Februari 18, 2017
>>commentator: thanks everyone for comingtoday and for dialing in. today we have the next installment in the authors@google seriesand i'm very pleased to present angela saini. angela is an award winning science journalistwho writes for the new scientist, wide, and gq. she's also a regular reporter for thebbc including the digital planet program. "geek nation" is her first book. it's justbeen released to great reviews in europe. it is coming out in asia next week, and wejust found out that it's gone to number four in the india bestsellers list today even pre-releaseso. it's coming out in the u.s. shortly but if you didn't pick up the book on the wayin, you can pick one up amazon or on the kindle. angela's based in london but she's flown infrom new york to be with us today. so thank
you very much for coming. without furtherado, angela saini. [applause] >>angela siani: this is a really small audiencebut i'm cheered by the fact that millions of youtube listeners will be watching it.yes. my book launched a month ago and i have donequite a few talks since then but never to a very techy audience. so if this way belowyour i.q. level, please tell me and i'll speed it up and i'll find something more interestingto talk about. i didn't really know what to talk about. "geeknation covers" so many themes. each chapter is a self contained story in its own rightand there's an overarching narrative that
goes on top of it. so it's very difficultto pick out stories and have them make sense or pick out things and have them make sense. but one of the things that people always sayto me especially if they've visited india or they've lived in india, is, "india is sucha poor country. how is it possible that this could be a nation of geeks? how can it bepossible that you are calling it an aspiring scientific superpower? there's a huge paradoxthere." so that's what i want to talk about today and i want to try and communicate toyou this idea that even though india is poor and has high rates of illiteracy and pooreducation, it can still have the potential of entering the ranks of a scientific giant.
and, also at the same time, my book doesn'thave any pictures in it and people have said they would love to be able to see picturesof the places i'm describing so that's -- i'm gonna give you a chance to have a look atsome of the places that i talk about. so there is this weird thing that india isthis eleventh largest economy and yet it is still, it still has very high rates of illiteracy.so it actually has more illiterate adults than there are people in the u.s. which kindof puts that in perspective, while at the same time having this huge population of scientistsand engineers. so i wanted to start by putting some kindof perspective for you on the culture, the culture of geekiness that i believe existsin india. so the picture on the slide right
now is of viswanathan anand who is an indianchess champion, actually world chess champion. and india loves chess. it has this huge passionfor chess and so i want to start just by reading an extract from the beginning of the bookin chapter 1 where i go to this chess tournament in delhi and i try to figure out why it isthat indian's love chess so much. "so the country is ranked fourth globallyin the sport and chess players insist it is a sport above the united states which is ninth."which gives you some perspective on how brilliant india really is at chess. "but there's something more unusual aboutthis scene in the chess tournament. generally india is not a sporting nation. in fact apartfrom cricket and a handful of other games,
chess is a rare exception in a land that hasone of the worst sporting records of anywhere in the world. take the olympics, for example. in the historyof the modern games the united states has won 2,549 medals. great britain has won 737,and china 429. even the small eastern european nation of belarus has taken home 73. but youhave to scroll almost to the bottom of the league tables to find india. it sits justabove the desolate central asian republic of mongolia and just below slovakia. in thewhole of the olympics history, india has won only 20 medals. given the country's vast population,it's a mystery that's confused sports writers for decades.
so a few years ago, two u.s. researchers,anirudh krishna from the stanford institute of public policy at duke university and erichaglund from the congressional hunger center decided to investigate. a country of morethan a billion people like india they calculated should have won 157 medals at the 2004 olympicgames. but, of course, this fails to take into account that elite sports are expensive,ruling out millions of indians who would never have a hope of becoming professional athletes. wealth and size aren't the only things thatdetermine olympic success either. there's also the general level of education, people'shealth, and how close they live to sporting facilities. so the researchers crunched thenumbers again. taking into account the myriad
factors that determine sporting success, theycame up with a formal conservative estimate. india should have won around 14 medals atthe 2004 olympic games they said." does anyone know how many they actually won? [pause] it was one. >>voice in audience: [unintelligible] "and in fact no other nation in their studyhad such a huge gap between its predicted medal count and the actual total. 'india didnot and does not have a sporting culture,' the veteran indian sports columnist rohitbrijnath explains to me frankly. today he
works with the straits times newspaper insingapore after the indian sports magazine he was writing for closed down. 'personallyone of the things i always felt as a sports writer was a lack of drive among many athletes.i can't understand it. it is much better now but earlier you only found that drive hereand there in exceptions like the great 400 meter runner of the 1960's milkha singh whoused to boast that he trained so hard that he used to pee blood. my theory and it's justmine' he adds 'is that we're better suited to hand eye sports like shooting or billiardsor archery or thinking sports like chess. i turned to radisham tuari, a 64 year oldinternational arbiter for the world chess association, for his opinion. he's been playingthis game for 40 years. watching the players
on the table next to us, he ponders the questionfor awhile. 'indians well basically they have a good liking for brainy games,' he announcesat last rolling each r with his tongue. 'yes, and we are good at brainy things,' he continues.'brain makes us supreme.'" that kind of sums up the attitude that indianshave to science and technology and academic pursuits. this idea that sport, physical sport,isn't really necessary in order to move the nation forward even though it might be a niceindicator of a kind of show of how much of a superpower a country is, but what reallywill take them forward is academic games: chess and if you look at the olympiads whichunlike the olympics are a kind of a academic contest that happen around the world amongstudents, india actually does really well.
