killing sparks global chase

Man held in India after flight from U.S.

By MARK HUME and TENILLE BONOGUORE AND JASON OVERDORF
(Toronto Globe and Mail, April 3, 2007)

VANCOUVER, TORONTO, NEW DELHI -- Travelling at about 900 kilometres an hour over the Atlantic, on a Continental Airways Boeing 777, Avtar Grewal may have thought he had left his problems behind.

But in a blood-spattered home on the outskirts of Phoenix, Ariz., police were making links to Mr. Grewal, 32, a logistics manager from Abbotsford, B.C., that would soon trigger an international chase for the alleged killer of Navneet Kaur, his estranged wife.

Phoenix police began their investigation on Friday, just after noon, when an alarmed co-worker of Ms. Kaur's from Assist Technologies, where the 30-year-old ran a product testing team, called to say the young woman had missed work -- and there appeared to be signs of violence at her home.

By 12:30, a police team was in the affluent, newly built neighbourhood in south Phoenix on a routine "check welfare" call, but soon the home where the young woman lived alone was the focus of intense activity.

"It was very quiet. It was a hot afternoon. Police put yellow crime scene tape around the front of the house. Some of her co-workers were standing across the street in kind of the shade of the house, just waiting for detectives to come to interview them. There was a police chaplain who was there who was kind of chatting with them," said Doug Murphy, a reporter with the Ahwatukee Foothills News. Detective Bob Ragsdale said yesterday that investigators found evidence of a violent altercation in the home - and Ms. Kaur's lifeless body.

"It looks like the victim was going to seek a divorce," Det. Ragsdale said in an e-mail. "The husband was seen in Phoenix some time between 22:15 and 22:30 hours . . . outside the residence. Investigators found information from the suspect, inside the victim's residence, related to homicide. There were further indications that the husband was suicidal."

That's when the chase began.

Police soon tracked Mr. Grewal's movements to Sky Harbor International Airport, a 20-minute drive away, north on Maricopa Freeway.

There, investigators found he had taken a one-way flight to Newark, N.J. -- a major transit point in the United States for travellers bound for India.

Deborah McCarley, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Phoenix police contacted her office, and soon, international law enforcement connections were being made.

"The Phoenix PD . . . had information that this individual was involved . . . they knew who they wanted, we just tried to figure out . . . if he was on a plane and if he was, where he was going."

By then, Mr. Grewal was aboard a Continental Airways flight bound for Indira Gandhi International Airport, in New Delhi.

Ms. McCarley said the FBI's strategic information and operations centre was called into action and soon Indian police were on the case.

"He was arrested in New Delhi when he came off the plane," said Ms. McCarley. "He didn't give the authorities any problems."

Ms. McCarley said the U.S. government has 60 days to put through paper work requesting extradition.

Meanwhile, Ms. Kaur's family has been struggling to deal with their grief. Sukmindher Singh Cheema, news director at Radio India in Vancouver, said he had spoken with Ms. Kaur's father, Rattan Singh, a former superintendent in the Indian Police Service.

He was told Mr. Grewal and Ms. Kaur had met in California at a family function and then got married in 2005 in India.

"Grewal wanted Navneet to leave her job in Phoenix and stay with him in Canada," Mr. Singh told Delhi reporters. "But Navneet, a qualified software engineer working at a senior level, didn't want to quit. This led to strained relations between the couple."

Ms. Kaur's younger brother, Sandeep Singh, told The Times of India that he spoke to his sister the morning of her death, and there were obvious tensions in the relationship.

"He [Mr. Grewal] put many restrictions on my sister Navneet and used to keep her confined. A few months back, she wanted to attend our cousin's marriage and asked him to accompany her, but he said he would not go and did not let her attend the wedding either," Mr. Singh said.

accused killer facing extradition from india

TENILLE BONOGUORE AND JASON OVERDORF
Globe and Mail Update

TORONTO AND DELHI — A Vancouver logistics executive is under arrest in India and facing extradition to the United States for allegedly killing his estranged wife and fleeing to his homeland.

A worldwide Interpol arrest warrant was issued for Avtar Singh Grewal, 32, on Friday after the body of his estranged wife, Navneet Kaur, was found in her home in Ahwatukee, a bedroom community of Phoenix.

Ms. Kaur's co-workers from Assist Technologies, a world-leader in electronic data collection, were worried when the project manager did not arrive at work on Friday.
Checking on Ms. Kaur's home, her colleague found signs of a violent and bloody struggle, and called police, reports say.

An alert was issued that day for Mr. Grewal, who was reportedly seen outside Ms. Kaur's home at 10.30 p.m. Thursday night.

Delhi police arrested Mr. Grewal late Saturday night at Indira Gandhi International Airport after the Interpol Red Corner notice was declared by the U.S. police, the Indian press reported.
He had allegedly flown from Phoenix to Newark, N.J., where he reportedly caught a one-way Continental Airlines flight to India.

Mr. Grewal appeared in front of a magistrate at the Patiala House Courts on Sunday and was placed in judicial custody.

He appeared in court again Monday for the initiation of extradition proceedings to the United States. Delhi police said they are not investigating the matter, saying the accused had not committed any crime in India.

Mr. Grewal and Ms. Kaur married in Delhi in 2005, but they had been living separately due to their jobs, said Ms. Kaur's father Rattan Singh, a former officer in the Indian Police Service.
“Grewal wanted Navneet to leave her job in Phoenix and stay with him in Canada,” Mr. Singh told Delhi media.

“But Navneet, a qualified software engineer working at a senior level, didn't want to quit. This led to strained relations between the couple.”

Phoenix police told local media Ms. Kaur was seeking a divorce.

Ironically, Mr. Grewal fled virtually into the arms of his alleged victim's family, as Mr. Singh lives near the IGI Airport in Gurgaon with his wife and son.

On Monday, Mr. Singh left for America to bring back his daughter's body.
Ms. Kaur's brother Sandeep Singh told Times of India that he spoke to his sister the morning of her death.

“He (Mr. Grewal) put many restrictions on my sister Navneet and used to keep her confined. A few months back, she wanted to attend our cousin's marriage and asked him to accompany her, but he said he would not go and did not let her attend the wedding either,” Mr. Singh said.

indian state gets ready for an onslaught of rats

Rare species of flowering bamboo puts rodents in a feeding and breeding frenzy

JASON OVERDORF
(Toronto Globe & Mail, March 30, 2007)

NEW DELHI — At nightfall in the remote state of Mizoram in northeast India, villagers listen with apprehension to the rustling of thousands of rats foraging and breeding in the jungle. For now, the rodents are gorging themselves on flowering bamboo. But when the bamboo dies and the rice harvesting season begins, a scurrying plague will descend on their paddy fields.

An unusual species of bamboo blankets Mizoram, a remote state with an ethnically distinct tribal population. Melocanna baccifera flowers only once every 50 years or so, generating millions of high-protein seeds that turn the local rats into incredibly prolific breeders. But when the seeds disappear, the huge number of rats left over invade the rice paddies of the area's farmers, destroying the crops the villagers depend on for survival.

In a single night, the legion of rodents can clip the ears from every rice stalk in a field, says James Lalsiamliana, the Mizoram Agriculture Department official who heads the state's rodent control cell. During last year's harvest -- when the bamboo flowering began in the eastern part of the state -- more than 40 villages lost their entire crop. And this year, the flowering has peaked across all of Mizoram.

"They depend on this paddy for subsistence," Mr. Lalsiamliana said. "The state will now have to arrange financial support for these areas."

Local villagers call the once-in-50-years phenomenon mautam, or "bamboo death." And the last time it hit, in 1959, it was indeed deadly. The central government dismissed local forecasts as superstitious raving, and was unprepared to fight off the rodents or provide adequate relief for the massive food shortages that followed. The famine spawned a revolt against Indian rule by the Mizo National Front that lasted until 1986 and took more than 3,000 lives. Now, one of the movement's leaders, Pu Zoramthanga, is Mizoram's chief minister.

This time around, the government has released more than $125-million to fight the problem. And as much as five years back, Mizoram began tapping experts to develop a co-ordinated plan to limit the effects of the flowering and control the rodent population. The Ministry of Environment and Forests drew on experts from the International Bamboo and Rattan Network (INBAR) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) to help find new ways to utilize the bamboo and thus encourage local villagers to harvest it before it flowers. The ministry also called in Canada's John Bourne, a 30-year veteran of Alberta's rat patrol who helped make the Canadian province rat free, to study the local rodents and develop a plan for killing rats. Last season, the program Mr. Bourne helped develop allowed villagers to kill hundreds of thousands of rodents using homemade traps and poison supplied by the state.

Mr. Lalsiamliana says the state paid villagers 100 rupees (about $2.50) for every 50 traps they set and distributed more than 15,000 kilograms of rodenticide.

T.P. Subramony, head of INBAR's Delhi office, says India now has a comprehensive plan that covers extraction and management of the bamboo, how to regenerate the forest cover, controlling the rodent population and dealing with health hazards that may arise with the proliferation of the vermin. But he says the key to a solution lies in realizing the value of the bamboo itself.

Although locals cut down and burn bamboo to collect ash that they use as fertilizer, experts from the state's Bamboo Development Agency estimate that less than 1 per cent of the 850,000 hectares of bamboo gets harvested, which is why a panel of researchers from UNIDO and India's Rain Forest Research Institute has recommended the promotion of cottage industries such as the manufacture of tooth picks and bamboo mats and a temporary ban on harvesting bamboo in other parts of the country for the paper industry, along with a host of other economic stimuli.

"One issue is the dying bamboo," Mr. Subramony said. "Then there is the question of how to utilize it. There is a threat, but there is an opportunity also."

Nevertheless, this flowering season, averting a food shortage depends on killing rats. And that may not be enough.

"There will likely be a food shortage, and that may lead to famine," said S.N. Kalita, formerly the principal secretary of forests and head of the environment and forest department of Mizoram. "But the situation cannot be compared with 1959. Now our communication by road and air transport are improved, so transporting in food will not be a problem. Already, some reserve stock has been created. All I can say is that the state government and the government of India is fully prepared."

