‘We make great ideas available to millions of people’

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, an annual four-day residential conclave devoted to “ideas worth spreading”, which concluded in Mysore recently, was held for the first time in India. Chris Anderson, curator of TED, spoke to Sudeshna Chatterjee:

What has taken you so long to reach India?
Apart from one experimental event in Japan 15 years ago, TED has been for most of its history a closed event held annually in California. In 2001, its ownership transferred from its founder into my non-profit foundation (The Sapling Foundation) and we gradually started bringing in a more global roster of speakers. The big shift came in 2006 when we started releasing talks on the Web and discovered that there was a vast global audience excited by this type of content.

But isn’t the Rs 1 lakh entry fee exorbitant in a country like India?
Yes, a lakh is a lot, although it’s one-third the price we charge in California. No one is making a profit at TED. It’s run from a foundation and the fees don’t cover the large costs of putting on an event as ambitious as TED. This conference was subsidised by the foundation because we so badly wanted to come to India. Despite the high price it sold out. We also included 100 fellows, selected from 1,000 applicants, all of whose costs we covered, and a number of discounted educational and non-profit passes. We also streamed four of the sessions on the Web to anyone for free, and will be releasing all the best talks on our website, ted.com, in the coming months.

There will be numerous selforganised events held across India in the coming months under the programme we call TEDx. These will be publicised in due course, and people can find them on http://ted.com/tedx. Typically they will be one-day events held in various cities or universities and targeting a few hundred local knowledge-seekers.

Can you talk about some of the interesting ideas that came up at the Mysore conference?
Pranav Mistry is developing SixthSense, which is a wearable prototype that augments the physical world around us with digital information. Shaffi Mather’s corruption-busting business idea, where he proposes to set up anti-bribe BPOs across India and which will take a fee from the client is both brilliant and courageous. Shashi Tharoor’s views on soft power have been articulated before, but perhaps never in so compelling a way. The philosophy behind TED is ideas have a unique ability to shape the future. By making great ideas available to millions of people on ted.com, we’re helping to accelerate this process. There was the special moment when attendees responded to Sunitha Krishnan’s searing talk on her fight against sex trafficking by committing more than $100,000 in donations on the spot, and by promising jobs for the young women she is rehabilitating.

Invest In The Future

Our children hold the key to our collective good

Shantha Sinha & Karin Hulshof

A child growing up in India today can aspire to be an astronaut sending rockets into space, a cricket batting legend, a government minister, a Bollywood film star or a teacher set to inspire a new generation of children. As the world celebrates the 20^th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) today, India has a lot to be proud of in the strides being made for its children. Home to onefifth of the world’s children, India ratified the CRC in 1992, embracing standards in health care, education and legal, civil and social services.

What difference has the convention made to India? Fewer children under five die as the national mortality rate fell from 117 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 72 in 2007. More children have access to improved drinking water, rising from 62 per cent in 1992-93 to 88 per cent in 2005-06. More girls go to primary school as attendance rates for girls aged between 6 and10 increased from 61 to 81 per cent over the same period. When 12-year-old Rekha Kalindi, from a remote village in the Purulia district of West Bengal, stood up against child marriage she was relying on knowledge gained while attending the National Child Labour Project school run by the government’s labour department to rehabilitate working children and help mainstream them in the education system.

The passage of the Education Bill in Parliament this year, and the prohibition of Child Labour and Child Marriage Acts are prime examples of how the Indian government is championing the rights of the children. Progress has been made towards identifying and legally addressing child protection violations and targeting essential services to marginalised groups and disabled children. The National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights was established by the government in March 2007 and now five state commissions have been added. This year’s roll-out of the Integrated Child Protection Scheme, a programme focusing on transforming legislative commitments into action for child protection, is truly a cause for celebration.

True, many challenges remain. One million newborns die each year during the first month of their lives, another million die between 29 days and five years. These statistics call for ensuring that every child has access to the basic right to survival. Society must save the large number of lives snuffed out within the first few days of life. UNICEF, along with other aid agencies, is closely working with the government to encourage women to have institutional deliveries and ensure both mother and baby receive critical post-natal care for at least 72 hours.

Eliminating malnourishment should be our top priority as it directly contributes to child mortality, school drop-out rates, gender equality and poverty reduction. Almost 55 million children under five in India are underweight for their age. Children who are chronically undernourished before their second birthday are likely to have diminished cognitive and physical development for the rest of their lives. As adults, they are less productive and earn less than their healthy peers and the cycle of undernutrition and poverty repeats itself, generation after generation.

