A Primer on Sahara

Way back on  August 31, 2012, the Supreme Court had asked Sahara group companies Sahara Housing Investment Corporation Ltd (SHICL) and Sahara Real Estate Corporation Ltd (SIRECL) to hand over Rs 24,029.73 crore to SEBI, with 15 per cent interest per annum from the date of receipt of the amount till the date of repayment, within a period of three months. SEBI was ordered to return the money after ascertaining the genuineness of each of the 2.96 crore investors and deposit the balance in the government revenue account. 

1. Sahara group only paid the first tranche of Rs 5,120 crore and defaulted in giving back the remaining amount. But they claimed in December 2012 that they had already paid off the investors Rs 22,885 crore. That is repayment within 4 months—in cash!
   
2. The source of these 22885 crore—all cash—is a mystery that they wouldn't disclose even to the Supreme Court.
    
3. If we add the accumulated interest, the total repayment from SAHARA would be 37000 crores.
   
4. Earlier, they had claimed the deposits with them as private placement from 3.07 crores of friends, families, associates and employees! They first claimed that no general public was involved at all.
   
5. Even before the SEBI case, when they first came under the RBI scanner, Sahara companies claimed to be dealing with small amounts deposited by millions of depositors. When the RBI revised the rules for Residual Non Banking Companies (RNBCs) and sought to control its para banking activities, Sahara claimed to haverepaid Rs 73000 crore, four years before maturity, and announced the same through ads. SEBI came into the picture when a Sahara  group company filed a prospectus to go for a public issue of shares and the details included deposits raised by two other Sahara Companies.
   
6. After the Supreme Court passed the order, Subrata Roy Sahara, in a full page ad, challenged SEBI for a national TV debate, to settle the matter!
   
7. When the SEBI order was passed, depository accounts in India totalled 15 million. The largest company in India today has 4 million investors. Sahara claimed to have 30.7 million!
   
8. The latest ad by Sahara talks about 80 million investors. India has about 250 million households. A third of India is below poverty line. That means every second household in India would be a Sahara investor.
   
9. Based on investors details submitted by Sahara, SEBI sent out 21000 letters:

• Only 280 responded.
• 7000 letters were returned with addressee not found.

10. The list of investors submitted to SEBI, on a cursory examination, included:

• 5984 Kalawatis
• 55 Kalawatis at the same address
• A Kalawati having the same address as a Mairunnissa, another investor
• A Kalawati being paid back on the same day multiple times
• 1433 Anirudh Singhs, all of them S/ O Hukum Singh
• One depositor's name was Haridwar.
• An address was Jaipur, Nagpur, Maharashtra.
• Another address was Aurangabad, Lucknow, UP.

11. There are numerous instances of:

• one person having multiple accounts
• one account having multiple beneficiaries
• one person with multiple addresses 
• one address having multiple investors.
• People whose claimed dues spread over multiple accounts running into crores.
• Many depositors addresses are untraceable,
• There were cases having addresses like national highways, and just names of villages with no specific house number etc.

12. In SC, Saharas deposited a title deed of a 106 acre plot in Versova and claimed its worth at Rs.19300 Crores!! SEBI says it is not worth a penny, because it is in a mangrove and in a no construction zone.
13. Sahara claims to employ 12 lakh employees. Applying the minimum Act Including PF, ESI, Bonus etc, the cost is 12500 per month. If i were to take different scales, the average would be 25000/month. That would be 36,000 Crores p.a of salaries alone!
    
14. And the PF dues on such salaries would be about 5000 crores/annum. EPFO did ask for the details as they scarcely match with their records and Saharas go to Lucknow High Court and start another 'merry go round'.
    
15. In an ad recently, they declared a 60% increment across the board. Wouldn't you love to work with them? As Rajnikanth would have said ''Any doubt'?

Questions for Narendra Modi

Reference AAM AADMI PARTY

1. If you become the PM, will you raise price of the KG Basin gas, which has already been doubled by the UPA government to $8 per unit?

2. Why does your government buy solar power at Rs 13 per unit? Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka are buying it at Rs 7.50 and Rs 5 per unit, respectively.

3. You claim 11% agriculture growth in state while your government's data says production has shrunk at 1.18% annually and revenue declined from Rs 27,815 crore in 2006-07 to Rs 25,908 crore in 2012-13. Why?

