Medicine or Poison - Let us Wake Up

This news is there for a while and for most of us it is just a news. We don't go medical shop that frequently and there is every possibility that we get good medicine even if we go or very least we can think that we will get medicines that are perfect to cure diseases. Few months back, I heard an interview from a government health officer in radio (FM) and he promised that there are no incidences of selling fake or expired medicine. He said that the medicines given in government hospitals had very strict quality control. But it seemed genuine when he accepted that there were few isolated cases but that could not be generalized.

Recently, there was a big scam or rather a cruelty brought into light. It was shocking to hear about a single person involved in selling of expired and contaminated medicines. He used to involve in an activity of collecting drugs from garbage (that were thrown out by people) and sold it to shops like a drug distributor. Should we believe that this is done by a single person? How can the collection, packaging, distribution and selling of expired medicine of such massive scale be done by single person without any help from others? The magnitude is so big and revenue picks to few hundred crores. 

Just few minutes back, I heard someone in drug distribution (I bet he must be a President or in similar post) to talk about medicine. His statement was too general to believe. He says that the medicine loses weight after expiry date and loses it power or curing capabilities. He says that it will not cause death. Another one says that the people should buy medicines in full strips so that the expiry dates printed in the strip is not cut away and clearly visible. For sure, these creatures are better to be magicians. The guys who sell medicine on the road side ("legiyam vickaravan") are much better than these creatures. I don't want to ask them whether they will give this medicine to their loved ones or for that matter will they go and buy the entire strip when they just need two tablets. This shows that how irresponsible they are and I quite related to Mr. Subroto Bagchi's example of a doctor who sold kidneys and later to fled to Nepal. This is pure impurity - the lack of integrity and the lack of professionalism.

But I m sure that the guy involved in this scam will also get bail in few months and lead a peaceful life. At maximum he will be fined few lakhs, the bank account and property in his name will be seized (but his wife's, son's, friend's, relatives' and dogs' account will not be seized) and few police officers will get promotion, the chief minister will appreciate the police department (and himself) for being proactive.

But who is responsible for betraying the people who did not get a chance to go to medical college (or any school) and ended up swallowing the poison?

Indian IT Industry is Dying

It was the time when India had huge English speaking population who speak better English than the other developing nations in the region like China. Today, China is no more a China that was 10 years back. Not only China, the entire region is likely to take position in providing services not only in back offices but also in high end technology like research. The growth of other countries in the region is first threat to IT (that we cannot do much).

Looking at the education in India, it seems like we are heading back. We focus on quantity and but back in quality. We are not able to scale well without compromising the quality. Today, the average cost of an engineering degree in a self financing college sums up to 0.3 million rupees. However, the return of investment for the students is very little. The students are not able to get jobs. The industry picks few of them and trains them to do low end back office jobs. The companies select them because of "low cost" strategy.

With the current state, even within India, there are small companies that are willing and ready to do outsourced work at the half the price of bigger companies. Within no time, there will be someone who is ready to offer services at much reduced price. With this trend, in couple of years, many of the big companies are ready to hit a huge margin pressure and which will be downfall of Indian IT industry. Few companies that are trying to act know by thinking on creating IP. It is too late now. But better late than never.

This is the right time that we stop scratching the itch of making big money by providing low end back office work. We need to move up in research/development and the investments need to come from the organizations. If you are in IT industry and if you read this, go and ask your management what are the plans to invest in research. Investing in research/innovation makes sense than giving you double digit hike.

So, it is highly critical that we, as a community, rethink about outsourcing. This is time to move up (or at least try to move up) providing high end technology services. Else, Indian IT industry will be a history.

Giving Back - Company Should be a Community

Almost of all Indian IT companies have enjoyed tax incentives in the name of IT export and creating high end technology jobs in India. We continue to enjoy monetary benefits in the name of tax incentives. These tax incentives in no way are less. IT industry have been enjoying these and it is fair to say that this has become one of the key strategies to make money (or at very least to increase profit). Whenever the government says its plan to cut the incentives, the industry voices and makes sure that they get some form of incentives.