Special to The Globe and Mail

indian state gets ready for an onslaught of rats

Rare species of flowering bamboo puts rodents in a feeding and breeding frenzy

JASON OVERDORF
(Toronto Globe & Mail, March 30, 2007)

NEW DELHI — At nightfall in the remote state of Mizoram in northeast India, villagers listen with apprehension to the rustling of thousands of rats foraging and breeding in the jungle. For now, the rodents are gorging themselves on flowering bamboo. But when the bamboo dies and the rice harvesting season begins, a scurrying plague will descend on their paddy fields.

An unusual species of bamboo blankets Mizoram, a remote state with an ethnically distinct tribal population. Melocanna baccifera flowers only once every 50 years or so, generating millions of high-protein seeds that turn the local rats into incredibly prolific breeders. But when the seeds disappear, the huge number of rats left over invade the rice paddies of the area's farmers, destroying the crops the villagers depend on for survival.

In a single night, the legion of rodents can clip the ears from every rice stalk in a field, says James Lalsiamliana, the Mizoram Agriculture Department official who heads the state's rodent control cell. During last year's harvest -- when the bamboo flowering began in the eastern part of the state -- more than 40 villages lost their entire crop. And this year, the flowering has peaked across all of Mizoram.

"They depend on this paddy for subsistence," Mr. Lalsiamliana said. "The state will now have to arrange financial support for these areas."
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The Globe and Mail

Local villagers call the once-in-50-years phenomenon mautam, or "bamboo death." And the last time it hit, in 1959, it was indeed deadly. The central government dismissed local forecasts as superstitious raving, and was unprepared to fight off the rodents or provide adequate relief for the massive food shortages that followed. The famine spawned a revolt against Indian rule by the Mizo National Front that lasted until 1986 and took more than 3,000 lives. Now, one of the movement's leaders, Pu Zoramthanga, is Mizoram's chief minister.

This time around, the government has released more than $125-million to fight the problem. And as much as five years back, Mizoram began tapping experts to develop a co-ordinated plan to limit the effects of the flowering and control the rodent population. The Ministry of Environment and Forests drew on experts from the International Bamboo and Rattan Network (INBAR) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) to help find new ways to utilize the bamboo and thus encourage local villagers to harvest it before it flowers. The ministry also called in Canada's John Bourne, a 30-year veteran of Alberta's rat patrol who helped make the Canadian province rat free, to study the local rodents and develop a plan for killing rats. Last season, the program Mr. Bourne helped develop allowed villagers to kill hundreds of thousands of rodents using homemade traps and poison supplied by the state.

Mr. Lalsiamliana says the state paid villagers 100 rupees (about $2.50) for every 50 traps they set and distributed more than 15,000 kilograms of rodenticide.

T.P. Subramony, head of INBAR's Delhi office, says India now has a comprehensive plan that covers extraction and management of the bamboo, how to regenerate the forest cover, controlling the rodent population and dealing with health hazards that may arise with the proliferation of the vermin. But he says the key to a solution lies in realizing the value of the bamboo itself.

Although locals cut down and burn bamboo to collect ash that they use as fertilizer, experts from the state's Bamboo Development Agency estimate that less than 1 per cent of the 850,000 hectares of bamboo gets harvested, which is why a panel of researchers from UNIDO and India's Rain Forest Research Institute has recommended the promotion of cottage industries such as the manufacture of tooth picks and bamboo mats and a temporary ban on harvesting bamboo in other parts of the country for the paper industry, along with a host of other economic stimuli.

"One issue is the dying bamboo," Mr. Subramony said. "Then there is the question of how to utilize it. There is a threat, but there is an opportunity also."

Nevertheless, this flowering season, averting a food shortage depends on killing rats. And that may not be enough.

"There will likely be a food shortage, and that may lead to famine," said S.N. Kalita, formerly the principal secretary of forests and head of the environment and forest department of Mizoram. "But the situation cannot be compared with 1959. Now our communication by road and air transport are improved, so transporting in food will not be a problem. Already, some reserve stock has been created. All I can say is that the state government and the government of India is fully prepared."

Special to The Globe and Mail

can india make a blockbuster drug?

Indian generic-drug makers once bedeviled Big Pharma; now they may be its best hope for success.

By Jason Overdorf
Newsweek International

March 5, 2007 issue - India used to be big pharma's worst nightmare. Loose patent laws and a glut of talented scientists made that country the world capital for generics. As quickly as companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novatis, Pfizer and others could develop innovative new drugs, nimble Indian companies could copy them—and sell them for a fraction of the price. The practice led to a tangle of litigation. But now, the legal battles are giving way to new partnerships.

Earlier this month, GlaxoSmithKline signed a groundbreaking deal to develop new drugs with India's Ranbaxy—the same company it is fighting over a copycat herpes treatment. In January, Eli Lilly began working with Mumbai-based Nicholas Piramal on a number of new drugs. Several similar partnerships are in the works, and they aren't just outsourcing deals. Rather than simply sending bits and pieces of lab work over to India, the Big Pharma companies are increasingly giving their Indian counterparts the rights to develop specific drug targets, and to share in the profits. Industry sources estimate that there are 500 new drugs in development on the Subcontinent today.
The end result could be the first-ever Indian "blockbuster" drug.

The new friendships reflect two separate changes in the pharmaceutical industry. First and most important is the drying up of Big Pharma's pipeline. Western companies have historically depended on sales of "blockbuster" drugs (mass treatments for big ailments like cancer or heart diseases, which typically generate more than $1 billion in annual sales). But the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and the cost of discovering big new drugs has increased from an average of $100 million in the '80s to more than $800 million today, even as the output of novel drugs has fallen. Meanwhile, many existing blockbusters are due to go off patent this year.

That will certainly open up new copycat targets for drug makers in India. But at the same time, there's been a recent tightening of patent laws there. This second shift is pushing scientists toward more profitable original research. Indian firms believe they can make new drugs much more cheaply than Big Pharma—the head of Nicholas Piramal believes the first Indian blockbuster will be made for less than $50 million.

That's the lure for companies like Lilly and Glaxo, which have huge libraries of molecules that have shown promise—more than they can possibly investigate themselves with today's cost constraints. By licensing them out to Indian firms that are starting their own R&D from scratch, Big Pharma gets to keep the lion's share of the profits with virtually no capital outlay. But the Indian partners aren't just cheap, they're skilled. Thanks to the intense focus on science education and extensive experience in reverse-engineering generics, Indian firms are now "at least as good in chemistry" as Western players, says Daniel Vasella, head of Swiss drug giant Novartis.

So what's the most likely candidate for first-ever Indian blockbuster? A tongue-twisting compound known as balaglitazone, which helps the body to produce insulin more efficiently, and may be used to treat diabetes. It takes the partnership between India and the West a step further than a simple alliance between two companies. First developed by an Indian company called Dr. Reddy's (which got the idea from a Japanese firm), it was then licensed out to Denmark's Novo Nordisk, a big pharmaceutical specializing in insulin. After a couple of failed efforts, Novo lost patience, and the patent went back to Dr. Reddy's. The Indian firm then picked up where the Danes left off, and is now tag-teaming with another European firm to bring the drug to market. It is already in Phase III trials, the final large-scale test on humans that is one of the last hurdles before public sale. It's a stage only one in 5,000 drugs reach.

If balaglitazone goes the distance, it will profit European and Indian drug makers. But it will also offer new hope for diabetes sufferers, more of whom live in India than anywhere else in the world. It may be that the rise of emerging-market drug makers will also mean better treatments for diseases that strike hardest in developing countries.

With Silvia Spring in London

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17303201/site/newsweek/

reinventing bollywood

By Jason Overdorf (Business 2.0 March 2007)

A REBEL MOVIE PRODUCER IN INDIA LOOKS TO HOLLYWOOD FOR INSPIRATION--NOT JUST FOR HIS FILMS, BUT ALSO FOR HIS BUSINESS MODEL.

RONNIE SCREWVALA WALKED THE RED CARPET AT THE glitzy Dubai International Film Festival in December with Oliver Stone and Richard Gere. Westerners might have wondered who he was and why he deserved the company of two Hollywood luminaries, but anyone familiar with the Indian film industry would have understood. Screwvala, one of the leading movie producers in India, is bringing Hollywood-style filmmaking to the subcontinent. And U.S. moviemakers, desperate for new opportunities, want a piece of the action.

India's teeming film industry, known as Bollywood, is extraordinarily prolific. Indian filmmakers churn out 1,000 movies each year. Yet the industry grossed just $1.5 billion in 2005, and only a handful of movies made it to first-run theaters overseas. Compare that with Hollywood, which pumped out 563 movies that year and made more than $18 billion at the box office, including $9.6 billion from international distribution.

Why isn't Bollywood making more money? That question is the driving force behind Screwvala's company, UTV Software Communications. "Broadcasting [in multiple channels] started here in 1992, and it's already a $4 billion business," says the 49-year-old entrepreneur. "Yet this 100-year-old industry is still less than $2 billion. We have to grow." His solution is to revolutionize Bollywood--blow up the business model and replace it with traditional studio rules.

It's a huge job. Bollywood has always been a haphazard affair. Half a dozen prominent families controlled it, but they weren't very businesslike. Movies started shooting with no scripts and little money. Stars disappeared midshoot for weeks at a time to vacation, go home, or work on another movie. Theater owners underreported ticket sales to avoid sharing revenue with producers. It was nearly impossible to figure out whether a movie had made money and, if so, how much.

In addition, Indian story lines did not appeal to many outside the country. To the Western eye, Bollywood movies were chaotic, a surreal combination of Sylvester Stallone and Busby Berkeley musicals. In a typical plot, the hero sang, danced, fought bad guys, got the girl, found his long lost brother, and wept on his mother's deathbed--for at least three hours.

Screwvala broke into Bollywood in the late '90s, teaming up with anyone willing to work by his rules. UTV has produced a dozen movies with all the earmarks of professional filmmaking: budgets, marketing and distribution plans, real preproduction, and three-month shoots. The company distributes them worldwide and milks Hollywood-style ancillary revenue, from product placement to soundtrack rights and video-on-demand. Screwvala has also cut the running times and dumped the disorganized and stale story lines. His hit Rang de Basanti (The Colors of Spring) tells the story of India's disaffected urban youth; it also made more than $2 million in the United States. "We're breaking the mold," Screwvala says, comparing his experience to the days when Star Wars and other independent films paved the way for new genres in Hollywood.

Screwvala likes pioneering. The former game show host started his business career walking around Mumbai, asking apartment dwellers to try a newfangled gadget called a remote control. He got Indians to give up their single-channel, government-run television and brought cable to the country in the 1980s. He used the money from that to get into television production, making a steady stream of animated cartoons that attracted U.S. producers looking to outsource their own animation.

