Economic crisis has turned the attention of India's corporate honchos to some of the country's biggest challenges.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 26, 2009 06:29 ET
NEW DELHI — In India, the economic crisis may actually be good news.
During the salad days of the past decade, India's entrepreneurs grew fat selling gas guzzlers and palatial homes to the country's new rich, while ignoring the needs of the biggest segment of Indian consumers: the poor. It was an expatriate Indian, the University of Michigan's C.K. Prahalad, who first posited that there were millions to be made selling to the “bottom of the pyramid.”
Now that's starting to happen.
The rich aren't buying, and Indian businessmen are finally starting to look at the teeming masses as something more than cheap labor. The result could be the solution of some of India's most persistent problems — an abysmal housing shortage, chronic underemployment and an unsustainable rate of rural-urban migration, for instance.
“The slowdown was a great thing to happen to India,” affirmed management consultant Harish Bijoor, who said the downturn has encouraged companies to look beyond the “low-hanging fruit” in the urban market to the vast multitude of consumers in India's rural heartland — which still accounts for more than two-thirds of the country's population and some 60 percent of its gross domestic product.
“There are a whole slew of energy products, both solar and thermal, and cook stoves and all types of things, all of which are aimed at reducing fuel consumption or replacing traditional fuels,” said Vijay Mahajan, founder of BASIX, a microfinance company that provides credit to more than a million poor customers. “And there's a whole slew of clean drinking water products. These have both health and economic benefits.”
The best example of the upside of the downturn, so far, comes from the real estate sector. Throughout the boom years, posh high rises were the name of the game in Indian real estate. But as the buyers for $200,000 to $1 million apartments have dried up and falling property values have left builders scrambling to finance the completion of existing projects, a dozen-odd companies have begun to take interest in building housing for the nearly endless market represented by the urban poor.
Led by Tata Housing's so-called “Nano homes,” which will go for as little as $8,000, these ventures represent the entrance of respected business leaders into the low-income housing market, including figures like Jaithirth Rao (founder of outsourcing heavyweight Mphasis), Ramesh Ramanathan (founder of the citizen's action group Janaagraha) and established companies like Bangalore's CSC Constructions. The trust factor that these players bring has given this sector new viability, according to Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's.
“The focus on the base of the pyramid to create scale businesses was overdue,” Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao said. “You can sell millions of homes in this category, whereas in the upscale category you can only sell tens of thousands.”
But real estate isn't the only sector where the financial crisis has had an unexpected upside for India's future. Almost every type of business — from refrigerators to motorcycles to computers to mobile phones — is now looking to the vast market represented by India's urban poor and the legions living in its villages. By increasing competition, this expansion lowers prices, connects the dispossessed to the broader economy and makes new, income-generating products affordable.
“Telecom is a great example. The kind of price at which a rural poor person can now talk to their migrated family members and so on is incredible,” said Mahajan. “That's all happened because of the penetration rush and price competition, and the same thing is beginning to happen in microfinance, it's beginning to happen in solar energy. The volumes attract new suppliers and as more suppliers come in, then competition sets in, and it's a win-win for all sides.”
The push to widen the footprint of broadband internet and boost the average revenue per user from low-income mobile subscribers, for instance, has put more muscle behind the network-based computing devices like Novatium's NetPC — which provides a computer, broadband access, software and support to consumers for a bundled price as low as $25 a month. Recently Airtel, India's largest integrated telecommunications company, launched a similar service, while Nokia has rolled out its Nokia Life Tools range of agriculture, education and entertainment services for consumers in small towns and rural areas. Samsung has launched Solar Guru, a solar-powered mobile phone.
The sales network for fast-moving consumer goods and products like motorcycles and refrigerators is also expanding into the rural hinterland. Motorcycle maker Hero Honda, for instance, has boosted its “touch points” in rural areas from 2,000 in 2006 to 3,500 in 2008, while Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. will appoint 1,500 wholesalers in small towns and villages this year, up from 500 last year.
Eventually, Godrej plans a presence in 50,000 of India's 650,000 villages. And the impact of this expansion on Indian villagers goes beyond simply being able to buy a greater range of products closer to home. With the purchase of a motorcycle or mobile phone, for instance, a rural Indian gets much more than a leg up on the Kapurs next door. He gets a “prosperity creator” that connects him to the job market 28 miles away, said Bijoor.
Next on the docket: clean drinking water, cheap electricity, basic healthcare and other bottom of the pyramid products and services that may attract the attention of big firms, as marketers “rob the rich” for premium products so they can also sell basic necessities to the poor.
“It's a Robin Hood marketing which is going to capture the hearts and the emotive imaginations of the largest numbers of consumers in this country,” Bijoor said.
Source URL (retrieved on August 27, 2009 21:40 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090813/indias-economy-grow-rich-think-poor
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
CSI: New Delhi
At India's first private forensic laboratory, business is booming.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 19, 2009 07:11 ET
NEW DELHI — For Dr. KPC Gandhi, a former police inspector, the truth is an obsession.
He believes it's a fundamental human right that India's legal system is too overburdened to guarantee. That's why, in 2007, Gandhi set up India's first private forensic investigation laboratory, Truth Labs, a firm that will soon have offices in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore and Jaipur.
“Crime can be stopped by involving and engaging and enabling and empowering the common people,” said Gandhi, who resigned from the police force after a 40-year career in forensic investigation to start Truth Labs. “Within one-and-a-half years, we started getting cases from the courts, including the high court, from the police, and from a large number of subordinate courts. I get calls from four or five people every day, asking for some consultancy about fraud or forgery.”
As India modernizes, more disputes are arising over inheritance, forgery, impersonation, marital infidelity and even corporate espionage. But because India has one of the world's smallest police forces, and because the civil and criminal courts face a backlog that runs into literally millions of cases, getting to the bottom of mysteries and resolving conflicts through the legal system is fraught with problems.
A simple dispute over a forged will, for instance, might take 25 or 30 years to resolve in court. Using techniques now world famous thanks to C.S.I., Gandhi promises a solution in 24 hours: the truth.
Truth Labs charges a little more than $100 per investigation, and the company waives even that nominal fee for destitute or deserving clients — like a teacher who lost his job because his superior had forged his initials on a document used to pilfer government funds.
“We're interested only in the people's welfare, finding the truth, and rendering them justice,” said Gandhi, who explained that Truth Labs primarily acts as a facilitator in the arbitration of disputes, rather than providing evidence for use in legal proceedings.
The cases that Truth Labs has solved range from paternity and inheritance disputes to criminal cases of forgery and fraud. In one case, an industrialist family from Mumbai approached Truth Labs for polygraph testing after a young bride confessed that her father-in-law had propositioned her when it was discovered that the husband was infertile and they were planning to have a test tube baby.
In another, DNA testing proved that a husband's suspicions about the paternity of his second child were unfounded — ending years of marital strife. And in a third, Truth Labs document experts verified that a will that had divided a family for more than two generations had been doctored by an unscrupulous cousin.
In all of these cases, like the majority that Truth Labs investigates, the guilty party confessed when he was confronted with scientific proof, and the certainty of the resolution allowed the disputants to move on with their lives.
“We are getting quality cases where a genuine problem arises that has been persisting in a family for generations, and they come to me and within a day or five days their problems are permanently solved,” Gandhi said.
It's a curious business model for India. Though the use of forensic science for preventing fraud was pioneered here during the British Raj by Sir William Herschel — who in 1858 concluded that the fingerprint was a "signature of exceeding simplicity" that defeated even the local genius for forgery — in modern times the Indian legal apparatus is no more known for cutting edge science than the bureaucracy is for its speed and efficiency.
Senior police officers readily admit that the most common form of investigation amounts to rounding up the usual suspects and slapping them around. And in several famous whodunits — like the 2008 murder of Aarushi Talwar, a 14-year-old girl who was found with her throat slit in her family's New Delhi apartment — blatant mishandling of evidence by bumbling constables has virtually precluded a genuine investigation.
According to Jagadeesh Narayanareddy, a professor of forensic medicine at the Vydehi Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Center in Bangalore, India's mortuaries lack basic facilities, a shortage of qualified personnel makes forensic investigation impossible in many cases and cultural prejudices often override science in cases involving rape or disputed paternity.
In rural areas, for instance, officials often skip autopsies for suspicious deaths, either due to medical ignorance or even to keep crime statistics low, while larger hospitals carry out autopsies as a matter of course whether they are needed or not — burdening personnel and putting unnecessary stress on the bereaved.
But it's just that kind of incompetence, along with the public's nearly complete lack of faith in the police and the court system, that makes Truth Labs a booming business.
“At a peak load, we can handle up to 3,000 cases a year,” Gandhi said.
As the backlog of cases in India's court system continues to mount, there's unlimited room for expansion.
“This has a larger role to play, because people are not fully aware of the services we offer. We expect every state will have these Truth Labs in the next 10 years,” Gandhi said.
Source URL (retrieved on August 20, 2009 01:07 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090817/delhi-forensic-lab-investigate
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 19, 2009 07:11 ET
NEW DELHI — For Dr. KPC Gandhi, a former police inspector, the truth is an obsession.
He believes it's a fundamental human right that India's legal system is too overburdened to guarantee. That's why, in 2007, Gandhi set up India's first private forensic investigation laboratory, Truth Labs, a firm that will soon have offices in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore and Jaipur.
“Crime can be stopped by involving and engaging and enabling and empowering the common people,” said Gandhi, who resigned from the police force after a 40-year career in forensic investigation to start Truth Labs. “Within one-and-a-half years, we started getting cases from the courts, including the high court, from the police, and from a large number of subordinate courts. I get calls from four or five people every day, asking for some consultancy about fraud or forgery.”
As India modernizes, more disputes are arising over inheritance, forgery, impersonation, marital infidelity and even corporate espionage. But because India has one of the world's smallest police forces, and because the civil and criminal courts face a backlog that runs into literally millions of cases, getting to the bottom of mysteries and resolving conflicts through the legal system is fraught with problems.
A simple dispute over a forged will, for instance, might take 25 or 30 years to resolve in court. Using techniques now world famous thanks to C.S.I., Gandhi promises a solution in 24 hours: the truth.
Truth Labs charges a little more than $100 per investigation, and the company waives even that nominal fee for destitute or deserving clients — like a teacher who lost his job because his superior had forged his initials on a document used to pilfer government funds.
“We're interested only in the people's welfare, finding the truth, and rendering them justice,” said Gandhi, who explained that Truth Labs primarily acts as a facilitator in the arbitration of disputes, rather than providing evidence for use in legal proceedings.
The cases that Truth Labs has solved range from paternity and inheritance disputes to criminal cases of forgery and fraud. In one case, an industrialist family from Mumbai approached Truth Labs for polygraph testing after a young bride confessed that her father-in-law had propositioned her when it was discovered that the husband was infertile and they were planning to have a test tube baby.
In another, DNA testing proved that a husband's suspicions about the paternity of his second child were unfounded — ending years of marital strife. And in a third, Truth Labs document experts verified that a will that had divided a family for more than two generations had been doctored by an unscrupulous cousin.
In all of these cases, like the majority that Truth Labs investigates, the guilty party confessed when he was confronted with scientific proof, and the certainty of the resolution allowed the disputants to move on with their lives.
“We are getting quality cases where a genuine problem arises that has been persisting in a family for generations, and they come to me and within a day or five days their problems are permanently solved,” Gandhi said.
It's a curious business model for India. Though the use of forensic science for preventing fraud was pioneered here during the British Raj by Sir William Herschel — who in 1858 concluded that the fingerprint was a "signature of exceeding simplicity" that defeated even the local genius for forgery — in modern times the Indian legal apparatus is no more known for cutting edge science than the bureaucracy is for its speed and efficiency.
Senior police officers readily admit that the most common form of investigation amounts to rounding up the usual suspects and slapping them around. And in several famous whodunits — like the 2008 murder of Aarushi Talwar, a 14-year-old girl who was found with her throat slit in her family's New Delhi apartment — blatant mishandling of evidence by bumbling constables has virtually precluded a genuine investigation.
According to Jagadeesh Narayanareddy, a professor of forensic medicine at the Vydehi Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Center in Bangalore, India's mortuaries lack basic facilities, a shortage of qualified personnel makes forensic investigation impossible in many cases and cultural prejudices often override science in cases involving rape or disputed paternity.
In rural areas, for instance, officials often skip autopsies for suspicious deaths, either due to medical ignorance or even to keep crime statistics low, while larger hospitals carry out autopsies as a matter of course whether they are needed or not — burdening personnel and putting unnecessary stress on the bereaved.
But it's just that kind of incompetence, along with the public's nearly complete lack of faith in the police and the court system, that makes Truth Labs a booming business.
“At a peak load, we can handle up to 3,000 cases a year,” Gandhi said.
As the backlog of cases in India's court system continues to mount, there's unlimited room for expansion.
“This has a larger role to play, because people are not fully aware of the services we offer. We expect every state will have these Truth Labs in the next 10 years,” Gandhi said.
Source URL (retrieved on August 20, 2009 01:07 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090817/delhi-forensic-lab-investigate
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
the ugly indian
Move over, America. The world has a new rude traveler to detest.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
August 10, 2009
NEW DELHI — The instant that the fasten seat belts light went out aboard Cathay Pacific's inaugural Delhi-Bangkok flight this summer, a chorus of metallic dongs erupted like a romper roomful of Ritalin-deprived 5-year-olds turned loose on an arsenal of xylophones.
The passengers were attacking their call buttons.
In seconds, flight attendants were up and running. By the time they began dishing out the special meals, tempers were beginning to fray.
“Whiskey!” demanded an old man with a white beard when the young Chinese flight attendant tried to put a meal in front of him.
“Sir, we are not serving drinks now,” the flight attendant replied politely. (Dong! Dong-dong! Do-Dong, dongdong!)
In the next row, another man, younger but no less eloquent, reached up to press his call button, and the flustered attendant caved and uncapped the Scotch.
“Arre, such a small peg she's given you,” the old man's companion protested.
Dong!
Once the world loved to hate the Ugly American — fat, loud-mouthed and blissfully superior in his utter cultural ignorance. But since the economic crisis put the kibosh on American and European travel budgets, there's a new kid in town. India's rampaging outbound travel market has thrown a much-needed lifeline to the tourism industry in Southeast Asia, Europe and farther afield.
For those schlepping bags and serving drinks, though, the Ugly Indian can be so demanding that the lifeline sometimes looks like it has a noose at the end of it.
“It's a cultural thing,” said Pankaj Gupta, part-owner of Outbound Travels, a New Delhi-based travel agency. “In India, we have servants to do everything in everybody's houses mostly, so people are just sort of used to getting stuff delivered to them.”
Culture conflict has already resulted in several public relations debacles. In May, for instance, a group of Indian passengers caused a minor sensation in the local press when they leveled allegations of racism against Air France — saying that when their flight was delayed for 28 hours in Paris other passengers were transported to hotels, but the Indians were made to wait in the lounge. (The distinction was not made based on race, but on possession of a valid Schengen visa, the airline maintains).
In a similar incident in 2006, 12 Indian passengers accused Northwest Airlines of racism when they were offloaded and detained in Amsterdam for what flight attendants called “suspicious behavior.”
“Imagine arresting 12 guys just because they were changing seats and talking on their cellphones when the plane was taking off,” wrote Indian humorist Jug Suraiya in his Times of India column. “Everyone does that in India all the time, and no one gets arrested.”
But just as the American tourist's penchant for plaid never stopped France from chasing his dollars, the Indian tourist's insatiable thirst for Scotch hasn't made his rupees any less attractive. Tourism boards from a laundry list of countries have flooded Indian cities with delegations — or simply set up shop here. Airlines and hotels abroad have wooed Indian travel companies with bargain basement rates, and pulled out all stops to compete — throwing open their kitchens to traveling Indian chefs, topping up their in-flight entertainment libraries with Bollywood movies, and fighting tooth and nail for the right to host stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan for the Indian International Film Awards.
