A soldier turned on his own unit in Kashmir, killing 4 and raising specter of morale crisis in Indian army.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 30
NEW DELHI, India — An Indian soldier stationed in Indian-administered Kashmir opened fire on his own unit Thursday, killing four comrades and again raising the specter of a morale crisis in the world's second-largest standing army.
“In an unfortunate incident today [Thursday] morning, Havildar [Sgt.] Abhay Kumar, for unexplained reasons, fired at his own colleagues resulting in the death of one junior commissioned officer and three other ranks," local newspapers quoted army spokesman Lt. Col. J.S. Brar as saying.
Apparently triggered by Sgt. Kumar's anger over a public dressing down he received from a superior officer, the alleged fratricide was the first incident of fragging in Indian-administered Kashmir in two years. Various measures have been implemented to ward off such incidents and to boost troop morale "such as constant counseling by superiors and religious teachers, regular rest, yoga and other such means," according to Brar.
But as India simultaneously reduces the numbers of boots on the ground in the disputed territory and seeks a better engagement with the local population to win hearts and minds, the shooting raises concerns that despite a lull in militant activity, the psychological pressure on soldiers is as great as ever.
"The soldiers come to Kashmir from mainland India," said Noor Ahmad Baba, a professor at Kashmir University. "They come from a different sociocultural context. They have no empathy with the people, and the people have no empathy with them. The people of Kashmir don't trust them and they don't trust us."
After a rash of fragging incidents in 2006, which saw 23 cases of fratricide among the country's armed forces, the Indian army took a number of measures to relieve the pressure on soldiers in fraught areas like Kashmir, where the government is battling separatists.
Along with a pay raise and an increase in food rations for troops stationed above 12,000 feet, the army liberalized its leave policy to allow soldiers to deal with family problems — a major source of stress, according to a study by the Defence Institute of Psychological Research.
And though both suicides and fratricides continued — there were 520 such cases between 2006 and 2009, according to a statement given in parliament by the defense minister — as of last year the new measures had brought suicides down to an all-time low and virtually eliminated fragging.
But according to Dr. Rajat Mitra, a psychologist who specializes in violent behavior, the army's efforts have been mainly cosmetic. Untrained and inexperienced psychologists were dispatched to treat troops in the field and counseling programs were designed to meet deadlines rather than to provide real help, he said. One military officer asked Mitra to recommend someone less-experienced when he objected to the timebound, goal-oriented therapy program, Mitra said.
Moreover, even though introducing yoga classes might sound touchy-feely, no effort has been undertaken to change the culture of command — in which officers are disdainful toward the feelings of their men and reluctant to treat them humanely.
"In this situation, the [soldier] was humiliated in front of other people and he was teased about it," Mitra said. "The same thing could have been done by him in a more gentle and empathetic manner, and it would have been more effective."
Interestingly, there is little correlation between the fierceness of combat and these incidents, as suicides and fratricides spiked in Kashmir even as militant violence waned. In fact, studies found, it was most often grinding problems with family members left back home that drove soldiers to violence — not the fear of battle or post traumatic stress disorder.
Through interviews with around 200 officers and 900 soldiers stationed in Kashmir, Col. K.C. Dixit, a research fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, found that most cases of violence and suicide stemmed from problems like marital discord, property disputes and heavy debts rather than stress related to policing an insurgency-affected region.
In 2008, for instance, 13 out of 18 suicides and attempted suicides resulted due to domestic problems, two from failed love affairs and two due to previously diagnosed psychological disorders. Only one case was traced directly to the stress of active duty.
Nevertheless, in at least one respect, so-called "operational stress" is likely to get worse before it gets better as India seeks to turn its million-man army into a modern fighting force.
There is a wide cultural gap — sustained by an inherently prejudicial system — between soldiers and officers, though it has never been linked officially to morale problems.
According to Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta of the Brookings Institution, India suffers an "acute shortage" of junior officers because the country's economic rise has made a military career less attractive for the middle class. The army leadership has resisted reforming the system to allow enlisted men to win commissions based on performance in the field.
"Even if you are good, you cannot hope to rise, so there is a deep sense of frustration," said Mitra. "There's a feeling of us versus them. That runs very deep."
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
India's untouchables make millions
Members of the lowest caste have proven themselves as entrepreneurs and India's elite is turning to them for business advice.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 22, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Not long ago, some of India's most influential economic planners sat down with a group of Dalits — India's erstwhile untouchables — to get, of all things, some business advice.
Though brutally oppressed for thousands of years, Dalits have benefited from education and job quotas in recent years. Some have struck out on their own to become entrepreneurs — and successful ones at that.
India's Planning Commission, which formulates the government's five-year spending plans, is taking notes.
"To be honest, the Planning Commission was stunned to find out the scope and size of our businesses," said Milind Kamble, a 43-year-old construction business owner who heads the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"We told them we are also contributing to GDP also and generating employment also."
India's Dalit castes were once forced to perform jobs that the Hindu religion deems polluting — like sweeping floors, making shoes and cleaning toilets.
And even though India outlawed untouchability in 1950 and established quotas in government, higher education and public sector jobs, Dalits still suffer from social and economic discrimination, according to a recent book by economist Sukhadeo Thorat. Dalits are still twice as likely to be wage laborers than Indians from other castes, for instance, and they are still routinely denied access to tea shops, water pumps and barber shops.
However, since the economic liberalization of 1991 — when India dismantled the planned economy system of quotas for manufacturing — a growing number of the Dalits have — without connections or capital — had varying degrees of business success.
"Including mine, most of the big Dalit-owned businesses are 15 years old," said Kamble. "With the emergence of globalization and the disappearance of the License-Permit Raj, many opportunities appeared and many of us jumped on them. Multinationals started rushing in, and business expanded in a big way."
The 30 Dalit business owners who met with the Planning Commission — which formulates the five-year plans that map out for the government how best to spend its resources — are just the tip of the iceberg, the Dalit chamber of commerce claims.
According to a spokesman, the Maharashtra-based organization has more than 1,500 members. Kamble estimates that there are 10 times that number of Dalit entrepreneurs across India. Combined, their companies generate about $4.5 billion in revenue and employ more than 50,000 people. And apart from gaining access to education through mandatory "reservations," they built their businesses without government help.
"The Planning Commission was stunned when they asked how many of us used government schemes to build their businesses," said Kamble. "Only one entrepreneur from Mumbai raised his hand and described how he'd applied for $20,000, spent three years visiting government offices to chase his money and finally got $15,000."
For the government advisory body, that was more inspiring than depressing — considering the increasing clamor for the expansion of welfare programs, escalating demands for establishing education and job quotas for more and more groups, and calls to extend the job quota system to the private sector as well as government jobs.
"The Dalits reframed the topic from give me the grants and reservations ..." said Boston Consulting Group's India chairman Arun Maira, a member of the Planning Commission since 2009. "Any time someone starts to make suggestions from a very practical exposition of their own situation ... that's a very interesting conversation to have."
Local press reports suggest that the Planning Commission is now considering measures such as launching executive training programs for Dalit business owners at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management, raising the limit on loans offered to Dalit businesses through the main government program for encouraging industries run by economically weaker sections of society and making Dalit entrepreneurs eligible for special lending rates from key state banks.
But according to Surinder Jodhka, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University who recently conducted a study of first-generation Dalit entrepreneurs, the Planning Commission is trying to present a picture that looks rosier than the reality warrants — precisely because of the renewed calls for state intervention that threaten efforts to liberalize the economy further through labor reforms and other measures.
"There are of course [Dalits] who are doing very well," Jodhka said. "But the absolute numbers in proportion to the Dalit population is statistically insignificant. To see it as a trend or something which is going to become a routine thing is an overstatement."
Meanwhile, the obstacles preventing most Dalits from pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps go way beyond discrimination.
Most Dalits have almost no assets, so startup loans are nearly impossible to get — even when the government announces a special scheme. As new entrants, they lack the familial and social connections on which most small-scale businesses depend — a problem that can be exacerbated by prejudice. And in a country where trade has always been connected to caste, many find it difficult to master the intangible "style" of the marketplace. They simply don't fit in.
Take the case of 68-year-old Ratibhai Makwana, who heads an Ahmedabad-based plastics conglomerate called Gujarat Pickers. With more than $20 million in annual revenue, Makwana's company has been growing more than 10 percent per year for the past three years. But it wasn't easy getting started.
When his father tried to break into leather manufacturing — a natural extension of a traditional "polluting" occupation — in 1962, banks refused to grant him a loan. When they expanded into textiles, their association with leather-making meant that they had to deal with high-caste middlemen rather than sell directly to the mills. And once they were granted a distributorship, their high-caste rivals organized a boycott.
"This all happened because I was a Dalit," Makwana said.
Rajender Gaikwad, the 49-year-old head of GT Pest Control, tells a similar story. Once a sprayer himself, today he employs 400 people in four Indian states, has already opened for business in Singapore and plans to enter Malaysia and Thailand soon. But he faced plenty of obstacles along the way.
"I had no money. I used to take money from money lenders even on high interest rate of sometimes 20, 25 percent," Gaikwad said. "And back when my business was still small, a lot of the checks people used to give me would bounce. People were not giving me my hard-earned money."
Those stories don't surprise Jawaharlal Nehru University's Jodhka. Surveying prosperous regions in Punjab, he found that lack of access to loans or capital forced most Dalit entrepreneurs into businesses like running a small grocery shop or an agency for a cooking gas distributor. Fewer than 2 percent operated more capital-intensive enterprises such as hotels or factories.
"People need jobs. People need secure employment," said Jodhka. "Entrepreneurship is fine ... but it's tough. Whatever has happened over the last 70 to 80 years has been due to state policies — the new Dalit middle class, Dalit politics, etc. If you ask them, they all give credit to reservations."
However committed they are to self-reliance, Kamble, Makwana and Gaikwad agree. All three of them argued that India's system of job and education quotas must be continued for 10 to 25 years to complete the uplift of the oppressed castes.
All three also suggested that the government could redefine the conventional wisdom about quotas to include not just jobs and seats in universities, but also business loans, tax breaks and advantages in the tender process for government contracts.
"This is only the beginning," said Gaikwad. "Businessmen are coming forward, but they need support from the government. If the government supports entrepreneurs, then there will be lot more people like me."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 22, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Not long ago, some of India's most influential economic planners sat down with a group of Dalits — India's erstwhile untouchables — to get, of all things, some business advice.
Though brutally oppressed for thousands of years, Dalits have benefited from education and job quotas in recent years. Some have struck out on their own to become entrepreneurs — and successful ones at that.
India's Planning Commission, which formulates the government's five-year spending plans, is taking notes.
"To be honest, the Planning Commission was stunned to find out the scope and size of our businesses," said Milind Kamble, a 43-year-old construction business owner who heads the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"We told them we are also contributing to GDP also and generating employment also."
India's Dalit castes were once forced to perform jobs that the Hindu religion deems polluting — like sweeping floors, making shoes and cleaning toilets.
And even though India outlawed untouchability in 1950 and established quotas in government, higher education and public sector jobs, Dalits still suffer from social and economic discrimination, according to a recent book by economist Sukhadeo Thorat. Dalits are still twice as likely to be wage laborers than Indians from other castes, for instance, and they are still routinely denied access to tea shops, water pumps and barber shops.
However, since the economic liberalization of 1991 — when India dismantled the planned economy system of quotas for manufacturing — a growing number of the Dalits have — without connections or capital — had varying degrees of business success.
"Including mine, most of the big Dalit-owned businesses are 15 years old," said Kamble. "With the emergence of globalization and the disappearance of the License-Permit Raj, many opportunities appeared and many of us jumped on them. Multinationals started rushing in, and business expanded in a big way."
The 30 Dalit business owners who met with the Planning Commission — which formulates the five-year plans that map out for the government how best to spend its resources — are just the tip of the iceberg, the Dalit chamber of commerce claims.
According to a spokesman, the Maharashtra-based organization has more than 1,500 members. Kamble estimates that there are 10 times that number of Dalit entrepreneurs across India. Combined, their companies generate about $4.5 billion in revenue and employ more than 50,000 people. And apart from gaining access to education through mandatory "reservations," they built their businesses without government help.
"The Planning Commission was stunned when they asked how many of us used government schemes to build their businesses," said Kamble. "Only one entrepreneur from Mumbai raised his hand and described how he'd applied for $20,000, spent three years visiting government offices to chase his money and finally got $15,000."
For the government advisory body, that was more inspiring than depressing — considering the increasing clamor for the expansion of welfare programs, escalating demands for establishing education and job quotas for more and more groups, and calls to extend the job quota system to the private sector as well as government jobs.
"The Dalits reframed the topic from give me the grants and reservations ..." said Boston Consulting Group's India chairman Arun Maira, a member of the Planning Commission since 2009. "Any time someone starts to make suggestions from a very practical exposition of their own situation ... that's a very interesting conversation to have."
Local press reports suggest that the Planning Commission is now considering measures such as launching executive training programs for Dalit business owners at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management, raising the limit on loans offered to Dalit businesses through the main government program for encouraging industries run by economically weaker sections of society and making Dalit entrepreneurs eligible for special lending rates from key state banks.
But according to Surinder Jodhka, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University who recently conducted a study of first-generation Dalit entrepreneurs, the Planning Commission is trying to present a picture that looks rosier than the reality warrants — precisely because of the renewed calls for state intervention that threaten efforts to liberalize the economy further through labor reforms and other measures.
"There are of course [Dalits] who are doing very well," Jodhka said. "But the absolute numbers in proportion to the Dalit population is statistically insignificant. To see it as a trend or something which is going to become a routine thing is an overstatement."
Meanwhile, the obstacles preventing most Dalits from pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps go way beyond discrimination.
Most Dalits have almost no assets, so startup loans are nearly impossible to get — even when the government announces a special scheme. As new entrants, they lack the familial and social connections on which most small-scale businesses depend — a problem that can be exacerbated by prejudice. And in a country where trade has always been connected to caste, many find it difficult to master the intangible "style" of the marketplace. They simply don't fit in.
Take the case of 68-year-old Ratibhai Makwana, who heads an Ahmedabad-based plastics conglomerate called Gujarat Pickers. With more than $20 million in annual revenue, Makwana's company has been growing more than 10 percent per year for the past three years. But it wasn't easy getting started.
When his father tried to break into leather manufacturing — a natural extension of a traditional "polluting" occupation — in 1962, banks refused to grant him a loan. When they expanded into textiles, their association with leather-making meant that they had to deal with high-caste middlemen rather than sell directly to the mills. And once they were granted a distributorship, their high-caste rivals organized a boycott.
"This all happened because I was a Dalit," Makwana said.
Rajender Gaikwad, the 49-year-old head of GT Pest Control, tells a similar story. Once a sprayer himself, today he employs 400 people in four Indian states, has already opened for business in Singapore and plans to enter Malaysia and Thailand soon. But he faced plenty of obstacles along the way.
"I had no money. I used to take money from money lenders even on high interest rate of sometimes 20, 25 percent," Gaikwad said. "And back when my business was still small, a lot of the checks people used to give me would bounce. People were not giving me my hard-earned money."
Those stories don't surprise Jawaharlal Nehru University's Jodhka. Surveying prosperous regions in Punjab, he found that lack of access to loans or capital forced most Dalit entrepreneurs into businesses like running a small grocery shop or an agency for a cooking gas distributor. Fewer than 2 percent operated more capital-intensive enterprises such as hotels or factories.
"People need jobs. People need secure employment," said Jodhka. "Entrepreneurship is fine ... but it's tough. Whatever has happened over the last 70 to 80 years has been due to state policies — the new Dalit middle class, Dalit politics, etc. If you ask them, they all give credit to reservations."
However committed they are to self-reliance, Kamble, Makwana and Gaikwad agree. All three of them argued that India's system of job and education quotas must be continued for 10 to 25 years to complete the uplift of the oppressed castes.