But all the while, he had movies on the brain. "Indians have always been voracious movie viewers," he says. "That's in our DNA. But we're as strong in commerce as we are in creative. It seemed to me that there was a huge opportunity here."

He was right. Now U.S. filmmakers, their revenue streams threatened by videogames, the Internet, and video-on-demand, knock on his door. This year, along with his Indian films, he's partnering with Sony Pictures and Fox Searchlight on movies starring Chris Rock and Will Smith, as well as an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake. News Corp. and Disney bought stakes in UTV last year.

And Screwvala's plan is starting to bear fruit. In 2005, UTV took in $52 million--$32 million of it from movies--and turned a modest profit. That made it the second-largest producer in India, counting box office and ancillary revenue, a meteoric rise for an industry newcomer. And its "new" business practices are spurring changes at competing studios. Contracts, budgets, and balance sheets are more common. So are shooting schedules, bigger marketing budgets, and the exploitation of ancillary revenue. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, Indian films will generate $2.3 billion by 2010

UTV has many other ventures, including 15 straight-to-DVD movies, an animated feature co-produced with a U.S. company, and a U.S. television series. But Screwvala has yet to reach his ultimate goal. "We have a good relationship with Disney," he says. "I'm hoping it can help us get some of our films into Wal-Mart." Spoken like a true Hollywood producer, albeit with a distinct colonial accent.

UNECONOMIES OF SCALE

Indians crank out nearly twice as many movies as U.S. producers but reap less than 10 percent of the revenue.

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]

[Table]

	2005 films released	Revenue
Bollywood	1,041	$1.5 billion
Hollywood	563	$18 billion

Sources: Box Office Mojo; MPAA; PricewaterhouseCoopers

3 STEPS TO SUCCESS

Find a fragmented industry

Enforce standards and discipline

Grow the market via exports

book review: way out there

Book Review: Way Out There, a collection of writing from Canada's explore magazine

By Jason Overdorf
(Outlook Traveler, February 2007)

This may sound like a strange confession for a magazine writer, but I've never been much of a fan of reading magazines. Secretly, I've always had the sneaking suspicion that anything of any consequence will eventually make its way into a book. Reading Way Out There, a new anthology of writing from Canada's top travel magazine, almost changed my mind.

A collection of 30-odd features from Explore, Way Out There shows that the Canadian magazine has terrific range. There's no endless slog of gear-based, “I'm-more-daring-than-you” articles here, and none of the formulaic, begin-with-colourful-anecdote-and-end-with-hotel-prices articles that plague travel mags. From Ross Crockford's piece about the fastest cyclist on planet Earth (“What has two legs, 122 teeth and goes 80 miles an hour?”) to Charles Montgomery's interview with the Solomon Island's last surviving headhunter (“Searching for Big Man Magik”) these are thoughtful, surprising, and above all informative stories—not of the “how I rate the service at the Plaza” variety, but the kind you remember and irritate your wife by reading aloud.

Consider, for example, Explore contributing editor J.B. MacKinnon's piece on traveling in the Sudan (“Behind the Grass Curtain”). It begins with a gimmicky, commercial magazine premise—MacKinnon sets out to prove that Canadians are no longer the world's most welcomed travelers, now that Canada has begun to interfere in world affairs. But MacKinnon hardly allows the sales-pitch to distract him as he narrates his story of traveling across the southern region of the warring country. The result is a more vivid and accessible portrait, certainly, than anything you'll find in the newspaper, all the more perceptive because it has no journalistic purpose, because the entire project, like the war, is essentially absurd.

Similarly evocative, though in a completely different vein, is Jerry Kobalenko's feature about the extreme sport of marathon swimming (“Gruelling, on a summer afternoon”). Like many outdoor pursuits, marathon swimming has in recent years changed from a feat of endurance like climbing Everest (all those paddlers who dared the English Channel) into an organized sport with a tour along the lines of the one ran by the Association of Tennis Professionals. Kobalenko manages to capture the drama of competitive swimming and the freakish psychology of the athletes who risk their lives in Canada's freezing waters remarkably well. But I mention it here because it illustrates the great strength of many of the articles in this collection: they evoke the bizarre nature of Canada's remote and cold expanses as dramatically as most “travel writing” describes India, Africa, and other places deemed to be “exotic” by editors on the other side of the world.

And for that reason, Way Out There offers great armchair traveling.

the 100 dollar un-pc

Rajesh Jain thinks the next billion computer users hold the key to the industry's next big innovation.

By Jason Overdorf

Newsweek International

Feb. 12, 2007 issue - In a humble residential neighborhood in the south Indian city of Chennai, Hema Malini—a quiet 13-year-old girl whose hair was braided with jasmine flowers—switched on the family television and a curious new device called Nova NetTV that was connected to the TV and a keyboard. In a few seconds, the Microsoft Windows logo appeared, and suddenly her TV was transformed into a PC. With her mother looking on proudly, Hema fired up encyclopedia software, checked her e-mail and Googled for a site that offers free versions of Nintendo's Mario Bros. games.

If Rajesh Jain is successful, the NetTV, which hooks up to any television, could be the first in a family of devices that connect the next billion people to the Internet. Jain, 39, is cofounder and chairman of Novatium, the Chennai-based company that makes NetTV and NetPC, a similar product that uses a normal computer monitor. Both are based on cheap cell-phone chips and come without the hard-disk drive, extensive memory and prepackaged software thatadd hundreds of dollars to the cost of regular PCs. Instead, they are little more than a keyboard, a screen and a couple of USB ports—and use a central network server to run software applications and store data. Novatium already sells the NetPC for only $100—just within reach of India's growing middle class—and Jain believes he can soon drive the price down to $70.

Entrepreneurs, philanthropists and established computer firms have for the better part of a decade invested millions of dollars to lower the cost of a desktop PC and develop cheaper alternatives. Intel has made its Eduwise laptop; AMD, a Personal Internet Communicator; Microsoft, the FonePlus. MIT computer guru Nicholas Negroponte's Children's Machine, now called the XO, is the most publicized recent attempt at converting the poor into computer users. But Negroponte's idea is to spread computers to the poor, with the help of heavy subsidies from private and public philanthropy. His price is still about $140, too high for India. Indeed India rejected Negroponte's offer of a million for cost reasons. Jain's motive is different: he wants to make money.

And he knows India. Despite the country's rise as an outsourcing hub, PCs are selling slowly—far more slowly than mobile phones or motorbikes—because they are too expensive, too complicated to use and too difficult to maintain. What people have been waiting for, some experts think, is a new approach to computing that boils the essence of Internet access down to its lowest cost—and lowest risk. Jain plans to offer all this in lease deals that include easy-to-use hardware, Internet connection, application software and service—for $10 a month.

This formula could provide a long-sought bridge over the digital divide—and may just change the way the average person thinks of computing. The solution would open up a huge new market for Internet service providers, starting in India but possibly spreading to other emerging markets, a possibility that is already attracting the attention of the world's biggest computer companies. It would become a target for innovation on a global scale, forged by immense competition for new customers, and that would have a big impact on the PC world in the West. And if the winning formula turns out to be Jain's, or something like it, it could kill the PC altogether.

Google's push into web-hosted software and Web-based data storage is already prompting the world's software makers (including Microsoft) to rethink a business built on selling copies of software for installation on hard drives. As a consequence, the compulsion to upgrade to a more powerful PC every few years is gradually disappearing. As PC sales slow, hardware makers are looking to the developing world as the source of future profits. But if Novatium or a similar competitor succeeds, that market won't ever materialize. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and the rest will have to phase out PCs and concentrate on devices that are similar in concept to Novatium's NetPC. The hardware business will be dead. The real money will be in providing the network, applications, data storage and other elements that are even now becoming synonymous with computing. Compaq will have to become more like Comcast.

Jain makes an unusual agent for such sweeping change. He has none of the bombast of Oracle's Larry Ellison. He lives more like a monk than a millionaire—though he sold his first successful venture, IndiaWorld, for more than $100 million in 1999. Jain first got the idea to build a low-cost computer alternative back in 2000, when he realized Western PCs weren't getting cheap enough fast enough to serve India's needs. He considered buying secondhand computers from abroad, or opening cybercafés. Then he read about Oracle CEO Ellison's plans for the so-called network computer. Maintenance and management costs for the PC were untenable, Ellison proclaimed, and businesses would soon save millions of dollars by putting software and data back onto their network servers. Ellison's idea hadn't taken off, Jain decided, because so many users in Western markets already had PCs and resisted the change. Jain realized that India would be a better target for the idea.

Aiming first at small and medium-size enterprises, Jain started to explore the potential of network-based computing software at Netcore Solutions, a company he started in 1998 (he remains its CEO). But the hardware costs were a problem. After giving a talk in 2003 at a conference in Bangalore, he was approached by Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, who runs a research lab and business incubator much like MIT's Media Lab. "The device you're talking about, the network you need?" Jhunjhunwala told him. "We can build it."

A few months later Jhunjhunwala and researchers at IIT came up with a plan that builds on the "thin client" concept that has been popular in the West for years, but only for business applications. It uses a cheap microprocessor (not Intel or AMD's standard PC chips) and removes the hard disk, CD/DVD drive and other costly and problem-prone components, leaving the keyboard, screen and USB port. Easier to maintain than regular PCs, sales of thin-client PCs to businesses are growing at about 20 percent a year in developed nations, even as sales of regular PCs flatten. Instead of working backward from the PC, Jhunjhunwala pioneered a new architecture from the ground up, replacing the expensive microprocessor with the guts of a mobile phone—thus tapping a supercompetitive industry with enormous economies of scale. In 2003, Jain and Jhunjhunwala cofounded Novatium, along with Analog Devices Chairman Ray Stata, with the aim of taking thin-client computers into the home market.

Making the computer affordable was only part of the equation, Jain realized. It also had to be what users want: something that looks and performs like a PC, with all the necessary software and an Internet connection, but which is also easy to maintain and operate. Products like the Simputer, an inexpensive, Indian-made version of the Pocket PC launched in 2004, never took off because it didn't match potential buyers' image of a computer. Meanwhile, people resisted purchasing low-priced or secondhand conventional desktops because they were too threatening—there was software to install, viruses to fight and all manner of mysterious problems.

