without a trace

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

By Jason Overdorf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the good life

Four Hours in Detroit

(Newsweek International, January 22, 2007)

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

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

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

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

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

—Jason Overdorf

bioinvaders: the next plague

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

By Mac Margolis

Newsweek International

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

kingdom for a horse

By Jason Overdorf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the good life

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

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

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

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

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

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

--JASON OVERDORF

india's weapon: its diaspora

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

By Jason Overdorf
Newsweek International (November 13 issue)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

an oasis for india's poorest

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

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

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

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

migration: roads to nowhere

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

By Mac Margolis

Newsweek International

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

the green devolution

India's population is growing faster than farm output, threatening one of its most prized achievements.


By Jason Overdorf
Newsweek International

Sept. 4, 2006 issue - The Furnace Australia sailed into Chennai last month carrying a load of wheat and, some warned, ill tidings. India's first wheat imports in six years marked a reversal in the march toward "food independence" that the country began in the 1970s. To M. S. Swaminathan, one of the agronomists credited with sparking the so-called Green Revolution, the return of grain imports should be seen as "a wake-up call" for a country that has in recent years taken its ability to feed its people for granted.

Though India's government officially dismissed the return of grain imports as a passing event, Swaminathan and other experts saw it as the latest sign of a long-term decline. The growth rate of grain production has fallen from 1.5 percent before 1995 to 1 percent today, due to a combination of bad management, unpredictable weather and a growing water shortage. Meanwhile, the growth rate for all crops has fallen to 1.25 percent a year, the lowest level since India gained independence in 1947, says Ramesh Chand, acting director of India's National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research. That's too slow to keep pace with a population now growing, according to United Nations estimates, at a rate of 1.5 percent a year. Chand says the threat to India's food independence is manageable, if the government makes the right moves.

These are sobering indicators for the Green Revolution, which was originally inspired by grave threats to the food supply in India. After back-to-back droughts put the country in danger of massive starvation in 1966, a U.S. presidential-advisory commission called for an "effort unprecedented in human history" to raise farm output around the world. And so it did, as scientists produced new strains of rice and wheat that boosted yields by a factor of five, with the help of heavy irrigation and applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. In India, an initially well-executed campaign raised grain output from 82 million metric tons in 1960 to 176 million tons in 1990 and cut imports to zero by 2000. That is, until the trend reversed last month.

Now production gains are slowing as the water supply dwindles, overzealous use of fertilizer and pesticides taints the soil and excessive irrigation waterlogs the land along canals in the showpiece states of India's Green Revolution, like the Punjab and Haryana.

Because irrigated land is two and ahalf times more productive than rain-fed land, many of the gains of the Green Revolution were produced by an increase in the area under irrigation. But as India's population and economy grow, water supplies are shrinking. Already, the World Bankestimates, India meets most of its irrigation and household demand by tapping groundwater—a practice that is "no longer sustainable."

Similar threats haunt China and other developing nations that were big beneficiaries of the Green Revolution. China has responded by relaxing its commitment to being completely self-sufficient in the production of food—encouraging farmers to grow more lucrative fruits and vegetables, while importing wheat and soybeans. To free-trade advocates, this approach makes sense—why obsess over "food independence" in an increasingly global free market, if others grow wheat more efficiently than you do? Focus on the goods, agricultural or not, that you grow most efficiently.

Indeed, when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called in January for a "second Green Revolution," his concern focused on raising farm incomes, not securing the food supply. He called for a fresh emphasis on fruits, vegetables and new plant varieties that would command higher prices in export markets. He also encouraged measures to harvest rainwater more efficiently, improve the soil and spread the benefits of agricultural technology, including genetically modified seeds.

