As China tries to catch up to the United States and Russia, its regional neighbors are fast on its heels.
By Mary Hennock, Adam B. Kushner and Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008
If the weather holds, China plans to celebrate another milestone on its long march to the moon this week in a PR extravaganza that will rival its Olympic performance a few weeks ago. Fittingly, a Long March II-F rocket will take off from the Jiuquan launch center in Gansu province carrying three astronauts on China's third mission to low Earth orbit. After a live broadcast of the launch and heartwarming made-for-TV linkups between the crew and their families, the ruggedly handsome Zhai Zhigang will open the hatch and emerge into outer space. It will be China's first spacewalk and another step in its ambitious plan to build its own space station by 2015 and—if the rumors are true—to put astronauts on the moon by 2020.
The display will no doubt be lauded as yet another indication that China is ready to join the ranks of the world's space titans, Russia and the United States. But are these missions cause for worry in Washington and Moscow? The Soviet Union performed the first spacewalk in 1965 when Aleksei Leonov stepped out of a Voskhod II capsule, and the United States did it later that year when Ed White left his Gemini capsule. Although the ability to launch payloads can also be used to lob bombs, the military implications of a manned program are virtually nil: nobody has yet figured out what humans can do in space that robotic weapons can't do better.
China sees its spacewalk as a way of proving that it belongs with the United States and Russia in the top tier of space-faring nations. But its true opponent in this space race is not the West so much as its Asian neighbors—India in particular. India has in recent years transformed its space program from a utilitarian affair of meteorological and communications satellites into a hyperactive project that seems designed to make a splash on the world stage. Its robotic-exploration program is scheduled to launch a probe on Oct. 22 that will orbit the moon for two years. And Japan is considering expanding its well-established (if less ambitious) space program—which includes research on the International Space Station and a respectable commercial satellite business—and exploring military applications. Against this backdrop, Beijing's dominance is not unshakable. Just as the Soviet Union's launch of its Sputnik satellite back in 1957 was only a fleeting victory, China's recent accomplishments have provided merely the opening salvos in a modern-day Asian space race.
The two biggest forces driving the race between China and India are their insistence on self-reliance and the idea that space exploration feeds national prestige. Naturally, the two ideas work in tandem. India was shut out from NASA and European space missions for years after testing its first nuclear bomb in 1974; now many technologies for its space program have been developed by Indian engineers with little outside help. (India has agreed to carry U.S. and European payloads on its moon launch.) Beijing has watched U.S.- Russian cooperation on the International Space Station rise and fall with their diplomatic relations. "The most important thing is that China has developed and formed its own system for space aviation independently," says Huang Hai of the China Aviation Science and Research Institute. Ouyang Ziyuan, a space expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, summed it up to People's Daily: China's program "suggests comprehensive national strength …, increasing China's international prestige and the cohesive power of the Chinese nation."
Beijing's space program electrified the competition when astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the earth in October 2003. Last year China shot down an aging weather satellite, adding an arms-race quality to the battle for prestige. It is now constructing its fourth launch base, on Hainan Island, for a new 25-ton booster rocket that will carry aloft modules for its space station, which will be permanently staffed. Also ahead: robotic moon landings (a data-gathering probe is already in orbit) and even a rumored manned trip to the lunar surface—a prospect that provoked a minor crisis in Washington, culminating in President George W. Bush's State of the Union promise in 2004 to establish a permanent U.S. moon base. Despite technology export controls imposed by the United States, China's commercial satellite business is thriving. It has launched 79 satellites altogether—10 of them in 2007. This year India has launched 11 satellites, including nine from other countries—and it became the first nation to launch 10 satellites on one rocket.
The United States and the Soviet Union were racing in the context of a cold war, but India and China are vying for leadership in a competitive marketplace of people and knowledge industries. It's about developing technology, talent and markets. All of which has stimulated Chinese technology: sensors built for space have ended up in GPS systems, washing machines and other products. The Chinese hope to spin out their rockets and orbiters into inventions and products they can patent. And "they're now right up in the world class of robotics," says British scientist Martin Sweeting, CEO of Surrey Satellite Technology, which built Beijing a pollution-monitoring satellite for the Olympics and does work on China's moon rovers.
None of this has gone unnoticed abroad. China's manned space program "shook up all the neighbors because the Chinese asserted, 'We are the dominant regional power'," says Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. After China used a ballistic missile to blow up the aging weather satellite in January 2007, scattering debris into low orbit, Japan's Parliament overturned a law isolating its space program from military uses, and its space agency is trying to capitalize on the new mood by requesting a 29 percent budget increase at a time when the general science budget is growing by only 1 percent per year. The public, however, worries more about the social problems of an aging population than beating China to the moon. As a stable democracy and charter member of the world's most advanced economies, Japan simply has less to prove.
The repercussions of China's program were felt most strongly in Delhi, where the 36-year-old space program is now ramping up its moon project at launch speed. China first sent a man into space in 2003, and India won't achieve that goal until 2015, but according to unofficial schedules, China will beat India to a moon landing by only a year. Reaching the moon is the childhood dream of Madhavan Nair, chairman of India's space program, which is now spending about $1 billion per year, compared with an estimated $2.5 billion a year in China. If all goes well, at the end of October India will launch the $100 million Chandrayaan-I, its first lunar orbiter, using the workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The orbiter will fire a probe at the moon's surface, kicking up a cloud of lunar dust that scientists will analyze from afar—and it will plant the Indian flag in lunar soil. Its successor, Chandrayaan-II, a cooperative effort with Russia (and, therefore, one looked down upon by Chinese analysts), is expected to land a rover on the moon by 2012. The space agency, if it can persuade Parliament to fund all its dreams, aims to put a man on the moon by 2020, followed by robotic missions to Mars, a nearby asteroid and the sun—an agenda even more ambitious than China's.
The Indian space agency is careful to defend the program as more than an ego competition with the Chinese. It argues that its space program has earned a return of $2 on every dollar invested by the government, according to Nair. For example, its remote sensing satellites, which map the Earth's surface at a resolution of close to one meter, have helped find well water in dry regions, saving the government's drill boring program $100 million. And, while only a few years ago Indian space officials ruled out manned missions as too expensive and of dubious scientific value, they now speak—just like the Chinese—of mapping the moon for deposits of aluminum, silicon, uranium and titanium, probably with an eye to lunar mining. "I don't think we're in any race as far as the space program is concerned," says Nair. "We have our own national priorities, and based on those priorities we try to concentrate on developments which will benefit the people."
Moon shots for the masses? "If you ask people [in the space agencies], they will never acknowledge there is a competition," says Pallava Bagla, the author of "Destination Moon," a book about India's moon mission. "But subliminally there is a definite race there." The two sides don't talk about it because, says the Stimson Center's Michael Krepon, "for Beijing, you don't want to put New Delhi on the same playing field. For New Delhi, you don't want to acknowledge anxiety." Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, a member of Parliament and Nair's predecessor, says that in addition to luring Indian engineers from the high-paying IT divisions into astrophysics, the space program will "establish our credentials in the international community." It makes India a player.
The benefits of manned missions for the military are only somewhat clearer. Beijing's satellite shoot-down last year demonstrated the potential vulnerability of objects in space. Its space program—which is ultimately run by the Army—got its start when engineers took military rockets and stuck capsules on the tip. And despite Delhi's claims to the contrary, Western analysts suspect that booster technology developed for India's civilian space program is used by its military arm. But the quick way to strengthen military rockets is to fund them directly, not to fly moon missions. By the same token, ground-based and orbiting lasers would probably make better antisatellite weapons than missiles. "The U.S. military and the Russian military searched for years for good reasons to put military people in space and never found any," says John Logsdon, senior fellow at America's Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Still, a space race is a risky way to boost national status: after all, a catastrophic accident while attempting merely to repeat this step for mankind would be a historic humiliation. But the risk is not without rewards. Successful space flight is a kind of national advertisement for satellites and, more broadly, quality control. "[China's] manned space program has gone a long way to proving to potential customers that their products are safe," says Theresa Hitchens of Washington's Center for Defense Information. In these days of global competition, that's a message both China and India desperately want to send.
With Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/160037
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
quiet revolution
While Asia reels from a food crisis, India is benefiting from three years of investment in farming.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
(Sep 13, 2008)
The food crisis earlier this year hit developing countries particularly hard, but India has fared surprisingly well. That's partly because India had already gone through a crisis of its own, three years ago, when surpluses were depleted; agricultural output was hardly growing; and farmers were committing suicide in record numbers. For this reason, agricultural productivity has been a hot-button issue for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. To keep his party in power, Singh needed not only to increase food production, but also to increase farmer incomes and end a debt crisis. Despite these gains, India lags behind China and Vietnam in productivity. P.K. Joshi, director of the New Delhi-based National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jason Overdorf about the challenges India faces. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: India produces only about half as much rice per hectare as China, the world's largest producer, and just about a third less than Vietnam. Why are India's crop yields so low?
P.K. Joshi: We need not compare China's yield and India's yield, because of several reasons. The first reason is that India is a very heterogenous country, from irrigated area to rain-fed area and rice is also grown in very marginal areas. So the average productivity seems to be very low. If we look to our irrigated areas, the yields are very high compared to any part of the world, and in rain-fed areas they are low because of less water and other factors. In China, they are using more than two-and-a-half times [the fertilizer that] Indian farmers are [using]. And China is growing hybrid rice, which has very high potential, and because of their governance system, they distribute the seed, and the farmers have to produce that variety.
In India, we have a democratic society, and the farmer is free to choose any variety or any hybrid. If the farmer has enough money to buy good seed, he does. But if not, he uses his own seed (from the year before). Another reason is the length of growing season. You know, in China, they take one crop per year. If you see our farmers, in Punjab they are growing rice and wheat in one year. In Haryana, rice and wheat. In some parts of West Bengal, the entire Indo-Gangetic Plain, three rice crops are being taken up per year. So if you compare the double crops, it will be on par with the Chinese one crop per year.
Should India be doing more to encourage farmers to use hybrids?
Yes, definitely. If we are speaking particularly about rice, then I would say that in rice, the hybrids have very high potential. There's a difference between high yielding varieties and hybrids. A hybrid is a cross between two different male and female plants, but the varieties are self-pollinating, so the hybrid has higher potential.
One issue for India's agricultural productivity appears to be water scarcity. Does India need more irrigation projects?
We do not have a water scarcity. But the issue of water management is important. We need to harvest water; use it more appropriately, use it more judiciously.
Has India invested sufficiently in agriculture, or has it fallen behind China and other Asian nations?
These countries are investing huge in agricultural research and also in agricultural development programs. In India, we [used to have] a huge surplus--if you go only six years back we used to have a huge buffer stock [of food grains]. [Unfortunately] we wanted to get rid of that buffer stock, either by subsidizing food or through many different social safety net programs. We started reducing poverty through these distribution programs, so investment in agriculture was reduced. And I would tell you that right now, this government has started increasing investment in agriculture, but it's still lower than what it used to be in 1970, if we compare in terms of percentage of agricultural GDP.
Why hasn't India been able to boost agricultural investment further? Singh has talked about this as a big issue since he came into office.
During the last three years, a lot of investment has been done in the agriculture sector because there was a serious crisis in Indian agriculture three years ago. Everybody was talking about agrarian distress. Farmers were committing suicide. And agricultural growth was less than 2 percent, while the target was 4 percent and more. The government [made] agriculture [a top] priority. Investment started increasing. Programs were tuned to increase agricultural production. [Prices were controlled] so they didn't rise as quickly as they did in the global market. The result was that when there was a serious food crisis around the world this year, India was almost comfortable. We were importing wheat two years ago, but for the past two years we have not thought about importing wheat. We now have a surplus in rice as well as wheat.
For several years, the growth rate of India's agricultural output has been slow. Apart from more investment, what does India need to do to rejuvenate the green revolution?
We expect the same kind of green revolution, which we witnessed in the mid 60s and early 70s. But we have an unnoticed revolution in Indian agriculture. If you look at sugar production, if you look at cotton, or dairy milk production, poultry or fish, or horticulture--which is vegetables and fruits, even maize--you see that the production of these commodities has remarkably increased. Also, you will notice that this year we had record food grain production--230.5-million tons. We have not seen that kind of food production during the green-revolution days. At that time, the reason we realized it was a revolution was that we were hungry. There was a famine in 1966, and suddenly production increased. Now that kind of hunger is not there, so we are ignoring the increase in production.
The introduction of genetically modified crops has been a controversial topic in India. Why are Indian farmers and activists concerned about GM foods?
Among activists, the apprehension is that [GM crops] may adversely affect [human] health. There's no evidence so far, globally, that it will. But activists [worry about] playing with nature and using genes from other organisms to change another species. The proponents feel that the future lies with these genetically modified crops, because the [cultivation] area is shrinking for crops, and you have to increase production. Production can be increased only by increasing productivity.
Even during the green revolution period, when high-yielding varieties came, there was a lot of apprehension. I still remember in 1967-1968 activists saying that it would create [stomach ulcers and that] the taste is not good. From the health point of view, the nutritional point of view, there was no negative effect during the green revolution. So may be the case with genetically modified commodities.
A lot of farmers seem to be shifting from essential grains to horticulture and cash crops to take advantage of the end consumer's higher spending power. Is it a concern from a food security standpoint that they're switching away from food grains?
As our incomes are increasing, as urbanization is taking place, as globalization is unfolding, the demand of the consumers is shifting away from cereal based diets to high-value commodities or processed commodities. Horticulture crops like fruits and vegetables have increased, milk products have increased. You now see lots of ice cream parlors--demand for processed dairy products [is rising]. Farmers are responding.
All these commodities are perishable in nature. If there is a sudden increase in production, there is a flood in the market and prices crash like anything because farmers cannot store these commodities. So what we need are good cold-storage facilities, we need the cold chains [to refrigerate products on the way to market]. And I feel that the government alone can't develop so many cold storage facilities or these cold chains. The participation of the private sector is very important, in this context, to integrate the markets.
Why does so much of India's agricultural production spoil on the way to market or in storage? I've read some estimates that peg the waste as high as 40 percent.
Largely, it is the perishable commodities. In the case of grains, it is only through rats and rodents and some storage problems. But in perishable commodities the waste is extreme. This is because the markets are not well integrated; there are missing markets; the roads are not good.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/158566
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
(Sep 13, 2008)
The food crisis earlier this year hit developing countries particularly hard, but India has fared surprisingly well. That's partly because India had already gone through a crisis of its own, three years ago, when surpluses were depleted; agricultural output was hardly growing; and farmers were committing suicide in record numbers. For this reason, agricultural productivity has been a hot-button issue for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. To keep his party in power, Singh needed not only to increase food production, but also to increase farmer incomes and end a debt crisis. Despite these gains, India lags behind China and Vietnam in productivity. P.K. Joshi, director of the New Delhi-based National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jason Overdorf about the challenges India faces. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: India produces only about half as much rice per hectare as China, the world's largest producer, and just about a third less than Vietnam. Why are India's crop yields so low?
P.K. Joshi: We need not compare China's yield and India's yield, because of several reasons. The first reason is that India is a very heterogenous country, from irrigated area to rain-fed area and rice is also grown in very marginal areas. So the average productivity seems to be very low. If we look to our irrigated areas, the yields are very high compared to any part of the world, and in rain-fed areas they are low because of less water and other factors. In China, they are using more than two-and-a-half times [the fertilizer that] Indian farmers are [using]. And China is growing hybrid rice, which has very high potential, and because of their governance system, they distribute the seed, and the farmers have to produce that variety.
In India, we have a democratic society, and the farmer is free to choose any variety or any hybrid. If the farmer has enough money to buy good seed, he does. But if not, he uses his own seed (from the year before). Another reason is the length of growing season. You know, in China, they take one crop per year. If you see our farmers, in Punjab they are growing rice and wheat in one year. In Haryana, rice and wheat. In some parts of West Bengal, the entire Indo-Gangetic Plain, three rice crops are being taken up per year. So if you compare the double crops, it will be on par with the Chinese one crop per year.
Should India be doing more to encourage farmers to use hybrids?
Yes, definitely. If we are speaking particularly about rice, then I would say that in rice, the hybrids have very high potential. There's a difference between high yielding varieties and hybrids. A hybrid is a cross between two different male and female plants, but the varieties are self-pollinating, so the hybrid has higher potential.
One issue for India's agricultural productivity appears to be water scarcity. Does India need more irrigation projects?
We do not have a water scarcity. But the issue of water management is important. We need to harvest water; use it more appropriately, use it more judiciously.
Has India invested sufficiently in agriculture, or has it fallen behind China and other Asian nations?
These countries are investing huge in agricultural research and also in agricultural development programs. In India, we [used to have] a huge surplus--if you go only six years back we used to have a huge buffer stock [of food grains]. [Unfortunately] we wanted to get rid of that buffer stock, either by subsidizing food or through many different social safety net programs. We started reducing poverty through these distribution programs, so investment in agriculture was reduced. And I would tell you that right now, this government has started increasing investment in agriculture, but it's still lower than what it used to be in 1970, if we compare in terms of percentage of agricultural GDP.
Why hasn't India been able to boost agricultural investment further? Singh has talked about this as a big issue since he came into office.
During the last three years, a lot of investment has been done in the agriculture sector because there was a serious crisis in Indian agriculture three years ago. Everybody was talking about agrarian distress. Farmers were committing suicide. And agricultural growth was less than 2 percent, while the target was 4 percent and more. The government [made] agriculture [a top] priority. Investment started increasing. Programs were tuned to increase agricultural production. [Prices were controlled] so they didn't rise as quickly as they did in the global market. The result was that when there was a serious food crisis around the world this year, India was almost comfortable. We were importing wheat two years ago, but for the past two years we have not thought about importing wheat. We now have a surplus in rice as well as wheat.
For several years, the growth rate of India's agricultural output has been slow. Apart from more investment, what does India need to do to rejuvenate the green revolution?
