User Pays - Pay Toll or Pay a Decongestion Charge

The drama about the toll road in Delhi-Gurgaon is very amusing (Fortunately, I do not have to travel on it). However, I do spend Rs. 74 for each trip on toll to Ropar at two toll booths, which is about 15% of the cost of petrol.

Curiously, 15% of the travel time is about the minimum time I spend at the toll booths. The travel time is 15 minutes from the first toll gate to the IIT Campus. The usual 2 minutes at the toll booths does occasionally stretch to 10 minutes.

Wouldn't it be better if 10% or even 15% was added to the fuel price and used as 'road usage charges'? I would definitely welcome it and I am sure that people will get used to it fairly quickly.

Money collected does not have to be used only for highways and roads. A fair proportion of it could and should be used to subsidize public transport. It can make sure that public transport is available on routes and at frequencies which may seem uneconomical but which would encourage people to have the option of using public transport instead of own transport.

If the use of public transport usage increases, we can rename the 'road usage charge' to a very welcome 'road de-congestion charge'!

Cooking Gas Connection Transfer and Rs 5 Stamp Paper

An interesting coincidence - I was reading about Charles Babbage and was fascinated by his creation of the foundations of Operations Research:

Undaunted, he applied his new method to the analysis of the postal system of his day, and proved that the cost of accepting and assigning a value to every piece of mail according to the distance it had to travel was far more expensive than the cost of transporting it. The British Post Office boosted its capabilities instantly and economically by charging a flat rate, independent of the distance each piece had to travel--the "penny post" that persists around the world to this day.

While the British government saw sense a hundred years ago in transforming the postal rates, Indian government continues to thrust stamp papers on us mindlessly, whose absence of value is visible even without operations research.

I need a stamp paper to state that my father has expired and that the gas connection may be transferred into my mother's name.

I need another stamp paper to state  that the original documents for allotment of a gas connection, from over 30 years ago, cannot be located.

In each case, I need to get them notarised  by a Notary Public.

Each stamp paper is worth Rs. 5. It has to be bought from specified locations.

I am certain the cost of producing and selling that paper - as each paper sale has to be documented - has got to be more than the sale price.

The cost of procuring it is certainly much more than Rs. 5 for me and I am not even including the cost of the time spent.

I can see some notional value in notarisation in case my mother disowns signing the documents.

I have not been able to think of any meaningful benefit from the stamp paper even by a Telgi. The value is just not high enough to even counterfeit!

Ah, the hope of a paperless bureaucracy! Who knows - as in Pete Seeger's wonderful song - Adam's children might surprise us all :)

Switch a healh insurance policy? My brain hurts.

For some years, we have contemplated changing the health insurance company as the healthcare TPA for our policy did not seem to have too many hospitals in its network.

Thanks to portability, switching a service provider should be easy. Well, may be not. Anyway, I did not reach that stage. I was paralyzed by just trying to find basic information about the policies and costs. After a fair amount of search and avoiding all sites which insisted I supply them with an email id and my mobile number, I did find some comparison charts. However, implications or comparison of terms and conditions for various policies were not easy to find.

Anyway, I decided it hurt my brain far too much. So, I will stick to what I have had for a decade, which I have never had to use, and hope that I never have to find out what my policy will or will not cover.

I can, of course, wish that all policies were also like open source software where all needed information is freely available and each product is encouraged to use the best capabilities of every other product. That should evolve to a product which is truly useful.

Instead, I get the feeling that the companies offer but discourage a base product and add perceived benefits of questionable value to the base at highly inflated rates to make idiots of us. And that resulted in my brain hurting badly :(

How to feel very poor - not planning for legal expenses

The news of B. R. Raju's (Satyam fame)  legal bills made me feel really very very poor. That was an expense I had never even considered :( Neither had the idea of an insurance cover had never even occurred to me. This really affected my yard stick of the money one should have and my personal worth:

Tata AIG ... is footing his legal bill of Rs 60 crore so far, and will continue to do so till the court gives its verdict.