But the basic position of the Singh government is that India normally produces more grain than it consumes, and soon will again. As for the recent return to imports, officials dismissed it as a procurement snafu: this year, for the first time, India allowed private buyers, including multinationals, to buy wheat directly from farmers. That helped push up prices, and the government responded by refusing to match the prices offered by private buyers. It wound up buying less wheat than usual for the federal program that provides subsidized grain to 150 million poor Indians. When supplies fell short, the government had to turn to imports—temporarily, officials insist.

Critics argue that Singh and his government are missing the big picture. Farm-policy analyst Devinder Sharma complains that "the people who govern this country believe technology is the answer to every problem," and are pushing a second revolution without examining why the first "has collapsed." Chand says the key going forward is to target backward states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, which have done little to modernize their farms, and thus have "huge potential" to reverse the slowdown in output.

One reason for these problems is that over the past decade India, as part of its effort to reduce the state role in the economy, has cut back significantly on investment in farms. Public-sector investment fell from just over 2 percent of agricultural output in 1991 to less than 1.5 percent in 2001. That slashed funds for upgrading Green Revolution technologies and for the extension programs that teach farmers how to make it all work.

By the late 1980s, when the early gains made in rice and wheat had slowed, India attempted to extend its success to pulses (peas and beans) and oilseeds. Though it did manage to produce high-yield seeds, the program failed to supply enough of these seeds to farmers, and poor oversight allowed corrupt traders to pass off ordinary seeds as high-yield hybrids, says Delhi University agricultural economist Usha Tuteja. With its vegetarian tradition India is the world's largest consumer of protein-rich pulses, but now ranks near the bottom in the production of these crops.

Swaminathan urges leaders to focus on what he calls an "evergreen revolution." The goal would be to correct the damage wrought by the first Green Revolution: adoptingnew methods like the use of natural predators instead of chemicals to eliminate pests, and switching to organic fertilizers and more efficient drip irrigation. He also says Singh should promote crops that require less water, including native Indian grains such as finger millet (ragi), pearl millet (bajra) and sorghum (jowar).

That's a tough sell for two reasons: these coarse grains, once a staple of regional Indian cuisines, have fallen out of style since the first Green Revolution made wheat cheap and plentiful. So restoring their popularity will take a major marketing push, of the kind governments rarely do well. Second, Singh sees India very differently from the critics, as a nation fighting to attain middle-class comfort, not one at risk of sliding into mass hunger. Watch the future voyages of the Furnace Australia, and whether it is carrying grain to India, for one strong sign of which view is right.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14535864/site/newsweek/
© 2006 MSNBC.com

sexing up science

Western educators and industrialists team up to boost engineering's appeal.

By Mac Margolis and Karla Bruning

Newsweek International

Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue - With his unkempt hair, halogen smile and soft spot for Tamil poetry, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is not your ordinary national figurehead. The diminutive 74-year-old Indian president seems more like a self-help guru than India's leading technocrat. Though his job in this parliamentary nation is largely ceremonial, Kalam, a newspaper boy turned aeronautical engineer who stewarded India's guided-missile program, has made it his mission to raise his country to glory through scientific scholarship. He travels from school to school, exhorting students to hit the books and excel at science. If they do, he promises, India will be a fully developed nation by 2020. His mantra: "Dream, dream, dream."

By all indications, the budding scientists of India—and elsewhere in the developing world—have taken that advice to heart. Enrollment is soaring at engineering and technical schools throughout Asia. India claims to produce more than 300,000 engineers a year—three times the number in the United States. By some estimates, China turns out twice as many engineers as India, while South Korea produces nearly as many engineers as the United States with one sixth the population. Skeptics say the numbers are exaggerated. But even discounting for official hype and inconsistent academic standards, it's hard to miss the new geography. Legions of engineers from Asia's emerging-market nations are vying for—and winning—contracts, customers and patents in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. According to a recent report by Booz Allen Hamilton and Nasscom, India's IT-industry trade group, the offshore engineering industry is expected to surge from between $10 billion and $15 billion today to between $150 billion and $225 billion in 2020. India alone is poised to grab a quarter of the market.