We expect the same kind of green revolution, which we witnessed in the mid 60s and early 70s. But we have an unnoticed revolution in Indian agriculture. If you look at sugar production, if you look at cotton, or dairy milk production, poultry or fish, or horticulture--which is vegetables and fruits, even maize--you see that the production of these commodities has remarkably increased. Also, you will notice that this year we had record food grain production--230.5-million tons. We have not seen that kind of food production during the green-revolution days. At that time, the reason we realized it was a revolution was that we were hungry. There was a famine in 1966, and suddenly production increased. Now that kind of hunger is not there, so we are ignoring the increase in production.
The introduction of genetically modified crops has been a controversial topic in India. Why are Indian farmers and activists concerned about GM foods?
Among activists, the apprehension is that [GM crops] may adversely affect [human] health. There's no evidence so far, globally, that it will. But activists [worry about] playing with nature and using genes from other organisms to change another species. The proponents feel that the future lies with these genetically modified crops, because the [cultivation] area is shrinking for crops, and you have to increase production. Production can be increased only by increasing productivity.
Even during the green revolution period, when high-yielding varieties came, there was a lot of apprehension. I still remember in 1967-1968 activists saying that it would create [stomach ulcers and that] the taste is not good. From the health point of view, the nutritional point of view, there was no negative effect during the green revolution. So may be the case with genetically modified commodities.
A lot of farmers seem to be shifting from essential grains to horticulture and cash crops to take advantage of the end consumer's higher spending power. Is it a concern from a food security standpoint that they're switching away from food grains?
As our incomes are increasing, as urbanization is taking place, as globalization is unfolding, the demand of the consumers is shifting away from cereal based diets to high-value commodities or processed commodities. Horticulture crops like fruits and vegetables have increased, milk products have increased. You now see lots of ice cream parlors--demand for processed dairy products [is rising]. Farmers are responding.
All these commodities are perishable in nature. If there is a sudden increase in production, there is a flood in the market and prices crash like anything because farmers cannot store these commodities. So what we need are good cold-storage facilities, we need the cold chains [to refrigerate products on the way to market]. And I feel that the government alone can't develop so many cold storage facilities or these cold chains. The participation of the private sector is very important, in this context, to integrate the markets.
Why does so much of India's agricultural production spoil on the way to market or in storage? I've read some estimates that peg the waste as high as 40 percent.
Largely, it is the perishable commodities. In the case of grains, it is only through rats and rodents and some storage problems. But in perishable commodities the waste is extreme. This is because the markets are not well integrated; there are missing markets; the roads are not good.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/158566
Monday, August 11, 2008
when more is worse
India's vast plan to build a bevy of new schools will fix only half the problem: quantity, not quality.
By Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK (Aug 9, 2008)
On the sprawling campus of Delhi University, the fear in July was as palpable as the excitement. For several weeks, prospective students rushed from college to college desperately combing admission lists for their names. Never before has India offered a better chance at a comfortable life after graduation. But never has getting a seat at one of the nation's universities been so hard. And for those who do land a spot, the troubles are just beginning.
Although India's economy and its job markets are booming, the nation's university system, which has been struggling for years, has recently hit a full-fledged crisis. The country's post-secondary schools currently offer only enough spots for about 7 percent of India's college-age citizens—about half the Asian average—and face a crushing faculty shortage. Already 25 percent of teaching positions nationwide are vacant, and 57 percent of professors lack either a master's or a Ph.D., according to a recent regulatory report. Curriculums are outdated, forcing companies to spend millions of dollars on "finishing schools" for new employees. Infrastructure is crumbling even at top schools like the famed Indian Institutes of Technology, where once cutting-edge laboratories have grown obsolete. And incompetent (or, as many allege, corrupt) regulators have let fly-by-night colleges proliferate while keeping out elite foreign universities keen to break into a potentially lucrative education market.
There is one ray of hope: for the first time in decades, the nation's leader has finally recognized the gravity of the problem. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called India's university system "dysfunctional" and embarked on the boldest educational reform program since Jawaharlal Nehru. But hamstrung by India's unwieldy bureaucracy and by ideological opponents, Singh may manage to dramatically expand the size of the country's higher education system without addressing many of its underlying problems.
Singh, himself a former economics professor at Delhi University, has promised to open 72 new post-secondary schools over the next five years, including eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, seven new Indian Institutes of Management, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology. To fund them, he's promised to boost the government's higher education spending ninefold, to $20 billion annually, during the five-year period that began in 2007.
But these changes may wind up addressing India's quantity problem without affecting its quality crisis. Already up to 75 percent of India's 400,000 annual technology grads and 90 percent of its 2.5 million general college grads are unable to find work. That's not due to a lack of jobs, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom)—it's due to a lack of skills. "For a long time after Independence, we were trying to solve the employment problem. Now we're trying to solve the employability problem," said Vijay Thadani, head of the Confederation of Indian Industry's committee on education. Loosening the purse strings will help Singh improve infrastructure and expand access for students, but it will take more than money to solve the faculty shortage, revamp outdated courses, encourage innovation and crack down on diploma mills. Indeed, rapid expansion could make these problems worse.
To be fair, Singh has tried to address the quality crisis. In 2005, he appointed a dream team of academics, planners and business executives to the National Knowledge Commission with a mandate to redesign India's entire education infrastructure by this October. Led by chairman Sam Pitroda—the architect of the nation's telecommunications network and thus no stranger to bureaucratic hurdles—the commission published a comprehensive set of recommendations in January 2007, focusing on "expansion, excellence and inclusion." Among its proposals, the commission advocated not only expanding the state university system but also diversifying sources of financing to include private participation, philanthropic contributions and industry links. It also suggested introducing frequent curricular revisions, moving away from the present system of standardized university-wide exams in favor of internal assessments of students by their professors, and setting up an independent regulatory authority. Yet while Singh's government has allocated a huge sum for building more universities and improving inclusiveness by expanding the quota system, it has yet to make progress on the crucial regulatory elements of the commission's plan.
That could prove disastrous. At present, India has no less than 16 different supervisory bodies for higher education, few of which are independent and all of which are of questionable efficacy. Mostly due to bureaucratic inertia, they've so far blocked attempts to modernize curriculums and methods of evaluation. They haven't done a good job at policing, either. Shoddy for-profit colleges have proliferated even as internationally respected foreign providers have been barred from opening up branch campuses and have struggled to get their joint programs certified. The All India Council of Technical Education, for example, has approved thousands of substandard private engineering colleges—many of them founded by profit-minded politicians. But it has refused to recognize the Indian School of Business, a private institution founded by former McKinsey & Co. managing director Rajat Gupta. And political wrangling at the parliamentary level (engineered by Singh's erstwhile communist coalition partners) has stymied legislation to allow foreign universities to set up campuses, even though Cornell, Columbia, and Stanford universities have all sent high-ranking delegations to the country on exploratory missions.
The will to reform remains strong, at least at the top. But the prime minister and his allies haven't succeeded in actually getting much done. In his introduction to the National Knowledge Commission's second report, published this January, Pitroda warned, "there is still resistance at various levels in the government to new ideas, experimentation ... external interventions, transparency and accountability, due to rigid organizational structures with territorial mindsets." If those obstacles can't be overcome, he wrote, "increasing resources could well result in more of the same." In other words, India could end up throwing good money—a lot of it—after bad, something this nation and its students could ill afford.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/151682
By Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK (Aug 9, 2008)
On the sprawling campus of Delhi University, the fear in July was as palpable as the excitement. For several weeks, prospective students rushed from college to college desperately combing admission lists for their names. Never before has India offered a better chance at a comfortable life after graduation. But never has getting a seat at one of the nation's universities been so hard. And for those who do land a spot, the troubles are just beginning.
Although India's economy and its job markets are booming, the nation's university system, which has been struggling for years, has recently hit a full-fledged crisis. The country's post-secondary schools currently offer only enough spots for about 7 percent of India's college-age citizens—about half the Asian average—and face a crushing faculty shortage. Already 25 percent of teaching positions nationwide are vacant, and 57 percent of professors lack either a master's or a Ph.D., according to a recent regulatory report. Curriculums are outdated, forcing companies to spend millions of dollars on "finishing schools" for new employees. Infrastructure is crumbling even at top schools like the famed Indian Institutes of Technology, where once cutting-edge laboratories have grown obsolete. And incompetent (or, as many allege, corrupt) regulators have let fly-by-night colleges proliferate while keeping out elite foreign universities keen to break into a potentially lucrative education market.
There is one ray of hope: for the first time in decades, the nation's leader has finally recognized the gravity of the problem. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called India's university system "dysfunctional" and embarked on the boldest educational reform program since Jawaharlal Nehru. But hamstrung by India's unwieldy bureaucracy and by ideological opponents, Singh may manage to dramatically expand the size of the country's higher education system without addressing many of its underlying problems.
Singh, himself a former economics professor at Delhi University, has promised to open 72 new post-secondary schools over the next five years, including eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, seven new Indian Institutes of Management, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology. To fund them, he's promised to boost the government's higher education spending ninefold, to $20 billion annually, during the five-year period that began in 2007.
But these changes may wind up addressing India's quantity problem without affecting its quality crisis. Already up to 75 percent of India's 400,000 annual technology grads and 90 percent of its 2.5 million general college grads are unable to find work. That's not due to a lack of jobs, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom)—it's due to a lack of skills. "For a long time after Independence, we were trying to solve the employment problem. Now we're trying to solve the employability problem," said Vijay Thadani, head of the Confederation of Indian Industry's committee on education. Loosening the purse strings will help Singh improve infrastructure and expand access for students, but it will take more than money to solve the faculty shortage, revamp outdated courses, encourage innovation and crack down on diploma mills. Indeed, rapid expansion could make these problems worse.
To be fair, Singh has tried to address the quality crisis. In 2005, he appointed a dream team of academics, planners and business executives to the National Knowledge Commission with a mandate to redesign India's entire education infrastructure by this October. Led by chairman Sam Pitroda—the architect of the nation's telecommunications network and thus no stranger to bureaucratic hurdles—the commission published a comprehensive set of recommendations in January 2007, focusing on "expansion, excellence and inclusion." Among its proposals, the commission advocated not only expanding the state university system but also diversifying sources of financing to include private participation, philanthropic contributions and industry links. It also suggested introducing frequent curricular revisions, moving away from the present system of standardized university-wide exams in favor of internal assessments of students by their professors, and setting up an independent regulatory authority. Yet while Singh's government has allocated a huge sum for building more universities and improving inclusiveness by expanding the quota system, it has yet to make progress on the crucial regulatory elements of the commission's plan.
That could prove disastrous. At present, India has no less than 16 different supervisory bodies for higher education, few of which are independent and all of which are of questionable efficacy. Mostly due to bureaucratic inertia, they've so far blocked attempts to modernize curriculums and methods of evaluation. They haven't done a good job at policing, either. Shoddy for-profit colleges have proliferated even as internationally respected foreign providers have been barred from opening up branch campuses and have struggled to get their joint programs certified. The All India Council of Technical Education, for example, has approved thousands of substandard private engineering colleges—many of them founded by profit-minded politicians. But it has refused to recognize the Indian School of Business, a private institution founded by former McKinsey & Co. managing director Rajat Gupta. And political wrangling at the parliamentary level (engineered by Singh's erstwhile communist coalition partners) has stymied legislation to allow foreign universities to set up campuses, even though Cornell, Columbia, and Stanford universities have all sent high-ranking delegations to the country on exploratory missions.
The will to reform remains strong, at least at the top. But the prime minister and his allies haven't succeeded in actually getting much done. In his introduction to the National Knowledge Commission's second report, published this January, Pitroda warned, "there is still resistance at various levels in the government to new ideas, experimentation ... external interventions, transparency and accountability, due to rigid organizational structures with territorial mindsets." If those obstacles can't be overcome, he wrote, "increasing resources could well result in more of the same." In other words, India could end up throwing good money—a lot of it—after bad, something this nation and its students could ill afford.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/151682
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
the third sex: new job training program aims to improve the lot of india's eunuchs
By Jason Overdorf
Toronto Globe and Mail
NEW DELHI -- Following the example of India's 18th-century Mughal rulers, who used castrated men or hermaphrodites to guard their harems, the government of the eastern state of Bihar plans to post eunuchs as guards in girls dormitories, colleges and hospitals.
"We are trying to prepare a plan for them so they can be involved in normal economic activity of society," said Vijay Prakash, a principal secretary in the state social welfare department. "They will be trained to work as security guards and for other types of activities which suit their temperament or in which they have developed certain expertise. They will also be involved in promoting activities related to women and child development and AIDS education."
The program will begin as early as this summer, Mr. Prakash said. The department estimates that about 2 per cent of the state's population of 100 million are transgender.
Known as hijras in the Hindi-speaking north, the so-called third sex has a 4,000-year history in India, where they comprise a distinct religio-ethnic group. Most hijras are born as men, but renounce their gender and sexuality to worship the mother goddess Yellamma, also called Renuka. Traditionally, the castration ceremony was performed, at great peril to the recipient, by an elder of the community. Sex reassignment surgery is not available in India, and even today many hijras go to quacks or fly-by-night hospitals to be castrated, which, though it is not compulsory, gives them higher status among their peers.
Ostracized by their families and mainstream society, hijras live in communal homes headed by their gurus. Because discrimination prevents them from taking ordinary jobs, they earn money through prostitution or begging--and sometimes by extorting funds by threatening to lift their saris and expose their mutilated genitals.
This is not the first time that Bihar—a state with a dismal reputation for lawlessness and poverty--has capitalized on their unique position in society. In 2006, the Patna Municipal Corporation used eunuchs as tax collectors in what became one of its most successful revenue drives, as habitual tax evaders preferred to pay up rather than have hijras singing and dancing on their doorsteps for the whole neighborhood to see. "That was slightly negative," says Prakash, "since they were used to pressurize people to pay. We want to use them in a more positive way." Taking advantage of the hijras' traditional method of earning money—singing for alms at weddings and birth ceremonies—the government will train them to communicate messages about child development, family-planning and other important issues through their songs. "They're great singers, and whenever a child is born they go to the house," Prakash explained.
"They [the hijras] consider themselves to be outside of the society, and their interactions with society have been very, very negative," says Dr. Hetukar Jha, a sociologist based in Bihar. "Although I welcome this move, the government needs to study their culture and habits to find out the best points at which to expand their interactions with [mainstream] society." Otherwise, Jha argues, the added visibility of these new roles could create additional problems for the ostracized group.
Though they held respected positions in the courts of India's Mughal rulers—Central Asian Muslims who ruled India from the 16th to the 18th century—today hijras are often attacked and persecuted, according to the New Delhi-based People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Salacious rumors still circulate accusing hijras of kidnapping children for castration, and apocryphal stories of hijras who passed themselves off as women in order to marry unwitting heterosexual men are common. These myths stoke fear and revulsion, provoking hate crimes ranging from rape to disfigurement with acid and even murder, according to PUCL, which has documented dozens of cases of such abuse.
Because homosexuality remains illegal in India—under Section 377 of the Indian penal code hijras and other homosexuals may be sentenced to a prison term of 10 years to life--corrupt policemen also routinely harrass the transgender community. "They're subjected to violence on a day to day basis by the community and the police, and there's no legal framework to deal with it," said Arvind Narain, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, which represents marginalized groups and communities.
As the protectors of the state's young women, though, the state hopes the eunuchs will regain some of the respect they once commanded.
Link to Globe & Mail site
Toronto Globe and Mail
NEW DELHI -- Following the example of India's 18th-century Mughal rulers, who used castrated men or hermaphrodites to guard their harems, the government of the eastern state of Bihar plans to post eunuchs as guards in girls dormitories, colleges and hospitals.
"We are trying to prepare a plan for them so they can be involved in normal economic activity of society," said Vijay Prakash, a principal secretary in the state social welfare department. "They will be trained to work as security guards and for other types of activities which suit their temperament or in which they have developed certain expertise. They will also be involved in promoting activities related to women and child development and AIDS education."
The program will begin as early as this summer, Mr. Prakash said. The department estimates that about 2 per cent of the state's population of 100 million are transgender.
Known as hijras in the Hindi-speaking north, the so-called third sex has a 4,000-year history in India, where they comprise a distinct religio-ethnic group. Most hijras are born as men, but renounce their gender and sexuality to worship the mother goddess Yellamma, also called Renuka. Traditionally, the castration ceremony was performed, at great peril to the recipient, by an elder of the community. Sex reassignment surgery is not available in India, and even today many hijras go to quacks or fly-by-night hospitals to be castrated, which, though it is not compulsory, gives them higher status among their peers.
Ostracized by their families and mainstream society, hijras live in communal homes headed by their gurus. Because discrimination prevents them from taking ordinary jobs, they earn money through prostitution or begging--and sometimes by extorting funds by threatening to lift their saris and expose their mutilated genitals.
This is not the first time that Bihar—a state with a dismal reputation for lawlessness and poverty--has capitalized on their unique position in society. In 2006, the Patna Municipal Corporation used eunuchs as tax collectors in what became one of its most successful revenue drives, as habitual tax evaders preferred to pay up rather than have hijras singing and dancing on their doorsteps for the whole neighborhood to see. "That was slightly negative," says Prakash, "since they were used to pressurize people to pay. We want to use them in a more positive way." Taking advantage of the hijras' traditional method of earning money—singing for alms at weddings and birth ceremonies—the government will train them to communicate messages about child development, family-planning and other important issues through their songs. "They're great singers, and whenever a child is born they go to the house," Prakash explained.
"They [the hijras] consider themselves to be outside of the society, and their interactions with society have been very, very negative," says Dr. Hetukar Jha, a sociologist based in Bihar. "Although I welcome this move, the government needs to study their culture and habits to find out the best points at which to expand their interactions with [mainstream] society." Otherwise, Jha argues, the added visibility of these new roles could create additional problems for the ostracized group.
Though they held respected positions in the courts of India's Mughal rulers—Central Asian Muslims who ruled India from the 16th to the 18th century—today hijras are often attacked and persecuted, according to the New Delhi-based People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Salacious rumors still circulate accusing hijras of kidnapping children for castration, and apocryphal stories of hijras who passed themselves off as women in order to marry unwitting heterosexual men are common. These myths stoke fear and revulsion, provoking hate crimes ranging from rape to disfigurement with acid and even murder, according to PUCL, which has documented dozens of cases of such abuse.