4. In the past 10 years, two-thirds of all SMEs have shut down in Gujarat, especially in your home town Mehsana where 140 units out of 187 died away. Do you want to concentrate all power in the hands of a few big industrial houses?

5. You claim to have eradicated corruption in Gujarat. People here claim that up to Rs 10 lakh bribe is demanded for appointment of a 'talati' (revenue official).

6. Your ministry has people like Babu Bokhiria, convicted for three years in a mining case, and Purshottam Solanki, accused in a Rs 450 crore fishing scandal. Why?

7. Why have you inducted in your cabinet a minister who is the son-in-law of the Ambani family?

8. About 13 lakh people applied for 1,500 posts of 'talati' recently. How can you claim to have solved the problem of unemployment?

9. Why is your government exploiting young graduates by paying them only Rs 5,300 per month for five years on contract basis?

10. There are only three teachers to teach 600 students at some schools. What is your comment?

11. Medical and health services are in a shambles.

12. Around 800 farmers have committed suicide in Gujarat in recent years because the government has stopped subsidies and is not paying support prices. Your reaction.

13. Electricity is a distant dream for four lakh farmers waiting for years to get a connection. Why do you claim 24x7 availability of electricity? Farmers have not been paid adequately for their land while the Ambanis and Adanis have got it for just one rupee per square metre.

14. Sardar Sarovar dam's height was raised in 2005 but people of Kutch have not got water. Industries have been given water. Why?

15. Despite assurances, the Gujarat government has not withdrawn court cases against Sikh farmers of Kutch who have lost their land. Why?

16. How many planes and helicopters do you have? Who owns them? How much do you pay or does someone else pay for them? Why don't you make public these air expenses?

India's activist role in breaking the pharmaceutical patent monopolies

Ritu Kumar in The Indian Express 4 March 2014

Recently, there were rumours that the United States Trade Representative (USTR) was getting ready to announce “trade enforcement actions” or sanctions against India over its intellectual property rights regime. The Obama administration has been under pressure from the US Chamber of Commerce and lobby groups, like the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, to take a tough stance against Indian rulings that have vetoed several multinational pharmaceutical company patents.

The lobbyists are pushing for India to be classified as a “priority foreign country”, a label associated with the worst offenders of patent law. The row blew over, but not before the USTR had filed a case at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against India’s domestic content requirements for its solar programme.

In the last few years, the Indian government and judiciary have taken up major cases on patent protection for life-saving cancer drugs. Novartis’s drug Glivec was denied patent protection by the Supreme Court and India granted a compulsory licence to Bayer’s drug Nexavar, which treats kidney and liver cancer.

Compulsory licences are a provision in international patent norms, including the WTO’s TRIPS agreement, under which a government permits someone else to manufacture the patented product without the consent of the patent owner, usually to lower prices of life-saving drugs and increase access to them.

This is not the first time that India has taken a strong stance in the pharmaceutical patent wars. In 2001, Indian generic manufacturers played a crucial role in slashing prices of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs used against HIV, bringing down the cost of the drugs per patient per year from around $15,000 to about $300. Today, the cost of ARV drugs is as low as $60 per patient per year. This remarkable achievement was only possible because at the time, India was not party to WTO agreements on patent protection.

Indian generic manufacturers were able to disregard patents, and ended up supplying over 80 per cent of all ARV drugs purchased in the world. India was recognised as playing a leading role in providing quality healthcare to people in developing countries.

It is evident that India’s role in the pharmaceutical patent wars has great implications for poor people’s access to healthcare, not just at home but around the world. Emerging economies like Brazil and South Africa follow the Indian model when they modify their intellectual property laws in order to bar awards to frivolous and obvious patents, and to allow pre-and post-grant challenges. For instance, Brazil’s proposed changes to its patent policy quote provisions in India’s Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005. Doctors Without Borders, meanwhile, has publicly encouraged South Africa to borrow from India when drafting its new patent policy.

With markets in the developed world becoming saturated, multinational drug companies are increasingly looking to emerging economies with large populations for sales expansion and growth. However, their model of intellectual property protection as an incentive for innovation is running into obstacles in low- and middle-income countries. Supporters of the pharmaceutical industry believe that without patent protections, there will be no breakthrough innovations and no new life-saving technologies.

