EDITORIAL:
NEW LOOK, NEW CONTENT

The argument made to us was simple: There are specialty periodicals to cater to the needs of those interested in technology and science, while the growing community deserves our full attention. We hear you, reader, and from this month Siliconeer will become a general interest magazine for the South Asian reader.

While we are at it, we have done a complete revamp of the layout of the magazine (pending some tweaking and fine-tuning). We are proud to say that the magazine is comparable in design to any mainstream periodical.

That’s no mean achievement. Mainstream magazines have a million-dollar revenue stream from advertising and subscription, while we continue to distribute the magazine free of charge.

At Siliconeer we continue to change and evolve and seek new ways to make our magazine a better read and a more satisfying aesthetic experience. So the makeover is not the end, but the beginning. We hope to bring many changes to you in the future.

Here’s a brief wish list, which we will implement as time and space allows.

Book reviews. With s highly educated community as our readership, we have long felt the need of a section that informs our readers about the most stimulating and interesting books that are coming out. We don’t plan to limit ourselves to South Asian authors or subjects, either.

Mainstream arts and culture. Siliconeer will try to break out of the ethnic cultural ghetto and take a peek at what’s going on outside the desi scene. Surely South Asians do not limit themselves to desi performing arts. Why should a magazine for South Asians? There is a wondrous world of art and culture out there — theatre, ballet, cinema, you name it.

Cricket. A passion for cricket is something many of us have brought with us from the old country, but looking at the mainstream media here, you wouldn’t even know the sport existed. Yet South Asians have a vibrant league here here, and most cricket aficionados keep a keen eye on developments in the cricket world.

Politics. Outside the odd fundraiser for the local lawmaker who is happy to utter the standard bromides about the model minority, the community’s knowledge or involvements in politics is abysmal. Yet America is a dynamic democracy, and you ignore politics at your peril. Our focus will be mainly on issues that affect the South Asian minority.

Other issues. We plan to cut a wide swath. Issues like civil rights, even when it does not directly involve South Asians, has long term implications for the community. We also plan to occasionally publish South Asian fiction, which may be contemporary or classical, or translated from Indian languages.

What won’t change. Some things will remain the same, because they ought to. Every month, we will remain just as committed to providing you a compendium of well written and interesting articles in a format that is easy on the eyes.

Although we have become a general interest magazine, we will continue to keep a keen eye on science and technology, it’ll just be part of a much larger pie.

And we will continue to call ourselves Siliconeer. It’s true that given the current focus, the name does not fit the magazine as well as it used to, but it’s a name that has helped establish our reputation. It’s true Shakespeare once said: “What’s in a name?” but for once, we beg to disagree with the Bard.

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So he moved from pure research to more hands-on work with grassroots organizations. His peers raised their eyebrows, but he didn’t care. What mattered was making sure the benefit of his scientific techniques didn’t get buried in some dusty report but actually made a difference in real people’s lives.

Several decades down the road, what a difference he’s made.

In 2001, the Penang, Malaysia-based World Fish Center estimated that 1.04 million farmers/families practiced his low-input aquaculture technologies. Now, nearly 60 non-government organizations are working with these farmers to maintain and improve their aquaculture practices.

This year, he has been named winner of the $250,000 World Food Prize for his work to enhance nutrition for over one million people, mostly very poor women, through the expansion of aquaculture and fish farming in South and Southeast Asia and Africa.

Gupta’s name was announced by Ambassador Kenneth M. Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation on June 10 at a ceremony at the U.S. State Department.

Quinn said Gupta had been selected for this honor based on his work over three decades at the World Fish Center, a member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research of the World Bank. “Through his dedicated and sustained efforts in Bangladesh, Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia , Dr. Gupta made small scale aquaculture a viable means for over one million very poor farmers and women to improve their family’s nutrition and wellbeing,” As a result of Gupta’s efforts, freshwater fish production has risen dramatically in these countries by as much as three to five times, he added.