The following really rubbed it in :(

...in the insider trading case of Rajat Gupta in the US, Goldman Sachs paid almost $ 30 million (around Rs 150 crore) for Gupta’s legal defence...

But in a world where we have "Betting on Death: Creepy or Not?", what else can be expected?

Is quality to be measured by how few get first class?

Our "modernisation" of examination system is clearly an example of 'a camel is a horse designed by a committee'. It upsets me to read such news because there is an implicit bias against internal examinations. Some extracts:

• a professor who did not wish to be named even alleged that marks were being sold in some colleges
• there is a 99 per cent chance of manipulation in evaluation of internals
• many teachers hate the new system as it involves considerable extra work such as preparing question papers for internal tests, assignments, projects and the like. Many of them claim that such elaborate work leaves them with little time to conduct classes.
  
  (Emphasis mine - I find it hard to believe that anyone who has taught for even short period can believe that classroom teaching is an effective tool for learning by students. An example of what we could be doing: Eric Mazur's view on how to make students learn.)

At issue is not the internal evaluation. However, you cannot have part central and part local with no regard for any normalisation. It is cleaner to let the exam be entirely internal and each degree should specify the college from which a student graduated and his/her percentile rank within the college.

Misery of Aging and Education

I used to tell my wife that I am happiest when I had something to be miserable about. She never did appreciate this concept.

Recently, a couple of reasons have given me cause for misery but they have not made me happy :( So, I suppose I need to be miserable about only some type of things.

I have been trying to get some output from a person and it makes me wonder. Is it possible for the education system to have damaged a person to such an extent that he can no longer think? I have lost my patience which makes me literally miserable.

The other factor is that home visit by a doctor seems unthinkable. Getting a nurse for home care is equally difficult.

But we do not necessarily need or want a doctor but a health care worker. It amazes me that there is no effort to train people who will provide home care services. The person does not need to be able to prescribe medicines but needs to be able to adjust dosage based on observations. It is not hard. I think that we have learnt a fair amount about some medicines using internet, some advice by the doctor and based on observing the patient.

What makes me miserable is that we can see some type of jobs are bound to disappear - like truck and taxi drivers. But the society is unprepared for the new jobs which will require skills and training and the need for some of them is blatantly obvious.

Varied student intake - Introduce reservations for the Elite?

It seems that the high cutoff of Delhi university is creating an exodus of students studying abroad.

I remember a joke from my childhood -

If you want your son to be a communist, send him to study in the US. If you want him to be a capitalist, send him to the USSR instead.

Warts are not visible from afar.

Today, the Soviet Union option has disappeared and if I ever believed that the world provided an equal opportunity to all, it was cured by a great short novel - Nathanial West's A Cool Million.

However, I now feel that it is better to accept reality rather than create policies on wishful thinking. For example, in education, there is one advantage of the elite universities which online education may never be able to match - face to face networking.

A very successful university would offer the possibility of smart people networking with the children of the power elite.  Let's accept it. The likelihood of the children of the elite becoming the elites of the next generation is very-very high. The scenario is likely to be much worse for India compared to the US and Europe.

So, it seems desirable to introduce reservations for a group that is not bothered about competitive exams as this group has the option of Harvard, Stanford, etc. Interacting with them is likely to increase the chances of upward mobility for the rest of us.

Likely Best Universities

Since that is not likely to happen, I expect that the great universities in India will be private. Government will have to give flexibility to private institutions for admissions and fees as that may be the only option for increasing capacity.

The smarter among them will be elite, with high fees and endowments. They  will also be the ones with generous scholarships for the exceptional students.

If you were a smart student bursting with ideas, wouldn't you prefer to rub shoulders with the progeny of ....?

Update:  Interesting news!

Oxford University announced Wednesday a £75 million donation from Michael Moritz, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and his wife, Harriet Heyman.

The gift, worth about $115 million, will provide financial assistance to undergraduates from low-income backgrounds. The donation, the biggest grant for student support in the university’s modern history...