The reason is simple. Despite the downturn, India's travel market is still growing. According to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, more than 800,000 Indians are expected to visit Singapore this year, more than 669,000 Indians are expected to visit the U.S. and more than 625,000 are expected to visit Malaysia. Moreover, PATA expects the number of Indian visitors to Singapore, Malaysia and the U.S. to continue to grow rapidly through 2011.
“Since the economic crisis began, there has been a reduction in travel, but the reduction in travel by Indians has been very low compared to any other country,” said Gupta. “Indians are still traveling a lot. Maybe some people have downgraded, by say, instead of going to the U.S. traveling closer to home, but they're still traveling abroad.”
Many of these Indian travelers, of course, are erudite, suave, charming, or simply humble and polite — it's just that nobody remembers them. For every passenger aboard Cathay's Delhi-Bangkok run with his finger on the call button, there were three or four who were fast asleep, mummified in blankets, or peacefully guffawing at the mindless in-flight movies.
Most problems result from simple misunderstandings, explained Thomas Thottathil, spokesman for Cox & Kings, one of India's largest tour companies. “We sensitize our customers, our tour guides, and we also explain to our suppliers overseas — the hotels or whatever — that Indian travelers have their own needs, their own particular habits.” Because of that effort, Thottathil said his firm has not faced anything more serious than the occasional complaint that a hotel didn't provide dinner after 9:30 p.m.
Thottathil may well be onto something. A quick lesson about Indians' love of thrift, for instance, might ease international tensions in the air. What's the multicultural secret to a tranquil flight, you ask?
Five dollar whiskeys.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
August 10, 2009
NEW DELHI — The instant that the fasten seat belts light went out aboard Cathay Pacific's inaugural Delhi-Bangkok flight this summer, a chorus of metallic dongs erupted like a romper roomful of Ritalin-deprived 5-year-olds turned loose on an arsenal of xylophones.
The passengers were attacking their call buttons.
In seconds, flight attendants were up and running. By the time they began dishing out the special meals, tempers were beginning to fray.
“Whiskey!” demanded an old man with a white beard when the young Chinese flight attendant tried to put a meal in front of him.
“Sir, we are not serving drinks now,” the flight attendant replied politely. (Dong! Dong-dong! Do-Dong, dongdong!)
In the next row, another man, younger but no less eloquent, reached up to press his call button, and the flustered attendant caved and uncapped the Scotch.
“Arre, such a small peg she's given you,” the old man's companion protested.
Dong!
Once the world loved to hate the Ugly American — fat, loud-mouthed and blissfully superior in his utter cultural ignorance. But since the economic crisis put the kibosh on American and European travel budgets, there's a new kid in town. India's rampaging outbound travel market has thrown a much-needed lifeline to the tourism industry in Southeast Asia, Europe and farther afield.
For those schlepping bags and serving drinks, though, the Ugly Indian can be so demanding that the lifeline sometimes looks like it has a noose at the end of it.
“It's a cultural thing,” said Pankaj Gupta, part-owner of Outbound Travels, a New Delhi-based travel agency. “In India, we have servants to do everything in everybody's houses mostly, so people are just sort of used to getting stuff delivered to them.”
Culture conflict has already resulted in several public relations debacles. In May, for instance, a group of Indian passengers caused a minor sensation in the local press when they leveled allegations of racism against Air France — saying that when their flight was delayed for 28 hours in Paris other passengers were transported to hotels, but the Indians were made to wait in the lounge. (The distinction was not made based on race, but on possession of a valid Schengen visa, the airline maintains).
In a similar incident in 2006, 12 Indian passengers accused Northwest Airlines of racism when they were offloaded and detained in Amsterdam for what flight attendants called “suspicious behavior.”
“Imagine arresting 12 guys just because they were changing seats and talking on their cellphones when the plane was taking off,” wrote Indian humorist Jug Suraiya in his Times of India column. “Everyone does that in India all the time, and no one gets arrested.”
But just as the American tourist's penchant for plaid never stopped France from chasing his dollars, the Indian tourist's insatiable thirst for Scotch hasn't made his rupees any less attractive. Tourism boards from a laundry list of countries have flooded Indian cities with delegations — or simply set up shop here. Airlines and hotels abroad have wooed Indian travel companies with bargain basement rates, and pulled out all stops to compete — throwing open their kitchens to traveling Indian chefs, topping up their in-flight entertainment libraries with Bollywood movies, and fighting tooth and nail for the right to host stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan for the Indian International Film Awards.
The reason is simple. Despite the downturn, India's travel market is still growing. According to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, more than 800,000 Indians are expected to visit Singapore this year, more than 669,000 Indians are expected to visit the U.S. and more than 625,000 are expected to visit Malaysia. Moreover, PATA expects the number of Indian visitors to Singapore, Malaysia and the U.S. to continue to grow rapidly through 2011.
“Since the economic crisis began, there has been a reduction in travel, but the reduction in travel by Indians has been very low compared to any other country,” said Gupta. “Indians are still traveling a lot. Maybe some people have downgraded, by say, instead of going to the U.S. traveling closer to home, but they're still traveling abroad.”
Many of these Indian travelers, of course, are erudite, suave, charming, or simply humble and polite — it's just that nobody remembers them. For every passenger aboard Cathay's Delhi-Bangkok run with his finger on the call button, there were three or four who were fast asleep, mummified in blankets, or peacefully guffawing at the mindless in-flight movies.
Most problems result from simple misunderstandings, explained Thomas Thottathil, spokesman for Cox & Kings, one of India's largest tour companies. “We sensitize our customers, our tour guides, and we also explain to our suppliers overseas — the hotels or whatever — that Indian travelers have their own needs, their own particular habits.” Because of that effort, Thottathil said his firm has not faced anything more serious than the occasional complaint that a hotel didn't provide dinner after 9:30 p.m.
Thottathil may well be onto something. A quick lesson about Indians' love of thrift, for instance, might ease international tensions in the air. What's the multicultural secret to a tranquil flight, you ask?
Five dollar whiskeys.
Monday, August 03, 2009
the stones of srinagar
On the streets of this political hotspot, chucking rocks at the police is the most cherished form of free speech.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 3, 2009 06:43 ET
SRINAGAR, India — In Srinagar's Lal Chowk, or “red corner,” a hotbed of social unrest in a city that many residents believe to be occupied by a hostile Indian military, 26-year-old “Mohammad” is primed for the next call to action.
A handsome, muscular youth with a beard that would pass muster in Kabul and incongruously gelled hair, he has been a stone pelter — what locals here call the young men who engage in rock-chunking skirmishes with the police and security forces nearly every Friday — since he was 15 years old.
“I saw so many young boys had been killed by the security forces, so I said, 'Let me join this protest also,'” Mohammad says.
The protests that Mohammad — who did not want to reveal his real name for fear of retribution — is talking about have become part of daily life in Srinagar, the center of political life in the Indian part of Kashmir. Marches and the inevitable skirmishes that follow them are so common that the shopkeepers in Lal Chowk have grown accustomed to a three- or four-day work week. And stone pelting has become so inseparable from political demonstrations that the police themselves carry slingshots for firing back. The government even employs a special brigade of street cleaners to make sure that the pavement is cleared of ammunition.
To be sure, Kashmir is a state still reeling under insurgency, where militants strike at the government and melt back into the forest, and these angry, habitual protesters tell only their side of the story. But a talk with the proverbial man on the street shows that there's more to Srinagar's stone battles than simple hooliganism.
Despite India's claims to have won the hearts and minds of Kashmiris since the armed rebellion by militant separatists that raged from 1989 to 2003 declined to a simmer, the anger over what locals term the Indian occupation — and hatred for the police and the army — still run hot and deep.
“I became a stone thrower in 2004,” says 24-year-old Imran (also using a pseudonym). Dressed in a white Oxford-style shirt, he looks more like a middle class college student than a street thug. “That day, the troops had pulled some women out of their houses in my neighborhood and beat them up. So when the boys came out onto the streets, I joined them.” Since then, he's only grown more committed. “A boy I know is in a coma because he was hit in the head by a teargas shell,” he says.
From Delhi, the complex mire that is called “the Kashmir conflict” looks very different. The days when newspapers chastised the Indian army for human rights abuses and cataloged the long roster of “disappeared persons” are over. Today those reports have been replaced by repeated claims that “peace has returned to the valley,” premature announcements that Kashmir tourism is on the verge of bouncing back, and patriotic paeans to the ordinary soldier. Last year's election, in which voter turnout was high for the first time in many years, was also interpreted as a sign that the people were ready to accept India's dominion.
On the ground, though, Kashmir looks and sounds more like a territory already under occupation than one besieged by a foreign power. For one thing, the Indian army — some 600,000 soldiers, nearly one soldier for every ten civilians — is everywhere, not just on the border with Pakistan. For another, nobody here considers India's troops to be heroes. “If you talk to the people,” said Sajaad Hussain, an activist who heads an NGO called the J&K Research Development Trust, “You'll find 80 percent want independence. Maybe 20 percent want to go with Pakistan. Nobody is for India.”
That's likely an exaggeration. But in my brief wanderings, I wasn't able to turn up a single person who had good things to say about the Indian government. Almost everyone said they wanted Kashmir to be independent. Some of the more practical Kashmiris demanded autonomy — both political and economic — since that is a measure India has at least declared itself willing to consider. And others, still more jaded, simply hoped for demilitarization. This was not at all what I had expected. But in some ways, it made perfect sense.
For many years, watchdog groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the Indian army for human rights violations in Kashmir, where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act gives the military the right to arrest civilians, seize property and shoot to kill and the Public Safety Act allows security forces to detain suspects for as long as two years without any sanction from the court.
In Srinagar, the security presence is unmistakable. Armed soldiers direct traffic at intersections. Flak-jacketed mine sweeping units patrol the roadside with sniffer dogs. Bunkers built from sandbags and razor wire blanket the city at strategic corners. And the stone pelters of Lal Chowk say they abuse these powers — storming into homes, beating protesters, and threatening activists with arbitrary detention under the Public Safety Act — to crush independence activists' freedom of expression. From that enforced silence, they say, comes the stone.
For 45 days prior to my visit, Kashmir had been rocked by protests over the alleged rape and murder of two young women from Shopian, a town located about 50 kilometers from Srinagar. Initially, local police and government officials, including the state's fresh-faced chief minister, Omar Abdullah, dismissed the case as an ordinary drowning. But the people of Shopian alleged that the two women had been raped and murdered — which was later confirmed after the protests forced the administration to conduct an autopsy — and claimed that the police forces had conspired to cover up the crime. After a month and a half of protests that stopped all economic activity in the area, four police officials were arrested for allegedly suppressing evidence.
Nothing has been proven in the Shopian case yet. “There have been some unfortunate incidents in the past, in some cases action was taken promptly and in one or two cases there is a perception of avoidable delay,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram has told the press. “Our intentions are good and there will be proper action. The state government will to go through investigations and punish the guilty.”
But for the disgusted local populace, no further investigation is necessary. Over the 20-odd years since militancy began, during which the army and police have enjoyed almost absolute power in Kashmir, these kinds of allegations are so common, one local resident told me, that for every one that makes news there are another dozen that never make national headlines. “Even the Shopian story took a week to come into the national papers,” explains Parvaiz Bukhari, a local journalist.
All of the young men I interviewed say that police officers have come to their homes and threatened to arrest them under the public safety act, under which alleged offenders can be jailed for as long as two years without formal charges.
“We say, 'Give us freedom,' and they say, 'You are a terrorist.'” said Aftab, another youth. “But we have no guns. Only stones.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 3, 2009 06:43 ET
SRINAGAR, India — In Srinagar's Lal Chowk, or “red corner,” a hotbed of social unrest in a city that many residents believe to be occupied by a hostile Indian military, 26-year-old “Mohammad” is primed for the next call to action.
A handsome, muscular youth with a beard that would pass muster in Kabul and incongruously gelled hair, he has been a stone pelter — what locals here call the young men who engage in rock-chunking skirmishes with the police and security forces nearly every Friday — since he was 15 years old.
“I saw so many young boys had been killed by the security forces, so I said, 'Let me join this protest also,'” Mohammad says.
The protests that Mohammad — who did not want to reveal his real name for fear of retribution — is talking about have become part of daily life in Srinagar, the center of political life in the Indian part of Kashmir. Marches and the inevitable skirmishes that follow them are so common that the shopkeepers in Lal Chowk have grown accustomed to a three- or four-day work week. And stone pelting has become so inseparable from political demonstrations that the police themselves carry slingshots for firing back. The government even employs a special brigade of street cleaners to make sure that the pavement is cleared of ammunition.
To be sure, Kashmir is a state still reeling under insurgency, where militants strike at the government and melt back into the forest, and these angry, habitual protesters tell only their side of the story. But a talk with the proverbial man on the street shows that there's more to Srinagar's stone battles than simple hooliganism.
Despite India's claims to have won the hearts and minds of Kashmiris since the armed rebellion by militant separatists that raged from 1989 to 2003 declined to a simmer, the anger over what locals term the Indian occupation — and hatred for the police and the army — still run hot and deep.
“I became a stone thrower in 2004,” says 24-year-old Imran (also using a pseudonym). Dressed in a white Oxford-style shirt, he looks more like a middle class college student than a street thug. “That day, the troops had pulled some women out of their houses in my neighborhood and beat them up. So when the boys came out onto the streets, I joined them.” Since then, he's only grown more committed. “A boy I know is in a coma because he was hit in the head by a teargas shell,” he says.
From Delhi, the complex mire that is called “the Kashmir conflict” looks very different. The days when newspapers chastised the Indian army for human rights abuses and cataloged the long roster of “disappeared persons” are over. Today those reports have been replaced by repeated claims that “peace has returned to the valley,” premature announcements that Kashmir tourism is on the verge of bouncing back, and patriotic paeans to the ordinary soldier. Last year's election, in which voter turnout was high for the first time in many years, was also interpreted as a sign that the people were ready to accept India's dominion.
On the ground, though, Kashmir looks and sounds more like a territory already under occupation than one besieged by a foreign power. For one thing, the Indian army — some 600,000 soldiers, nearly one soldier for every ten civilians — is everywhere, not just on the border with Pakistan. For another, nobody here considers India's troops to be heroes. “If you talk to the people,” said Sajaad Hussain, an activist who heads an NGO called the J&K Research Development Trust, “You'll find 80 percent want independence. Maybe 20 percent want to go with Pakistan. Nobody is for India.”
That's likely an exaggeration. But in my brief wanderings, I wasn't able to turn up a single person who had good things to say about the Indian government. Almost everyone said they wanted Kashmir to be independent. Some of the more practical Kashmiris demanded autonomy — both political and economic — since that is a measure India has at least declared itself willing to consider. And others, still more jaded, simply hoped for demilitarization. This was not at all what I had expected. But in some ways, it made perfect sense.
For many years, watchdog groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the Indian army for human rights violations in Kashmir, where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act gives the military the right to arrest civilians, seize property and shoot to kill and the Public Safety Act allows security forces to detain suspects for as long as two years without any sanction from the court.
In Srinagar, the security presence is unmistakable. Armed soldiers direct traffic at intersections. Flak-jacketed mine sweeping units patrol the roadside with sniffer dogs. Bunkers built from sandbags and razor wire blanket the city at strategic corners. And the stone pelters of Lal Chowk say they abuse these powers — storming into homes, beating protesters, and threatening activists with arbitrary detention under the Public Safety Act — to crush independence activists' freedom of expression. From that enforced silence, they say, comes the stone.