During the South Asian conference on sanitation last year Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that sanitation should be a birthright. Eighty-eight per cent of all diarrhoeacaused deaths in children under five are related to poor water quality, hygiene and sanitation. More than half of India’s population, or 665 million people, practise open defecation. Though India has been able to double the total number of people using improved toilets, from 19 to 38 per cent between 1990 and 2006, further acceleration is needed.

The CRC provides clear parameters on how schools can be childfriendly and now we must make concerted efforts to ensure that every child attends and stays in school. The Right to Education Act is a powerful way forward, placing the obligation on the state that all children receive at least eight years of schooling. But today millions of India’s children are not attending school. Child labour also remains a major area of concern, especially among teenagers in the 14 -18 age bracket who do not have access to education and continue to work in hazardous occupations.

Widespread and entrenched exploitation, gender discrimination and caste bias in India cannot be wished away overnight. The recent global fuel, food and economic crises will certainly affect the country’s social progress, possibly slowing or even stalling recent gains in child survival and education.

We are all aware that rights can be declared and policies formulated, but unless the life of the child in the family and community is improved, all our efforts are meaningless. As common citizens we must pledge not to accept work from children, not tolerate child marriage and ensure all children, especially girls, go to school. India’s children are its future. The rights spelled out in the convention must become a reality for each and every child in this nation.

Sinha is chairperson, National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, and Hulshof is representative, UNICEF India.

Looking ahead with hope

EYE-OPENER

Web sight: A new window to the world

A new content-sharing website has opened up a vista of reading material for the visually impaired

Joeanna Rebello Fernandes | TNN

Through his tapering school years, Moiz Tundawala studied via his brother. The brother would read out texts to him as Moiz—who started to show signs of Retinitis Pigmentosa in his teens and whose sight gradually declined—would commit the lessons to memory. Then Moiz decided to study law, and he had to look for another oral tradition. In 2004, he found JAWS (Job Access With Speech), a text-tospeech software that could read out pages of digital text. But scanning a half-ton textbook requires the patience of Job.

“There are limited institutionalised arrangements for the access of study material for the visually impaired,’’ complains

Moiz. “While NAB (National Association for the Blind) does a good job producing basic level texts and popular literature in Braille and audio books, it falls short when it comes to advanced academic material.’’

The problem of restricted access to reading material for the visually and print-impaired choruses across the developing world. The cataracts of the Indian government have denied this significant population—the 2001 census counted 13 million visually impaired (VI) people—the fundamental right to read. According to NAB, only 30 per cent of the VI go all the way to Standard X.

But corrective efforts are under way. Moiz recently stumbled upon an online social network and content-sharing platform called Bookbole—floated by an Indian social enterprise called Inclusive Planet in collaboration with the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). Bookbole is a clean site designed expressly for the VI, with Accessibility for iPhone and iPod touch—a blind user’s review—topping its ‘most viewed’ list.

The site aims to connect visually and print-impaired (including dyslexic) people around the world and gets them to share their digital archives of class notes, blogs, recipes, articles, audio magazines, theses, sound recordings and e-books. “In three months, Bookbole has managed a 10,000-strong archive with a global member base of 1,000,’’ says Bookbole’s active ally Soner Coban, a blind English Literature graduate from Bosphorus University in Turkey. “In other systems, you have to wait for the administrator to upload books, but BB users can upload what they want and request for what they’d like.’’

“We are trying to connect isolated users and their libraries and enable them to solve one another’s problems,’’ says Rahul Cherian from Chennai, one of the three cofounders of Inclusive Planet.

“A visually impaired person would have accumulated about 30-40 GB of reading material over time through his own efforts,” Cherian says. “By providing a platform for sharing some of this material we’re trying to minimise the duplication of effort.’’ Says Reuben Jacob, co-founder and IT brain of the project, “Not all electronic files are readable by text to speech software. But we have made sure that the semantics of the shared documents on this site are compatible with screen-reading software.’’

NAB has a Talking Books library with 5,000 titles on cassettes and CDs. The VI have to either borrow from the NAB centre itself or request a posted copy. Raman Shankar, project head of Talking Books, says that publishers permit the conversion of their books to audio format on condition that they are only circulated to the blind. While Bookbole currently stipulates that only VI persons join the club and requires new users to indicate this, it doesn’t ask for a sight certificate. “Being global is essential to the way Bookbole works,’’ insists Sachin Malhan, one of the co-founders of Inclusive Planet. “If we can’t connect similarly placed visually impaired in different parts of the world, then the value won’t be created.” It is unfeasible and impractical to create a body to screen the users across the world. Instead,if they receive a copyright-related complaint about a certain file or of misuse of the site, they will remove the content.