They argue that the high costs of research and development for new drugs can only be compensated by patent monopolies that allow expensive drug prices. Yet, developing economies are keen on providing affordable healthcare products for their citizens. The developed world itself is beset with unsustainable rising healthcare costs and is looking for cost-effective innovation. A reassessment of patent monopolies, especially in the case of life-saving products, is essential if healthcare access is to be broadened beyond wealthy patients.

Some new models of incentivising medical research are being proposed. Since large funds are required for the development of new medical technologies, scholars have proposed the creation of attractive prizes, along the lines of the XPrize, which was instituted to encourage space exploration by giving successful teams up to $10 million in awards. The idea behind prizes is that the winning team receives a large one-time payment, but it cannot patent the solution, which ensures that the technology remains in the public domain.

Other models of funding innovation have already seen success in the marketplace, such as the public-private partnership that created a new rotavirus vaccine. This vaccine, called Rotavac, is now sold in India and other developing countries by Bharat Biotech, at profit, for about $1 per dose.

Millions of patients are suffering from many other poorly managed or untreatable diseases, such as diabetes or dengue fever. They would greatly benefit if companies were incentivised to create therapies at affordable prices that were widely accessible. India must not slow the pace of developing new therapies, nor shy away from the difficult work of making healthcare available to all. The rest of the world is watching.

For ‘cheering’ Pakistan in India match, university in Meerut suspends 67 Kashmiri students

Written by Amit Sharma , Mir Ehsan | Meerut | March 5, 2014 7:58 am in The Indian Express

A large private university in Meerut has suspended 67 Kashmiri students for allegedly cheering Pakistan during the India-Pak match at the Asia Cup on Sunday. The students were told to vacate their hostel rooms, and were escorted by police and university officials to nearby Ghaziabad. Some students are now back with their families in the Valley.

Groups of students were watching the match on TV in the community hall of the hostel at the Swami Vivekananda Subharti University (SVSU). A clash broke out soon after India lost, a result which the Kashmiris allegedly celebrated. No action was taken against the other group.

G S Bansal, the warden of the hostel, said the Kashmiri students had been punished for being “anti-national”. “By raising pro-Pakistan slogans, the Kashmiri boys did an anti-national act, and that was why we suspended them and did not take any action against the others,” Bansal told The Indian Express.

SVSU vice-chancellor Manzoor Ahmed said the suspension was a “precautionary measure”.

“There was strong resentment against the students who had shouted anti-national and pro-Pakistan slogans after Pakistan won the match. So as a precautionary measure, we temporarily suspended students of J&K for three days. We arranged for two buses to take the boys to Ghaziabad. We also sent three senior university officials with them,” Ahmed said.

Eyewitnesses said heated exchanges followed all-rounder Shahid Afridi’s last-over sixes off Ravichandran Ashwin, which quickly escalated to brawls, followed by several rounds of stone-throwing. “Security guards did not intervene for nearly an hour after the violence began. The students were ultimately forced to go to their rooms, but the groups clashed again on Monday,” said a student who spoke on condition of anonymity.

University registrar R K Garg said the students were sent home because the university feared more violence. “Meerut is communally sensitive. We were apprehensive that if word of the violence got out, outsiders would storm the campus and target students,” Garg said.

In Srinagar, families of the suspended students said they hoped for normalcy to return to the campus soon. “The university has ordered the students to leave for some time in order to avert confrontations between groups,” Abdul Majeed Khan of Uri said. Khan’s son is a second year student of BBA at the university. He added that the university administration had taken the right steps.

Shahid Bashir, whose son Talib Bashir had to leave Meerut, said, “The university has asked the students to leave for a few days. Most of the students have left for the Valley, while a few are staying in Delhi with friends. Once the situation improves, they will rejoin the university.”

Can the cricket coach be king?

The role is still evolving, but it's hard to see it become the centrepiece of the narrative like in football

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

March 3, 2014

 

	Micky Stewart (sitting, extreme right) was one of cricket's first coaches, but his role was more to support the captain than to be the man in charge © PA Photos  Enlarge

Where is cricket's Jose Mourinho, its Pep Guardiola, its Sir Alex Ferguson?