And that's exactly why educators in the wealthiest countries are losing sleep. True, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany—the three engineering titans—still lead the way in technological innovation. A recent study by Duke University showed that while developing countries often inflate the numbers of science scholars, the United States still employs nearly a third of the world's science and engineering researchers, publishes 35 percent of science and engineering articles and generates 40 percent of research and development spending. But in middle and high schools, where the spark of scientific curiosity begins, the majority of students can't be bothered to take advanced math or physics. Enrollment in university engineering programs is stagnating; the dropout rate for graduate engineering students is a whopping 45 percent. "We have a choice: do we want Britain to become a theme park or a hub of business activity?" James Dyson, the British inventor cum entrepreneur, wrote recently in The Sunday Times. "We are on course to shuffle into a sort of residential home for retired great powers."

Now Western educators are shifting their focus from what went wrong with engineering to how to fix it. They are most troubled not by the shortfall of new scientists but by their plummeting caliber of scholarship. Even those who make it through engineering school are not always well prepared; the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis says it often has to retrain science graduates in the company laboratory.

Some institutions are trying to present students with more real-world challenges early on. In planning its curriculum, Dyson's new School of Design Innovation—scheduled to open in Bath, England, in 2008—has teamed up with companies like Rolls-Royce and Airbus to work practical design and innovation problems into the coursework. Other schools are drafting students into community service. Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering dispatched one group of undergraduates to Indonesia to help shrimp fishermen devastated by the 2004 tsunami by building a manually operated aerator for hatchery ponds. Duke junior Lee Pearson spent a month in Uganda for a clean-water project, using a clothes iron to seal water samples and building an incubator out of cardboard and Styrofoam.

Being in the field "teaches you to be flexible and ruthlessly creative," says Pearson. Indeed, Richard K. Miller, president of Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, which graduated its first class in May, says it's crucial to get students to think "outside the box" and work in teams. "Our future doesn't depend on producing more engineers than China. [We] need more innovators," he says. "Engineering is about invention." A number of Olin graduates have parlayed classroom projects into award-winning business plans. One student, in partnership with his grandfather, launched an inter-national company that designs, manufactures and sells supportive seating for meditation.

At younger levels, industries are going out of their way to make engineering—and its components, math and science—more appealing. The Society for Women Engineers recently launched "Wow! That's Engineering?" a high-tech hands-on program that invites middle-school students to play games with gravity, motion and sound. The campaign is aimed especially at young girls, who traditionally have been conditioned to think of math and science as guy stuff—one of the reasons, perhaps, that only 11 percent of working engineers in the United States are women. Another program, "FMA Live! Where Science Rocks," sponsored by Honeywell Hometown Solutions and NASA, sends troupes of hip-hop artists and other professional entertainers into U.S. high schools and colleges across the United States to stage "interactive" skits and demonstrations of basic physics. (FMA stands for Isaac Newton's second law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration.) One routine launches a hapless school administrator across a stage in a futuristic hover chair to collide with a giant cream pie—all in the name of showing the laws of action and reaction. Is it education or show business? "Our culture has changed profoundly," says Tom Buckmaster, president of Honeywell Hometown Solutions. "We have to think of students as you would potential customers, and discover what turns them on."

Behind the hocus-pocus is the conviction that engineering has long had a bad rap. "The misperception of science and engineering jobs as geeky, dirty and dull puts off young people from a bright, exciting and profitable future," says Dyson. That's a stark contrast to the developing world, where science and technology are considered the keys to progress. "When I go to Seoul or Hong Kong, I see signs everywhere for nanotechnology, biotech labs and IT firms," says Florence Hudson, a space engineer and vice president of marketing for IBM. "The developing world's students are hungry for technology. We are not."

Whatever helps break down that resistance, say the experts, is worth trying. "It's an incredibly sexy time to be an engineer," says Kristina Johnson, dean of the Pratt School of Engineering. "Think of the problems science has to solve, like global warming, public transportation, communicable diseases. Yet we still do not have a cadre of professionals prepared to solve them." Engineering's toughest challenge may be to reinvent itself—and the work has just begun.