Currently the situation is that an overwhelming majority of publishers don’t make books available for the visually and printimpaired, and for the low-earning VI in India audio books are prohibitively priced as it is. So they have little recourse other than to scan or search for e-books on the internet, a move that automatically makes them culpable by myopic copyright laws.

This is why Inclusive Planet, along with non-profits like the CIS, The Daisy Forum of India and EnAble India, has also launched the Indian chapter of the World Blind Union’s Right to Read campaign. It has been pushing for a greater availability of books in accessible formats and an amendment of copyright laws. “We will present a white paper to the HRD ministry at the end of our sixcity Right to Read tour,’’ says Cherian.

SCREEN TIME: Bookbole allows the visually impaired to share notes, photos and even recipes

PRIMARY EDUCATION

EDUCATING Ammi and Abba

The Tanzeem-e-Walidaen works at enlightening Muslim parents as a prelude to schooling their children

Mohammed Wajihuddin | TNN

In an airy first-floor room at suburban Vikhroli, around a dozen middle-aged couples are listening attentively to a bespectacled man holding forth in chaste Urdu. Ibrahim Abedi talks passionately, his speech laced liberally with Quranic commands and couplets of the revered poet Allama Mohammad Iqbal. At the end, he hammers home a basic point: “Don’t let your children go astray. Hand them over to our custody.

No, this isn’t a dharma guru’s discourse to his devoted disciples on parental care. Rather, it’s an adult education class with a difference—one which parents of poor Muslim students attend to equip themselves to deal with the vicissitudes of their first-generation-learner children’s academic lives. Conducted by the Tanzeem-e-Walidaen (Parents’ Association), a group which reaches out to needy children through their parents, its unusual inasmuch as methods go: while many NGOs work directly with disadvantaged children to keep them in class, the Tanzeem first drills some discipline into parents through motivational talks and counselling by clinical psychologists.

“There’s no point spending time and energy on kids whose parents are not motivated,’’ says Abedi, Tanzeem-e-Walidaen’s general secretary. “Since 1997, we have guided over 15,000 students. Around 75% of them have cleared the SSC exams. That means we have substantially checked the drop-out rate among the targeted group.’’

Since the Tanzeem confines its work to parents who send their wards to municipal schools, its volunteers scour civic schools in minority pockets like Bhendi Bazaar, Kurla, Govandi, Mumbra and Bhiwandi. Once the back-benchers are identified, the organisation approaches parents. Why municipal schools? Apart from the concern about poor kids dropping out and “swelling the number of unemployable and unemployed angry youth’’, there’s another reason: a municipal rule says that no child till the fourth grade will be failed, and by the time the children reach fifth grade, many of them are hopelessly unfit to be in higher grades. It is here that the Tanzeem intervenes.

The parents are first told why they need to enroll their kids in special classes conducted by the Tanzeem’s teachers. They are also told that poverty should not be an excuse to take their kids out of school. A few sessions later, parents learn that their seemingly dull kids too could excel if guided properly. Examples of successful people, who also had humble beginnings, are given. Parents are free to voice their doubts and inhibitions, if any. “At our initial meetings, we heard parents complain against teachers who failed their children,” says Ali M Shamsi, the Tanzeem’s president. “We asked the parents to evaluate their own conduct.’’

As a pilot project, the Tanzeem “raided’’ the slums of Kurla, held meetings with the parents and adopted over 200 children, incubating them for five months. “As the word spread, people started coming to us with requests to coach their children beyond the fifth grade as well,” says Sheikh Abdullah, president of the Tanzeem’s Kurla unit. “We didn’t do that but guided them to other organisations which helped them financially.’’

The result has been overwhelming. Kids who didn’t know the three Rs even in the fifth standard are showing rapid progress. “My daughter didn’t even know how to write her name when we brought her here. Now she is in college,’’ says Qamruddin Khan, a factory worker. “My other four kids were also coached and are doing well academically.

Most of the parents are poor— tailors, taxi drivers, labourers at construction sites and factory workers. “I probably wouldn’t have sent my three daughters to college had these people not convinced me. They guided me and my children at the right time,’’ says a visibly obliged Ansar Patel, a BEST employee and father of three. Patel’s elder daughter Sajeda, now a third-year BA student, recalls: “I was very inhibited and couldn’t even go out alone. Their training equipped me with the confidence to do my things on my own.’’