Because homosexuality remains illegal in India—under Section 377 of the Indian penal code hijras and other homosexuals may be sentenced to a prison term of 10 years to life--corrupt policemen also routinely harrass the transgender community. "They're subjected to violence on a day to day basis by the community and the police, and there's no legal framework to deal with it," said Arvind Narain, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, which represents marginalized groups and communities.
As the protectors of the state's young women, though, the state hopes the eunuchs will regain some of the respect they once commanded.
Link to Globe & Mail site
Friday, July 11, 2008
where blood runs thick
By Jason Overdorf
(NEWSWEEK Jul 12, 2008)
For some time now, Indian firms have been growing in competitiveness; companies like Tata, Reliance, and the Aditya Birla Group now rival giant Western multinationals like General Electric and Procter & Gamble. The conventional wisdom has also been that Subcontinental powerhouses are getting more sophisticated. Management is becoming more professional, too; bullish analysts point to the recent merger of Ranbaxy (India's largest drugmaker) with Japan's Daiichi as a sign of a new willingness among India's CEO scions to move beyond the walled garden of family firms and team up with smart outside companies.
Now a very public fight between Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. and Anil Ambani's Reliance Anil Dhirubai Ambani Group—the billion-dollar refineries to telecoms rivals created when the brothers divided the family assets after a soap-opera-style split in 2005—underscores how much work remains. The brothers are battling over Anil's planned merger of his Reliance Communications unit with South Africa's MTN Group, which would create one of the world's ten largest telecoms companies, worth an estimated $70 billion and with 116 million subscribers worldwide. Mukesh has effectively stymied the deal by invoking his right of first refusal on any sale or transfer of Anil's shares in the company.
Nor are such tantrums limited to the Ambanis—many family-owned Indian monoliths still favor insider deals, hire relatives over better-qualified outsiders, squabble unproductively, and ignore independent directors' advice, according to a managing partner at a private-equity company that invests in such firms. The bottom line: don't look for the next Jack Welch on the Subcontinent any time soon.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/145827
(NEWSWEEK Jul 12, 2008)
For some time now, Indian firms have been growing in competitiveness; companies like Tata, Reliance, and the Aditya Birla Group now rival giant Western multinationals like General Electric and Procter & Gamble. The conventional wisdom has also been that Subcontinental powerhouses are getting more sophisticated. Management is becoming more professional, too; bullish analysts point to the recent merger of Ranbaxy (India's largest drugmaker) with Japan's Daiichi as a sign of a new willingness among India's CEO scions to move beyond the walled garden of family firms and team up with smart outside companies.
Now a very public fight between Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. and Anil Ambani's Reliance Anil Dhirubai Ambani Group—the billion-dollar refineries to telecoms rivals created when the brothers divided the family assets after a soap-opera-style split in 2005—underscores how much work remains. The brothers are battling over Anil's planned merger of his Reliance Communications unit with South Africa's MTN Group, which would create one of the world's ten largest telecoms companies, worth an estimated $70 billion and with 116 million subscribers worldwide. Mukesh has effectively stymied the deal by invoking his right of first refusal on any sale or transfer of Anil's shares in the company.
Nor are such tantrums limited to the Ambanis—many family-owned Indian monoliths still favor insider deals, hire relatives over better-qualified outsiders, squabble unproductively, and ignore independent directors' advice, according to a managing partner at a private-equity company that invests in such firms. The bottom line: don't look for the next Jack Welch on the Subcontinent any time soon.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/145827
Sunday, June 29, 2008
putrid rivers of sludge
Delhi's bureaucrats bicker over cholera and the role of city drains and state sewers.
By Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
Jun 28, 2008
India scores 120 on the green index and especially poorly in sanitation.
If anybody needed a reminder of how crippling bureaucracy can be, consider the campaign to clean up the sacred Yamuna River in Delhi. The river oozes through town like a putrid ribbon of black sludge. Its level of fecal bacteria is 10,000 times higher than what's deemed safe for bathing. After a half-billion-dollar, 15-year program to build 17 sewage treatment plants, raw sewage still spills into the river at the rate of 3.6 billion liters a day.
Lack of sanitation is one of India's many environmental problems. On Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index, it scores a miserable 21 on sanitation, compared with 67 for the region and 48 for its income group. That helps push the country's overall ranking to 120th, below all its income peers except Angola and Cambodia. Like China, India tends to suffer the ills of over- and underdevelopment. On the one hand, its power-starved, industrializing economy has prevented it from making substantial progress in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and has put further pressure on its ability to protect the biodiversity of its disappearing wilderness (in the EPI, the country fares poorly on both counts). On the other hand, desperate poverty leaves most of its population vulnerable to environment-related illnesses caused by water and air pollution, which together account for an estimated 20 percent of the disease burden. Illnesses related to air pollution alone cost India as much as $20 billion a year, according to The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a Delhi think tank headed by climate scientist and Nobel laureate R. K. Pachauri.
India's messy democracy is particularly ill equipped to handle the conflicting pressures of rapid growth and poverty. Although the national water policy was revised in 2002 to encourage community participation and decentralize water management, the country's byzantine bureaucracy ensures that it remains a "mere statement of intent," according to TERI. Responsibility for managing the country's water resources is fragmented among a dozen different ministries and departments without any coordination. "You have multiple agencies with no synergy between them and no interaction between them," says Chandra Bhushan, associate director of the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi NGO. Thus, in states like Rajasthan and Karnataka, public water schemes launched by the Ministry of Rural Development didn't meet their targets because they weren't coordinated with the Ministry of Power's program for rural electrification.
These problems have come to a head in the Yamuna River. The state-government-controlled water board built the new wastewater treatment plants, but the municipal government has failed to clear garbage from the drains. As a result, so little wastewater reaches the plants that they can operate at about only 30 percent capacity. After a cholera epidemic in May, the state and municipal governments bickered over whether the state's leaky sewer pipes or the city's clogged sewer drains were to blame. "Having democracy at the top but not having good democratic institutions and institutional structures at the bottom is a fundamental problem," says Bhushan.
Whereas China's totalitarian government has an easier time enforcing its rules, corruption and lack of accountability plague India's efforts to enforce regulations and set priorities. Agricultural states like Punjab, where the water table is dropping dangerously fast, still offer farmers free or subsidized electricity to pump water for irrigation, encouraging them to grow water-intensive crops like rice and use inefficient irrigation techniques. Small businesses operating in old facilities and lacking the capital to invest in modern technologies are ill equipped to deal with the contaminants they produce and too numerous to be regulated by the central and state pollution-control boards. "The pollution-control boards that we have are poorly staffed; their technological capacity is inadequate. Combine that with poor salaries and some level of corruption, and you have a real problem," says Leena Srivastava, executive director of TERI.
Considering these fundamental shortcomings, it's easy to see why the Western obsession with carbon emissions rankles Indians. Even the EPI raps India's knuckles with a poor score on emissions per megawatt of electricity. Try telling that to the 500 million or so Indians who burn dung in their homes because they're not even connected to the grid.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143694
By Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
Jun 28, 2008
India scores 120 on the green index and especially poorly in sanitation.
If anybody needed a reminder of how crippling bureaucracy can be, consider the campaign to clean up the sacred Yamuna River in Delhi. The river oozes through town like a putrid ribbon of black sludge. Its level of fecal bacteria is 10,000 times higher than what's deemed safe for bathing. After a half-billion-dollar, 15-year program to build 17 sewage treatment plants, raw sewage still spills into the river at the rate of 3.6 billion liters a day.
Lack of sanitation is one of India's many environmental problems. On Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index, it scores a miserable 21 on sanitation, compared with 67 for the region and 48 for its income group. That helps push the country's overall ranking to 120th, below all its income peers except Angola and Cambodia. Like China, India tends to suffer the ills of over- and underdevelopment. On the one hand, its power-starved, industrializing economy has prevented it from making substantial progress in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and has put further pressure on its ability to protect the biodiversity of its disappearing wilderness (in the EPI, the country fares poorly on both counts). On the other hand, desperate poverty leaves most of its population vulnerable to environment-related illnesses caused by water and air pollution, which together account for an estimated 20 percent of the disease burden. Illnesses related to air pollution alone cost India as much as $20 billion a year, according to The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a Delhi think tank headed by climate scientist and Nobel laureate R. K. Pachauri.
India's messy democracy is particularly ill equipped to handle the conflicting pressures of rapid growth and poverty. Although the national water policy was revised in 2002 to encourage community participation and decentralize water management, the country's byzantine bureaucracy ensures that it remains a "mere statement of intent," according to TERI. Responsibility for managing the country's water resources is fragmented among a dozen different ministries and departments without any coordination. "You have multiple agencies with no synergy between them and no interaction between them," says Chandra Bhushan, associate director of the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi NGO. Thus, in states like Rajasthan and Karnataka, public water schemes launched by the Ministry of Rural Development didn't meet their targets because they weren't coordinated with the Ministry of Power's program for rural electrification.
These problems have come to a head in the Yamuna River. The state-government-controlled water board built the new wastewater treatment plants, but the municipal government has failed to clear garbage from the drains. As a result, so little wastewater reaches the plants that they can operate at about only 30 percent capacity. After a cholera epidemic in May, the state and municipal governments bickered over whether the state's leaky sewer pipes or the city's clogged sewer drains were to blame. "Having democracy at the top but not having good democratic institutions and institutional structures at the bottom is a fundamental problem," says Bhushan.
Whereas China's totalitarian government has an easier time enforcing its rules, corruption and lack of accountability plague India's efforts to enforce regulations and set priorities. Agricultural states like Punjab, where the water table is dropping dangerously fast, still offer farmers free or subsidized electricity to pump water for irrigation, encouraging them to grow water-intensive crops like rice and use inefficient irrigation techniques. Small businesses operating in old facilities and lacking the capital to invest in modern technologies are ill equipped to deal with the contaminants they produce and too numerous to be regulated by the central and state pollution-control boards. "The pollution-control boards that we have are poorly staffed; their technological capacity is inadequate. Combine that with poor salaries and some level of corruption, and you have a real problem," says Leena Srivastava, executive director of TERI.
Considering these fundamental shortcomings, it's easy to see why the Western obsession with carbon emissions rankles Indians. Even the EPI raps India's knuckles with a poor score on emissions per megawatt of electricity. Try telling that to the 500 million or so Indians who burn dung in their homes because they're not even connected to the grid.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143694
Sunday, May 18, 2008
rebel brides and ex-wives
As India gets more wealthy, arranged marriage is giving way to more love weddings, and divorces.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK (May 17, 2008)
Not long ago, 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela returned home to Hyderabad from Delhi to attend a family funeral—but didn't get the welcome she expected. Konidela, whose father, Chiranjeevi, is a megastar in the Telugu-language film industry, had been disowned for eloping with Shirish Bharadwaj, 23, who was from a different caste. The two had married on live television last October in a bid to keep Sreeja's father from interfering—they were afraid he'd accuse Bharadwaj of kidnapping her, a common tactic in such cases. But their TV wedding alerted police and a mob of angry fans, who trailed the couple from the temple to the registrar and scared them so badly they fled to Delhi. Now the lovers were back, but Konidela's relatives weren't interested in reconciliation. Instead, she says, they forced Bharadwaj to wait outside and tried to browbeat her into dumping him so she could marry a groom of her parents' choosing. "They just tried brainwashing me," she says. "So I got out of there as fast as I could."
The story electrified India, where a rapidly modernizing society is changing its views on marriage. Tales of rebellion are on the rise. Now that fresh college grads can start outearning their parents right away and the rising influence of Western culture is empowering women, more young couples are challenging tradition. So-called love marriages were rare a generation ago, but now account for 10 percent of urban weddings, according to a November study by Divya Mathur of the University of Chicago. An additional 19 percent in Mathur's survey chose their own spouses but confirmed their engagements with their parents—choosing what urban India awkwardly refers to as "love-cum-arranged" unions. Meanwhile, more and more couples are meeting online or through friends instead of at torturous, parent-chaperoned tea sessions. The revenue of online matchmakers more than doubled from $15 million in 2006 to $35 million in 2007, and more than 12 million Indians—about half the country's Internet users—now visit matrimonial sites.
The changes aren't producing only love and bliss, however: demographers say divorce rates doubled to about 7 percent from 1991 to 2001, when the latest Census was taken. Lawyers affirm that, at least among urban couples, they've since climbed much higher, though they're still very low by Western standards. "India is facing changing times," says Pinky Anand, a lawyer who represented Konidela and Bharadwaj when they sought protection in a Delhi court. "Modernization, urbanization, access to information and globalization—there are no holds barred."
Traditionally, under all of India's major religions, all marriages were arranged by the bride and groom's parents. Unions were considered religious contracts between families, designed to uphold the social order and cemented with the gift of a virgin daughter. They were not seen as private agreements between two people in love, says King's College anthropologist Perveez Mody. With strict injunctions against crossing caste boundaries, arranged marriages helped Hindus to prevent lower castes from gaining status and made it easier to restrict them to hereditary occupations. "Many women got married before puberty, and to keep a nubile girl in the house was a monumental sin," says Delhi-based sociologist Patricia Uberoi. After marriage, couples moved in with the husband's parents to form what is known here as the "joint family." New brides had few rights and answered to their mothers-in-law, their husbands' siblings and his brothers' wives (if they'd been in the family longer). Today class and religious divides remain very strong, so in many respects the old system persists. Parents still work the family network and advertise in newspapers to make advantageous matches for their children—often without informing their sons or daughters until the process is well underway.
Now, however, a complex mix of political, economic and social developments is putting pressure on the old methods. The caste hierarchy itself is under threat thanks to urbanization and civil-rights reforms. India's city population has increased from about 20 percent of the total in 1971 to more than 28 percent today—bringing a new anonymity that makes it more difficult to identify a person's caste. Similarly, quotas for the lower castes in education and government jobs, along with the shift to an industrial economy, have allowed the lower castes to break out of traditional occupations. At the same time, young people—particularly young women—have become better positioned to assert their independence and become more exposed to Western influences, as Hollywood begins to compete with Bollywood, and Vogue and Cosmo hit the newsstands. Today's top engineering graduates, moreover, can earn as much as $30,000 within a few years of starting work—more than most parents ever earned—and even call-center employees make enough to defy their parents. Many of these new lucrative careers also require young people to relocate outside their families' ambit. And although a recent study by Watson Wyatt Asia-Pacific shows that women make up only 18 percent of India's urban work force, they now account for 38 percent of enrollment in higher education, and the number of women in white-collar jobs is increasing. As a result, they now enjoy more power and greater awareness of their rights, as well as more unsupervised contact with men. Together, these shifts have caused a decline in the number of joint families, a relaxation of the rules that once gave husbands' parents (but not wives') a dominant role in their children's marriages, and an uptick in children choosing their own partners.
Society is struggling to cope with the shifts. While the weakening of tradition has made relationships more equal, it has also led to higher divorce rates, as women object to archaic constraints and loveless unions. This is true even in remote corners of the country; according to India Today magazine, about a tenth of all child marriages now end in divorce. Geeta Luthra, a New Delhi-based lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues, says that men are often the ones to split up their marriages when their newly empowered wives refuse to do housework, play the good hostess or kowtow to her in-laws.
Love marriages, meanwhile, are also leading to serious conflict, especially among India's rural populations. In communities like the Jat caste of rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the murder of couples that elope has become disturbingly common; at least five such cases made headlines in the last month alone. "If a lower-caste man is involved with a higher-caste woman, he is invariably killed. And the girl, whether belonging to the higher caste or the lower, is also almost certainly eliminated," says Prem Chowdhry, author of "Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India."
So far, the state's response to these changes has also been flawed. Officially, intercaste and interreligious marriages have been legal in India since 1872, almost 100 years before interracial marriages were legalized in all 50 American states. But over time, the law designed to facilitate these unions, known as the Special Marriage Act, has been twisted around to prevent love marriages. Under a 1954 amendment still on the books, couples are required to register their intent to marry with the court, provide the names and addresses of their parents and wait 30 days while the police verify that neither spouse-to-be is already married. Although in 2006 the Supreme Court directed police and other authorities nationwide to protect intercaste and interreligious couples from harassment, this filing requirement still helps parents locate runaway lovers and retrieve them, often by accusing the groom of kidnapping. (Since 2002, such charges have grown 30 percent faster than other crimes against women.) Though police acknowledge that in most of these cases the women have willingly fled with their future husbands, the cops nonetheless often track the couples down, throw the boyfriends (or husbands) in jail and return the women to their parents. Judges also often play a pernicious role, rejecting girls' testimony of consent or ignoring documents that prove she is of marriageable age.
India's divorce procedures similarly lag behind the times. The formal rules have become more liberal over the past 30 years—for example, by allowing Muslim women to sue for alimony and expanding the grounds for Christian divorce. Yet in practice, getting India's overburdened courts to process a divorce if one spouse objects can take up to 15 years. For women like 23-year-old Rani—a resident of provincial Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh—such waits can be unbearable. "I want to be divorced this minute!" she says. And because the glacial pace of courts often drives women to misuse laws against dowries and domestic violence to threaten their husbands into granting a quick settlement, the separation process can mean almost weekly trips to court and the police station, and constantly wondering whether one is going to be arrested and jailed.
Perhaps because of all these obstacles, even many of India's Westernized urban youth remain fairly conservative when it comes to love. Most still strive to find a partner who is roughly acceptable to their parents, even if not of their choosing. Often, when they do marry without their parents' blessing, they keep the marriage secret at first and continue living with their parents, only gradually introducing the new spouse as "a good friend," hoping to win over their parents before revealing the truth. If all goes well, a proper public ceremony then follows.
Even for those who do play by their parents' rules, however, things are slowly changing. Caste and class boundaries have expanded over time to permit more unions, and the old prohibition on the bride and groom's meeting before the wedding has been relaxed so that prospective spouses are now allowed to date or at least exchange phone calls before the big day.
