do that first...

Lok Sabha Elections India 2014 - Part 1

 The dates of the Lok Sabha elections have been declared. Elections would be held from 7th April 2014 to 12th May 2013 and the results would be declared by 16th May 2014. According to the Election Commission of India, the current electoral strength of India is 81.45 cores.

There would be total 543 seats. Out of these the major contributors would be:-

• Andhra Pradesh - 42
• Bihar - 40
• Maharashtra - 48
• Tamilnadu - 39
• Uttar Pradesh - 80
• West Bengal - 42

 Hence we can clearly see that 6 states out of 28 states (Not including Telangana yet) and 7 union territories, are contributing a total of 291seats which is 53.6% of the total electoral seats. No doubt the move to break Andhra Pradesh clearly had ulterior motives.

NDA headed by BJP and UPA headed by Congress would be the two major coalitions that are expected in 2014. However we have to see what is the percentage of coalition in each of these groups. Meaning how much autonomy would the leader of each of these coalitions enjoy. That would eventually determine the quality of governance in the coming 5 years.

A brief look at the 2009 Lok Sabha election trends :-

• According to the 2009 election results, the voter turnout was 58.19
• 52% voters were male and 47% voters were female
• Total 8070 (93% male and 6.9% female)candidates contested for 543 seats. Which means approximately 15 candidates contested for 1 seat

The data mentioned above is from the website of the Election Commission of India. The ratios are going to remain nearly the same, however there is going to be an increase of about 12 crore voters who would attain the age of 18 for this Lok Sabha elections.

Based on the current scenario of Indian politics, society and economy, the following factors are of primary importance for deciding whom to vote:-

1. We need change definitely. The consistent scams and persistent corruption that has grown within the system needs to be uprooted. India is the largest producer of vegetables in the world and yet the prices of vegetables is so high. This is because of corruption (hoarding and black marketing) under the patronage of politicians and weak supply chain infrastructures. Each scam is of thousands of crores. Which means few people enjoy thousand of crores worth stolen wealth. And this wealth comes from the taxes we pay as Indian citizens. It is the hard earned money of each and every taxpayer 
2. We do not need a "khichdi" government. Which means a govt. formed by a political alliance of many small regional parties. This type of alliance would not enable the governmental machinery to take decisions freely for the country's development. So in this election we need to vote for the national parties rather than regional parties if we want good governance
3. New parties that have come into the forefront are now too new to take care of the governance in a mature manner. Moreover they have not yet placed themselves firmly on the ground. Hence they would fall prey to existing political parties who have exploited the system so far

Watch this space, more interesting data, statistics and analysis to come.....

Sanskrit

   India is a rich country, rich with knowledge. All the ancient knowledge is buried in our country and we are unable to harness it, why ? because we cannot decode it. 99% of the population of India do not know Sanskrit. The C.B.S.E has included Sanskrit in the curriculum but only from 5th Std. and the journey ends by 9th Std, so we eventually end up as a half-baked Sanskrit learners who are good for nothing as far as the language is concerned.

But times are changing. The way the fragrance of camphor cannot be hidden, similarly Sanskrit which is considered as a "Divine" language cannot be stopped from blossoming.

Sanskrit facts:-

• Taught in 450 universities and 60 countries across the world
• Sanskrit is considered to be most appropriate for computational linguistics because of its highly regular structure
• http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/index.jsp - computational linguistics R&amp;D special centre for Sanskrit studies JNU
• 97% of the world languages have been directly or indirectly influenced by Sanskrit
• Sanskrit has the power to express a sentence in minimum number of words than in any other language
• Sanskrit is the most suitable and precise language for programming (Forbes Magazine)
• Delhi university has a 4 year undergraduate program in Sanskrit
• Sudharma - the only newspaper in Sanskrit language
•  According to Friedrich Max Muller - " Sanskrit is to science of language what Mathematics is to Astronomy"
• Uttarakhand is the only state in India with Sanskrit as one of its official languages
• Today there are many universities in India offering online program in Sanskrit language