I intend no disrespect to cricket coaches. But the question is unavoidable. The football manager has evolved not only as the boss - the "gaffer" - but also the central and controlling mind. He is the team's selector, its tactician and its figurehead. Compare cricket's separation of powers, a three-way division of responsibility. The selectors determine which players get onto the field; the captain sets the field, declares and changes the bowling; while the coach - well, hang on a minute, what does the coach do? This second question partly answers my first one: the role of the coach leads us to the absence of Jose Mourinho.

The original football manager was Herbert Chapman, whose first job was at Northampton Town in 1907. He pioneered a new style of play, rebranded his teams (it was Chapman who termed Arsenal "the Gunners"), and signed players at lower prices by plying rival directors with alcohol while he sipped ginger ale from a whisky glass. No wonder his nickname was "Football's Napoleon". That tradition of managerial control continues to this day. Arsenal's club captain is Thomas Vermaelen. You may not have noticed because he very rarely makes the team. The manager, Arsene Wenger, in contrast, is ever-present.

With occasional exceptions - meddling owners, egotistical chairmen, exceptional captains - there is no doubt who runs a football team: the manager. This has long made them the envy of the coaching fraternity. When the Welsh rugby visionary Carwyn James, who coached the British Lions, was asked if he had any regrets, he replied that he would have liked to be a football manager instead: they didn't have to put up with the interference of selectors.

Cricket didn't even have coaches when James was shaping his teams in the 1970s, let alone Chapman his in the 1910s. English cricket's first full-time professional coach was Micky Stewart, who took over as team manager for the 1986-87 tour of Australia. But Stewart and his generation of coaches were managers in name, not reality. They were more organisers than bosses. David Lloyd, who succeeded Stewart in the England job, put it like this: "The captain ruled the roost, he was the boss really, and you were there to support him. So I wouldn't cross either of the captains I worked with, Atherton or Stewart."

So history, clearly, is part of the explanation. The cricket coach is relatively new. There has not yet been much time for cricket's pioneering coaches to expand and enhance the role. One perfectly plausible projection is that cricket will become more like other sports and a single manager will assume control of the central decisions. Michael Vaughan believes that selectors are now superfluous and their role should been ceded to the coach. Sir Clive Woodward, who coached England to the rugby World Cup, recently accused cricket of being "stuck in the dark ages", with an over-mighty captain and a weak manager. Woodward was baffled that English cricket could sack Kevin Pietersen before the appointment of a new coach. Surely, Woodward argued, that decision was for the coach, not the captain and administrators? This line of argument holds that the cricket coach is still taking infant steps towards its logical evolution and that - in a decade or two - the coach will be king.

	A football coach can alter the effect of individual players by tinkering with the structure in which they operate. Cricket, in contrast, is the accumulation of what statisticians call "discrete" events, actions that occur in a comparative vacuum

There is a counter argument. Ian Chappell and Shane Warne, among others, believe that the cricket coach should be held in check rather than allowed to launch a power grab. At international level, in Warne's words, "the coach shouldn't be coaching." The coach can certainly help create the right environment. But the Warne-Chappell approach remains suspicious of interventionist technical coaching once players have reached Test level. They believe it must be the captain, not the coach, who runs the team on the field.

This is the nub of the issue. Is there something about cricket, almost unique among sports, that makes it harder (perhaps impossible) for a coach to shape what happens during the match? We know it is the baseball manager who pulls off the pitcher and replaces him with a fresher arm. We know it is the football manager who devises the playing system and structure for each match. Why not cricket?

We now run into a parallel question: how central is captaincy? For if the coach wishes to become the defining figure, he can assume selection control from the selectors, but tactics he must wrestle from the captain. As a teenager, I was 12th man for Kent in a one-day match. I organised the drinks bottles while sitting next to the coach. When Kent took a wicket and I prepared to run onto the pitch, the coach pulled me to one side. "Tell the captain to change the bowling at the far end and move mid-off deeper. And tell him that has come from me!" I relayed the message. "Tell the coach to f*** off and let me captain the team," the captain replied, "and tell him that's from me." It was an early lesson in a familiar confusion about roles and responsibilities.