it's one of the champions in that. and so one of the things i wanted to figureout when i wrote "geek nation" was where does this apparent love of brainy games comes from?why india? and why asia as well? india actually has a very long scientifichistory. i'm just gonna give you a quick, really quick overview now. india has a verylong scientific history as well as having some of the world's leading philosophers twothousand, one thousand years ago. it was the place where the zero was invented which youguys will probably know is a linchpin of modern mathematics, it's very important to modernmaths. it was also a big center of philosophy. the picture on the screen right now is ofthe bakhshali manuscript which is the oldest
scientific text ever found in asia and itwas found in a farm in what is now pakistan but obviously used to be india once. and ispent a really long time when i was there trying to dig behind the history. there'snot that much of it in the book, but just out of personal interest, i really wantedto figure out where are these texts and where do they lie. a lot of them have been destroyedover the years. and the bakhshali manuscript oddly turned out not to be in india anymoreat all. one hundred years ago it was moved to oxford which is where i studied so i hadto go back to the uk in order to see it. and very kindly the library at my old collegelet me in and let me see the manuscript. it's beautiful. what you can see here is exactlywhat it looks like, this kind of faded palm
leaf manuscript, a little shred. but you cansee, not so much on this one but on the shred that i saw you can see numbers in columnsand little groupings everywhere and different signs, which just goes to show that beforethe west had even encountered these quite sophisticated mathematical ideas and scientificideas, countries like india and china already had them. the problem was, just like the bakhshalimanuscript, they all moved west and they didn't stay in the east and the east didn't reallytake advantage of them like they could have, and science and technology instead rose inthe west which is why we have the situation that we have now. india never went through an enlightenmentlike europe did. it never went through a renaissance
like europe did. and it wasn't india thattook advantage of advances, those early advances in science and tech. it was a royal societyin london that was one of the places that became the arena for the development of modernscience as we understand it today. so this idea that you can make a hypothesis, testit empirically, and then subject it to peer review, which is what we think of sciencenow, that was not what science looked like a thousand, two thousand years ago. so india kind of exists in this strange scientificlimbo because it hasn't completely separated these ideas of the past with modern science.it is re [bad audio] pseudoscience and astrology and homeopathy and ideas that in the westwhere we've ditched to some extent or at least
we don't treat them like we treat modern science.in india, they sit almost side by side. so, for example, i sent to the indian sciencecongress last year in january which is the biggest scientific meeting in india and theprime minister comes, lots of ministers. and in the exhibition hall, there were pamphletson vedic science and vedic science is a type of religious, hindu religious science andastrology and there were panels on homeopathy. so there is this, it does exist in this strangelimbo and it's been difficult to get out of it because that renaissance period never happened,but they have tried. and so now i want to go much forward in timeand back about 60 years when india became independent from the british.
