ARTICLES WORTH READING 09.10.

2011
FROM TIMES OF INDIA Soya magic and desi Marie Antoinettes Many idealists and TV anchors favour highly subsidized rice and wheat for all consumers, not just the poor. They draw no lessons from Indira Gandhis failed attempt to do exactly this in her Garibi Hatao phase. Indias nutritional indicators are terrible. Child malnutrition, anaemia and vitamin deficiency are among the worst in the world. However, in NSSO surveys only 2% of Indians say they dont get enough to eat. Malnutrition is a bigger problem than hunger. The populist notion that everybody is entitled to subsidized food is wrong. Why on earth should Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata have such entitlements? Or even our burgeoning middle class, which has done so well in the last two decades? Cheap food for all is a regrettable populist slogan. It sounds idealistic, but in practice means continuing with a failed public distribution system that engenders monumental waste and corruption. Cash transfers to the poor could combat malnutrition better. However, activists are right in saying that targeting the poor is problematicunworthy folk get included and many of the poor get excluded. The answer, surely, is self-targeting--providing benefits that only the needy will apply for. Historically, this has been the logic of rural employment schemes too. In the case of food, self-targeting should aim for universal provision of highly nutritious but unfamiliar foods. One example would be a 70:30 mix of wheat and soya flour, fortified with iron and vitamins. Better-off people will not opt for such an unfamiliar food, but the needy will do so and benefit greatly. Diversion to the open market will fetch little profit, and so decrease. Many people are dead against this. They say the poor should not be asked to eat things like soya and husk. Alas, this simply reflects ignorance and prejudice against soya.
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It may be an unfamiliar food, but to equate it with husk and agricultural waste is ridiculous. The Chinese make bean curd from soya, and bean curd is served in 5star hotels. Again, 5-star hotels have dishes like tofu salad, also made from soya. Chinese and American millionaires eat soya. Only in India do people view it, wrongly, as fit only for animals. After extracting oil, soya meal has 48% protein, twice as much as dal and four times as much as wheat. This extremely nutritious food can combat widespread protein deficiency. Best will be a soya-wheat mix, fortified with iodine, iron and vitamin A (to combat goitre, anaemia and vitamin deficiency). Unlike rice or wheat, this fortified mix will attack nutritional deficiencies, which are far bigger problems than hunger. Soya-wheat rotis will resemble missi roti, made of wheat and dal flour, and widely eaten in Uttar Pradesh. Missi roti is a superior food, costing much more than plain roti. So, a soya-wheat mix can be popularized as missi soya roti. India started growing soyabeans only in the 1980s, mainly for its oil. After extracting oil, the solid residue was mainly exported, or used as animal food precisely because its high protein content increased meat and milk production. But in a poor country with massive malnutrition this represents a terrible waste of a highly nutritious food, which is also viewed as a high-class food in China and the US. It should be the duty of activists to popularize this valuable food to combat malnutrition. Instead many of them incorrectly view soya as fit for animals. Middle class idealists favoring rice and wheat say on TV that we should all eat the same food. This is deeply hypocritical. Most of these idealists are rich enough to eat chicken, mutton and fish. If they really believe in everybody eating equally, they should offer tandoori chicken and fried fish to the poor. Rather like Marie Antoinette. Its wrong to provide subsidized rice to all. Rice is the most expensive cereal, so a basic right to rice is halfway to a basic right to cake (favoured by Marie Antoinette). Rice guzzles water and lowers the water table terribly in states using tubewell irrigation. So, drinking water wells used by the poor go dry, and shallow tubewells of small farmers also run dry. Thus, rice has impoverishing side-effects. Subsidizing its cultivation and consumption is ethically wrong, not just bad economics. Populist politicians, TV anchors and activists nevertheless back rice over soya to satisfy consumers unaware or dismissive of the nutritional and environmental
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consequences. This may mean more malnutrition, but it will also fetch far more votes and media attention. Thus does good sense get trumped by populism. When so many influential people implicitly favour malnutrition, why be surprised at its high prevalence? IT's a brand war that Nasscom has to win Nasscom's greatest challenge is to ensure that the Indian IT industry's success must not become its greatest enemy. We must never forget that as recently as 2008-09 India's share of the global IT and services industry ($967bn) and hardware industry ($594bn) was still in single digits. One hopes that in the relentless race of individual companies to get a bigger share of India's existing pie, the more important mission of making the pie itself bigger while adopting a transformational agenda for the country is not ignored. First, cloud was just something we learnt in geography 15 years ago. Today it is the next frontier for the IT industry to conquer. By 2020 it is expected to be a $650 billion-global market and a $16 billion-Indian market. Are our firms competitive enough to conquer a significant part of this? Second, Nasscom is perhaps the only organization in India whose brand exceeds that of India as a country itself. It is not marred by CWG or 2G scams, and is globally respected today as a purveyor of world-class talent and IT services. Its name is associated with excellence and, indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Brand India has piggybacked on Brand Nasscom and Brand IT many a times. However, given that India has barely scratched the surface of the global ITaddressable market, there is a huge task ahead for Nasscom. The biggest challenge for Nasscom is to do something which actually the government ought to do, namely showcasing India as a preferred IT destination for global investment, pretty much along the lines of the 'Incredible India" tourism campaign. It must open offices in select international investment hubs such as Silicon Valley, New York, Tokyo, London, networking intensely with the local business and IT communities. The challenge is to bring the investment lead or business lead to the shores of India. Third, Nasscom needs to take a leaf from the book of Apple as it went about creating the broader Mac community, and catalyze the development of a broad ecosystem into which SMEs, incubators and entrepreneurs can plug into and create innovative solutions and products. In other words, in a small scale, Nasscom must endeavor to bring together all those ingredients, which enabled Silicon Valley to
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succeed and create something like the Tsinchu Science Park, which can bloom a thousand ideas and millions of dollars of value. Fourth, the success of India's IT industry while on the one hand has led to the unleashing of India's middle and lower class' potential, it has also quietly sown the seeds of discontent, something that Nasscom needs to address jointly with the government. Nasscom needs to focus more on the domestic market, intensive skill development and engage with the government by deepening the penetration of IT into various verticals such as citizens' services, pharma, retail to both develop an inclusive growth agenda and engender a multiplier effect on productivity in other sectors. This apart, Nasscom must actively shape and influence the IT and ITES policies of the Centre and state governments such as to be able to incentivize the creation of jobs and investments in different clusters around the country. As one looks at the next 10 years, by 2020 India will hopefully be a $4 trillion economy, with possibly a $500 billion IT industry (including a $75 billion-or-so domestic industry). There has to be a recognition and acceptance of the fact by all stakeholders concerned that it will take a very different Nasscom to propel the industry from $70 billion to $700 billion than it did from 0 to $70 billion. Emerging markets will drive 27% of IT market spending and 54% of its growth; Nasscom must position itself to increase the size of India's IT spread rather than its member companies fighting for larger individual slices of the same. A confluence of leadership, strategy and opportunity is needed as India's youngest but unarguably the most respected industry gazes into its future with a Teflon-coated sheen on it. The war to be won is as much within as it is outside. It is a war without mercy or without an end. And failure should not be an option.