If we look at the other side, are we fair enough. We simply forget the fact that we get incentive on tax which otherwise will go to welfare of the people (well some part to welfare of people and some part to welfare for politicians). Most of the IT companies fail to remember that they have to "give back". The companies have to give back to people in terms of money, time, efforts. Apart from transforming their businesses, the customer businesses, employees, we must "give back" to the country. Unless we give back, we will not get back. Simple logic.

When I traveled back to India from US, I happen to meet Mr Jayen Desai, Head Business Excellence, Applied Electronics. He talked about the role of an industry in national development. Particularly, with the technology expertise that IT industry possesses, we can do a lot to our nation. Will we get time to do it? Can each company become a community?

PS: The few minutes discussion with Mr Jayen Desai in Super Shuttle (from San Jose to SFO airport) is one of the defining moment and one of the most productive time in my professional career.

Indian IT Industry - Be Responsible

Indian IT industry doesn't seem to understand the importance of quality of resource. Most of them make offers out of which many are bad offers. If we think that "bad offers" is an exception that can be discounted as it is negligible, we are dead wrong. Anyone with an Engineering degree (with few days of reading a programming language) can get into IT and get six digit salary. I hear interviewers saying, he is good in concepts, struggles a bit in programming but trainable. Neither the mediocre create value for the organization nor the organization creates any value to its clients. Together, we create mess.

The quality of people that get into the organization not only affects the performance or morale that exist in the team. It also creates a devastating effects to the culture of the organization. As more mediocre people get in, they deliver mediocre results and they make everyone around them mediocre. The only reason why I find we are happy in hiring mediocre people is to fill the positions and to get that "extra" bucks (and bugs). Indian IT, please be responsible. If we are not responsible, we have to pay heavy prize. China is no longer non English speaking country. So, is that the reason why most of top Indian IT opened up shops in China.

Where is Humanity? Painfully Inhumane

It should be more than 15 years and it was early January. I was climbing the mountains of Sabarimala as a kanni swami. We were group of 20 people and segregated into three groups. The youngsters in the group will march fast to identify the best place to rest and fetch water/refreshments for others. There will be thousands of such groups marching towards Sabarimala. I still remember many instances where irrespective of the group we belong to there will numerous helping hands. People all over India will be on pilgrimage and on the way to worship Lord Ayyappa they will offer service. I still remember a 80 year old swami massaging my legs. Now, I feel that it is Lord Ayyappa who massaged my leg. It is such a pleasant experience and a rejoice to see a man serving a man without expecting anything. But we also have people who never feel that it is their duty to help mankind needing desperate help.

Yesterday it was so painful to hear a driver was suffering from a massive cardiac arrest while driving his car. The bosses in the car were supposed to meet a top shot businessman for a party or meeting. As soon as they saw the driver uncomfortable and stopped the car, the three men helped him to find a nice place in a roadside pavement for a fresh air. One of them drove the car and went to the meeting. These three gentlemen can be a big business magnets, how the hell they will ensure that their customers, employees and the environment is peaceful if they can't help a person who drove them. Isn't this driver played a key role by driving them safely throughout their life? Why are they equating everything to balance sheets? What rights they have to claim that they are human beings? It is very pathetic that we have given the economy to private companies who have people like this.

Another ordinary person you just walked by saw the driver and hospitalized him. He also informed his family and currently the driver is recuperating. As usual, the doctors said that had he been hospitalized five minutes late, he would have been no more. BTW, the driver is in his mid fifties and the incident happened a couple of days before in Mumbai.

Many activists are now trying using RTI to know who are those three and who is their boss, their company. I am also eagerly looking forward and join the activists. More story can be read from the following like - Mid Day. Will Mid Day disclose the information they have and help us to stop such cruelty.

Open Gyan - An Update

Some of you know that I have started an initiative for the students. Few folks joined with me later to when I started the website and Badhri created a Orkut community. As I promised you in one of the previous posts, I here to give you an update. There are reasons to be happy and finally we have given another dimension to Open Gyan. We have launched a long training program for the students who have at least 2-3 years to complete their degree (BE, MCA, ME, MSc). This program comes from a collective experience of 17 years and we are positive that many more people will join us.