Gupta is the sixth citizen of India to receive the World Food Prize since it was established in 1986.  Previous recipients include : Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, 1987; Dr. Verghese Kurien, 1989; Dr. Gurdev Khush, 1996; B.R. Barwale, 1998 and Dr. Surinder K. Vasal, 2000.

“My research in India till 1976 was more of science developing technologies for high productions of fish from aquaculture,” Gupta told Siliconeer. “When I joined the United Nations Organization (its various agencies) in 1977 and worked in a number of developing countries in Asia and Africa till 2004, I have realized that what the poor, under-nourished, poverty stricken farmers need is not just scientific technologies, but technologies that take into consideration their resources and needs and that could be easily adopted by them.

Realizing this, I closely worked with the rural farming communities and the NGOs who have been working at grass root level. Though the life was not easy, it gave me lot of satisfaction that my work could make much difference to these poor rural families, especially the women. Initially I was criticized by my peers that instead of doing research, I am doing development work. But once the impact of work was evident, every one was all praise for the work.”

Commenting on his career with the World Fish Center, Gupta said, “In my early years at World Fish when I started working with farmers and NGOs in Bangladesh, I was asked why I was doing development work instead of research. My answer was that science by itself will not help to increase production and improve the lives of rural poor. Science must take into consideration the socio-economic fabric and needs of the societies for whom the research is meant.”

Dr Stephen J. Hall, current director general of the World Fish Center, said, “We are truly delighted that Dr Gupta’s lifelong dedication and commitment to making a difference in the lives of poor people has been recognized. This award is a testament to the pivotal role that fisheries and aquaculture can play in improving the lives of the poor,” he said.

His tenacity in finding means to improve the nutrition and living conditions of poor people through low-cost and accessible aquaculture technologies has contributed to a “blue revolution” in India.

Two outstanding techniques  developed to raise the productivity of aquaculture were recycling farm waste and polyculture.  Using affordable and readily available farm waste such as chicken manure, rice bran and weeds, and culturing more than one species of carp with different food habits in the same pond, thus giving better utilization of available natural food produced in a pond, saw productivity beginning to rise in the 1970s and increasing to this day. Gupta was the first to start to break through the yield barriers and to do it with low-cost inputs. The national mean productivity per hectare climbed from only 0.5 tons per hectare in the early 1970s to an average of over 2 tons per hectare. Some farms increased production spectacularly and produced over 10 tons per hectare.

In another region of Asia, the lower Mekong basin countries, and at around the same time, the late 1970s, fish farmers were struggling to raise species which did not grow quickly enough. Gupta turned to other species and found that certain species of native Indian major carps could flourish in the Mekong basin environment. He introduced this species to the Mekong basin countries along with the technologies to breed and raise them. There followed a proliferation of hatcheries producing fingerlings of Indian major carps species. Now, in the north of Vietnam, Indian major carps have come from nil supply to comprise about 30 to 40 percent of total freshwater aquaculture production.

In the late 1980s Gupta worked closely with the Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute to find ways to increase fish production through pioneering low-cost aquaculture technologies. The agro-ecological environment conditions differed in different parts of the country and they worked to integrate aquaculture in farming systems under these different conditions. The results were remarkable. One study showed that fish production increased nearly eightfold, from 304 kg/ha to an impressive 2,574 kg/ha in 3-6 months. Moreover, with the new technologies, farmers tripled fish yields in the difficult season between monsoon floods, achieving yields of more than 1,000 kg/ha.

Furthermore, many unused small water bodies in Bangladesh were turned to productive use. Nearly half of the untapped resource of more than a million ponds, including seasonally-flooded ditches, and hundreds of thousands of small seasonal ponds and roadside canals were turned into a new source of food and income. The fish raised reduced protein malnutrition among the rural poor, especially those living in flood-prone areas. Gupta was the first to recognize the resource and to find ways to tap the fish-growing potential of these water bodies.

