Lessons out of the life of Arundhati Bhattacharya

Lessons out of the life of Arundhati Bhattacharya

GS Paper IV: Lessons out of the life of administrators

Consistency: Joined as a probationary officer in 1977; has been with SBI for more than four decades.

Donning different hats: She is not fatigued even after spending four decades in SBI as she does not treat her career as one job in one bank but a dozen jobs with different challenges—ranging from working at the foreign exchange wing in Kolkata to a stint in the US and retail banking, corporate banking, treasury, new business, human resources, investment banking in Mumbai and, finally, the assignment of the bank’s chief financial officer before moving to the corner room.

Adapts progressive forces such as rise of IT: Despite its much larger size, SBI is more nimble-footed than most of its peers on the digital space and probably the most aggressive bank in using social media.

Bhattacharya’s colleagues like her flexibility in approach to business. An example of that is junking the agreement signed with Gujarat’s Adani Group to build a $7.8 billion coal mine in Australia when she found that it would not be viable—a project announced with much fanfare in Brisbane where Adani Group boss Gautam Adani was accompanying a business delegation for the Group of 20 summit, attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Expresses views appropriately: She is articulate but not flamboyant. She has strong views on many things which she expresses in closed door meetings with the banking regulator and the finance ministry but, unlike her two immediate predecessors she doesn’t fight openly with the regulator.

Realist and doesn’t ignore the elephants in the room: After she took over as boss, every Saturday afternoon, she would hold a meeting on bad loan resolution. At these meetings, which at times stretched till late evening, accountability would be fixed and the executives concerned would need to get back with resolution plans in a week.

A team leader: None of these attributes may be entirely new for a person who runs the nation’s largest lender but what distinguishes Bhattacharya from others is that she always carries her people along with her, something which many of her predecessors could not do.

Source:

The importance of being Arundhati Bhattacharya

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/gWlY6oOmc4yLVdoXFXgXbP/The-importance-of-being-Arundhati-Bhattacharya.html

End of Life: Ethical Dilemma

End of Life: Ethical Dilemma

UPSC General Studies: Paper IV

Question: Thanks to massive advance in medical science, we now live longer and better, but what do we do when the end comes? How to decide the fate of life?

Purpose of medical school was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise. But that’s what’s inevitably happening. How to take the crucial decision of pulling the plug? Should there be guidelines for de-escalating medical care?

Outline the ethical dilemmas involved. What can be done to address these dilemmas?

Backgrounder: Why we need to discuss these issues in India? (This is just for the sake of putting things in a perspective and not for the actual answer)

Problems of the elderly:

Medical science has ensured longer lives and India with its focus on its young “demographic dividend” will find that by 2050 its over-60 population will have increased from 8% of the population to 19%, finds a 2015 report by HelpAge India. Average life expectancy then will be 74 years.

At the same time, fertility rates will have declined from 5.9 children per woman at the time of Independence to 2.6 children per woman by 2050. What this simply will mean is more older people with fewer children to take care of them—and that’s just the impact on families without factoring in the implications on public healthcare that increased longevity will inevitably pose.

Pointers that will help tackle the above question:

Ethical dilemmas involved:

At what point do you tell the doctors that you cannot bear to hear the struggling breath of your mother?

How do you decide that it’s OK to feed her through a tube but not OK for doctors to cut a hole and insert a tube so that a ventilator can breath for her?

Home or hospital?

Dialysis or do nothing?

How do you decide the fate of a life? When that life belongs to a parent—ironically, the person who gave you life—the dilemma is unbearable.

Does wanting my mother to die quickly, unwilling to have her linger on and fade away make me a bad daughter or a son? What will the society think?

How to address these dilemmas?

Address the issue within lifetime within family: We have to tackle the issue of mortality during our lifetime. We all know that death is an inevitable finality. Yet, we are not at all open about discussing death within families. We need to have a discussion in advance. How do our parents want to die? In a hospital or at home? With the maximum medical intervention or the least? What about organ donation? But, he warns, this is a discussion for families to take at an appropriate time, when the going is good, not when confronted with a sudden decline in a parent’s health.