The advent of online matchmaking has also helped. In the old days, young people often had no idea they'd entered the marriage market until photographs and résumés of prospects began arriving in the mail (parents aimed to avoid confrontation with their children by cluing them in as late as possible). Now as many as 40 percent of the profiles posted online on matrimonial sites are written by the candidates themselves, and industry experts say would-be brides and grooms—not their parents—make up a similar percentage of those viewing their pages. The result: today "the marriage decision is negotiated between parents and their adult children," says Delhi University sociologist Radhika Chopra.
One middle-class Delhi couple that wedded three years ago illustrates how such negotiations work. Arun and Deepti decided to get hitched in 2005 after dating secretly for a few years. When they approached their families, both sides objected. Though both are Brahmins, they belong to different subcastes, and Arun is from Bihar, considered a backward region, while Deepti grew up in Delhi; she is also better educated, speaks better English, and has a higher-paying job than Arun. But over time, sustained lobbying won over the families. "We both were ready to have a runaway marriage," says Deepti. "But we wanted our parents to agree. That is something which has not changed in India." Today, to show her respect, Deepti veils her face when she visits Arun's family in conservative Bihar, and Arun (a rare atheist) goes to temple to please Deepti's parents. Love, as they say, may still conquer all; but in India today, tradition remains nearly as powerful.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/137472
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK (May 17, 2008)
Not long ago, 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela returned home to Hyderabad from Delhi to attend a family funeral—but didn't get the welcome she expected. Konidela, whose father, Chiranjeevi, is a megastar in the Telugu-language film industry, had been disowned for eloping with Shirish Bharadwaj, 23, who was from a different caste. The two had married on live television last October in a bid to keep Sreeja's father from interfering—they were afraid he'd accuse Bharadwaj of kidnapping her, a common tactic in such cases. But their TV wedding alerted police and a mob of angry fans, who trailed the couple from the temple to the registrar and scared them so badly they fled to Delhi. Now the lovers were back, but Konidela's relatives weren't interested in reconciliation. Instead, she says, they forced Bharadwaj to wait outside and tried to browbeat her into dumping him so she could marry a groom of her parents' choosing. "They just tried brainwashing me," she says. "So I got out of there as fast as I could."
The story electrified India, where a rapidly modernizing society is changing its views on marriage. Tales of rebellion are on the rise. Now that fresh college grads can start outearning their parents right away and the rising influence of Western culture is empowering women, more young couples are challenging tradition. So-called love marriages were rare a generation ago, but now account for 10 percent of urban weddings, according to a November study by Divya Mathur of the University of Chicago. An additional 19 percent in Mathur's survey chose their own spouses but confirmed their engagements with their parents—choosing what urban India awkwardly refers to as "love-cum-arranged" unions. Meanwhile, more and more couples are meeting online or through friends instead of at torturous, parent-chaperoned tea sessions. The revenue of online matchmakers more than doubled from $15 million in 2006 to $35 million in 2007, and more than 12 million Indians—about half the country's Internet users—now visit matrimonial sites.
The changes aren't producing only love and bliss, however: demographers say divorce rates doubled to about 7 percent from 1991 to 2001, when the latest Census was taken. Lawyers affirm that, at least among urban couples, they've since climbed much higher, though they're still very low by Western standards. "India is facing changing times," says Pinky Anand, a lawyer who represented Konidela and Bharadwaj when they sought protection in a Delhi court. "Modernization, urbanization, access to information and globalization—there are no holds barred."
Traditionally, under all of India's major religions, all marriages were arranged by the bride and groom's parents. Unions were considered religious contracts between families, designed to uphold the social order and cemented with the gift of a virgin daughter. They were not seen as private agreements between two people in love, says King's College anthropologist Perveez Mody. With strict injunctions against crossing caste boundaries, arranged marriages helped Hindus to prevent lower castes from gaining status and made it easier to restrict them to hereditary occupations. "Many women got married before puberty, and to keep a nubile girl in the house was a monumental sin," says Delhi-based sociologist Patricia Uberoi. After marriage, couples moved in with the husband's parents to form what is known here as the "joint family." New brides had few rights and answered to their mothers-in-law, their husbands' siblings and his brothers' wives (if they'd been in the family longer). Today class and religious divides remain very strong, so in many respects the old system persists. Parents still work the family network and advertise in newspapers to make advantageous matches for their children—often without informing their sons or daughters until the process is well underway.
Now, however, a complex mix of political, economic and social developments is putting pressure on the old methods. The caste hierarchy itself is under threat thanks to urbanization and civil-rights reforms. India's city population has increased from about 20 percent of the total in 1971 to more than 28 percent today—bringing a new anonymity that makes it more difficult to identify a person's caste. Similarly, quotas for the lower castes in education and government jobs, along with the shift to an industrial economy, have allowed the lower castes to break out of traditional occupations. At the same time, young people—particularly young women—have become better positioned to assert their independence and become more exposed to Western influences, as Hollywood begins to compete with Bollywood, and Vogue and Cosmo hit the newsstands. Today's top engineering graduates, moreover, can earn as much as $30,000 within a few years of starting work—more than most parents ever earned—and even call-center employees make enough to defy their parents. Many of these new lucrative careers also require young people to relocate outside their families' ambit. And although a recent study by Watson Wyatt Asia-Pacific shows that women make up only 18 percent of India's urban work force, they now account for 38 percent of enrollment in higher education, and the number of women in white-collar jobs is increasing. As a result, they now enjoy more power and greater awareness of their rights, as well as more unsupervised contact with men. Together, these shifts have caused a decline in the number of joint families, a relaxation of the rules that once gave husbands' parents (but not wives') a dominant role in their children's marriages, and an uptick in children choosing their own partners.
Society is struggling to cope with the shifts. While the weakening of tradition has made relationships more equal, it has also led to higher divorce rates, as women object to archaic constraints and loveless unions. This is true even in remote corners of the country; according to India Today magazine, about a tenth of all child marriages now end in divorce. Geeta Luthra, a New Delhi-based lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues, says that men are often the ones to split up their marriages when their newly empowered wives refuse to do housework, play the good hostess or kowtow to her in-laws.
Love marriages, meanwhile, are also leading to serious conflict, especially among India's rural populations. In communities like the Jat caste of rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the murder of couples that elope has become disturbingly common; at least five such cases made headlines in the last month alone. "If a lower-caste man is involved with a higher-caste woman, he is invariably killed. And the girl, whether belonging to the higher caste or the lower, is also almost certainly eliminated," says Prem Chowdhry, author of "Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India."
So far, the state's response to these changes has also been flawed. Officially, intercaste and interreligious marriages have been legal in India since 1872, almost 100 years before interracial marriages were legalized in all 50 American states. But over time, the law designed to facilitate these unions, known as the Special Marriage Act, has been twisted around to prevent love marriages. Under a 1954 amendment still on the books, couples are required to register their intent to marry with the court, provide the names and addresses of their parents and wait 30 days while the police verify that neither spouse-to-be is already married. Although in 2006 the Supreme Court directed police and other authorities nationwide to protect intercaste and interreligious couples from harassment, this filing requirement still helps parents locate runaway lovers and retrieve them, often by accusing the groom of kidnapping. (Since 2002, such charges have grown 30 percent faster than other crimes against women.) Though police acknowledge that in most of these cases the women have willingly fled with their future husbands, the cops nonetheless often track the couples down, throw the boyfriends (or husbands) in jail and return the women to their parents. Judges also often play a pernicious role, rejecting girls' testimony of consent or ignoring documents that prove she is of marriageable age.
India's divorce procedures similarly lag behind the times. The formal rules have become more liberal over the past 30 years—for example, by allowing Muslim women to sue for alimony and expanding the grounds for Christian divorce. Yet in practice, getting India's overburdened courts to process a divorce if one spouse objects can take up to 15 years. For women like 23-year-old Rani—a resident of provincial Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh—such waits can be unbearable. "I want to be divorced this minute!" she says. And because the glacial pace of courts often drives women to misuse laws against dowries and domestic violence to threaten their husbands into granting a quick settlement, the separation process can mean almost weekly trips to court and the police station, and constantly wondering whether one is going to be arrested and jailed.
Perhaps because of all these obstacles, even many of India's Westernized urban youth remain fairly conservative when it comes to love. Most still strive to find a partner who is roughly acceptable to their parents, even if not of their choosing. Often, when they do marry without their parents' blessing, they keep the marriage secret at first and continue living with their parents, only gradually introducing the new spouse as "a good friend," hoping to win over their parents before revealing the truth. If all goes well, a proper public ceremony then follows.
Even for those who do play by their parents' rules, however, things are slowly changing. Caste and class boundaries have expanded over time to permit more unions, and the old prohibition on the bride and groom's meeting before the wedding has been relaxed so that prospective spouses are now allowed to date or at least exchange phone calls before the big day.
The advent of online matchmaking has also helped. In the old days, young people often had no idea they'd entered the marriage market until photographs and résumés of prospects began arriving in the mail (parents aimed to avoid confrontation with their children by cluing them in as late as possible). Now as many as 40 percent of the profiles posted online on matrimonial sites are written by the candidates themselves, and industry experts say would-be brides and grooms—not their parents—make up a similar percentage of those viewing their pages. The result: today "the marriage decision is negotiated between parents and their adult children," says Delhi University sociologist Radhika Chopra.
One middle-class Delhi couple that wedded three years ago illustrates how such negotiations work. Arun and Deepti decided to get hitched in 2005 after dating secretly for a few years. When they approached their families, both sides objected. Though both are Brahmins, they belong to different subcastes, and Arun is from Bihar, considered a backward region, while Deepti grew up in Delhi; she is also better educated, speaks better English, and has a higher-paying job than Arun. But over time, sustained lobbying won over the families. "We both were ready to have a runaway marriage," says Deepti. "But we wanted our parents to agree. That is something which has not changed in India." Today, to show her respect, Deepti veils her face when she visits Arun's family in conservative Bihar, and Arun (a rare atheist) goes to temple to please Deepti's parents. Love, as they say, may still conquer all; but in India today, tradition remains nearly as powerful.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/137472
Monday, May 05, 2008
the pom-pom girls save the world
Baulk at the bimbo? When it's Americana, India will learn, this too shall be.
(Outlook India, May 12, 2008)
JASON OVERDORF
Not long ago, a columnist for the New York Times celebrated the arrival of the Washington Redskins cheerleaders in the Indian Premier League by remarking that this hallowed event must surely signal that India now more than ever looks to America, rather than Britain or Europe, as its model for cultural development. Apparently, while you are still playing cricket—a kind of baseball with a flat bat—you are now doing it in a satisfyingly snazzed-up American way.
As a red-blooded Yankee with a more than passing love for the steroid-pumped spectacle of the US National Football League (the one with armour and the funny-looking ball), as well as the more historic American standbys of Mom, baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, I felt my eyes well with sentimental tears. Not since the foul-mouthed hulks from Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment toured India has American culture had so representative an emissary as the humble and hardworking cheerleader.
Keep your Ramanujan and your 6,00,000 engineers a year. So you invented zero. Discovered it. Whatever. It's a number for losers anyway. For statistical and mathematical gimcrackery, we'll take our guys any day. Consider P.T. Barnum, the circus promoter who calculated, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or, of course, Earl Whipple, who invented the giant foam finger, aid to sports fans everywhere, that eloquently proclaims "We're Number One!" Anyway, what's math compared with Reality TV? Most of your software geeks are even now cracking open cans of Budweiser, and watching large-bosomed women wolf down plates of worms on Fear Factor. Yes, readers, I will say it. American culture has converted "pop" into a celebration of the dumb. Today's Elvis is Britney Spears. Genius!
Naturally, I was stunned to discover that not all Indians have greeted our scantily-clad emissaries with my own enthusiasm. Some members of Parliament have rashly sought to ban them, others to curb their freedom of expression by imprisoning them in pants. Clearly, this is both prudish and undemocratic. Worse, even, than rejecting our nukes.
It is obvious from America's present ascendancy in economic and political affairs that the dumb-beats-smart phenomenon is not limited to sports and entertainment—stupidity and vulgarity triumph over reason and good taste in all arenas. To prove this to the world, we elected George W. Bush, a former cheerleader. Twice! It is now time for you to fall in line. You're starting to get the hang of stupidity. So far you are doing very well with Indian Idol and Nach Baliye, and Bollywood has mastered the art of stealing Hollywood plotlines and denuding them of their last vestiges of intelligence. You even refer to Vijay Mallya as "doctor". Why baulk at the bimbos?
Most Americans—who, to be quite honest, remain perplexed about why Christopher Columbus was looking for India in the first place—are blissfully ignorant of this blatant slap in the face. But were they to read of it, perhaps at the end of an amusing story about a eunuch who has run for mayor or a village woman who has married an elephant, it would only confirm their convictions that we are embroiled in a battle more perilous than the one we fought against communism. The truth is, we can't help but feel we are beset on all sides, because we are! No matter which backward country to which we bring the joys of freedom and democracy—processed food, bleach blondes, and some other stuff to do with civil rights and powerful detergents and whatnot—the people greet our sharp-dressed marketing executives and our fresh-faced soldiers the same way: with suspicion and distrust. When even our cheerleaders—who did for the ballerina what Velveeta cheese spread did for brie—receive such a reception, it is no surprise we're always wondering, "Why do they hate us so?" Ours is an utterly thankless task.
Perhaps a bit of background is needed, if the cheerleader is to make a comeback in an India worthy of KFC. Once upon a time, American sports were primitive and wholesome, like cricket, and there were no cheerleaders for the professional teams. (Now only Major League Baseball remains sadly bimboless). Cheerleading began at the University of Minnesota in 1898. Through what now seems an obvious oversight, the squads were all-male until 1923. But as it evolved, a dearth of athletic activities for women made cheerleading into a sort of substitute sport for the fairer sex. The original purpose, that is the leading of the crowd in cheers ("Rah, rah, ree! Kick 'em in the knee! Rah, rah, rass! Kick 'em in the other knee!") has long since been forgotten. The crowd is better at organising its own cheers anyway, and the players have money and performance-enhancing drugs to keep them motivated. But high school cheerleaders—like Olivia Newton John's character Sandy in Grease, or more recently the characters played by Mena Suvari in American Beauty and Hayden Panettiere in Heroes—have become iconic representations of America's youthful exuberance: contortionist Lolitas in tiny skirts, fresh and innocent...or maybe not.
Still more progress was made in the Farrah Fawcett 1970s by the cheerleaders for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys ("America's Team") who scrapped the virginal facade and made cheerleading unapologetically sexy. In tiny white hot pants, white cowboy boots and cowboy hats, they merged the worldly glamour of the Coffee, Tea or Me era airhostess with Playboy's liberated (but still pliant) bombshell. Now, professional cheerleaders look and perform less like wholesome girls filled with school spirit than like the entertainers known in America as "exotic dancers". You may not understand, but this transformation has reached its peak in India, where they play a wonderful double role—first as women with remarkable (if surgically enhanced) bodies, and second as the white, blonde temptresses of the West—in encouraging India's much ballyhooed rise.
I dare say this important reinforcement of femininity—cheering for men, rather than playing on a team yourself—has been no less important than the Barbie Doll. But it is faltering in America, due to a foolish new emphasis on women's athletics. Not long ago, for instance, when a mother in Texas committed first-degree murder to make sure her daughter made the cheerleading squad, the court was not sympathetic. The judges failed to see she was defending a vital American tradition that is now under serious threat.
Today, it is mostly in nostalgic films and TV shows that the cheerleaders are the most beautiful and popular girls, ruling the school together with the male athletes in their varsity letterman jackets, tormenting the smart kids by pushing their heads down the toilet and similar time-honoured pastimes. In real life, sad changes are afoot. At the school I attended, for instance, the pretty girls turned up their noses at cheerleading, letting those who were plain and slightly overweight fill in the ranks. The guys who played guitar and could dance—even some "straight A students", what we call the kids who ace all the exams—had more girlfriends than the football players. Something has to be done to stop this perversion of the natural order of things.
Thankfully, as it did with the Miss Universe pageant, India has stepped forward to shoulder the burden, casting off benighted traditions like purdah and socialism. It is high time somebody said it. Like the editorial staff of the Indian Express, who last week decried the joyless opposition to the "shiny, happy girls who inject a bit of pep into the IPL".So brave it was, it reminded me of a red-white-and-blue declaration along similar lines: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
(Outlook India, May 12, 2008)
JASON OVERDORF
Not long ago, a columnist for the New York Times celebrated the arrival of the Washington Redskins cheerleaders in the Indian Premier League by remarking that this hallowed event must surely signal that India now more than ever looks to America, rather than Britain or Europe, as its model for cultural development. Apparently, while you are still playing cricket—a kind of baseball with a flat bat—you are now doing it in a satisfyingly snazzed-up American way.
As a red-blooded Yankee with a more than passing love for the steroid-pumped spectacle of the US National Football League (the one with armour and the funny-looking ball), as well as the more historic American standbys of Mom, baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, I felt my eyes well with sentimental tears. Not since the foul-mouthed hulks from Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment toured India has American culture had so representative an emissary as the humble and hardworking cheerleader.
Keep your Ramanujan and your 6,00,000 engineers a year. So you invented zero. Discovered it. Whatever. It's a number for losers anyway. For statistical and mathematical gimcrackery, we'll take our guys any day. Consider P.T. Barnum, the circus promoter who calculated, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or, of course, Earl Whipple, who invented the giant foam finger, aid to sports fans everywhere, that eloquently proclaims "We're Number One!" Anyway, what's math compared with Reality TV? Most of your software geeks are even now cracking open cans of Budweiser, and watching large-bosomed women wolf down plates of worms on Fear Factor. Yes, readers, I will say it. American culture has converted "pop" into a celebration of the dumb. Today's Elvis is Britney Spears. Genius!
Naturally, I was stunned to discover that not all Indians have greeted our scantily-clad emissaries with my own enthusiasm. Some members of Parliament have rashly sought to ban them, others to curb their freedom of expression by imprisoning them in pants. Clearly, this is both prudish and undemocratic. Worse, even, than rejecting our nukes.
