Do a 1991 on cricket

August 26, 2007 on 2:51 pm | In Newspapers, Times of India | No Comments

Not unlike other unrepentant fans of Indian cricket, I have been feeling pretty low ever since our ignominious exit from the World Cup. Although we managed to defeat England recently, there is something rotten with our cricket and it lies in the monopoly of our cricket board (BCCI).   I am no cricket expert but I do know something about how organizations work and the damage that monopolies can cause. More...

BCCI is reminiscent of the ugly days of License Raj when you could choose any TV channel as long it was Doordarshan and fly any airline as long as long as it was Indian Airlines. You could queue up and wait forever for a telephone, a gas connection or an Ambassador car. Our lives changed after 1991 because economic reforms brought competition. Waiting lines disappeared, prices came down, quality went up, and service improved. If there is one lesson we have learned as a nation, it is that competition can transform the lives of citizens, producers, and even regulators.

Some areas have not experienced reform, however. One of these is electric power; another is cricket. Like the old department of telecom (DOT), our cricket board is both a player and an umpire. It is the only buyer of cricket talent, the only supplier of matches, the monopoly controller of cricket infrastructure and the sole regulator. Despite its tall talk, BCCI has never bothered to nurture talent. If it had there would be a hundred Kanga Leagues in a hundred Indian towns. BCCI is mainly focused on 11 players for the national team. This is why no one watches Ranji Trophy. Thus, the market for cricket players remains tiny, much as the telephone market was before the reforms. In 1990, there were only 5 million telephones in the whole of India; today there are 200 million, growing by 8 million a month. The old DOT was politicised—you needed a political connection to get a telephone. So is the BCCI, whose corrupt and dysfunctional state cricket associations are run mostly by politicians. With Indian agriculture in deep trouble should the honourable minister, who is the head of BCCI, worry about 11 men in whites? No wonder a nation of a billion people can’t produce a decent cricket team.

Things are about to change, however. A new venture, the Indian Cricket League (ICL), will soon begin playing cricket with six local teams, and this will grow to sixteen in three years. When 176 players play on television night after night, millions of viewers will judge them. Talent will no longer remain hidden. Rishwat and sifarish will not get you selected by state cricket associations. ICL will become a nursery for talent like the professional sports leagues in America and Europe, and India might even field a world beating cricket team soon. BCCI will fight tooth and claw to defend its monopoly, of course, but it will fail in the end. For Subhash Chandra, the man behind ICL, knows how to break monopolies. It was his Zee Televison that broke the Doordarshan’s monopoly in the 1990′s.

India was a sick economy in 1991. It took the medicine of competition and went on to become the second fastest growing economy in the world. The same could happen to Indian cricket. Competition is like a school in which companies learn to improve. Competition created excellent companies like Infosys, Airtel, Jet Airways, and ICICI Bank. Indian Cricket League could also become a world class brand as international players vie to play in it. So BCCI, don’t play spoilsport. Let’s do a 1991 on Indian cricket.

It’s time to free our schools

August 12, 2007 on 2:44 pm | In Newspapers, Times of India | No Comments

 

A dear friend of mine has grown weary. He runs five schools in the slums of Delhi which provide a fine education to 13,500 poor children with 250 motivated teachers. But his idealism is frayed from fighting the ‘license raj’ for 20 years. He has been unable to gain accreditation for his schools because he is unwilling to bribe. Instead he is humiliated daily as he runs from one official to another. Ironically, ‘license raj’ went away in industry in 1991 but it still thrives in education. You need 11 licenses to run a school and each comes with a bribe. The most egregious one is an Essentiality Certificate by which a bureaucrat decides if your school is ‘essential’. More...

 

The answer to corruption is institutional reform–get rid of licenses and Essentiality Certificates and create massive disincentives against corruption. The new science of sociobiology explains how this works and how to get people to behave honestly. Evolutionary scientists teach us that human beings have evolved through a long struggle in which only the fittest have survived. The fittest are those who pass on their genes. But it is a mistake to believe that life is a tooth and claw struggle where only the selfish survive. Yes, we have evolved from animals—we share 98.6 percent of our genes with chimpanzees—but nature is replete with dharma-like goodness. Wolves and wild dogs bring food back for their young who cannot hunt. Dolphins will help lift an injured companion for hours to help him survive. Blackbirds and thrushes give warning calls when they spot a hawk even if it risks their own lives. Similarly, human parents make huge sacrifices for their children with little expectation of return. So, it is wrong to view nature as an amoral law of the jungle.
  

But how do you get human beings to behave as nicely with strangers as they do with their children? Two weeks ago I wrote in this column about two prisoners who would go free if they cooperated and how dharma-like behaviour emerges from reciprocal altruism. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote that each person ‘learns from experience that if he aided his fellow-men he would receive aid in return’. However, if a person is mean, he will receive ‘tit for tat’ according to the principle of reciprocity. This is sociobiology’s answer to corruption: reciprocate corrupt behaviour with exemplary and quick punishment. Even Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata, who is inclined to turn the other cheek, realizes this and finally declares war on the Kauravas.

 

We have forgotten this lesson in India and this is why Gunnar Myrdal called us a ‘soft state’. Our idealistic approach to labour prevents quick punishment of the guilty. We have all the laws in place but our administrative processes are so ‘soft’ that they allow both the bribe taker and giver to get away, and this in turn sends a signal that corruption pays. Western countries were able to eliminate corruption because they punished it ruthlessly at various moments in their history. The message, ‘corruption does not pay’, became encoded in their culture, and their citizens over time acquired virtuous habits.

 

The answer to my friend’s problem is thus two-fold: first, liberalize and get rid of most licenses in education. If you do this, honest professionals will start good schools. More schools will mean more competition and this will improve quality all round, and good schools will drive out bad schools. Second, bribe-taking bureaucrats will behave decently if you vigorously inflict massive, rapid punishment on the guilty in accordance with sociobiology’s principle of reciprocity.  

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