Have a relook at the laws: Laws are not supportive of end of life either. For instance, once a patient is on a ventilator then it cannot be withdrawn in the hospital without a court order that must be approved by a three-member committee.

Doctor’s must have guidelines as to how to respond in various emergencies: In an emergency, there is an implicit consent that you have to do everything to save the life of the patient, which could mean even attempting a heroic surgery on a 75-year-old stroke patient. Doctors don’t have guidelines on when to de-escalate care. There are so many grey areas. Address these grey areas.

Bamboo Industry in India: How can it be developed?

Bamboo Industry in India: How can it be developed?

UPSC General Studies: Paper I: Key Natural Resource: Bamboo

Question: ‘India has the world’s largest natural base of bamboo, yet China controls the world market in this natural resource.’ Outline the uses of bamboo. How has the above situation come to be what it is and how should it be redressed?

Backgrounder: (This is just for the sake of putting things in a perspective and not for the actual answer)

India, not China, is the world’s largest natural repository of bamboo: approximately 11,361 sq.km of it, compared to China’s area of 5,444 sq.km. Most of India’s bamboo is in the north-east, some in Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and in the Western Ghats.

Yet India holds a mere 4% of the world market on bamboo.

China’s innovations in bamboo have certainly been manifold. It controls over 83% of the world market, and has seen its industry grow from $10 billion to a $30 billion turnover industry employing 7.7 million people and reforesting over 3 million hectares of degraded land.

IBNAR: INBAR (International Network for Bamboo and Rattan) is infusing bamboo into five of the Paris Agreement’s 29 clauses through Articles 5, 7, 10, 11 and 12, all dealing in sustainable forestry and renewable energy.

Pointers that will help tackle the above question:

Uses of bamboo

Bamboo’s benefits are immense—it restores degraded soils, is good for afforestation and water conservation and thereby in climate change mitigation. It has myriad uses ranging from high-end construction materials to producing biomass fuel with potential for further products, thereby enhancing not just rural livelihoods but an industry, all contributing to the overall economy.

What’s powered China ahead?

IBNAR India and China: Interestingly, INBAR was founded by an Indian-origin Canadian scientist, Cherla Sastry, in 1983 through Canada’s IDRC (international development research), then having several other Indian “bamboo scientists”. The initiative set up some centres within forestry institutes in India, but got bogged down by “all kinds of parliamentary questions”, said Sastry over the phone, when it came to establishing INBAR in India. “There is continuity in China,” says Sastry, along with cooperation, foresight and their own money.

What’s kept India behind?

Bamboo a tree or a grass? Forest Rights Act of 2006 allows access to NTFPs but still restricts it as an industry. But the Forest Act of 1927 said bamboo was a tree, thus excluding local communities from harvesting bamboo inside protected areas as non-timber forest produce (NTFP). (This provision remains unchanged in 1980 Forest Act.

Lack of cohesive policy: Bamboo is also controlled by the rural development and the agriculture ministries. None of these ministries have as yet a policy that is cohesive to all.

Way Ahead

Adopt state best practices: there has been an environment ministry directive urging states to consider bamboo as an NTFP and a Supreme Court order categorizing bamboo as such, the ambiguity of our current laws has left it to the political will of states to decide. The result of this is a few discrete pockets of success in communities in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Odisha mainly.

Utilize funds from existing schemes: bamboo could be promoted with great effect in the 10 million hectare afforestation scheme under India’s climate change mitigation plans, while the compensatory afforestation management's current funds of Rs 42,000 crore offer even more potential.