The device shouldn't be a stripped-down version of a PC, Jain says. It should be entirely new machines, like the NetPC and NetTV, with streamlined technology and a lower price. Already, Novatium can afford to sell computing like the power company sells electricity, providing everything you need, including Internet access, for about $10 a month. And once production volume hits 1 million units, the cost of materials for a NetTV will fall to $35, bringing the sale price down to $70. In July Novatium started a commercial pilot program in Chennai with a cable operator whose feed goes into about 1,500 homes. By the end of December, it had 100 users. By the end of March it's expected to have 500, all of whom would pay around $10 a month. Started with only $2.5 million, Novatium has just 60 employees, but it is attracting attention from many major players.

One reason is that Novatium machines are open to all. Unlike most thin clients, Novatium's devices work with any network server without requiring major modifications, whether it uses proprietary software from Microsoft or Sun, or free software from an open-source company like Linux. Microsoft is participating in the Chennai pilot program because Novatium's subscription-based payment system could generate profit in markets where most users run pirated versions of Microsoft products. Top U.S.-based executives from Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and other companies have visited Hema's house and other homes wired with the NetPC and the Nova NetTV to see how the utility computing model could work in the home. And network server giant Sun Microsystems—whose slogan has long been "The network is the computer"—has already inked a deal to market the NetPC to enterprises and schools in India beginning this year. "There's a 100 million-unit opportunity in the next five years in India itself," Jain says.

The difference between Jain's approach and Negroponte's is stark. Negroponte is world famous, and teamed up with Rupert Murdoch at Davos to promote One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a program to get computers into the hands of poor, rural users. Negroponte's XO laptop is truly innovative in its own right: it has no moving parts—it uses flash memory instead of a spinning hard disk—because they are prone to failure and overheating, and it uses so little power that it can run for hours on a car battery and can be charged by hand in a pinch. To extend Internet access, it uses "mesh networking" technology that turns each device into a relay that bounces the network onward.

But the XO also needs help. Though Negroponte promises he'll meet the $100 mark by the end of 2008, today each XO costs about $140, even with subsidized parts. AMD, for instance, offer its processors and Chi Lin Technology supplies screens at prices below what they charge for-profit companies. So OLPC is dependent on the kindness of wealthy partners, and does not get great reviews for performance—at least from rivals in the for-profit business. Microsoft's Bill Gates has disparaged the machine as an underpowered and obsolete PC, and Intel executives call it a "100-dollar gadget."

Novatium's approach has been to completely redesign the computer, slashing costs while keeping the form and functions typical of a top-end PC. Once it's set up, it doesn't look all that different from a conventional PC—the basic box plus a keyboard and monitor. It installs and operates as simply as a television—you plug it in and switch it on. And the money doesn't come from government budgets or philanthropic largesse, but from Jain's profit-oriented business model. "We do want to serve people, but we want to be profitable first," says Novatium CEO Alok Singh, who was hired for his experience bringing new products to market at Cummins Auto Services Ltd.

Negroponte is critical of Novatium's approach. For one thing, he argues that reliable networks aren't available in the rural areas where his target users live. He's adamant that the XO's approach, in which software resides on the PC, is better suited to India's needs. "The [Novatium] thin-client approach is not suited for the poor or developing [countries], because it leads to a metering economic model and presumes a stable, omnipresent, broadband network," he said in an e-mail. It's "a bit like buses versus bicycles. I would recommend the bicycle for daily use."

The Novatium team makes no apologies. It is not targeting the deeply poor rural farmers that Negroponte sees as his market. It is looking first to make money on the urban middle class, where many people are too poor to buy PCs but have ready access to cable and telecommunications networks. Taking inspiration from University of Michigan management expert C. K. Prahalad, author of "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits," Jain says that in India's PC market there are 10 million relatively wealthy Indians at the "top of the pyramid" who buy computers just like consumers in developed countries. There are an additional 30 million urban Indians at the "middle of the pyramid" and 100 million very poor Indians at the "bottom of the pyramid." "What we are saying is how can you dramatically bring down the entry levels for computing in this country and make it accessible to the middle of the pyramid?" he says. "This is the sweet spot."

Novatium, of course, has a long way to go. It needs to build a network along the lines of those run by India's mobile and Internet service providers. For that, the company will need to partner with telecom or cable companies that are pushing broadband Internet access. (It is working to line up a contract with a few small cable companies, which if successful could lead to deals with larger broadband firms like Airtel, Hathway, Sify, Tata Indicom and state-owned BSNL and MTNL.) Success will bring competition from Western firms such as San Jose, Calif. -based Wyse, which already sells some network PCs to India's IT firms. But Wyse and the others aren't yet interested in the home market. And Novatium has licensed its technology to Sun Microsystems for the enterprise and education markets so Novatium can focus on selling to home users. Jain is hoping that that head start plus a rich offering of features—such as streaming video, video-on-demand and voice-over-IP, which other low-cost thin-client PCs don't offer—will give Novatium an edge for at least a few years.

Down the road, Jain envisions his device transforming the computing landscape. "It's taken a quarter century for computer makers worldwide to get to 700 million users," he says. "The utility and network computing model can double that number in the next five years. That means there's a huge opportunity for the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel, Microsoft and so on, and the entire existing computer value chain. But they'll have to reinvent their businesses. They have to look at an entirely different model." And they'll have to look to India.

With Jessica Bennett in New York

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

without a trace

A gruesome serial-killing case raises furious questions about whether the police are doing enough to find the 45,000 kids reported missing each year in India.

By Jason Overdorf

(Newsweek Web Exclusive Jan. 20, 2007) - Half an hour from the heart of New Delhi, in the mushrooming grid of houses, cottage industries and tech companies that make up Noida, one of India's fastest-growing cities, a small crowd of protesters are calling for the head of their state's chief minister. "Mulayam Singh," the leader chants. "Murdabad!" the crowd shouts in response. "Noida police," the leader calls. "Hai! Hai!" the crowd echoes.

Their chanting means: "Death to Mulayam Singh!" and "Noida police, shame! shame!" Many of the lower-middle-class demonstrators hold aloft handmade flyers emblazoned with the photographs of schoolchildren, some in uniforms, some in poorly knotted neckties, others in colorful salwar kameez. The kids on the flyers have one thing in common. They have all disappeared without a trace, some of the approximately 45,000 children reported missing each year in India. And now, behind a block-long screen hastily erected to thwart rubberneckers, a backhoe and a team of forensic investigators are digging up their small bodies.

In a case that came to light on Dec. 29, police have detained businessman Monander Singh Pandher and his servant Surindra Koli for interrogation about the abduction and murder of at least 20 women and children. No charges have been filed, the suspects are under judicial remand while the police conduct their investigation. According to reports, the servant has confessed and implicated his boss, but the boss hasn't admitted any crime. Body parts and skulls, mostly from the kids, were found hidden in municipal storm drains attached to Pandher's house. The protesters are furious because the police discovered the alleged murderers and the grisly evidence of their crimes by accident, after ignoring as many as 40 missing- persons reports in the area over the last two years. And their anger has tapped into a deep and growing well of resentment in India, where the gap between rich and poor grows wider every day.

According to summaries of interrogations and other stage-whispering that has been leaked to the press, the alleged murderers were said to be sexual predators who operated as a team, with Pandher supplying his house and veneer of respectability to protect them from suspicious eyes and Koli acting as procurer. Police say they found 17 skulls and a large number of bones in the drain outside Pandher's house and surgical knives, gloves, a butcher's knife, and blood-stained clothes inside the home. Last week, the Uttar Pradesh police turned over the case to India's Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI—a national policing unit similar to America's Federal Bureau of Investigation—after several weeks of bumbling that allowed journalists and curious neighbors to trample all over the crime scene. Dr. Rajat Mitra, a criminal psychologist who has worked closely with the police, admits frankly that the authorities (even perhaps the CBI) are out of their depth. "The understanding of serial killers is virtually nonexistent here. They could not understand what kind of crime it is. It involved pedophilia, gory rituals ... The diabolic nature of the crime was not something they believed happened here."

But the victims and their activists remain convinced that the police failures amount to more than simple incompetence. "This is a failure of our democracy," says Kailash Satyarthi, the leader of a group fighting the trafficking of children, "because it shows that the poor, and especially the children of the poor, are totally neglected." As long ago as September, Satyarthi's group, the Bachpan Bachao Andolan or Save the Childhood Movement, approached the Noida police on behalf of parents who alleged that their missing-persons reports had been ignored. At that point, 31 neighborhood kids had disappeared. One local TV channel picked up the story. The police, apparently, did nothing. Only after the apparently unrelated kidnapping of the 3-year-old son of a rich businessman made stop-the-presses headlines, and the entire police and government apparatus mobilized to secure his safe return, did Noida's other missing kids draw notice. Even then, they were soon forgotten. Not until neighbors who'd earlier been dismissed once again complained of a rotting stench coming from the storm drain outside Pandher's home, was the first body discovered.

Noida is not the first Indian city to suffer a serial killing. Last year, for instance, a gang of nine taxi drivers based in Gurgaon (another booming satellite town) confessed to robbing and murdering at least 35 passengers. In 2004, a 57-year-old merchant named Sadashiv Sahu was nabbed for murdering 22 elderly and middle-aged men in the small Uttar Pradesh town of Fursatganj. And in 1995, a rickshaw driver nicknamed "Auto" Shankar was executed for kidnapping, raping and murdering six young girls throughout the late 1980s. Although these documented cases are far fewer in number than the cases of serial murders in the United States and other developed countries, Mitra says that police ignorance of profiling and other relevant investigative techniques, the lack of coordination among law enforcement in different regions of the country, and problems as simple as poor record-keeping, make it likely that there are many more serial murders that have never been linked to one killer.

But more than any previous case, the horror of the Noida murders has drawn attention to an unpleasant truth about the safety of children in this intensely family-oriented society. The 45,000 children reported missing each year doesn't include those whose families are turned away or are afraid to go to the police. Eleven thousand youngsters, presumably trafficked for prostitution, pornography or slave labor, are never found. Yet, in large part, the official apparatus continues to treat these cases as though they are a necessary condition of poverty—children running away from starvation—rather than as undiscovered crimes. "Missing children masks a lot of more heinous crimes [like pedophilia]," says Mitra. "That notion needs to get into the police psyche."