All three also suggested that the government could redefine the conventional wisdom about quotas to include not just jobs and seats in universities, but also business loans, tax breaks and advantages in the tender process for government contracts.
"This is only the beginning," said Gaikwad. "Businessmen are coming forward, but they need support from the government. If the government supports entrepreneurs, then there will be lot more people like me."
Thursday, April 07, 2011
The Shiva Rules: India's nuclear nightmare?
Critics say India is woefully unprepared to handle the world's largest nuclear plant.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 7, 2011
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
JAITAPUR, India — When Vijay Raut talks about the government's plans to throw the villagers of Madbad off their land to make way for the world's largest nuclear power plant, his voice quickly rises in volume. The tendons stand out in his neck as he describes how government officials and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) have trampled local resistance.
“Is this a democracy?” demands Raut, who was jailed along with some 18 protesters after what local police termed a riot in early March. “They came and started the survey without even explaining the purpose properly to us. Then they would not let us talk as a single voice. When they came to negotiate for the land in 2006-07, if at all you could call it that, they would not let us even stand around as a group. Individual farmers were called in to tell them their land was being acquired.”
Residents like Raut have strong incentives to fight. As yet undiscovered by travelers, this part of the Konkan coast in the Indian state of Maharashtra — about 150 kilometers from foreign tourists' beloved Goa — rivals the beauty of romantic locales like Puerto Vallarta. But local fishermen and mango farmers are not the only ones who should be concerned.
When the United States inked a controversial civilian nuclear agreement with India in 2008, the biggest fear for Americans was that the pact would encourage other would-be nuclear weapons states by letting India skate past the non-proliferation treaty. But after the near-meltdown in meticulous Japan last month, it's beginning to look like the real risk may come from the reactors themselves — even as the world's nuclear industry looks to India and China to spark a renaissance in nuclear power.
Can India handle disaster?
"In contrast [to Japan], in India we are most disorganized and unprepared for the handling of emergencies of any kind of even much less severity," said A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), in an email to GlobalPost. "The AERB's disaster preparedness oversight is mostly on paper and the drills they once in awhile conduct are half-hearted efforts which amount to more [of] a sham."
India suffers from an increasingly worrisome shortage of electricity. Today, the country faces a shortfall of around 10 percent. Blackouts, or "power cuts" due to load shedding, are a daily reality in most areas, and nearly half the households in the country don't have electricity. Meanwhile, demand for power is rising more than 10 percent a year due to industrialization and rising incomes.
But is the country's plan to dramatically increase its production of nuclear power the solution?
In Jaitapur, a cluster of villages about 375 kilometers from Mumbai, New Delhi has inked an agreement with France's Areva Group to build the first two of a planned six Evolutionary Pressurized Reactors (EPR), each capable of producing 1,650 megawatts of electricity, in what promises to be the world's largest nuclear power facility when it is completed.
But according to the plans dangled before the nuclear industry in the course of negotiating the India-U.S. civil nuclear pact, that's only the first step in a breakneck sprint. In 2008, India boosted its forecasts for nuclear power production from a target of 20 gigawatts by 2020 to 275 gigawatts by 2050 to entice the nuclear suppliers' group to grant a waiver allowing it to import civilian nuclear technology and fuel. After getting the waiver, it boosted the target again, to 455 gigawatts by 2050 — a hundredfold increase in its present capacity.
The speed of that expansion is frightening — especially considering India has already had several near misses.
India's track record
According to Benjamin Sovacool, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, "the Tarapur nuclear power plant suffered a partial meltdown in 1979; a fire and explosion forced the closure of the Narora power plant in 1993; the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station at Kota leaked radioactive water into a lake for two months until it was detected in 1995; and, in December 2006, one of the pipes carrying radioactive waste from the uranium enrichment facility at Jadugoda burst and distributed highly radioactive materials as far as 100 km away."
India's nuclear establishment has repeatedly downplayed the risks at its facilities since the Fukushima crisis, and the regulatory board's chairman, S.S. Bajaj, disputed some of the reports cited in Sovacool's paper. "India has not experienced any accident in its nuclear power plants involving release of radioactivity in public domain," Bajaj said in an emailed reply to questions from GlobalPost.
"The worst accident was the Narora fire in 1993, which resulted in station blackout. Operators were able to successfully implement the necessary emergency operating procedures, and cool the core safely. Based on the experience from this event, detailed reviews and upgradations [sic] were carried out at all [nuclear power plants] in India," he said.
The need for an independent regulator
Safety is hardly the only issue of concern when it comes to India's plans for nuclear expansion.
Even as the central government debates changes to land acquisition laws that led to deadly riots in West Bengal in 2007, it's steamrolling ahead with a forcible "land grab" in Maharashtra to smooth the way for the first big-ticket nuclear project signed after the India-U.S. nuclear pact.
In what critics allege is quid pro quo for French support for the move to let India bypass the non-proliferation treaty, India granted the contract to Areva without inviting tenders from competitors — potentially making the green power generated by the project too costly for ordinary Indians to afford.
And the lines separating India's nuclear industry and its nuclear regulator are too blurry to allow for independent assessment of risks.
“It is probably time to have an independent regulatory authority which is separate from the Department of Atomic Energy, something on the lines of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said in an interview with the Indian Express earlier this month, following claims that conflict of interest influenced the regulatory board's radiological impact assessment for the Jaitapur project. On Wednesday, he wrote a letter to the prime minister opposing large nuclear parks like the one proposed for Jaitapur, saying "Jaitapur will have 10,000 MW capacity. Is it wise?"
Even before the disaster at Fukushima, Areva's plans for Jaitapur had prompted serious questions from Indian anti-nuclear groups like the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP). Apart from general objections related to the size and potential impact of the project in the case of an accident, the coalition drew attention to Areva's design for the pressurized reactors — which it criticized as an "untested" technology.
The safety of the reactors' failsafe controls been called into question by nuclear regulators in Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States. And the pressurized reactor projects that Areva has underway in Finland and France have been plagued by delays caused by apparently basic errors in construction — like failing to pour concrete or weld steel structures to technical specifications. Scholars opposed to nuclear power agree.
Areva's growing pains
"The previous design from Areva [the N4, four units built in France in the late 1990s] had design flaws that were only discovered after plant completion, and the construction record at Olkiluoto and Flamanville is awful," said Stephen Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich. "Until Areva has units built to time and cost and they are operating reliably, why [should India] take the risk?"
In an emailed response to queries from GlobalPost, Areva said that the safety authorities who questioned the designs for pressurized reactors said the issues identified "do not put into any doubt the overall safety of the EPR reactor itself" and added that the U.K.'s Health and Safety Executive has already accepted its designed modifications.
Concerning its construction problems, the company declined to specify the cost overruns that errors and delays entailed. But it pointed out that its added experience since means it is unlikely to face the same problems in India. Arguing that even its first installation has proceeded swiftly in comparison with other "first of its kind" reactors, the company said that the two pressurized reactor projects in China it began subsequently are "well within schedule and budget" and will be finished in less than 50 months.
"This shows the impressive learning curve of the new EPR reactor series, which NPCIL [Nuclear Power Corporation of India] will also benefit from in India," according to the company email.
"Isn't it amazing that the world's largest nuclear builder ... is arguing teething problems?" said Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based energy consultant who opposes nuclear power. "This is supposed to be a mature technology, even if the design has been modified. This is not a revolutionary reactor, it's called an evolutionary reactor. One wonders if after 40 years of operational experience and building experience, how much time do they need to get over teething problems?"
The local opposition
In Jaitapur, they wonder why their land should be the proving ground. Unlike the villages of so-called "backward regions" where India is pushing ahead with equally controversial mining projects, the towns and villages of the area that will be affected by the Jaitapur project are thriving — even in places the government's Environmental Impact Assessment classifies as "barren land," locals say.
From the baking hot, rust-colored inland hills, land owners cut porous, red laterite stones to sell to builders across the state for about 50 U.S. cents a brick, generating ready capital that they use to lay down topsoil and plant mango trees — which the hard stone below allows them to irrigate with well water or water brought in tankers.
The unique conditions make the area famous for the Alphonso variety, known as "king of the mangoes," which India recently agreed to export to the U.S. in exchange for Harley Davidson motorcycles. There is evidence of this thriving industry everywhere around the affected villages — whether it's mango saplings, workers mining stone or constructing new buildings, or the burnt ground that identifies a plot where diggers will soon begin to cut laterite.
As for the agricultural potential of the land already acquired for the project, the government has cordoned of the area, and does not even allow journalists to enter it for inspection.
In short, it's a place to which economic development is coming organically, where unemployment is not an issue, and where locals fear industrialization could kill the golden goose — considering that buyers already recognize that the mangoes produced here are superior to those grown closer to the highway. Milind Desai, a local doctor turned anti-nuclear activist, says that's why only 112 out of more than 2,000 farmers in the proposed plant zone have accepted checks from the government for their property (which has already been taken over without their consent).
"People here are happy with their economic situation," said Desai, who was also jailed by the local authorities earlier this month. "We're not looking at high salaries, but neither are people waiting on street corners to try to pick up jobs doing day labor."
The Nuclear Power Corporation maintains that the Jaitapur facility will cause no significant damage to the local environment, and Areva argues that both the site location and several innovations in the design of its pressurized reactors will make the Jaitapur project much less vulnerable to natural disasters than the older reactors of Fukushima — incorporating a double concrete shell to protect the reactor building, housing the fuel pool in a separate building protected by its own double shell, and incorporating three independent cooling systems to prevent overheating in the event one of them fails, for example.
But the manner in which India's nuclear agencies and state-owned NPCIL have pursued clearances for the project suggest that neither the project's cost, nor the rights of local residents, nor the impact to the environment nor the safety of a reactor design were ever considered as serious questions. They were simply hoops to jump through along the way.
What about due diligence?
Beginning in 2005, for example, when the agency responsible for developing India's nuclear power capabilities, the Department of Atomic Energy, authorized the head of NPCIL to push ahead with the Jaitapur project, the all powerful nuclear agency more-or-less granted the company the right to override any opposition to set up the plant in an open letter addressed “to whomsoever it may concern.”
The letter had its desired effect with all government agencies quickly falling in line, and “fast-tracking” work on the project. Records of meetings held by the Expert Assessment Committee for nuclear power, for example, are shallow enough to imply that they viewed their evaluation of the project as a formality.
At the final Nov. 15, 2010, meeting in which the project was granted “partial” environmental clearance, one of the conditions put forth by the assessment committee reads as follows: “The requisite prior clearance from AERB for the plant design and their safety shall be obtained.”
Two weeks earlier, at a meeting held Oct. 28, the committee had requested a huge list of information including details of how the plant would be decommissioned, the rehabilitation and resettlement plan, and how much water and land would be used by the project. On the same day the committee had also visited the project site for the first time. In this context, the sudden partial clearance granted to the project suggests that the committee was passing the buck rather than exercising due diligence in assessing risks.
Is safety is more than an afterthought?
Areva has been chosen, the site for the plant has been selected, the environmental impact assessment has been completed and the land has already been forcibly acquired from the locals by the government. Yet according to an email from the chairman of India's nuclear regulator, the official safety review of Areva's design for pressurized reactors has not even begun.
"AERB’s formal review of [the] EPR [design] will commence once we get an application from NPCIL along with the detailed Safety Analysis Report," Chairman S.S. Bajaj said by email. "So far AERB’s involvement has been limited to giving comments on [the] draft Technical Assignment document being discussed by NPCIL with Areva."
Meanwhile, the environment minister isn't the only one to suggest that the nuclear regulatory board lacks the muscle to do its work independently. Konkan Bachao Samiti, a local non-governmental organization at the forefront of opposition to the Jaitapur project, told GlobalPost that in one of their meetings with officials from the assessment committee, one of the officials clearly mentioned that the agency was under pressure from the French government.
Further, the NGO claimed that regulatory board refused to sign the minutes of the meeting saying that they did not have recordings of the meeting. The NGO also said that board always recorded their meetings. More recently, Greenpeace India claimed to have obtained evidence through a Right to Information request showing that the Jaitapur site is located in a level 4 seismic zone according to the Geological Survey of India, not level 3 as senior officials with NPCIL said data from the Indian Metrological Department indicates.
"In the case of earthquake engineering, the [NPCIL] strategy is to have their favorite consultants cook up the kind of seismicity data which suits them, and there is practically no independent verification of their data or design methodologies," according to former AERB chairman Gopalakrishnan, who commented prior to the allegations by Greenpeace. "A captive AERB which reports to the [Department of Atomic Energy] makes the overall nuclear safety management in India worthless."
For many, that will make India's dreams of expanding its nuclear power production a hundredfold over the next 40 years sound like a nightmare.
Additional reporting by Praveen Kurup in Mumbai.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 7, 2011
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
JAITAPUR, India — When Vijay Raut talks about the government's plans to throw the villagers of Madbad off their land to make way for the world's largest nuclear power plant, his voice quickly rises in volume. The tendons stand out in his neck as he describes how government officials and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) have trampled local resistance.
“Is this a democracy?” demands Raut, who was jailed along with some 18 protesters after what local police termed a riot in early March. “They came and started the survey without even explaining the purpose properly to us. Then they would not let us talk as a single voice. When they came to negotiate for the land in 2006-07, if at all you could call it that, they would not let us even stand around as a group. Individual farmers were called in to tell them their land was being acquired.”
Residents like Raut have strong incentives to fight. As yet undiscovered by travelers, this part of the Konkan coast in the Indian state of Maharashtra — about 150 kilometers from foreign tourists' beloved Goa — rivals the beauty of romantic locales like Puerto Vallarta. But local fishermen and mango farmers are not the only ones who should be concerned.
When the United States inked a controversial civilian nuclear agreement with India in 2008, the biggest fear for Americans was that the pact would encourage other would-be nuclear weapons states by letting India skate past the non-proliferation treaty. But after the near-meltdown in meticulous Japan last month, it's beginning to look like the real risk may come from the reactors themselves — even as the world's nuclear industry looks to India and China to spark a renaissance in nuclear power.
Can India handle disaster?
"In contrast [to Japan], in India we are most disorganized and unprepared for the handling of emergencies of any kind of even much less severity," said A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), in an email to GlobalPost. "The AERB's disaster preparedness oversight is mostly on paper and the drills they once in awhile conduct are half-hearted efforts which amount to more [of] a sham."
India suffers from an increasingly worrisome shortage of electricity. Today, the country faces a shortfall of around 10 percent. Blackouts, or "power cuts" due to load shedding, are a daily reality in most areas, and nearly half the households in the country don't have electricity. Meanwhile, demand for power is rising more than 10 percent a year due to industrialization and rising incomes.
But is the country's plan to dramatically increase its production of nuclear power the solution?
In Jaitapur, a cluster of villages about 375 kilometers from Mumbai, New Delhi has inked an agreement with France's Areva Group to build the first two of a planned six Evolutionary Pressurized Reactors (EPR), each capable of producing 1,650 megawatts of electricity, in what promises to be the world's largest nuclear power facility when it is completed.
But according to the plans dangled before the nuclear industry in the course of negotiating the India-U.S. civil nuclear pact, that's only the first step in a breakneck sprint. In 2008, India boosted its forecasts for nuclear power production from a target of 20 gigawatts by 2020 to 275 gigawatts by 2050 to entice the nuclear suppliers' group to grant a waiver allowing it to import civilian nuclear technology and fuel. After getting the waiver, it boosted the target again, to 455 gigawatts by 2050 — a hundredfold increase in its present capacity.
The speed of that expansion is frightening — especially considering India has already had several near misses.