Related Article

19.09.16: Gadkari blasts forest officials for corruption (Related to Bamboo in Vidarbha)
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/Gadkari-blasts-forest-dept-for-corruption/articleshow/54396164.cms

Security Issues: Counter-terrorism Strategy

Security Issues: Counter-terrorism Strategy

UPSC General Studies: Paper III

Question: Research finds that many foreign fighters joining ISIS originate from countries with high levels of economic development, low income inequality, and highly developed political institutions. How do these findings affect the commonplace understanding of causes of terrorism? What policy measures would you suggest to stem the breeding of violent extremists?

Backgrounder: (This is just for the sake of putting things in a perspective and not for the actual answer)

It is generally believed that terrorists are from economically backward and educationally poor backgrounds. A growing body of economic research disputes this hypothesis.

Evidence in favor of above assertion: Perpetrators of the Dhaka terror attack were from well-off families and received good education.

Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey and Jordan are the top five countries by number of foreign fighters.

However, an interesting picture emerges if one looks at the percentage share of foreign fighters in the total Muslim population of these countries. Four West European countries, Finland; Belgium; Ireland and Sweden are among the top five countries.

(India is at the bottom of the chart in terms of number of fighters as well as their share in total Muslim population.)

Pointers that will help tackle the above question:

Other causes of terrorism

Ideology and assimilation: Flow of foreign fighters to ISIS could be driven “not by economic or political conditions but rather by ideology and the difficulty of assimilation into homogeneous Western countries.”

Bloated sense of self-worth: the elite in a poor country might turn to terrorism while seeking to improve the condition of their society. Altruism and an exaggerated sense of importance plays an important role in driving terrorists including suicide attackers. The attackers often believe that their acts would force repressive forces to reverse their policies and hence improve the quality of life of the population whose cause the terrorist group claims to be fighting.

Socio-Economic roots of terrorism: Dependence on superficially benign organizations (often religious) for services/company/support, which eventually exposes the beneficiary to ideas of Jihad etc. If the member refuses to partake, he/she maybe threatened with exclusion from organization.

Policy Responses

Has to be multi-faceted.

Security policies should be but one component. There has to be others.

Policies need to be targeted at filling in the voids left by weak states and shifting incentive structures within societies away from the use of violence.

Associated Information

Specific Steps taken by India

Legislation: Amongst the specific steps, at the legal level, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) was strengthened, reinforced and equipped to handle terrorism in all its manifestations.

Logistics: The limitation of inadequate security forces were addressed by opening NSG hubs at places other than Manesar in order to ensure faster and more effective reaction to crisis situations.

Intelligence: Intelligence gathering, sharing and dissemination became a priority and the NATGRID was established, which is in the process of formalization.

A Multi Agency Centre was established which is likely to evolve into the NCTC, thereby honing the inter-agency capability to fight terrorism.

Diplomacy: At the diplomatic level as well, India has pushed for international recognition of terrorism in all its forms and a number of UN Resolutions have been passed to provide a cohesive effort against terrorism.

Finance: Yet another initiative has been the targeting of terrorism finance, which has received an impetus with both the UAPA and Anti Money Laundering legislations becoming more effective.

Socially: A long-term step has also been to address the alienation of certain sections of the population through better integration, concessions, and targeting of hardline propaganda machinery, both from within and outside the country.

Further Reading

http://www.cfr.org/india/counterterrorism-india/p11170

Musings on Leadership

Musings on Leadership

By Avinash Agarwal

UPSC GENERAL STUDIES: Paper IV (Ethics) 

Quotes on Leadership

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. —Lao Tzu

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. —Jack Welch

A leader is a dealer in hope. —Napoleon Bonaparte

My responsibility is getting all my players playing for the name on the front of the jersey, not the one on the back. –Unknown

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership. —Nelson Mandela

                                  Leadership is in an uncertain place. We long desperately for better leaders. But perhaps it is precisely our longing that’s the problem. We’re waiting for a rescue at the cost of our own redemption. Because it’s easier to complain about the leaders we have than to try to do better. After all, it’s a pretty hard job.........

What is good leadership?