The structure of cricket may work against an off-field mastermind, certainly in the longer formats of the game. In a five-day match, the coach can only directly speak to his players at lunch, tea or the close of play. During each session, the captain must make his own decisions - as Bob Woolmer discovered when his coach-to-captain walkie-talkie system was outlawed in 1999. It is possible to imagine a T20 match mapped out in advance because there are only a small number of bowling changes to make. But a Test match is so fluid and unpredictable, with so many moving parts interacting and influencing each other, that a "planned" Test is a contradiction in terms.

In other respects cricket is anything but fluid. The ball is "live" in cricket for a very small percentage of the match. And for the vast majority of that time, only two or three players are involved: the bowler, the batsmen and sometimes a fielder. Crucially, their individual actions take place in perfect isolation. No one else can help you hit a cover drive or bowl a yorker. This truth is captured by the old cliché that cricket is a team game played by individuals.

That makes it very different from football. When an attacking player tracks back, the job of being a defender becomes fundamentally easier. When a coach devises a different midfield formation, the experience of being out on the pitch materially changes. The spaces are in different places, so it becomes a changed match. Not so in cricket. A coach (or captain) can change his batting order. But no coach can soften or alter the isolated examination that awaits all the batsmen when they eventually face Mitchell Johnson's thunderbolts. You can shuffle the pack, but the cards must be played individually.

This is the greatest challenge facing a cricket coach. A football coach can alter the effect of individual players by tinkering with the structure in which they operate. The presence of a good defensive midfielder frees up the playmaker to push up-field and express himself. Just ask the playmaker. When Real Madrid sold the defensive midfielder Claude Makelele and bought David Beckham instead, Zinedine Zidane felt the pinch. "Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley," asked Zidane, "when you are losing the entire engine?" These are managerial judgements, decisions about structure and strategy that affect almost every moment of a football match. Cricket, in contrast, is the accumulation of what statisticians call "discrete" events, actions that occur in a comparative vacuum.

Paradoxically, this makes it harder for cricket coaches to influence the shape of the match. They come up against an impenetrable wall: every player, with bat or ball, is on his own when it really matters. This, I suspect, is why cricket coaches, during periods of desperate failure, are so often reduced to the worst of all managerial failings: telling their players how to bat and bowl. It almost never works, but you can see how they end up there.

By my own logic, cricket coaching could evolve in either of two opposite directions. Given the technical and individual nature of the game, the trend may be towards individual coaches who work for the player, rather than vice versa - exactly as already happens in golf and tennis. Alternatively, cricket may eventually accept a version of the football model, despite its structural differences. One thing is certain. Unless that happens - and I'm not sure it should - I can't see a cricketing Jose Mourinho putting up with the constraints of the job. After all, pity the poor chief selector who relays the following message, "Jose, here's the team we've picked for you to play against Manchester City."

Free Lunches - Modi's Crony Capitalism

Lola Nayyar in Outlook India

During the Vibrant Gujarat summit in 2011, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was seen being venerated by the bigwigs of Indian industry, from Ratan Tata to Mukesh Ambani, for his grand vision of dev­elopment. It figures. The development model has increasingly come to be skewed in favour of capital-intensive mega industries.

This is evident not just in project allocation but also in terms of resources, be it finances, subsidies, land or natural wealth. If Adani tops the list of Modi’s favourites in popular perception, the Ambanis, Tatas, Essar, Torrent Power follow closely. Many like Welspun, Zydus Cadila, Nirma, Lalbhais etc are giving way to others as front-runners for subsidies that are huge by any standard, whether capital subsidy, interest subsidy, infrastructure subsidy, sales tax and now VAT subsidy. The capital is being provided at just 0.1 per cent interest with an average of a 20-year moratorium on repayment, stretched in some cases to over 40 years. Besides land, water and other natural resources come at throwaway prices.

A rough calculation of the subsidy the Tatas effectively got to set up their Nano manufacturing plant in Gujarat pegs it at around Rs 33,000 crore, say local politicians. “Historica­lly, the Gujarat model was to promote smes in backward areas, but over the years premier, prestigious and now mega industries are being promoted in the state. Starting from the Tatas’ Nano project, the share of subsidy and incentives has become tilted in favour of mega projects—the greater the investment, the greater is the rate of subsidy,” says Prof Indira Hirway of the Centre for Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad.