BACK TO SCHOOL Poverty is not an excuse to deny your kids education, parents are told

Soon, the biggest thing since www

The Grid Coming To A Computer Near You

Shobhan Saxena | TNN

CERN (Geneva): With domain names in Hindi, Arabic and Chinese set to become a reality on the web, the pundits in this science hub of Switzerland, where the internet was arguably invented, claim the next giant leap towards internationalisation will be the grid, which is just weeks away from powering up. The grid, made of thousands of desktops, laptops, supercomputers, data vaults, mobile phones, meteorological sensors and telescopes, will start work when proton beams collide in the world’s biggest experiment ever inside a deep tunnel here on the French-Swiss border.

It is a revolution, say scientists of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) because it uses the internet but is not the internet. Using cloud computing, the grid will combine the computing resources of more than 100,000 processors from more than 170 sites in 34 countries and will be accessible to thousands of physicists globally. The scientists claim it will change the way the information superhighway works.

Small computer grids similar to power grids have been in operation for some time, but CERN’s will be the biggest one of them all and will become a reality when its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) becomes operational this month.

Maarten Litmaath, the Dutch physicist who heads CERN’s computing centre, told TOI, “When it begins operation, the LHC will produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes or equivalent to storage capacity of 20 million CDs) of data annually which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyze.”

Grid: The Future of Science
The Web just shares info on computers, the Grid also shares computing power and data storage capacity Scientists can log on anywhere in the world, processing on machines across the planet CERN needs the Grid to store 15 pentabytes — equivalent to a 20-km high stack of CDs Grid computing can help drug discovery by speeding up the computer-based screening and testing process

Grid to be ‘global computer’
Our grid will make it possible for scientists around the world to access this data real time.’’ Till now, a giant grid was considered something of a pipe dream, says Litmaath. Its implications, he says, are enormous. “Imagine several million computers from all over the world, and owned by thousands of different people. And imagine if these PCs, workstations, servers and storage elements can all be connected to form a single, huge and super-powerful computer. This sprawling, global computer is what the grid will be.’’

CERN says it is only right and proper that the giant grid be developed in the place where the world wide web was invented.

Although there are several claimants to the internet’s authorship, it was here that British software whiz Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists set the stage for the internet explosion in 1990. At the time, Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN offered the measured response—“vague but impressive’’—to the scientists’ proposed system that would allow scientists around the world to swap information on research.

It was in that proposal, written in a small room in a CERN building, that the terms “http’’ (global hypertext language) appeared for the first time. A small placard saying ‘The web was invented here’ still hangs on the door of the room where Berners-Lee and the other scientists developed the first blueprint of the internet.

The web changed the world forever and now CERN expects great results from grid computing, which, Litmaath says, will power science around the globe—scientists can share data, data storage space, computing power, and results. Together, researchers can tackle bigger questions than ever before: from disease cures and disaster management to global warming and the mysteries of the universe.

CERN already has at least three centres in India with which it shares data and expertise on a regular basis, something that can only grow exponentially.

In ’06, a test grid analysed 300,000 avian flu drug components

FOR THE RECORD MOHAMED NASHEED ‘Climate change will be an election issue in five years’

Young presidents are in vogue. None more so perhaps than Maldives’ 41-year-old president Mohamed Nasheed, who ended dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s threedecade grip on power. Nasheed, who has long prodded the country’s nascent democratic process, has been to prison 16 times, been tortured twice and remains committed to liberal politics. He’s been in office just over a year and is busy trying to build new institutions to last, even as he tries to save his country from disappearing — literally. If global warming proceeds apace, sea levels around the Maldives will rise 60 cm in the next 50 years, swallowing large tracts of the country, says the president. During a visit to Delhi, he talked climate change and constitutional change to Ranjan Roy. Excerpts from the interview

Are you able to adhere to your roadmap of establishing democracy in Maldives?

Our expectations were a little higher than what we are achieving right now. In terms of institution-building, the judiciary lacks the capacity to deliver. With the first multi-party election, we were able to come up with the first fresh executive. With the first parliamentary elections, we were able to come up with a fresh parliament. But we never had anything fresh in the judiciary, so the judicial system is as it was under the dictatorship.

Do you trust the old judiciary?
I trust them, but the thing is, to my mind, they do not know what is going on. They might, on one fine day, ask the president’s office for instructions on asentence. The next judge might do something more ridiculous against the legislature or the executive, another judge might start giving media interviews.