“The diets of more than a million impoverished farmers and women in Bangladesh, Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia now include high-quality protein thanks to his 40 years of work,” the Des Moines Register has said in an editorial tribute to Gupta. “Congratulations to Dr. Gupta, and to the Food Prize committee for selecting such a worthy recipient.”
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The Indian software sector, with last year earnings of $22 billion (exports over $17 billion) is one enterprise in which India is a leader. Topping the list for close observation as well as understanding are the two information technology giants, Wipro and Infosys, who have been at the vanguard of the software revolution. Both the firms have witnessed a huge jump in the number of management students seeking to make them part of their project coursework.

Apart from credit-granting programs, many business schools in the U.S. have begun to bring students groups to India. Wipro has played host to a team of students from the Royal Institute of Stockholm and the Stockholm School of Economics. Recently, a team from Stanford visited Infosys and Wipro. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, has a full-fledged program called Global Initiatives Management and is looking at offshore outsourcing as their topic of study. Students from the university will soon be visiting India. Schools like Wharton, Stern, MIT Sloan, Michigan, School of Management Boston plan to visit the country to build up knowledge in offshore sourcing.

Recently, India was host to C. Jischke, president of Purdue University, the first president in Purdue’s 135-year history to visit India with the object of “globalizing” U.S. education. He is probably also the first head of a U.S. university who came to India to network personally and to talk to leading Indian institutes and identify subjects for study. “We are aiming at subjects India is strong in: engineering, pharmacy, management,” said Jischke.

Jischke felt that with globalization, multinational firms with operations around the world will and have been showing preference for candidates who have had experience in study abroad as well as exposure to different cultures. “It demonstrates an ability to work in different environments at times more challenging,” he says. Purdue has already inked deals with the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Mumbai) as well as GE to arrange for short stints for students to imbibe a first-hand experience of the Indian syllabus as well as management style.

Infosys, which is looking at attracting high-caliber professionals from around the globe, has a global internship program called InStep to introduce students around the world to Infosys and India. Infosys officials say that they have been receiving interns from colleges like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, St Gallen (Switzerland), London Business School, Darmstadt (Germany) Hitotsubashi (Japan) and RMIT (Australia). InStep has received 3,000 applications for 33 positions this year. The company presently has interns from more than 12 different countries.

In an interview Prabhudev Konana, professor at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, said he plans to bring a large contingent of students to visit India soon. The professor said since more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies and most other big global firms are looking at India for IT outsourcing, it is imperative for MBA programs to expose students to economic, political and cultural issues of doing business with India.

The United States Education Foundation of India too has been involved in identifying India-specific study abroad programs that give American students a view of this country. Usefi has identified over 50 such packages, ranging from week-long to full-year to semester-long study options that can range from subjects such as religion and culture to law, engineering and the sciences. “India is strategically and culturally an important country for U.S. students. Knowledge of India is valued by universities,” says Jane Schukoske , executive director of Usefi.

This, however, is not the first time that India has been involved in the education process of Americans. In what has been termed as outsourcing of education or e-learning, Indian e-teachers tutor students from the grade of 3-9 across America, sitting at their work stations in India due to shortage of teaching manpower in the U.S. Outsourcing companies such as Career Launcher, Educomp, Datamatics and NIIT have identified this opportunity that arose after the George W. Bush administration signed the No Child Left Behind Act with its multi-billion dollar funding. NCLB requires reading and math tests in grades 3-8 and high school.

Of course when today’s global students come to get a first-hand feel of the information technology powerhouse that is India, it is an indicator that tomorrow’s professionals will follow or have already arrived.

The interest of foreigners in Indian industry has been at two-levels — one, high-end technology and multinational jobs (for example, in GE, Nokia) and two, language specific requirements further to India emerging as a hub of outsourced jobs catering to international customers. A recent research has pegged the potential demand of over 160,000 foreign language professionals in call centers and other back end operations by 2010. Estimates put the number of foreigners working in India in the software and outsourcing industries to be mounting at a rapid pace, the last count, as recorded in the foreign registrar’s office in New Delhi, having crossed 50,000 and growing.

