Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

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I happened to attend TedxGateway at NCPA, Nariman Point at Mumbai today. Thanks to Bloomberg for sponsoring my corporate ticket. Overall a fantastic experience with some awesome and inspiring speakers. Here are key take aways:

1. TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading." TED started granting licenses to third parties to organize independent TED-like events internationally. At these TEDx events are prohibited from making profit, although sometimes a fee ($100 max.) can be charged to cover running costs. The licences are free but franchisees are vetted by TED and events are subject to conditions. Speakers are not paid and they must agree to give TED the right to edit and distribute their presentation under a Creative Commons licence.

So, there came about TedxGateway at Mumbai.

Source: Wikipedia

2. Event saw 22 speakers from India and abroad, all with brilliant ideas worth sharing. Most of them being inspiring and top notch speakers. Worth mentioning few:

Mittal Patel:
She runs an NGO called VSSM in Gujarat which works for nomadic communities who are not even registered under census in India and leading unrecognized life. Tradition there is to enter prostitution for girls to earn family income. They can not even own land. Mittal came into act and got few girls married along with getting 20000 official voter id cards for the community.

Cynthia Koenig:
Imagine millions of rural women going several kms to get water for their household. They typically get water by carrying utensil on top of their heads, it is such a painful and time consuming process. Cynthia's organization has decided to made it a history with wello as shown below. She has made the process simple by pulling a wheel in which enough water can be carried. The device is only 750-1000 INR.


Arunachala M.M:
Arunachala is from a poor background in the South of India where he found that women do not have access to hygienic sanitary pads. Recognizing the problem, he created the world's first low-cost machine to produce sanitary towels. This social entrepreneur sells the £1,600 machines directly to rural women through the support of bank loans and not-for-profit organisations. A machine operator can learn the entire towel-making process in three hours and then employ three others to help with processing and distribution.

There were many more speakers but these three touched the hearts and souls of everyone.

3. Overall the event was a huge hit. Though due to inexperienced team it was slightly mis managed, started 45 minutes late, no network coverage, no wifi to tweet, no pads/agenda fliers even for corporate attendees but I am sure they will learn and make 2013 events even better.

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He counted numbers of political posters up on Mumbai streets while driving to work. In 1.9 kms of stretch, there were 106 posters!!! Now I tried to think who are putting up these posters and why:

1. Political Party workers : To gain political mileage
2. RWAs : To please political leaders and get their society cleaned up
3. Associations like Yuva Morcha : To enter into politics or showoff or become local group leader (good for nothing)

Implications:

1. Illegal hoardings as these are politically driven
2. Revenue loss for local municipal as lot of commercial ads could have been put. I happened to call an ad agency (name confidential) who told me:
Illegal ad rate: Rs. 5000 near signal of Andheri Naka per month (he said "sab setting ho jayegi", it means everything will be sorted with relevant authorities)
Legal ad rate: Rs. 10000 including for same site including undertable payment for clearance in few days
3. Lost cause: Nobody would be looking at them. Damn it, people are fed up.
4. City looks awful. It makes entire surronding look dull.

This is not only trend on Mumbai roads but across the country. I remember me and Paras were going to Ghaziabad, city in Uttar Pradesh adjacent to New Delhi and we came across poster of Ms. Mayavati on every single pole on streets.



What can be done:
1. Public awareness
2. Empowering local municipal to remove such hoardings and not to give up from political pressure
3. Mass rallies from people like us to destroy such posters
4. Ban people in politics whose illegal hoardings are up on streets

These are instances that make me feel that we are living in uneducated and unregulated society. Keep posting your comments on this issue.

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RailRadar, an application which gives you muscle to track Indian Railways trains in real time. It uses the Google Maps platform to deliver timings, location, station, routes and schedules of more than 6,500 trains on a real time basis.

RailRadar has been developed by Centre for Railway Information System and uses a top level colour coding system to mark trains as blue and red. Blue arrows indicate trains running on time while red arrows are those which have been delayed. Users can use the + and – buttons to zoom in and zoom out of the map.

Clicking on an arrow will reveal train details and its route on the map. The details include the train’s number and name, last stop, station at which it will halt next and the train’s status as on-time or delayed in minutes. The real time status will generally be on a 5 minute delay.