For 45 days prior to my visit, Kashmir had been rocked by protests over the alleged rape and murder of two young women from Shopian, a town located about 50 kilometers from Srinagar. Initially, local police and government officials, including the state's fresh-faced chief minister, Omar Abdullah, dismissed the case as an ordinary drowning. But the people of Shopian alleged that the two women had been raped and murdered — which was later confirmed after the protests forced the administration to conduct an autopsy — and claimed that the police forces had conspired to cover up the crime. After a month and a half of protests that stopped all economic activity in the area, four police officials were arrested for allegedly suppressing evidence.
Nothing has been proven in the Shopian case yet. “There have been some unfortunate incidents in the past, in some cases action was taken promptly and in one or two cases there is a perception of avoidable delay,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram has told the press. “Our intentions are good and there will be proper action. The state government will to go through investigations and punish the guilty.”
But for the disgusted local populace, no further investigation is necessary. Over the 20-odd years since militancy began, during which the army and police have enjoyed almost absolute power in Kashmir, these kinds of allegations are so common, one local resident told me, that for every one that makes news there are another dozen that never make national headlines. “Even the Shopian story took a week to come into the national papers,” explains Parvaiz Bukhari, a local journalist.
All of the young men I interviewed say that police officers have come to their homes and threatened to arrest them under the public safety act, under which alleged offenders can be jailed for as long as two years without formal charges.
“We say, 'Give us freedom,' and they say, 'You are a terrorist.'” said Aftab, another youth. “But we have no guns. Only stones.”
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
a heaven on earth? not so much
With the tourists frightened away by Kashmir's separatist struggle, the famous Dal Lake is slowly succumbing to pollution.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: July 28, 2009 07:36 ET
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — From the shores of Srinagar's Dal Lake, once described as heaven on earth, the water looks dull and brackish. The storied houseboats that were the summer playgrounds of India's British colonizers are lined up across what from this vantage appears to be a weed-choked pond, no larger than a football field.
The boats' garish decorations and cheery names — “New Australia,” “Sansouci,” “Young Dreams,” “The Golden Fleece” — hint at a Gatsbyish heyday of long, lazy afternoons and parties that echoed across the water through the night. But packed chock-a-block, in all their faded grandeur, most of the boats lie empty.
Dal Lake is dying, and along with it a remarkable culture.
“If you had seen Kashmir 20 years back, 30 years back, then half of the population lived in boats,” Rashid Dangola, owner of a houseboat named “Hilton Kashmir” tells me. “In the next 20 years, day by day, this culture will go.”
In fact, the football field-sized parcel where the Hilton Kashmir lies moored is only a tiny portion of the real Dal Lake, which spreads over six square miles but which over the last 30 years has shrunk to half its original size. It has been reclaimed by weeds and eventually land, paved over by the government in an effort to improve roadways and accommodate Srinagar's growing population, or simply converted to real estate and farmland by people in need of a place to live.
Only a small part of the remaining lake can be seen from the shore, because at its heart it is a sort of floating, rural Venice — a maze of canals, vegetable gardens and lotus-root farms where houseboats have been converted into souvenir stores and papier mache factories, and islands have been reclaimed to erect towering colonial brick houses.
These islands, and the “floating land” that an estimated 40,000 farmers use to grow eggplant, squash and tomatoes, multiplies every year. So do the people. And so does the waste they create. Garbage spills into the water from the Dal's banks, and a thick green scum covers canals that 20 years ago were splashing playgrounds for local children.
“[The] Dal has become a vegetable garden; where is the water body?” an exasperated high court Chief Justice Bashir Ahmad Khan reflected recently, as he issued a stern warning to the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA) and the Srinagar Development Authority (SDA), which have failed to arrest the lake's decline despite investments of some $125 million over the years.
As a rented shikhara — India's version of the gondola — ferries us through the lake's floating villages, Dangola tells me: “I was proud to bring people to this side, so they would understand how we live. But now it is all spoiled.”
Conventional wisdom once blamed the pollution problem on the lake's 1,200 houseboats, but in reality these boats account for only about 3 percent of the waste released into the lake. The real culprits are a succession of poor planners and the city of Srinagar itself — with a population of about a million — which releases tons of raw sewage into the waters of the Dal through 15 different drains along the shore. Moreover, due to a poorly thought out decision to pave over the network of canals that once linked the Dal Lake to several other bodies of water surrounding Srinagar and the fast-flowing River Jhellum, the waters here are now stagnant.
In June, Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh committed another $225 million — $60 million of which the central government has already rubber stamped — to build sewage treatment plants, purchase de-weeding machines and resettle nearly 10,000 families who live on the lakes network of islands. But Kashmir has been throwing money at the problem for years, and resettling the families who live in the lake would be tantamount to destroying it.
A two-hour shikhara ride along the shore and through the winding canals reveals that while claims of the lake's great beauty are somewhat exaggerated — it is by no means a crystal clear, glacial teardrop like Lake Tahoe — it boasts a unique and vibrant culture.
The enormity of the task at hand is also clear. Everywhere, clawing weeds choke the passages, and the water is covered with tiny specks of green algae, massing like something out of B-grade science fiction. The reason the plant life is so prolific — excessive fertilizer in the water — is evident, too.
From secluded pipes that are easy to spot from inside the lake, the coffee brown sewage of the city of Srinagar glugs untreated into the water. Though some years ago 6,000 families deemed to be “encroachers” without legitimate claim to houses in the lake were pushed out, the cleanup effort now appears to be limited to half-a-dozen dredging and weeding platforms — which patrol the waters, belching smoke, when the whim strikes their operators.
According to locals, it's a haphazard, rearguard action with little hope of success. The 6,000 displaced families have been replaced by some 20,000. The city's much discussed sewage system shows no signs of building itself. And even the dubiously expensive deweeding machines, parked in convenient proximity to shore while I was in town, seem to remain idle most of the day.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: July 28, 2009 07:36 ET
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — From the shores of Srinagar's Dal Lake, once described as heaven on earth, the water looks dull and brackish. The storied houseboats that were the summer playgrounds of India's British colonizers are lined up across what from this vantage appears to be a weed-choked pond, no larger than a football field.
The boats' garish decorations and cheery names — “New Australia,” “Sansouci,” “Young Dreams,” “The Golden Fleece” — hint at a Gatsbyish heyday of long, lazy afternoons and parties that echoed across the water through the night. But packed chock-a-block, in all their faded grandeur, most of the boats lie empty.
Dal Lake is dying, and along with it a remarkable culture.
“If you had seen Kashmir 20 years back, 30 years back, then half of the population lived in boats,” Rashid Dangola, owner of a houseboat named “Hilton Kashmir” tells me. “In the next 20 years, day by day, this culture will go.”
In fact, the football field-sized parcel where the Hilton Kashmir lies moored is only a tiny portion of the real Dal Lake, which spreads over six square miles but which over the last 30 years has shrunk to half its original size. It has been reclaimed by weeds and eventually land, paved over by the government in an effort to improve roadways and accommodate Srinagar's growing population, or simply converted to real estate and farmland by people in need of a place to live.
Only a small part of the remaining lake can be seen from the shore, because at its heart it is a sort of floating, rural Venice — a maze of canals, vegetable gardens and lotus-root farms where houseboats have been converted into souvenir stores and papier mache factories, and islands have been reclaimed to erect towering colonial brick houses.
These islands, and the “floating land” that an estimated 40,000 farmers use to grow eggplant, squash and tomatoes, multiplies every year. So do the people. And so does the waste they create. Garbage spills into the water from the Dal's banks, and a thick green scum covers canals that 20 years ago were splashing playgrounds for local children.
“[The] Dal has become a vegetable garden; where is the water body?” an exasperated high court Chief Justice Bashir Ahmad Khan reflected recently, as he issued a stern warning to the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA) and the Srinagar Development Authority (SDA), which have failed to arrest the lake's decline despite investments of some $125 million over the years.
As a rented shikhara — India's version of the gondola — ferries us through the lake's floating villages, Dangola tells me: “I was proud to bring people to this side, so they would understand how we live. But now it is all spoiled.”
Conventional wisdom once blamed the pollution problem on the lake's 1,200 houseboats, but in reality these boats account for only about 3 percent of the waste released into the lake. The real culprits are a succession of poor planners and the city of Srinagar itself — with a population of about a million — which releases tons of raw sewage into the waters of the Dal through 15 different drains along the shore. Moreover, due to a poorly thought out decision to pave over the network of canals that once linked the Dal Lake to several other bodies of water surrounding Srinagar and the fast-flowing River Jhellum, the waters here are now stagnant.
In June, Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh committed another $225 million — $60 million of which the central government has already rubber stamped — to build sewage treatment plants, purchase de-weeding machines and resettle nearly 10,000 families who live on the lakes network of islands. But Kashmir has been throwing money at the problem for years, and resettling the families who live in the lake would be tantamount to destroying it.
A two-hour shikhara ride along the shore and through the winding canals reveals that while claims of the lake's great beauty are somewhat exaggerated — it is by no means a crystal clear, glacial teardrop like Lake Tahoe — it boasts a unique and vibrant culture.
The enormity of the task at hand is also clear. Everywhere, clawing weeds choke the passages, and the water is covered with tiny specks of green algae, massing like something out of B-grade science fiction. The reason the plant life is so prolific — excessive fertilizer in the water — is evident, too.
From secluded pipes that are easy to spot from inside the lake, the coffee brown sewage of the city of Srinagar glugs untreated into the water. Though some years ago 6,000 families deemed to be “encroachers” without legitimate claim to houses in the lake were pushed out, the cleanup effort now appears to be limited to half-a-dozen dredging and weeding platforms — which patrol the waters, belching smoke, when the whim strikes their operators.
According to locals, it's a haphazard, rearguard action with little hope of success. The 6,000 displaced families have been replaced by some 20,000. The city's much discussed sewage system shows no signs of building itself. And even the dubiously expensive deweeding machines, parked in convenient proximity to shore while I was in town, seem to remain idle most of the day.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
working on the chain gang
According to a new report, India isn't doing enough to combat human trafficking.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 21, 2009
FARIDABAD, India —Teerath Ram came to Faridabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, to work in one of its many stone quarries. Recruited by a labor contractor who promised he'd earn much higher wages here than he could ever make in his native state of Chhattisgarh, Teerath Ram took a notional "advance" of a few thousand rupees to pay the contractor for getting him the job and agreed to work in the quarry to repay his debt. Fifteen years later, he's still there.
The high wages he was meant to receive never materialized, and at the end of the month when the rock he had risked his neck to blast out of the ground was weighed against the dynamite he'd "bought" from the company store, the owner told him that his wages were just enough to cover the interest on his debt.
"They just kept records of what they loaned me in a notebook," he said. And because Teerath Ram is illiterate as well as desperately poor, "They could change the figures anytime they wanted."
There are literally millions like Teerath Ram in India, which has failed to meet minimum standards to combat human trafficking, according to the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report released by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week.
"India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation," according to the report.
Because it has been on the “tier two” watch list — the second-worst category of offenders — for two years, India now faces the prospect of being moved to the “tier three” blacklist of egregious violators next year if it fails to improve its record in fighting human trafficking. Those countries face sanctions under which the U.S. can withhold non-humanitarian aid and oppose aid projects from agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Band, though it is likely India would receive a presidential waiver.
The sad thing for India is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Though they are still being cheated and exploited, laborers like Teerath Ram, for instance, don't even understand that they were the victims of trafficking, since nobody clubbed them on the head and threw them in the back of a truck. Nor do the police.
“The word trafficking has not been defined in India,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with the New Delhi-based Global March Against Child Labor. “There is no comprehensive definition, despite the fact that trafficking in human beings has been banned as [violating] a fundamental right.” That means when people are duped into migrating for work, rather than kidnapped, India's law enforcement agencies rarely recognize them as the victims of traffickers.
Technically, Teerath Ram is now no longer a bonded laborer. He knows exactly how much money he owes the quarry owner and the rate of interest on his debt. He can leave anytime, provided he finds someone else — which would mean another labor contractor — to grant him another loan to pay off his debt. But he still has to pay for the blasting equipment he uses from the quarry to which he's indebted, and the owner and debt-holder still assesses the value of the rock Teerath Ram blasts out of the ground. Naturally, the price of dynamite always seems to climb, while the price for stone plunges.
The quarry workers of Faridabad — only a 15-minute drive from the heart of Delhi — are victims of what some Indian economists are terming "modern bonded labor."
Unlike in the past, when agricultural laborers were forced to work because of traditional feudal ties to landlords or debts that went back generations, these modern bonded laborers migrate to new farms or industrial sites where wages are higher. They enter "freely" into loan agreements with their employers and sometimes even pay off what they owe at the end of the year. This has prompted some economists to argue that the laborers aren't the victims of traffickers, and that they opt to take these jobs because they are better than the alternatives available to them elsewhere, said Professor Ravi Srivastava, a labor economist at Jawarhalal Nehru University.
But, as Teerath Ram knows, the reality is very different. "This is the way the new bonded labor relationships are emerging," Srivastava said. These relationships are not purely economic contracts, even though employees may enter them due to necessity, rather than compulsion. And once employees enter into these relationships, there are high exit costs that the employees did not understand at the outset.
Bonded labor has been illegal in India since the enactment of the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act in 1976, and a series of progressive Supreme Court judgments expanded India's definition of bonded labor to make it more comprehensive.
India's highest court ruled in Bandhua Mukti Morcha vs. the Union of India (1984) that all laborers who are working for below the nationally mandated minimum wage should be presumed to be bonded to their employers. The ruling recognized that economic compulsions can be as powerful as historical feudal relationships and even the threat of physical harm, and that proving exploitation can be a knotty problem when employers keep all the records and their workers are illiterate and mathematically ignorant.
While this law doesn't go so far as to define anybody who is working for less than minimum wage to be a bonded laborer, it shifts the burden onto the employer to prove that his employees are there of their own volition. But despite this progressive interpretation of the law, forced labor, debt servitude and even slavery persist, according to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector.
Numbers are hard to come by. The Bandhua Mukti Morcha (or Bonded Labor Liberation Front) claims that as many as 300 million Indian workers should be presumed to be bonded laborers, based on the Supreme Court's definition.
The working conditions for such laborers are grim. They handle hazardous chemicals — and even explosives — without any safety equipment. Crippling and fatal accidents are routine. The work is backbreaking, and the pay is miserable. For instance, the “rapaswala,” a kiln worker who buries the bricks before firing, earns only 8 rupees (or about 20 cents) for every thousand bricks he produces.
Things are no better for Teerath Ram and the other the “modern” bonded laborers of Faridabad, even though they have fought long and hard for their rights, and, according to some definitions, they're free.
Organized by the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labor Liberation Front) in 1984, they have secured a school and access to electricity at the cost of the life of one of their own — allegedly at the hands of company goons. But they still have yet to receive the legally mandated minimum wage for their labor. They handle dynamite and blasting caps without proper safety equipment because their employer requires them to pay for their gear themselves, and fatal accidents are so commonplace no one has an accurate count.
"I owe 20,000 rupees ($500), which I borrowed to buy dynamite and other equipment," said Resham Lal, another quarry worker. "Every month, I repay 250 rupees. Nobody has told me how long it will take me to pay off my debt at this rate, and I keep working and spending more money on equipment and the interest on my loan keeps growing."
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 21, 2009
FARIDABAD, India —Teerath Ram came to Faridabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, to work in one of its many stone quarries. Recruited by a labor contractor who promised he'd earn much higher wages here than he could ever make in his native state of Chhattisgarh, Teerath Ram took a notional "advance" of a few thousand rupees to pay the contractor for getting him the job and agreed to work in the quarry to repay his debt. Fifteen years later, he's still there.
The high wages he was meant to receive never materialized, and at the end of the month when the rock he had risked his neck to blast out of the ground was weighed against the dynamite he'd "bought" from the company store, the owner told him that his wages were just enough to cover the interest on his debt.