This program is an attempt to help students to improve their experiential learning. If you have any of your friends who are in college, you may want to pass this information to them. The detail of this program be accessed through this link - Open Gyan

Where is education? Is it education Industry?

We are living in the world of commercialization where even relationships are commercialized. Education is no exception. Few years back, I was traveling to Delhi for a conference and fortunate to meet a senior person. Since Chennai to Delhi travel time is two and half hours, I wasn't sure about how to spend time. Fortunately, I happen to sit next to a senior person who is Engineer by profession but retired from service.

He was talking about present education system and commercialization of education. He felt that even the educated were falling in the trap of education industry business magnets. He said that the real education did not happen in classroom and the real education for the student was to connect the dots - ability to know the unknown through known. He said that the students of those days suffered from poor exposure and even these days it didn't improve. It is through exposure and constant practice one can become a perfect engineer. He was suggesting me that I should contribute more the society and share my knowledge with others.

Our journey ended when the flight landed in Delhi airport and he wished me for my talk that afternoon and blessed me. I cannot forget the travel and it comes to my mind today because I m so excited to architect a prolonged training for students from computers background to make them employable. I am going to put all my seven and odd years of experience in this initiative. I am going to do this through Internet with the help of web applications. I ll keep you posted and you can expect a post in a month.

Will the world end by 12-12-2012?

Sometime back, when I was surfing, I happened to visit a site that talked about 12-12-2012. The world is likely to come to an end by 12-12-2012 giving a lot of evidences from ancient history to modern sciences. The evidences are not more than mere superstitions. This superstitious group is arguing about end of this planet and another group tries to give array of counter arguments that the world will not end. After reading an article from this month's Scientific American India, I feel that the world will not end by 12-12-2012 but it may take few more decades, probably 5-8 decades. Why? Read on.

When we compare the population of the world with the population that existed few decades back, it is fair to say that we are exponentially growing. We are likely to hit a spot somewhere higher and as of now it is difficult to predict where it will be. As a result of increase in population, the demand for food and infrastructure is increasing. When we want to live, we will happily kill trees and massacre forests leading to rapid deforestation. Even with the current population, as more developing nations become developed nations, their consumption will also increase which in turn increases the demand for food. So, there are two visible factors that is going to influence the high demand for food. Let us assume the following simple math.

Assume that we double our consumption and engage in rapid deforestation by converting half of the forest as living communities. How can we produce 2X food from y/2 land. There is going to be a big pressure and we will end by increasing the productivity of lands artificially through fertilizers. To our havoc, we will run out of one of the components of fertilizers soon. In order to understand the entire mess that is currently building up, I encourage you to read Scientific American India. In this article, the author gives a clear picture about depletion of phosphorous and how the world will end if phosphorous depletion is not addressed. When you do not have phosphorous, you cannot grow plants and trees.

So, without being supersititious, we have found another reason why the world will end. We are creating a big mess for the future generations and making this planet unsuitable for living.

Lip Service, Laziness and Five Years in Hell

My father was a teacher in state government and he has retired now. When he was in service, he used to go to election booths as presiding officer. When we were kids, he used to tell us about his election experience. There would be so many people inquire him about his election experience on how people stone the election booths. Generally he used to go to other constituency and during all his election duties he never stopped exercising his duty - casting his vote (through post) .My grandmother is now 80s and she never missed one. Check with your family, you will have many great grandparents who are still casting their votes and show us that casting votes is such an important one. But these days, the people are merely enjoying a holiday either watching movies or mini-serial or mega-serial. You have whole bunch of entertainment channels. Also, this time, we also have IPL. Whether it is Congress or BJP or XYZ, why should I bother? Whatever is going to happen is going to happen? I can always yell at politicians or my servant just in case the economy fails.

Sometime back, the senior advocate and journalist Mr Cho. Ramaswamy, in his speech said that people of this generation do not exercise their electoral rights properly. It was proven right during that time that a by-election in TN registered a record polling of 90%. God and politicians only knows how they made the record. Sometimes, even God does not know. When we are not going to exercise our votes, there are two things that can possibly happen. Either someone cast your vote or wrong candidate has been selected to represent you because you did not vote. When you sum up, both the cases is sufficient enough to take our country backwards. If you are going to assume that no one will cast your vote other than you, you are dead wrong. This is secret for record polling. With this economic recession, the prosperity will be evaporated if a wrong party or party with protectionism comes to power. So, use your voting rights to pick the right candidate and right party.