Because competitive forces do not dictate the allocation of resources, favours determine the slice of the cake. This has resulted in the suboptimal allocation of resources. As capital has become cheaper, it has become more profitable for corporates to go in for capital-intensive industries with little emp­loyment generation. The huge outgo in corporate and infrastructure subsidies has also meant few resources are left for social development, whether health or education.

“Modi seems to practise a lot of crony capitalism, but knows very little about capitalism, which involves liberalism and spiritualism—none of which applies to him,” says Rajiv Desai, CEO of Comma Consulting.

Industrial growth in Gujarat, going by the  last two audit reports of state psus by the Comptroller and Auditor General, is coming at a high cost to the exchequer. In 2012, the CAG took a critical view of the Modi government’s mismanagement resulting in losses of over Rs 16,000 crore.

In the case of the state-owned Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC), the audit report is critical of “undue benefits” extended to favoured corporates like Adani Energy and Essar Steel. The report points out that GSPC purchased natural gas from the spot market at the prevailing prices and sold it to Adani Energy at a fixed price much lower than the market price, benefiting the latter to the tune of over Rs 70 crore. To Essar Steel, the corpora­tion extended undue benefits of over Rs 12.02 crore by way of a waiver of capacity charges, contrary to the provisions of the gas transmission agreement.

Again in 2013, the CAG took a critical view of state public sector undertakings extending undue favours to Reliance Industries and Adani Power Ltd (APL). It highlighted a loss of Rs 52.27 crore due to a retweaking of the gas transportation agreement (GTA) with RIL for transportation of D6 gas from Bhadbhut in Bharuch district to RIL’s Jamnagar refinery.
In the case of Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Limited (GUVNL), over Rs 160 crore was lost by not levying a penalty on APL for violation of the power purchase agreement.

Experts point out how major projects in the state are increasingly being captured by a few favourite industrial groups, which have been witnes­sing faster than their average growth just a decade back. Paying the price is the aam aadmi. Take the sale of CNG in Ahmedabad. It’s more expensive than in Delhi despite the fact that most of the gas is transported via pipeline to the capital from Gujarat. A reason assigned by the locals is that the cng vending stations are largely operated by the Adanis.

In God we trust - all others bring data. The perils of data-driven cricket -

 

For all his triumphs as England coach, Andy Flower ultimately got the balance between trusting people and numbers wrong

Tim Wigmore in Cricinfo

March 2, 2014

 

Was Andy Flower ultimately empowered by data or inhibited by it? © PA Photos

Cricket is an art, not a science. It's a fact that needs restating after the disintegration of Andy Flower's reign as England coach. Slavery to data had gone too far. The triumphs of the more jocund Darren Lehmann, Flower's coaching antithesis, are a salutary reminder of the importance of fun and flair in a successful cricket team. And it's not only cricket that could learn from the tale.

Big data - the vogue term used to describe the manifold growth and availability of data, both structured and not - is an inescapable reality of the 21st century. There are 1200 exabytes of data stored in the world; translated, that means that, if it were all placed on CD-ROMs and stacked up, it would stretch to the moon in five separate piles, according to Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's book Big Data. Day-to-day life can often feel like a battle to stay afloat against the relentless tide of data. One hundred and sixty billion instant messages were sent in Britain in 2013. Over 500 million tweets are sent worldwide every day.

Kevin Pietersen was the subject of a good number of those after his sacking as an England cricketer. Amid the cacophony of opinions, one voice we could have done without was David Cameron's; the prime minister gave a radio interview saying that there was a "powerful argument" for keeping the "remarkable" Pietersen in the team.

Cameron had once recognised the dangers of descending into a roving reporter, promising, "We are not going to sit in an office with the 24-hour news blaring out, shouting at the headlines." Downing Street's impulse to comment on the Pietersen affair is a manifestation of information overload at its worst: with so much space to fill, politicians feel compelled to fill it. The result is that they have less time to do their day jobs.

	Flower's reign, for the most part, showed the virtues of using data smartly. But data is emphatically not a substitute for intuition and flair - either in the office or on the cricket field

Datafication often brings ugly and perverse consequences. The easiest way to reduce poverty is to give people just enough money to inch them ahead of an arbitrarily defined definition of poverty, rather than tackle the deep-rooted and more complex causes. Schools are routinely decried for a narrow-minded approach to education - "teaching to the test" - but this is the inevitable result of the obsession with standarised tests. California has pioneered performance-related pay for teachers, but a huge rise in teacher-enabled cheating has been one unforeseen result.