"They just kept records of what they loaned me in a notebook," he said. And because Teerath Ram is illiterate as well as desperately poor, "They could change the figures anytime they wanted."
There are literally millions like Teerath Ram in India, which has failed to meet minimum standards to combat human trafficking, according to the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report released by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week.
"India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation," according to the report.
Because it has been on the “tier two” watch list — the second-worst category of offenders — for two years, India now faces the prospect of being moved to the “tier three” blacklist of egregious violators next year if it fails to improve its record in fighting human trafficking. Those countries face sanctions under which the U.S. can withhold non-humanitarian aid and oppose aid projects from agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Band, though it is likely India would receive a presidential waiver.
The sad thing for India is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Though they are still being cheated and exploited, laborers like Teerath Ram, for instance, don't even understand that they were the victims of trafficking, since nobody clubbed them on the head and threw them in the back of a truck. Nor do the police.
“The word trafficking has not been defined in India,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with the New Delhi-based Global March Against Child Labor. “There is no comprehensive definition, despite the fact that trafficking in human beings has been banned as [violating] a fundamental right.” That means when people are duped into migrating for work, rather than kidnapped, India's law enforcement agencies rarely recognize them as the victims of traffickers.
Technically, Teerath Ram is now no longer a bonded laborer. He knows exactly how much money he owes the quarry owner and the rate of interest on his debt. He can leave anytime, provided he finds someone else — which would mean another labor contractor — to grant him another loan to pay off his debt. But he still has to pay for the blasting equipment he uses from the quarry to which he's indebted, and the owner and debt-holder still assesses the value of the rock Teerath Ram blasts out of the ground. Naturally, the price of dynamite always seems to climb, while the price for stone plunges.
The quarry workers of Faridabad — only a 15-minute drive from the heart of Delhi — are victims of what some Indian economists are terming "modern bonded labor."
Unlike in the past, when agricultural laborers were forced to work because of traditional feudal ties to landlords or debts that went back generations, these modern bonded laborers migrate to new farms or industrial sites where wages are higher. They enter "freely" into loan agreements with their employers and sometimes even pay off what they owe at the end of the year. This has prompted some economists to argue that the laborers aren't the victims of traffickers, and that they opt to take these jobs because they are better than the alternatives available to them elsewhere, said Professor Ravi Srivastava, a labor economist at Jawarhalal Nehru University.
But, as Teerath Ram knows, the reality is very different. "This is the way the new bonded labor relationships are emerging," Srivastava said. These relationships are not purely economic contracts, even though employees may enter them due to necessity, rather than compulsion. And once employees enter into these relationships, there are high exit costs that the employees did not understand at the outset.
Bonded labor has been illegal in India since the enactment of the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act in 1976, and a series of progressive Supreme Court judgments expanded India's definition of bonded labor to make it more comprehensive.
India's highest court ruled in Bandhua Mukti Morcha vs. the Union of India (1984) that all laborers who are working for below the nationally mandated minimum wage should be presumed to be bonded to their employers. The ruling recognized that economic compulsions can be as powerful as historical feudal relationships and even the threat of physical harm, and that proving exploitation can be a knotty problem when employers keep all the records and their workers are illiterate and mathematically ignorant.
While this law doesn't go so far as to define anybody who is working for less than minimum wage to be a bonded laborer, it shifts the burden onto the employer to prove that his employees are there of their own volition. But despite this progressive interpretation of the law, forced labor, debt servitude and even slavery persist, according to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector.
Numbers are hard to come by. The Bandhua Mukti Morcha (or Bonded Labor Liberation Front) claims that as many as 300 million Indian workers should be presumed to be bonded laborers, based on the Supreme Court's definition.
The working conditions for such laborers are grim. They handle hazardous chemicals — and even explosives — without any safety equipment. Crippling and fatal accidents are routine. The work is backbreaking, and the pay is miserable. For instance, the “rapaswala,” a kiln worker who buries the bricks before firing, earns only 8 rupees (or about 20 cents) for every thousand bricks he produces.
Things are no better for Teerath Ram and the other the “modern” bonded laborers of Faridabad, even though they have fought long and hard for their rights, and, according to some definitions, they're free.
Organized by the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labor Liberation Front) in 1984, they have secured a school and access to electricity at the cost of the life of one of their own — allegedly at the hands of company goons. But they still have yet to receive the legally mandated minimum wage for their labor. They handle dynamite and blasting caps without proper safety equipment because their employer requires them to pay for their gear themselves, and fatal accidents are so commonplace no one has an accurate count.
"I owe 20,000 rupees ($500), which I borrowed to buy dynamite and other equipment," said Resham Lal, another quarry worker. "Every month, I repay 250 rupees. Nobody has told me how long it will take me to pay off my debt at this rate, and I keep working and spending more money on equipment and the interest on my loan keeps growing."
Friday, June 19, 2009
everybody was kung fu fighting
South Indian prostitutes learn martial arts to protect against creeps and other bad customers.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 19, 2009
CHENNAI — Scorned by society and ignored by the police, sex workers in the South Indian city of Chennai are learning karate to protect themselves against the beatings, robberies and rapes they say are part of a prostitute's daily life here.
“Sometimes I make an agreement with one customer, and then later he tries to bring his friends along as well,” said Kalaiarasi, a woman who works as a prostitute near the Chennai neighborhood of Anna Nagar. “Other times they want to have sex with me and they beat me up so they don't have to pay.”
According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, India has about 3 million prostitutes. But other organizations, like Human Rights Watch, suggest that the figure could be as much as five times higher than that.
Because of desperate poverty, high rates of unemployment and the low status of women in Indian society, these sex workers have few options. Prostitution is illegal, and, recently, efforts have been made to decriminalize prostitution and make clients — instead of just the prostitutes — liable to prosecution. But these efforts have had little impact.
Kalaiarasi is all too aware that it is rape, not business, when a client brings along his friends. But in the past she has never been able to do anything about it because the local police are not interested in the legal rights of a woman who takes money in exchange for sex. In fact, if the allegations of local sex workers and activists are true, the police officers charged with upholding the law are the worst offenders.
“The law never says the policemen can beat them up, they can rape the women, they can abuse them,” said AJ Hariharan, founder of the Indian Community Welfare Organization, a nonprofit that aims to protect the rights of sex workers and homosexuals. “The law doesn't say that. But the people implementing the law are taking advantage of it ... So no one can go and complain to the police.”
That's why, along with 75 other sex workers here, Kalaiarasi is learning karate so she can fight back. So far, Kalaiarasi has only taken a 15-day crash course. But as she and her fellow students kick and punch in imitation of their instructor, you can already see how the basic knowledge of karate — together with the recognition that they have the right to protect themselves — has given them a huge surge in confidence.
Dressed in white karate uniforms and wearing Spiderman masks to hide their faces from my camera, these women are clearly having fun. At one point, Valli, another sex worker, attacks Kalaiarasi with a wooden knife — haieeya! Kalaiarasi blocks the thrust with her nunchaku, or “numchuks,” catching Valli's wrist with the chain connecting the wooden sticks and twisting it painfully so her would-be attacker is forced to drop the knife. Everyone's Spiderman mask shakes with laughter.
While most karate students will probably never have to use their skills on a real attacker, the prostitutes' precarious position in society makes an assault almost certain.
“The clients feel that the women are vulnerable,” Hariharan said. “If they pay, they can do anything [they believe]. We want to pass on a message that this is enough. That the women will protect themselves.”
“I have to keep going out after dark [because of my job],” Valli said. “Sometimes clients misbehave. Sometimes they refuse to pay. What we want is to be able to protect ourselves from hooligans.”
Hariharan hopes that learning karate will not only help protect these women from abuse, but also raise awareness about their plight and cause others to realize that sex workers, too, deserve basic human rights.
“When you look at the [total] number of sex workers, the number who know self-defense is very less,” he said. “But we want to send this message across the country, (to) women in Kanyakumari and other districts of Tamil Nadu, or elsewhere in the country, maybe Rajasthan or Delhi or Gujarat. We want this message to be taken that sex workers can equip themselves to prevent violence against them.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 19, 2009
CHENNAI — Scorned by society and ignored by the police, sex workers in the South Indian city of Chennai are learning karate to protect themselves against the beatings, robberies and rapes they say are part of a prostitute's daily life here.
“Sometimes I make an agreement with one customer, and then later he tries to bring his friends along as well,” said Kalaiarasi, a woman who works as a prostitute near the Chennai neighborhood of Anna Nagar. “Other times they want to have sex with me and they beat me up so they don't have to pay.”
According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, India has about 3 million prostitutes. But other organizations, like Human Rights Watch, suggest that the figure could be as much as five times higher than that.
Because of desperate poverty, high rates of unemployment and the low status of women in Indian society, these sex workers have few options. Prostitution is illegal, and, recently, efforts have been made to decriminalize prostitution and make clients — instead of just the prostitutes — liable to prosecution. But these efforts have had little impact.
Kalaiarasi is all too aware that it is rape, not business, when a client brings along his friends. But in the past she has never been able to do anything about it because the local police are not interested in the legal rights of a woman who takes money in exchange for sex. In fact, if the allegations of local sex workers and activists are true, the police officers charged with upholding the law are the worst offenders.
“The law never says the policemen can beat them up, they can rape the women, they can abuse them,” said AJ Hariharan, founder of the Indian Community Welfare Organization, a nonprofit that aims to protect the rights of sex workers and homosexuals. “The law doesn't say that. But the people implementing the law are taking advantage of it ... So no one can go and complain to the police.”
That's why, along with 75 other sex workers here, Kalaiarasi is learning karate so she can fight back. So far, Kalaiarasi has only taken a 15-day crash course. But as she and her fellow students kick and punch in imitation of their instructor, you can already see how the basic knowledge of karate — together with the recognition that they have the right to protect themselves — has given them a huge surge in confidence.
Dressed in white karate uniforms and wearing Spiderman masks to hide their faces from my camera, these women are clearly having fun. At one point, Valli, another sex worker, attacks Kalaiarasi with a wooden knife — haieeya! Kalaiarasi blocks the thrust with her nunchaku, or “numchuks,” catching Valli's wrist with the chain connecting the wooden sticks and twisting it painfully so her would-be attacker is forced to drop the knife. Everyone's Spiderman mask shakes with laughter.
While most karate students will probably never have to use their skills on a real attacker, the prostitutes' precarious position in society makes an assault almost certain.
“The clients feel that the women are vulnerable,” Hariharan said. “If they pay, they can do anything [they believe]. We want to pass on a message that this is enough. That the women will protect themselves.”
“I have to keep going out after dark [because of my job],” Valli said. “Sometimes clients misbehave. Sometimes they refuse to pay. What we want is to be able to protect ourselves from hooligans.”
Hariharan hopes that learning karate will not only help protect these women from abuse, but also raise awareness about their plight and cause others to realize that sex workers, too, deserve basic human rights.
“When you look at the [total] number of sex workers, the number who know self-defense is very less,” he said. “But we want to send this message across the country, (to) women in Kanyakumari and other districts of Tamil Nadu, or elsewhere in the country, maybe Rajasthan or Delhi or Gujarat. We want this message to be taken that sex workers can equip themselves to prevent violence against them.”
Thursday, June 18, 2009
can the indian government end hunger?
That's the new plan, anyway.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 7, 2009 12:04 ET
NEW DELHI — In a move some are hailing as the boldest — and most needed — action taken by any administration since the country gained independence in 1947, India's new government has promised to eliminate hunger and malnutrition nationwide with a powerful National Food Security Act.
In her June 4 speech to parliament outlining for the first time the agenda for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's new United Progressive Alliance government, President Pratibha Patil said, “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide a statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas will be entitled, by law, to 25 kilograms of rice or wheat per month at three rupees (about 6 cents) per kilogram. This legislation will also be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the public distribution system.”
Even usually trenchant critics of the nation's policies toward its farmers and its poor were cheered by the pledge. “After independence, this will be the most important program any government has ever thought of launching,” said agriculture policy expert Devinder Sharma. “It should at least allow us to put our heads up for the first time of being a democracy. How could democracy coexist with such appalling hunger?”
India's starvation and malnutrition problems have always been as perplexing as they are horrifying. With more than 200 million people classified as hungry by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India has the world's largest population of the starving and malnourished — despite being the world's second-largest grower of rice and wheat and boasting a surplus of 56.5 million tons of food grains in government warehouses.
“If you put one bag of grain over another bag of grain, you can walk to the moon,” Sharma said. “That's the quantity of food lying in India, and we have the largest population of hungry also in India.”
Sharma gives credit for this program, last year's massive farm loan waiver, and a jobs scheme that guarantees rural laborers at least 100 days of work each year to Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi. And he points out that the scale of these programs is unprecedented. “She has launched the world's largest social security program with the NREGA, and this is the world's largest food security program,” he said. “I can tell you she deserves the Nobel Prize.”
Part of a breathtaking array of landmark changes to public policy — many of which will also present a hefty bill to the exchequer — the new food security law will cost the government more than $10 billion at today's exchange rate. To foot the bill, the government will need to push forward with the sale of stakes in state-owned companies in the oil and gas sector and complete the sale of 3G telecom licenses. In a sense, therefore, it is both the mother of all social welfare policies and the biggest impetus for the growth-spurring economic reforms that business has long demanded.
More importantly, together with the UPA's groundbreaking Right to Information Act, which was passed in 2005, the national food security guarantee will be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the Public Distribution System (PDS) through which India already distributes subsidized food to the poor. Notorious for corruption — yes, people steal from the starving, too — the PDS was vulnerable to exploitative vendors because nobody was able to track where the food actually went.
But with the introduction of national identity cards with biometric and radio frequency technology to prevent fraud, which is also part of an anti-terrorism initiative of the home ministry, many believe there is a real chance of plugging the holes in the sieve.
Not everyone is convinced. According to Bibek Debroy, an economist at the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank, the vague plan to reform the PDS doesn't go nearly far enough to succeed. “It's a terrible idea,” Debroy said.
Citing the silence about just how the distribution system will be reformed and drawing attention to several past efforts that have failed ignobly, he argues that the solution is actually much more simple. Instead of funneling even more money through the PDS and making an unwieldy behemoth still larger, he said, India should put the monster out of its misery.
“The simple point I'm making is that it's far more efficient to have direct cash transfers,” he said, echoing an argument that has recently gained credence in international development circles.
Through the NREGS, India already has a database of the working poor, including their bank accounts, so it would be easy to transfer food subsidy money directly to them in the form of cash — a move that would slash the government's bill by as much as two-thirds and put thousands of corrupt officials out of business overnight. It would also eliminate an internal conflict between India's food policy and its farm policy: For farmers, the government continually tries to push prices up, while for the poor it struggles to push prices down.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 7, 2009 12:04 ET
NEW DELHI — In a move some are hailing as the boldest — and most needed — action taken by any administration since the country gained independence in 1947, India's new government has promised to eliminate hunger and malnutrition nationwide with a powerful National Food Security Act.
In her June 4 speech to parliament outlining for the first time the agenda for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's new United Progressive Alliance government, President Pratibha Patil said, “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide a statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas will be entitled, by law, to 25 kilograms of rice or wheat per month at three rupees (about 6 cents) per kilogram. This legislation will also be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the public distribution system.”
Even usually trenchant critics of the nation's policies toward its farmers and its poor were cheered by the pledge. “After independence, this will be the most important program any government has ever thought of launching,” said agriculture policy expert Devinder Sharma. “It should at least allow us to put our heads up for the first time of being a democracy. How could democracy coexist with such appalling hunger?”
India's starvation and malnutrition problems have always been as perplexing as they are horrifying. With more than 200 million people classified as hungry by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India has the world's largest population of the starving and malnourished — despite being the world's second-largest grower of rice and wheat and boasting a surplus of 56.5 million tons of food grains in government warehouses.