Let us make this place a better one for the future generations. Let the future generations know that their great grandparents are visionaries and thought leaders. If you choose the other way, the next five will be "hell".

Be an agent of Change

Have you ever thought that this generation is going to do a turnaround. This is going to be a history in evolution of mankind. We saw a dreadful effects of hyper leverage, the retirement funds of many senior people eroded, lifetime wealth were gone without traces and the economy has come closed to a depression, if not grinding halt. We thought that "entry today" and "exit tomorrow" is a great game. Having said that, today, many organizations, business leaders and most importantly policymakers, economic experts are trying to make this as turnaround. We are in the verge of witnessing one more revolution which, I believe will take the economy and mankind to next level. I am sure, we will and it is just a matter of time. If each one of us take part in this change, I feel, the recovery will be fast and post recovery will be great. How can you take part in this change? Read on.

The concept is going to be simple but difficult. As Scott Berkun used tell, if something is simple, it doesn't mean that it is easy. Many simple things in the world are difficult. For example, consider a mother giving birth to a baby. The doctors and even some elderly folks many know that the process is simple. But they will also agree that it is difficult. The work of the security guard is simple - to continuously watch the trespassers. But it is difficult to watch consistently. So, many things in this world is simple but yet they are difficult.

Similarly, it is very much easier to say "be an agent of change" and it takes a great deal to be the agent and consistently trace the agenda - wellness to mankind. When I write this, I hear a good news from US of some data better than expected number. Can we try to shorten our turnaround time? Yes, it lot depends on how we work and face the challeges in front of us. This is the time that we should demostrate a state of high productivity and fully focussed on the work. It is the time that we show some mercy to people who lost jobs and try to help them to find their way. You can try to impart your knowledge to next generation and take sometime to make "education poverty (illiteracy)" a history. When economy recovers, the entire mankind should have a reason to cheer and not just few "so called" gifted souls.

Make use of this time to build your home, town, state and country. After a year, the economy will take of itself and show a great recovery. Think about this. What will you do if economy recovers? How do you want to see your people in a recovered economy? Don't we like to see a green ecosystem, dont we like to see computers in village schools or showing computers to these kids at least once. Devote 5% of your time to others. Believe me, it is not spending your time, it is investing. If you invest now, you will eat fruits, and then your generations. If you don't do, then, you will be a history and so is your generations.

This is the time to be a agent and hero or to die.

Happy Recovery :-)

What can you say? Is it a progressive society

It was late in night and all the big shots in Indian business gathered. Right from liquor king to king khan. When you allow these people, they will talk in length about social responsibility. Their social responsibility stop at either putting a web link in their company website, establishing aviation academy in a tribal village, or at maximum doing a lip service in their movies. They were in a big posh place and guy hitting the hammer. All were wearing fashionable dresses. Gents were in full suit and ladies :-( (I dont remember exactly they were wearing, but I believe there should be some dress). Thanks to Modi, CEO of IPL, who commercialized playing cricket. Thanks to media who gave him award for being innovative. Thanks to BCCI for brining an excellent cricket session. I know they are working really hard, squeezing their brain to bring only best cricket to Indian cricket lovers. It was great to watch movie stars, business guys, cricket players, spouses of stars/business guys/players. Each one of them involved in IPL deserve special award. But it is the cricket lover who has been cheated by these guys to make money. Read on.

Unlike 20 years back, these days cricket are played frequently. One dayers, test match and recent T20 cricket. The main strength of T20 is that it steals a lot of time but we do not know that it is stealing time. A normal cricket lover watches a match for 4 hours and these match certainly will be in memory for another 4 hours. Another 4 fours he spends in mere dreaming on how the match is going to be and seeing highlights of watched match. Totally, the "cricket fanatic" is going to waste 1.5 day of productive work. This is a case of one match. But generally these matches never come in single. There is a proverb in Tamil - "Sani ponam, thaniya poogathu". Each match except Semis and final are "sani ponam". And this is going to happen for almost 2 months in year. So for every year, on an average basis, a cricket fanatic is going to waste 3 months (I lost count and hence let us maintain the lower limit as 3 months). Also, you cannot say who is going to be the cricket fanatic.

