Beyond CSAT - aim to select the optimum group of civil servants and not the "best" individuals

I watched a discussion on Lok Sabha Tv for an hour about the aptitude test of UPSC which has been in the news recently - its need and its fairness. Neither the discussion nor anything I have seen in the paper talks about the fact that if there is a single test, any single outcome may seem unfair even if the test is not.

As the ratio of the number of candidates to the number of people selected increases to the levels in India, a thought experiment can tell us that if the test were repeated, examiners interchanged, the list of selected candidates can vary substantially.

A very large number of candidates not selected could have done better than the selected candidates on another day or in another mental state.

The scenario becomes far more complex if one tries to think of what would be an excellent group of candidates for the civil service. After all no one would select a soccer team by any method where all the selected players  could turn out to be goal keepers!

The concern about the mix of the outcome is very real. The discussion had references to states  complaining about the number of candidates selected from their state because of the changes in the exam system.

Suppose there was a  formula for the optimum selection of the group with factors like

• Test result
• overall
• individual subject
• hetergeneity
• male/female
• economic background
• mother tongue
• place of residence
• social background
• Affirmative action 
• Replacement of reservations
• New blood
• people whose parents/relations have not been in any government service

Factors to be considered could be specified. The multiple objective functions could be specified. The number of objectives could be quite large. It will make no difference to the implementation of the algorithm. The source code of the algorithm could be published.

These could be tested against the past examinations to create the lists of who would have been selected had this process been in use.

I am certain if the outcome is fair to all stakeholders, the concern over unfairness of the exam and bias of examiners will decrease. But more significantly, we can have a group of administrators in whom the society as a whole has confidence and which as a group is likely to deliver better outcomes for the governance of the country.

Using IT for Real Estate Registration and making the use of Black money risky

The following comment in an Indian Express column by Pratik Kanjilal reminded me of my own feelings that we talk of money in Swiss banks and ignore the elephant in the room which affects almost anyone needing to buy or sell property:

But gentle reader, do put yourself in the shoes of the black money-wallah, who has allegedly salted away $1.5 trillion. Would you stash it in a European bank where a return of 3 per cent looks fantastic, or in an Indian real estate project where 25 per cent is boring? When shall we see a programme on black money which asks why it must be recovered dramatically from foreign shores, when most of it is obviously here in India?

And I wonder what if the property registration process was modified as follows:

1. Register a sale on a web site.
2. An auction is initiated for, say, 10 days.
3. Anyone can bid over the registration price.
4. At the end of the auction, if a successful bid is present:
1. The seller received the extra amount
2. The buyer is refunded his purchase price
3. The government gets extra stamp/registration duty.
5. Property is registered in the name of the buyer of the successful bidder as the case may be.

 Wouldn't everyone benefit :)

BSNL - Counting Miracles and not their Online Presence

This post was triggered by a desire to lodge a complaint about telemarketeers on our landline. I got a phone with caller id just so I could complain.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is possible to verify that our number is indeed in the dnd list. I had registered for DND a couple of years ago but the call center employee was clueless, so I was apprehensive about our number being in the list. It was.

Next step - file a complaint on BSNL's selfcare portal. The effort to do so reminded me of a story a friend had told me. He was flying in Europe - on a European airline and not Air India - and the service was lousy. He complained a couple of times and the stewardess just laughed and responded - "It's a miracle that we are flying".

It is indeed a miracle that my phone works. It has a broadband connection of 2MBPS which now streams videos without lengthy pauses, at least often enough that I do see some.

Even greater miracle was that the service engineer who came to fix a broadband issue knew how to configure a modem for Linux. Even linesman fixed a lose connection on the pole with no fuss. This is truly miraculous for anyone who had experienced BSNL service over a dozen years ago.

BSNL may have been technically one organisation, each circle or area had its own web services and with its own interface. Integration was inevitable. Even needing to create new accounts when the next level of integration occurred was tolerated, though the creation of new email id's led me to switch entirely to gmail. It is strange and sad that I found an ad supported service preferable to my ad-free email account.

Some time ago, I could  no longer find the data usage of my broadband account. There were 4 links to new self-service accounts based on regions. Unfortunately, our circle was not listed in any! We had to wait till our circle's billing was integrated with the region. Since I couldn't access it, I forgot about it. Anyway, my net usage had come down drastically for personal issues.

For reasons mentioned above, I was back at the self-service portal.

The self-care portal offered several ways to register my complaint:

1. I could fill the general complaint form. I was using Firefox and submitting the form resulted in "The page isn't redirecting properly" error. I tried Chrome. The problem reported "Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to selfcare.ndc.bsnl.co.in". The URL was obviously incorrect.
2. May be I needed to login. I registered and tried to login. Result was the same as in 1. I tried fixing the URL. The result was better - "The requested resource does not exist." but there was an option to go to the main page, which was an alternate login page for the portal. With a minor difference. 
3. It would not accept the credentials I had obtained via registration but offered its own registration page. This needed billing information. It was the same page as I had tried months ago but our circle's customers were now recognised. I successfully registered; but credentials will now be sent to me after verification. So, I will know after some time - days? - whether this method works.

In a few days, I may finally be able to lodge a complaint against the irritating insurance companies. Who knows, I may even be able to track my data usage on the broadband - at least until BSNL's new beta site goes live.

State of IT Usage in India?

Mutual funds in the old days would give paper certificates. As computerisation increased, these paper certificates disappeared and were replaced by an account statement. Over the years, each purchase became a different account. Some consolidation of the accounts into folios was done but even then I had a lot of folios.

Online handling of the accounts meant that I had to manage multiple folios with multiple passwords. It seemed simpler to try to consolidate them.

The rules were not too complex, though some seemed a bit silly. But without silly rules, bureaucracy would not be able to survive.

Since online purchase required that a registered bank account be used to prevent money laundering, I filled a form to add a second bank account to each of my holdings. That would also ensure that the bank accounts would be the same for each folio that I wanted to consolidate.

Request was rejected because it was treated as a request for CHANGE of bank account though the form was for ADDITION of bank accounts. The change of bank account required some more papers. I suspect that the chances are their IT system could not handle the additional requirement introduced by the regulator.

There was some impact of my request, which I cannot really comprehend. One of my holdings now had the account number of one bank but the name of the other bank! The dividend could not be credited. I had to provide proof of the account which was already there in their computer records! The service centre printed a copy from their system, which I signed and submitted.

I decided to make one more attempt as ensuring that the registrar did not goof up with my bank records was a scary proposition.

This time I carefully consolidated only those folios which had the same bank account. Folios of one bank were consolidated but not for the other.

Reason - the bank details did not tally. That was strange. However, it appears that in their system, the bank details associated with each account are separately stored. For some reason, in some folios, in some of the holdings the other bank's details were present. This is a logical fallacy as per their rules. But their computer system is more flexible!

Since that flexibility is not be used, it clearly implies an erroneous data model of their system.

The process has left me bewildered and worried. As the computer systems keep getting more complex, I will need to monitor my accounts to ensure that no mess has been created.

I have also decided not to consolidate my folios because I wonder what new errors will be introduced.

Or may be they moved their processes to the cloud as they  were too complex - as in tech-comics- let cloud computing make your life-easier.