Constant Adaptation and Improvisation

No one would have predicted just a decade ago that Nokia would be something like a distant memory of a household name. Yet, while its decline was happening, Nokia’s leaders, though they were acting like leaders—reassuring, confident, calm, giving fine speeches—were not being leaders. They weren’t doing the things they had to do to set their company up for the future, things that, precisely because the future is uncertain, sometimes make you look hesitant, or fumbling, or foolish.

Not Grabbing Power, but Empowering

Leaders are not merely politicians, human calculators of advantage whose main goal is to attain, and then maintain, power. But the job of leaders is not taking power, but the opposite: empowering. If a leader fails to empower his or her teammates, it will eventually lead to stagnation and the setting in of a rot.

Create a Sense of Purpose

Te job of a leader is to create a reality in which performance itself stops being merely a performance—to focus people on the meaning and mission of their work, not on the politics of flattering and threatening, cajoling and conquering. When Steve Jobs asked John Sculley his famous question, “Do you really want to spend your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” he was making just such a distinction. Selling sugared water might make you a few bucks—but only at the cost of doing something that matters. The purpose of a leader is to create a purpose.

Finally, to Inspire to Achieve

The job of a leader is indeed to inspire people—but in the truer sense of the word: from the Latin inspirare, inspire, to breathe or blow into. Leaders breathe life into the organizations they lead, into the people they’re responsible for. They breathe life into possibilities. They make it more possible for the rest of us to dare, imagine, create and build. They do not merely encourage us to do so; theirs is the hard work of crafting all the incentives, processes, systems and roles that actually empower us to do so.

Why just putting a high-performer in the leadership role will not be enough?

Leadership requires constant adaptation to today’s challenge and improvisation upon yesterday’s performance. But good leadership also requires:

* Empowering of team mates

* Creating a sense of purpose among team members.

* Inspiring the entire organization.

If our goal is discovering and cultivating leaders like that, then we aren’t likely to find them among our best performers, but among those who are challenging our ideas of what performance can be.

Can we think of examples where high performers made for poor leaders?

Attitude: Components and Functions

Attitude: Components and Functions

By Nikeeta Rathod

UPSC GENERAL STUDIES: Paper IV

Table of content

What is Attitude?

What are components of Attitude?

Functions of Attitude

* Function of Attitude Example

Important Attitude at workplace

Unfavourable Attitude at workplace

Attitude Change Theories

Persuasion

Political Attitude

* Development of Political Attitude

* Politics and Morality

* Morality as a modern Political Divide

You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.

What is Attitude? 

Attitude is the mental evaluation of the social situation that has the potential to guide the way we think, we feel, and we behave.

What are the components of Attitude?

Attitudes structure can be described in terms of three components.

Affective component: this involves a person’s feelings / emotions about the attitude object.

For example: “I am scared of spiders”.

Behavioral component: the way the attitude we have influences how we act or behave.

For example: “I will avoid spiders and scream if I see one”.

Cognitive component: this involves a person’s belief / knowledge about an attitude object.

For example: “I believe spiders are dangerous”.

This model is known as the ABC model of attitudes.

The Function of Attitudes

Attitudes can serve various functions for the individual.  Daniel Katz (1960) outlines four functional areas:

Knowledge Function

Attitudes provide meaning (knowledge) for life.  The knowledge function refers to our need for a world which is consistent and relatively stable. 

This allows us to predict what is likely to happen, and so gives us a sense of control. Attitudes can help us organize and structure our experience. 

Knowing a person’s attitude helps us predict their behavior.

For example, knowing that a person is religious we can predict they will go to Church.

Self/Ego Expressive Function

The attitudes we express

(1) Help communicate who we are and

(2) May make us feel good because we have asserted our identity. 

Self-expression of attitudes can be non-verbal too: think bumper sticker, cap, or T-shirt slogan. 

Therefore, our attitudes are part of our identity, and help us to be aware through the expression of our feelings, beliefs and values.

Adaptive Function

If a person holds and/or expresses socially acceptable attitudes, other people will reward them with approval and social acceptance. 