Once they decided to go mad, they go mad to an extent which you and I cannot imagine. It catches everyone right from Vice President to Software Engineer, Homemaker to Aeroplane pilot. The cricket can make anyone idiot. It doesn't care whether he is Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Actor Vijay, Vijay Mallaiya, Srinivasan, Ramamoorthy, Gunasekaran, Prabhakaran, Karthi, Jopesh, Aslam, he, she, they, it, you and I. I also feel that we can official introduce betting as a part of IPL T20 so that it also helps us to earn (this is joke. dont take it seriously. i certainly feel that it may happen and tomorrow CNN-IBN will give me award for innovation. LOL)

Is it a sign of responsible society? If you are reading this, please think for a while, are you gaining anything because of T20 or does it lead to any benefits to our country. When you sum up, India loses more, IPL T20 is making Indian lazy and unproductive. Playing in casino is a gambling and IPL T20 is an organized gambling with cricket lovers as mere jokers. The "cricket fanatics" has to remember that it is energy sucker and growth ****er.

Ironically, these business leaders when they go and sit in their office they want their employees to be productive. But they forget the fact that they are the main culprits for making Indians unproductive. It is good that this time we are not going to have T20 in Indian soil. Let us say good bye to 2-month long T20, Lalit Modi, BCCI, Owners of the team and players. Let us spend sometime in thinking on how to make ourselves better and India better. If you are one of the policymaker or responsible citizen, please spread the awareness to fellow Indian. It is the people of India who make the future India and not these kinds of energy suckers. As Gerald Weinberg says, there is thin line between doing and over doing. Even a good thing done beyond a point turns out to be the negative. IPL is now overdoing cricket and let us stop it before it becomes overly non-sense.

Let Indian and India to grow.

Imparting Experience to our students community

Being in IT industry, I am also one of the guys who feel that the students who graduate and comes out have known many theoretical concepts and some practical stuff at an abstract level. I feel, like others that they could more towards building skills at the college itself. While they read about software engineering and working at office, mere reading alone will not be sufficient. They need to experience it by doing projects and engaging in activities that would give them "experiential knowledge".

So, this summer, I am planning to conduct series of workshops (Saturdays and Sundays) on some with specific areas. I am also going to take this idea to some of my friends and get their inputs. Meanwhile, if you are student and willing to get this kind of learning, I encourage you to contact me via email. As of now, the idea is at an abstract level. Based on the response, we will do something solidly.

You can contact me via my email (grabyourfreedom@gmail.com)

Couple of Workshops Next Month

The next month (Apr 2009), I have signed up for couple of workshops on open source/Linux. The first workshop is to the students of Vellore Institute of Technology and I will be speaking to them on Linux Process Management, POSIX Threads and Linux Scheduler. It has been a while since I read on these areas. I have started to refresh and testing my memory power. I m quite happy with my memory power. I am able to come out with presentation slides without refering to famous Robert Love and Cesati books. Of course, I will be refering these books after completing my presentation to validate/verify the content. I would say, even preparing the presentation slides for Linux presentation itself is fulfilling. This event will be on 4-Apr-2009. Some well known dignitaries of Indian OSS community are speaking as well.

The next workshop is still conceptual stage and I am discussing with ILUC, Chennai co-ordinator Mr Bharathi Subramanian. I proposed a talk on SNORT and he came up with a brilliant idea on conduting a full day workshop on SNORT. I am going to team up with my friend and colleague S. Badhrinath. Badhri and myself have already started to have set up ready for a basic workshop on SNORT. We just downloaded SNORT source code and some attack tools. We are yet to start the preparation of presentation slides. Still, we have time for this event. This is likely to happen on 25-Apr.

Since there is a holiday season coming up, I am planning to conduct few full day workshops for students in Software Engineering, Linux, Networking, Network Security in Chennai. Let me see how far I m doing this.