so india's first prime minister, after thecountry became independent from the british in 1947, was jawaharlal nehru. and these days,we always think of nehru as this kind of charismatic, cool leader who was a bit of a ladies' manand built this entire nation from scratch after the british left india. but he was alsoa geek in his own right. he studied natural sciences at cambridge and when he became primeminister of india, he had seen what had happened in the u.s. and he'd seen what happened inthe soviet union and said to himself, "i want a part of that for india. science and technologyis the way we are going to grow this country. and we have to do it not just by investingin science and tech but also by making the population more rational." so it was almosta call to enlightenment -- not quite because
it was many hundreds of years later. but hislegacy was so huge that if you look at the indian constitution now, it says on the slide,"one of the fundamental duties of an indian citizen is to develop the scientific temper,humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and reform," which is unique in constitutions around theworld. we can't even imagine that now, that all those decades ago, indian leaders wouldhave looked at the country and said, "this is a birthplace of four major world religions,a very spiritual nation, yet we have to make the country more rational and logical in theway it thinks. even if you're not a scientist in your everyday life, we want you to be morelogical." so nehru carried this kind of legacy forwardand it was a button that was picked up by
subsequent leaders, every single one. so hefounded these huge indian institutes of technology which today many of the people who graduatedfrom there in 1970s and 1980s have come to silicon valley and san francisco, have setup huge firms. so sun microsystems, for example, was founded by vinod khosla who's an iit graduate.and many of india's it leaders and politicians, technocrats, are iit graduates. he also foundednuclear power stations, hydroelectric dams; he invested in labs and research facilities.so he really laid or helped to lay the foundation for what we now think of as more of a nationof geeks. but then the question is, given this kindof geeky culture that exists and given this investment on the government's side into scienceand technology, what exactly today are we
seeing in terms of results? so how far isindia really at becoming a scientific superpower? that was a big question for me. i'm a, i meani'm a science journalist, i work mainly in the uk, and i was skeptical when i went toindia because a lot of people have said to me, "you won't even find enough examples oforiginal indian science to fill your book. there's not much going on there." so one of the first things i did when i landedin new delhi, that was in the winter of 2009, was i knew the first thing had to be thati had to visit one of these indian institutes of technology to see what they're like onthe inside. are they really these hotbeds of exciting innovation or are they just perpetuatingthe stereotype that indian engineers are kind
of geeky, drone-like, and a bit boring anddull? so the picture on the slide here is insidethe geek factory, the indian institute of technology in delhi. the photographs thatyou're going to see now, the next three slides were taken by tom parker who is a conde nastphotographer. i did a piece for gq at the same time as visiting the iit and these arepictures that he took. and they're a perfect glimpse into how these places look. this especially: it's a dusty window or aboard where a guy is writing on and you can see a kind of shabby lecture theater in thebackground, and that's exactly what this place is like. they're really shabby. i was kindof disappointed at turning up to this, what
is meant to be the most elite engineeringcollege in the whole of india, and it didn't have air conditioning in most of the lecturetheaters which meant that in the summer, these kids boil to death and yet they still haveto turn up to lectures. and worse than that, worse than the shabbinessand the old fashioned lecture theaters and the lack of air conditioning, there reallydidn't seem to be, on the surface at least, any kind of spirits of creativity. i meani studied engineering and when i was there, one of my classmates built a computer in hisspare time. when i was a kid, i used to build model rockets and engineers are natural tinkerersand there didn't seem to be this quality among the indian, young indian engineers that iwas meeting at the indian institute of technology.
and that kind of disappointed me, althoughit did reinforce the stereotype and it did confirm it. so i tried to figure out, why is it? why isit that these kids choose to do engineering and yet they don't seem to have a passionfor it? and part of the reason is that the education system is so competitive. so in 2009, almost half a million indian studentssat the engineering college entrance exams and only 10,000 of them got a place, whichjust goes to show -- that's harder to get into than harvard, oxford, cambridge, anyof the big universities in the west -- which just goes to show how difficult and competitivethese places are. and so in order to win a
place like that, in order to pass the exams,these kids spend every evening and every weekend in coaching classes. so almost all the studentsat this indian institute of technology will have been coached almost entirely throughtheir teenage years and by the time they get to college, they're burnt out, understandably.that passion has been sucked out of them, if you like. they're literally spending theirchildhoods cramming for these exams. and this, the picture on the slide right nowis of a kid called nishant ranka. he's 22 years old, an engineering student, and hesaid to me, "when i went to the uk and saw people shut their shops at five o'clock, icouldn't understand it. here they're open late into the night. indians work a lot, lotharder than europeans and americans." and