For example, when people flatter their bosses or instructors (and believe it) or keep silent if they think an attitude is unpopular.  Again, expression can be nonverbal. 

Attitudes then, are to do with being a part of a social group and the adaptive functions helps us fit in with a social group. People seek out others who share their attitudes, and develop similar attitudes to those they like.

Ego defensive function 

The ego-defensive function refers to holding attitudes that protect our self-esteem or that justify actions that make us feel guilty.

For example, one way children might defend themselves against the feelings of humiliation they have experienced in P.E. lessons is to adopt a strongly negative attitude to all sports.

People whose pride have suffered following a defeat in sport might similarly adopt a defensive attitude: “I’m not bothered, I’m sick of rugby anyways”.  This function has psychiatric overtones. 

Positive attitudes towards ourselves, for example, have a protective function (i.e. an ego-defensive role) in helping us reserve our self-image.

The basic idea behind the functional approach is that attitudes help a person to mediate between their own inner needs (expression, defense) and the outside world (adaptive and knowledge).

Functions of Attitudes Example

Imagine you are very patriotic about being British.  This might cause you to have an ethnocentric attitude towards everything not British.  Imagine further that you are with a group of like-minded friends. You say:

“Of course, there’s no other country as good as Britain to live in.  Other places are alright in their own way, but they can’t compare with your mother county.”

(There are nods of approval all round. You are fitting in - adaptive).  The people in the group are wearing England football shirts (This is the self-expression function).

Then imagine you go on to say:

“The trouble with foreigners is that they don’t speak English.  I went to France last year and they were ignorant. Even if they could speak our language they wouldn’t do so.  I call that unfriendly.

(Others agree with you and tell you of their similar experiences.  You are making sense of things. This is the knowledge function).

Then someone who has never travelled takes things a stage further “I don’t mind foreigners coming here on holiday…but they shouldn’t be allowed to live here….taking our jobs and living off social security. Britain for the British is what I say, so you can’t get a decent job in your own country.”

(Now the others in the room join in scapegoating foreigners and demonstrating the ego defensive function of attitudes).

Important Attitude at workplace

Respectfulness

Respect is a very important attitude in the workplace and deals with the way in which employees interact with management, clients as well as co-workers. 

Pridefulness

It might seem as if being prideful is a good attitude to have in the workplace, but most employees who have a prideful attitude about their work tend to work harder to excel. A prideful attitude mean that for an employee the outcomes of their tasks and how they contribute to the company matter a great deal to him.

Commitment

Employees who have a committed attitude show a willingness to do whatever it takes to fulfill the duties of their positions and via the development of new ideas make the company even better.

Innovation

Employees with an innovative attitude don't shy away from trying something new or finding a different way to do things. Employees with this type of attitude know their ideas might not work out to be the best way to do something, but that the biggest failure is not at least giving new ideas a shot.

Helpfulness

It is important to have a helpful attitude at work, whether that means assisting clients and customers with their needs or helping co-workers accomplish overall company goals.

Unfavourable Attitude at workplace

Jugaad:

It seems to exist only within our society. It as a term applied to a creative or innovative idea providing a quick, alternative way of solving or fixing a problem, it misses two important.

First, there is an implicit understanding that because the solution needs to be quick and creative, it is acceptable to make a compromise on the quality of what is produced.

Second, because we focus on making “it” work just-in-time, we never think of making the solution that last. That leads to poor quality.

Chalta hai attitude:

The  notion of chalta-hai  accept that if it is 80 per cent good, works 80 per cent of the time, and does 80 per cent of what it needs to do, it is acceptable. This attitude manifests itself in almost every facet of common life in India

Attitude change theory

Dissonance theory

Attitude can be changed by planting an idea that challenges the contrast in your beliefs.

Example: Tax evasion is same as corruption. So tax evader will either try to justify his action or change his tax-evasion behavior.

Elaboration likelihood model 

If you’re sleepy/just woken up then your cognitive capacity is very low. Your elaboration will be low, but if you’re doing math your elaboration level will be high.