It is obvious from America's present ascendancy in economic and political affairs that the dumb-beats-smart phenomenon is not limited to sports and entertainment—stupidity and vulgarity triumph over reason and good taste in all arenas. To prove this to the world, we elected George W. Bush, a former cheerleader. Twice! It is now time for you to fall in line. You're starting to get the hang of stupidity. So far you are doing very well with Indian Idol and Nach Baliye, and Bollywood has mastered the art of stealing Hollywood plotlines and denuding them of their last vestiges of intelligence. You even refer to Vijay Mallya as "doctor". Why baulk at the bimbos?
Most Americans—who, to be quite honest, remain perplexed about why Christopher Columbus was looking for India in the first place—are blissfully ignorant of this blatant slap in the face. But were they to read of it, perhaps at the end of an amusing story about a eunuch who has run for mayor or a village woman who has married an elephant, it would only confirm their convictions that we are embroiled in a battle more perilous than the one we fought against communism. The truth is, we can't help but feel we are beset on all sides, because we are! No matter which backward country to which we bring the joys of freedom and democracy—processed food, bleach blondes, and some other stuff to do with civil rights and powerful detergents and whatnot—the people greet our sharp-dressed marketing executives and our fresh-faced soldiers the same way: with suspicion and distrust. When even our cheerleaders—who did for the ballerina what Velveeta cheese spread did for brie—receive such a reception, it is no surprise we're always wondering, "Why do they hate us so?" Ours is an utterly thankless task.
Perhaps a bit of background is needed, if the cheerleader is to make a comeback in an India worthy of KFC. Once upon a time, American sports were primitive and wholesome, like cricket, and there were no cheerleaders for the professional teams. (Now only Major League Baseball remains sadly bimboless). Cheerleading began at the University of Minnesota in 1898. Through what now seems an obvious oversight, the squads were all-male until 1923. But as it evolved, a dearth of athletic activities for women made cheerleading into a sort of substitute sport for the fairer sex. The original purpose, that is the leading of the crowd in cheers ("Rah, rah, ree! Kick 'em in the knee! Rah, rah, rass! Kick 'em in the other knee!") has long since been forgotten. The crowd is better at organising its own cheers anyway, and the players have money and performance-enhancing drugs to keep them motivated. But high school cheerleaders—like Olivia Newton John's character Sandy in Grease, or more recently the characters played by Mena Suvari in American Beauty and Hayden Panettiere in Heroes—have become iconic representations of America's youthful exuberance: contortionist Lolitas in tiny skirts, fresh and innocent...or maybe not.
Still more progress was made in the Farrah Fawcett 1970s by the cheerleaders for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys ("America's Team") who scrapped the virginal facade and made cheerleading unapologetically sexy. In tiny white hot pants, white cowboy boots and cowboy hats, they merged the worldly glamour of the Coffee, Tea or Me era airhostess with Playboy's liberated (but still pliant) bombshell. Now, professional cheerleaders look and perform less like wholesome girls filled with school spirit than like the entertainers known in America as "exotic dancers". You may not understand, but this transformation has reached its peak in India, where they play a wonderful double role—first as women with remarkable (if surgically enhanced) bodies, and second as the white, blonde temptresses of the West—in encouraging India's much ballyhooed rise.
I dare say this important reinforcement of femininity—cheering for men, rather than playing on a team yourself—has been no less important than the Barbie Doll. But it is faltering in America, due to a foolish new emphasis on women's athletics. Not long ago, for instance, when a mother in Texas committed first-degree murder to make sure her daughter made the cheerleading squad, the court was not sympathetic. The judges failed to see she was defending a vital American tradition that is now under serious threat.
Today, it is mostly in nostalgic films and TV shows that the cheerleaders are the most beautiful and popular girls, ruling the school together with the male athletes in their varsity letterman jackets, tormenting the smart kids by pushing their heads down the toilet and similar time-honoured pastimes. In real life, sad changes are afoot. At the school I attended, for instance, the pretty girls turned up their noses at cheerleading, letting those who were plain and slightly overweight fill in the ranks. The guys who played guitar and could dance—even some "straight A students", what we call the kids who ace all the exams—had more girlfriends than the football players. Something has to be done to stop this perversion of the natural order of things.
Thankfully, as it did with the Miss Universe pageant, India has stepped forward to shoulder the burden, casting off benighted traditions like purdah and socialism. It is high time somebody said it. Like the editorial staff of the Indian Express, who last week decried the joyless opposition to the "shiny, happy girls who inject a bit of pep into the IPL".So brave it was, it reminded me of a red-white-and-blue declaration along similar lines: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
india on the fly
Fishing for the legendary Mahseer in the Himachal foothills of the Himalayas
By Jason Overdorf
DESTINASIAN (May 2008)
MY FEET MUST BE BLEEDING, I KEPT THINKING. I COULDN’T know for sure because I was wading barefoot across a freezing Himalayan river in my underwear, and Prahalad, my leather-soled fishing guide, wouldn’t stop long enough for me to check. But there was no turning back. I was in the middle of the river now, and I really, really wanted to catch one of the golden mahseer that I hoped to find on the opposite bank. Besides, Prahalad had a viselike grip on my hand. And he had my pants.
The mahseer (Hindi for “great fish”) has a storied reputation from the days of the Raj, when India’s British colonizers introduced sport fishing to the subcontinent. Jim Corbett, the famous hunter, considered wrestling the mahseer more exciting, even, than stalking man-eating leopards and tigers. And Rudyard Kipling went so far as to write that the mahseer was a game fish “beside whom the tarpon is as a herring, and he who lands him can say he is a fisherman.”
To Atlantic anglers, those are provocative words. But they’re not unfounded. The
mahseer is one of the world’s largest scaly freshwater fish, capable of growing more
than a meter long and weighing up to 90 kilograms—though the record for one taken
with rod and reel, set in 1946, is 54 kilos. A beautiful fish with green and gold scales the size of silver dollars, the mahseer bears a resemblance to the Chinese carp (a distant relative) and the prized tarpon. An opportunistic predator, the Himalayan variety will strike flies and spinning lures, as well as live bait. It hits like a ton of bricks and fights like hell, too—sometimes snapping an 18-kilo test line like it’s cotton string. The golden mahseer, found in the rivers of the
Himalayas, is swifter and lighter than the monstrous humpback mahseer of south
India’s Cauvery River. But experts say the golden mahseer is more aggressive. It’s also harder to catch. As dams mushroom in the Indian Himalayas and local villagers
empty the best pools, you have to trek deeper and deeper into tiger country to land one of these legendary fish.
This spring, I traveled from Delhi up the old Grand Trunk Road with my 64-year-old father to try to hook one. The trip was organized by Himalayan Outback, a three-year-old company started by a young Indian outfitter named Misty Dhillon, whom a number of graybearded mahseer fanatics have called “the future of Indian angling.” Compared with those of the United States, Europe, or even South America, India’s sport-fishing industry is virtually nonexistent. After the British left India, interest in sport
fishing waned, and a rapidly expanding—and hungry—population stripped the rivers of fish. Something of a revival began in 1977, when Britons Robert Howitt, Andrew Clark, and Martin Clark made a comprehensive survey of India’s rivers as part of their
so-called Transworld Fishing Expedition. A few years later, Howitt convinced the Indian government to protect a section of the Cauvery River from overzealous meat fishermen, giving rise to events like the Mahseer Maharaja World Cup and a steady influx of international anglers. But the golden mahseer of the Himalayas is only now starting to get the same kind of attention, and Misty Dhillon is a good part of the reason why. A quick Internet search on the mahseer shows that he’s written dozens of articles about fishing in the Himalayas, and doggedly farmed them out to every forum, Web site, and discussion board he could find. Today he’s one of a handful of Himalayan outfitters (perhaps the only one) who makes the lion’s share of his revenue from catch-and-release fishing.
“A lot of companies here say they’re angling specialists, but they really sustain their businesses through wildlife tours or rafting,” he says. “We’ve focused on angling, and all our clientele is pretty much angling right now.”
Misty is also leading an effort to prove that the golden mahseer, unlike its fat-bellied cousin down south, will take a fly. “People used to say that you can never catch this fish on a fly, but I believed that you could,” he says, adding that he began experimenting with his own fly lures a few years ago. “That was important, because fly fishermen are the ones who have the money and the passion to be able to afford to come to these wild areas. Now, pretty much all of our work is fly fishing.”
The survival of the golden mahseer could well be at stake. India is hard at work on dozens of hydroelectric projects in the Himalayas, and locals still fill their larders using dynamite, gill nets, bleaching powder, and truck batteries—practices that kill every fish in the water, big or small. As a result, the mahseer has already disappeared from waters in heavily populated areas like the Thumaria, Deoha, and Dhora reservoirs, according to a recent report by the Wildlife Institute of India.
Outfitters like Misty have so far proven to be the best defense. By leasing the fishing rights to sections of rivers like the Yamuna, Ramganga, Ganges, and Alaknanda, angling and rafting companies have assumed responsibility for curbing pollution and poaching. “In prime habitats—our clients want to go to the finest areas—companies like us are doing a lot of education,” Misty told me. “Our main strength is that our staff is all local. When they go to the villages and say, ‘Look guys, if you dynamite you’ll probably make 500 rupees for every 10 fish that you kill, but if
you get a job with Himalayan Outback, you stand a chance of making a lot more money,’ it really means something. Where we are operating, people are actually seeing the benefits.” So far, no detailed studies have been undertaken to track the results. But the condition of the rivers near outfitters’ fishing beats and rafting camps suggests that the scheme is working.
For our trip, my dad and I hiked about two hours into the Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh to reach Misty’s fishing camp on a tributary of the Yamuna—a location that he wants to keep secret from his competitors. “It’s a fishing expedition in the real sense of the word, unlike, say, Alaska, where you’re flown into a remote section of river and you’re fishing out of a lodge,” he’d told me before I left. “Here, you’re trekking and experiencing a lot of local culture. It’s more of a real expedition.”
Even with porters carrying our gear, it was a pretty tough slog up and down the steep, narrow trail that the local villagers use to walk to the nearest road, and now and then I asked myself whether I had overestimated my dad’s physical limits. But Misty was right about the beauty of the place. The psychological fatigue of seven hours swerving around trucks, minicabs, and bullock carts on the Grand Trunk Road evaporated in the crisp air, and looking down at the snaking, green-and-blue river from the track, I made a mental note to escape the noise and dust of Delhi more
often. The year before, my dad and I had made a trip out to central Oregon to fish for trout on the Deschutes River; Misty’s “secret” tributary was just as beautiful.
The fishing camp was comfortable enough, if rustic. Accommodations were canvas, army-style tents large enough to stand up in. There was a shower tent with heated bucket water for bathing and another tent with a freshly dug latrine, a pile of dirt, and a shovel. No 400-threadcount sheets; no electricity. But the beds were soft enough that I never failed to get less than nine hours of sleep, completely dead to the world after the sun went down. We never had to lift a finger, and the camp staff looked after us as expertly as a moderatepriced Indian hotel. A cook equipped with a propane stove, two dogsbodies, and running water from a hose attached to a mountain spring a few hundred meters up the hill managed some fairly impressive culinary feats for the bush, though I will say that “continental” fare should be struck from the menu by all trekking, rafting, and fishing companies throughout India (as well as most hotels). Spaghetti bolognese was never meant to be hammered out of ground mutton and sprinkled with chips of goat bone.
The only problem was one frequently encountered on this sort of expedition: no fish. I’d been to the Ramganga River in April the year before—not for a fishing trip, unfortunately—and I’d seen entire schools of mahseer hunting in the shadows along the bank. No such luck this time; February to May is supposed to be a strong season, but the winter had been unusually long, and a week of sporadic rainstorms had lowered the water temperature even further. Despite our best efforts, fishing hard for four or five hours a day over the course of two days (one day was wasted as we hunkered down to weather a freezing drizzle, finally declaring it a write-off and returning to our sleeping bags), we never felt a tug, never glimpsed a ripple, and certainly never hooked a fish.
That’s probably why I agreed to cross the river, against my better judgment, even though I hadn’t thought to bring along a pair of wading shoes. As with all stupid decisions, I knew it was a mistake before I started out. But I blundered along anyway, and before long I was hip-deep in ice-cold water, dead certain that I was
doggedly turning my half-numb feet into hamburger. And I still didn’t get a nibble.
The only upside? When I finally hobbled back to camp, my miraculously unscathed feet
were toasty warm for the first time on the trip. Come to think of it, they were burning hot.
GETTING THERE
Most of the mahseer fishing camps in the Himalayan foothills are in Himachal Pradesh or Uttaranchal, a 7- to 10-hour drive from Delhi. For Himalayan Outback’s Camp Mahseer—the fishing spot featured in this article—the outfitters will meet guests at the New Delhi airport and travel with them by train (a comfortable three-hour trip
on the Shatabdi Express) to Ambala, from where you’ll travel another hour by car to the trailhead. From there, it’s about a 90-minute trek to the campsite; this takes you over some steep hills, so even with porters carrying your gear you need to be moderately fit.
WHEN TO GO
The official seasons for golden mahseer fishing are October– December and February–June, depending to some degree on the timing of the monsoon. Like salmon, the Himalayan mahseer migrates to spawn, traveling upriver once or twice a year, during which time they have little interest in feeding. The major migration takes place in
July and August, during the peak of the monsoon and snowmelt, when the rivers are at their highest levels. Weather-wise, February through early May is the most comfortable period for fishing.
FISHING OPTIONS
Himalayan Outback (91-987/ 280-6359; himalayanoutback.com) offers a six-day Classic
Fishing Adventure at Camp Mahseer, on its secret Yamuna tributary, from US$200 per
person per day, depending on the season. The outfitter can also arrange a variety of
different float trips on the Ganges, Yamuna, Alaknanda, Ramganga, and Mahakali rivers, ranging from 5 to 15 days.
Another reputable operator, Otter Reserves (91-124/256- 4794; otterreserves.com)
focuses on fishing beats in Pancheshwar (on India’s border with Nepal) and the Ramganga Valley, outside Corbett National Park in Uttaranchal. Camp conditions and offerings are similar to those offered by Himalayan Outback.
For more comfortable accommodations, consider Vanghat River Lodge (91-971/924-3939; vanghat.com; doubles from US$70 plus US$50 per day of fishing), which has five spacious cottages on the Ramganga River. –JO
By Jason Overdorf
DESTINASIAN (May 2008)
MY FEET MUST BE BLEEDING, I KEPT THINKING. I COULDN’T know for sure because I was wading barefoot across a freezing Himalayan river in my underwear, and Prahalad, my leather-soled fishing guide, wouldn’t stop long enough for me to check. But there was no turning back. I was in the middle of the river now, and I really, really wanted to catch one of the golden mahseer that I hoped to find on the opposite bank. Besides, Prahalad had a viselike grip on my hand. And he had my pants.
The mahseer (Hindi for “great fish”) has a storied reputation from the days of the Raj, when India’s British colonizers introduced sport fishing to the subcontinent. Jim Corbett, the famous hunter, considered wrestling the mahseer more exciting, even, than stalking man-eating leopards and tigers. And Rudyard Kipling went so far as to write that the mahseer was a game fish “beside whom the tarpon is as a herring, and he who lands him can say he is a fisherman.”
To Atlantic anglers, those are provocative words. But they’re not unfounded. The
mahseer is one of the world’s largest scaly freshwater fish, capable of growing more
than a meter long and weighing up to 90 kilograms—though the record for one taken
with rod and reel, set in 1946, is 54 kilos. A beautiful fish with green and gold scales the size of silver dollars, the mahseer bears a resemblance to the Chinese carp (a distant relative) and the prized tarpon. An opportunistic predator, the Himalayan variety will strike flies and spinning lures, as well as live bait. It hits like a ton of bricks and fights like hell, too—sometimes snapping an 18-kilo test line like it’s cotton string. The golden mahseer, found in the rivers of the
Himalayas, is swifter and lighter than the monstrous humpback mahseer of south
India’s Cauvery River. But experts say the golden mahseer is more aggressive. It’s also harder to catch. As dams mushroom in the Indian Himalayas and local villagers
empty the best pools, you have to trek deeper and deeper into tiger country to land one of these legendary fish.
This spring, I traveled from Delhi up the old Grand Trunk Road with my 64-year-old father to try to hook one. The trip was organized by Himalayan Outback, a three-year-old company started by a young Indian outfitter named Misty Dhillon, whom a number of graybearded mahseer fanatics have called “the future of Indian angling.” Compared with those of the United States, Europe, or even South America, India’s sport-fishing industry is virtually nonexistent. After the British left India, interest in sport
fishing waned, and a rapidly expanding—and hungry—population stripped the rivers of fish. Something of a revival began in 1977, when Britons Robert Howitt, Andrew Clark, and Martin Clark made a comprehensive survey of India’s rivers as part of their
so-called Transworld Fishing Expedition. A few years later, Howitt convinced the Indian government to protect a section of the Cauvery River from overzealous meat fishermen, giving rise to events like the Mahseer Maharaja World Cup and a steady influx of international anglers. But the golden mahseer of the Himalayas is only now starting to get the same kind of attention, and Misty Dhillon is a good part of the reason why. A quick Internet search on the mahseer shows that he’s written dozens of articles about fishing in the Himalayas, and doggedly farmed them out to every forum, Web site, and discussion board he could find. Today he’s one of a handful of Himalayan outfitters (perhaps the only one) who makes the lion’s share of his revenue from catch-and-release fishing.
“A lot of companies here say they’re angling specialists, but they really sustain their businesses through wildlife tours or rafting,” he says. “We’ve focused on angling, and all our clientele is pretty much angling right now.”
Misty is also leading an effort to prove that the golden mahseer, unlike its fat-bellied cousin down south, will take a fly. “People used to say that you can never catch this fish on a fly, but I believed that you could,” he says, adding that he began experimenting with his own fly lures a few years ago. “That was important, because fly fishermen are the ones who have the money and the passion to be able to afford to come to these wild areas. Now, pretty much all of our work is fly fishing.”