India's track record
According to Benjamin Sovacool, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, "the Tarapur nuclear power plant suffered a partial meltdown in 1979; a fire and explosion forced the closure of the Narora power plant in 1993; the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station at Kota leaked radioactive water into a lake for two months until it was detected in 1995; and, in December 2006, one of the pipes carrying radioactive waste from the uranium enrichment facility at Jadugoda burst and distributed highly radioactive materials as far as 100 km away."
India's nuclear establishment has repeatedly downplayed the risks at its facilities since the Fukushima crisis, and the regulatory board's chairman, S.S. Bajaj, disputed some of the reports cited in Sovacool's paper. "India has not experienced any accident in its nuclear power plants involving release of radioactivity in public domain," Bajaj said in an emailed reply to questions from GlobalPost.
"The worst accident was the Narora fire in 1993, which resulted in station blackout. Operators were able to successfully implement the necessary emergency operating procedures, and cool the core safely. Based on the experience from this event, detailed reviews and upgradations [sic] were carried out at all [nuclear power plants] in India," he said.
The need for an independent regulator
Safety is hardly the only issue of concern when it comes to India's plans for nuclear expansion.
Even as the central government debates changes to land acquisition laws that led to deadly riots in West Bengal in 2007, it's steamrolling ahead with a forcible "land grab" in Maharashtra to smooth the way for the first big-ticket nuclear project signed after the India-U.S. nuclear pact.
In what critics allege is quid pro quo for French support for the move to let India bypass the non-proliferation treaty, India granted the contract to Areva without inviting tenders from competitors — potentially making the green power generated by the project too costly for ordinary Indians to afford.
And the lines separating India's nuclear industry and its nuclear regulator are too blurry to allow for independent assessment of risks.
“It is probably time to have an independent regulatory authority which is separate from the Department of Atomic Energy, something on the lines of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said in an interview with the Indian Express earlier this month, following claims that conflict of interest influenced the regulatory board's radiological impact assessment for the Jaitapur project. On Wednesday, he wrote a letter to the prime minister opposing large nuclear parks like the one proposed for Jaitapur, saying "Jaitapur will have 10,000 MW capacity. Is it wise?"
Even before the disaster at Fukushima, Areva's plans for Jaitapur had prompted serious questions from Indian anti-nuclear groups like the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP). Apart from general objections related to the size and potential impact of the project in the case of an accident, the coalition drew attention to Areva's design for the pressurized reactors — which it criticized as an "untested" technology.
The safety of the reactors' failsafe controls been called into question by nuclear regulators in Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States. And the pressurized reactor projects that Areva has underway in Finland and France have been plagued by delays caused by apparently basic errors in construction — like failing to pour concrete or weld steel structures to technical specifications. Scholars opposed to nuclear power agree.
Areva's growing pains
"The previous design from Areva [the N4, four units built in France in the late 1990s] had design flaws that were only discovered after plant completion, and the construction record at Olkiluoto and Flamanville is awful," said Stephen Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich. "Until Areva has units built to time and cost and they are operating reliably, why [should India] take the risk?"
In an emailed response to queries from GlobalPost, Areva said that the safety authorities who questioned the designs for pressurized reactors said the issues identified "do not put into any doubt the overall safety of the EPR reactor itself" and added that the U.K.'s Health and Safety Executive has already accepted its designed modifications.
Concerning its construction problems, the company declined to specify the cost overruns that errors and delays entailed. But it pointed out that its added experience since means it is unlikely to face the same problems in India. Arguing that even its first installation has proceeded swiftly in comparison with other "first of its kind" reactors, the company said that the two pressurized reactor projects in China it began subsequently are "well within schedule and budget" and will be finished in less than 50 months.
"This shows the impressive learning curve of the new EPR reactor series, which NPCIL [Nuclear Power Corporation of India] will also benefit from in India," according to the company email.
"Isn't it amazing that the world's largest nuclear builder ... is arguing teething problems?" said Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based energy consultant who opposes nuclear power. "This is supposed to be a mature technology, even if the design has been modified. This is not a revolutionary reactor, it's called an evolutionary reactor. One wonders if after 40 years of operational experience and building experience, how much time do they need to get over teething problems?"
The local opposition
In Jaitapur, they wonder why their land should be the proving ground. Unlike the villages of so-called "backward regions" where India is pushing ahead with equally controversial mining projects, the towns and villages of the area that will be affected by the Jaitapur project are thriving — even in places the government's Environmental Impact Assessment classifies as "barren land," locals say.
From the baking hot, rust-colored inland hills, land owners cut porous, red laterite stones to sell to builders across the state for about 50 U.S. cents a brick, generating ready capital that they use to lay down topsoil and plant mango trees — which the hard stone below allows them to irrigate with well water or water brought in tankers.
The unique conditions make the area famous for the Alphonso variety, known as "king of the mangoes," which India recently agreed to export to the U.S. in exchange for Harley Davidson motorcycles. There is evidence of this thriving industry everywhere around the affected villages — whether it's mango saplings, workers mining stone or constructing new buildings, or the burnt ground that identifies a plot where diggers will soon begin to cut laterite.
As for the agricultural potential of the land already acquired for the project, the government has cordoned of the area, and does not even allow journalists to enter it for inspection.
In short, it's a place to which economic development is coming organically, where unemployment is not an issue, and where locals fear industrialization could kill the golden goose — considering that buyers already recognize that the mangoes produced here are superior to those grown closer to the highway. Milind Desai, a local doctor turned anti-nuclear activist, says that's why only 112 out of more than 2,000 farmers in the proposed plant zone have accepted checks from the government for their property (which has already been taken over without their consent).
"People here are happy with their economic situation," said Desai, who was also jailed by the local authorities earlier this month. "We're not looking at high salaries, but neither are people waiting on street corners to try to pick up jobs doing day labor."
The Nuclear Power Corporation maintains that the Jaitapur facility will cause no significant damage to the local environment, and Areva argues that both the site location and several innovations in the design of its pressurized reactors will make the Jaitapur project much less vulnerable to natural disasters than the older reactors of Fukushima — incorporating a double concrete shell to protect the reactor building, housing the fuel pool in a separate building protected by its own double shell, and incorporating three independent cooling systems to prevent overheating in the event one of them fails, for example.
But the manner in which India's nuclear agencies and state-owned NPCIL have pursued clearances for the project suggest that neither the project's cost, nor the rights of local residents, nor the impact to the environment nor the safety of a reactor design were ever considered as serious questions. They were simply hoops to jump through along the way.
What about due diligence?
Beginning in 2005, for example, when the agency responsible for developing India's nuclear power capabilities, the Department of Atomic Energy, authorized the head of NPCIL to push ahead with the Jaitapur project, the all powerful nuclear agency more-or-less granted the company the right to override any opposition to set up the plant in an open letter addressed “to whomsoever it may concern.”
The letter had its desired effect with all government agencies quickly falling in line, and “fast-tracking” work on the project. Records of meetings held by the Expert Assessment Committee for nuclear power, for example, are shallow enough to imply that they viewed their evaluation of the project as a formality.
At the final Nov. 15, 2010, meeting in which the project was granted “partial” environmental clearance, one of the conditions put forth by the assessment committee reads as follows: “The requisite prior clearance from AERB for the plant design and their safety shall be obtained.”
Two weeks earlier, at a meeting held Oct. 28, the committee had requested a huge list of information including details of how the plant would be decommissioned, the rehabilitation and resettlement plan, and how much water and land would be used by the project. On the same day the committee had also visited the project site for the first time. In this context, the sudden partial clearance granted to the project suggests that the committee was passing the buck rather than exercising due diligence in assessing risks.
Is safety is more than an afterthought?
Areva has been chosen, the site for the plant has been selected, the environmental impact assessment has been completed and the land has already been forcibly acquired from the locals by the government. Yet according to an email from the chairman of India's nuclear regulator, the official safety review of Areva's design for pressurized reactors has not even begun.
"AERB’s formal review of [the] EPR [design] will commence once we get an application from NPCIL along with the detailed Safety Analysis Report," Chairman S.S. Bajaj said by email. "So far AERB’s involvement has been limited to giving comments on [the] draft Technical Assignment document being discussed by NPCIL with Areva."
Meanwhile, the environment minister isn't the only one to suggest that the nuclear regulatory board lacks the muscle to do its work independently. Konkan Bachao Samiti, a local non-governmental organization at the forefront of opposition to the Jaitapur project, told GlobalPost that in one of their meetings with officials from the assessment committee, one of the officials clearly mentioned that the agency was under pressure from the French government.
Further, the NGO claimed that regulatory board refused to sign the minutes of the meeting saying that they did not have recordings of the meeting. The NGO also said that board always recorded their meetings. More recently, Greenpeace India claimed to have obtained evidence through a Right to Information request showing that the Jaitapur site is located in a level 4 seismic zone according to the Geological Survey of India, not level 3 as senior officials with NPCIL said data from the Indian Metrological Department indicates.
"In the case of earthquake engineering, the [NPCIL] strategy is to have their favorite consultants cook up the kind of seismicity data which suits them, and there is practically no independent verification of their data or design methodologies," according to former AERB chairman Gopalakrishnan, who commented prior to the allegations by Greenpeace. "A captive AERB which reports to the [Department of Atomic Energy] makes the overall nuclear safety management in India worthless."
For many, that will make India's dreams of expanding its nuclear power production a hundredfold over the next 40 years sound like a nightmare.
Additional reporting by Praveen Kurup in Mumbai.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
India: As the middle class rises, so does tuberculosis
Still a taboo disease associated with poverty, endemic TB knows no boundaries in India.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 31, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — When Fatima's doctor told her that she wasn't suffering from ordinary Delhi belly — her stomach cramps and diarrhea were caused by tuberculosis — her biggest fear wasn't the dreaded disease. With her marriage still impending, the 29-year-old, middle-class resident of Kolkata was afraid that her secret would get out, said Dr. Raja Dhar, a physician at the West Bengal city's posh Fortis Hospital.
“The first thing she told me was never to tell anyone that she had TB,” said Dhar, who explained that the young IT professional feared her impending marriage would be scuttled if people came to know of her infection — even though she was eventually cured.
Despite her shame, Fatima — whose name was changed for this article to preserve her anonymity — is in good company.
Although tuberculosis is still associated with poverty, malnutrition and crowded living conditions in India, the disease is endemic among rich and poor, Dhar said. Among the affluent, it has simply been lying in wait, only to emerge when the immune systems of the new rich are compromised by the same stress factors that are causing an increases in “lifestyle related” problems like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
“In a country where tuberculosis is more or less endemic, you have latent TB present in the body that does not manifest because you have a good immune system,” Dhar said. “But if the immune system goes down, the time is ripe for the TB to actually flare up.”
According to the World Health Organization, the total number of TB sufferers has steadily declined in South and Southeast Asia over the past decade, but the region still accounts for a third of the world's total TB patients — with more than 3 million cases added every year, mostly from India. And just as the disease made a resurgence in America in the 1990s, thanks to immune system complications associated with HIV/AIDS, in at least one respect the problem is getting worse.
Working at an upscale, private Indian hospital for the past two years, Dhar said that around 70 percent of his TB patients are middle-class or affluent professionals — many of whom react with anger or disbelief when they hear his diagnosis. And looking back at hospital records and discussing the rate of incidence with doctors in other cities, he estimates that the number of wealthy people contracting TB has risen about 20 percent in recent years, even as the number of poor patients has dropped. Meanwhile, local press reports say the number of TB patients from higher income families have doubled in the last three years in Delhi hospitals.
Though TB is better known as the debilitating lung ailment, once called consumption, which affected writers like the Romantic era poet John Keats, India's affluent sufferers are mainly falling victim to lesser known versions of the disease that strike the stomach, heart or even bone. That makes sufferers even less likely to think they have TB, and also makes it harder for doctors to make the right diagnosis.
“More than the rate actually going up in affluent people, I think it may be just that people are realizing that TB is affecting everyone, not just the really poor,” said Dr. Madhukar Pai, a McGill University-based researcher who works with WHO's Stop TB Partnership program. “Awareness about TB may be higher, especially with rumors about Bollywood celebrities being affected.”
But even if TB has scaled the society columns, it still carries a powerful stigma. Not long ago, film star Amitabh Bachchan was compelled to issue a public denial when press reports circulated claiming that his daughter-in-law, Bollywood's Aishwarya Rai, was suffering from the same type of TB that Fatima hid from her parents and fiance.
That, too, makes a disease that should be easily cured more difficult to treat, according to Dhar. Most TB cases can be cured easily if the victim seeks medical treatment early in the disease's progression, and their doctors get the diagnosis right and prescribe the right treatment. But the more fear and shame associated with TB, the less likely that is to happen.
“There is a far greater taboo about people in the affluent class saying that they have TB,” Dhar said. “It's like having leprosy years ago.”
In that respect, some high-profile Bollywood victims — if any are willing to rise above ignorant perceptions about the disease – could be a huge boon, said McGill's Dr. Pai. Just as Hollywood stars and professional athletes helped reduce the fear and stigma surrounding HIV, a few rich and famous Indian TB patients could revolutionize the fight as new, drug-resistant strains of TB increase fear of the illness worldwide.
With a new molecular diagnostic test, called Xpert, available, India could eliminate its persistent problem with erroneous false-positives, provided it could roll out the new test to thousands of laboratories that today report as many as 1.5 million inaccurate results every year. And four new vaccines are in late-stage trials, setting the stage for a massive eradication campaign — if somebody will step up to the plate.
“Rich Indians have done almost nothing for TB in India,” Pai said. “No major philanthropic groups or donors or industries have taken on the TB challenge in India. Politicians and Bollywood stars and cricket celebrities have largely ignored the TB problem.”
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 31, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — When Fatima's doctor told her that she wasn't suffering from ordinary Delhi belly — her stomach cramps and diarrhea were caused by tuberculosis — her biggest fear wasn't the dreaded disease. With her marriage still impending, the 29-year-old, middle-class resident of Kolkata was afraid that her secret would get out, said Dr. Raja Dhar, a physician at the West Bengal city's posh Fortis Hospital.
“The first thing she told me was never to tell anyone that she had TB,” said Dhar, who explained that the young IT professional feared her impending marriage would be scuttled if people came to know of her infection — even though she was eventually cured.
Despite her shame, Fatima — whose name was changed for this article to preserve her anonymity — is in good company.
Although tuberculosis is still associated with poverty, malnutrition and crowded living conditions in India, the disease is endemic among rich and poor, Dhar said. Among the affluent, it has simply been lying in wait, only to emerge when the immune systems of the new rich are compromised by the same stress factors that are causing an increases in “lifestyle related” problems like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
“In a country where tuberculosis is more or less endemic, you have latent TB present in the body that does not manifest because you have a good immune system,” Dhar said. “But if the immune system goes down, the time is ripe for the TB to actually flare up.”
According to the World Health Organization, the total number of TB sufferers has steadily declined in South and Southeast Asia over the past decade, but the region still accounts for a third of the world's total TB patients — with more than 3 million cases added every year, mostly from India. And just as the disease made a resurgence in America in the 1990s, thanks to immune system complications associated with HIV/AIDS, in at least one respect the problem is getting worse.
Working at an upscale, private Indian hospital for the past two years, Dhar said that around 70 percent of his TB patients are middle-class or affluent professionals — many of whom react with anger or disbelief when they hear his diagnosis. And looking back at hospital records and discussing the rate of incidence with doctors in other cities, he estimates that the number of wealthy people contracting TB has risen about 20 percent in recent years, even as the number of poor patients has dropped. Meanwhile, local press reports say the number of TB patients from higher income families have doubled in the last three years in Delhi hospitals.
Though TB is better known as the debilitating lung ailment, once called consumption, which affected writers like the Romantic era poet John Keats, India's affluent sufferers are mainly falling victim to lesser known versions of the disease that strike the stomach, heart or even bone. That makes sufferers even less likely to think they have TB, and also makes it harder for doctors to make the right diagnosis.