Link - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16713819/site/newsweek/">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16713819/site/newsweek/

the good life

Four Hours in Detroit

(Newsweek International, January 22, 2007)

You thought people only wanted to leave the Motor City? Believe it or not, there's much to enjoy—the cold notwithstanding of course.

STROLL through the future of the car at the North American International Auto Show, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year (Jan. 13-21; naias.com).

GROOVE to the sounds of Hitsville U.S.A. at the Motown Historical Museum, home of Studio A, where the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and others recorded with the Funk Brothers (motownmuseum.org).

RIDE the People Mover, an elevated monorail that offers an unsurpassed tour of the city, from the Cobo Exhibition Center to General Motors' headquarters in the breathtaking Renaissance Center (thepeoplemover.com).

EAT "nouvelle soul" cuisine at Sweet Georgia Brown, where there's live jazz every night.

—Jason Overdorf

bioinvaders: the next plague

Migrating species may be the biggest threat to plant and animal life on the planet

By Mac Margolis

Newsweek International

Jan. 15, 2007 issue - Tall and tan and fat and ugly, achatina fulica is not something you'd want to behold on the sands of Ipanema. But you may not have a choice. Since gaining a beachhead in Brazil 19 years ago, this unlovely mollusk, better known as the giant African land snail, has proved unstoppable. Imported on the sly in 1988 as a cheap substitute for escargot, it has become a scourge, blistering Latin America's biggest country like a strange pox. Growing to the size of a man's fist and weighing one kilogram or more, it lays up to 2,000 eggs a year and eats a tenth

of its body weight a day, devouring everything from lettuce to mouse droppings to its own dead comrades. Worse, it can also carry rat lungworm, a nasty parasite that burrows into the human brain and causes meningitis, and another that can rupture the intestines. "It crawls into gardens, up walls, over the pavement," says Silvana Thiengo, a snail expert at Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. "We found it in Copacabana. I mean, Copacabana!"

Brazil's unwelcome snail is just one of a burgeoning breed of pests and pathogens that have broken free of their native habitats around the world. Biologists somewhat quaintly call them exotic species. The rest of the world knows them for what they are: bioinvaders. They come in all guises, from trifling microbes to towering trees, from the mosquito to the mongoose. What they share is a penchant for stealth, spiriting around the planet on the wings of migratory birds, nestled in the threads of clothing or swimming in the human bloodstream. Scores of bioinvaders are deliberately set loose by farmers or eggheads trying to outsmart nature (importing snakes to chase rats), gardeners with exotic tastes (knotweed) or entrepreneurs too clever by half (seeking the perfect escargot). Bioinvaders are also ferocious competitors; free from the predators of their homelands, they prosper on virgin territory, monopolizing food supply and reproducing at a rate that would make rabbits blanch. Once lodged in a new land, the intruding species may never go away, forcing public authorities to battle them again and again with earthmoving equipment, fire and poison—a job as futile as Sisyphus'.

There is nothing new or automatically pernicious about wandering wildlife. Without the millennial scrambling of life forms, humankind would neither eat nor prosper. "More than 90 percent of food crops like wheat, corn and rice, and almost as many strains of livestock, are exotic species," says Cornell University's David Pimentel, a leading scholar on the subject. But bioinvasion has taken a quantum leap in a borderless world where billions of people and tons of goods traverse the globe in a matter of hours, making a mockery of customs inspectors and quarantines. Indeed, the very forces that make the international economy flourish—trade, travel, transport and tourism—also make it vulnerable to invasive species.

World trade has increased twenty-fold over the last half century, with cargo ships, planes, and trucks providing a free ride for countless bugs and germs—an epic genetic upheaval that Jeffrey McNeely, chief scientist for the World Conservation Union, called "the great reshuffling." Pimentel reckons that the total numberof alien invading species known to science has climbed to 500,000—double the figure of just 60 years ago. Keeping track of invaders is vexing for even the most vigilant societies. A few years ago, the National Academy of Science reported that some 13,000 plant diseases are intercepted every year at international ports of entry in the United States. Yet customs inspectors are able to examine just two percent of incoming cargo and baggage. "This is the cost of globalization," says Charles Perrings, an environmental economist at Arizona State University.

Any pest, domestic or foreign, can be a nuisance, spoiling the flower patch or buzzing about the ears. But bioinvaders are especially dangerous. Some wipe out harvests, choke waterways and desiccate the landscape, inviting wildfires. A deadly few microbes cause pandemics, like mad-cow disease and AIDS. Even when they aren't an outright menace, exotic plants, animals and pathogens impoverish nature by crowding out a whole suite of homegrown species or creating mongrel hybrids through interbreeding. An increasing number of scientists now agree that bioinvasion is the most immediate—and surely the fastest-growing—threat to plant and animal life on the planet after deforestation and breakneck development. (Of course, global climate change may eventually trump all other dangers, but in part because invasive species are likely to run rampant in a warming world.) "Once you get a nonnative plant or animal species in the system, then it's very difficult to get the habitat back to where it was," says Mark Spencer, an expert on invasive species at the Natural History Museum in London. "We are at an ecological tipping point."

In the United States alone some 50,000 bioinvaders cause an estimated $120 billion in damages to harvests, trees and fisheries every year, according to Pimentel. Throw in India, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and Brazil, and the cost nearly doubles, to $228 billion. Globally, says Pimentel, bioinvasion's toll on the economy and the environment—accounting for damage to watersheds, soil degradation and extinction of wildlife—may be a staggering $1.4 trillion a year. And if the majority of experts are right, the cost of bioinvasion is only going to get worse.

Fittingly, perhaps, invasive pests and pathogens seem perfectly suited to the rigors of a world without flags. Some alien plants and animals need little more than a toehold to lay siege to a new land. Barely a decade after washing out of the ballast tanks of European ships into the inland waterways of the United States, the Baltic zebra mussel has spread from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta, choking water pipes, clogging hydroelectric-power plants and driving native water plants and mussels to the brink by monopolizing food and oxygen. Officials spend $1 billon a year combating zebra and quagga mussels—just two of the 88 exotic species loose in the United States.

Often in the natural world, what goes around comes around. So while Old World mollusks choke U.S. waterways, Yankee imperialists like the American mink and the signal crayfish are "taking over British waterways, outmuscling native competition and spreading disease," warns Britain's environmental authority. Then there is Japanese knotweed, a peripatetic ornamental plant so aggressive it can crack roads, fissure buildings and simply overwhelm native plants. London Development Agency director Gareth Blacker, who is excavating a vast East End brownfield site to build a sports complex for the 2012 Olympics, says unexploded World War II bombs will be "less difficult to deal with than knotweed."

Like so much else in the global marketplace, the burden of bioinvasion falls unevenly across the world. The human toll is often devastating to the poorest nations, where a failed crop can start a famine. Implacable exotic pests like the cassava mealybug, gray leaf spot and witchweed claim up to half the harvests in the poorest countries, posing a "serious threat to life and livelihood" with "enormous economic and political ramifications," says Guy Preston of the Working for Water program, a South African government initiative dedicated to preserving fresh water.

Since exotic species tend to thrive in milder weather, global warming has expanded the frontiers for a host of heat-seeking organisms. Not surprisingly, one of the major ports of entry for bioinvaders in the U.S. is Florida, which is already home to half of the country's 50,000 known alien species, from rogue ornamental plants like hydrilla to escaped pets like Burmese pythons, which have been found in the Everglades. "Invasive species are at a definite advantage in a warming world," says Pimentel.

Bioinvaders can be sleeping giants, lying about for decades until a biological opportunity like a storm or a heat wave arouses them. Take the Hottentot fig. Known for its profusion of pink and yellow flowers, this carpetlike succulent plant spread only modestly in the decades since its arrival in the U.K. from South Africa more than a century ago, held in check by the cooler climate of the British Isles. But the run of mild winters brought on by global warming has set it loose. "It's rampaging," says Spencer, "smothering local plant communities as it goes."

The planet's most reckless species has given bioinvaders some of their biggest breaks. The African snail, originally from East Africa, found its way to steamy Asia a century ago, perhaps tucked away in the cargo of some trading vessel, and never stopped. In 1936 a gardener from Formosa (today's Taiwan) took a couple of specimens to Hawaii to bejewel her rock garden and touched off an environmental emergency that still hasn't ended. Achatina fulica later landed in Guam and then Saipan, apparently stowing away in the gear of U.S. soldiers, sparking one of the less celebrated occupations of World War II. So thickly did living and dead snails line the island highways "dat de jeeps er slipten," one Dutch scientist reported. Twenty years later, a boy returning from vacation in Hawaii landed in Florida with a pair of snails in his pocket, touching off an invasion that took seven years to eradicate.

By then, you'd think the word on African snails would have oozed out, but apparently not to Brazil. In 1988 an ambitious merchant showed off a box of them at an agricultural fair in Curitiba, waxing about the fortunes to be made off the mother of all escargot. A cottage industry was born, as snail farmers began to export their harvest for a tidy sum. But along came Brasília's economic-stability plan, which caused the country's currency to spike against the dollar, pricing tropical escargot out of the world market. Scores of breeders ended up dumping their glut into the wilds. The authorities eventually banned the snail, but too late. At last count, the giant African snail had spread to 23 of Brazil's 27 states. Now civil-defense teams scramble around the map, shoveling up yesterday's delicacy by the unsavory ton.

Importing nature can be a blessing. A parasitic wasp from South America has helped millions of African farmers control the cassava mealybug, which ravages that continent's staple food, while Australia has successfully turned a killer virus from the Czech Republic against the ubiquitous European rabbit. Often, though, nature bites back. The Indian mongoose was shipped to the West Indies to hunt rats, but ended up feasting on almost everything that crawled or croaked; a handful of ground-nesting birds and up to a dozen amphibians and reptiles were driven to extinction.

Indeed, bioinvasion's worst legacy may be the havoc it wreaks on other forms of wildlife. In the United States, as much as 40 percent of all extinctions can be blamed on invasive weeds, predators or pathogens, says Pimentel. In South Africa, many alien weeds come hard-wired for combustion, worsening the hazard in a nation where wildfires cause $461 million in damage a year. So thick are the palisades of thorny mimosa—an aggressive weed akin to the touch-me-not—that India's endangered one-horned rhino can no longer move about freely in Kaziranga National Park. Chinese authorities have spent some $800,000 battling the American white moth, which now destroys more than 1.3 mllion hectares of woodlands each year.