Important Sanskrit links:-

• http://www.sanskrit.nic.in/sans.htm
• http://sanskrit1.ccv.brown.edu/tomcat/sl/Index
• http://sudharma.epapertoday.com/
• http://www.ksu.ac.in/en/
• http://oyepages.com/blog/view/id/5184c19abc54b22f09000005
• http://oyepages.com/blog/view/id/5261510fbc54b2ca3a000002
• http://sanskritforums.tk/
• http://ignousanskrit.chinfo.org/i/
• http://spokensanskrit.de/
• http://www.learnsanskrit.org/
• http://sanskrit.inria.fr/portal.html
• http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/languages/sanskrit/resources.html
• http://www.speaksanskrit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit

We must all take some time and effort to revive this beautiful divine language which is not only rich because of its linguistic structure but it is also rich in terms of its structural intelligence which is most suitable for developing advanced computational architectures and tools.

Macaulay and the Indian education system

 Thomas Babington Macaulay was a British historian who was instrumental in introducing English medium education in India. However in the process the original Indian education system was gradually replaced with English education system. When Macaulay visited India, he was astonished at the prosperity and cultural richness of India. He noticed that the basis of India's cultural strength was in the strong spiritual roots of India. So he concluded that in order to rule over India, her cultural and spiritual roots have to be weakened, and hence the English-medium education was introduced in India. According to wikipedia, a word was coined called "Macaulayism" which means the conscious policy of liquidating indigenous culture through the planned substitution of the alien culture of a colonizing power via the education system. That is exactly what was done in the erstwhile British India.

With the above premise in place, the irony is that after India became independent in 1947, the then ruling party and people continued the use of Macaulayism in India and till today the same education system is being systematically promulgated. Though the current education system has metamorphosed with tid-bits of different Indian regional cultures, if one looks at the text books of C.B.S.E/NCERT one would find that the history has been considerably manipulated. The ancient Vedic civilization is hardly properly described. There is very little emphasis on "Vedanta" which is millions of centuries old. There is absolutely no mention of spiritual history and scriptures. Ramayana and Mahabharata are considered as mere mythology, which in reality are actual historical events.

Also Sanskrit is being systematically kept at a lesser importance level. Today people from different states cannot converse with each other because there is  no common Indian language that is being popularised across India. English is the only common medium of communication across India, but it is only the middle/upper class who can converse fluently in English. The lower and poor class cannot converse in English and they constitute 70% of the Indian population. So lower classes are always behind in terms of access to developmental information. Hindi though is popular in few of the north Indian states, is not at all popular in the southern Indian states. Hence just because of the systematic elimination of Sanskrit, today the regional mindset is becoming more predominant in India. In ancient days pilgrims from south India would visit north India like Varanasi etc., and they could easily converse with each other in Sanskrit. Hence Sankrit served as a source of national integration as well as gave people the tool of convenience in communication across entire India.

India being a secular country is an amalgamation of various religions i.e., Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and many more different religious sub-categories. And all the religions are equally respectable. Hence Indian education system should have the gist of all religions being taught at the secondary education level, so that each and everyone should be able to appreciate every religion in its essence and should be able to develop a harmonious intellectual concept of all religions. And the essence of every religion is nearly the same. Hence there would be no religious conflicts in the society.

As a summary I would like to put forward three important changes in the Indian education system that can transform the Indian society as a whole :-

1. Nurturing Sanskrit as a national language all across India and giving Sanskrit the importance of a national language
2. Reviving ancient Indian knowledge which is being lost and updating the curriculum with this knowledge
3. Gist of all religions being made part of the curriculum

The benefits of the above three points are :-

1. National integration and a sense of oneness being developed among societies irrespective of diversity in religions and regions
2. Poorer sections being able to come to mainstream development
3. Revival of ancient knowledge and culture