The survival of the golden mahseer could well be at stake. India is hard at work on dozens of hydroelectric projects in the Himalayas, and locals still fill their larders using dynamite, gill nets, bleaching powder, and truck batteries—practices that kill every fish in the water, big or small. As a result, the mahseer has already disappeared from waters in heavily populated areas like the Thumaria, Deoha, and Dhora reservoirs, according to a recent report by the Wildlife Institute of India.
Outfitters like Misty have so far proven to be the best defense. By leasing the fishing rights to sections of rivers like the Yamuna, Ramganga, Ganges, and Alaknanda, angling and rafting companies have assumed responsibility for curbing pollution and poaching. “In prime habitats—our clients want to go to the finest areas—companies like us are doing a lot of education,” Misty told me. “Our main strength is that our staff is all local. When they go to the villages and say, ‘Look guys, if you dynamite you’ll probably make 500 rupees for every 10 fish that you kill, but if
you get a job with Himalayan Outback, you stand a chance of making a lot more money,’ it really means something. Where we are operating, people are actually seeing the benefits.” So far, no detailed studies have been undertaken to track the results. But the condition of the rivers near outfitters’ fishing beats and rafting camps suggests that the scheme is working.
For our trip, my dad and I hiked about two hours into the Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh to reach Misty’s fishing camp on a tributary of the Yamuna—a location that he wants to keep secret from his competitors. “It’s a fishing expedition in the real sense of the word, unlike, say, Alaska, where you’re flown into a remote section of river and you’re fishing out of a lodge,” he’d told me before I left. “Here, you’re trekking and experiencing a lot of local culture. It’s more of a real expedition.”
Even with porters carrying our gear, it was a pretty tough slog up and down the steep, narrow trail that the local villagers use to walk to the nearest road, and now and then I asked myself whether I had overestimated my dad’s physical limits. But Misty was right about the beauty of the place. The psychological fatigue of seven hours swerving around trucks, minicabs, and bullock carts on the Grand Trunk Road evaporated in the crisp air, and looking down at the snaking, green-and-blue river from the track, I made a mental note to escape the noise and dust of Delhi more
often. The year before, my dad and I had made a trip out to central Oregon to fish for trout on the Deschutes River; Misty’s “secret” tributary was just as beautiful.
The fishing camp was comfortable enough, if rustic. Accommodations were canvas, army-style tents large enough to stand up in. There was a shower tent with heated bucket water for bathing and another tent with a freshly dug latrine, a pile of dirt, and a shovel. No 400-threadcount sheets; no electricity. But the beds were soft enough that I never failed to get less than nine hours of sleep, completely dead to the world after the sun went down. We never had to lift a finger, and the camp staff looked after us as expertly as a moderatepriced Indian hotel. A cook equipped with a propane stove, two dogsbodies, and running water from a hose attached to a mountain spring a few hundred meters up the hill managed some fairly impressive culinary feats for the bush, though I will say that “continental” fare should be struck from the menu by all trekking, rafting, and fishing companies throughout India (as well as most hotels). Spaghetti bolognese was never meant to be hammered out of ground mutton and sprinkled with chips of goat bone.
The only problem was one frequently encountered on this sort of expedition: no fish. I’d been to the Ramganga River in April the year before—not for a fishing trip, unfortunately—and I’d seen entire schools of mahseer hunting in the shadows along the bank. No such luck this time; February to May is supposed to be a strong season, but the winter had been unusually long, and a week of sporadic rainstorms had lowered the water temperature even further. Despite our best efforts, fishing hard for four or five hours a day over the course of two days (one day was wasted as we hunkered down to weather a freezing drizzle, finally declaring it a write-off and returning to our sleeping bags), we never felt a tug, never glimpsed a ripple, and certainly never hooked a fish.
That’s probably why I agreed to cross the river, against my better judgment, even though I hadn’t thought to bring along a pair of wading shoes. As with all stupid decisions, I knew it was a mistake before I started out. But I blundered along anyway, and before long I was hip-deep in ice-cold water, dead certain that I was
doggedly turning my half-numb feet into hamburger. And I still didn’t get a nibble.
The only upside? When I finally hobbled back to camp, my miraculously unscathed feet
were toasty warm for the first time on the trip. Come to think of it, they were burning hot.
GETTING THERE
Most of the mahseer fishing camps in the Himalayan foothills are in Himachal Pradesh or Uttaranchal, a 7- to 10-hour drive from Delhi. For Himalayan Outback’s Camp Mahseer—the fishing spot featured in this article—the outfitters will meet guests at the New Delhi airport and travel with them by train (a comfortable three-hour trip
on the Shatabdi Express) to Ambala, from where you’ll travel another hour by car to the trailhead. From there, it’s about a 90-minute trek to the campsite; this takes you over some steep hills, so even with porters carrying your gear you need to be moderately fit.
WHEN TO GO
The official seasons for golden mahseer fishing are October– December and February–June, depending to some degree on the timing of the monsoon. Like salmon, the Himalayan mahseer migrates to spawn, traveling upriver once or twice a year, during which time they have little interest in feeding. The major migration takes place in
July and August, during the peak of the monsoon and snowmelt, when the rivers are at their highest levels. Weather-wise, February through early May is the most comfortable period for fishing.
FISHING OPTIONS
Himalayan Outback (91-987/ 280-6359; himalayanoutback.com) offers a six-day Classic
Fishing Adventure at Camp Mahseer, on its secret Yamuna tributary, from US$200 per
person per day, depending on the season. The outfitter can also arrange a variety of
different float trips on the Ganges, Yamuna, Alaknanda, Ramganga, and Mahakali rivers, ranging from 5 to 15 days.
Another reputable operator, Otter Reserves (91-124/256- 4794; otterreserves.com)
focuses on fishing beats in Pancheshwar (on India’s border with Nepal) and the Ramganga Valley, outside Corbett National Park in Uttaranchal. Camp conditions and offerings are similar to those offered by Himalayan Outback.
For more comfortable accommodations, consider Vanghat River Lodge (91-971/924-3939; vanghat.com; doubles from US$70 plus US$50 per day of fishing), which has five spacious cottages on the Ramganga River. –JO
Thursday, April 17, 2008
want a gun? get a vasectomy
JASON OVERDORF
Toronto Globe and Mail
(April 17, 2008)
SHIVPURI, India — Shivraj Singh already had three sons and a daughter, but what he really wanted next was a gun, so he got a vasectomy.
The 45-year-old Indian farmer is one of several men who recently took advantage of a creative population control program started in the gun-loving state of Madhya Pradesh. Under the scheme, men with vasectomy certificates can jump to the front of the waiting list for gun licences - so coveted around here that around 10,000 people apply every year even though fewer than 500 are awarded.
India, which has seen its population triple to 1.1 billion people since the 1940s, has long been striving to reduce the birth rate from the present five children per couple to 2.1. According to the Family Planning Association of India, sterilization is the country's most common form of birth control, but because of masculine pride, vasectomies are far less popular than female tubal ligations, even though the latter procedure is more fraught with complications.
"Among the uneducated, ladies think that if their husband gets the operation, then he might have trouble working," says Vimal Dwivedi, medical adviser to the FPA branch in Gwalior, the nearest large city. "And the men think that they might have problems with impotence."
Go under the knife, get a gun. Family planning officials in a remote part of India where everyone wants a gun have come up with novel way to promote vasectomies: You can't get a permit to fire bullets unless you get an operation to make sure you're shooting blanks. Photo by:
Enlarge Image
Go under the knife, get a gun. Family planning officials in a remote part of India where everyone wants a gun have come up with novel way to promote vasectomies: You can't get a permit to fire bullets unless you get an operation to make sure you're shooting blanks. Photo by: Jason Overdorf (Jason Overdorf/The Globe and Mail)
The Globe and Mail
Guns are helping to fight that ignorance. "Over the last eight years, the number of vasectomy operations has never crossed double digits," says Manish Srivastav, the 50-year-old district magistrate who came up with the guns for sterilization scheme. "Last year we had only eight, and the year before that just one." This year there were 174.
In rural, male-dominated societies such as Shivpuri, India's population has spiralled out of control because every family wants a son, and couples keep trying until they get one, sometimes resorting to selective abortions, which have brought the ratio of men to women down to 750 women for every 1,000 men in Shivpuri, well below the normal level of about 1,000 women for every 1050 men.
But the gun culture in this arid, rocky country, which adjoins a mazelike network of deep ravines called the Chambal River Valley, may be strong enough to overcome that. Gangs of bandits, known locally as dacoits, have preyed on the Chambal for centuries, robbing, killing and kidnapping villagers and townspeople, then disappearing into canyon hideouts.
Most are like Rambabu Gadaria, who was gunned down by police last year after a long reign of terror in Shivpuri. A ruthless kidnapper and extortionist whose unkempt beard fell past the third button of his shirt, he massacred 13 villagers who dared to oppose him in 2004.
In that atmosphere, self-defence is a strong motivator. "My village is near the forest, in an area that's infested with bandits," says Mr. Singh, who plans to buy a 12-gauge shotgun now that he's infertile.
Last year, a gang of bandits tramped out of the jungle while Mr. Singh was working in his field and stuck their homemade pistols and ancient shotguns in his face. He didn't have much cash, but they took the submersible pump he relied on to irrigate his crops and the motorized tiller he used to plow his fields.
Once they hear through the grapevine he has a gun, he says, they won't return.
But protection is only part of the reason firearms are popular here. Perhaps because of the romance associated with dacoits - sometimes viewed as proletariat rebels - or simply because a man's sense of his masculinity here is deeply tied to his ability to stand up for himself, owning a gun has also become a potent symbol of virility, power and izzat - or honour.
That is helping to encourage younger men to seek vasectomies, and to have the procedure before they have too many children.
"I'll march with my gun on my shoulder when I go to weddings and fire into the air to celebrate," says Devanand Sharma, who had the operation at just 26 after he'd had a son and a daughter. "People will look at me and think that I'm a big man. My honour will increase and I'll feel more important."
Special to The Globe and Mail
Toronto Globe and Mail
(April 17, 2008)
SHIVPURI, India — Shivraj Singh already had three sons and a daughter, but what he really wanted next was a gun, so he got a vasectomy.
The 45-year-old Indian farmer is one of several men who recently took advantage of a creative population control program started in the gun-loving state of Madhya Pradesh. Under the scheme, men with vasectomy certificates can jump to the front of the waiting list for gun licences - so coveted around here that around 10,000 people apply every year even though fewer than 500 are awarded.
India, which has seen its population triple to 1.1 billion people since the 1940s, has long been striving to reduce the birth rate from the present five children per couple to 2.1. According to the Family Planning Association of India, sterilization is the country's most common form of birth control, but because of masculine pride, vasectomies are far less popular than female tubal ligations, even though the latter procedure is more fraught with complications.
"Among the uneducated, ladies think that if their husband gets the operation, then he might have trouble working," says Vimal Dwivedi, medical adviser to the FPA branch in Gwalior, the nearest large city. "And the men think that they might have problems with impotence."
Go under the knife, get a gun. Family planning officials in a remote part of India where everyone wants a gun have come up with novel way to promote vasectomies: You can't get a permit to fire bullets unless you get an operation to make sure you're shooting blanks. Photo by:
Enlarge Image
Go under the knife, get a gun. Family planning officials in a remote part of India where everyone wants a gun have come up with novel way to promote vasectomies: You can't get a permit to fire bullets unless you get an operation to make sure you're shooting blanks. Photo by: Jason Overdorf (Jason Overdorf/The Globe and Mail)
The Globe and Mail
Guns are helping to fight that ignorance. "Over the last eight years, the number of vasectomy operations has never crossed double digits," says Manish Srivastav, the 50-year-old district magistrate who came up with the guns for sterilization scheme. "Last year we had only eight, and the year before that just one." This year there were 174.
In rural, male-dominated societies such as Shivpuri, India's population has spiralled out of control because every family wants a son, and couples keep trying until they get one, sometimes resorting to selective abortions, which have brought the ratio of men to women down to 750 women for every 1,000 men in Shivpuri, well below the normal level of about 1,000 women for every 1050 men.
But the gun culture in this arid, rocky country, which adjoins a mazelike network of deep ravines called the Chambal River Valley, may be strong enough to overcome that. Gangs of bandits, known locally as dacoits, have preyed on the Chambal for centuries, robbing, killing and kidnapping villagers and townspeople, then disappearing into canyon hideouts.
Most are like Rambabu Gadaria, who was gunned down by police last year after a long reign of terror in Shivpuri. A ruthless kidnapper and extortionist whose unkempt beard fell past the third button of his shirt, he massacred 13 villagers who dared to oppose him in 2004.
In that atmosphere, self-defence is a strong motivator. "My village is near the forest, in an area that's infested with bandits," says Mr. Singh, who plans to buy a 12-gauge shotgun now that he's infertile.
Last year, a gang of bandits tramped out of the jungle while Mr. Singh was working in his field and stuck their homemade pistols and ancient shotguns in his face. He didn't have much cash, but they took the submersible pump he relied on to irrigate his crops and the motorized tiller he used to plow his fields.
Once they hear through the grapevine he has a gun, he says, they won't return.
But protection is only part of the reason firearms are popular here. Perhaps because of the romance associated with dacoits - sometimes viewed as proletariat rebels - or simply because a man's sense of his masculinity here is deeply tied to his ability to stand up for himself, owning a gun has also become a potent symbol of virility, power and izzat - or honour.
That is helping to encourage younger men to seek vasectomies, and to have the procedure before they have too many children.
"I'll march with my gun on my shoulder when I go to weddings and fire into the air to celebrate," says Devanand Sharma, who had the operation at just 26 after he'd had a son and a daughter. "People will look at me and think that I'm a big man. My honour will increase and I'll feel more important."
Special to The Globe and Mail
Saturday, April 05, 2008
the negotiator
Kamal Nath has become not only the voice of India in trade circles, but an advocate of the developing world.
Jason Overdorf
Newsweek Web Exclusive
April 5, 2008
Kamal Nath is India's Minister of Commerce & Industry, a position that due to India's rising prominence in global trade—both as a coveted market and a growing power in agricultural and industrial production—makes him an important figure in international affairs. Since assuming office as commerce minister in 2004, he's become the voice of the globe's developing countries in World Trade Organization negotiations. He brings the same perspective to the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos and similar high-powered international conferences. He spoke with NEWSWEEK 's Jason Overdorf. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What differences have you seen in the world's power elite, as represented by the attendees at Davos, the WTO negotiations, and similar events?
Kamal Nath: The constituents at the head table have changed. Where the WTO is concerned, the most important thing is that the manner of negotiations has changed. In the last round of the WTO, there were just 10-to-12 countries who got together, and the other countries never had a voice. It was decided by 12 countries, and everybody else had to fall in line. Today, in the consensus building process, developing countries have not only a voice, but a loud voice.
Why do you think that is?
With the changing global economic architecture, the mass of economic activity is shifting. At Davos, twenty years ago or even ten years ago, the invitees were mainly from the US and Europe, and it was for interaction between them. Today, many of those who are coming from Europe or the United States are coming for interaction with those from the East.
Do you also find that government actors are losing prominence and private actors are becoming bigger players?
As the GDP of countries—the growth of GDP in developing countries—gets more and more driven by the private sector, obviously the private sector assumes a voice which is pretty loud.
From your own agenda, I know you represent India, so that's obviously your main focus, but what else do you see as your role in these forums?
In these forums, it's not only the concerns of India, but the concerns of other developing countries also, which helps keeps the coordination among developing countries so that fragmentation does not happen.
You've emerged as one of the main negotiators for developing countries. Do you find that in these forums, forming relationships with the other attendees becomes very important in pushing your agenda forward?
A personal relationship is an important ingredient in negotiations, and there's an element of trust and greater sensitivity to fairness. And it can be very frank.
Apart from negotiating for the interests of the developing world in trade negotiations...
That is one part of my job. The other part has been really the India story—the investment story and the credibility of India. WTO is only one part, a very small part. For example, I went to Chicago for a trade policy meeting, and there were people there from agriculture, commerce, treasury. I asked them, how do you see the agriculture position globally. I know you share many views. How do you see agriculture in the world? And they said, you know we are very worried, we are thinking of putting reserve land in the US into agriculture.... These are things that are very important.
Now private players are playing a much more important role in shaping international policy, aren't they?
The biggest example is that every president or prime minister that comes to India is coming with a business delegation. He's coming with his trade minister, his industries minister—that's why I'm so stressed, because I'm the one who has to deal with it. Same thing with our prime minister. When he goes to another country, he goes with a trade delegation. It's an understanding that the business communitY are the players. The government can be the facilitator, but the players in economic growth are different. The government is only a facilitator and an enabler.
Does it raise concerns that the perspective of the poor will be lost in our rush to create more capital?
I don't think so. I think that the level of those who are in power think beyond their own profit. They also recognize that the growth of their economies and their country is necessary for the growth of their own company.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/130670
Jason Overdorf
Newsweek Web Exclusive
April 5, 2008
Kamal Nath is India's Minister of Commerce & Industry, a position that due to India's rising prominence in global trade—both as a coveted market and a growing power in agricultural and industrial production—makes him an important figure in international affairs. Since assuming office as commerce minister in 2004, he's become the voice of the globe's developing countries in World Trade Organization negotiations. He brings the same perspective to the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos and similar high-powered international conferences. He spoke with NEWSWEEK 's Jason Overdorf. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What differences have you seen in the world's power elite, as represented by the attendees at Davos, the WTO negotiations, and similar events?
Kamal Nath: The constituents at the head table have changed. Where the WTO is concerned, the most important thing is that the manner of negotiations has changed. In the last round of the WTO, there were just 10-to-12 countries who got together, and the other countries never had a voice. It was decided by 12 countries, and everybody else had to fall in line. Today, in the consensus building process, developing countries have not only a voice, but a loud voice.
Why do you think that is?
With the changing global economic architecture, the mass of economic activity is shifting. At Davos, twenty years ago or even ten years ago, the invitees were mainly from the US and Europe, and it was for interaction between them. Today, many of those who are coming from Europe or the United States are coming for interaction with those from the East.
