In that darkened room in Hyderabad, I could see that the muscular
arms that once smashed a table-tennis ball at blinding speed were
now skeletal. The full head of hair had now only a few strands from
repeated bouts of chemotherapy. Even a slight movement on the bed
made him grimace with pain.
A flurry of email among the Indian Institute of Management alumni
had brought me to Hyderabad that morning. "Professor Iyer is dying
with cancer," announced one mail. "They say there is an experimental
drug that could help; he has ordered it from the US but he has no
money to clear it when it arrives next week."
Ramu Iyer taught computer science at IIM Calcutta in 1969, a year
when Bill Gates was eleven years old and a decade before Intel and
Microsoft, the defining companies of the modern information
technology era, were founded. Many of his students are multi-
millionaires, board members and CEOs of world-scale companies.
"Does it pain much," I asked and immediately felt stupid; of course
it did, I could see the pain in his face. "How is your business," he
asked, pointedly ignoring my question.
We talked for the next few hours about what was going on in the
technology world, his mind eager to keep up-to-date, mine trying to
find an opening in the conversation when I could ask the question
that the IIM alumni had deputed me to ask -- could we help out with
the money needed for his drug?
To ask a professor at whose knee you learned everything that you
know whether he needed the money to buy a drug that might save his
life is a difficult thing to do. What has failed here, you wonder.
The way we have organised Indian society that its teachers live a
life of penury while their students prosper? Our health care system
with its medical insurance schemes that extend to very few? The
callousness of the business world, which, preoccupied with growth
and investment, doesn't ever cast an eye on the fountainheads of
their success: schools and colleges and teachers?
In the Indian system, an IIM professor's salary is fixed through the
Pay Commission, that gigantic exercise that happens once in 10
years, when compensation levels of five million central government
employees are re-set, and 20 million others at state and municipal
levels and government-owned companies and semi-autonomous bodies
like the IIMs and the IITs follow using a similar formula.
It works on an apparently egalitarian principle, a 1:11 ratio for
lowest-level peon to chief secretary and a system of equivalences:
an IIM professor's post is equated to other posts in fisheries,
mines, customs, income tax, defence, All-India Radio, Doordarshan.
Either all get a raise or nobody gets one. Except that an IIM
professor needs a high-quality PhD and has unlimited job
opportunities as every country in the world gears up its management
schools.
The fallacy of the Pay Commission system is that it prevents market
forces from working in the job market. By keeping the salaries of
college professors low by equating them to a dozen different types
of civil servants, it slows down talented people from staying on for
PhDs and then teaching at colleges, which results in colleges like
the IIMs not being able to increase their intake, which leads to
artificially inflated salaries for their graduates, which causes
resentment in government circles, which leads to more Pay Commission
demands. . . and the cycle continues.
What prevents the Pay Commission method of compensation- setting
being broken, in spite of many recommendations that it be abolished,
is the vast "distributional coalition" (a term coined by the Nobel
Prize-winning political economist Mancur Olson) of state sector
employees, who are adamant that all of their members be included in
the Pay Commission.
A distributional coalition, according to Olson, is overwhelmingly
oriented to struggles over the distribution of wealth and income to
its members rather than to the production of any additional output.
Distributional coalitions also keep societies stagnant by preventing
re-allocation of resources. By artificially equating salaries across
large swathes of the economy, market forces, which direct people
away from low-utility jobs to higher-utility ones, are not allowed
to come into play.
The darkening afternoon reminded me that I had to catch a flight
back to Bombay. I bade goodbye to my professor knowing that it was
probably the last conversation that I'd have with him. His wife
escorted me to the door. As we stepped out of range of Ramu's
hearing, she burst into tears: "I don't know what to do-I am so
scared ."
I did not say anything, I merely smiled sympathetically because I
too was worried; for Ramu Iyer, what would happen to his wife after
his time, and a system where a professor could die for want of an
amount that his students get as starting salaries. And the seeming
impossibility of dealing with the vast distributional coalitions
that keep our country in their grip.
A few of us alumni put up the money for Ramu Iyer's cancer drug
though it did not help and Ramu Iyer died soon after. I would like
to imagine that wherever he is now, he has the solace of knowing
that at least his students had not forsaken him even if the giant
bureaucratic system that he served for so long had no thought for
him.