Do you want a liberal judiciary or a bit of shariah?
We don’t want a mixture of shariah. We are looking at a liberal judiciary. But you have to be mindful that Maldives is a Muslim society. So the shariah and the liberal judiciary aren’t contradictory. Shariah can be as liberal as common law or Roman law. The other area is corruption. I can’t expect people to be completely honest the very next day.

You’ve had personal experience of torture?
I was tortured twice but that was long ago. But we do not want to torture our people. But there will always be some people at the penitentiary who’ll do it.

Should the man you ousted, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, be worried?
We don’t think Gayoom should be worried. But he should take responsibility for his portion and say sorry.

How can India help?
India is already helping. The Prime Minister was very quick to give us a soft loan of $100 million — 50 million in grant and 50 million in loan. So, at least I got three months to sort things out. It gave us that breathing space. India is also very willing to invest heavily in lucrative areas like tourism. India can assist us by building capacity in the judiciary. And India can assist us so much by being the huge example that it is. Maybe others misunderstand India but I don’t because maybe I know India.

On climate change, does Maldives get the sinking feeling that no one is really bothered about the victims?
We need shared responsibility. You can’t ask countries like India to stop consumption. We might be the victims but there are millions and billions of others. I shouldn’t be so selfish to push for that. Countries like India should invest heavily in renewable energy and maintain lower emission levels and higher energy consumption. I think the winners of the 21st century will be those who are bold enough to venture into new technology. We are on the verge of a technological breakthrough, a revolution again that would have more impact than the industrial revolution perhaps.

Do politicians worldwide really care about global warming or are they just protecting their turf?
I don’t think people are still that concerned about it. Countries still don’t have climate change as a major election issue. Until it becomes an election issue, politicians aren’t going to take notice. But it will become one in the next five years. There is a new generation of people growing up for whom climate change is a serious problem. Even as early as next summer, you’ll see huge numbers of people out on the streets, in the same fashion they were out in the 1960s, to save the world. There are narratives about the end of the world in every culture and religion, so here is going to be no backlash against the emergence of climate change as the big issue.

DID YOU KNOW?
Maldives gained independence from Britain on July 26, 1965
It’s the smallest Asian country
At just 4 ft 11 in above sea level, it’s the lowest country on the planet
Its original inhabitants were Buddhist; Islam arrived in 1153

IIT agrees to bare JEE marks, but only just

Insists On Hard Copy That Makes Detecting Anomalies ‘Impossible’ Manoj Mitta | TNN New Delhi: Stung by the exposure of admission anomalies in recent years, the IIT system has come up with an innovative method of blocking transparency even as it agreed to give data under RTI on the marks obtained by the four lakh candidates in this year’s joint entrance examination (JEE). It insisted on giving the data only in the hard copy running into hundreds of thousands of pages rather than in the more convenient form of a CD. The information seeker, Rajeev Kumar, a computer science professor in IIT Kharagpur, is crying foul. For, the hard copy would not only result in a steep increase in the cost of information (running into six figures) but also make it almost impossible for him to detect irregularities in the latest JEE as he did in the three previous ones by analyzing the electronic data that had then by given to him under RTI. As a result of this change in the strategy of the IIT system, central information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi fixed a hearing for November 6 specially to resolve this soft vs hard debate. The hearing follows the unusual reasons given by Gautam Barua, director of IIT Guwahati and overall incharge of JEE 2009, for his failure to comply with the CIC’s disclosure direction passed on July 30. In his first mail to CIC on October 2, Barua said that as there were a number of RTI applications seeking the CD, “we are apprehensive that this request for electronic data is to profit from it by using it for IIT JEE coaching purposes (planning, targeting particular cities, population segments, etc).” The reference to the coaching institutes is reminiscent of the recent controversy over the move to raise the bar on 12th class marks to be eligible for IIT selection. Asserting that IITs had “nothing to hide regarding the results”, Barua said “we are ready to show the running of the software with the original data to the CIC, if it so desires.” As a corollary, Barua made an issue of the fact that Kumar “has not asked to see the data, but he wants an electronic version delivered to him. Why is this so?” Faculty to accept new pay structure The stand-off between the IIT faculty and the government over the “anomalies” in pay structure finally ended on Saturday with the teachers’ body deciding to accept the new package in the “interest” of the institutes, but maintained that concerns still remain. The All India IIT Faculty Federation asked the teachers of the seven IITs to agree to the new pay structure. “We have requested the faculty to accept the pay package in the interest of the IIT system. But we will pursue with the HRD ministry and the board of governors of the IITs on certain issues till they are resolved,” federation president M Thenmozhi said. AGENCIES