“More than the rate actually going up in affluent people, I think it may be just that people are realizing that TB is affecting everyone, not just the really poor,” said Dr. Madhukar Pai, a McGill University-based researcher who works with WHO's Stop TB Partnership program. “Awareness about TB may be higher, especially with rumors about Bollywood celebrities being affected.”
But even if TB has scaled the society columns, it still carries a powerful stigma. Not long ago, film star Amitabh Bachchan was compelled to issue a public denial when press reports circulated claiming that his daughter-in-law, Bollywood's Aishwarya Rai, was suffering from the same type of TB that Fatima hid from her parents and fiance.
That, too, makes a disease that should be easily cured more difficult to treat, according to Dhar. Most TB cases can be cured easily if the victim seeks medical treatment early in the disease's progression, and their doctors get the diagnosis right and prescribe the right treatment. But the more fear and shame associated with TB, the less likely that is to happen.
“There is a far greater taboo about people in the affluent class saying that they have TB,” Dhar said. “It's like having leprosy years ago.”
In that respect, some high-profile Bollywood victims — if any are willing to rise above ignorant perceptions about the disease – could be a huge boon, said McGill's Dr. Pai. Just as Hollywood stars and professional athletes helped reduce the fear and stigma surrounding HIV, a few rich and famous Indian TB patients could revolutionize the fight as new, drug-resistant strains of TB increase fear of the illness worldwide.
With a new molecular diagnostic test, called Xpert, available, India could eliminate its persistent problem with erroneous false-positives, provided it could roll out the new test to thousands of laboratories that today report as many as 1.5 million inaccurate results every year. And four new vaccines are in late-stage trials, setting the stage for a massive eradication campaign — if somebody will step up to the plate.
“Rich Indians have done almost nothing for TB in India,” Pai said. “No major philanthropic groups or donors or industries have taken on the TB challenge in India. Politicians and Bollywood stars and cricket celebrities have largely ignored the TB problem.”
India's aid money-go-round
Rising India sends money abroad, even as it fails to spend it to alleviate poverty at home.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - April 6, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — A few weeks before Bill Gates and Warren Buffett brought their Giving Pledge road show to India in an effort to persuade the country's budding billionaires to donate more to charity, state donors in countries like the United Kingdom engaged in a spirited debate.
The question: With an economic boom and rising ambition turning India itself into a donor nation, does it still make sense for more developed countries to keep shoveling dollars its way?
There's two sides to the story, of course.
Despite its rapid economic growth, India is still battling poverty and disease on a massive scale, thanks to its huge population. And the new prosperity is not trickling down fast enough to warrant much celebration among its millions of rural farmers.
But too much money to spend can be a bad thing, too. According to a recent report by India's Comptroller and Auditor General, the government failed to spend some $20 billion in foreign aid last year thanks to problems rolling out public works programs — which meant foreign funding actually cost India about $20 million in penalties.
It's not that the money wasn't needed. According to the report, the unspent funds were intended for some 16 areas where India faces acute problems — including some $5 billion allotted for urban development, $2.5 billion for building roads, $2 billion for agriculture and rural development and $2 billion for improving water supply and sanitation.
In its characteristically dry style, the audit office blamed "inadequate planning" for the failure, hinting obliquely at the country's notorious bureaucratic sloth. (Project delays in general will cost India some $28 billion this year, equal to a third of total government spending.)
But even as the large-scale projects funded by agencies like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank languish and penalties mount for unspent loans, nonprofits on the front lines of India's battle against poverty say that the country's efforts to project itself as a newly arrived economic power have hurt their ability to raise money.
"If you go to the West or other countries, you will see all the news about Indians on the Forbes list and the IT boom and all the good news about India," said Anand Joshua, marketing head of World Vision India. "But the other side of India, the India that is languishing, that news is not there overseas."
It's not only media perception. India may have been the world's largest recipient of foreign aid back in the 1980s, but these days New Delhi has been steadily reducing the number of countries from which it will accept bilateral aid.
India has also been spending aggressively in neighboring nations like Afghanistan, where it is the fifth largest aid donor — as well as Africa, where it has dramatically stepped up aid to compete with China. International aid agencies have taken note.
Earlier this year, the U.K.'s Department for International Development made waves with the announcement that it would freeze bilateral funding for projects in India at 280 million pounds a year until 2015, shifting focus to the poorest areas of the country and moving to tie up with private companies to fund projects. But it was hardly alone. According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), American economic assistance to India fell from about $175 million in 2006 to about $130 million in 2009. And the Netherlands has also reduced funding for India-based aid projects dramatically.
As a result organizations like Oxfam India are facing a "severe funding crisis," according to local press reports. The Times of India recently reported that Oxfam India has less than a third of the funds it would normally expect for the year, and Netherlands-based Hivos is coping with a 40 percent cut in its India budget. Meanwhile World Vision India's Joshua said his organization had to scale back its plans by 30 percent this year due to funding constraints.
"Now when foreign donors come to India they say you have enough wealth in India to take care of your own poor," Joshua said.
The government's miserable failure to spend the aid it already receives will make it even harder to convince them to open their wallets.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - April 6, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — A few weeks before Bill Gates and Warren Buffett brought their Giving Pledge road show to India in an effort to persuade the country's budding billionaires to donate more to charity, state donors in countries like the United Kingdom engaged in a spirited debate.
The question: With an economic boom and rising ambition turning India itself into a donor nation, does it still make sense for more developed countries to keep shoveling dollars its way?
There's two sides to the story, of course.
Despite its rapid economic growth, India is still battling poverty and disease on a massive scale, thanks to its huge population. And the new prosperity is not trickling down fast enough to warrant much celebration among its millions of rural farmers.
But too much money to spend can be a bad thing, too. According to a recent report by India's Comptroller and Auditor General, the government failed to spend some $20 billion in foreign aid last year thanks to problems rolling out public works programs — which meant foreign funding actually cost India about $20 million in penalties.
It's not that the money wasn't needed. According to the report, the unspent funds were intended for some 16 areas where India faces acute problems — including some $5 billion allotted for urban development, $2.5 billion for building roads, $2 billion for agriculture and rural development and $2 billion for improving water supply and sanitation.
In its characteristically dry style, the audit office blamed "inadequate planning" for the failure, hinting obliquely at the country's notorious bureaucratic sloth. (Project delays in general will cost India some $28 billion this year, equal to a third of total government spending.)
But even as the large-scale projects funded by agencies like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank languish and penalties mount for unspent loans, nonprofits on the front lines of India's battle against poverty say that the country's efforts to project itself as a newly arrived economic power have hurt their ability to raise money.
"If you go to the West or other countries, you will see all the news about Indians on the Forbes list and the IT boom and all the good news about India," said Anand Joshua, marketing head of World Vision India. "But the other side of India, the India that is languishing, that news is not there overseas."
It's not only media perception. India may have been the world's largest recipient of foreign aid back in the 1980s, but these days New Delhi has been steadily reducing the number of countries from which it will accept bilateral aid.
India has also been spending aggressively in neighboring nations like Afghanistan, where it is the fifth largest aid donor — as well as Africa, where it has dramatically stepped up aid to compete with China. International aid agencies have taken note.
Earlier this year, the U.K.'s Department for International Development made waves with the announcement that it would freeze bilateral funding for projects in India at 280 million pounds a year until 2015, shifting focus to the poorest areas of the country and moving to tie up with private companies to fund projects. But it was hardly alone. According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), American economic assistance to India fell from about $175 million in 2006 to about $130 million in 2009. And the Netherlands has also reduced funding for India-based aid projects dramatically.
As a result organizations like Oxfam India are facing a "severe funding crisis," according to local press reports. The Times of India recently reported that Oxfam India has less than a third of the funds it would normally expect for the year, and Netherlands-based Hivos is coping with a 40 percent cut in its India budget. Meanwhile World Vision India's Joshua said his organization had to scale back its plans by 30 percent this year due to funding constraints.
"Now when foreign donors come to India they say you have enough wealth in India to take care of your own poor," Joshua said.
The government's miserable failure to spend the aid it already receives will make it even harder to convince them to open their wallets.
Friday, April 01, 2011
Mahatma Gandhi watch: India avoids adding insult to injury
Indian state bans controversial book about Gandhi, but government stops short of making insults to the leader a crime.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — A controversial new biography of Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi has kicked up a predictable furor in India, where assaults on free speech have become increasingly common in recent years.
It appears, however, that the government will stop short of making any insult to Gandhi punishable as a crime.
"It's a clear case of the undesirable deification that everyone does when it comes to someone like Gandhi, and also a lot of our other great men of the past," said Jai Arjun Singh, an Indian book reviewer. "[We have] this idea that he must be seen as a saint, not a human being who achieved extraordinary things."
Already this week, the Indian state of Gujarat banned the book, called "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India," following assertions by the local press that Joseph Lelyveld's biography claims Gandhi was a bisexual racist who left his wife for a German bodybuilder.
Soon after, central government politicians reportedly sought to make insulting the former pacifist leader and Indian symbol a crime. The harsh reaction was not surprising.
While India's muckraking newspapers and magazines ensure that freedom of the press remains one of the country's most cherished values, freedom of speech has been under assault.
A New Delhi court recently ordered police to file charges of sedition against novelist Arundhati Roy and Kashimiri separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani for making anti-India speeches at a conference on the Kashmir conflict. And Lelyfeld now joins a growing list of eminent authors whose books have been officially banned.
In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena, a far-right political party, last year forced Mumbai University to remove Rohinton Mistry's "Such a Long Journey" from its syllabus, and earlier compelled the state government to ban James Laine's "Shivaji — The Hindu King in Muslim India."
Similarly, Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi spearheaded a fight to ban Javier Moro's racy biography on her life, which she called "fictionalized." And despite its literary community's immense love for Salman Rushdie, India's politicians were quick to ban "The Satanic Verses" in an apparent move to court the conservative Muslim vote.
"This is a country where hundreds of thousands pride themselves on having copies of [Adolf Hitler's] 'Mein Kampf' in their houses and treat it like a management guide, and we're talking about banning this sort of thing," Singh said.
Earlier this week, Indian law minister M. Veerapa Moily said that the central government would move to ban Lelyveld's biography, telling journalists that the book is “baseless, sensational and heresy and denigrating to a national leader," according to local news reports.
And on Wednesday the Indian Express newspaper quoted sources in the law ministry saying that Moily was seeking to amend the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act of 1971 to make any action or gesture that shows disrespect to Gandhi an offense punishable as a crime. Moily later backed away from any legal action related to the book, saying, "My stand is that since the author has himself denied any adverse remarks on Mahatma Gandhi, no further action is required."
The current political furor stems more from sensationalist reviews than from Lelyveld's book.
"The word bisexual never appears in the book," Lelyveld told an Indian television station. "The word racist only appears once in a limited context relating to a single phrase and not to Gandhi's whole set of attitude or history in South Africa."
Even a cursory dip into the biography reveals that it is on the whole a generous and admiring portrait of India's most beloved leader, written in a matter-of-fact style that could hardly be called salacious.
But in the passages dealing with Gandhi's relationship with Hermann Kallenbach (the bodybuilder), Lelyveld clearly invites reviewers to make their own conclusions.
Calling Gandhi's friendship with Kallenbach "the most intimate, also ambiguous, relationship of his lifetime," Lelyveld quotes Tridip Suhrud, a scholar, as saying the two men were a couple.
Lelyveld asks rhetorically "what kind of couple were they?" in the same passage that he quotes Kallenbach as saying that they lived together "almost in the same bed" and Gandhi as saying he destroyed Kallenbach's "logical and charming love notes" to him.
And later, after warning that "selective details" can "easily be arranged to suggest a conclusion," he launches into a long description of Kallenbach's "taut torso," then quotes at length a letter in which Gandhi tells the architect and bodybuilder, "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom," and reveals that cotton wool and Vaseline "are a constant reminder" of his absent friend, whom he wants to show "how completely you have taken possession of my body."
Lelyveld never uses the word bisexual. But he invites readers to think it, first with suggestive language, and finally with a second rhetorical question: "What are we to make of the word 'possession' or the reference to petroleum jelly, then as now a salve with many commonplace uses?"
Lelyveld concludes with what appears to be feigned ignorance.
"The most plausible guesses are that the Vaseline in the London hotel room may have to do with enemas, to which [Gandhi] regularly resorted, or may in some other way foreshadow the geriatric Gandhi's enthusiasm for massage...."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — A controversial new biography of Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi has kicked up a predictable furor in India, where assaults on free speech have become increasingly common in recent years.
It appears, however, that the government will stop short of making any insult to Gandhi punishable as a crime.
"It's a clear case of the undesirable deification that everyone does when it comes to someone like Gandhi, and also a lot of our other great men of the past," said Jai Arjun Singh, an Indian book reviewer. "[We have] this idea that he must be seen as a saint, not a human being who achieved extraordinary things."
Already this week, the Indian state of Gujarat banned the book, called "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India," following assertions by the local press that Joseph Lelyveld's biography claims Gandhi was a bisexual racist who left his wife for a German bodybuilder.
Soon after, central government politicians reportedly sought to make insulting the former pacifist leader and Indian symbol a crime. The harsh reaction was not surprising.
While India's muckraking newspapers and magazines ensure that freedom of the press remains one of the country's most cherished values, freedom of speech has been under assault.
A New Delhi court recently ordered police to file charges of sedition against novelist Arundhati Roy and Kashimiri separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani for making anti-India speeches at a conference on the Kashmir conflict. And Lelyfeld now joins a growing list of eminent authors whose books have been officially banned.
In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena, a far-right political party, last year forced Mumbai University to remove Rohinton Mistry's "Such a Long Journey" from its syllabus, and earlier compelled the state government to ban James Laine's "Shivaji — The Hindu King in Muslim India."
Similarly, Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi spearheaded a fight to ban Javier Moro's racy biography on her life, which she called "fictionalized." And despite its literary community's immense love for Salman Rushdie, India's politicians were quick to ban "The Satanic Verses" in an apparent move to court the conservative Muslim vote.
"This is a country where hundreds of thousands pride themselves on having copies of [Adolf Hitler's] 'Mein Kampf' in their houses and treat it like a management guide, and we're talking about banning this sort of thing," Singh said.
Earlier this week, Indian law minister M. Veerapa Moily said that the central government would move to ban Lelyveld's biography, telling journalists that the book is “baseless, sensational and heresy and denigrating to a national leader," according to local news reports.
And on Wednesday the Indian Express newspaper quoted sources in the law ministry saying that Moily was seeking to amend the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act of 1971 to make any action or gesture that shows disrespect to Gandhi an offense punishable as a crime. Moily later backed away from any legal action related to the book, saying, "My stand is that since the author has himself denied any adverse remarks on Mahatma Gandhi, no further action is required."
The current political furor stems more from sensationalist reviews than from Lelyveld's book.
"The word bisexual never appears in the book," Lelyveld told an Indian television station. "The word racist only appears once in a limited context relating to a single phrase and not to Gandhi's whole set of attitude or history in South Africa."
Even a cursory dip into the biography reveals that it is on the whole a generous and admiring portrait of India's most beloved leader, written in a matter-of-fact style that could hardly be called salacious.
But in the passages dealing with Gandhi's relationship with Hermann Kallenbach (the bodybuilder), Lelyveld clearly invites reviewers to make their own conclusions.
Calling Gandhi's friendship with Kallenbach "the most intimate, also ambiguous, relationship of his lifetime," Lelyveld quotes Tridip Suhrud, a scholar, as saying the two men were a couple.
Lelyveld asks rhetorically "what kind of couple were they?" in the same passage that he quotes Kallenbach as saying that they lived together "almost in the same bed" and Gandhi as saying he destroyed Kallenbach's "logical and charming love notes" to him.