he told me that he was coached before he cameto college for three hours a day as well as the nine hours he would study anyway at schoolto make sure he passed the exams. and the pressure is so immense that the nationalcrime records bureau which keeps a check of suicides, the suicide rate across india, in2008, which is their most recent figure, more than 2,000 students across india committedsuicide because of the pressure of exams and the fear that they would fail. so this, the growth in it has lead to thedemand for engineers, has led to thousands more kids wanting to go to college to studyengineering, but has also lead in turn to this kind of [bad audio] is stifled becauseof the competition and because it's so difficult
to get into these places. but that is changing,and it was only after spending many weeks there that i noticed how these tiny littleshoots of innovation are coming up now. so the next slide is of, is still inside theindian institute of technology. in 1991, so when nehru became prime minister of indiahe was very much a socialist. he believed that india had to be self sufficient, hadto do everything itself. he didn't believe in foreign imports, not only of objects butalso ideas. in 1991, that began to change; india liberalized its economy. i'm sorry thisis a really potted history, it's really quick [laughs] and i hope you're keeping up withit. so in 1991, the economy liberalized. mtv camein, coca-cola came in, but also with that
was this kind of influx of new ideas, foreignideas. it was easier to travel. everybody saw more of the world, and this new generationcame up. a guy at tata consultancy services which is one of indian's big three it firmscalled it "generation why." so not generation xy but generation w-h-y, the first generationpost-liberalization who are willing to question and not just do rote learning or not justcram for exams but think outside the box a bit. and at the iit in delhi, i wanted to findevidence of that and luckily, fortunately i did. it's beneath the surface and it's onlyjust beginning to happen now which makes sense if you think about it because the 22 yearolds of now are the ones who have grown up
in this post-liberalization age, post-1991. so the student in the slide right now tookpart in a contest called the rubicon which is a big pan-asian event where students haveto come together and build a robot that can do one specific human task. so things likethis are happening. there's also this new group on campus called "technocracy" whichin their spare time they're learning things like matlab which is a venturing programminglanguage and they're learning to build microprocessors. so there's tiny, creative shoots that arecoming up right now. it's very small and in the six months i spent researching this book,i did find tiny examples of this innovation happening all over india, but it's very smalland it's very much at the beginning of a revolution,
if you like. and i think the reason we still carry thestereotype that we do about the indian engineers reminds me a lot of how we saw japan in the1970s, 1960s and 70s: that here is this country that is really good at copying what otherpeople are doing, but not so good at coming up with its own ideas. and india is in thatstate now, but just crossing the line in the same way that japan did. so these kids whoare now graduating, who have only lived in a liberalized india, are going to be the onesthat think outside the box and create this new innovative society -- the kind of societythat you have in san francisco and silicon valley that is truly scientific and creative.
so what are they actually achieving in scientificterms? now given that this generation hasn't completely come of age yet, it's a bit difficult,but one example that i talk about in the book is tuberculosis. so research into tuberculosisis quite wide spread in india. it's a disease that kills two indians every three minutes.so it's incredibly deadly, incredibly contagious. in the west, we haven't heard of it so muchor it's not so prevalent just because it's almost been eradicated here. and it is a functionof poverty. it's a function of poor health and poor diet and low immunity, and in india,it's a huge problem. the picture on the slide right now is of atuberculosis clinic in mumbai and a poor guy being, having his chest examined by a doctor.now i didn't go to mumbai. i actually went
to chennai to visit some tb hospitals. andchennai, if you don't know already, is india's medical capital. it's so great at medicine.it has some of the best hospitals in the world, so good in fact that medical tourists go fromthe west to have their hips replaced and kidneys replaced there at rock bottom prices, andthey can stay in a fancy hotel while they're doing it. but of course that's not where thepoor go. the poor end up in places like this and they're the majority. so here is a deadly disease killing millionsof indians and millions in the developing world. western pharmaceutical companies haven'tcome up with a cure for tb in 40 years, a new treatment in 40 years, which means thatif you have tb, you need to take a cocktail
of drugs for six months in order to fix itand even then, you're not guaranteed of not being contagious. and while you are contagious,the chances are you will infect many dozens of people around you. so the reason that big pharma don't investin tb is like i said it's not a disease prevalent in the west, there's not that much money forit. but in india, what they're doing is all these disparate researchers with very small,with a very small amount of resources and in very ramshackle labs, are trying to workon it. so i visited one researcher, for example, in chennai who has a lab that's so unbiosafe,has such poor resources, that you can't even work on the tb bacterium itself because it'stoo dangerous. she has to work on e. coli