With William Underhill in London, Jason Overdorf in New Delhi and Corinna Emundts in Berlin

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

this rampart is rising

In many nations, class barriers to college are growing.
By Rana Foroohar
Newsweek International

Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue - When students take to the streets, they're usually united against something like war or racism. But when Indian students took to the streets last May they had a different cause. These were children of the wealthy upper castes out to stop a plan to reserve more university places for their peers from poor and lower-caste backgrounds. This was youth versus youth, and they were fighting for the status quo.

Resistance to social-leveling campaigns in higher education isn't limited to India. When a top French Grande Ecole—alma mater of presidents and prime ministers—began giving preferential treatment to poor students, there was an outcry from the upper classes. In Britain, there are fears that efforts by top-tier universities to recruit more students from state secondary schools will dumb down the ivory tower. These controversies say something important about the state of academia: for all the pious attacks on injustice that emanate from universities, the class gap is growing from the United States to Britain, parts of Continental Europe and Asia. The reasons are myriad: state-controlled systems that artificially limit the number of university places, admissions procedures that favor the privately educated, falling financial aid and failing public secondary schools.

The bottom line is that the worldwide boom in higher education is not, in many cases, broadening its reach among the poorest. The proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who have university degrees is rising across the 30 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and exceeds 20 percent in 18 of them. But in nations like Japan and the United States, where education costs are skyrocketing, the typical student comes from a much wealthier background than in the past. At Tokyo University, which has traditionally educated an economically diverse population, nearly half the parents of undergraduates now have incomes higher than $82,500 (well above the national average of about $57,500 for men in their 50s). In the United States, the percentage of students with families making more than $150,000 a year has been rising steadily for over a decade, to nearly 17 percent, while the proportion of those with a family income of $49,000 or less has been declining. A 2003 study of the 146 most selective U.S. colleges found that only 3 percent of students came from the poorest quartile of families, while 74 percent came from the richest.

By some accounts, the class divide is perhaps most pronounced in Europe. The slotting of children into vocational or university tracks continues to limit the upward mobility of many poor kids at an early age. Meanwhile, the relative lack of funding, particularly compared with the United States, means fewer new university slots to accommodate growth in demand. Today, only about a third of all secondary-school grads in the European Union go on to university, and working-class kids are highly underrepresented, especially at elite institutions. In the U.K., where Tony Blair's New Labour Party has made socioeconomic diversity in top schools a key priority, a recent survey found that the share of spots at Oxford that go to state schoolkids (in other words, not rich private-school grads) has fallen 5 percent since 2001.

Politicians and educators everywhere are looking for ways to fix the imbalance. But there's a lingering fear that easing the way for poor kids will bring down the quality of education and, thus, national competitiveness. "My honest opinion is that it is going to be a disaster," says P. V. Indiresan, former director of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (Madras), about the proposed quota system. "No. 1, it introduces a new social tension which we never had in the IIT system before. No. 2, you need certain institutions in a country where you are able to stream the very best talent available. Once you get students of a lower caliber, there will be enormous pressure to reduce to the standard of instruction."

Business leaders second this sentiment, and not only in India. Almost everywhere outside the United States, where affirmative action has long been the status quo, there is resistance to changing admissions to favor the less advantaged. When Richard Descoings, the head of France's prestigious Sciences Po Paris, began aggressively recruiting kids from lower-class backgrounds in 2001, critics lamented the end of blind égalité and privileged students worried that the degree would be devalued. "There were eternal debates on whether this program fit in with the principles of the French Republic," says Descoings, "but nobody asked whether or not it was effective."