And later, after warning that "selective details" can "easily be arranged to suggest a conclusion," he launches into a long description of Kallenbach's "taut torso," then quotes at length a letter in which Gandhi tells the architect and bodybuilder, "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom," and reveals that cotton wool and Vaseline "are a constant reminder" of his absent friend, whom he wants to show "how completely you have taken possession of my body."
Lelyveld never uses the word bisexual. But he invites readers to think it, first with suggestive language, and finally with a second rhetorical question: "What are we to make of the word 'possession' or the reference to petroleum jelly, then as now a salve with many commonplace uses?"
Lelyveld concludes with what appears to be feigned ignorance.
"The most plausible guesses are that the Vaseline in the London hotel room may have to do with enemas, to which [Gandhi] regularly resorted, or may in some other way foreshadow the geriatric Gandhi's enthusiasm for massage...."
Friday, March 18, 2011
Palin in India: The view from Delhi
Analysis: An Indian event may be a soft launch for Palin's presidential hopes, but many in Delhi are on gaffe-watch.
Bu Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 18, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Washington wonks see Sarah Palin's trip to India as a soft launch for her bid for the White House in 2012, but don't read too much into the guest list for the hyped conference, which both Palin's people and the event organizers are only too happy to remind you has included Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. You don't, after all, get elected president by association.
Palin will no doubt receive a warm welcome and some easy laughs in India — an easy touch for anybody prepared to call it a major world power and wolf down a curry or two. But even though she'll appear on the same dais as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the India Today Conclave, an event organized by India Today magazine, the prevailing view here in Delhi is that the speech fest is primarily an exercise in hot air.
"Let me put it this way: There will be no serious political attention paid to what she says, but it will be watched with some curiosity to see what potential faux pas she may make," said former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal.
Palin is unlikely to share a confab with the prime minister. She is on the guest list for the same reason she's invited anywhere. The conclave is not a peace summit; it's a for-profit enterprise designed to boost magazine revenue. And because of the circus that surrounds her — and the chance that she will say something surprising or baffling — Palin puts bottoms in seats.
Based on the title of her address, "My Vision of America," the speech is likely to sound familiar to Palin-watchers in the United States.
“I’m very excited to visit India. Americans have a great respect for the world’s largest democracy," an India Today Conclave press release quoted Palin as saying. “India and the United States are partners in trade and business affairs, and working together our two nations can build a more peaceful and prosperous world.”
But apart from gaffe-watching, the Delhi crowd will be curious to see if Palin dares to push the envelope in criticizing Pakistan to please the local crowd (and, perhaps, Tea Party "patriots" back home). For the live webcast, tune in March 19 between 8 and 9:30 p.m. Indian Standard Time (10:30 a.m. EDT).
Is the event likely to make Palin look good in India? You betcha.
Along with Singh, speaking at the conclave puts her in the company of Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who was instrumental in toppling Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, not to mention Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. And through serendipity, the conference theme, "The Changing Balance of Power," has compelled the event's public relations machine to cast Palin as "one of the contenders for the U.S. presidency" before she even throws her hat in the ring.
It's true that India (and Singh) loved President George W. Bush. But like Nixon once did in China, Bush won hearts with his pathbreaking work to slash through decades of ill-thought American policy and reshape U.S.-India relations — not with his aw shucks charm. And even among the biggest fans of the India-US civilian nuclear agreement that acted as the fulcrum for that new relationship, there were always serious reservations about the Bush Administration's other policies, especially in Iraq.
"He was seen as somebody who was committed to India and was willing to take steps contrary to longterm U.S. policy," said Sibal. "It wasn't an endorsement of the right in America."
Moreover, Palin isn't the first world leader to be going to the Indian well of publicity. She's not only following Bush, Clinton and Obama, but also French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, among others.
"There will be enormous curiosity about her," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst with Delhi University. "But remember now that [praising India] has been done by several people. Three different U.S. presidents have done that in different circumstances. That's par for the course. So what's new?"
Following Palin's Delhi trip, she'll hop a plane and head for that "other" favorite location of ambitious U.S. politicians: Israel.
Bu Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 18, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Washington wonks see Sarah Palin's trip to India as a soft launch for her bid for the White House in 2012, but don't read too much into the guest list for the hyped conference, which both Palin's people and the event organizers are only too happy to remind you has included Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. You don't, after all, get elected president by association.
Palin will no doubt receive a warm welcome and some easy laughs in India — an easy touch for anybody prepared to call it a major world power and wolf down a curry or two. But even though she'll appear on the same dais as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the India Today Conclave, an event organized by India Today magazine, the prevailing view here in Delhi is that the speech fest is primarily an exercise in hot air.
"Let me put it this way: There will be no serious political attention paid to what she says, but it will be watched with some curiosity to see what potential faux pas she may make," said former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal.
Palin is unlikely to share a confab with the prime minister. She is on the guest list for the same reason she's invited anywhere. The conclave is not a peace summit; it's a for-profit enterprise designed to boost magazine revenue. And because of the circus that surrounds her — and the chance that she will say something surprising or baffling — Palin puts bottoms in seats.
Based on the title of her address, "My Vision of America," the speech is likely to sound familiar to Palin-watchers in the United States.
“I’m very excited to visit India. Americans have a great respect for the world’s largest democracy," an India Today Conclave press release quoted Palin as saying. “India and the United States are partners in trade and business affairs, and working together our two nations can build a more peaceful and prosperous world.”
But apart from gaffe-watching, the Delhi crowd will be curious to see if Palin dares to push the envelope in criticizing Pakistan to please the local crowd (and, perhaps, Tea Party "patriots" back home). For the live webcast, tune in March 19 between 8 and 9:30 p.m. Indian Standard Time (10:30 a.m. EDT).
Is the event likely to make Palin look good in India? You betcha.
Along with Singh, speaking at the conclave puts her in the company of Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who was instrumental in toppling Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, not to mention Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. And through serendipity, the conference theme, "The Changing Balance of Power," has compelled the event's public relations machine to cast Palin as "one of the contenders for the U.S. presidency" before she even throws her hat in the ring.
It's true that India (and Singh) loved President George W. Bush. But like Nixon once did in China, Bush won hearts with his pathbreaking work to slash through decades of ill-thought American policy and reshape U.S.-India relations — not with his aw shucks charm. And even among the biggest fans of the India-US civilian nuclear agreement that acted as the fulcrum for that new relationship, there were always serious reservations about the Bush Administration's other policies, especially in Iraq.
"He was seen as somebody who was committed to India and was willing to take steps contrary to longterm U.S. policy," said Sibal. "It wasn't an endorsement of the right in America."
Moreover, Palin isn't the first world leader to be going to the Indian well of publicity. She's not only following Bush, Clinton and Obama, but also French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, among others.
"There will be enormous curiosity about her," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst with Delhi University. "But remember now that [praising India] has been done by several people. Three different U.S. presidents have done that in different circumstances. That's par for the course. So what's new?"
Following Palin's Delhi trip, she'll hop a plane and head for that "other" favorite location of ambitious U.S. politicians: Israel.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Shiva Rules: India's new robber barons
A new Gilded Age threatens to make
India the world's largest oligarchy.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 17, 2011
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a
year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st
century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win
will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes
that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and
sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of
India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting
metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
NEW DELHI, India — Shortly after
industrialist Anil Ambani exited the offices of the Central Bureau of
Investigation last month after a taxing, two-hour interview, his $80
billion-dollar company issued a press release.
The Reliance Anil Dhirubai Ambani Group
stated that Ambani had not been "summoned" by India's
federal investigators but had simply met with them to clarify
"ongoing issues" related to the telecom scandal Indian
reporters have dubbed the 2G spectrum scam.
But the grim expression on the
billionaire's face as the flashbulbs strobed told a different story.
As impossible as it might have seemed just 24 hours before, this was
a perp walk.
Over the past few weeks, that
billionaire perp walk has turned into a parade, a veritable who's who
of Indian business have visited the CBI offices to make their own
"clarifications" — including Ratan Tata's right-hand man,
Tata Realty CEO Krishna Kumar; the $15 billion Essar Group's scion
and CEO Prashant Ruia; the $4 billion Videocon Group's Chairman
Venugopal Dhoot; and the $650 million Unitech Group's Managing
Director Sanjay Chandra.
“We still have economic might
concentrated in relatively few people's hands.”
Their market muscle may well be the
engine behind the Indian economy's projected 8.6 percent growth this
year and their firms may well be fueling the rise of the Indian
middle class — a phenomenon that will move nearly 300 million
Indians out of poverty over the next two decades, according to
McKinsey & Co.
But even though nothing has been proven
in court and all of the companies involved have denied wrongdoing, in
the eyes of the people, India's captains of industry have turned into
robber barons overnight — with the Supreme Court instructing the
CBI to go after the guilty "even if they are millionaires or
feature in the Forbes rich list.”
Dark as the horizon seems, though, the
current disgust could mark the beginning of a much needed correction.
Just as during America's Gilded Age,
when bankers and industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, John D.
Rockefeller and John Pierpont Morgan amassed their enormous fortunes,
India's celebrated entrepreneurs have capitalized on the country's
rapid economic growth to rocket up the charts of the world's rich
list over the past decade.
But as Forbes feted the rise of the
self-made Indian billionaire and free market champions credited the
decision to liberate the economy from government quotas for
manufacturing in 1991, some vital features of the enormous increase
in India's wealth were overlooked.
Taking into account family
associations, India's BusinessWorld magazine's list of this year's 10
richest Indianslooks a great deal like the list one might have drawn
up in the 1980s — featuring Tata, Birla and Ambani — only the
sums are vastly larger. Despite claims that Indian business
flourishes in spite of the state, virtually every name on the roster
has reaped dramatic gains through accessing or taking over
government-owned resources.
Meanwhile, ever greater wealth has
increased their influence in politics and control over regulatory
policy — raising concerns that the world's largest democracy is
quietly becoming the world's largest oligarchy.
"We are still relatively small as
an economy and we still have economic might concentrated in
relatively few people's hands," said Pramath Sinha, a former
longtime McKinsey & Co. partner who founded 9.9 Media-Worx in
2007. "If you start writing the names down, you quickly run out
of names."
Since 2000 or so, when India's "growth
story" started to take off, the conventional wisdom has been
that the dismantling of the so-called License-Permit Raj in 1991 had
dealt a mortal blow to corruption — though it kept hanging on —
and opened the field to a host of creative and dynamic entrepreneurs.
But the recent wave of alleged scams
and an examination of the companies that have dominated Indian
business since liberalization shows that the opposite may well be
true: Government influence is as important as ever, and the state's
dependence on its largest corporations to fight off global
competition has given India's big industrialists even greater
political clout.
Thus, as many as 15 of a recent list of
India's 25 largest business groups were also among the top 25 in
1969, when the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act came
into effect, argues Surajit Mazumdar, a professor at New Delhi's
Institute for Studies in Industrial Development.
"[Despite liberalization] things
didn't really change that much," Mazumdar said. "If you had
new entrants, it was essentially from within the set of large groups
or international firms. So in a sense what you got was a process of
competition between the big and the dominant."
To be sure, there are strong arguments
for succeeding Indian governments' support of the country's dynamic
tycoons. In the essay that coined the phrase "captains of
industry," Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle told an England
increasingly concerned about the plight of its workers at the height
of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 19th Century, "Government
can do much, but it can in no wise do all."
And in India, that seems especially
true. As graft absorbs nine out of every 10 dollars spent on
government projects, India's 10 largest business groups account for
as much as a fifth of the entire economy. Ratan Tata's Tata Group
alone accounts for as much as 5 percent of India's GDP, while Mukesh
Ambani's Reliance Industries contributes another 3 percent and Kumar
Birla's Aditya Birla Group adds another 2 percent.
It's therefore easy to see why state
planners might turn the responsibility for providing the country's
essential services to companies like Tata, which in Jamshedpur, the
headquarters of its flagship Tata Steel, provides roads, utilities,
health care and sanitation infrastructure superior to most Indian
cities. After all, the land grants that built America's railroads in
the Gilded Age not only helped create great fortunes for eight of the
40 richest Americans of all time, but also helped to quadruple U.S.
gross national product and nearly double the per capita income of
average Americans between 1865 and 1900, according to Northeastern
University professor Ballard C. Campbell. For most part workers'
wages also increased over the same period.
But critics of the business-friendly
policies of India's own golden era say that under the auspices of
stimulating industrialization and the building of houses, roads,
bridges and ports, the country's leaders seems to have forgotten that
government can do anything except give public land and resources to
big capitalists — even as spending dwindles for the social programs
intended to deliver "inclusive growth."
Given India's huge population, it's
hard to imagine a scenario where industrialization creates a tight
enough labor market to result in the kind of wage increases that
America saw in its Gilded Age. And deals aren't only being cut to
increase the wealth of the nation, they say; in the back room, the
country's elected leaders are signing a raft of policies and
contracts with the express purpose of lining their own pockets.
"Collusive arrangements exist in
all the areas where the government maintains control over limited
resources, whether it's minerals, forests, airwaves, frequencies,
spectrum, water or land," said Praful Bidwai, a writer and
activist who is among the most trenchant critics of the India's
recent economic policy. "The land grab is extraordinary. It's
never happened on this scale."
Perhaps that's why India's recent
policies in areas like telecom, real estate and mining have seemed so
flexible when it comes to accommodating the new robber barons.
The so-called 2G spectrum scam
captivates India today. But the CBI allegations that billionaire
industrialists used shell companies to violate regulations and
engineered payoffs to former telecom minister Andimuthu Raja are only
the tip of the iceberg. And while one might argue that the people
have benefited from those allegedly corrupt deals with a rapidly
growing mobile market and low airtime charges, that kind of
justification is much more difficult when it comes to other
government policies like the allocation of Special Economic Zones and
mining rights.
Since 2005, India's SEZ policy has
allowed corporate developers to acquire hundreds of thousands of
acres of land, running roughshod over the protests of small
landowners with the aid of the state. Supposedly to encourage
employment-generating industries, India granted developers and
zone-based businesses exemptions from import and export duties,
excise and sales taxes, and up to 15 years of tax holidays on
profits.
Yet most of the SEZs mushroomed in
desirable areas where no incentives were needed, and many turned into
residential real estate plays or IT sector office complexes.
Moreover, few of the 400,000-odd jobs resulting from the scheme are
of the type that could absorb the farmers that the zones displaced,
and their net effect actually appears to have exacerbated,
rather than reduced, inequality, argues Loraine Kennedy, deputy
director of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS) in Paris.
Similarly, in the mining sector,
various state governments have required forest dwellers and
indigenous tribal groups to turn over mineral resources to
industrialists like Vedanta Resources' Anil Agarwal. And while the
industry displaced some 2.6 million people between 1959 and 1991 —
most of them from indigenous tribes — the pace of mining clearances
has accelerated dramatically in recent years according to a recent
Times of India report that synthesized government data. Between 1998
and 2005, 216 mining projects a year were granted clearance to
extract minerals from India's forests, compared with only 19 per year
from 1980 to 1997, the paper found.
The resulting concentration of wealth
is stunning. Going by the Forbes list, the combined wealth of
the 10 richest Indians, at around $150 billion, accounted for 12
percent of the country's gross domestic product in 2010 — the
annual income of some 150 million average people.
But it's the influence and sheer power
of the new robber barons and the changing character of the Indian
political system that's most disturbing. According to an analysis of
mandatory filings conducted by India's Association for Democratic
Reforms (ADR), the number of Indians in the parliament with more
than 10 millionrupees in assets — known here as crorepatis —
doubled from 2004 to 2009.
While it's true that America's Congress
is also stacked with millionaires, the amount of wealth amassed by
India's leaders over the past five years alone is remarkable: The
assets of the average MP increased from around $400,000 in 2004 to
around $1.2 million in 2009. Meanwhile, the composition of the
committees that steer government policy has also changed.