And yet getting rid of bioinvaders can often prove equally problematic. Brought to China from the Philippines to eat mosquitoes, the mosquitofish has lately become a tyrant, spreading throughout the marshlands in southern China and driving several native aquatic species to the brink. The only way to kill the mosquitofish is by dousing the water with rotenone—a poison so potent it also kills almost everything else that swims. Still, doing nothing may "threaten China's most important species—the Chinese people," says Wang Fanghao, who lectures at China's Agricultural Science Academy.

Perhaps the only sure way to curb bioinvasion is to plug the gaping holes on international borders. If customs inspection in the United States is lax, in much of the rest of the world it's almost laughable. Only in 2005 did India get around to asking arriving passengers whether they were carrying any fruits, vegetables or plants—all major pathways for disease. But customs controls have their limits in the global economy. Thanks to tough import laws, Australia has developed one of the best bioinvasion defenses of any nation. Yet in the late nineties Canadian salmon farmers cried foul, charging Australia with unfair trade barriers. The World Trade Organization agreed, forcing Australia to open its market—a ruling that scientists fear could undermine other quarantine regulations.

And yet in a time when germs ride the wind and tide, even the most zealous border guards may be of little use. In most countries, exotic species are simply too entrenched to eradicate. Now a few scientists, mindful of Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum that "a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered," are trying to put bioinvaders to work. In India, one team of researchers is helping rural families turn lantana camara—a scraggly weed that overruns native woodlands—to good use as a substitute for bamboo. Not all pests and weeds may prove so compliant, but that doesn't mean scientists should give up and grab the flamethrower. "The issue isn't stopping bioinvasion, but understanding it," says Perrings. In the end, that means learning to live with the enemy.

With William Underhill in London, Jason Overdorf in New Delhi, Karen MacGregor in Durban, and Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

kingdom for a horse

By Jason Overdorf

Outlook Traveler (January 2007)--Ten years ago, when local villagers dragged Thakur Hemant Singh Deval back from the big city life of Udaipur to take over as sarpanch and head of the one-time jagir of Ravla Khempur, he wasn’t sure what to make of his new life as a country gentleman. But today, it’s clear from the unspoiled metalled roads and well-equipped school that the villagers knew what they were doing. And for visitors, Hemant’s skill as host and hotelier shines through in the homely atmosphere and casual efficiency of Ravla Khempur, today an eight-room heritage hotel that caters to horse lovers.

A long-time resident of Delhi, I travelled to Ravla Khempur to rid myself of the black mood that had crept over me through the long, hot summer in the crowded capital and to recapture the love for Rajasthan that I’d cultivated during my first year in India. The key to both, I knew, was Rajasthan’s beautiful and spirited Marwari horse, the subject of my first ‘big’ story as a freelance writer in India and an enduring fascination for a grown-up boy who’d spent many an hour fancying himself a character in Riders of the Purple Sage. On this trip, I’d leave books and breeders’ conferences behind and ride. I wasn’t disappointed by Hemant’s horses or by his hotel, which provides a window into authentic Rajasthani culture and an escape from the state’s turban-and-camel cliches.

Ravla Khempur is set amid the sarson and jowar fields like an antique gemstone—slightly faded and nicked, but all the more enchanting for its wear. The climate here is not as dry as it is further north and west as you approach the Thar Desert, so the landscape is touched everywhere with a subtle pastel beauty. The cactus, which grows thick across the untilled land and which villagers cultivate for the hedgerows around their fields, is the pale blue of an old knife. The drying jowar that Hemant feeds his horses is tinged with salmon and rose. And here and there bougainvillea blooms like a burst of flame.

Ravla Khempur itself is a grand, two-storey haveli, pale yellow in colour, with arched windows trimmed with ornate white carvings that reminded me of the sugary frosting on a wedding cake. Wherever possible, Hemant has allowed the building’s age to show through, so the exterior walls are streaked with mossy water patterns that set off the frilly balconies and give the estate a dignified air that harkens back to the origin of the jagir—which was awarded to Hemant’s great-great grandfather when he killed two assassins to save the life of Jagat Singh II, future Rana of Udaipur and builder of the Palace on the Lake. Having seen havelis before, though, the first things that struck me were the fine, arched stables alongside the haveli’s iron-spiked doors. Originally used to stable the horses of travellers visiting Ravla Khempur, today the four stalls house Hemant’s four Marwari broodmares, all of which were in various stages of pregnancy when I visited.

Their nickering and snorting and earthy smells are the perfect introduction to the hotel, I soon found, as I began to explore the property. Though Hemant only took up horse-breeding a decade back, he is now thoroughly obsessed with the Marwari, and his obsession is reflected everywhere at Ravla Khempur. Nearly every wall features a painting or photograph of one of the prime specimens of the breed, and at every turn Hemant’s love for horses reveals itself in some unexpected form—in a glass-topped table supported by wooden horses, or coat hooks in the shape of horses heads.

Hemant can arrange riding lessons, excursions for experienced riders and day trips to Chittaurgarh, Udaipur and Kumbhalgarh. But Khempur is a quiet, clean place, without babbling televisions or whining air-conditioners, best suited to travellers who have learned how to relax and understand the merits of doing nothing. There is no menu card or dreaded multi-cuisine restaurant. Instead visitors are treated to traditional Rajasthani dishes prepared with local vegetables under the supervision of Hemant’s mother. I’ve never stayed in a hotel in India with better food. “We don’t want to be too commercial,” Hemant is fond of saying, along with, “We don’t have to operate on a schedule,” even though he’s always energetically striding from place to place to keep everything running smoothly.

Relaxation is one area in which my expertise is unsurpassed, so the pace of life in Khempur suited me. I spent my first day sitting in one of the window seats on the verandah and watching the grooms work with Bazigar, Hemant’s prize stallion, next to the small temple in the courtyard below, every so often turning my attention to a flock of green parrots. Later, I took a stroll through the village with Hemant, stopping by the temple steps where old men congregated to smoke chillums and discuss the problems with the “young people of today”. After that, I took a nap on the window-seat in my room, lounging in the coloured sun that filtered through the stained glass. There’d be plenty of time for Hemant’s Marwaris in the morning.

Every school kid in India knows the story of Chetak, the grey Marwari stallion that carried Rana Pratap safely away from his battle against the Mughals at Haldighati on three legs after one of his hind legs was hacked off above the hoof. But few know much else about this indigenous horse breed—or even that it has only recently begun a return from the brink of extinction.

Bred as a battle mount by the Rathore clan (of Jodhpur/Marwar), the Marwari is a hot-blooded horse with a thick, arched neck, long-lashed eyes and flaring nostrils. The Rajputs bred the Marwari to be passionate, showy and quick-tempered and nurtured the breed’s most distinctive characteristic: ears that curve inward to a sharp point, meeting at the tips to form an almost perfect arch. Today, every carthorse in India has some form of these arching ears, so most non-experts are stunned to discover that pure Marwaris number only in the low thousands and there are only a few hundred truly excellent specimens. Sadly, though, the same Rajput pride that created the Marwari has nearly proved its undoing in the post-Independence era. Because in feudal times only Rajput nobles had been permitted to ride them, the Marwari became a symbol of casteism and oppression following the incorporation of the princely states into independent India. And after India stripped the jagirs of their fiefdoms in 1956, thousands of Marwaris were shot, castrated or turned over to the peasant farmers to use as draft animals. Though there was little demand for Marwaris then, except for use in wedding ceremonies, the Mirasi caste of horsebreeders who’d once supplied the Rajputs with their mounts kept the breed alive until the 1980s, when Rajasthan’s erstwhile nobles began to regain some of their former wealth through heritage tourism and the Marwari began its comeback. But over the years, the breeding stock was diluted and essential information about the lineage of the top horses—once kept by the bards the noblemen employed to sing (and perhaps embellish) their exploits—was lost.

That’s why Hemant thinks of himself as a horsebreeder as much as a hotelier, even though hospitality rather than horses is his roti-sabzi. “I bought my first Marwari in 1990 for Rs 80,000,” he told me. “At that time I didn’t know the first thing about horses. After some time passed, my father explained why this wasn’t a good horse for breeding, showing me all the points that one should look for in a Marwari.” A few months later, Hemant sold that colt for Rs 15,000. He bought and sold another horse, and another, and another, learning more about the business as he went along. “Horse breeding isn’t rocket science,” he said. “Anybody can learn it if he takes the time and he has the passion.” Today he breeds some eight foals a year, some of which later sell for a lakh or more. The frequent presence of ‘baby horses’ at Ravla Khempur adds to its attraction for families with small children.

That morning was bright and cool, and Hemant had consented to put the stallion, Bazigar, through his paces for me and the other hotel guests, a party of tourists from New Zealand. Ravla Khempur generally accepts only one group at a time, so visitors feel that they are guests in a Rajput house rather than patrons of a hotel. But he’d made an exception so that I could see how the hotel operated when it was full. Bazigar, too, had an equine visitor—a dapple-grey mare belonging to the local MLA that was to be ‘covered’ or bred over the next few days—so the stallion was more than happy to preen and strut for us. “See, this is the true Marwari,” Hemant said, providing an apt description of himself and the rest of the Rajputs as he squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest. “He’s like the hero in a movie. Here you see him in a jacket. Later he wears a hat. He’s always looking good.” Hemant was dead-on. Bazigar was as big a ham as Salman Khan.

That afternoon, I climbed aboard Rajroop, Hemant’s most obedient mare, which he uses for displays of the traditional art of horse dancing popular at Rajasthani weddings, for a ride through the village and the local fields. Finally, I was riding a Marwari. A beautiful, chestnut-coloured animal with four white socks and an auspicious white ‘tilak’ on her forehead, Rajroop was more responsive than most tourist horses, perhaps because she has not been spoiled by legions of inexperienced trail riders. But though she was always ready for a gallop, a gentle tug on the reins was enough to keep her in check—even when another of the pregnant ladies, Kalyani, decided to take a vicious kick at her.

On the way back to the stable, I hatched schemes to delay my return to the car horns and shoving matches of Delhi. All I could think was, “All this, and all you had to do to get it was hack off a couple guys’ heads?” What can I say? I’ve always been a sucker for hot-tempered girls.

the good life

4 HOURS IN . . . MUMBAI
(Newsweek International, November 13, 2006 issue)

Still known to many as Bombay--and to others as Bollywood--India's film and financial capital is a great melting pot.