Another fulfilling moment in my life

During last September, I happen to visit Paavai Engineering College at Salem, Tamilnadu for a guest lecture on Linux. It is quite a while after that and couple of weeks before, I got an invitation through my colleague Vinoth to speak students of IT department at Sona College of Technology, Selam, Tamilnadu on Open Source and how they can learn with the help of Open Source. My friend and colleague, Sundar also been invited to speak about "How to handle change", the change from college to company.

We (Sundar, Vinoth and myself) started from Chennai on Friday night and reached Salem Saturday early morning. Vinoth's family (Parents and his brother) gave a very warm welcome. After relaxing a bit after the journey, we reached the college around 8.30 am and met HoD of IT department. We discussed and understood his expectation from us and he insisted to have an informal and interactive session. It didn't surprise us as we prepared our lectures that way and I was more than happy because I do not know to speak formally.

At 9.30am, we started the proceedings with a warm welcome by the students and staff of IT department. I started to speak about Open Source. I planned my session for about 2 hours but wrapped by session within 30-45 minutes as I sensed that the students needed much awareness on taking some areas interest and specialize in a particular area rather than focus too much on Open Source. I feel that Open Source is of much use to the students only when they specialize in a particular area. For example, one needs to know the basics of Networking and Network Security before downloading or using SNORT intrusion detection system. While anyone can download it and do ".configure; make; make install", a lot of theoretical and systematic learning is required to make their learning meaningful. With this in mind, I thought that I would give the floor to Sundar who needed to speak on "change and how to respond to it". It would give me sometime to think about what we should do. Apart from that, I thought Sundar's talk would give students enough courage to speak up and participate. It happened exactly the same way.

Around 10.15am, Sundar talked about change and it was well received and I believe he spoke for more than an hour. Then we left for a break for 15 minutes. The students were impressive on keeping up the punctuality and they were back to their seats exactly after 15 minutes. I was inspired by it. Next, we asked the students to pick an area (Networking, Network Security, Operating System, Database, Embedded) and form groups. Asked them to write down what they already knew and what they would like to know and how they would achieve it.

The view about gaining technical knowledge is not through lectures and trainings. The lectures and trainings will give only awareness. During my session, i thought I should give that awareness and motivate the students to work consistently and specialize in their area of interests. I insisted upon having good theoretical knowledge and expand the gained theoretical knowledge with the help of Open Source Software. A long term goal would be contributing to some Open Source Products and at the same time achieving the purpose of joining an Engineering/Technology course.

We had this session for about 90 minutes and then 15 minutes Q/A session. Few students were around there for another 15-20 minutes to get their questions clarified. We could see some sparks in student's mind. Overall, I had another fulfilling day at Sona College of Technology. It was also quite a learning experience for me and yet again the students showed me so many good qualities that are needed for human beings such as mutual respect and trust. Also, I would like to emphasize and inspired by the humbleness, modesty and professionalism of HoD of Department of IT and hospitality of Mr. Iyyanar, NSS Co-ordinator of the college.

Building knowledge based society – A minute a day

The gap between rich and poor people is increasing widely in India. The rich is getting richer and poor is getting poorer (last year is an exception where rich people become poor due to financial meltdown). It is the poor people who are struggling to get access to basic life needs – food, clothing and shelter. Irrespective of the inflation (14.4% or 3.3%) or crude price ($140 or $45/barrel), it is the farmers who take the loss and price beating. The people in developed countries are eating as much as five times more than any developing nation. We can see people living in poverty line as a micro issue confining to individuals and families. But these individuals make states and India. These people have the ability to turnaround India and take India to next level – Super Power in the region, if not THE SUPER POWER. Yes, the poor people have that capability. It depends on how, we, the people of this country take efforts to erase the poverty line.

When we were kids we should have heard a story of this sort. There were number of doves flew to specific part of the country for food. The owner of the farm wanted to catch all the doves and so hired a hunter. The hunter put a net in the field to catch the doves. Somehow, the doves came to know about this and strategize to escape from this. So, they masterminded to fly taking off the ground simultaneously and in coordinated fashion. We need something of this sort right now.

One of the asset and trump card for India’s growth is our human resources. However, many economist and researchers have pin pointed that though we have abundance of human resources, the amount of skilled worker is very less. While theoretically it may be possible to put forth some policies and allocate funds, the implementation is going to be a very biggest challenge. Also, if we are going to dependent completely on government, the vision will be very far from achievable.