which is the closest to tb that she can getand do studies on safely for her team. so what's the solution? given that you haveall these poor but willing researchers all over india working on this drug, on this bugand trying to come up with a solution and yet they don't have the resources of big pharma.and this is what may be the solution. it's the open source drug discovery project andit's run out of delhi. it's, the government funds it, the indian government funds it partlywith a very, when you compare it to how much it would cost big pharma to produce a drugfor tb, a fraction of the cost. and what they're essentially doing, they call it science 2.0and what they're essentially doing is collecting all the tb research from all over the countryand putting it online and trying to make sense
of it in a way that might help lead to a tbdrug later down the line. one of the things that they're trying to dois annotate the tb genome, and if anyone knows, this is a long process. it's basically explaininghow the tb genome works and how it's built and it can take many months to do it. butgiven that they had all these researchers, disparate researchers the osdd team got togetherand said, "how about if we ask indian students to each take a small section of the genomeand annotate it?" so that's what they did. they got thousands of students from all overthe country, obviously post-grad and qualified students because it's not an easy, it's aspecialized job. and yet because of indian's vast geeky manpower, they can do this. andthey got them all together and within a few
months they had annotated the genome, whichis incredibly quick. they still have to verify it and check it and make sure that it's allfine, but as a model for doing very fast biology it's incredibly efficient. and companies have been so excited about it.one indian it company, emphasis, has offered to give their expertise for free. so they'reoffering to design a semantic web platform where all this research can be made senseof so that they can use it to develop a new drug. and they're fairly confident they willdevelop a new drug out of it. so when i met the team, which was last spring,2,700 people in india and overseas had registered to be part of the group. and when i was writingout the chapter -- from 53 different countries,
when i was writing up the chapter a few monthslater that had gone up to 3,800 in 93 countries. so if you look at this, india is a poor countryand yet in an innovative way, it's overcoming the fact that it has resource shortfalls bytaking advantage of its huge geeky manpower and coming up with alternatives. this is completelyantithetical to the way science works. science, especially pharmaceutical science,is about credit. it's about keeping research maintained within a small company or a smallgroup so that you can make sure that you own it at the end. and yet, these thousands ofscientists are willing to give up their credit or share their credit, dilute it and worktogether in order to come up to a solution to a problem like this. science isn't donethis way and it's interesting and i think
it shows a measure of innovation in indiathat they came up with a solution like this and that it is working. and it's not just pharmaceuticals or obviousareas like biological research or medicine where things like this are happening. thegovernment, in the vein of nehru's vision for india to be a more scientific society,are also trying to harness that geeky manpower to improve the country as a whole. and toillustrate that, i want to read another extract from the book. this is the last one. it'sfrom a chapter called "geeks rule" and it's about a city being built in the western ghats.there's a picture of the western ghats behind me. this an enormous range of hills just afew hours' drive from pune -- that's the nearest
city -- but quite isolated, very few peoplelive there. "so the ground beneath our feet is alwaysmoving. two hundred million years ago south america, africa, india, australia, and antarcticaweren't where they are now but were part of one enormous supercontinent that spanned thehemisphere. the split happened around thirty million years later, after which they graduallydrifted into positions they occupy today. when this violent breakup happened, giganticvolcanic ranges burst through the crust while vast new oceans filled the gaps that the shiftingcontinents left behind. the earth looked like a pie that had been torn into slices. at itsedges, the land buckled and creased. in the north of india, the himalayas were createdand when indian's west coast finally broke
free from the island of madagascar, anotherone of these geological creases became the western ghats. today, this 1,600 kilometer stretch of highhills, blanketed in forest, is one of the most remote places in the world. there areat least 5,000 different types of flowers. elephants, snakes, tigers, and cave bats alllive here, secluded from the rest of india. zoologists who have occasionally venturedinto the ghats have found new species by the handful. one time they discovered a dozenmulti-colored types of frog, a species that was thought to have been extinct for a century.the mountainous territory is inhospitable. the second i cross into it civilization disappears.it's eerily silent in every direction, save
a cry from the odd makak. and yet here in the middle of the westernghats, in what can reasonably be called 'nowhere' i descend into a steep valley and find myselfin one of the most advanced cities on earth. i arrive in the evening, just in time to catchdinner at one of the first restaurants in this half built metropolis. it's an americanstyle diner and i'm their only customer. there are pictures of lucille ball and betty boopon the walls and the floor is covered in black and white checkerboard tiles. when they bring my food, they slide bottlesof french's yellow mustard and heinz tomato ketchup onto the countertop of my red leatherbooth. this could be new york in the 1950s.