Do you also find that government actors are losing prominence and private actors are becoming bigger players?
As the GDP of countries—the growth of GDP in developing countries—gets more and more driven by the private sector, obviously the private sector assumes a voice which is pretty loud.
From your own agenda, I know you represent India, so that's obviously your main focus, but what else do you see as your role in these forums?
In these forums, it's not only the concerns of India, but the concerns of other developing countries also, which helps keeps the coordination among developing countries so that fragmentation does not happen.
You've emerged as one of the main negotiators for developing countries. Do you find that in these forums, forming relationships with the other attendees becomes very important in pushing your agenda forward?
A personal relationship is an important ingredient in negotiations, and there's an element of trust and greater sensitivity to fairness. And it can be very frank.
Apart from negotiating for the interests of the developing world in trade negotiations...
That is one part of my job. The other part has been really the India story—the investment story and the credibility of India. WTO is only one part, a very small part. For example, I went to Chicago for a trade policy meeting, and there were people there from agriculture, commerce, treasury. I asked them, how do you see the agriculture position globally. I know you share many views. How do you see agriculture in the world? And they said, you know we are very worried, we are thinking of putting reserve land in the US into agriculture.... These are things that are very important.
Now private players are playing a much more important role in shaping international policy, aren't they?
The biggest example is that every president or prime minister that comes to India is coming with a business delegation. He's coming with his trade minister, his industries minister—that's why I'm so stressed, because I'm the one who has to deal with it. Same thing with our prime minister. When he goes to another country, he goes with a trade delegation. It's an understanding that the business communitY are the players. The government can be the facilitator, but the players in economic growth are different. The government is only a facilitator and an enabler.
Does it raise concerns that the perspective of the poor will be lost in our rush to create more capital?
I don't think so. I think that the level of those who are in power think beyond their own profit. They also recognize that the growth of their economies and their country is necessary for the growth of their own company.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/130670
storm warning
The world could be one crop failure away from an actual food crisis. Market panic has already started.
By George Wehrfritz and Jason Overdorf
(Newsweek, April 5, 2008)
When all goes well, thunderheads tower above India's southwestern state of Kerala in early June, drenching the region's vital rice fields and ensuring a bountiful harvest. From there the summer monsoon plods northward to soak the baking plains and irrigate vital breadbasket regions that feed 1.1 billion people before arriving at the foot of the Himalayas in August. Forecasting this complex meteorological process has always been an obsession within India, but this year the world will be watching. Changes in the monsoon cycle can shrink India's total grain harvest by up to 20 percent, creating a shortfall of 30 million metric tons. During India's last crop failure, in 2002, the country had a massive reserve to fall back on. "Now," says Usha Tuteja, an agricultural economist at Delhi University, "we don't have enough buffer stocks to make up for one bad year."
India isn't the only danger zone today. A major storm battering the Philippines or Bangladesh at the wrong moment, a pest or plant-disease outbreak in Vietnam, or floods along China's Yangtze River like those that occurred in the mid-1990s would put serious strains on global grain reserves already depleted to levels not seen since the 1970s. Global markets are behaving as if a food shock is imminent.
In recent months the commodity prices of rice, wheat and corn has jumped 50 percent or more, pushing retail prices to levels unseen in a generation and prompting grain-exporting countries to curtail trade to suppress domestic inflation. On March 20, the World Food Program issued an emergency appeal for more funding to keep aid moving to the world's poorest countries. Last week World Bank president Robert Zoellick called for urgent global action on the part of rich nations "or many more people will suffer or starve."
Experts blame a variety of factors for today's food crunch. Poor harvests in Europe since 2005 and Australia's ongoing drought have crimped the pipeline of staple grains to world markets. Soaring demand for bio-fuels in response to $100-per-barrel oil is diverting crops. And the rise of Asia's twin giants—China and India—is turning them both into market-moving grain hogs. Add to that climate change and a decline in agricultural investment as a percentage of GDP worldwide, and there's little mystery to why food security is a pressing issue from Tokyo to Abidjan. "We're paying the price of complacency," says biologist Robert Zeigler, head of the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute.
The immediate crisis is one of confidence. As governments with grain surpluses tighten their grip on reserves, countries that rely on imported staples are scrambling to secure supplies. Driven partly by speculation, commodities markets have seen the per-ton cost of rice, wheat and corn surge by 50 percent or more since mid-2007. There are real supply issues, to be sure. But experts blame governments that inhibit grain flows, speculators betting on price spikes and fearful consumers who buy 10 sacks instead of one at the local markets for making the problem worse than it needs to be. When the United Nations' World Food Program issued an "extraordinary emergency appeal" to fill a $500 million funding gap last month, executive director Josette Sheeran said it was the first ever issued over a "market-generated crisis."
Unfortunately the government response is making the market squeeze worse. Richard Barichello, an economist at the University of British Columbia, argues that countries that have recently slapped new controls on exports—including India, Vietnam, Egypt and Cambodia—are putting politics ahead of economics. "It's a beggar-thy-neighbor policy," he says, that reduces incentives for farmers to grow more and leads to black marketeering.
The underlying problem with global food supplies is stark. After spiking dramatically in the 1970s following the introduction of scientific farming techniques during the Green Revolution, crop yields are now rising by less than 1 percent per year, which is half the annual increase in worldwide demand for grain and well below global population growth, now at 1.3 percent. The problem was largely invisible until 2000, when poor Asian harvests and surging regional demand conspired to draw down global grain stocks from 37 percent to 17 percent of annual consumption in three years—erasing a surplus that took a decade to accumulate.
Today's shortage punishes poor nations disproportionately. In countries with low per capita incomes, food is often the largest single component of household spending—up to 80 percent, compared with just 15 percent for the average American or European family. On the United Nations' list of countries most vulnerable to food shocks (according to their demand for imported food), Indonesia, the Philippines and Bangladesh rank first, second and fourth, respectively—and China and India make the top 10 due to their huge populations of rural poor. As grain prices push higher, "a lot of people are going to be forced to tighten their belts when they don't have any notches left," says environmentalist Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. "The people who will be most affected are those who are on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder."
An emergency is now unfolding in what the United Nations calls "low-income food-deficit countries." Most are in Africa, including Congo, Sudan and Kenya. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's latest forecast, those nations will import 2 percent fewer cereals in 2007-08 but pay 35 percent more for its food bill "for the second consecutive year." It warned that if the WFP did not receive emergency funding by May 1, it might be forced to cut back aid to 73 million people.
The crisis has put rural development back on the global agenda. "We're coming off 15 years of neglect in research, technological development and [infrastructure] investment in agriculture," says Zeigler, who advocates a second Green Revolution aimed at boosting crop yields above demand growth for grains. In a speech in Washington last week, Zoellick called for a "New Deal for Global Food Policy" and said the bank would nearly double loans for agricultural development to Africa. Mitigating the global food shortage is expected to dominate discussions at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's spring meeting this week in Washington.
Poor countries are now vulnerable not because food is unavailable but because they can't afford it. "If in a country like India there is a monsoon failure or some crisis in agriculture, the global food situation will become very, very precarious," says Devinder Sharma, an agriculture analyst in New Delhi. With demand from India and China on global markets, he warns that "the world will not have any food grains left for anybody else." That's a theory nobody hopes will be tested any time soon. Which is why the monsoon skies over Kerala are worth watching closely this year.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/130641
By George Wehrfritz and Jason Overdorf
(Newsweek, April 5, 2008)
When all goes well, thunderheads tower above India's southwestern state of Kerala in early June, drenching the region's vital rice fields and ensuring a bountiful harvest. From there the summer monsoon plods northward to soak the baking plains and irrigate vital breadbasket regions that feed 1.1 billion people before arriving at the foot of the Himalayas in August. Forecasting this complex meteorological process has always been an obsession within India, but this year the world will be watching. Changes in the monsoon cycle can shrink India's total grain harvest by up to 20 percent, creating a shortfall of 30 million metric tons. During India's last crop failure, in 2002, the country had a massive reserve to fall back on. "Now," says Usha Tuteja, an agricultural economist at Delhi University, "we don't have enough buffer stocks to make up for one bad year."
India isn't the only danger zone today. A major storm battering the Philippines or Bangladesh at the wrong moment, a pest or plant-disease outbreak in Vietnam, or floods along China's Yangtze River like those that occurred in the mid-1990s would put serious strains on global grain reserves already depleted to levels not seen since the 1970s. Global markets are behaving as if a food shock is imminent.
In recent months the commodity prices of rice, wheat and corn has jumped 50 percent or more, pushing retail prices to levels unseen in a generation and prompting grain-exporting countries to curtail trade to suppress domestic inflation. On March 20, the World Food Program issued an emergency appeal for more funding to keep aid moving to the world's poorest countries. Last week World Bank president Robert Zoellick called for urgent global action on the part of rich nations "or many more people will suffer or starve."
Experts blame a variety of factors for today's food crunch. Poor harvests in Europe since 2005 and Australia's ongoing drought have crimped the pipeline of staple grains to world markets. Soaring demand for bio-fuels in response to $100-per-barrel oil is diverting crops. And the rise of Asia's twin giants—China and India—is turning them both into market-moving grain hogs. Add to that climate change and a decline in agricultural investment as a percentage of GDP worldwide, and there's little mystery to why food security is a pressing issue from Tokyo to Abidjan. "We're paying the price of complacency," says biologist Robert Zeigler, head of the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute.
The immediate crisis is one of confidence. As governments with grain surpluses tighten their grip on reserves, countries that rely on imported staples are scrambling to secure supplies. Driven partly by speculation, commodities markets have seen the per-ton cost of rice, wheat and corn surge by 50 percent or more since mid-2007. There are real supply issues, to be sure. But experts blame governments that inhibit grain flows, speculators betting on price spikes and fearful consumers who buy 10 sacks instead of one at the local markets for making the problem worse than it needs to be. When the United Nations' World Food Program issued an "extraordinary emergency appeal" to fill a $500 million funding gap last month, executive director Josette Sheeran said it was the first ever issued over a "market-generated crisis."
Unfortunately the government response is making the market squeeze worse. Richard Barichello, an economist at the University of British Columbia, argues that countries that have recently slapped new controls on exports—including India, Vietnam, Egypt and Cambodia—are putting politics ahead of economics. "It's a beggar-thy-neighbor policy," he says, that reduces incentives for farmers to grow more and leads to black marketeering.
The underlying problem with global food supplies is stark. After spiking dramatically in the 1970s following the introduction of scientific farming techniques during the Green Revolution, crop yields are now rising by less than 1 percent per year, which is half the annual increase in worldwide demand for grain and well below global population growth, now at 1.3 percent. The problem was largely invisible until 2000, when poor Asian harvests and surging regional demand conspired to draw down global grain stocks from 37 percent to 17 percent of annual consumption in three years—erasing a surplus that took a decade to accumulate.
Today's shortage punishes poor nations disproportionately. In countries with low per capita incomes, food is often the largest single component of household spending—up to 80 percent, compared with just 15 percent for the average American or European family. On the United Nations' list of countries most vulnerable to food shocks (according to their demand for imported food), Indonesia, the Philippines and Bangladesh rank first, second and fourth, respectively—and China and India make the top 10 due to their huge populations of rural poor. As grain prices push higher, "a lot of people are going to be forced to tighten their belts when they don't have any notches left," says environmentalist Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. "The people who will be most affected are those who are on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder."
An emergency is now unfolding in what the United Nations calls "low-income food-deficit countries." Most are in Africa, including Congo, Sudan and Kenya. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's latest forecast, those nations will import 2 percent fewer cereals in 2007-08 but pay 35 percent more for its food bill "for the second consecutive year." It warned that if the WFP did not receive emergency funding by May 1, it might be forced to cut back aid to 73 million people.
The crisis has put rural development back on the global agenda. "We're coming off 15 years of neglect in research, technological development and [infrastructure] investment in agriculture," says Zeigler, who advocates a second Green Revolution aimed at boosting crop yields above demand growth for grains. In a speech in Washington last week, Zoellick called for a "New Deal for Global Food Policy" and said the bank would nearly double loans for agricultural development to Africa. Mitigating the global food shortage is expected to dominate discussions at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's spring meeting this week in Washington.
Poor countries are now vulnerable not because food is unavailable but because they can't afford it. "If in a country like India there is a monsoon failure or some crisis in agriculture, the global food situation will become very, very precarious," says Devinder Sharma, an agriculture analyst in New Delhi. With demand from India and China on global markets, he warns that "the world will not have any food grains left for anybody else." That's a theory nobody hopes will be tested any time soon. Which is why the monsoon skies over Kerala are worth watching closely this year.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/130641
Saturday, February 16, 2008
small. it's the new big.
Poor countries are getting rich, gas costs are rising and our planet is heating up. The result: a new breed of 21st-century cars that are cooler, cheaper and more compact than ever.
By Keith Naughton
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 11:39 AM ET Feb 16, 2008
When gas prices shot up last summer, Millie Richardson had had it with her minivan. So the Lawrenceville, New Jersey, mom traded in her Dodge Caravan for a $17,000 Nissan Versa, a subcompact car that gets more than 30 miles per gallon. Richardson, 55, likes spending less at the pump, but she's most excited about how roomy her little car is. "My son is 6 foot 6, and he drove it," she marvels. "So it's small, but it's big—does that make sense?" What makes even more sense to Richardson, though, is this $2,500 car she's heard about that was introduced in India last month: the Tata Nano. Though there are no plans yet to bring it to America, Richardson is ready when they do. "Oh, boy, would I ever love to drive one," she says. "I would look at it as a disposable car. We have so many things in our lives now that are disposable—why not disposable cars? It would be so cheap, you could always afford a new one."
Around the automotive world, small is the new big. Driven by growing earning power in emerging markets, and rising gasoline prices and global-warming concerns in developed countries, small-car sales are hitting high gear. By 2012, forecasters expect consumers around the world to buy a record 38 million small cars annually, up 65 percent from a decade earlier. In Western Europe, the market for microcars—the tiniest runabouts on the road—is projected to rise nearly 50 percent by 2011 from 2004 levels. Even in the United States, land of the large, sales of small cars are expected to grow 25 percent by 2012 to a record 3.4 million, while SUVs and pickup trucks continue to tank. Last year subcompact sales soared 33.7 percent in the United States, driven by hot sellers like the tiny Toyota Yaris and the Mini Cooper. And Daimler had 30,000 orders in hand before it even launched its three-meter-long Smart Fortwo model in the U.S. last month. "This is not a fad," says Smart USA president Dave Schembri. "It's a trend."
But the car generating the most buzz hasn't even hit the road yet: the Nano. A car for the price of a laptop computer is transformational. Before it even goes on sale later this year, the Nano is changing the rules of the road for the auto industry and society itself. Millions of emerging-market commuters can now own four-wheel transportation, creating unheard-of mobility for the masses. But the Nano and its expected rivals will also lead to more traffic congestion, more global warming, more highway fatalities and more demand for oil. As the world approaches 1 billion vehicles on the road, the Nano and its ilk raise a daunting prospect for society: global gridlock. If the rest of the world begins buying cars at the same rate as America, the global parking lot will swell to 5.6 billion vehicles, figures Sean McAlinden of the Center for Auto Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "The Nano is the 21st-century equivalent of the Model T," says Global Insight auto analyst John Wolkonowicz. "The Nano will put the Third World on wheels, and that will have far-reaching implications. It's going to affect every citizen of the world."
It's already shaking up the industry. All the major car companies dispatched teams to the New Delhi Motor Show in January to snap photos and build a dossier on the new Nano. The little car from India could lead to an overhaul in the global auto industry, which was always geared to earn big profits from big cars. Now the car czars will have to learn to make a business out of selling lots of little cars that make less money, instead of relying on big rigs to make most of their money. Detroit is going through a wrenching overhaul as it retools its product line to offer more small gas sippers and fewer big guzzlers. General Motors, which last week reported a record $38.7 billion loss for 2007, can't make money at home, but turns a tidy profit in Asia selling smaller cars. "The whole story in the auto industry today is that the profits are shifting to the developing markets," says Renault- Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, who is working with the Indian motorcycle maker Bajaj to try to develop a $3,000 car to go against the Nano. "I'm very bullish on the $3,000 car. We're not trying to do it in Japan or Paris; we're asking Bajaj to do it. We don't know how to do a car like this, but for them it's a natural evolution."
Consumers see it as natural, too. A new generation, weaned on mini mobile phones and iPods, equates small with high tech, not cheap. "For the first time in the history of the auto industry, we have a generation that's connected globally," says J. Mays, chief designer for Ford Motor Co., which in 2010 will begin importing its stylish Fiesta subcompact from Europe. "They see an iPod or a Nokia phone or a $1,200 woman's handbag and think, 'Just because it's small doesn't mean it can't be fantastic'."
This is where the West parts company with the Nano. Today's car buyers in developed nations expect small cars to have all the accouterments they enjoyed in their XL rides. The hot-selling Mini Cooper is a prime example: sporty and stylish, it's loaded with luxurious items like a 10-speaker stereo, leather seats and an optional voice-activated navigation system, and it's priced accordingly. The well-appointed new Mini Clubman S starts at $24,600—or roughly the price of 10 Nanos. "People like the Mini Cooper because it's so well designed and well equipped; there's nothing spartan about it," says Mini U.S. chief Jim McDowell. "I don't think American consumers are looking for a car with less safety features and fewer windshield wipers."
Indeed, the Nano, which has only one windshield wiper, has more in common with the bare-bones econo-boxes that baby boomers drove during the '70s energy crisis. The children of the boomers wouldn't know what to make of a car like that. "To Gen Y kids, something without power windows or door locks is not a real car," says Jim Lentz, president of Toyota's U.S. sales arm. "Most wouldn't know what this crank thing in the door does. It's like a rotary phone."