In fact, it was; this past summer, the first class of 15 pioneers from poorer suburbs graduated from Sciences Po with respectable results, some near the top of the class. Elsewhere, there's also plenty of evidence that, given a chance, kids from lower-income backgrounds can do just as well or better than others. In the U.K., for example, Sir Peter Lampl, head of the Sutton Trust, an education nonprofit, says that if admissions were based purely on A-level test results, two thirds of students at Oxbridge would come from state rather than private secondary schools. In reality, only about half of them do. "Many poor kids don't have the confidence" to apply to top schools, particularly since graduating secondary school students must apply before they see their test results, says Lampl. And while private secondary academies advise students on how to maximize their chances of admission, even how to target specific departments at certain schools, state-school pupils are left to their own devices. The result, says Lampl, is that top-tier universities in Britain are excluding some 3,000 qualified state-school students every year.

That has major economic implications, given that the wage premium on a top-tier degree has never been higher. According to a number of studies, if going to college increases your earning power, then going to a top university increases it exponentially. Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby has shown that graduates of top schools in the United States typically earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more during their lives than similarly accomplished graduates of state universities. Depending on the country, a person with a university degree can command anywhere from 25 to 120 percent more than one without.

Finances are a further burden for the nonrich. As numbers of college applicants rise, costly prep classes, which can run $50 or more per hour, are becoming de rigueur. In the United States, while the absolute amount of aid to university students is up, financial aid is being replaced by merit aid, which favors the middle and upper classes. In Europe, where universities are still tax-supported and practically tuition-free for everyone, the poor get no leg up on the rich, who already have every advantage.

That something must be done is obvious to most nations. Basically, the combination of aging societies and rising demand for tech-savvy workers mean that most rich nations face an emerging shortage of educated labor, one that can't possibly be filled by the wealthy alone. Some solutions are, of course, country-specific. Europeans need to modernize and, to some extent, privatize their university systems so they can better respond to the needs of the market. More flexibility is key; while the United States and Scandinavia offer all kinds of two-year or associate's degree programs, in many parts of Europe and Asia four-year degree courses are the only option. But in Norway, for example, a modular system allows students to balance school with work or family commitments. They can finish courses in their own time, acquiring certificates for specific skills over a period of months, or a year, which can eventually be combined into a degree.

Perhaps the best way to equalize university education is to improve secondary schools in poor regions. In India, the rate of absenteeism in state schools is 25 percent—and that's for teachers. "Poor but talented kids tend to go to impoverished high schools, where parents, teachers and other students are just less interested in learning," says Richard Kahlenberg, a fellow at the Washington-based Century Foundation. "What they need is to be around peers who have big dreams—that will allow them to work up to their potential."

In Britain, educators are trying to cultivate those dreams with a new program in which top universities would help identify talented students as young as 11, and help them stay on track to reach elite colleges. The ethos is reflected in Oxford's new recruiting slogan: "It's not where you're from—it's where you want to go." As the need for knowledge workers grows, it will clearly be more and more important for poor kids, as well as rich ones, to go all the way to the top.

With Jason Overdorf in New Delhi, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris and Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14320419/
© 2006 MSNBC.com

tutors get outsourced

(Business 2.0) August 1, 2006 -- IDEA NO. 6 Services that once required face time can be profitably handled online.

America's education crisis, along with the rise of online video, is turning into another big opportunity for India. Companies like New Delhi-based Educomp are tutoring U.S. high school students in math and science one-on-one via the Internet. Anyone with a PC and a webcam can use the service, and the Indian companies' combined annual revenue is an estimated $10 million. That's a small slice of the $2.3 billion tutoring business, but India's share is growing fast.

Indian companies charge as little as $100 a month for unlimited, real-time, interactive video tutoring. A private face-to-face session in the United States runs as much as $100 an hour. Plus, most of the Indian companies guarantee that their tutors have at least an undergraduate degree in the subject they teach. In the United States, nearly 30 percent of high school math teachers lack a major or minor in the field.