It may be sound simple and even foolish to some people. If you can spend five minutes per day for the sake of this country, for the prosperity of the future generations, for achieving the visions of visionaries, to fulfill the dreams of many freedom fighters, we can create a knowledge based society. We need second freedom fight. On 15th August, 1947, we got freedom from slavery. But we are yet to get a freedom for creating equal society providing equal opportunities for both rich and poor. It is 5 minutes a day and if we sum up, it comes around 30 days per year. Go to a school or college where people are in need of your knowledge. Share with them, discuss with them, and try honestly to make the gap between the knowledge level rich and poor narrow.

When we do this, we need to keep in mind that we are creating a knowledge based society and suddenly on one fine day, the poor people may be poor in terms of wealth, but they will be wealthy in terms of knowledge. When the have that knowledge, they acquire the skills on their own or with the help of others. How about this? All the students who are graduating from colleges get a job or become entrepreneurs. When we reach such state, the consumption of India alone drives our growth as everyone will have buying potential. So, the knowledge based society is such a powerful idea (coined by many visionaries including Dr. Kalam).

When we have that, the gap between rich and poor will be narrowing and after sometime the gap becomes meaningless. It is easier said than done. We have two options now. The first option is blame the politicians, blame the government and not doing anything. The second option is to do things slowly but gradually. The incremental change can be a transformation.

Touch and Transform Lives - Build India

Anyone who uses Internet will understand its benefits and I agree with me if I say that Internet has wealth of Information. Not only we use Internet to connect with our closed ones, many educational institutions are started to change their learning methodologies. Internet has become a platform to deliver online classes and training. The advancements of video over Internet and video over mobile is going to take us much closer to our dream of classroom on the move. Your location is going to be immaterial, the classes will be delivered to you with Internet and mobile. This is looking from technological perspective and what is feasible with technology. Most of the things will apply to developed countries where these technologies are affordable or more rightly, the people have buying potential as their per capita income is high. The technological advancements will bring the next revolution in developed countries.

However, in countries like India where the majority of people do not have buying capacity, these technologies will take time to penetrate into Indian markets. Again these technological advancement, if not properly employed, is going to divide Indian society - the people who have access to these technologies and the people who do not have access. The main advantage of India is having people in working age compared to Europe, China and so many other countries where people are in retiring age. But, according to researchers, this is not going to be easier job for India as the policies are focussed on quantity but not quality. Certain reports question the quality of the graduates and claim that most of them are not immediately employable. Their claim is proven valid as we see a trend of increasing colleges and increasing rate in unemployment. Many corporates started to feel that heat and we will see a lot of churn post global economic downturn (In India, after economic recovery, I feel the training industry is going to boom. We will see many training companies that focus on imparting experiential knowledge). The corporates are breathing easy as demand matches with supply. However, after recovery, the demand will be more and the supply will be less. 

There is a heavy irony. Many of IT services company work on these technologies and take part in the Information revolution. But yet, we have so many Indians who have deprived of not these advanced technologies but even basic Information to get a job.

Many corporates fail to notice that they need to get people from the pool of available graduates. They have a blurred vision on elevating the average knowledge of college graduates/students. While corporates are focusing on profit margin, innovation and market positioning, they fail to see the important issue - "basic supply - human resources". Why the companies in India does not ask their employees to go back to some colleges and impart some useful training to students. Won't it help the students and corporates in a long run? Don't these companies have money to deliver classes to villages with the help of technological advancements.

One can look at this as CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). At the same time, this is not purely a charity work, it is pure business. It is bread and butter for them as they heavily depend on the local workforce and its quality. If they fail to act now, they should be prepared to hire people and train them during the job which is very risky. So, either you have CSR or not, act right now.

Your CSR rating is not in the number of MoU you sign the colleges. It is directly proportional to the number of lives you touch and transform.

We strongly believe and want to bank on bright Indian brains. We have rolled out an initiative OpenGyan targeting colleges. We welcome you to join on the board. If you can't, at least spread a word to your friends and closed ones.