STROLL past the majestic stone dome, turrets and pointed arches of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus--a UNESCO world-heritage site known by most locals as Victoria Terminus, or VT.

WATCH a few overs of cricket--India's one universal religion--at the Oval Maidan (Veer Nariman and Mahatma Gandhi roads).

EAT a plate of sali boti (mutton with fried potatoes) at Britannia, beloved by the city's Parsis. Don't leave without trying the unbeatable caramel custard (Wakefield House, 11 Sprott Road, 16 Ballar Estate).

SAIL across the harbor to Elephanta Island and tour the remarkable 1,500-year-old rock-hewn temples in honor of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Beware of tourist-bullying monkeys! (www.maharashtratourism.gov.in/mtdc).

--JASON OVERDORF

india's weapon: its diaspora

Nonresident Indians were once viewed with suspicion. But now they and their money are coming home.

By Jason Overdorf
Newsweek International (November 13 issue)

In a way, the story of India and its diaspora reads like a Bollywood script about two brothers, the younger one rich and successful, the older one poor but closer to the family. And now, not too late in life, they are reconciling.

As recently as a decade ago, overseas Indians were viewed either as cash cows to be milked or as traitors who'd taken their highly subsidized educations and abandoned the motherland to get rich abroad. That disapproval was reflected in a play on words that turned NRI, or nonresident Indian, into "not required Indian." But as India has evolved from agrarian torpor to high-tech vibrancy in recent years, the newly self-confident country has also begun to re-evaluate its relationship with its expatriates. At the same time, members of the diaspora have begun looking homeward for the same reason they originally left—the pull of economic opportunity. "The mind-set of India changed in the 1990s," says author Gurcharan Das, whose book "India Unbound" charts the country's rise. "The minds of young Indians, especially, became decolonized."

Everyone knows about the "reverse brain drain" of talented Indians who have returned home from Silicon Valley to fuel the country's tech boom. But more quietly, the money has now begun to follow the people. Though overseas Chinese, not to mention overseas Filipinos and Mexicans, are much more famous for sending cash home, Indians now lead the world in this category. According to the World Bank, cash remittances from Indians abroad have more than doubled since 1995, and last year totaled $22 billion. (China, at $21 billion, was close behind.) Over the past decade India's aggregate remittances totaled $154 billion—about 50 percent higher than what China received from its much larger diaspora.

With more than 20 million Indians overseas, including 200,000 millionaires in America alone, the diaspora could be a critical weapon for India in its effort to catch up to its archrival. A recent JPMorgan report says the diaspora is becoming "a powerful catalyst in helping India realize—perhaps even exceed—its aspiration toward 10 percent annual GDP growth." Aside from remittances, the stock of bank deposits held by nonresident Indians, many of whom bank money in India to take advantage of preferential interest rates, topped $32 billion last year, accounting for a whopping 23 percent of India's foreign-exchange reserves. These large inflows have helped protect the value of the rupee and dampen inflation in a nation that, unlike China, runs a trade and government deficit. And while it's not clear how much of the foreign money flowing into the Bombay Stock Exchange comes from overseas Indians, local traders assume the NRIs account for a good share of the incoming money that has driven up the market 300 percent since 2003. Over the same period, the Shanghai market has stagnated (due in large part to China's reluctance to open it to hot money from any overseas source).

There are other critical differences between the Chinese and Indian diasporas. Because overseas Chinese are concentrated nearby in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan and largely earned their wealth in manufacturing, they're both better situated and more motivated to make direct investments in factories on the mainland. In contrast, India's post-independence emigrants were mainly professionals—doctors, lawyers, scientists and engineers—or small shop and hotel owners, settled in countries far from India. Until recently they had neither the expertise nor the impetus to invest in their homeland.

That's a big reason, says JPMorgan analyst Rajeev Malik, that to date overseas Chinese have sunk far more than their Indian counterparts have into new factories back home. The overseas Chinese contributed as much as half of China's foreign direct investment in the 1990s, while overseas Indians chipped in only about 10 percent of India's much smaller total. In 2000, for example, overseas Chinese pumped $32 billion in FDI into China, compared with $200 million for Indians.

But this, too, is changing. Curiously enough, India's first concerted official effort to court its own diaspora began on the heels of its first nuclear test in 1998. To help offset the international backlash that led to sanctions, India issued Resurgent India Bonds, for sale to overseas Indians only. This patriotic appeal drew in $4.2 billion.

Over the next five years, India's burgeoning economic might undermined the members of the protectionist swadeshi—or "self-sufficiency" —lobby in their battle against free-market reformers. Bureaucrats began for the first time to embrace the business class, including videshi—or "foreign"— executives. In 1999, India introduced a quasi-citizenship scheme for Indians born overseas that allows them to travel in and out of the country without a visa, as well as to buy land and take advantage of investment programs directed at nonresident Indian passport holders. In 2000, the government formed a high-level committee to explore ways to improve ties with Indians abroad, and in 2003 it introduced Non-Resident Indian Days, at which government ministers seek diaspora investment. The next year India created a Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs to address the concerns of the diaspora throughout the year.

At the same time, the diaspora itself has undergone remarkable changes. The mix of contract workers and professionals, scattered from the Persian Gulf to Britain, the United States and Canada, has developed a new core of increasingly high-powered entrepreneurs, centered in but not limited to Silicon Valley. Many of them, like Gururaj (Desh) Deshpande (founder of Sycamore Networks), Vinod Dham (father of Intel's Pentium chip), Vani Kola (founder of RightWorks software) and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla are investing time and money in Indian companies. "Business people in India now have a lot more confidence, and people here [in America] have a lot more respect for what the guys in India are doing," says Deshpande. "If it was 10 years ago and somebody came here looking to invest or contribute, if you got a phone call or an invitation from somebody in the government it was like they were doing you a big favor. Now they offer to come see you. They're reaching out."

The result has been a very recent spike in huge investments from the diaspora. "The pace of investing in India is accel-erating," says Google billionaire Ram Shriram, whose Sherpalo Ventures is now investing in Indian firms. Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia has unveiled plans for a $2 billion infrastructure project in Haryana that he's billing as India's Silicon Valley. And, most dramatically, the world's leading steel tycoon, London-based Lakshmi Mittal, is building a $9 billion steel plant in the eastern state of Jharkhand—the largest expat investment to date. "I am very proud to be an Indian, and yes, there is certainly an emotional dimension to be able to invest in my place of birth," says Mittal. "[But] investing in India is a business decision, as it's a market with huge potential for growth in steel consumption."

All this has made Indian and NRI business leaders more active in promoting ties. Organizations like the Confederation of Indian Industry's Indian American Council identify opportunities for collaboration in areas like training and education, health care and scientific research. The expat network Indus Entrepreneurs mentors younger entrepreneurs and has created more than $200 billion in wealth by helping to build start-up companies.

Supersuccessful NRIs see India as an exciting frontier where they can use the skills and contacts they developed abroad to launch second-act careers with a broad socio-economic impact. Consider Deshpande, who—first as "coach," then as investor and chairman of the board—helped entrepreneur Sanjay Nayak build India's first homegrown telecom-equipment company, Tejas Networks. Now six years old, Tejas holds the No. 2 market share in India. Former McKinsey & Co. managing director Rajat Gupta, who left India more than 20 years ago, used a combination of India savvy and a brilliant network abroad to set up the Indian School of Business and the Public Health Foundation of India. Six years after it opened its doors, ISB is the eighth largest business school in the world. The PHFI, launched this year, will set up five world-class Indian Institutes of Public Health, the first two opening by 2008, which will eventually produce as many as 10,000 graduates a year.

Successful emigrants like Dham, Kola and Shriram are bringing more than money to India. They're both benefiting from and fueling a new sense of possibility. Dham, for instance, helped persuade Kola to move home after 22 years in the United States to run a new $100 million VC fund, based in Bangalore. On a trip home, Kola felt something she had felt years ago in Silicon Valley, a sense of being at the center of things. "I'm happy and proud that this is where things are happening now," says Kola, who says the move to India was like getting back on a bike after a break of 20 years. "It's fun. It's almost like a gift I wasn't expecting." Today, India's prodigal sons and daughters are more than welcome home.

an oasis for india's poorest

The All India Institute treated 3.5 million patients last year, and charged each a dollar.

By Jason Overdorf
Newsweek International
Oct. 30, 2006 issue - Several hundred poor and middle-class Indians are awaiting screening for dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease that has reached near-epidemic proportions in Delhi this fall. Sick and frightened, they lie on straw mats and blankets spread over the pavement in a queue that streams around the ambulance drive and out to the main road. Inside, doctors in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, or AIIMS, are working to fight off the outbreak of the sometimes deadly virus. Mosquitoes are common on the hospital campus, too, and a dozen ward doctors have contracted dengue themselves. One medical student has died.

This is what it takes to be India's best public hospital. Last year the government-run hospital, with about 2,000 beds, treated 3.5 million people, achieving mortality and infection rates comparable to the best facilities in the developed world—for fees that come to about $1 a day for inpatients.

AIIMS can do this because of government funding of about $100 million a year. Because it doesn't waste much cash on amenities, it can afford to buy cutting-edge equipment. Senior residents at AIIMS make about $400 a month. But they stay because of perks—doctors get the chance to spend one or two years working abroad, for instance—plus the opportunity to work with the latest technology and obtain big research grants.

migration: roads to nowhere

The world's poor are heading from one struggling nation to the next, as globalization rewrites the immigration map.

By Mac Margolis

Newsweek International

Sept. 11, 2006 issue - When he left Luanda six years ago, fleeing the draft and the ruins of Angola's civil war, José Paixão Afonso hoped to start over in a new land. Like thousands of his compatriots, he chose Brazil, a country that not only shared his mother tongue of Portuguese but also stoked imaginations all over Africa. "I thought it was going to be all love and brotherhood, like a Brazilian soap opera," he says. In a way it was. Afonso married and settled in Rio de Janeiro, where he began buying cheap

Brazilian clothing to resell back home. Then one night in July the pilgrim's idyll turned ugly. After collecting on a shipment to Angola from a courier at the Rio airport, he stuffed $6,000 into his underpants and caught a bus to town. Apparently, someone was watching. Minutes later, two armed men claiming to be police intercepted the bus and forced all the Angolans aboard to disembark. Afonso was robbed and beaten senseless. Another foreigner might have been on the next plane home. But Afonso is an immigrant not a tourist, and Brazil is home now. "I never expected this," he says, sighing, still nursing his injuries. "But what can you do?"