"Money has been playing such a
huge role [that] it's obvious," said ADR's national coordinator,
Anil Bairwal. "If you look at the committee on finance, mostly
industrialists are sitting on it. If you look at policy making, in
the Lok Sabha [lower house] or Rajya Sabha [upper house] most people
represent industry one way or the other."
Conflicts of interest go unmonitored or
ignored. MPs in the lower house do not have to declare their
interests in corporations, and the declarations of MPs in the upper
house have not been made public — though a Right to Information
request from ADR is pending. A similar RTI request revealed that no
objections to the inclusion of an MP on any parliamentary committee
on the grounds that he or she had a personal or financial interest in
its affairs over the past five years, according to PRS Legislative
Research, another civil society group.
And there were only two instances
during the 2004-2009 session when upper house MPs voluntarily
declared their personal stakes in the proceedings before speaking
before the parliament, while no such declaration was made by lower
house representatives.
Perhaps they didn't bother, thinking
that the conflict of interest was glaringly obvious — with
flamboyant Kingfisher Airlines promoter Vijay Mallya sitting on the
civil aviation committee and enjoying day-to-day interactions with
the minister.
But consider some of the cases
illustrated by muckraking journalist Shafi Rahman in India
Today magazine. During the 2004-2009 session, for instance, MP
Nageswara Rao asked for details about the government's plans to build
eight-lane expressways without mentioning that he also happened to be
the non-executive chairman of the Madhucon Group — a company
involved in a dozen-odd projects with the National Highways Authority
of India.
Meanwhile, although the composition of
parliamentary standing committees often changes during a government's
five-year term, Rahman pointed out at the time that the standing
committees on finance, industry, public accounts and health included
tycoons with massive holdings in IT, media and cement, hotels and
shipping and medical colleges — though on the parliament's website
they ticked industrialist along with a laundry list of other
professions, calling themselves agriculturalists, educationists and
social workers. Since then, little has changed but the names of the
players.
"They are writing policies more or
less," said Bidwai. "This is something that perhaps not
even Rockefeller or Morgan was able to do as successfully."
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/110316/india-economy-anil-ambani
Friday, March 11, 2011
What's to come of Free Tibet movement?
The Dalai Lama's decision to give up political role places the Tibetan freedom movement in precarious position.
By Jason Overdorf
NEW DELHI, India — Like his previous suggestion that he might pick his next incarnation before his own death, the Dalai Lama's move to withdraw from politics is a savvy move — this time to dilute the official powers of his office before China's pet monks can begin wrangling with Buddhist leaders in exile for the right to choose his successor.
But will the rough and tumble of parliamentary democracy also dilute international support for "Free Tibet"?
Observers say that the common people of the Tibetan exile community in India, at least, are nervous about the decision. But the Dalai Lama will likely retain his role as the symbolic head of the Tibetan exiles, and his sway over affairs will remain supreme if he chooses to wield it.
"He's trying to take less political responsibility and focus more on the spiritual dimension," said Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor in Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. "But it doesn't mean that he will go away from the scene. Obviously the Tibetan community is highly religious, which means regardless of who is the prime minister, regardless who is the speaker of the parliament in exile, or the cabinet ministers, they will go ahead with the Dalai Lama."
That's true. But it also means that the Dalai Lama is the only leader who enjoys the complete trust and full support of the entire community. Democracy may bring a new kind of factionalism to Tibetan exile politics — where some groups reject the Dalai Lama's decision to settle for autonomy rather than independence and a radical fringe questions the resistance movement's commitment to nonviolence.
"There are factional, divisive politics within the Tibetan community," said Abanti Bhattacharya, a professor in the Asian studies department of Delhi University.
Moreover, exiled Tibetans are likely apprehensive because the move comes as alleged corruption scandals highlight the possible pitfalls of politics in the government-in-exile's host country, India. And it closely follows an ugly round of corruption allegations that implicated the third-highest Tibetan Buddhist religious leader, the Karmapa Lama — which reminded the exiles of their vulnerability, though the devout never gave the accusations much credence.
"As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power," the Dalai Lama said in a speech Thursday to mark the 52nd anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan [3] uprising against the Chinese government in Llasa.
China quickly interpreted the statement as "a trick," as the religious leader has talked of stepping down in the past. But this time — to the dismay of many exiled Tibetans — he gave a specific date for his withdrawal from politics, saying he would propose the necessary amendments to the constitution of the parliament in exile on March 14.
"I'm sure the Tibetan people have been talking about the statement yesterday [announcing the Dalai Lama's retirement]," said Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile political party. "But at the same time we have to understand that his holiness has said many times that he's in semi-retirement and the current prime minister [of the government-in-exile] is his political boss. As far as we know His Holiness' vision is to have a truly democratic Tibetan society."
That line will make things difficult for China, forcing the Chinese government to talk with the elected government of Tibetan exiles, rather than their religious leader, if they are to hold any negotiations at all. And by devolving his political powers to elected representatives, the Dalai Lama is implicitly challenging the Chinese leadership to do the same thing at a time when it is already under international and internal pressures.
"[This means that] the future will be more complicated for the Chinese," said JNU's Kondapalli. "If you consider them as portions of China, a lot of portions of China are getting democratized, while the central government is not. For instance, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and now the Tibetans in a massive way. It will put a lot of pressure on the Chinese, especially after the Egyptian and Libyan developments."
At the same time, by diluting his political role and delegating more power to the elected government in exile, the Dalai Lama has acted to forestall a leadership crisis after his death. There is bound to be a contest between China's Tibetan representatives and the exiled monks to choose his next incarnation, which could end with the Chinese government effectively selecting the Tibetans' supreme religious leader. And regardless of who makes the selection, the present Dalai Lama's successor will be a small child, which would leave senior monks wrangling for influence.
"[Currently] the Dalai Lama has sweeping powers," said Kondapalli. "So it's better to amend the constitution and let the elected representatives deal with the day to day affairs, rather than [risk] a Chinese-appointed Dalai Lama running roughshod over everybody — because [otherwise] the sweeping powers will be there for the next Dalai Lama as well."
By Jason Overdorf
NEW DELHI, India — Like his previous suggestion that he might pick his next incarnation before his own death, the Dalai Lama's move to withdraw from politics is a savvy move — this time to dilute the official powers of his office before China's pet monks can begin wrangling with Buddhist leaders in exile for the right to choose his successor.
But will the rough and tumble of parliamentary democracy also dilute international support for "Free Tibet"?
Observers say that the common people of the Tibetan exile community in India, at least, are nervous about the decision. But the Dalai Lama will likely retain his role as the symbolic head of the Tibetan exiles, and his sway over affairs will remain supreme if he chooses to wield it.
"He's trying to take less political responsibility and focus more on the spiritual dimension," said Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor in Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. "But it doesn't mean that he will go away from the scene. Obviously the Tibetan community is highly religious, which means regardless of who is the prime minister, regardless who is the speaker of the parliament in exile, or the cabinet ministers, they will go ahead with the Dalai Lama."
That's true. But it also means that the Dalai Lama is the only leader who enjoys the complete trust and full support of the entire community. Democracy may bring a new kind of factionalism to Tibetan exile politics — where some groups reject the Dalai Lama's decision to settle for autonomy rather than independence and a radical fringe questions the resistance movement's commitment to nonviolence.
"There are factional, divisive politics within the Tibetan community," said Abanti Bhattacharya, a professor in the Asian studies department of Delhi University.
Moreover, exiled Tibetans are likely apprehensive because the move comes as alleged corruption scandals highlight the possible pitfalls of politics in the government-in-exile's host country, India. And it closely follows an ugly round of corruption allegations that implicated the third-highest Tibetan Buddhist religious leader, the Karmapa Lama — which reminded the exiles of their vulnerability, though the devout never gave the accusations much credence.
"As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power," the Dalai Lama said in a speech Thursday to mark the 52nd anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan [3] uprising against the Chinese government in Llasa.
China quickly interpreted the statement as "a trick," as the religious leader has talked of stepping down in the past. But this time — to the dismay of many exiled Tibetans — he gave a specific date for his withdrawal from politics, saying he would propose the necessary amendments to the constitution of the parliament in exile on March 14.
"I'm sure the Tibetan people have been talking about the statement yesterday [announcing the Dalai Lama's retirement]," said Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile political party. "But at the same time we have to understand that his holiness has said many times that he's in semi-retirement and the current prime minister [of the government-in-exile] is his political boss. As far as we know His Holiness' vision is to have a truly democratic Tibetan society."
That line will make things difficult for China, forcing the Chinese government to talk with the elected government of Tibetan exiles, rather than their religious leader, if they are to hold any negotiations at all. And by devolving his political powers to elected representatives, the Dalai Lama is implicitly challenging the Chinese leadership to do the same thing at a time when it is already under international and internal pressures.
"[This means that] the future will be more complicated for the Chinese," said JNU's Kondapalli. "If you consider them as portions of China, a lot of portions of China are getting democratized, while the central government is not. For instance, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and now the Tibetans in a massive way. It will put a lot of pressure on the Chinese, especially after the Egyptian and Libyan developments."
At the same time, by diluting his political role and delegating more power to the elected government in exile, the Dalai Lama has acted to forestall a leadership crisis after his death. There is bound to be a contest between China's Tibetan representatives and the exiled monks to choose his next incarnation, which could end with the Chinese government effectively selecting the Tibetans' supreme religious leader. And regardless of who makes the selection, the present Dalai Lama's successor will be a small child, which would leave senior monks wrangling for influence.
"[Currently] the Dalai Lama has sweeping powers," said Kondapalli. "So it's better to amend the constitution and let the elected representatives deal with the day to day affairs, rather than [risk] a Chinese-appointed Dalai Lama running roughshod over everybody — because [otherwise] the sweeping powers will be there for the next Dalai Lama as well."
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
India: the new East India Company
The flagship of the British colonial empire comes back as a luxury brand.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
(February 16, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Once upon a time, the East India Company toppled governments, enslaved peoples and staffed a private army and navy to rule the world of commerce — then dominated by tea, coffee and exotic spices.
Now Sanjiv Mehta, a 48-year-old British Indian businessman, believes it's time for the ultimate symbol of colonial oppression to make a comeback — you guessed it, as a luxury brand.
"Wealth is moving from the West to the East, and all the luxury brands are typically brands which originated in the West," Mehta told GlobalPost. "[In that context] the East India Company is an interesting brand because Asia looks at it as the old West and the West looks at it as the exotic East."
An Indian buying the East India Company is a gimmick that makes good copy, of course. But the East India Company is actually the real deal.
Having been nationalized after the 1857 rebellion in India that Britain dubbed "the mutiny" despite its revolutionary character, the "brand" was lying virtually forgotten in the hands of the British crown and a handful of apathetic shareholders when Mehta ran across it in 2004. He snapped it up — along with the original coat of arms and merchant's mark — and set about sourcing some $15 million in investment capital to put it back on the map.
According to company lore, Mehta then spent six years meeting museum curators and examining company artifacts to make sure he got the image right before he finally launched the flagship store in London last year.
"It was a long journey," Mehta said.
The London launch received predictable fanfare. This year, though, will be time to put up or shut up, as the East India Company goes back to its colonial roots in Hong Kong, Singapore and India, where the $7 billion Mahindra Group announced it was taking a minority stake in the brand in January.
"India, Singapore and Hong Kong were huge locations for the East India Company," Mehta said, recalling the company's role in forming each of these nations. "We definitely have a very aggressive plan to enter all these markets," he added. "We will be entering with our fine foods business in India in 2011, starting from Bombay."
Mahindra, which knows the market, is optimistic. "The East India Company (EIC) is a truly global brand and can transverse across multiple product categories," Parag Shah, managing partner in Mahindra's investment arm, said in a press statement. "This 400-year-old brand is the first modern transnational brand and in a sense, the founder of the phrase 'international trade.'"
But will colonial chic sell in the colony that lent the company its name?
"The relationship of India with its colonial past has always been surprisingly without rancor, and the fact that some Indian businessman is reviving the brand is not without irony and all that," said Santosh Desai, chief executive of Future Brands. "But it's a symbolic kind of move. It's hardly likely to be a significant brand in a real sense."
The new East India Company sells posh chocolates, tea and coffee and the kind of condiments that old India hands used to whinge were always running out (mustards, marmalade — but not Marmite), as well as gold bullion. But in all of those product categories, it's likely to find that the same economic and cultural developments that have refurbished the old colonial brand as politically correct will also make its former home market a tough nut to crack, says Desai.
To be sure, India has shed its postcolonial baggage. There are still gin and tonics and whisky sodas at "the club" for the old Indian elite, and condo complexes with pretentious-sounding names like the Wyndham Estate. But these days, the cricket team expects to thrash the Brits soundly whenever they meet, and the players are as apt to call their white opponents "sir" as they are to sprout wings and fly.
Young people no longer strive for "propah" British accents — or even American ones — preferring the free-flowing mashup of Hinglish to any other lingo. And the most popular foreign grub — American fast food — must be thoroughly Indianized before it will sell.
"In general, 15 years ago there was a presumption of superiority for an international brand in all sorts of categories," said Desai. But that's no longer the case — even when it comes to products like cars, refrigerators and stereos. "For a whole set of general brands, in everyday categories, Western brands have become commonplace, and the distinction between Indian and Western brands has become less significant."
For luxury brands like the East India Company aspires to be, that's not strictly the case, though one increasingly finds the collections of top Indian designers alongside clothing labeled with Armani or Zegna — and Jaguar, of course, is already owned by Tata. The Haagen Daaz outlet in New Delhi's most popular mall, for instance, is almost always packed even though — or perhaps because — its ice cream costs nearly $10 a scoop.
But brand-conscious consumers are conservative in India — where class distinctions are rigid, and the gossip is vicious. So however long its history, East India Company may find it tough to compete with established brands.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
(February 16, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Once upon a time, the East India Company toppled governments, enslaved peoples and staffed a private army and navy to rule the world of commerce — then dominated by tea, coffee and exotic spices.
Now Sanjiv Mehta, a 48-year-old British Indian businessman, believes it's time for the ultimate symbol of colonial oppression to make a comeback — you guessed it, as a luxury brand.
"Wealth is moving from the West to the East, and all the luxury brands are typically brands which originated in the West," Mehta told GlobalPost. "[In that context] the East India Company is an interesting brand because Asia looks at it as the old West and the West looks at it as the exotic East."
An Indian buying the East India Company is a gimmick that makes good copy, of course. But the East India Company is actually the real deal.
Having been nationalized after the 1857 rebellion in India that Britain dubbed "the mutiny" despite its revolutionary character, the "brand" was lying virtually forgotten in the hands of the British crown and a handful of apathetic shareholders when Mehta ran across it in 2004. He snapped it up — along with the original coat of arms and merchant's mark — and set about sourcing some $15 million in investment capital to put it back on the map.
According to company lore, Mehta then spent six years meeting museum curators and examining company artifacts to make sure he got the image right before he finally launched the flagship store in London last year.
"It was a long journey," Mehta said.
The London launch received predictable fanfare. This year, though, will be time to put up or shut up, as the East India Company goes back to its colonial roots in Hong Kong, Singapore and India, where the $7 billion Mahindra Group announced it was taking a minority stake in the brand in January.
"India, Singapore and Hong Kong were huge locations for the East India Company," Mehta said, recalling the company's role in forming each of these nations. "We definitely have a very aggressive plan to enter all these markets," he added. "We will be entering with our fine foods business in India in 2011, starting from Bombay."
Mahindra, which knows the market, is optimistic. "The East India Company (EIC) is a truly global brand and can transverse across multiple product categories," Parag Shah, managing partner in Mahindra's investment arm, said in a press statement. "This 400-year-old brand is the first modern transnational brand and in a sense, the founder of the phrase 'international trade.'"
But will colonial chic sell in the colony that lent the company its name?