No industry has been permeated by datafication quite like the financial sector. The complex - oh, so complex - algorithms that underpinned the financial system had a simple rationale. In place of impulsive human beings, decision-making would be transferred to formulas that dealt only in cold logic, ensuring an end to financial catastrophes. We know what happened next. Yet the crash has changed less than is commonly supposed: around seven billion shares change hands every day on US equity markets - and five billion are traded by algorithms.

The Ashes tour felt like English cricket's crash. The numbers said that it couldn't possibly happen; those who spotted the warning signs were belittled as naysayers letting emotions cloud their judgement. The Ashes series was caricatured as the triumph of the old school - Lehmann's penchant for discussing the day's play over a beer - over Flower's pseudo-scientific approach. While clearly a simplification - Lehmann is no philistine when it comes to data - the accusation contains a grain of truth.

Flower's attraction to big data originated from reading Moneyball, the book that examined how the scientific methods of Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane helped the baseball team punch above its financial limitations. But it is too readily forgotten that the Oakland Athletics ran out of steam in knockout games. "My shit doesn't work in the playoffs," Beane exclaimed. "My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is luck." Not even Beane found an empirical way of measuring flair, spontaneity and big-game aptitude.

After the debris of England's tour Down Under, The Sun published its list of the 61 "guilty men" - including 29 non-players - involved in England's Ashes tour. It was hard not to ask what on earth the backroom staff was doing. And, more pertinently, if England's total touring party had numbered only 51 or 41, could England really have performed any worse? The proliferation of specialist coaches and analysts seemed antithetical to the self-expression of players on the pitch.

	The selection of Finn, Rankin and Tremlett for the Ashes was proof of the pitfalls of the reliance on bogus statistics © Getty Images  Enlarge

Similar questions are being asked in different fields. The average businessman now sends 108 emails a day. But, as inboxes get bigger, so opportunity for creativity decreases. This reality is slowly being recognised: a multi-million dollar industry has grown around filtering emails to liberate businessmen from the grind. The world is running into the limits of Silicon Valley's favoured mantra "In God we trust - all others bring data."

No one would advocate pretending that big data doesn't exist. Datafication is happening at a staggering rate - the amount of digital data doubles every three years. Flower's reign, for the most part, showed the virtues of using it smartly. But data is emphatically not a substitute for intuition and flair - either in the office or on the cricket field.

By the last embers of Flower's rule, England seemed not empowered by data but inhibited by it, as instinct, spontaneity and joy seeped from their cricket. Accusations of England lacking flair on the field had a point - witness Alastair Cook's insistence on having a cover sweeper regardless of the match situation. Going back to 2011, consider England's approach to tying down Sachin Tendulkar in the home series against India: they relied on drawing Tendulkar outside his off stump in the early part of his innings rather than let him get his runs on the on side, the result of a computer simulator plan, created by their team analyst Nathan "Numbers" Leamon.

The selection of three beanpole quick bowlers to tour Australia was rooted in data showing that such bowlers were most likely to thrive in Australia. The ECB looked at the characteristics of the best quick bowlers - delayed delivery, braced front leg and so on, and then tried to coach those virtues into their own players, seemingly not realising it was too late; you can't change those things once bowlers are more than about 15. But it did not matter how many boxes Steven Finn, Boyd Rankin and Chris Tremlett ticked in theory when they were utterly bereft of fitness and form in practice. It was proof of the pitfalls of excess devotion to data and reliance on bogus statistics. "Garbage in, garbage out," as some who work with data are prone to saying.

Data is a complement to intuition and judgement, not a replacement for them. As Cukier and Mayer-Schonberger argue in their study, big data "exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think".

Criticisms of Flower's reliance on data always lingered under the surface, as when South Africa expressed bafflement when Graham Onions was dropped for Ryan Sidebottom in 2010, a data-driven decision largely made before the tour even began. For all his triumphs as England coach, Flower ultimately got the balance between trusting people and numbers wrong. He was in good company. In the brave new world, those who thrive will not be those who use data most - but those who use it most smartly.