What this new generation does get is small as a way to reduce its carbon car-print. After all, these little runabouts are powered by tiny engines that burn less gasoline and spew fewer greenhouse gases. The irony, though, is that as millions of small cars clog the planet, they'll only add to global warming and increase demand for oil. GM chairman Rick Wagoner recently warned that the world is already consuming 1,000 barrels of oil per second, and demand is on track to rise 70 percent more by 2030. The motorization of emerging economies is driving that demand. By 2015, 100 million households in the developing world will be able to afford cars priced between the Nano and the $6,000 Renault Logan, predicts the Boston Consulting Group. Governments are already grappling with how to put the brakes on runaway energy use. In the United States, George W. Bush just signed legislation that will boost mandatory mileage on new cars to an average of 35mpg by 2020, up from about 25mpg today. In Europe, regulators are looking at requiring cars to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (the prime global-warming gas) by up to 25 percent by 2012.
But the West can enact all the green-leaning laws it wants. That won't stop the emerging world's yearning for the freedom of the open road. And that growing automotive appetite could create a climate calamity, environmentalists warn. "Even if they are very clean cars, collectively it will lead to emissions that will only add to local pollution," Indian climatologist Rajendra K. Pachauri tells NEWSWEEK. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore last year—is critical of the climate consequences of the Nano: "Before we unleash this kind of animal on the streets of India, we ought to explore the public-transportation options." To rein in car ownership, Pachauri suggests that drivers pay a carbon toll to gain access to the roads. The Nano, he says, "is clearly a carbon-intensive option. We need to impose a price on that carbon."
Others hope the rise of the small car in emerging economies will accelerate alternative-fuel vehicles elsewhere. "We'll be driving $40,000 electric vehicles or hydrogen-powered cars while people in India and China are using the remaining gasoline," says Wolkonowicz. "This push for alternate-fuel vehicles in the developed world is not coming a moment too soon, because the motorization of the Third World is coming at a very rapid pace."
That came clearly into focus when Indian motor mogul Ratan Tata upstaged the Detroit Auto Show by rolling out his "people's car" in New Delhi on Jan. 10. Introducing his car to the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey," Tata hyped its "disruptive innovation" as the equivalent of the Wright brothers' first flight. At first glance, the stubby little car doesn't look like much: no radio or air conditioning, a top speed of about 95 kilometers per hour and a motorcycle-like engine. What has captured the world's attention is the Nano's spartan simplicity. There are no tubes in the tires, to save weight and money. To ease assembly, body panels are glued instead of welded. The wheels are hooked onto the body in a fashion that one rival compared to a child's little red wagon. "We look closely at anything we regard as a breakthrough," says GM product-planning VP John Smith, with photos and diagrams of the Nano spread out in his Detroit office. "You can look at these, but I can't let you have them."
Rivals eager to develop their own low-cost small cars find they simply can't look away from the Nano, even as they dismiss it as far too crude for Western tastes. "It's not so much the vehicle itself," says Chrysler trend watcher Steve Bartoli, "it's the thought process that went into it that's more provocative." Until Tata rolled out his new model, nobody believed anyone could produce a $2,500 car. Now they're jumping on the Nano wagon. Chrysler is looking at developing a racy little car called the Dodge Hornet with China's Chery Automobile. GM vice chairman Bob Lutz says his company could engineer a Nano competitor with its Chinese partner Wuling. And GM is already working on a new car that would rival Renault's $6,000 Logan, says Smith. In fact, GM recently canceled plans for a new line of big V-8 engines and is pouring that money into developing small cars. "We're spending a lot of money on the low end of the business," says Smith.
Europeans are following suit. Coming soon is Volkswagen's Up!, a funky four-seater that's about three and a half meters long. Last year, Fiat launched a remake of the classic Cinquecento (a.k.a. the Fiat 500). Peugeot already offers its tiny 107 city car, developed with Toyota, which sells a similar model called the Aygo (as in "I go"). On the high end, BMW is launching its diminutive 1 Series sedan in the United States starting at $29,375, making it the smallest Beemer on U.S. highways. "We are at a crossroads," says consultant Peter Schmidt of Automotive Industry Data in Britain. "An increasing proportion of the car-buying public has discovered a conscience."
One key country hasn't bought into small-is-cool: China. SUV sales rose 51 percent in China last year, big Buicks and VWs are all the rage and small cars go begging. Ratan Tata predicted that an automaker in China would be the first to match the Nano's $2,500 price, but analysts doubt that. "In China, image is more important than function," says China auto analyst Michael Dunne of J.D. Power and Associates. "Nobody wants to be seen on the bottom of the totem pole."
The biggest roadblock facing small cars is fear about safety. Chery's QQ suffered a PR setback when a video circulated on YouTube of a horrific crash in which the tiny car was crushed between two buses and the driver burned to death. A NEWSWEEK REPORTER TEST-drove a Chevy Aveo subcompact in Detroit last week and felt dwarfed by the SUVs. U.S. statistics on highway fatalities show the smallest cars have death rates 2.5 times higher than the biggest cars. In Europe, small cars, which are driven mostly at slower speeds in cities, have lower death rates, but are in more crashes than big cars. "It comes down to physics," says Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. "If you're in a smaller vehicle out there, you're at greater risk."
To overcome small-car phobia, automakers are working to burnish their safety bona fides. In every Smart car showroom in the United States, for example, you'll find the car's reinforced steel skeleton on display. Called its "tridion cell," the steel cage protects occupants in a crash. The sales staff also shows prospective buyers violent crash-test videos and talks up the car's four airbags and electronic stability control. "In America," says Smart USA president Schembri, "you have to address this issue."
The more features automakers can stuff into small cars—be they safety, style or stereos—the better for the bottom line. This is the formula Japan and Europe have used to develop a lucrative small-car market. Typically, an automaker earns about a 5 percent profit on a car. That comes to about $125 on a Nano, $1,250 on a Mini Cooper or, better yet, $2,000 or more on a BMW 1 Series convertible. Putting premium-priced mileage misers on the road could help save the planet without bankrupting the world's automakers. The problem comes in convincing drivers in America and China—the world's two largest auto markets—that they should pay more for less. "Space and weight equal value for most buyers" in America and China, says analyst McAlinden. "It's a dollar-per-pound concept."
We may like to think that the recent spike in small-car sales is driven by altruism. But auto execs says it's a pocketbook issue: U.S. gas prices doubled this decade, and Western Europe is now paying about $2 per liter, up nearly 25 cents from just two years ago. "The worst thing that could happen to us now is if gas prices fell back, because that would take the pressure off," says Ford executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. "We've all started down this path now." And there's no turning back. Forecasters predict oil prices, global warming and emerging-market desire for cars will continue to rise. As long as those factors drive demand, small cars will rule the road.
--with Jason Overdorf in New Delhi
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112729
By Keith Naughton
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 11:39 AM ET Feb 16, 2008
When gas prices shot up last summer, Millie Richardson had had it with her minivan. So the Lawrenceville, New Jersey, mom traded in her Dodge Caravan for a $17,000 Nissan Versa, a subcompact car that gets more than 30 miles per gallon. Richardson, 55, likes spending less at the pump, but she's most excited about how roomy her little car is. "My son is 6 foot 6, and he drove it," she marvels. "So it's small, but it's big—does that make sense?" What makes even more sense to Richardson, though, is this $2,500 car she's heard about that was introduced in India last month: the Tata Nano. Though there are no plans yet to bring it to America, Richardson is ready when they do. "Oh, boy, would I ever love to drive one," she says. "I would look at it as a disposable car. We have so many things in our lives now that are disposable—why not disposable cars? It would be so cheap, you could always afford a new one."
Around the automotive world, small is the new big. Driven by growing earning power in emerging markets, and rising gasoline prices and global-warming concerns in developed countries, small-car sales are hitting high gear. By 2012, forecasters expect consumers around the world to buy a record 38 million small cars annually, up 65 percent from a decade earlier. In Western Europe, the market for microcars—the tiniest runabouts on the road—is projected to rise nearly 50 percent by 2011 from 2004 levels. Even in the United States, land of the large, sales of small cars are expected to grow 25 percent by 2012 to a record 3.4 million, while SUVs and pickup trucks continue to tank. Last year subcompact sales soared 33.7 percent in the United States, driven by hot sellers like the tiny Toyota Yaris and the Mini Cooper. And Daimler had 30,000 orders in hand before it even launched its three-meter-long Smart Fortwo model in the U.S. last month. "This is not a fad," says Smart USA president Dave Schembri. "It's a trend."
But the car generating the most buzz hasn't even hit the road yet: the Nano. A car for the price of a laptop computer is transformational. Before it even goes on sale later this year, the Nano is changing the rules of the road for the auto industry and society itself. Millions of emerging-market commuters can now own four-wheel transportation, creating unheard-of mobility for the masses. But the Nano and its expected rivals will also lead to more traffic congestion, more global warming, more highway fatalities and more demand for oil. As the world approaches 1 billion vehicles on the road, the Nano and its ilk raise a daunting prospect for society: global gridlock. If the rest of the world begins buying cars at the same rate as America, the global parking lot will swell to 5.6 billion vehicles, figures Sean McAlinden of the Center for Auto Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "The Nano is the 21st-century equivalent of the Model T," says Global Insight auto analyst John Wolkonowicz. "The Nano will put the Third World on wheels, and that will have far-reaching implications. It's going to affect every citizen of the world."
It's already shaking up the industry. All the major car companies dispatched teams to the New Delhi Motor Show in January to snap photos and build a dossier on the new Nano. The little car from India could lead to an overhaul in the global auto industry, which was always geared to earn big profits from big cars. Now the car czars will have to learn to make a business out of selling lots of little cars that make less money, instead of relying on big rigs to make most of their money. Detroit is going through a wrenching overhaul as it retools its product line to offer more small gas sippers and fewer big guzzlers. General Motors, which last week reported a record $38.7 billion loss for 2007, can't make money at home, but turns a tidy profit in Asia selling smaller cars. "The whole story in the auto industry today is that the profits are shifting to the developing markets," says Renault- Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, who is working with the Indian motorcycle maker Bajaj to try to develop a $3,000 car to go against the Nano. "I'm very bullish on the $3,000 car. We're not trying to do it in Japan or Paris; we're asking Bajaj to do it. We don't know how to do a car like this, but for them it's a natural evolution."
Consumers see it as natural, too. A new generation, weaned on mini mobile phones and iPods, equates small with high tech, not cheap. "For the first time in the history of the auto industry, we have a generation that's connected globally," says J. Mays, chief designer for Ford Motor Co., which in 2010 will begin importing its stylish Fiesta subcompact from Europe. "They see an iPod or a Nokia phone or a $1,200 woman's handbag and think, 'Just because it's small doesn't mean it can't be fantastic'."
This is where the West parts company with the Nano. Today's car buyers in developed nations expect small cars to have all the accouterments they enjoyed in their XL rides. The hot-selling Mini Cooper is a prime example: sporty and stylish, it's loaded with luxurious items like a 10-speaker stereo, leather seats and an optional voice-activated navigation system, and it's priced accordingly. The well-appointed new Mini Clubman S starts at $24,600—or roughly the price of 10 Nanos. "People like the Mini Cooper because it's so well designed and well equipped; there's nothing spartan about it," says Mini U.S. chief Jim McDowell. "I don't think American consumers are looking for a car with less safety features and fewer windshield wipers."
Indeed, the Nano, which has only one windshield wiper, has more in common with the bare-bones econo-boxes that baby boomers drove during the '70s energy crisis. The children of the boomers wouldn't know what to make of a car like that. "To Gen Y kids, something without power windows or door locks is not a real car," says Jim Lentz, president of Toyota's U.S. sales arm. "Most wouldn't know what this crank thing in the door does. It's like a rotary phone."
What this new generation does get is small as a way to reduce its carbon car-print. After all, these little runabouts are powered by tiny engines that burn less gasoline and spew fewer greenhouse gases. The irony, though, is that as millions of small cars clog the planet, they'll only add to global warming and increase demand for oil. GM chairman Rick Wagoner recently warned that the world is already consuming 1,000 barrels of oil per second, and demand is on track to rise 70 percent more by 2030. The motorization of emerging economies is driving that demand. By 2015, 100 million households in the developing world will be able to afford cars priced between the Nano and the $6,000 Renault Logan, predicts the Boston Consulting Group. Governments are already grappling with how to put the brakes on runaway energy use. In the United States, George W. Bush just signed legislation that will boost mandatory mileage on new cars to an average of 35mpg by 2020, up from about 25mpg today. In Europe, regulators are looking at requiring cars to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (the prime global-warming gas) by up to 25 percent by 2012.
But the West can enact all the green-leaning laws it wants. That won't stop the emerging world's yearning for the freedom of the open road. And that growing automotive appetite could create a climate calamity, environmentalists warn. "Even if they are very clean cars, collectively it will lead to emissions that will only add to local pollution," Indian climatologist Rajendra K. Pachauri tells NEWSWEEK. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore last year—is critical of the climate consequences of the Nano: "Before we unleash this kind of animal on the streets of India, we ought to explore the public-transportation options." To rein in car ownership, Pachauri suggests that drivers pay a carbon toll to gain access to the roads. The Nano, he says, "is clearly a carbon-intensive option. We need to impose a price on that carbon."
Others hope the rise of the small car in emerging economies will accelerate alternative-fuel vehicles elsewhere. "We'll be driving $40,000 electric vehicles or hydrogen-powered cars while people in India and China are using the remaining gasoline," says Wolkonowicz. "This push for alternate-fuel vehicles in the developed world is not coming a moment too soon, because the motorization of the Third World is coming at a very rapid pace."
That came clearly into focus when Indian motor mogul Ratan Tata upstaged the Detroit Auto Show by rolling out his "people's car" in New Delhi on Jan. 10. Introducing his car to the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey," Tata hyped its "disruptive innovation" as the equivalent of the Wright brothers' first flight. At first glance, the stubby little car doesn't look like much: no radio or air conditioning, a top speed of about 95 kilometers per hour and a motorcycle-like engine. What has captured the world's attention is the Nano's spartan simplicity. There are no tubes in the tires, to save weight and money. To ease assembly, body panels are glued instead of welded. The wheels are hooked onto the body in a fashion that one rival compared to a child's little red wagon. "We look closely at anything we regard as a breakthrough," says GM product-planning VP John Smith, with photos and diagrams of the Nano spread out in his Detroit office. "You can look at these, but I can't let you have them."
Rivals eager to develop their own low-cost small cars find they simply can't look away from the Nano, even as they dismiss it as far too crude for Western tastes. "It's not so much the vehicle itself," says Chrysler trend watcher Steve Bartoli, "it's the thought process that went into it that's more provocative." Until Tata rolled out his new model, nobody believed anyone could produce a $2,500 car. Now they're jumping on the Nano wagon. Chrysler is looking at developing a racy little car called the Dodge Hornet with China's Chery Automobile. GM vice chairman Bob Lutz says his company could engineer a Nano competitor with its Chinese partner Wuling. And GM is already working on a new car that would rival Renault's $6,000 Logan, says Smith. In fact, GM recently canceled plans for a new line of big V-8 engines and is pouring that money into developing small cars. "We're spending a lot of money on the low end of the business," says Smith.
Europeans are following suit. Coming soon is Volkswagen's Up!, a funky four-seater that's about three and a half meters long. Last year, Fiat launched a remake of the classic Cinquecento (a.k.a. the Fiat 500). Peugeot already offers its tiny 107 city car, developed with Toyota, which sells a similar model called the Aygo (as in "I go"). On the high end, BMW is launching its diminutive 1 Series sedan in the United States starting at $29,375, making it the smallest Beemer on U.S. highways. "We are at a crossroads," says consultant Peter Schmidt of Automotive Industry Data in Britain. "An increasing proportion of the car-buying public has discovered a conscience."
One key country hasn't bought into small-is-cool: China. SUV sales rose 51 percent in China last year, big Buicks and VWs are all the rage and small cars go begging. Ratan Tata predicted that an automaker in China would be the first to match the Nano's $2,500 price, but analysts doubt that. "In China, image is more important than function," says China auto analyst Michael Dunne of J.D. Power and Associates. "Nobody wants to be seen on the bottom of the totem pole."
The biggest roadblock facing small cars is fear about safety. Chery's QQ suffered a PR setback when a video circulated on YouTube of a horrific crash in which the tiny car was crushed between two buses and the driver burned to death. A NEWSWEEK REPORTER TEST-drove a Chevy Aveo subcompact in Detroit last week and felt dwarfed by the SUVs. U.S. statistics on highway fatalities show the smallest cars have death rates 2.5 times higher than the biggest cars. In Europe, small cars, which are driven mostly at slower speeds in cities, have lower death rates, but are in more crashes than big cars. "It comes down to physics," says Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. "If you're in a smaller vehicle out there, you're at greater risk."
To overcome small-car phobia, automakers are working to burnish their safety bona fides. In every Smart car showroom in the United States, for example, you'll find the car's reinforced steel skeleton on display. Called its "tridion cell," the steel cage protects occupants in a crash. The sales staff also shows prospective buyers violent crash-test videos and talks up the car's four airbags and electronic stability control. "In America," says Smart USA president Schembri, "you have to address this issue."
The more features automakers can stuff into small cars—be they safety, style or stereos—the better for the bottom line. This is the formula Japan and Europe have used to develop a lucrative small-car market. Typically, an automaker earns about a 5 percent profit on a car. That comes to about $125 on a Nano, $1,250 on a Mini Cooper or, better yet, $2,000 or more on a BMW 1 Series convertible. Putting premium-priced mileage misers on the road could help save the planet without bankrupting the world's automakers. The problem comes in convincing drivers in America and China—the world's two largest auto markets—that they should pay more for less. "Space and weight equal value for most buyers" in America and China, says analyst McAlinden. "It's a dollar-per-pound concept."
We may like to think that the recent spike in small-car sales is driven by altruism. But auto execs says it's a pocketbook issue: U.S. gas prices doubled this decade, and Western Europe is now paying about $2 per liter, up nearly 25 cents from just two years ago. "The worst thing that could happen to us now is if gas prices fell back, because that would take the pressure off," says Ford executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. "We've all started down this path now." And there's no turning back. Forecasters predict oil prices, global warming and emerging-market desire for cars will continue to rise. As long as those factors drive demand, small cars will rule the road.
--with Jason Overdorf in New Delhi
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112729
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