There are jobs up for grabs. Estimates suggest that 200,000 to 400,000 jobs have moved from the U.S. since the outsourcing trend began in the 1990s, which is still a fraction of 138 million jobs in the U.S. The most high-end projection is by Forrester Research — a loss of 3.3 million jobs by 2015, including 1.7 million back-office jobs and 473,000 IT jobs — which will create a dent in the U.S. job market but not the wreck everyone fears.

Elsewhere, hardly a week goes by without Indian IT whiz kids hitting the jackpot somewhere in the world. In the most recent instance, two IIT graduates are set to become dollar billionaires by listing their internet gambling company, Party Gaming, in London. The London Stock Exchange flotation is expected to be worth $10 billion. It is the LSE’s biggest flotation since the $29 billion listing of Orange, the mobile telephone company, four years ago. The extraordinary entrepreneurial saga of an Internet upstart hitting the big league will redefine rules of wealth creation, and again, perhaps, provide ground for future study material.

- Siddharth Srivastava is the India correspondent for Siliconeer. He is based in New Delhi.

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One Bangladesh is degenerated Bangladesh. A decaying, Bangladesh, which is rotting, stinking. A Bangladesh that is headed towards an abyss.

At the same time there is another Bangladesh. This Bangladesh is regenerative, creative, changing, adaptive, innovative and moving forward.

A big part of the degenerating Bangladesh is its rotting politics. Another is its backward bureaucracy. Another part is corruption. Another is a section of business.

Almost all the awful things you hear about Bangladesh are true. But it’s not the whole truth. It’s only a part of the truth. The rest of the truth is that of regenerative Bangladesh –Many NGOs are contributing towards the development of this Bangladesh, where a lot of community leadership is coming up, where an innovative, creative class of entrepreneurs are coming up, where educators, engineers, doctors, lawyers contribute, and Daily Star and Prothom Alo are also a very small part of this Bangladesh.

Now which Bangladesh will prevail? The decaying Bangladesh, or the regenerative Bangladesh? That depends on where people like you and I stand. There is no room for sitting on the fence or being neutral here.

Bangladesh can go down the road of Somalia or Bangladesh can become another Malaysia. But it won’t become Malaysia if we just sit it out. If we sit it out, it’ll surely go down the road of Somalia. I don’t want to castigate Somalia, I’m just taking it up as an example where the state is disintegrating and society is not progressing.

Mahfuz Anam

After living in a problem-ridden society for so long, perhaps we have forgotten how to acknowledge the positive. When I joined UNESCO in 1977, Paris had a substantial Middle Eastern population. Through my work, I made many Palestinian friends. You know, Palestinians are the brightest of the Arabs. They are most educated, they are doers.

When my Palestinian friends would hear about our history, that after just a nine-month-long freedom struggle we became a free country, they would go green with envy. My Palestinian friends told me that they were born in the ’50s and ’60s, but they had never ever lived anywhere besides a refugee camp. I became conscious how lucky I was to be a citizen of an independent country, however problematic, however backward. If you look at a map of the world today, at least you can look at one country and say, “This is mine.” Something no Palestinian has ever had an opportunity to experience.

I had once gone to Senegal while working for UNESCO. Senegal is a central African nation. Its western part touches the Sahara desert. I had to go there. For the first time I saw a desert. After talking to people there, I learned that not a thing grows there, and for a bucket of water, somebody from the family has to go out in the morning and return in the afternoon. I thought of verdant, riverine, bountiful Bangladesh, full of ponds, where if you through away the core of a mango it grows into a tree, where you can sleep in the outdoors eight months in a year.