Few observations:

1. Ease of use
2. Google Maps interface which looks familiar
3. Website loads quickly, no comparison with sucking IRCTC site
4. Most importantly, it gives loads of information like estimated arrival, halt duration, last stop, train status, exact location, timetables.

In nutshell, it is welcome step with right use of technology.

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How many times we have came across the quote - "vo engineering kar raha hai". It means he is studying engineering. Literally, everyone is pursuing engineering in India it seems thanks to exponential growth in engineering colleges and IT companies recruiting in masses.

I tried to analyse how once a novel and rare profession has lost its sheen now. Here are my findings:

- Growth of "advertised" engineering institutes:

Institutes spun fantastic tales about multinational corporations falling over each other to recruit its students.  They rarely focus on  quality education and building skill set, grooming students. It is all about fancy hoardings and large ads in newspapers.

PurpleLeap, a Pearson and Educomp company, released the findings of its survey of 34,000 students from 198 engineering colleges across the country: only one out of ten graduates from Tier 2, 3 and 4 colleges is readily employable, and one-third are unemployable even after training.  

- IT Companies recruiting like cats and dogs:

IT companies, according to analysis done by Nasscom and Evaluserve, spend $1.2 billion every year on training. Had the engineering schools churning quality grads, this money would go straight to their bottom-line. Infosys's Mysore campus has trained 100000 fresh graduates so far, at a cost of $6000-7000 per employee.   That's a whopping $600-700 million knocked out of the company's profits over ten years.

Since companies are recruiting, thanks to some pathetic recruiting HR executives, students are getting paid easily. Starting salaries are over INR 350000 which is more than pocket money at young age of 20-21.

- Simple Economics: Demand & Supply:

There are 1.5 million engineering seats in India today, up from 500000 five years ago. This is way beyond the demand for engineers. Himanshu Aggarwal, the CEO and co-founder of Aspiring Minds, says that the IT sector absorbs around 200,000 engineers in a year, and the demand from the other sectors can't add up to more than that.

Fortunately or unfortunately, many of unemployed students get onto B schools which are again in plenty in India. Few join non engineering jobs and others continue family businesses as engineering degrees are good for marriage purpose.

- Return on Investment:

College perspective - An engineering college can cost more than INR 150 million and if my cash flows are correct (have accounted for capitation fees as well) then payback happens within 5 years.

Parents perspective - Student can payback within 2 years if he/she gets a job otherwise higher education is deemed as prestigious and is matter of social symbol. If nothing, he can do MBA for sure and then ROI calculations get further extended.

Student perspective - None, they don't have a perspective on ROI. They are running in mad race. 

Being an engineer, I understand these parameters and have been on receiving end. Hopefully, society will grow up and change engineering trend to something better.

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Reserve Bank of India kept key Repo and Reverse Repo unchanged today in its announcement. However, it decided to cut Cash Reserve Ratio by 25 basis points to 4.5% in its mid quarter review of the monetary policy on Monday. CRR is the minimum proportion of deposits that banks must hold with the central bank. The CRR reduction is expected to inject Rs 17,000 crore liquidity into the banking system.

Effects Analysis:

1. G-Sec Yield

Immediate - Indian Government Bond 8.15% 06/11/22 which is current 10 Yr Treasury note yields shot up after the annoucement.

Medium term: Yields can soften a bit on shorter end of the curve going forward.

2. The country's largest bank, State Bank of India has slashed interest rate on select retail loans including home and auto loans. Private sector banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank have reduced their deposit rates by upto 50 basis point.

3. The 25bps CRR cut would boost bank profitability by Rs2,000 crore, much higher than Rs75 cr cost reduction that a 25bps repo rate cut would have effected

Note: Screenshot is GIY screen of Bloomberg and data shown in it is property of Bloomberg L.P.

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Today, education institues have become money minting shops and marketing is done to lure candidates only to play with their future. Parents and students have limited choices as quality institutes like IITs, IIMs are limited and even government have diluted these prestiguos brands. I feel Amity University, IIPM and likes should focus on quality teaching and stop faking. If they produce good grads, no advertisement will be required.


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