“If you put one bag of grain over another bag of grain, you can walk to the moon,” Sharma said. “That's the quantity of food lying in India, and we have the largest population of hungry also in India.”
Sharma gives credit for this program, last year's massive farm loan waiver, and a jobs scheme that guarantees rural laborers at least 100 days of work each year to Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi. And he points out that the scale of these programs is unprecedented. “She has launched the world's largest social security program with the NREGA, and this is the world's largest food security program,” he said. “I can tell you she deserves the Nobel Prize.”
Part of a breathtaking array of landmark changes to public policy — many of which will also present a hefty bill to the exchequer — the new food security law will cost the government more than $10 billion at today's exchange rate. To foot the bill, the government will need to push forward with the sale of stakes in state-owned companies in the oil and gas sector and complete the sale of 3G telecom licenses. In a sense, therefore, it is both the mother of all social welfare policies and the biggest impetus for the growth-spurring economic reforms that business has long demanded.
More importantly, together with the UPA's groundbreaking Right to Information Act, which was passed in 2005, the national food security guarantee will be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the Public Distribution System (PDS) through which India already distributes subsidized food to the poor. Notorious for corruption — yes, people steal from the starving, too — the PDS was vulnerable to exploitative vendors because nobody was able to track where the food actually went.
But with the introduction of national identity cards with biometric and radio frequency technology to prevent fraud, which is also part of an anti-terrorism initiative of the home ministry, many believe there is a real chance of plugging the holes in the sieve.
Not everyone is convinced. According to Bibek Debroy, an economist at the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank, the vague plan to reform the PDS doesn't go nearly far enough to succeed. “It's a terrible idea,” Debroy said.
Citing the silence about just how the distribution system will be reformed and drawing attention to several past efforts that have failed ignobly, he argues that the solution is actually much more simple. Instead of funneling even more money through the PDS and making an unwieldy behemoth still larger, he said, India should put the monster out of its misery.
“The simple point I'm making is that it's far more efficient to have direct cash transfers,” he said, echoing an argument that has recently gained credence in international development circles.
Through the NREGS, India already has a database of the working poor, including their bank accounts, so it would be easy to transfer food subsidy money directly to them in the form of cash — a move that would slash the government's bill by as much as two-thirds and put thousands of corrupt officials out of business overnight. It would also eliminate an internal conflict between India's food policy and its farm policy: For farmers, the government continually tries to push prices up, while for the poor it struggles to push prices down.
india: the coming defense boom
With a new government, and a new nuclear deal with Washington, Delhi turns to the U.S. for military hardware.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 10, 2009 17:44 ET
NEW DELHI — With India's new government firmly in place, a top U.S. envoy landed in New Delhi Wednesday to discuss some key pacts to remove roadblocks for arms and aerospace companies keen to tap this country's $30 billion market for military hardware.
United States Undersecretary for Political Affairs William Burns visits New Delhi and Mumbai from June 10 to 13 to meet senior government officials and industry leaders and discuss “a broad agenda to further strengthen the partnership between the United States and India,” according to a State Department spokesman.
Following last year's pivotal Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement, which freed India from limitations on technology transfer imposed after its Pokhran-II nuclear test in 1998, the two nations need to hammer out an agreement that will allow U.S. companies to sell arms and high-end military electronics to India. Now that India's political left is out of the equation following last month's elections, Indian defense analysts expect these pacts to go through smoothly. India has a powerful desire to upgrade its military hardware and U.S. defense companies are more keen than ever to tap its potentially huge market — which could be worth as much as $80 billion by 2020.
According to Rahul Bedi, India correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly, India has already started the ball rolling for some big purchases from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, including 126 multi-role combat aircraft, eight maritime reconnaissance aircraft, 22 attack helicopters, 15 heavy lift helicopters and a Patriot missile defense system.
The completion of these deals would mark a substantial shift in India's military spending. “Broadly, India's largest supplier remains Russia,” said Bedi. “The second-largest over the last eight or nine years has been Israel. The U.S. is the new kid on the block.”
But there is more at stake than money. “An arms sale purchase relationship is a long-term relationship, and that has a political commitment to it as well,” said Dipankar Banerjee, a retired major general in the Indian army who is now a defense analyst with the New Delhi-based Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. “If an aircraft is purchased, it has to last three to five decades, so that relationship remains, not only between companies, but also it leads to a type of partnership between companies and countries that are important, are long-term, and are in the interest of both countries to sustain.”
Laying the groundwork for a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in July, Burns will also be keen to discuss two more controversial pacts, a logistical support agreement (LSA) similar to the one the U.S. has signed with the members of NATO and the proliferation security initiative (PSI), which is intended to prevent the spread of technologies used in nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction. Both of these agreements faced heavy opposition from India's communist parties.
According to analysts at New Delhi's Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, the LSA would require both countries to provide their bases, fuel and other kinds of logistics support to each others' fighter jets and naval warships. The left believed that this arrangement would compel India to adopt America's foreign policy goals and participate in its military adventures, but defense analysts say that is not how similar agreements with NATO countries have played out. Similarly, under the PSI, the Indian Navy would potentially be required to board and search vessels suspected of transporting sensitive nuclear technologies in the Indian Ocean.
“We should have an understanding on the PSI sooner rather than later,” said Banerjee. “It started off with only a small number of countries, and India was asked to adhere to some of its regulations. But India would like to be part of the organization that sets out the rules. That is the primary issue involved in the PSI.”
The stickiest part of the discussions won't have anything to do with Indo-U.S. agreements, however. India aims to wring some promises out of Burns (and, later, Clinton) regarding the ongoing U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where New Delhi perceives its interests are being undermined by America's eagerness to end the war on terror.
India is expected to take a tough line on the recent release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed — which New Delhi cites as evidence of the emptiness of Pakistan's promise to crack down on terrorists using it as a base of operations. And officials will also express concerns about the large military aid package that Washington has offered Islamabad as an incentive to take the fight to the Taliban on Pakistan's eastern border. India argues that Pakistan has in the past used U.S. aid to bulk up the conventional hardware it would need in a military confrontation with India, rather than the quick-strike gear needed for fighting terrorists.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 10, 2009 17:44 ET
NEW DELHI — With India's new government firmly in place, a top U.S. envoy landed in New Delhi Wednesday to discuss some key pacts to remove roadblocks for arms and aerospace companies keen to tap this country's $30 billion market for military hardware.
United States Undersecretary for Political Affairs William Burns visits New Delhi and Mumbai from June 10 to 13 to meet senior government officials and industry leaders and discuss “a broad agenda to further strengthen the partnership between the United States and India,” according to a State Department spokesman.
Following last year's pivotal Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement, which freed India from limitations on technology transfer imposed after its Pokhran-II nuclear test in 1998, the two nations need to hammer out an agreement that will allow U.S. companies to sell arms and high-end military electronics to India. Now that India's political left is out of the equation following last month's elections, Indian defense analysts expect these pacts to go through smoothly. India has a powerful desire to upgrade its military hardware and U.S. defense companies are more keen than ever to tap its potentially huge market — which could be worth as much as $80 billion by 2020.
According to Rahul Bedi, India correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly, India has already started the ball rolling for some big purchases from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, including 126 multi-role combat aircraft, eight maritime reconnaissance aircraft, 22 attack helicopters, 15 heavy lift helicopters and a Patriot missile defense system.
The completion of these deals would mark a substantial shift in India's military spending. “Broadly, India's largest supplier remains Russia,” said Bedi. “The second-largest over the last eight or nine years has been Israel. The U.S. is the new kid on the block.”
But there is more at stake than money. “An arms sale purchase relationship is a long-term relationship, and that has a political commitment to it as well,” said Dipankar Banerjee, a retired major general in the Indian army who is now a defense analyst with the New Delhi-based Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. “If an aircraft is purchased, it has to last three to five decades, so that relationship remains, not only between companies, but also it leads to a type of partnership between companies and countries that are important, are long-term, and are in the interest of both countries to sustain.”
Laying the groundwork for a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in July, Burns will also be keen to discuss two more controversial pacts, a logistical support agreement (LSA) similar to the one the U.S. has signed with the members of NATO and the proliferation security initiative (PSI), which is intended to prevent the spread of technologies used in nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction. Both of these agreements faced heavy opposition from India's communist parties.
According to analysts at New Delhi's Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, the LSA would require both countries to provide their bases, fuel and other kinds of logistics support to each others' fighter jets and naval warships. The left believed that this arrangement would compel India to adopt America's foreign policy goals and participate in its military adventures, but defense analysts say that is not how similar agreements with NATO countries have played out. Similarly, under the PSI, the Indian Navy would potentially be required to board and search vessels suspected of transporting sensitive nuclear technologies in the Indian Ocean.
“We should have an understanding on the PSI sooner rather than later,” said Banerjee. “It started off with only a small number of countries, and India was asked to adhere to some of its regulations. But India would like to be part of the organization that sets out the rules. That is the primary issue involved in the PSI.”
The stickiest part of the discussions won't have anything to do with Indo-U.S. agreements, however. India aims to wring some promises out of Burns (and, later, Clinton) regarding the ongoing U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where New Delhi perceives its interests are being undermined by America's eagerness to end the war on terror.
India is expected to take a tough line on the recent release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed — which New Delhi cites as evidence of the emptiness of Pakistan's promise to crack down on terrorists using it as a base of operations. And officials will also express concerns about the large military aid package that Washington has offered Islamabad as an incentive to take the fight to the Taliban on Pakistan's eastern border. India argues that Pakistan has in the past used U.S. aid to bulk up the conventional hardware it would need in a military confrontation with India, rather than the quick-strike gear needed for fighting terrorists.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Singh's 100-day plan to revolutionize India
He may be shy, but his 100-day plan for India is strikingly bold.
Jason Overdorf and Sudip Mazumdar
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009
For much of the past 15 years, Indian politics were so chaotic that a prime minister would spend most of his first 100 days focused on a single objective: holding onto power. But Manmohan Singh's surprisingly decisive victory in last month's election—coupled with the global economic crisis—has suddenly put him on an American president's schedule: you have 100 days, now get to work fast.
Believing that the Congress Party's near-majority in Parliament will free Singh to slash red tape and spur growth, bankers, columnists, lobbyists and think tanks have spent the time since the poll results were announced on May 16 issuing a torrent of to-do lists for the prime minister. But probably the boldest and most innovative agenda has come from Singh himself. Conceived during the election campaign, at a time when nobody else had much faith in him, his 100-day plan is filled with specific, substantive measures that range from selling stakes in state-owned companies to restructuring rules on public-private partnerships to removing bottlenecks that have delayed some $15 billion worth of road projects to enacting a new food-security law. Together, the advances might just amount to the big-bang reforms that India has been awaiting for nearly a decade now. And having vanquished his foes on the left and the right and earned the unquestioning faith of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, his party's leaders, Singh might even manage to get it all done.
Not everyone is happy with his plans. Despite being best-known as the architect of India's economic opening in 1991, today the prime minister's got other things on his mind. He, Sonia and Rahul are intent on reforming—or transforming—India, but not in a way prescribed by international moneymen or CEOs. Instead, under the shorthand "inclusive growth," they aim to carve out a new path that, if successful, could provide a road map for developing countries worldwide.
Central to their goal are measures some people might not consider reforms at all. First among them are a National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and a Right to Information Act (RTI). Decried by some economists as a populist sop, the NREGS is in fact designed to revolutionize India's leaky bureaucratic mechanism for dispersing money and to free the poor from exploitative middlemen by channeling an unprecedented level of funds (and decision-making power) to village-level elected officials. Singh believes that, like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, this stimulus plan will put money in the hands of the people most likely to spend it well and will create a social safety net that will help unleash their productive capacities. Meanwhile, Congress plans to expand the use of the RTI, which was enacted in 2005, and to pass a few new laws to make bureaucrats, politicians and judges more accountable by shining a bright light on their activities.
In a country where even the trash in a government wastebasket is frequently considered classified information, the RTI is groundbreaking. Under the law, ordinary people can for the first time get a look at the books of their local ration shops, say, or at government departments—and see what corrupt officials have been skimming off the top, delivering to fictitious beneficiaries, or just plain stealing. And because the information must be made available within 30 days or the official in charge will face immediate punishment, whistleblowers get results from RTI cases much faster than they would from India's progressive but slow-as-molasses legal system.
Still, until recently, no one has pushed RTI far enough to enjoy its full potential. Now Rahul is striving to do just that by urging youth to storm the barricades of the bureaucracy with an ever-expanding number of RTI cases. The effects could be revolutionary. In Uttar Pradesh—India's largest state and a place where the Congress Party made a huge and unexpected surge in the recent election—Shailendra Singh, a former police officer who now heads the party's RTI cell, became such an irritant in September that the state's chief minister, Mayawati, had him arrested. With the rise of Rahul's youth brigade, there could soon be thousands of other gadflies just as irritating.
This isn't to suggest that the prime minister's 100-day agenda is only aimed at the poor and destitute. It also includes controversial measures that bankers have been advocating for a long time, such as the sale of state-owned enterprises. Though Singh himself has only said that disinvestment of public-sector units "will be tackled by the finance minister in the budget," sales of shares in Oil India Ltd. and the hydropower firm NHPC Ltd.—which were approved for IPOs of 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively, in 2007 but then blocked by the left—are reported to top the agenda. Deregulation of the oil industry—another move the left opposed because it would mean higher prices at the pump—is now also expected to be put before the cabinet within six to eight weeks. Instead of a vague pledge to increase capacity, the Power ministry has promised to deliver 5,600 megawatts of new power by the end of August and to unveil three 4,000 megawatt projects in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Orissa within 100 days. Investors have already taken note, pumping more than $4 billion into Indian equity markets in May and sending the benchmark Sensex on a 28 percent climb.
It's no small irony that all these measures are being driven forward by such a humble, soft-spoken man. At public gatherings Singh often seems to step backward and offer the microphone to someone else. The modest prime minister was denigrated during the campaign as the weakest leader in India's history. But he has turned his apparent shortcomings as a politician—his poor oratorical skills and incapacity for court intrigue—into strengths. His reputation for honesty is unparalleled in a country where a fourth of the legislature faces criminal charges or investigations and politicians have come to be generally reviled. Singh's name has never been mentioned in association with any scandal. And his refusal to trumpet his achievements or play political games has endeared him to the public and given him a reputation for impartiality, which has allowed him to build consensus and should help him implement his agenda. "He's been a very good arbiter when two departments disagree, or there's a disagreement between ministers," said Transport Minister Kamal Nath, who was Commerce minister in charge of World Trade Organization negotiations during Singh's first term.
The prime minister has another big weapon helping him in his current campaign: he knows what he's talking about. The Oxford-educated economist has served as governor of India's central bank, head of its planning commission and as finance minister—a unique résumé for a world leader and an especially potent one during the current crisis. "Others have to depend on so many inputs, and have to be briefed and have to try to understand. He briefs the others. He's a man who understands the subject better than any world leader today," says Nath. In these economic times, it turns out, you can afford to speak softly—if you carry a big calculator.
Just as important as his own qualities, though, is the degree of support that Singh now enjoys from Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, the dynasty's emerging heir apparent. Singh today is not so much India's prime minister as the leader of its first triumvirate. Yet the clear division of responsibilities makes him more powerful, not less. With Sonia managing the internecine rivalries within the party and Rahul focused on rebuilding Congress's grassroots network, the prime minister can concentrate on policy, not the party's next campaign. It's a unique political formulation for India and, as the recent election showed, a formidable one. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was derailed by divisions among its various leaders, Sonia and Rahul squashed internal efforts to undermine Singh's candidacy, performed the heavy lifting for him on the campaign trail and protected him from opposition attacks. Since concerns about her Italian birth forced Sonia to make Singh her surrogate in 2004, the two have developed a strong relationship built on mutual trust and respect. That good feeling facilitated Rahul's entry into their troika and should help when he someday assumes the top spot. "Singh needs Sonia as much as Sonia needs him. And they work very well in tandem," says a senior Congress leader who asked not to be identified.