I became fully conscious how bountiful nature has been to us. Perhaps we are so overwhelmed by the problems that Bangladesh has, we have forgotten to realize the bounty that Bangladesh gives us. What we have failed to do is to manage Bangladesh. It is our fault, not Bangladesh’s fault. And that’s the primary message I am sharing with you.

Let us now examine, in the midst of all the problems that we have, what has been Bangladesh’s achievement? If I concentrate on the last decade and a half, on an average Bangladesh’s GDP growth rate has been over 5 percent. Now if you look at the economic achievements of many countries of the world, an average of over 5 percent for more than a decade is a major significant achievement.

We have had the beginnings of industrialization in Bangladesh. We have made some modest progress in the social sectors. We have the beginnings of, if you like, capitalism. The entrepreneurs, the free market, the beginnings of it are there. This is on the economic side.

In politics, however flawed, we have a democracy in Bangladesh. Compared to Pakistan, compared to Nepal, I think in terms of developing a democratic society, as I said, however flawed, we have a semblance of democracy. The beauty of our democracy has been that in the last three elections all the time the opposition won. I think that is saying something. A country where the opposition always wins has something going for its democracy.

But I do not for a moment want you to think that Bangladesh doesn’t have any problems. I think it is foolish to ignore Bangladesh’s enormous economic problems. But it is fatal to be overwhelmed by those problems.

Let me use an icon in Bangla culture—our mother—as a metaphor. There was a time when your mother was young, hardworking, beautiful, vivacious, perhaps sang as a hobby, did so many things. You were born to this mother. That mother of yours is sick, unwell today. She can’t do a lot of things she used to. Her looks are also not what they used to be.

At a moment like this, are you going to constantly criticize your mother? Or are you going to gird your loins and get down to work to help ease your mother’s discomfort?

I don’t think we have any alternative. Bangladesh is our country. Its limitations are countless. Its shortcomings are no less. There are many things my country doesn’t have. All the same, it’s my country. We were born there. Whatever success we have achieved, all credit goes to our motherland and family.

With that claim of the motherland in mind, I ask you to join us in changing the future of Bangladesh. I believe it can be done. It is with that belief that I took my family back home to work.

One might ask what is the role of expatriate Bangladeshis? After returning to Bangladesh and living there, I have realized that returning to Bangladesh is not a primary condition for contributing to Bangladesh’s development. Those who want to come back are welcome, to those who can’t, I sincerely say, don’t feel guilty. In this age of information technology, in the age of Internet, in the age of globalization, whether you live in the U.S. or in Japan or wherever doesn’t matter. So to those Bangladeshis who are abroad, I tell them, be more successful, achieve greater professional excellence, this is also an asset for Bangladesh. Look what expatriate Chinese have done for China. What expatriate Indians are doing for India. Please don’t feel either guilty or disenchanted or disconnected with Bangladesh because you live here. Because I think you can be as much a part of the future of Bangladesh by living here as you can by going back home. What is important is your involvement.

The good news for you is that a change is happening in Bangladesh. Perhaps not to the level that’s necessary, but we are also changing. We are becoming more modern, we are gradually becoming aware that to we need to change a lot if we are keep pace with the modern world.

You will have to find the right partner.

I just want to say that I am really, really bullish about Bangladesh. This is not a pie-in-the-sky optimism. I live in that country. I have seen how honest, decent, hardworking, ordinary folks are in Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s problem is its wealthy elite. The previous British high commissioner, after a four-year stint in Bangladesh, told me before leaving, “Mahfuz, I’ve lived in Bangladesh for four years, and I have traveled all around the country, and I am going back with the conclusion that you people are poor by choice.”

What he meant was that there is no reason for Bangladesh to be poor. With a bit of effort we can get out of poverty. But we don’t do it because we lack long-term vision, and suffer from immature leadership, and a lack of earnestness.

But all of this can be changed. We have to change it. We can change it.

- Mahfuz Anam is editor of the Daily Star, Bangladesh’s leading English language daily.