Afonso's tale is stark but hardly unfamiliar. The story of immigrants everywhere is one of hard luck, humiliation, occasional violence and stubborn survival against long odds. What's surprising is the venue. Developing countries like Brazil are best known as exporters of the huddled masses, not hosts. At best the Third World has traditionally been a way station to somewhere better. Who among the placeless and the poor, after all, would want to stake life and limb on an uncertain future in another struggling nation? The answer: plenty. Now Burmese women flock to Thailand to stitch designer wear for U.S. and European labels. Jobless families from Bangladesh wash up on the coastline of Mozambique, hoping to make their way to South Africa. Costa Rica has instituted tough new laws to shut down people smuggling—into the country, not out. For more and more of the world's roving poor, yesterday's way station has become tomorrow's final stop.

Not that the basic laws of immigration have been revoked. The flight from poverty and the lure of some golden shore are, even more than war and natural disaster, the twin forces that drive millions from their homelands every year. But globalization is redrawing the map of mass migration. Cheap international travel, tumbling trade barriers, surging growth in once sleeper economies and 24/7 media that spread word of opportunities everywhere are all multiplying the choices for those looking to improve their lot. Argentine job ads are published in Bolivian newspapers. Nigerians track events in South Africa on satellite television.

As anxieties over terrorism and an ever more competitive job market send the richest societies into a xenophobic crouch, more and more of today's migrants are willing to try their luck in other developing nations. Population scholars reckon that some 61 million people from developing nations—nations of the "south" in the argot of economists—now make their home in another developing country. That's nearly a third of the total 191 million global migrants, and virtually the same share as the 62 million who have moved from poor to wealthy nations, or south to north. (An additional 53 million moved between the developed nations, while 14 million went from rich to poor countries.) "There is a tendency to see immigration as an issue only for the U.S. and Western Europe. But it's worldwide," says José Antonio Ocampo, under-secretary-general for Economic and Social Affairs for the United Nations, which will host a summit on migration and development on Sept. 14-15. "The booming parts of the developing world are becoming magnets for migration."

Such population movements are not unprecedented. India and China sent 50 million indentured servants and contract laborers to the Pacific islands, Australia, South Asia and Africa in the mid-19th century—a human tide rivaling the European exodus to the New World a few decades later. A few other rising nations of the south, like South Korea, Pakistan and the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, are also well-known destinations for itinerant laborers. But as globalization has spread investment around the world, the incomes of many other once poor nations have been steadily rising. After the late-'90s slump, Thailand's economy is on a roll again; this year, the Thai government reckons it will need 500,000 additional workers. On the rebound from its own financial meltdown early this decade, Argentina is taking in tens of thousands of Bolivians, Paraguayans and Uruguayans.

Unlike France, say, or the United States, these poor countries both ship out their own migrants and receive them from other nations. "When countries send people abroad they leave niches that are being filled by immigrants," says Donald Terry, who manages the Multilateral Investment Fund at the Inter-American Development Bank. While Mexicans are queuing up in droves at the U.S. border, for instance, plenty of less fortunate Central Americans settle for life just shy of the Rio Grande. In 2005, Mexican authorities detained 240,269 undocumented migrants, nearly double the figure for 2002. As the circle tightens on the northern escape route, Plan B is looking increasingly attractive. "I'm doing a bit better, thank God, and there is work in Tijuana," says Paulina Ibarra Salas, a 57-year-old Guatemalan widow and mother of nine, who slipped into Mexico in 2000 but ran out of money before she could cross over into California. "Life is very tough in Guatemala, and I like Tijuana."

Some southern nations have welcomed poor foreigners before but rarely in such numbers. South Africa has traditionally drawn laborers from surrounding states, but since the end of apartheid migrants have been streaming in from across the continent. Thailand, too, now attracts workers from all over the region. Even in Brazil, where foreigners have been scarce, Angolans and Koreans are arriving, while São Paulo has seen its Bolivian population increase more than sixfold in a decade.

What's worrisome is not just the volume of this migration but its implications. While life is no lark for immigrants anywhere, these newcomers are scratching out a living in lands with flimsy social safety nets and where the only consistent immigration policy is often mass deportation. The vast majority end up in the informal economy, where exploitation is the rule, and lodged in slums, so adding to urban decay. "South-to-south migration is one of the most challenging—and underrated—issues of our time," says Marcello Balbo, professor of urban planning at the University IUAV of Venice, and a specialist in developing-world migration.

Yet still they come. The going wages in the developing world are no prize, but often they're just high enough. Besides, many migrants find the language, climate and customs of southern nations far more comfortable than U.S. or European culture. "For today's migrants, neighborhood matters," says the United Nations' Ocampo. Though work in the United States may pay six times more, nearly half a million Haitians have settled next door in the Dominican Republic to earn $50 a month. By the books, Malaysia is a middle-income country and still pocked with poverty, but to millions of Indonesians and Bangladeshis, with a third and a tenth the per capita income respectively, it looks like a beacon of opportunity. Some 2 to 3 million migrants live alongside Malaysia's 25 million citizens. Thailand's surging economy has sucked in 2 million to 4 million workers from neighboring Burma, Laos and Cambodia, who gladly accept half the $4-a-day legal minimum wage for thankless factory and sweatshop jobs that many native Thais wouldn't touch.

Once, most migrants to the Third World headed to the countryside, to work the harvests, or to a few specific industries, such as mining or oil. Now they cluster in cities, where the jobs have also migrated and social networks smooth the way for newcomers. Though a modest 2.5 percent of South Africa's population is reckoned to be foreign born, immigrants now comprise 7 percent of Johannesburg's residents. Fully a third of those living in Abidjan were born outside the Ivory Coast. About half of the million or more Bolivians living outside their country reside in greater Buenos Aires. Tijuana harbors no fewer than 37 nationalities, including thousands of Chinese.

Not all cities open their arms to these strangers, however. Like outsiders everywhere, southern migrants are seen as intruders—stealing local jobs, depressing wages—or criminals. Mostly, they are victims. Labor rights are unheard-of, let alone access to public health or welfare. They know the law mostly by the blunt end of a nightstick. In Thailand, some employers have been known to keep undocumented workers "under lock and key at night," says Allan Dow, in the Bangkok office of the International Labor Organization.

Scores of São Paulo sweatshops now depend upon the labor of illegal immigrants from the Andes, who work slave's hours and bed down dozens to a room in airless tenements, which are hothouses for tuberculosis and other diseases. It took a deadly fire in a Buenos Aires garment factory, which claimed the lives of six undocumented Bolivian workers, to jump-start the Argentine government's plans to legalize some foreign workers. One of the harshest markets for migrants is surely Malaysia, where the government periodically orders crackdowns on illegal immigration. After a Kuala Lumpur raid in February by members of RELA, Malaysia's volunteer reserve, five bodies of Burmese workers were pulled from a lake. Eyewitnesses said they'd heard screams from the lake as volunteers had charged after the migrants. The government denied that the volunteers were responsible for the deaths.

No one knows the risks better than Femi Oshin, a Nigerian freelance journalist who moved to Johannesburg in 2003. When he failed to produce the proper paperwork at the airport, he landed in the notorious Lindela Repatriation Centre, once the guest quarters for itinerant gold miners near Johannesburg and now a holding tank for foreigners awaiting deportation. After a month of sharing a cramped cell with 19 other Nigerians, he was finally released and granted asylum, but not before—he and his cellmates claimed—they were badly beaten by 15 guards "for not obeying the rules."

In Hillbrow, a fading Johannesburg high-rise housing complex that has become Oshin's home and a haven for many of South Africa's estimated 1.2 million immigrants, everyone knows the rules. "Police are always on the prowl for illegal immigrants, and detain any foreigner who does not have his papers," he says. "If I see a cop in the distance, I take another route." The country's new Immigration Act, sanctioned in 2002, could help, but its implementation has been delayed by constant court battles. Meanwhile, South Africa has expelled more than a million migrants since 1994.

That is the lot of immigrants everywhere, of course—to be needed but not wanted, worked liked coolies yet condemned as parasites. Yet the benefits often outweigh the costs. "We'd like to say, 'These are ignorant people,' [but] it's not true," says Sashi Thatun, program manager for a U.N. project to combat human trafficking in the Mekong River region. "All these workers are taking calculated risks." What may be most surprising about the southern migrants is how well they fare in the face of adversity. The World Bank estimates that $70 billion to $90 billion—or 35 to 40 percent of all money sent home by migrants—flows between developing countries. Nearly a million Nepalese employed in India sent back some $500 million throughout the 1990s, according to one study. So vital is the lifeline of remittances from Buenos Aires to La Paz that the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001 shaved 1 percent off Bolivia's GDP—perhaps one of the factors contributing to the social turmoil that saw two Bolivian presidents fall in three years.

The message to officials in the developing world couldn't be sharper. Immigrants of the south are not only among the most mistreated laborers anywhere, but perhaps one of the world's most squandered assets as well. Coaxing foreign workers from the shadows of the informal economy, where neither they nor their employers pay taxes, is not only a matter of justice but of sound economics. After all, in many southern cities, some industries—textiles in Argentina and Brazil, water supply in Abidjan, canneries in Bangkok—are dominated by immigrant labor. Yet the pundits and policy gurus, and all but a handful of world leaders, are strangely silent about the growing problem in the south's own backyard. "Officially, developing-world migrants are invisible," says Balbo. "There is simply no south-south immigration debate."

The blind spot could be tragic. South Asians will not soon forget India's nationalist campaign in 2003 to arrest hundreds of Bangladeshis and herd them onto trains for deportation. Because Dhaka and New Delhi have never seen eye to eye on illegal aliens, Bangladeshi border guards drove them back with clubs and gunfire. Hundreds were trapped in a deadly no man's land for days, and several were injured in the shooting. India is now at work on a 4,000-kilometer fence on the Bangladesh border—seven times longer than the wall the U.S. Senate voted to build between Texas and Mexico. Given the determination of today's migrants, neither project is likely to do much good.

With Joe Cochrane in Jakarta, Joseph Contreras in Tijuana, Karen Macgregor in Johannesburg, Jason Overdorf in New Delhi and Jonathan Kent in Kuala Lumpur

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.