Singh is far from Sonia's puppet, as some allege. This became especially clear during the negotiation of the nuclear pact with the U.S. last year. Though there was much domestic pressure to scrap the deal, Singh managed to convince Sonia that it would end India's isolation and make it a much larger player in world affairs, even offering his resignation if the pact were scuttled, according to one of his former aides. Since then, with the emergence of Rahul, the team has become more effective. Though outwardly very different, the three leaders have much in common. For example, all are sensitive to the plight of India's minorities: Singh because he is a Sikh, Sonia because she was born a Christian and Rahul because he is linked through his grandfather to the tiny Parsi community. All three share a loathing for the Hindu supremacist rhetoric of the rival BJP. And all three are courteous and humble, traits that have endeared them to an electorate accustomed to imperious behavior from its pols.
Now the triumvirate's big challenge is living up to expectations. They face a slothful political system that is a holdover of the colonial mindset and they must contend with a culture of bureaucratic obstructionism that has outlasted many previous would-be reformers. Entrenched interests within Congress itself will also no doubt seek to derail Singh's programs and the Gandhis' efforts to make the party more democratic and to allow fresh faces to emerge. But with his newly enhanced grip on the reins of government, Singh knows that his 100-day deadline is a nominal one intended to light a fire underneath his subordinates. He has a full five years to perform. That said, the stakes couldn't be higher. This is more than Congress's big chance; it is India's. Failing to capitalize on it would be costly indeed, for the party, the country, and most of all, for its citizens.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/200866
Jason Overdorf and Sudip Mazumdar
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009
For much of the past 15 years, Indian politics were so chaotic that a prime minister would spend most of his first 100 days focused on a single objective: holding onto power. But Manmohan Singh's surprisingly decisive victory in last month's election—coupled with the global economic crisis—has suddenly put him on an American president's schedule: you have 100 days, now get to work fast.
Believing that the Congress Party's near-majority in Parliament will free Singh to slash red tape and spur growth, bankers, columnists, lobbyists and think tanks have spent the time since the poll results were announced on May 16 issuing a torrent of to-do lists for the prime minister. But probably the boldest and most innovative agenda has come from Singh himself. Conceived during the election campaign, at a time when nobody else had much faith in him, his 100-day plan is filled with specific, substantive measures that range from selling stakes in state-owned companies to restructuring rules on public-private partnerships to removing bottlenecks that have delayed some $15 billion worth of road projects to enacting a new food-security law. Together, the advances might just amount to the big-bang reforms that India has been awaiting for nearly a decade now. And having vanquished his foes on the left and the right and earned the unquestioning faith of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, his party's leaders, Singh might even manage to get it all done.
Not everyone is happy with his plans. Despite being best-known as the architect of India's economic opening in 1991, today the prime minister's got other things on his mind. He, Sonia and Rahul are intent on reforming—or transforming—India, but not in a way prescribed by international moneymen or CEOs. Instead, under the shorthand "inclusive growth," they aim to carve out a new path that, if successful, could provide a road map for developing countries worldwide.
Central to their goal are measures some people might not consider reforms at all. First among them are a National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and a Right to Information Act (RTI). Decried by some economists as a populist sop, the NREGS is in fact designed to revolutionize India's leaky bureaucratic mechanism for dispersing money and to free the poor from exploitative middlemen by channeling an unprecedented level of funds (and decision-making power) to village-level elected officials. Singh believes that, like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, this stimulus plan will put money in the hands of the people most likely to spend it well and will create a social safety net that will help unleash their productive capacities. Meanwhile, Congress plans to expand the use of the RTI, which was enacted in 2005, and to pass a few new laws to make bureaucrats, politicians and judges more accountable by shining a bright light on their activities.
In a country where even the trash in a government wastebasket is frequently considered classified information, the RTI is groundbreaking. Under the law, ordinary people can for the first time get a look at the books of their local ration shops, say, or at government departments—and see what corrupt officials have been skimming off the top, delivering to fictitious beneficiaries, or just plain stealing. And because the information must be made available within 30 days or the official in charge will face immediate punishment, whistleblowers get results from RTI cases much faster than they would from India's progressive but slow-as-molasses legal system.
Still, until recently, no one has pushed RTI far enough to enjoy its full potential. Now Rahul is striving to do just that by urging youth to storm the barricades of the bureaucracy with an ever-expanding number of RTI cases. The effects could be revolutionary. In Uttar Pradesh—India's largest state and a place where the Congress Party made a huge and unexpected surge in the recent election—Shailendra Singh, a former police officer who now heads the party's RTI cell, became such an irritant in September that the state's chief minister, Mayawati, had him arrested. With the rise of Rahul's youth brigade, there could soon be thousands of other gadflies just as irritating.
This isn't to suggest that the prime minister's 100-day agenda is only aimed at the poor and destitute. It also includes controversial measures that bankers have been advocating for a long time, such as the sale of state-owned enterprises. Though Singh himself has only said that disinvestment of public-sector units "will be tackled by the finance minister in the budget," sales of shares in Oil India Ltd. and the hydropower firm NHPC Ltd.—which were approved for IPOs of 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively, in 2007 but then blocked by the left—are reported to top the agenda. Deregulation of the oil industry—another move the left opposed because it would mean higher prices at the pump—is now also expected to be put before the cabinet within six to eight weeks. Instead of a vague pledge to increase capacity, the Power ministry has promised to deliver 5,600 megawatts of new power by the end of August and to unveil three 4,000 megawatt projects in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Orissa within 100 days. Investors have already taken note, pumping more than $4 billion into Indian equity markets in May and sending the benchmark Sensex on a 28 percent climb.
It's no small irony that all these measures are being driven forward by such a humble, soft-spoken man. At public gatherings Singh often seems to step backward and offer the microphone to someone else. The modest prime minister was denigrated during the campaign as the weakest leader in India's history. But he has turned his apparent shortcomings as a politician—his poor oratorical skills and incapacity for court intrigue—into strengths. His reputation for honesty is unparalleled in a country where a fourth of the legislature faces criminal charges or investigations and politicians have come to be generally reviled. Singh's name has never been mentioned in association with any scandal. And his refusal to trumpet his achievements or play political games has endeared him to the public and given him a reputation for impartiality, which has allowed him to build consensus and should help him implement his agenda. "He's been a very good arbiter when two departments disagree, or there's a disagreement between ministers," said Transport Minister Kamal Nath, who was Commerce minister in charge of World Trade Organization negotiations during Singh's first term.
The prime minister has another big weapon helping him in his current campaign: he knows what he's talking about. The Oxford-educated economist has served as governor of India's central bank, head of its planning commission and as finance minister—a unique résumé for a world leader and an especially potent one during the current crisis. "Others have to depend on so many inputs, and have to be briefed and have to try to understand. He briefs the others. He's a man who understands the subject better than any world leader today," says Nath. In these economic times, it turns out, you can afford to speak softly—if you carry a big calculator.
Just as important as his own qualities, though, is the degree of support that Singh now enjoys from Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, the dynasty's emerging heir apparent. Singh today is not so much India's prime minister as the leader of its first triumvirate. Yet the clear division of responsibilities makes him more powerful, not less. With Sonia managing the internecine rivalries within the party and Rahul focused on rebuilding Congress's grassroots network, the prime minister can concentrate on policy, not the party's next campaign. It's a unique political formulation for India and, as the recent election showed, a formidable one. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was derailed by divisions among its various leaders, Sonia and Rahul squashed internal efforts to undermine Singh's candidacy, performed the heavy lifting for him on the campaign trail and protected him from opposition attacks. Since concerns about her Italian birth forced Sonia to make Singh her surrogate in 2004, the two have developed a strong relationship built on mutual trust and respect. That good feeling facilitated Rahul's entry into their troika and should help when he someday assumes the top spot. "Singh needs Sonia as much as Sonia needs him. And they work very well in tandem," says a senior Congress leader who asked not to be identified.
Singh is far from Sonia's puppet, as some allege. This became especially clear during the negotiation of the nuclear pact with the U.S. last year. Though there was much domestic pressure to scrap the deal, Singh managed to convince Sonia that it would end India's isolation and make it a much larger player in world affairs, even offering his resignation if the pact were scuttled, according to one of his former aides. Since then, with the emergence of Rahul, the team has become more effective. Though outwardly very different, the three leaders have much in common. For example, all are sensitive to the plight of India's minorities: Singh because he is a Sikh, Sonia because she was born a Christian and Rahul because he is linked through his grandfather to the tiny Parsi community. All three share a loathing for the Hindu supremacist rhetoric of the rival BJP. And all three are courteous and humble, traits that have endeared them to an electorate accustomed to imperious behavior from its pols.
Now the triumvirate's big challenge is living up to expectations. They face a slothful political system that is a holdover of the colonial mindset and they must contend with a culture of bureaucratic obstructionism that has outlasted many previous would-be reformers. Entrenched interests within Congress itself will also no doubt seek to derail Singh's programs and the Gandhis' efforts to make the party more democratic and to allow fresh faces to emerge. But with his newly enhanced grip on the reins of government, Singh knows that his 100-day deadline is a nominal one intended to light a fire underneath his subordinates. He has a full five years to perform. That said, the stakes couldn't be higher. This is more than Congress's big chance; it is India's. Failing to capitalize on it would be costly indeed, for the party, the country, and most of all, for its citizens.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/200866
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
india's new government takes shape
The bar has been set high for Prime Minister Singh's first 100 days.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 20:03 ET
NEW DELHI, India — Most of the time, nobody expects too much out of the government in India.
The business of politics is business as usual, and the entrenched bureaucracy and revolving-door leadership seems designed to perpetuate the moribund status quo. But this election's surprise result has raised hopes so high that the shine could come off Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's big victory in as little as three months.
On the eve of swearing in the rest of his cabinet to complete the formation of the government Tuesday, Singh comes to power at a very difficult time. India is proving to be less immune to the global economic crisis than was originally supposed, stimulus packages and populist policies have left the country with a disturbingly high deficit, and observers from the left and right poles of the ideological spectrum are expecting bold, decisive actions in the new government's first 100 days — a ridiculously brief moment of time for an Indian administration.
“Even if you can't get a lot done in a hundred days, you can at least lay out a set of priorities that will be focused on in each ministry,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “If it doesn't come, the judgment repercussions will be fairly significant. The hope will start to die quite quickly.”
Most people will be expecting more than that. During the campaign, Singh himself promised to come out with a new economic stimulus within his first 100 days in office, and greedy appetites have been whetted by the action plans leaked by various government departments.
The 100-day actions being bandied about by bankers, economists and editorial writers comprise a wish list of social welfare measures and economic reforms that would be a tall order for a five year term. Thanks to the perception that the new government won't face opposition from allies, it includes items like starting a national urban poverty mission to complement the last term's rural employment guarantee scheme, boosting government revenue by divesting bloated state-owned enterprises, and further slashing bank lending rates for farmers and the poor. It also involves releasing some of the $8.5 billion of government money for infrastructure projects that has been stuck in the pipeline, and a host of other measures.
The initial signs look promising. For instance, the ministry of road transport, highways and shipping is reportedly planning to review and correct the implementation problems that derailed the national highways development program during Singh's first term, when the department failed to award contracts for road projects worth some $10 billion.
Similarly, the telecom ministry has vowed to finally get moving on the auction of 3G and Wimax licenses to spur further growth in the broadband Internet business. And reports are surfacing that the finance ministry is preparing for initial public offerings of state-owned companies like hydropower firm NHPC, Oil India Limited and infrastructure consultancy Rail India Technical and Economic Services, which would provide much needed revenue for the treasury.
Observers have also interpreted Singh's first moves in appointing cabinet ministers, announced Saturday, as a good sign. In the six key ministries that have been allotted — finance, home, external affairs, agriculture, defence, and railways — he has brought back experienced loyalists with reputations for efficiency, and managed to cede only the railways to an ally with the potential to be mercurial. The rest of the cabinet posts were yet to be announced at the time this article was published.
In many other areas, this government already has a course chalked out for it by the various commissions and study groups Singh set up during his first term, which the Congress party mentioned specifically in its election manifesto. These groups include bodies devoted to reforming the bureaucracy; addressing social security for the millions of workers employed by tiny, unregulated sweatshops; restructuring commodities pricing and other policies to boost the agricultural sector; and improving the quality and availability of education from the primary to postgraduate level. There are some 34 bills pending from the last parliamentary session, many of them stemming from these bodies.
But level-headed observers of India's political system say India has always been brilliant at forming committees and making plans; it's the actual doing that's the weakness. They also suggest that making hard choices may be nearly as difficult for this government as it was for the previous one. To start with, the economic crisis has rejuvenated the hoary old socialists of the Congress (at its nadir inspiring Sonia Gandhi to laud the nationalization of banks). But more importantly, the difficult economic times will mean that everybody is looking for handouts and that money will be tighter than ever.
“In the immediate future, there are fiscal issues,” said Gokarn. “How do you create resources that will sustain an infrastructure investment program, particularly as foreign investment inflows look to be rather sporadic and not very large over the next couple years? The other agendas will start to flow from that, depending on whether you have enough resources for the government to play a role or not.”
That means, like always, it will be easy to give things away—whether in the form of price subsidies or job programs—by increasing deficit spending. But it will remain difficult to initiate real change. What could be worse for Singh, is that there won't be anybody to blame for lack of progress this time around—the handy role of the Left last time--and the electorate's high expectations means that tolerance for business as usual will be especially low.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 20:03 ET
NEW DELHI, India — Most of the time, nobody expects too much out of the government in India.
The business of politics is business as usual, and the entrenched bureaucracy and revolving-door leadership seems designed to perpetuate the moribund status quo. But this election's surprise result has raised hopes so high that the shine could come off Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's big victory in as little as three months.
On the eve of swearing in the rest of his cabinet to complete the formation of the government Tuesday, Singh comes to power at a very difficult time. India is proving to be less immune to the global economic crisis than was originally supposed, stimulus packages and populist policies have left the country with a disturbingly high deficit, and observers from the left and right poles of the ideological spectrum are expecting bold, decisive actions in the new government's first 100 days — a ridiculously brief moment of time for an Indian administration.
“Even if you can't get a lot done in a hundred days, you can at least lay out a set of priorities that will be focused on in each ministry,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “If it doesn't come, the judgment repercussions will be fairly significant. The hope will start to die quite quickly.”
Most people will be expecting more than that. During the campaign, Singh himself promised to come out with a new economic stimulus within his first 100 days in office, and greedy appetites have been whetted by the action plans leaked by various government departments.
The 100-day actions being bandied about by bankers, economists and editorial writers comprise a wish list of social welfare measures and economic reforms that would be a tall order for a five year term. Thanks to the perception that the new government won't face opposition from allies, it includes items like starting a national urban poverty mission to complement the last term's rural employment guarantee scheme, boosting government revenue by divesting bloated state-owned enterprises, and further slashing bank lending rates for farmers and the poor. It also involves releasing some of the $8.5 billion of government money for infrastructure projects that has been stuck in the pipeline, and a host of other measures.
The initial signs look promising. For instance, the ministry of road transport, highways and shipping is reportedly planning to review and correct the implementation problems that derailed the national highways development program during Singh's first term, when the department failed to award contracts for road projects worth some $10 billion.
Similarly, the telecom ministry has vowed to finally get moving on the auction of 3G and Wimax licenses to spur further growth in the broadband Internet business. And reports are surfacing that the finance ministry is preparing for initial public offerings of state-owned companies like hydropower firm NHPC, Oil India Limited and infrastructure consultancy Rail India Technical and Economic Services, which would provide much needed revenue for the treasury.