but this isn't the twilight zone, this isa city of lavasa. i first read about it in an advertisementin an in-flight magazine and became intrigued by what the advert claimed would be a metropolisgoverned mainly by machines. a bank of centralized computers, i read, will control everythinghere from household security to the transport network. it's a half billion dollar projectto build from scratch an urban dream in the middle of the mountains. even the roads leadinghere have had to be carved out of the hills. it's the biggest thing to happen to the westernghats since the cretaceous period." so you can imagine how weird it was for meto turn up, to drive for two hours in the night and then turn up in the middle of ahill and be eating omelets in an american
diner [laughs] with pitch black all aroundme and nobody there because the workers had gone home and nobody has moved into the cityyet. so the interesting thing about this place,like i said, is that it will be electronically governed -- that's the aim. it's completelybeing built from scratch. so what they've done is during the construction they've mappedeverything in layers. so everything from the water pipes to where the houses are, the foundations,the broadband, everything has been designed so that if there's a fault, they'll know exactlywhere it is and they can go and fix it immediately. and every house and apartment in this complex,and i'll show you the complex here -- this is a picture of the promenade at lavasa. theamerican diner is near the end. this is the
only bit that was actually complete when igot there. so you can imagine just this and then hills all around it. every apartment in there will have a kioskwhere even if you don't have access to the internet or your own computer, you'll be ableto use this kiosk to pay all your bills, make complaints if you have to, communicate withother residents. it's an internet for the entire city. and what the temporary managertold me -- they're going to elect a mayor once the city gets running -- but what thetemporary manager told me was that this city will, the aim is to have as few people runningit as possible. essentially it will run itself. the geeks will rule, or the technology willrule.
but then again, this is a private development.it's really expensive to stay here. the houses have almost all been sold now i think, butthe population is capped at 300,000 and if you want to live there then you have to paya high price. so a lot of the people who have bought houses i understand, are actors andactresses and it moguls and stuff. but the principles that you can see here arebeing rolled out across the whole of india by the indian government. so exactly the samekind of thing is happening all over the country. if you've ever been to india, you'll knowthat it has very high levels of corruption and an incredibly frustrating bureaucracy.it holds up everything. it actually cuts to the heart of how scientists work because thecorruption even travels as far as the university
level. so professors will get promoted becauseof nepotism sometimes rather than actual merit. so in order for india to be a smoother society,in order for it to be any kind of superpower let alone scientific one, it needs to solvethis problem of a weak bureaucracy and corruption. and, of course, because it is a nation ofgeeks, i think, they're digitizing everything and that's their way of doing it -- geek governmentjust like in lavasa. so since the early 1990s, there've been thesehuge state run attempts to move government records online. this has happened all overthe world for sure. in india, though, it's happening in such a huge way, in a way thatstunned even me. so things like land records, birth records, birth certificates, death certificates,are all going online and it means you can
access them more easily. and this is whereit's being masterminded. so the picture on the screen right now isof electronics niketan which is the it ministry of india in delhi. "electronics niketan" meansan electronics house, so it's literally electronics house. i'm not a big fan of indian government ministries.every time i've gone to one, it's been really frustrating. you turn up. usually they'renot there or they knock off at like three o'clock so you miss them, huge lunch breaks.i went to the health ministry many years ago to do a story and while i was there waitingfor an official, who by the way gave me no useful information, i got bitten by a poisonousspider on my foot and my foot swelled up like
a sweet potato which is ironic given thatwas the health ministry. so i was kind of scared. i was worried aboutgoing to this building and i left with plenty of time, early appointment to make sure thatthey would see me. and it surprised me because it was like no ministry i'd ever been to.i was shown in immediately. this place is run like a well oiled machine. the secondi got there, i was told that most of the people working there, or at least in the unit thati was seeing, actually came from the private sector. so they'd worked in the indian itindustry and now they wanted to help the government make the country more streamlined and helpthe bureaucracy, which is why they've gone to work in this place. and it was incredible.they answered all my questions straight away.