"The relationship of India with its colonial past has always been surprisingly without rancor, and the fact that some Indian businessman is reviving the brand is not without irony and all that," said Santosh Desai, chief executive of Future Brands. "But it's a symbolic kind of move. It's hardly likely to be a significant brand in a real sense."
The new East India Company sells posh chocolates, tea and coffee and the kind of condiments that old India hands used to whinge were always running out (mustards, marmalade — but not Marmite), as well as gold bullion. But in all of those product categories, it's likely to find that the same economic and cultural developments that have refurbished the old colonial brand as politically correct will also make its former home market a tough nut to crack, says Desai.
To be sure, India has shed its postcolonial baggage. There are still gin and tonics and whisky sodas at "the club" for the old Indian elite, and condo complexes with pretentious-sounding names like the Wyndham Estate. But these days, the cricket team expects to thrash the Brits soundly whenever they meet, and the players are as apt to call their white opponents "sir" as they are to sprout wings and fly.
Young people no longer strive for "propah" British accents — or even American ones — preferring the free-flowing mashup of Hinglish to any other lingo. And the most popular foreign grub — American fast food — must be thoroughly Indianized before it will sell.
"In general, 15 years ago there was a presumption of superiority for an international brand in all sorts of categories," said Desai. But that's no longer the case — even when it comes to products like cars, refrigerators and stereos. "For a whole set of general brands, in everyday categories, Western brands have become commonplace, and the distinction between Indian and Western brands has become less significant."
For luxury brands like the East India Company aspires to be, that's not strictly the case, though one increasingly finds the collections of top Indian designers alongside clothing labeled with Armani or Zegna — and Jaguar, of course, is already owned by Tata. The Haagen Daaz outlet in New Delhi's most popular mall, for instance, is almost always packed even though — or perhaps because — its ice cream costs nearly $10 a scoop.
But brand-conscious consumers are conservative in India — where class distinctions are rigid, and the gossip is vicious. So however long its history, East India Company may find it tough to compete with established brands.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Killing India's Right to Information law
India's most vital tool for fighting corruption is bleeding from a thousand cuts.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
(February 15, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Empowered by a groundbreaking new law designed to help ordinary citizens fight corruption, Jagdish Sharma took on the leading clan of his village to expose the alleged theft of an elderly residents' pension money last week. But his triumph was short lived.
Just days after Sharma filed his case against the village head, Dharambir Malik, using India's Right to Information (RTI) act, Malik allegedly plowed down Sharma and several other protesters with his SUV — crushing Sharma's legs and killing his daughter-in-law, Sonu, according to local press reports. And though police say murder charges have been leveled against Malik, India's RTI crusaders argue that Sonu's death is the latest in a thousand cuts that are slowly killing the country's most powerful tool in the fight against corruption.
"This is a message to anyone raising their voice against corruption, that you will be killed," said Arvind Kejriwal, one of the leaders of the decade-long campaign for the RTI Act.
At least a dozen whistleblowers have been murdered for daring to expose crime and corruption since the RTI act was passed in 2005, according to activist Parshuram Ray. But rather than strengthening the law and fighting to protect the citizens who use it, the government is backpedaling fast to strip RTI of its sweeping powers, even as politicians and bureaucrats have adopted an informal go-slow policy that threatens to make it obsolete.
Already, by 2015, the Central Information Commission — the body responsible for addressing complaints when officials give incomplete or evasive answers to RTI requests — will face a backlog of 90,000 cases, which means an applicant would have to wait up to six years for an appeal. And the situation is all too likely to get worse.
"Despite all the provisions of the act, at every level information is being denied, and nothing is happening. Nobody is being punished for that," said Ray, who faced stonewalling when he sought to use RTI to expose corruption in a national program that provides work and wages for the rural poor. "The reality is that the original aims and objectives of the RTI act have almost been shattered."
The success or failure of these efforts to hamstring India's information law could well mark a turning point in the country's escalating battle against corruption, as well as the struggle for basic human rights.
The volume of alleged corruption exposed in recent months has been dramatic enough to raise fears that failure to rein in crony capitalism could derail the India rise to prominence on the global stage — especially after it was revealed that foreign direct investment has plunged 60 percent this year.
But the drama might actually be a sign of progress — showing not that corruption is increasing by leaps and bounds, but that more and more scandals are coming to light. And as bruised and battered as it may be, say some activists, that's down to the RTI. Not only did the act play a direct role in exposing two of the largest recent corruption scandals involving the telecom and defense ministries, says Nikhil Dey, another RTI pioneer, but it has also made it much easier for whistleblowers inside government to leak information without fear of reprisals, since an RTI filing from a newspaper is a speedy way to end a witchhunt.
"Once you enter the domain of open information, even a leak is legitimized much more," said Dey. "Before, the press had to think of a million ways to legitimize the information, because otherwise their source would be traced and persecuted. Now, because RTI is so extensive and powerful, it makes it very difficult for someone to say, 'How did this information get out?'"
Indeed, when it was passed in 2005, the RTI act promised a sea change in governance. By granting citizens the right to demand transparency, it swept out the colonial era practice of denying access to even the most mundane details of government programs under the official secrets act. It sought to pre-empt bureaucratic sloth and obfuscation by requiring government departments to respond to requests within 30 days. It mandated that every department computerize and make public its records proactively so that citizens could eventually access most information without filing a request. And it put in place stiff penalties for officials who refuse to comply.
But as individual citizens and civil society groups discover more and more ways to use the law, various efforts to undermine the RTI are gathering momentum. Virtually no department has voluntarily complied with the provision requiring proactive disclosure. Everyone from the Supreme Court to the Central Bureau of Investigation is fighting to be declared exempt from information requests. The government is seeking to amend the rules governing RTI requests in a move that activists say would make the procedure more arcane and thus make it easier for bureaucrats to justify stonewalling.
The information commissions are also being starved of resources. There are only six central information commissioners instead of the allotted 11, for instance, and limitations on hiring additional staff prevent them from clearing their backlog of complaints. Meanwhile, at the state level matters can be even worse. In Orissa and West Bengal, for example, the information commissioners are so far behind that they'll need more than 10 years to clear their present backlog of complaints, according to a survey by the Public Cause Research Foundation — and that's if they don't receive any appeals over the next decade.
"The reluctance to part with the information is just part of an old mindset," said Dey. "Very often if bureaucrats meet together they exchange notes about how they can avoid revealing information."
And that teamwork might be working, according to Anjali Bhardwaj, who heads Satark Nagrik Sangathan, an non-governmental organization that trains citizens to use the RTI act. At the grassroots level, India's bureaucrats are getting more and more clever at sidestepping the law. Aware of the long delays of an appeal, officials routinely refuse to disclose basic information about government activities by claiming it would violate the right to privacy, require applicants to prove their citizenship before they'll accept the request, or use the arcane structure of the bureaucracy itself to send them from one public information officer to another like Kafka's man before the law.
In the latest twist, most government bodies are putting low-level functionaries in place as public information officers so that even if they are sincere they don't have the clout needed to get documents from their colleagues.
"It clearly looks like a very deliberate move in government departments," said Bhardwaj.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
(February 15, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Empowered by a groundbreaking new law designed to help ordinary citizens fight corruption, Jagdish Sharma took on the leading clan of his village to expose the alleged theft of an elderly residents' pension money last week. But his triumph was short lived.
Just days after Sharma filed his case against the village head, Dharambir Malik, using India's Right to Information (RTI) act, Malik allegedly plowed down Sharma and several other protesters with his SUV — crushing Sharma's legs and killing his daughter-in-law, Sonu, according to local press reports. And though police say murder charges have been leveled against Malik, India's RTI crusaders argue that Sonu's death is the latest in a thousand cuts that are slowly killing the country's most powerful tool in the fight against corruption.
"This is a message to anyone raising their voice against corruption, that you will be killed," said Arvind Kejriwal, one of the leaders of the decade-long campaign for the RTI Act.
At least a dozen whistleblowers have been murdered for daring to expose crime and corruption since the RTI act was passed in 2005, according to activist Parshuram Ray. But rather than strengthening the law and fighting to protect the citizens who use it, the government is backpedaling fast to strip RTI of its sweeping powers, even as politicians and bureaucrats have adopted an informal go-slow policy that threatens to make it obsolete.
Already, by 2015, the Central Information Commission — the body responsible for addressing complaints when officials give incomplete or evasive answers to RTI requests — will face a backlog of 90,000 cases, which means an applicant would have to wait up to six years for an appeal. And the situation is all too likely to get worse.
"Despite all the provisions of the act, at every level information is being denied, and nothing is happening. Nobody is being punished for that," said Ray, who faced stonewalling when he sought to use RTI to expose corruption in a national program that provides work and wages for the rural poor. "The reality is that the original aims and objectives of the RTI act have almost been shattered."
The success or failure of these efforts to hamstring India's information law could well mark a turning point in the country's escalating battle against corruption, as well as the struggle for basic human rights.
The volume of alleged corruption exposed in recent months has been dramatic enough to raise fears that failure to rein in crony capitalism could derail the India rise to prominence on the global stage — especially after it was revealed that foreign direct investment has plunged 60 percent this year.
But the drama might actually be a sign of progress — showing not that corruption is increasing by leaps and bounds, but that more and more scandals are coming to light. And as bruised and battered as it may be, say some activists, that's down to the RTI. Not only did the act play a direct role in exposing two of the largest recent corruption scandals involving the telecom and defense ministries, says Nikhil Dey, another RTI pioneer, but it has also made it much easier for whistleblowers inside government to leak information without fear of reprisals, since an RTI filing from a newspaper is a speedy way to end a witchhunt.
"Once you enter the domain of open information, even a leak is legitimized much more," said Dey. "Before, the press had to think of a million ways to legitimize the information, because otherwise their source would be traced and persecuted. Now, because RTI is so extensive and powerful, it makes it very difficult for someone to say, 'How did this information get out?'"
Indeed, when it was passed in 2005, the RTI act promised a sea change in governance. By granting citizens the right to demand transparency, it swept out the colonial era practice of denying access to even the most mundane details of government programs under the official secrets act. It sought to pre-empt bureaucratic sloth and obfuscation by requiring government departments to respond to requests within 30 days. It mandated that every department computerize and make public its records proactively so that citizens could eventually access most information without filing a request. And it put in place stiff penalties for officials who refuse to comply.
But as individual citizens and civil society groups discover more and more ways to use the law, various efforts to undermine the RTI are gathering momentum. Virtually no department has voluntarily complied with the provision requiring proactive disclosure. Everyone from the Supreme Court to the Central Bureau of Investigation is fighting to be declared exempt from information requests. The government is seeking to amend the rules governing RTI requests in a move that activists say would make the procedure more arcane and thus make it easier for bureaucrats to justify stonewalling.
The information commissions are also being starved of resources. There are only six central information commissioners instead of the allotted 11, for instance, and limitations on hiring additional staff prevent them from clearing their backlog of complaints. Meanwhile, at the state level matters can be even worse. In Orissa and West Bengal, for example, the information commissioners are so far behind that they'll need more than 10 years to clear their present backlog of complaints, according to a survey by the Public Cause Research Foundation — and that's if they don't receive any appeals over the next decade.
"The reluctance to part with the information is just part of an old mindset," said Dey. "Very often if bureaucrats meet together they exchange notes about how they can avoid revealing information."
And that teamwork might be working, according to Anjali Bhardwaj, who heads Satark Nagrik Sangathan, an non-governmental organization that trains citizens to use the RTI act. At the grassroots level, India's bureaucrats are getting more and more clever at sidestepping the law. Aware of the long delays of an appeal, officials routinely refuse to disclose basic information about government activities by claiming it would violate the right to privacy, require applicants to prove their citizenship before they'll accept the request, or use the arcane structure of the bureaucracy itself to send them from one public information officer to another like Kafka's man before the law.
In the latest twist, most government bodies are putting low-level functionaries in place as public information officers so that even if they are sincere they don't have the clout needed to get documents from their colleagues.
"It clearly looks like a very deliberate move in government departments," said Bhardwaj.
Friday, February 11, 2011
India-Pakistan talks: read between the lines
Analysis: It's official. New Delhi lost the stalemate.
By Jason Overdorf
(February 11, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Nominally, India and Pakistan agreed to resume [2] high level peace talks Thursday.
But in reality, New Delhi bent over backwards to give in to Islamabad before the proposed negotiations even begin — by granting the Kashmir dispute equal status on the agenda with the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.
So how did India go from refusing to talk to begging for talks?
New Delhi believes that it has no choice but to talk eventually and surmises that the anger over the Mumbai attacks has faded enough over the past two years to make a resumption possible. Meanwhile, with the expected drawdown and eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan on the horizon, India may believe that a magnanimous stance today could help it to negotiate a stronger post-conflict role for itself in Kabul.
"I think it was necessary for us to discuss Afghanistan ... ," Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna [3] told reporters in New York Thursday, according to the Times of India newspaper. "India has been playing a very positive role in trying to build Afghanistan in terms of our volunteers who have gone there for capacity building and so I think Afghanistan had to be included," the paper quoted Rao as saying.
Unfortunately, what's more likely is that resuming the dialogue will just give Islamabad — which is wary even of India's limited present role in Afghanistan — another chance to run circles around India's negotiators.
Already, India has agreed to discuss a whole range of issues, including Pakistan's claims to territory in Indian-administered Kashmir, which will inevitably remove the focus from Pakistan's alleged support of terrorist groups that attack India.
At a 90-minute meeting between Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meeting in Thimphu, Bhutan, on Sunday, the two countries agreed to a series of secretary-level meetings to discuss, among other issues, confidence-building measures like cross-border bus services, the dispute over Sir Creek (between India's Gujarat and Pakistan's Sindh province) and Pakistan's desire to redraw the borders of Kashmir.
"The reality is that India and Pakistan cannot afford to turn their backs to each other, that they must engage in dialogue which is, as I said, serious and sustainable and comprehensive," Rao said in a televised interview on Thursday, when the substance of the Sunday meeting was disclosed.
It's taken two years, but that's a pretty big flip-flop.
Once, India claimed it would not resume normal diplomatic relations until Islamabad cracked down on terrorist groups operating with impunity in Pakistan and began a vigorous prosecution of the alleged perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. That vigorous prosecution never happened, of course. But as the United States proved unable to exert any pressure on Pakistan and instead began pressuring India to return to the negotiating table, New Delhi swiftly went from refusing to talk to begging to talk.
To make matters worse, China stepped up to back Pakistan's military shadow government. And events like the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer for opposing Pakistan's blasphemy laws — which suggest that Pakistan's radicals are gaining ground — have convinced India that it has no choice but to backpedal. Playing hardball, the logic runs, will only give Pakistan's hardliners more room for saber-rattling — and more credibility on the street. If it wasn't clear before, it is clear now: India has lost the stalemate.
"Any rational observer would say this is not the time to nourish much hope on moving forward on substantive issues," said former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. "But on our side they feel that vacuum is not in our favor and by not talking we would be giving up whatever little hope there is ... of stemming the rise of these radical forces and giving some backing to those who wish to normalize relations with India — especially Pakistani civil society."
But preventing Pakistani hardliners from playing the India card comes at a cost. The presumption that Qureshi will visit India in July to review the progress made by the two countries' foreign secretaries over the intervening months underscores the impression that India must woo Pakistan, even to merit a visit from its foreign minister. And it's far easier to make friendly noises now — when Indian-administered Kashmir enjoys a predictable winter lull in separatist protests — than it will be when Srinagar inevitably heats up for the summer.
At the last meeting between Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers last July, for instance, when Srinagar was rocked by bloody riots over the killing of civilian by Indian security forces, Qureshi sandbagged during meetings with Krishna in Islamabad. Then Qureshi undermined any possible gains at the post mortem press conference by equating a top Indian official with Hafiz Saeed — the Pakistani radical whom India believes masterminded the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and whose continued freedom and influence in Pakistan is a major impediment to better relations.