Observers have also interpreted Singh's first moves in appointing cabinet ministers, announced Saturday, as a good sign. In the six key ministries that have been allotted — finance, home, external affairs, agriculture, defence, and railways — he has brought back experienced loyalists with reputations for efficiency, and managed to cede only the railways to an ally with the potential to be mercurial. The rest of the cabinet posts were yet to be announced at the time this article was published.
In many other areas, this government already has a course chalked out for it by the various commissions and study groups Singh set up during his first term, which the Congress party mentioned specifically in its election manifesto. These groups include bodies devoted to reforming the bureaucracy; addressing social security for the millions of workers employed by tiny, unregulated sweatshops; restructuring commodities pricing and other policies to boost the agricultural sector; and improving the quality and availability of education from the primary to postgraduate level. There are some 34 bills pending from the last parliamentary session, many of them stemming from these bodies.
But level-headed observers of India's political system say India has always been brilliant at forming committees and making plans; it's the actual doing that's the weakness. They also suggest that making hard choices may be nearly as difficult for this government as it was for the previous one. To start with, the economic crisis has rejuvenated the hoary old socialists of the Congress (at its nadir inspiring Sonia Gandhi to laud the nationalization of banks). But more importantly, the difficult economic times will mean that everybody is looking for handouts and that money will be tighter than ever.
“In the immediate future, there are fiscal issues,” said Gokarn. “How do you create resources that will sustain an infrastructure investment program, particularly as foreign investment inflows look to be rather sporadic and not very large over the next couple years? The other agendas will start to flow from that, depending on whether you have enough resources for the government to play a role or not.”
That means, like always, it will be easy to give things away—whether in the form of price subsidies or job programs—by increasing deficit spending. But it will remain difficult to initiate real change. What could be worse for Singh, is that there won't be anybody to blame for lack of progress this time around—the handy role of the Left last time--and the electorate's high expectations means that tolerance for business as usual will be especially low.
the whiskey diaries
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 06:28 ET
NEW DELHI — A funny thing happened while Scottish whiskey makers were fighting to pry open India's tightly controlled, protectionist liquor market: A mass market Indian booze maker in Bangalore decided to develop its own premium, small-batch single malt — and launch it worldwide.
What's more, the stuff is pretty darned good.
Indian owned and operated Amrut Distilleries has been distilling malt whiskey since the early 1980s, because India's excise laws prevented it from sourcing it abroad, and the company needed malt to mix with molasses-based alcohol to produce what's known in the trade as “Indian whiskey.”
As Indian consumers grew more sophisticated, though, the company started aging its malts longer and longer. And then one day, the patriarch of the family-owned business, chairman Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, pulled the trigger. “It was around '98 or '99, when we had enough [quantity] of matured malt whisky, that we thought, 'Why can't we look at the possibility of producing our own single malt?'” Jagdale said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.
Drawing on the expertise of Scottish consultants and a large network of professional tasters, the company spent the next four years developing its first single malt, and another two years developing a marketing plan. The first bottles hit shelves in the United Kingdom in 2004 with little fanfare. But over time, the Indian distillery — which produces nearly a million cases of mid-range Indian whiskey for every case of single malt — has slowly been collecting accolades. So far, it has won silver and bronze medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, at the Wine & Spirits Magazine International Spirits Challenge, and last year its Blackadder single malt was awarded the top prize in the sub-50 euros categories by Malt Maniacs.
Frankly, nobody was more surprised than the Indians. “Being an Indian and having tasted only molasses-based Indian whiskies for decades, you normally scoff when somebody says that India has produced a decent dram,” said Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad resident who has rated more than 1,000 single malts from Scotland, Japan and other countries as a member of Malt Maniacs. “[But] Amrut's whiskey is as good as any SMSW (single malt Scotch whiskey) that is produced any where in the world.”
And like Japanese Scotch makers, Amrut is succeeding. “Currently we are selling in the UK, where we have our global office, as well as in France, Germany, Belgium, a little bit of Italy and Holland as well,” Jagdale said. “The only major market that we have yet to enter is the United States.”
And India.
It may sound weird, but Amrut's single malts are only for export. That's because India has to be the strangest liquor market in the world. Due in part to the famous “Patiala peg” (the frightening large serving favored in the Punjab), India is the globe's biggest whiskey consumer — downing about 90 million cases a year. But that doesn't mean it always goes down smooth. Thanks to Gandhi's ideas on prohibition, booze is banned in Gujarat and attracts punitive taxes in other states. The sugar lobby has ensured that traditional tipples (a.k.a. “country liquor”) remain illegal. And though the premium market segment is growing fast, ludicrously high taxes on imported spirits still ensure that so-called Indian-Made Foreign Liquor — the locally produced, molasses-based, artificially flavored versions of vodka, gin and whiskey known in these parts as IMFL — remains the unrivaled king of the hill.
Now, that looks set to change. Scotch exports to India rose 19 percent to a value of £7 million in 2008, according to Scotch Whiskey Association estimates, even though genuine Scotch made up less than 1 percent of India's spirits market and the association has approached the European Union about making an official complaint to the World Trade Organization over India's prohibitive taxes. Single malts, too, are on the rise. Forecasting near 50 percent growth rates in single malt consumption, Bacardi launched Dewar's White Lable, Dewar's 12, Dewar’s Signature, Aberfeldy 12 and Aberfeldy 21 in India last year, and there's plenty of competition.
“There's a lot of room for growth, because the alcohol industry itself is changing from lower quality spirits and country liquor to higher quality alcohols,” said Jagdale, who also revealed that Amrut plans to start selling its own single malts in India by the beginning of next year.
That said, the jury is still out on whether Amrut will be able to call its single malts and other whiskeys “Scotch.” Last year, under pressure from the Scotch Whiskey Association, China agreed to prohibit any whiskey makers whose products are made outside of Scotland from calling their beverages Scotch, and a similar campaign is underway in India — which might be more amenable to the Scots' argument if its own claims on Basmati rice had been successful.
But to Jagdale, a malt by any other name, if it's a top-quality one that is, would smell as sweet.
“We are in the position to make high-quality malt whiskey which is equal and comparable to any malt whiskey in the world today,” he said. “Having been in the business so long — I am the second generation, and my son is the third generation — there is a bit of satisfaction that we all feel. I feel very happy that we are able to be in that class.”
May 26, 2009 06:28 ET
NEW DELHI — A funny thing happened while Scottish whiskey makers were fighting to pry open India's tightly controlled, protectionist liquor market: A mass market Indian booze maker in Bangalore decided to develop its own premium, small-batch single malt — and launch it worldwide.
What's more, the stuff is pretty darned good.
Indian owned and operated Amrut Distilleries has been distilling malt whiskey since the early 1980s, because India's excise laws prevented it from sourcing it abroad, and the company needed malt to mix with molasses-based alcohol to produce what's known in the trade as “Indian whiskey.”
As Indian consumers grew more sophisticated, though, the company started aging its malts longer and longer. And then one day, the patriarch of the family-owned business, chairman Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, pulled the trigger. “It was around '98 or '99, when we had enough [quantity] of matured malt whisky, that we thought, 'Why can't we look at the possibility of producing our own single malt?'” Jagdale said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.
Drawing on the expertise of Scottish consultants and a large network of professional tasters, the company spent the next four years developing its first single malt, and another two years developing a marketing plan. The first bottles hit shelves in the United Kingdom in 2004 with little fanfare. But over time, the Indian distillery — which produces nearly a million cases of mid-range Indian whiskey for every case of single malt — has slowly been collecting accolades. So far, it has won silver and bronze medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, at the Wine & Spirits Magazine International Spirits Challenge, and last year its Blackadder single malt was awarded the top prize in the sub-50 euros categories by Malt Maniacs.
Frankly, nobody was more surprised than the Indians. “Being an Indian and having tasted only molasses-based Indian whiskies for decades, you normally scoff when somebody says that India has produced a decent dram,” said Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad resident who has rated more than 1,000 single malts from Scotland, Japan and other countries as a member of Malt Maniacs. “[But] Amrut's whiskey is as good as any SMSW (single malt Scotch whiskey) that is produced any where in the world.”
And like Japanese Scotch makers, Amrut is succeeding. “Currently we are selling in the UK, where we have our global office, as well as in France, Germany, Belgium, a little bit of Italy and Holland as well,” Jagdale said. “The only major market that we have yet to enter is the United States.”
And India.
It may sound weird, but Amrut's single malts are only for export. That's because India has to be the strangest liquor market in the world. Due in part to the famous “Patiala peg” (the frightening large serving favored in the Punjab), India is the globe's biggest whiskey consumer — downing about 90 million cases a year. But that doesn't mean it always goes down smooth. Thanks to Gandhi's ideas on prohibition, booze is banned in Gujarat and attracts punitive taxes in other states. The sugar lobby has ensured that traditional tipples (a.k.a. “country liquor”) remain illegal. And though the premium market segment is growing fast, ludicrously high taxes on imported spirits still ensure that so-called Indian-Made Foreign Liquor — the locally produced, molasses-based, artificially flavored versions of vodka, gin and whiskey known in these parts as IMFL — remains the unrivaled king of the hill.
Now, that looks set to change. Scotch exports to India rose 19 percent to a value of £7 million in 2008, according to Scotch Whiskey Association estimates, even though genuine Scotch made up less than 1 percent of India's spirits market and the association has approached the European Union about making an official complaint to the World Trade Organization over India's prohibitive taxes. Single malts, too, are on the rise. Forecasting near 50 percent growth rates in single malt consumption, Bacardi launched Dewar's White Lable, Dewar's 12, Dewar’s Signature, Aberfeldy 12 and Aberfeldy 21 in India last year, and there's plenty of competition.
“There's a lot of room for growth, because the alcohol industry itself is changing from lower quality spirits and country liquor to higher quality alcohols,” said Jagdale, who also revealed that Amrut plans to start selling its own single malts in India by the beginning of next year.
That said, the jury is still out on whether Amrut will be able to call its single malts and other whiskeys “Scotch.” Last year, under pressure from the Scotch Whiskey Association, China agreed to prohibit any whiskey makers whose products are made outside of Scotland from calling their beverages Scotch, and a similar campaign is underway in India — which might be more amenable to the Scots' argument if its own claims on Basmati rice had been successful.
But to Jagdale, a malt by any other name, if it's a top-quality one that is, would smell as sweet.
“We are in the position to make high-quality malt whiskey which is equal and comparable to any malt whiskey in the world today,” he said. “Having been in the business so long — I am the second generation, and my son is the third generation — there is a bit of satisfaction that we all feel. I feel very happy that we are able to be in that class.”
Sunday, May 24, 2009
from the network that brought you MTV: child marriage
Can a TV sensation in modern India change an ancient tradition?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
in india, the congress wins big
Analysts see ruling party's decisive victory as a rejection of identity politics.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — In a shockingly one-sided victory, the ruling Congress Party's secular alliance defeated the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the month-long Indian general election, local media reported Saturday as results flooded in.
The surprise outcome means that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not only return to power, but also that his government won't depend on support from the Left, as exit polls predicted. With more than 70 percent of the votes counted, Indian television channels called the election for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), reporting that the Congress Party alone would win 200 parliamentary seats, and 257 seats together with its allies.
Previously, the most optimistic exit polls had suggested that the entire UPA coalition would win just 216 parliamentary seats and the Congress Party just 160. To form a majority government in India and select the prime minister, a single party or coalition must win 272 of 543 constituencies. Even if the UPA tally doesn't increase as counting finishes, with 257 seats it can easily attain a majority with the addition of one of the smaller parties that will be angling for influence.
The verdict vindicated Singh's steadfast refusal to give up last year's path-breaking nuclear pact with the U.S., which freed India from sanctions related to its noncompliance with the global Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was a vote for Congress-style secularism and acknowledgement of India's diversity over the BJP's ideology of ethnic chauvinism. And it proved that UPA programs like a national rural employment guarantee scheme, a huge waiver of loans to farmers, and an expansion of the quotas for the so-called lower-caste Indians in higher education resonated with voters.
“Overall, it is a resounding vote for development and good governance,” said Congress Party General Secretary Prithviraj Chavan.
Because India's communist parties continue to oppose the nuclear pact with the U.S. and remain suspicious of India's burgeoning economic and military ties with America, it is also a verdict that is sure to go down well in Washington. And because the Left blocked Singh from pushing forward with liberalizing India's economy — preventing progress on loosening labor laws, selling off state-owned enterprises, and opening up new sectors like retail to direct foreign investment — the results will also provide some unexpected cheer to the business community.
The Indian stock exchange, too, will doubtless get a boost on Monday from the prospect of a stable government that will almost certainly survive for its entire five-year term.
“Clearly, the perception of stability will be reinforced, so there's no fear of government collapse and mid-term elections,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “That's absolutely critical in these circumstances for medium- and long-term planning" of business activities and investments.
But the most exciting implications of these results lie in the complex terrain of India's domestic politics. The vote has been hailed as marking the official arrival of Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi as a major figure, signaling the decline of identity politics and sounding the death knell for religious extremism.
Throughout his early career, and, indeed, throughout this campaign, Rahul Gandhi — who is the direct descendant of three of India's most respected prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi — was decried as an untested political ingenue, much as John F. Kennedy Jr. was in the years shortly after he finally passed the bar exam.
This election was Rahul's first real test. Despite his inexperience he made some bold moves — convincing senior members of the party that the Congress should fight the elections alone rather than forming pre-poll alliances in several key states, for instance.
He was the party's chief campaigner, traveling constantly and logging thousands of kilometers by convoy and helicopter. He sometimes went as far as to ditch his security cordon to woo voters from India's poorest classes with symbolic gestures like eating meals in the homes of Dalits (the people once called Untouchables). In both respects, he was incredibly successful, simultaneously rejuvenating the Congress as a national force and shaking the stranglehold that the Dalit leader Mayawati held on Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's most populous state.
“It was a huge victory for him, at many levels,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank. “One, the fact that there's a revival underway in UP, where he took the decision to go without allies and campaigned very hard. Second, the Congress has done well in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Gujarat — these are the states where Rahul experimented with reviving the Youth Congress. In that sense, it might strengthen his hand about the kind of organization that is needed in the party.”
Longtime political observers now also say that the Congress's huge gains in UP — and its strong performance in many other states where pollsters and pundits had been predicting that regional parties based on caste and ethnic formulations would dominate — may signal an end to the identity-based voting that has ruled Indian politics since the mid-1980s.
In this regard, it wasn't just the gains that Rahul's Congress made against Mayawati in UP that were significant; also significant was the thumping defeat in Bihar of Lalu Prasad Yadav, a middle-caste icon once as powerful and controversial a figure in his state as Boss Tweed.
The verdict points toward an end of regional factionalism, Mehta said. “Two things are clearly coming out,” he said. “It's a vote against the politics of opportunism — all kinds of small parties and formulations [allied for cynical reasons]. The second interesting trend is that you cannot take any vote bank for granted. The things that we took for granted, the Muslim vote, the Dalit vote, were all up for grabs.”
For the Hindu nationalist BJP, the election was a total debacle. As the results rolled in on the local television network CNN/IBN, historian Ramachandra Guha drew attention to the electorate's rejection of divisive and extremist politics to call this “the most sensible verdict in an Indian election since 1977.”
As such, this will undoubtedly be the swan song for Lal Krishna Advani — who could not shake the reputation for prejudice and extremism he had acquired while spearheading the agitation that led to the destruction of the 16th century Babri mosque in 1992 — and it confirms that the BJP faces a full-on leadership crisis.
“We never imagined this unexpected result,” said BJP President Rajnath Singh as he conceded defeat and announced that the party would retreat to headquarters Saturday night for a long session of troubled soul-searching.