So depending on your place in the elaboration spectrum, your persuasion capacity will change.

Advertisement works on people in low cognitive capacity mode. But it doesn’t have long lasting effect, so today you bought one brand mobile, after six months, another brand.

In governance, people have to be convinced during their high cognitive mode, for long lasting impact.

Learning theory

Attitude change can be made by actively persuading others. Persuasion as an effective means of attitude change is explained below.

Persuasion

Concept

Persuasion is our effort to bring about an attitudinal change in others through the use of various types of messages.

Factors Affecting Persuasive Capability

Attractiveness: Communicators who are attractive in some way (say physically) are more persuasive.

That is why celebrities are invited for TV commercial.

Source credibility: Persuasion is also affected by the credibility of the source/persuader.

This credibility may derive from the expert value of the persuader

For example, toothpaste ads show dentists recommending.
This credibility also depends upon the perceived trustworthiness. For example, a politician talking on ethics may not have any credibility. Mahatma Gandhi had a mass appeal.

Multiplicity of sources: If some message is delivered by multiple credible sources, then it is more persuading in general.

Example, if you are carrying a ring and 10 people say that it is not gold (and they are not experts), we are likely to change our attitude and start suspecting whether the ring is genuine or not. 

Familiarity with the persuader: We are more likely to be persuaded by in-group members than random people. We develop a group bias by the virtue of our membership of a particular group.

Example, we will always prefer a tribal to go and talk to tribal to persuade them.
Common sense: Messages in consonance with the receiver's common sense are likely to be more persuasive.

Design/presentation of the message: This is also very important.
Messages that do not appear to be designed to change our attitude are often more successful that seem to be designed to achieve this goal.

Political Attitude

Political Attitude include knowledge and skills about the operation of the political system, positive and negative judgments about the system

These attitudes determine how people participate, whom they vote for and which political parties they support. The factors which make attitudes are family, gender, religion, race, ethnicity and region. 

Development of Political Attitude 

Political attitude formulation is a learning process by which an individual acquires orientations, beliefs, values and norms and behavior patterns in political system.

Political attitude formulation is a psychological concept as it is concerned with the society in general and with individual in particular. 

Attitude Formulation in Childhood

A child develops his attitude towards the authority and obedience as per the obedience pattern at family. 

A child recognizes authority through particular individual such as parents, policemen and the president of the country.

Adulthood as the next Stage of Attitude Formulation 

In this stage the attitude formulation takes places due to peer groups. The way the peer groups behave that way only patterns of obedience and disobedience are decided. 

Attitude Formulation in Various Directions

The process of attitude formulation have its influence in various directions

Media plays an important role in shaping our political attitudes.

Apart from mainstream media, today, new media provides cheaper and easier ways to influence people’s political attitudes.

New media includes Internet and digital based forms of mass communication, including social media. 

Politics and Morality

Morality is an individual characteristic and determines his or her actions.

Politics on the other hand belong to the public and it is the collective opinion of the public which determines the public policy.

Contributions of morality in politics can be extrapolated to ancient beginnings of government.

Many rulers of the past established their authority based on the personal charisma, ability, charity etc. 

All these qualities were considered essential by people to be wise and just. Morality played a vital role in politics of antiquity.

Morality’s role in modern politics has evolved as morality itself has evolved.

It is the morality which ultimately underlies all discussions of public policy. Areas which were hitherto morally elusive like foreign affairs, health care, economics, etc. have now joined the traditional moral flash points like abortion, biological research etc. 

Morality as a Modern Political Divide

Morality at the center of current political debates is more social than personal and its considerations are manifested in many social issues like gay rights, scientific research, health-care etc. 

Morality also provides a known frame which allows all political arguments and concepts to be learnt and understood. This stands in contrast to all social and economic forces which need specialist analysis.

Such political arguments are open to all interpretations and misinterpretations. Democracy functions well only if there is a healthy divide of opinions.