TutorVista, based in Bangalore, recently tapped $2 million from Sequoia Capital and anticipates $10 million more for acquisitions by next year. Chairman K. Ganesh compares the sector to mobile communications: When the right price point is reached, he says, "the market size will increase 10-fold."

But the real opportunity could lie in using online tutoring to leverage other educational services. New Delhi-based Career Launcher has already acquired a U.S. company and begun to roll out bricks-and-mortar tutoring centers just like the ones it operates in Dubai. Seems they have a thing or two to teach American educators.

ring of change

The Ten Most Dynamic Cities

In this list of cities from key economic regions of the world, even the big names will surprise you.

Newsweek International

July 3-10, 2006 issue

....

A factory suburb of Delhi, now surrounded by posh high rises.

In old Ghaziabad—20 kilometers outside New Delhi in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh—ancient green-and-white three-wheeled Tempos that double as buses career alongside a tangle of bicycle rickshaws, buffalo-drawn wagons and pushcarts. Tiny, no-name manufacturers advertise rubber gaskets, gears, machine tools. You'd never guess Ghaziabad is India's hottest city.

But thanks to skyrocketing real-estate prices in the capital, Ghaziabad is emerging as the next popular address for Delhi-bound commuters. In residential pockets on the outskirts like Indirapuram, posh new developments are sold out. The largest developer, Shipra Estate Ltd., has built 7,000 two-, three- and four-bedroom flats, all of which are already occupied, says Vijay Sundar Raj, manager of sales and marketing. Many of the residents commute to IT jobs in neighboring Noida and Delhi.

Strategically located on the old Grand Trunk Road from Bangladesh to Afghanistan, Ghaziabad was targeted by the state for industrial development in the 1980s. Today the city is home to more than 14,000 small-scale industrial units and larger plants run by giants like Coca-Cola and the International Tobacco Co., which still provide most of the jobs in Ghaziabad proper. For all the new luxury high rises, Ghaziabad today is one of the most heavily industrialized cities in Uttar Pradesh.

The forecasts of rapid population growth, however, have more to do with New Delhi. Despite attempts to bar new industry within the capital, Delhi still creates more new jobs per year than the southern Indian IT centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad. "Delhi is a very big magnet," says S. K. Zaman, a top planner for Uttar Pradesh state, ruefully reflecting on the government's failure to contain the capital's population, which has grown by 50 percent every 10 years for the last half century, and now stands at around 14 million.

Authorities are having more success shifting at least some new growth to the outskirts. New roads, concessionary land prices and other schemes are drawing companies like Samsung, Honda and Siemens to satellite cities like Gurgaon and Noida. With its excellent highway connections to Noida and Delhi, Ghaziabad is starting to reap the benefits. Though it still doesn't have the cachet of Noida, it boasts cheaper land, and the completion this summer of the controversial Tehri Dam should help prevent frequent water and electricity shortages. None too soon. The city is already building a village to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games. And plans for both a new expressway and a second Delhi international airport on the east side of the capital should help put the entire region, Ghaziabad included, on the global map.

—Jason Overdorf

unlikely boomtowns

The last half-century was the age of the megacity. The next will belong to their smaller, humbler urban relations.

By Rana Foroohar

Newsweek International

July 3-10, 2006 issue - Great cities like London, New York and Tokyo loom large in our imaginations. They are the places people still associate with fortune, fame and the future. They can dominate national economies, and politics. The last half century has been their era, as the number of cities with more than 10 million people grew from two to 20, as now famous names like Rio, Mexico City and Mumbai joined the list. But with all respect to the many science-fiction novelists who have envisioned a future of increasingly dominant urban giants, their day is over. The typical growth rate of the population within a megacity has slowed from more than 8 percent in the '80s to less than half that over the last five years, and their number is expected to stagnate in the next quarter century. Instead, the coming years will belong to a smaller, far humbler relation—the Second City.