Indeed, if past talks are any indicator, nothing is likely to emerge from more dialogue. Though talking with Qureshi does grant Pakistan's democratically elected government an added stamp of legitimacy, in order to make progress India needs to negotiate with the real center of power in Islamabad — Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who heads the Pakistani army.
Moreover, Manmohan Singh's government is in a weakened position domestically, and recent revelations about the involvement of Hindu terror cells in the bombing of a "Friendship Express" train between Delhi and Lahore — in which 42 Pakistani citizens were killed — has undermined India's previous position of moral superiority.
"The jury is still out on these talks," said Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly. "Any progress, will necessarily be extremely slow and incremental. The level of distrust in India is too great and the PM is too weak with the opposition in an uproar about multiple [corruption] scandals."
By caving into Pakistan's demands up front and allowing Kashmir and "all outstanding issues" back on the table, India has essentially admitted that it has nothing to negotiate with. The threat of war is an empty one (thankfully), and generous aid from an opportunistic China and a fearful United States renders India's economic clout meaningless.
"The stick we have we can't use, and the carrot that the Pakistanis want [Kashmir] we can't give them," said Sibal.
By Jason Overdorf
(February 11, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Nominally, India and Pakistan agreed to resume [2] high level peace talks Thursday.
But in reality, New Delhi bent over backwards to give in to Islamabad before the proposed negotiations even begin — by granting the Kashmir dispute equal status on the agenda with the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.
So how did India go from refusing to talk to begging for talks?
New Delhi believes that it has no choice but to talk eventually and surmises that the anger over the Mumbai attacks has faded enough over the past two years to make a resumption possible. Meanwhile, with the expected drawdown and eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan on the horizon, India may believe that a magnanimous stance today could help it to negotiate a stronger post-conflict role for itself in Kabul.
"I think it was necessary for us to discuss Afghanistan ... ," Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna [3] told reporters in New York Thursday, according to the Times of India newspaper. "India has been playing a very positive role in trying to build Afghanistan in terms of our volunteers who have gone there for capacity building and so I think Afghanistan had to be included," the paper quoted Rao as saying.
Unfortunately, what's more likely is that resuming the dialogue will just give Islamabad — which is wary even of India's limited present role in Afghanistan — another chance to run circles around India's negotiators.
Already, India has agreed to discuss a whole range of issues, including Pakistan's claims to territory in Indian-administered Kashmir, which will inevitably remove the focus from Pakistan's alleged support of terrorist groups that attack India.
At a 90-minute meeting between Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meeting in Thimphu, Bhutan, on Sunday, the two countries agreed to a series of secretary-level meetings to discuss, among other issues, confidence-building measures like cross-border bus services, the dispute over Sir Creek (between India's Gujarat and Pakistan's Sindh province) and Pakistan's desire to redraw the borders of Kashmir.
"The reality is that India and Pakistan cannot afford to turn their backs to each other, that they must engage in dialogue which is, as I said, serious and sustainable and comprehensive," Rao said in a televised interview on Thursday, when the substance of the Sunday meeting was disclosed.
It's taken two years, but that's a pretty big flip-flop.
Once, India claimed it would not resume normal diplomatic relations until Islamabad cracked down on terrorist groups operating with impunity in Pakistan and began a vigorous prosecution of the alleged perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. That vigorous prosecution never happened, of course. But as the United States proved unable to exert any pressure on Pakistan and instead began pressuring India to return to the negotiating table, New Delhi swiftly went from refusing to talk to begging to talk.
To make matters worse, China stepped up to back Pakistan's military shadow government. And events like the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer for opposing Pakistan's blasphemy laws — which suggest that Pakistan's radicals are gaining ground — have convinced India that it has no choice but to backpedal. Playing hardball, the logic runs, will only give Pakistan's hardliners more room for saber-rattling — and more credibility on the street. If it wasn't clear before, it is clear now: India has lost the stalemate.
"Any rational observer would say this is not the time to nourish much hope on moving forward on substantive issues," said former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. "But on our side they feel that vacuum is not in our favor and by not talking we would be giving up whatever little hope there is ... of stemming the rise of these radical forces and giving some backing to those who wish to normalize relations with India — especially Pakistani civil society."
But preventing Pakistani hardliners from playing the India card comes at a cost. The presumption that Qureshi will visit India in July to review the progress made by the two countries' foreign secretaries over the intervening months underscores the impression that India must woo Pakistan, even to merit a visit from its foreign minister. And it's far easier to make friendly noises now — when Indian-administered Kashmir enjoys a predictable winter lull in separatist protests — than it will be when Srinagar inevitably heats up for the summer.
At the last meeting between Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers last July, for instance, when Srinagar was rocked by bloody riots over the killing of civilian by Indian security forces, Qureshi sandbagged during meetings with Krishna in Islamabad. Then Qureshi undermined any possible gains at the post mortem press conference by equating a top Indian official with Hafiz Saeed — the Pakistani radical whom India believes masterminded the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and whose continued freedom and influence in Pakistan is a major impediment to better relations.
Indeed, if past talks are any indicator, nothing is likely to emerge from more dialogue. Though talking with Qureshi does grant Pakistan's democratically elected government an added stamp of legitimacy, in order to make progress India needs to negotiate with the real center of power in Islamabad — Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who heads the Pakistani army.
Moreover, Manmohan Singh's government is in a weakened position domestically, and recent revelations about the involvement of Hindu terror cells in the bombing of a "Friendship Express" train between Delhi and Lahore — in which 42 Pakistani citizens were killed — has undermined India's previous position of moral superiority.
"The jury is still out on these talks," said Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly. "Any progress, will necessarily be extremely slow and incremental. The level of distrust in India is too great and the PM is too weak with the opposition in an uproar about multiple [corruption] scandals."
By caving into Pakistan's demands up front and allowing Kashmir and "all outstanding issues" back on the table, India has essentially admitted that it has nothing to negotiate with. The threat of war is an empty one (thankfully), and generous aid from an opportunistic China and a fearful United States renders India's economic clout meaningless.
"The stick we have we can't use, and the carrot that the Pakistanis want [Kashmir] we can't give them," said Sibal.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
A Bend In The River
The fabulous Darbargadh Palace in Morvi opens its doors.
JASON OVERDORF
Outlook Traveler - Feb. 1, 2011
In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I’m an easy enough heritage tourist. To me the mark of a good hotel has never been the variety of pillows on the bedside menu or the number of 20-something management trainees deputed to be my personal slaves. I am not in business. I have never sent an urgent fax in the pitch-black night. I like to feel comfortable, and I am not comfortable with absurd efficiency—which so often comes to resemble its opposite—or with making a dozen decisions before something so simple as turning off the light and drifting off to sleep.
A little charm and character makes up for a lot of opulence, and I don’t mind wearing a sweater in my room or running the tap for ten minutes to get hot water.
Fortunately, the Darbargadh Palace, a new heritage hotel in Morvi, Gujarat, has that charm and character in spades.
Opening to tourists this month, Darbargadh is a stunning, nineteenth-century neoclassical palace that has been lovingly restored by the Neemrana Group and Maharani Uma Dubash Morvi. The oldest of the region’s palaces, its stone walls tower over the meandering Macchu river alongside a swaying footbridge, but it feels less like a fortress than a mansion. Only seven guest rooms have been restored so far—there is an entire wing, equally large, that remains untouched—so, intimacy is the rule.
Unlike some heritage properties, there are no poor rooms here. Every room is a vast suite, with bedroom, dining area, sitting room and a colossal bathroom that would dwarf many a Manhattan studio, and the Maharani, who personally chose the décor, has beautifully recreated the neoclassical ambience with rich details like the embroidered cloth tapestries—specially woven by some of the world’s largest looms in Jaipur—which grace the stone instead of paint or wallpaper.
Each room boasts a distinguishing feature that gives it character, a marble fireplace or carved frieze, and wherever possible the designers have retained and accentuated elements of the palace’s original structure. The Kesarba Mahal I stayed in, for example—which was chosen for the terrace overlooking the Macchu—had an exposed stone archway separating the bedroom from the seating area, while the Mahindra Mahal boasts an original stone frieze depicting characters from ancient Greece.
The town of Morvi—a sleepy hamlet, known mainly for tile manufacturing, in the centre of a dry state—is, of course, not on the usual tourist’s itinerary. Morvi is only an hour from the airport (and railway station) at Rajkot, and there are a few attractions within striking distance in Dhrangadhra, Wadhwan, Maliya and Limbdi—each of which boasts palaces, stepwells and rustic bazaars. The only real ‘sights’ in Morvi are the hanging bridge and the Wagh Mandir, a 70-year-old temple of Jaipur stone that is currently being restored and expanded into a museum dedicated to the region’s royal past.
Darbargadh itself is the only true reason to stop here, most likely en route from Ahmedabad to Kutch. But Neemrana is renowned for turning hotels into destinations, and Darbargadh seems likely to uphold that tradition. Over my two-night stay, I never felt the least inclined to step outside the palace, whose high, thick walls kept out the noise of the city so that I could hear only the parakeets and songbirds as I lounged by the swimming pool in the courtyard with my Kindle. The winter sun was warm and bright, and from the terrace attached to my room I could look out over the tenant farms on the floodplain the way Maharaja Waghji Rawaji Thakore must have done in 1885.
The food at Darbargadh was excellent, and the service impeccable—as personable and informal as a trusted family retainer. Each morning, I devoured a stack of aloo parathas, a plate of sharp cheddar cheese and a basket of toast fingers with homemade jam, yet I always seemed to find room for lunch and dinner. As the hotel’s first guest, I had the luxury of ordering whatever I felt like (there was no menu), but I left it to the chef to try to impress me with his specialities, and once I convinced him that he didn’t need to make everything foreigner-bland, the eclectic feasts he prepared—think devilled eggs, penne arrabiata, mashed potatoes and mutton rogan josh—never failed to satisfy.
Only when it came time to leave did I venture out for a brief tour, stopping at the Wagh Mandir for an impromptu lesson in the techniques that the builders from Structwel—the same outfit that repaired the Taj Palace after the Mumbai attacks —were employing to fortify the cupolas damaged by the 2001 earthquake. Vipul, the hotel manager, had also arranged for me to visit the ‘new palace’ across the river, which the Maharani maintains as a part-time residence, so I spent the rest of the morning on a private viewing of the country’s finest art-deco palace outside of Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhavan.
When I left I was stuffed, rested and fully content, my only worry that I was returning to Delhi and work, instead of on down the road to Bhuj and further adventures.
The information
Location Morvi, Gujarat; three-four hours by car from Ahmedabad/one hour from Rajkot
Accommodation Seven suites (Vijayba, Kesarba, Bajiraj, Waghji, Lakhdir, Mahindra and Mayurdhwaj Mahals)
Tariff Rs 8,000 (Vijayba, Kesarba, Lakhdir, Mahindra, Mayurdhwaj); Rs 10,000 (Bajiraj, Waghji)
Contact 011-46661666, neemranahotels.com
JASON OVERDORF
Outlook Traveler - Feb. 1, 2011
In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I’m an easy enough heritage tourist. To me the mark of a good hotel has never been the variety of pillows on the bedside menu or the number of 20-something management trainees deputed to be my personal slaves. I am not in business. I have never sent an urgent fax in the pitch-black night. I like to feel comfortable, and I am not comfortable with absurd efficiency—which so often comes to resemble its opposite—or with making a dozen decisions before something so simple as turning off the light and drifting off to sleep.
A little charm and character makes up for a lot of opulence, and I don’t mind wearing a sweater in my room or running the tap for ten minutes to get hot water.
Fortunately, the Darbargadh Palace, a new heritage hotel in Morvi, Gujarat, has that charm and character in spades.
Opening to tourists this month, Darbargadh is a stunning, nineteenth-century neoclassical palace that has been lovingly restored by the Neemrana Group and Maharani Uma Dubash Morvi. The oldest of the region’s palaces, its stone walls tower over the meandering Macchu river alongside a swaying footbridge, but it feels less like a fortress than a mansion. Only seven guest rooms have been restored so far—there is an entire wing, equally large, that remains untouched—so, intimacy is the rule.
Unlike some heritage properties, there are no poor rooms here. Every room is a vast suite, with bedroom, dining area, sitting room and a colossal bathroom that would dwarf many a Manhattan studio, and the Maharani, who personally chose the décor, has beautifully recreated the neoclassical ambience with rich details like the embroidered cloth tapestries—specially woven by some of the world’s largest looms in Jaipur—which grace the stone instead of paint or wallpaper.
Each room boasts a distinguishing feature that gives it character, a marble fireplace or carved frieze, and wherever possible the designers have retained and accentuated elements of the palace’s original structure. The Kesarba Mahal I stayed in, for example—which was chosen for the terrace overlooking the Macchu—had an exposed stone archway separating the bedroom from the seating area, while the Mahindra Mahal boasts an original stone frieze depicting characters from ancient Greece.
The town of Morvi—a sleepy hamlet, known mainly for tile manufacturing, in the centre of a dry state—is, of course, not on the usual tourist’s itinerary. Morvi is only an hour from the airport (and railway station) at Rajkot, and there are a few attractions within striking distance in Dhrangadhra, Wadhwan, Maliya and Limbdi—each of which boasts palaces, stepwells and rustic bazaars. The only real ‘sights’ in Morvi are the hanging bridge and the Wagh Mandir, a 70-year-old temple of Jaipur stone that is currently being restored and expanded into a museum dedicated to the region’s royal past.
Darbargadh itself is the only true reason to stop here, most likely en route from Ahmedabad to Kutch. But Neemrana is renowned for turning hotels into destinations, and Darbargadh seems likely to uphold that tradition. Over my two-night stay, I never felt the least inclined to step outside the palace, whose high, thick walls kept out the noise of the city so that I could hear only the parakeets and songbirds as I lounged by the swimming pool in the courtyard with my Kindle. The winter sun was warm and bright, and from the terrace attached to my room I could look out over the tenant farms on the floodplain the way Maharaja Waghji Rawaji Thakore must have done in 1885.
The food at Darbargadh was excellent, and the service impeccable—as personable and informal as a trusted family retainer. Each morning, I devoured a stack of aloo parathas, a plate of sharp cheddar cheese and a basket of toast fingers with homemade jam, yet I always seemed to find room for lunch and dinner. As the hotel’s first guest, I had the luxury of ordering whatever I felt like (there was no menu), but I left it to the chef to try to impress me with his specialities, and once I convinced him that he didn’t need to make everything foreigner-bland, the eclectic feasts he prepared—think devilled eggs, penne arrabiata, mashed potatoes and mutton rogan josh—never failed to satisfy.
Only when it came time to leave did I venture out for a brief tour, stopping at the Wagh Mandir for an impromptu lesson in the techniques that the builders from Structwel—the same outfit that repaired the Taj Palace after the Mumbai attacks —were employing to fortify the cupolas damaged by the 2001 earthquake. Vipul, the hotel manager, had also arranged for me to visit the ‘new palace’ across the river, which the Maharani maintains as a part-time residence, so I spent the rest of the morning on a private viewing of the country’s finest art-deco palace outside of Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhavan.
When I left I was stuffed, rested and fully content, my only worry that I was returning to Delhi and work, instead of on down the road to Bhuj and further adventures.
The information
Location Morvi, Gujarat; three-four hours by car from Ahmedabad/one hour from Rajkot
Accommodation Seven suites (Vijayba, Kesarba, Bajiraj, Waghji, Lakhdir, Mahindra and Mayurdhwaj Mahals)
Tariff Rs 8,000 (Vijayba, Kesarba, Lakhdir, Mahindra, Mayurdhwaj); Rs 10,000 (Bajiraj, Waghji)
Contact 011-46661666, neemranahotels.com
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