so one of the things they're doing in thisbuilding is monitoring projects like lavasa, but also other examples of electronic governanceall over the country being run on the state level to see where the best practice is. andwhat they've come up with is a scheme very much like in the houses of lavasa, you'llhave those kiosks. they're introducing kiosks like that at the block level all across india.so a block is about five or six villages, half a dozen villages. so every block willhave a kiosk operated by, in some states, by women. it takes very little skill to beable to operate a kiosk like that. and you'll be able to pay all your bills there, everything. so i visited, they're around i think halfwaythrough the scheme and, at the moment, they're
trying to get it into the very furthest reaches.so there are some islands and there are some states in the northeast that are very remoteand inhospitable. so they're working on that right now. but i went to visit one of the kiosks in jaipur,which is a city in rajasthan on the tourist trail. and i was a bit skeptical 'cause i'vegrown up in britain where it projects always seem doomed to failure [laughs]. they neverwork and they've cost millions of pounds and yet they never work. and i got to this kiosk. it was a sunday andi expected there to be huge queues or if not huge queues, then nobody using it or reallybad records. and it turned out that already
that sunday hundreds of people across thestate had already used the kiosks near them to pay their bills. i saw one guy paying threedifferent bills: so a power bill, a mobile bill, and a landline bill, i think it was,in minutes. and you can't do that. you can't even do that in britain. you can't go to oneplace and pay all your bills in one place. so it is quite incredible what they've managedto achieve. there aren't that many stats about how efficientthis program is yet because it's very early days. but in 2008, the ministry of it heredid a survey that found that five out of the ten states that had computerized their landrecords by 2008 -- so that's just land records which are the most contentious documents inindia, by the way. many civil court suits
are about land records. bribes in those stateshad reduced, had either reduced significantly or been completely eliminated. now when you take into account that, accordingto transparency international, all the households below the poverty line in india, so theseare poor households in india, together pay more than $200 million in bribes every year,the potential for that is huge. if it works, then it's huge. and i'm not saying that itwill work, but it's exciting that india is taking those steps and making those advancesand making the investment to make it work. the thing that's making it work, of course,is that it has the geeky manpower. it's built up an expertise in doing western it outsourcingprojects to other governments, learned those
lessons, and brought them back and are nowhaving those same people run the projects themselves. so i'm nearly done. the final thought i just want to leave youwith is that india, while india might not, if you look at the stats, if you look at thefacts and figures, while it may not be making a huge impact on scientific output at themoment, i think india's proportion of scientific output is something as a share of the globe'sis something like three percent at the moment; so not incredibly encouraging. it is on thecusp of this revolution that's happening. they're trying to solve the problems, theunderlying problems, that will help the country
become a scientific superpower in the future.they're creating this legion of geeks that are going to help move that forward and ireally think this is what will give india its edge in the next 10 or 20 years. so if you look at scientific publications,yes india is very low down. but when you think that japan, germany, britain, and france havebecome steadily less productive since 2000 as a share of the world's output, if you lookat the graph, india's output has risen every single year like china's, although not atthe same rate as china's. in 2008, it published 53 percent more scientific papers than onaverage in each of the five years that went before. so it's ramping up its investmentquite incredibly.
the biggest difference i think will be madeby the fact that the indian government is planning to ramp up its proportion of gdpspending on r & d. so if you look at developed countries and developing countries, developedcountries tend to spend around two percent of gdp on r & d, so that includes, japan actuallyspends a lot more than that, u.s. spends about that, uk spends about that. whereas countrieslike brazil and china and south africa -- china is increasing but brazil and south africaand india tend to spend around one percent. the government has made a commitment to enterthat two percent category. i can't say when that will happen; they were hoping it wouldhappen by next year. that's unlikely, but it will happen soon.
the picture on the slide is of manmohan singhdoing a v sign, but i chose it because it was a two, two percent. [laughs] [laughter] although i'm sure that's not why he meantwhen he did that. he announced last year actually that 2012would be india's year of science which is great for the book, but i think also greatfor india. and so finally -- this is a very almost finalslide -- i love space rockets and it doesn't really serve a purpose but i wanted to showyou two pictures of space rockets quickly. [laughs]
the first is, i went to the indian space researchorganization in the book and i saw a rocket launch in south india which was just incredible-- not of a rocket this scale. but the first is a polar satellite launch vehicle whichis what carried india's first lunar probe a couple of years ago which was a pretty goodsuccess. and india's plan now is to send their first astronaut into space in 2015, whichis something in terms of individual nations only three nations have done -- that's china,u.s., and the soviet union. and that astronaut or those astronauts will go up in a rocketsomething like this which is a geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle. it'll probably bea bit bigger than that and so they're working on that now, working on the technology justnot, not just the rocket technology but also
making these things habitable which is actuallya huge scientific challenge. and i think this demonstrates in terms ofspace especially, demonstrate india's raw ambition when it comes to science and thateven though people might look at india and say, "why is this poor country investing somuch in science and tech?" it is playing the long game, it is thinking about the far, farfuture -- [pause[ and that's it. thank you. are there any questions?
yeah. >>male #1: [unintelligible] >>angela saini: oh yeah we need the microphonefor the question. >>male #1: thank you for coming. i had a couplequestions sort of related to if there's any signs of resistance or push back ? >>angela saini: yeah. >>male #1: to this movement. for example whenyou were speaking of lavasa ? >>male #1: and the sort of wide spread e-governmentproposals and so forth -- >>angela saini: um-hum.