They have plenty of reason to worry. Analysts see the verdict as a rejection of jingoistic, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and some suggest this could relegate the BJP to a perennial also-ran. None of the BJP's attempts to polarize the electorate over issues like terrorism or the dredging of a canal through a natural land bridge that some devout Hindus believe was built by the god Ram ever got off the ground. And there are serious questions about whether the party's erstwhile alliance partners will accept Advani's heir apparent, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, due to his alleged role in the 2002 pogrom that killed as many as a thousand Muslims in Ahmedabad.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — In a shockingly one-sided victory, the ruling Congress Party's secular alliance defeated the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the month-long Indian general election, local media reported Saturday as results flooded in.
The surprise outcome means that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not only return to power, but also that his government won't depend on support from the Left, as exit polls predicted. With more than 70 percent of the votes counted, Indian television channels called the election for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), reporting that the Congress Party alone would win 200 parliamentary seats, and 257 seats together with its allies.
Previously, the most optimistic exit polls had suggested that the entire UPA coalition would win just 216 parliamentary seats and the Congress Party just 160. To form a majority government in India and select the prime minister, a single party or coalition must win 272 of 543 constituencies. Even if the UPA tally doesn't increase as counting finishes, with 257 seats it can easily attain a majority with the addition of one of the smaller parties that will be angling for influence.
The verdict vindicated Singh's steadfast refusal to give up last year's path-breaking nuclear pact with the U.S., which freed India from sanctions related to its noncompliance with the global Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was a vote for Congress-style secularism and acknowledgement of India's diversity over the BJP's ideology of ethnic chauvinism. And it proved that UPA programs like a national rural employment guarantee scheme, a huge waiver of loans to farmers, and an expansion of the quotas for the so-called lower-caste Indians in higher education resonated with voters.
“Overall, it is a resounding vote for development and good governance,” said Congress Party General Secretary Prithviraj Chavan.
Because India's communist parties continue to oppose the nuclear pact with the U.S. and remain suspicious of India's burgeoning economic and military ties with America, it is also a verdict that is sure to go down well in Washington. And because the Left blocked Singh from pushing forward with liberalizing India's economy — preventing progress on loosening labor laws, selling off state-owned enterprises, and opening up new sectors like retail to direct foreign investment — the results will also provide some unexpected cheer to the business community.
The Indian stock exchange, too, will doubtless get a boost on Monday from the prospect of a stable government that will almost certainly survive for its entire five-year term.
“Clearly, the perception of stability will be reinforced, so there's no fear of government collapse and mid-term elections,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “That's absolutely critical in these circumstances for medium- and long-term planning" of business activities and investments.
But the most exciting implications of these results lie in the complex terrain of India's domestic politics. The vote has been hailed as marking the official arrival of Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi as a major figure, signaling the decline of identity politics and sounding the death knell for religious extremism.
Throughout his early career, and, indeed, throughout this campaign, Rahul Gandhi — who is the direct descendant of three of India's most respected prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi — was decried as an untested political ingenue, much as John F. Kennedy Jr. was in the years shortly after he finally passed the bar exam.
This election was Rahul's first real test. Despite his inexperience he made some bold moves — convincing senior members of the party that the Congress should fight the elections alone rather than forming pre-poll alliances in several key states, for instance.
He was the party's chief campaigner, traveling constantly and logging thousands of kilometers by convoy and helicopter. He sometimes went as far as to ditch his security cordon to woo voters from India's poorest classes with symbolic gestures like eating meals in the homes of Dalits (the people once called Untouchables). In both respects, he was incredibly successful, simultaneously rejuvenating the Congress as a national force and shaking the stranglehold that the Dalit leader Mayawati held on Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's most populous state.
“It was a huge victory for him, at many levels,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank. “One, the fact that there's a revival underway in UP, where he took the decision to go without allies and campaigned very hard. Second, the Congress has done well in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Gujarat — these are the states where Rahul experimented with reviving the Youth Congress. In that sense, it might strengthen his hand about the kind of organization that is needed in the party.”
Longtime political observers now also say that the Congress's huge gains in UP — and its strong performance in many other states where pollsters and pundits had been predicting that regional parties based on caste and ethnic formulations would dominate — may signal an end to the identity-based voting that has ruled Indian politics since the mid-1980s.
In this regard, it wasn't just the gains that Rahul's Congress made against Mayawati in UP that were significant; also significant was the thumping defeat in Bihar of Lalu Prasad Yadav, a middle-caste icon once as powerful and controversial a figure in his state as Boss Tweed.
The verdict points toward an end of regional factionalism, Mehta said. “Two things are clearly coming out,” he said. “It's a vote against the politics of opportunism — all kinds of small parties and formulations [allied for cynical reasons]. The second interesting trend is that you cannot take any vote bank for granted. The things that we took for granted, the Muslim vote, the Dalit vote, were all up for grabs.”
For the Hindu nationalist BJP, the election was a total debacle. As the results rolled in on the local television network CNN/IBN, historian Ramachandra Guha drew attention to the electorate's rejection of divisive and extremist politics to call this “the most sensible verdict in an Indian election since 1977.”
As such, this will undoubtedly be the swan song for Lal Krishna Advani — who could not shake the reputation for prejudice and extremism he had acquired while spearheading the agitation that led to the destruction of the 16th century Babri mosque in 1992 — and it confirms that the BJP faces a full-on leadership crisis.
“We never imagined this unexpected result,” said BJP President Rajnath Singh as he conceded defeat and announced that the party would retreat to headquarters Saturday night for a long session of troubled soul-searching.
They have plenty of reason to worry. Analysts see the verdict as a rejection of jingoistic, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and some suggest this could relegate the BJP to a perennial also-ran. None of the BJP's attempts to polarize the electorate over issues like terrorism or the dredging of a canal through a natural land bridge that some devout Hindus believe was built by the god Ram ever got off the ground. And there are serious questions about whether the party's erstwhile alliance partners will accept Advani's heir apparent, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, due to his alleged role in the 2002 pogrom that killed as many as a thousand Muslims in Ahmedabad.
give it a good shake
By Jason Overdorf
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
Monday, May 04, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
in india, love hurts
With an increased emphasis on romantic love, and greater opportunities for women, more Indian marriages are breaking down.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: April 21, 2009
NEW DELHI — In India, love is in the air. Unfortunately, so is the raucous noise of lover's quarrels and the soporific drone of the court judge.
The flawed, but familiar, bonds of tradition are fading away. And there's nothing to replace them except for what Danny DeVito identified in "The War of the Roses" as the “two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?”
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip. Now, though, India is working on DeVito's second dilemma.
Women are gaining independence through education and a more important role in the workforce. Divorce laws have been made more liberal, and progressive legislation has been adopted to curb “bride burning” to extort dowries. Women no longer have to suffer psychological or physical abuse. More couples live in nuclear families instead of with the husband's mother and father, which ought to make things easier but has instead resulted in a relaxing of the unofficial ban on a wife's family butting into the couple's business.
And, perhaps most significantly, a new cultural obsession with romance and personal fulfillment has raised the bar for a happy marriage.
“If people have to be romantic and romance has to endure through thick and thin, the idea can be that if romance withers, the marriage is ended,” says Patricia Uberoi, a New Delhi-based sociologist.
India does not track a national divorce rate, but some analyses of the number of divorce petitions filed in municipal courts indicate that divorce has doubled since 1990 in trend-setting Mumbai and Delhi.
“Statistically the number of cases on the docket has exploded,” says Prosenjit Banerjee, a Delhi divorce lawyer. That means that even though the number of courts devoted to divorce proceedings has grown to around a dozen over the past 10 years, up from just four or five, there are still more than 30 cases listed before each court every day.
The phenomenon has already spread beyond the cosmopolitan centers.
Though the broadest available figures, from the National Family Health Survey, still place the figure much lower, some estimates now peg the (once negligible) national divorce rate at close to 6 percent. The statistical discrepancy that can probably be attributed to the glacial pace of the Indian courts, since the NFHS counted the number of divorced people and other estimates focus on the number of divorce cases.
At least among Internet users, the problem knows no geographical boundaries. About 60 percent of the 50,000 customers who have registered with SecondShaadi.com, an online matchmaking service for divorced Indians that launched a year ago, live outside India's five largest cities; more than a third live outside the 20 largest cities. “In a few years, we may not even be talking about divorce and remarriage as a stigma anymore,” says Vivek Pahwa, the company's chief executive.
For men and women trapped in bad marriages, that's wonderful news. Rani, a 23-year-old woman from the provincial town of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, for instance, applied for the courts after her husband sent her back to her parents a year into their marriage with a demand for a dowry supplement of 50,000 rupees (the equivalent of a year's salary in these parts). And when she gave birth to a daughter, her husband didn't even come to look at the baby. After three years of legal wrangling over the dowry — prohibited since 1961, though the law is widely flouted — she now says, “I want to be divorced this minute!”
But the state is flailing helplessly as it tries to balance tradition with modernity when it comes to the legal and law enforcement responses to marital discord.
Because a court-ordered divorce can take 15 years, women's attorneys often advise them to file dowry or domestic violence cases against their husbands instead, says Geeta Luthra, a lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues. The criminal courts are equally slow, but the threat of being arrested and spending time behind bars while their lawyer argues for bail exerts pressure on men to settle. That's unfortunate, Luthra says, because the “eight false cases” are making the one genuine dowry petitioner more difficult to believe.
The domestic violence act of 2005 poses another kind of threat: An abused wife can be awarded any “matrimonial home” that she resided in during her marriage — whether or not her husband holds the deed. “The idea is that by scaring the husband and his family they'll force them to settle. And the settlement basically means money,” Banerjee says. “The law is certainly being abused. That's not my assessment, that's the assessment of the high court and the supreme court.”
For men like Rakesh, a middle-class Delhi resident, this means almost weekly trips to court and the police station's special cell for women.
After he refused his wife's demand to move into a second home that his family owned and rented to tenants, his wife filed a police case against him and threatened to have him, his aging mother, his two brothers and their wives thrown in jail for dowry violations he maintains are completely fictitious. He tried to come up with a compromise — he even rented a house for the couple to live in separate from his family. But when nothing worked he filed for divorce.
Now when he's not at the special police division devoted to women's issues suffering verbal abuse in the guise of police-enforced couples counseling, he spends his time wondering whether today is the day he'll get the warning he's going to be arrested and should seek anticipatory bail.
Still, the terms of the debate over dowry and domestic violence cases sometimes suggest what's at stake is a disagreement over the traditions of marriage.
For instance, a web site designed to help men victimized by false cases asks, “Wife forcing you to live separately? Wife does not respect you and is discourteous to your parents?”
This sort of thing cuts both ways, says Luthra. Perhaps understandably, women are less tolerant and more demanding than ever before. But it's not uncommon for a man to sue for divorce on the grounds that his wife refuses to do the housework, fails to play the good hostess when his friends drop by, or is impolite to her in-laws. On the other hand, Luthra says that these days, among couples who don't live with the husband's parents, the wife's mother may call with advice 10 times a day.
That's a problem any culture — traditional or modern — can understand.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: April 21, 2009
NEW DELHI — In India, love is in the air. Unfortunately, so is the raucous noise of lover's quarrels and the soporific drone of the court judge.
The flawed, but familiar, bonds of tradition are fading away. And there's nothing to replace them except for what Danny DeVito identified in "The War of the Roses" as the “two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?”
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip. Now, though, India is working on DeVito's second dilemma.
Women are gaining independence through education and a more important role in the workforce. Divorce laws have been made more liberal, and progressive legislation has been adopted to curb “bride burning” to extort dowries. Women no longer have to suffer psychological or physical abuse. More couples live in nuclear families instead of with the husband's mother and father, which ought to make things easier but has instead resulted in a relaxing of the unofficial ban on a wife's family butting into the couple's business.
And, perhaps most significantly, a new cultural obsession with romance and personal fulfillment has raised the bar for a happy marriage.
“If people have to be romantic and romance has to endure through thick and thin, the idea can be that if romance withers, the marriage is ended,” says Patricia Uberoi, a New Delhi-based sociologist.
India does not track a national divorce rate, but some analyses of the number of divorce petitions filed in municipal courts indicate that divorce has doubled since 1990 in trend-setting Mumbai and Delhi.
“Statistically the number of cases on the docket has exploded,” says Prosenjit Banerjee, a Delhi divorce lawyer. That means that even though the number of courts devoted to divorce proceedings has grown to around a dozen over the past 10 years, up from just four or five, there are still more than 30 cases listed before each court every day.
The phenomenon has already spread beyond the cosmopolitan centers.
Though the broadest available figures, from the National Family Health Survey, still place the figure much lower, some estimates now peg the (once negligible) national divorce rate at close to 6 percent. The statistical discrepancy that can probably be attributed to the glacial pace of the Indian courts, since the NFHS counted the number of divorced people and other estimates focus on the number of divorce cases.
At least among Internet users, the problem knows no geographical boundaries. About 60 percent of the 50,000 customers who have registered with SecondShaadi.com, an online matchmaking service for divorced Indians that launched a year ago, live outside India's five largest cities; more than a third live outside the 20 largest cities. “In a few years, we may not even be talking about divorce and remarriage as a stigma anymore,” says Vivek Pahwa, the company's chief executive.
For men and women trapped in bad marriages, that's wonderful news. Rani, a 23-year-old woman from the provincial town of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, for instance, applied for the courts after her husband sent her back to her parents a year into their marriage with a demand for a dowry supplement of 50,000 rupees (the equivalent of a year's salary in these parts). And when she gave birth to a daughter, her husband didn't even come to look at the baby. After three years of legal wrangling over the dowry — prohibited since 1961, though the law is widely flouted — she now says, “I want to be divorced this minute!”
But the state is flailing helplessly as it tries to balance tradition with modernity when it comes to the legal and law enforcement responses to marital discord.
Because a court-ordered divorce can take 15 years, women's attorneys often advise them to file dowry or domestic violence cases against their husbands instead, says Geeta Luthra, a lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues. The criminal courts are equally slow, but the threat of being arrested and spending time behind bars while their lawyer argues for bail exerts pressure on men to settle. That's unfortunate, Luthra says, because the “eight false cases” are making the one genuine dowry petitioner more difficult to believe.
The domestic violence act of 2005 poses another kind of threat: An abused wife can be awarded any “matrimonial home” that she resided in during her marriage — whether or not her husband holds the deed. “The idea is that by scaring the husband and his family they'll force them to settle. And the settlement basically means money,” Banerjee says. “The law is certainly being abused. That's not my assessment, that's the assessment of the high court and the supreme court.”
For men like Rakesh, a middle-class Delhi resident, this means almost weekly trips to court and the police station's special cell for women.
After he refused his wife's demand to move into a second home that his family owned and rented to tenants, his wife filed a police case against him and threatened to have him, his aging mother, his two brothers and their wives thrown in jail for dowry violations he maintains are completely fictitious. He tried to come up with a compromise — he even rented a house for the couple to live in separate from his family. But when nothing worked he filed for divorce.
Now when he's not at the special police division devoted to women's issues suffering verbal abuse in the guise of police-enforced couples counseling, he spends his time wondering whether today is the day he'll get the warning he's going to be arrested and should seek anticipatory bail.
Still, the terms of the debate over dowry and domestic violence cases sometimes suggest what's at stake is a disagreement over the traditions of marriage.
For instance, a web site designed to help men victimized by false cases asks, “Wife forcing you to live separately? Wife does not respect you and is discourteous to your parents?”
This sort of thing cuts both ways, says Luthra. Perhaps understandably, women are less tolerant and more demanding than ever before. But it's not uncommon for a man to sue for divorce on the grounds that his wife refuses to do the housework, fails to play the good hostess when his friends drop by, or is impolite to her in-laws. On the other hand, Luthra says that these days, among couples who don't live with the husband's parents, the wife's mother may call with advice 10 times a day.
That's a problem any culture — traditional or modern — can understand.
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