Within a year or so, more people will live in cities than in the countryside for the first time in human history: the 21st century will be an urban one. But increasingly, the urban core itself is downsizing. Already, half the city dwellers in the world live in metropolises with

less than half-a-million residents. Second Cities—from exurbs to regional hubs, resort towns to provincial capitals—are booming. Between 2000 and 2015, the world's smallest cities (with under 500,000 people) will grow by 23 percent, while the next smallest (1 million to 5 million people) will grow by 27 percent. This trend is the result of seismic shifts, including the global real-estate bubble; increasing international migration; cheaper transport; new technologies, and the fact that the baby-boom generation is reaching retirement age.

This rise of Second Cities is dramatically illustrated by our top-10 list, which encompasses the fastest-growing cities in each of the world's 10 most important economies (following stories). Based on an advance copy of the latest U.N. forecasts for all cities with populations greater than 750,000, the list includes only two major capitals—Moscow and London, which continue to outpace smaller rivals for unique national reasons. All the rest are aspiring middleweights like Toulouse, Munich and Las Vegas, or former unknowns like Florianópolis (Brazil), Ghaziabad (India), Goyang (South Korea) and Fukuoka (Japan), which may not remain unknown for much longer. Boomtowns breed ambitious city fathers, so it's hardly surprising that Toulouse is competing with Paris to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, or that Fukuoka is challenging Tokyo for the same honor.

There are several megatrends that get lost on a top-10 list, however. One is the concentration of fast-growing cities in emerging economies: of the top 150 fastest-growing cities in this size class, the most by far, 55, are in China, followed by an intense boomlet of 12 in Indonesia, and 10 in India. In the developed world, while none make the top 150, metropolises in the United States are growing much faster than those of Europe and Japan. This is due in part to the fact that overall population is declining in those places, but it drives home the relative dynamism of the Asian and American superpowers. The growth cities of the United States and China are growing faster than 2 percent, leading a pack of small cities, while those in Europe are growing at maybe half a percent, and are typically the rare exceptions in nations where most cities are shrinking.

In a way, the emergence of Second Cities has flowed naturally (if unexpectedly) from the earlier success of the megacities. In the 1990s, megalopolises boomed as global markets did. This was particularly true in metropolitan areas with high-tech or "knowledge based" industries like finance—witness the renaissance of New York and London, and the explosion of growth in Shanghai or Hong Kong. Bonuses got bigger, bankers got richer and real-estate prices in the world's most-sought-after cities soared. The result has been the creation of what demographer William Frey of the Washington-based Brookings Institution calls "gated regions"—places like New York, London, Tokyo—in which both the city and many of the surrounding suburbs have become unaffordable for all but the very wealthy.

One reaction to this phenomenon is further sprawl—high prices in the urban core and traditional suburbs drive people to distant exurbs with extreme commutes into big cities. As Frey notes, in the major U.S. metropolitan areas, average commuting times have doubled to about 90 minutes over the last 15 years, making once rural places like Pike County, Pennsylvania, viable dormitories for workers employed in New York. "It's hard to believe, but a place like Las Vegas is now actually a kind of suburb of Los Angeles," says Frey, noting that there are plenty of people who make the six-hour one-way drive a few times a week. And while the extreme commute is a longstanding tradition in Japan, it is spreading to Europe. Brighton, a once seedy beach resort about an hour by train from the capital, is now "London by the Sea," populated by arts and media types. House prices have boomed lately, and the city is now on its way to getting the requisite Frank Gehry landmark building (a futuristic residential tower and sports complex) to herald its success.

Why does one town become a booming Second City while another fails? The answer hinges on whether a community has the wherewithal to exploit the forces pushing people and businesses out of the megacities. One key is excellent transport links, especially to the biggest commercial hubs. Though barely a decade old, Goyang is South Korea's fastest-growing city in part because it is 30 minutes by subway from Seoul. Burgeoning IT hubs outside Delhi like Gurgaon and Noida, for which Ghaziabad serves as a new bedroom community, all sit on good roads into the capital.