>>male #1: i think that's fantastic -- >>male #1: i think that's wonderful to makepeople's lives more efficient and so forth. but i'm also thinking there's somebody outthere thinking, "wow, that's a bureaucrat that's not getting paid." >>angela saini: [laughs] >>male #1: those are bribes i'm not getting. >>male #1: and i should, if i can, derailthis as soon as possible." >>male #1: so as an economic reason for pushback -- and the other is sort a more cultural one and you can sort of see that here in theunited states where there's sort of the haves
and the have nots -- >>male #1: of technological progress -- >>male #1: and so forth and that has causedsomething of a religious resurgence here in the united -- >>male #1: states and other places and obviouslyas you mentioned india already has this great, impressive religious history -- >>male #1: and so i mean -- so one questionis -- is this, is this revolution going to be equally distributed -- >>male #1: both geographically, politically,and culturally and so forth? and then again
sort of a general question about have youseen any signs of push back ? >>male #1: sort of on these movement forward. >>angela saini: yeah, actually about a thirdof the book is about the resistance from religious groups and activists. there are many activistsin india who believe that the country, like mahatma gandhi dreamed of it, would alwaysbe this nation of farmers, that it would always be largely agricultural place, which is completelyat odds with this idea that you should industrialize and it should become this nation of geeks.and for them it will always be a nation of farmers, i think. so yeah, that resistancedoes exist. in terms of the bribes, i mean the peoplewho take the bribes i think will be quite
stupid to then say, "no. we want our bribesplease don't do this." [laughs] that would be quite odd, but i'm sure thatthere are even in these big bureaucratic it projects, people skimming off the top becausethat's the nature in places like this, and i'm sure that's the nature in big it projectsall over the world. there's always someone skimming off the top. but at the same time, if it increases transparency,which is what it's doing and if reduces corruption and bureaucracy because it reduces that distancebetween the person and the government and the modes for those people to come in andbecome middlemen -- which they had before and because of the internet can't -- theni think it will at least go some way to solving
that problem for sure. what was your other question? was there anotherquestion? >>male #1: cultural aspects. >>angela saini: there are, yeah. so in thebook i do give example. i mean the example i use in the book is of the debate over gmfood. so in the u.s. we, gm food is very widely grown. in europe, there's a huge resistanceto it. and in india, it's kind of half and half. so they grow bt cotton at the momentwhich is resistance to boll worm and they're trying to introduce their first bt food cropwhich is an aubergine brinjal, an eggplant. and there's been huge resistance to it partlybecause of activists, partly because of the
way it's being done and it's thought to havebeen controlled by commercial interests. so whenever a new technology comes in, i thinkpeople feel a bit reluctant about it. but india and i think a lot of asia actually issurprisingly excited about the new. so i gave a talk in new york the other dayand there was someone from south korea in the audience. and all the way through theywere nodding furiously, they were like, "yeah, my parents made me play chess as well -- and it was exactly like that in korea." andyeah there is, i mean in the west or at least in britain where i've grown up, there is thiskind of skepticism and fear of new things and technology. whereas in india not so muchi think people embrace it which is exciting.
>>male #2: how are the graduate research universitiesdoing? you mentioned the faculty. are the faculty, the research faculty improving andis india doing anything to help that? certainly the undergraduates coming out of there arefantastic ? >>male #1: but most of the top students don'tgo to there for the ph.d.s -- >>angela saini: no they don't. when i wentto the indian institute of technology, they complained, the dean was complaining thatvery few students stay on to do ph.d.'s and certainly none of the good ones because theycan earn these huge massive salaries working for it companies and multi-nationals. so there'sjust no incentive for them to do that especially since india is not known for research. soeven if you did stay on, the facilities are
so poor and the resources are so poor thatyou couldn't really make a mark. but that is changing. so for example at iit delhi,they're introducing programs now which will help you get funding, if not from the governmentor from the college then from private sources. and providing these kinds of incentives forstudents to stay on and do ph.d.'s. i really hope that happens because that's what youneed to build a truly scientific country and that's where has india suffered all thesegreat undergraduates go to the u.s. and do their ph.d.'s here and contribute to america'sscientific society and not to india's. but i'm convinced that that will change. are we done?
>>commentator: any questions on the vc justbefore we wrap up? no. okay, thanks everyone. thanks very much,angela, for coming. >>angela saini: thank you.
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