Another Bureaucratic Assininism

I did not turn the pages of the dictionary to see if "Assininism" was a real word, but what I mean to imply is the "condition of being assinine in someone's expression of speech". But if there is a word like that, that is what I would use to describe the following incident.

Recently, the Joint Secretary of a ministerial department, visited IIT and asked for help in various areas of research including medicine, energy, IT and so on.

In my opinion, an engineer is not supposed to "create" a problem, he "solves" it. His training is mainly targeted to handle real world situations. In this context, the faculty and the students of IIT asked the Joint Secretary to give out areas, or requirements in the specified areas where IIT people can help in the required manner.

The response from the Joint Secretary "How can I tell you what the problem is and where the problems lie?" Wow! The joint secretary of a ministerial department and the person does not know where the problems are! I started wondering how government appointments are handled!

The faculty and the students took more than 2 hours to explain to the Joint Secretary, that it was the ministry which was supposed to come up with the gap areas and then projects/research work could be taken up in the respective area. It was hard to explain to the person, who holds an IAS, that is impossible for an engineering student to throw stones in the dark.

Chasing Realistic Dreams and Not Utopia

The machinery that we follow in our country is pseudo-democratic. The bureaucracy is full of busybodies with a brimful of ideas and it wants to implement unrealisable dreams.

I am not naming the people involved here, but I am pained to describe before you, the young people of India, a certain initiative that has been taken up by one of the state governments in our country.

The initiative plans to draw from the world bank a sum that runs to a thousand crores and more. It aims to set right a certain set of "traditional" practices in the water distribution, allocation and irrigation sectors, that these people believe have gone "wrong".

I had an opportunity to look at the proposal made by the "chosen" people of the bureaucracy, and believe me, the three documents that I had a look into were akin to the famous bhasmasura. Not only the people had no idea which models were applicable when and where, but also they thought that GIS was only a tool to make maps. They plan to design a system which would design and dictate policies, handle billing and tender, make maps, devise alternate strategies, not be a black box to the user and display the model proposed and the relevant flowchart, become a repository of knowledge etcetera etcetera etcetera all built into one. They probably stopped short of doing the laundry and cleaning the toilets!

I ask you, o common man, would you like to be slaves of such kind of bureaucracy? Would you like to submit before the World Bank, a project that has no clear mission, no clear vision and yet is a khich of big-worded ideas, thus sending our country into debt and in foreign hands.

I would ask the young people to come forward, learn proper methods of writing project proposals and throw them open to the real world. Make your ideas available to the public, tell them that you know what to do and how. Choose small ideas but study the best practices. Let Geoinformatics be a friendly tool for the people and not an enemy of the country. There is a need to educate people on the proper use of Geoinformatics in our country.

I am signing off for the day.

Empty promises or fertile grounds

A question that has dwelled in my minds for long is "Are we innovative enough?" To add to the question, are we enterprising enough? I hate to compare ourselves with other countries, but I have always asked as to why we do not have popular software in any of the Indian languages. Is it because we have not bothered to design the interface, or we are just plain happy as it is with our illiteracy?

Major leading companies in our IT industry are mostly doing contractual or outsourced jobs. A single employee has to be paid a handsome salary of USD 4000 in the IT industry outside India. A BPO hires 4 people in the same salary. Everybody is happy, more work done, less money spent. Well, almost because we hear some indians being beaten up. Why are we happy doing other's jobs and bearing jeers and insults from them?

Imagine an institute like IIT. Isn't there a huge difference between the environment outside and inside? Are the students really aware of the problems happening in the city? No, I am not talking about political problems. I mean problems that THEIR discipline can handle. A civil engineering student or a group of them could easily plan better roads, mechanical engineers could design better engines to control pollution. But are we doing so? Some people say that most of the technology that is obsolete abroad, is imported to India. Are we proud of such a situation? Are we educating and making students who are more interested in making money than serving the country?

In a recent industry-student meet, people from the industry complained that faculty from the popular educational institutes do not give them enough support, and they have to spend a 100 times more to buy the machines from abroad. The faculty in turn say that the problems are not challenging enough for them to handle. The student is missing in the picture as he is too busy either with institute festivals or heavy course curricula.

In case a student comes up with an idea, the response is "Hey look! Your idea is too vague!" or "I do not think this should be done! Where is the research in it?". Two to three years later, somebody else does the same thing. The response is ...

Perhaps, we set our targets too high. People love thinking big. Let us come up with small but concrete ideas. Crisp! All problems do not have to be too complicated. All problems do not have to be multi-disciplinary. Think of small problems. Maybe, we would integrate them later into a bigger solution. In order to come up with our own ideas, we have to learn our concepts well. It is not enough to know the difference between a shapefile and a coverage.

As I had mentioned in my previous blog about the concept of "brain drain". Are we creating situations for brain drain ourselves, or are we going to do something about it?

Welcome to Geoparadigms

Dear Geospatial Researchers and Students of India:

In our childhood, many of us might have dreamt of going over to the foreign lands for studies or even for an illustrious career. My childhood was overcrowded with a single word "Brain Drain". As children we wrote essays on it!

Now that we are educated, and learn that our country is being tormented by elements beyond our control, because all the expertise has gone out, it is high time we get together and drive together on the long road of India's development.

There are many avenues where we should collaborate on as far as our expertise is concerned to make India the biggest geospatial power in the world.

I have created this blog today, because I had a spark in the morning and I hope that you would have sparks too, every morning. This blog will target emergent ideas in the geospatial domain and how the Indian government should develop strategies and projects to support capable and motivated researchers in our domain.

The final key words are as follows: Geo-entrepreneurship, Geo-capabilities, Geo-decisions, Geo-paradigms