Europe's cheap airlines have given new life to any number of provincial capitals, from Glasgow to Bologna. Estate agents estimate that a new Ryanair or easyJet link to a given city can immediately raise property prices in the area by 30 percent or more. In Asia, the number of cheap, short flights between cities is also growing.

Another growth driver for Second Cities is the decentralization of work, driven in large part by new technologies. While more financial deals are done now in big capitals like New York and London than ever before, it's also clear that plenty of jobs in booming service industries like banking, entertainment and high tech are flowing to places like Dubai, Las Vegas, Tallinn, Dalian and Cape Town, all of which international real-estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle names as "Rising Urban Stars." These places have not only improved their Internet backbones, but often have tech parks and universities that turn out the kinds of talent that populates growth industries.

Consider Montpellier, France, a case study in urban decentralization. Until the 1980s, it was a big Mediterranean village, but one with a strong university, many lovely villas and an IBM manufacturing base. Once the high-speed trains were built, Parisians began pouring in for weekend breaks. Some bought houses, creating a critical mass of middle-class professionals who began taking advantage of flexible working arrangements to do three days in Paris, and two down south. Soon, big companies began looking at the area; a number of medical-technology and electronics firms came to town, and IBM put more investment into service businesses there. To cater to the incoming professionals, the city began building amenities: an opera, a tram line to discourage cars in the city center. The result, says French urban-planning expert Nacima Baron, is that "the city is now full of cosmopolitan businessmen. It's an entirely new town, a new society."

Today it's easier for Second Cities to build self-sustaining economies, independent of megacities, as firms and workers look to avoid the problems of major urban centers. "Economically, after a city reaches a certain size, its productivity starts to fall," notes Mario Pezzini, head of the regional-competitiveness division of the OECD in Paris. He puts the tipping point at about 6 million people, after which real estate costs, travel times, and the occasional chaos (witness the recent Paris riots) "create a situation in which the center of the city may be a great place, but only for the rich, and the outlying areas become harder to live and work in."

Meanwhile, the democratization of the good life—even small towns now have good sourdough bread, international newspapers—means that people no longer have to choose between the culture and chaos of the big city, or the ease and boredom of everything else. Pseudo-European-style café culture is cropping up in American towns like West Palm Beach, and European minicities like Groningen, in the Netherlands, draw millions of tourists with Philippe Starck-designed museums and renovated downtowns. Retiring baby boomers are giving new life (and money) to a host of sun-belt cities in the United States, as well as many Provençal and Tuscan towns.

Immigrants play a big role, too. In places like Las Vegas, they're morphing from cheap labor to a new middle class reshaping the character of the city. In the U.K., hundreds of thousands of Eastern European immigrants have helped galvanize the capital and smaller northern and coastal cities, where workers in agriculture, construction and lower-level service jobs are sorely needed. Ultimately, they are expected to take their earnings home, where they are likely to seek property not in Prague or Warsaw, but in less-expensive Brno or Cracow. That's a big reason Jones Lang LaSalle expects the 60 Central and Eastern European cities with 500,000 or more people to be among the hottest places for corporate relocation in the next few years.

All this means, of course, that second cities won't stay small. Indeed, some countries are actively promoting their growth. China's Go West campaign encourages investment in smaller inland cities. Italy is trying to create tourist hubs of towns close to each other with different yet complementary cultural activities. "The worst-case scenario is that we end up with some national version of New Jersey—an inefficient sprawl with no center," says Frey of Brookings. Already, one has to wonder if all the marketing pressure for Second Cities to pay for iconic buildings or to re-create mock versions of New York's SoHo is a productive use of capital. If one of the biggest drawing cards for Second Cities is unique local flavor, why ape the best-known megacities? Devolution of policymaking power is leaving many lesser cities more free than ever to shape their destinies. To Vegas, Toulouse and company: this is your era. Don't blow it.

With Jason Overdorf in New Delhi

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.