Pondicherry: A dark wind blew into this sleepy, coastal town recently — it carried the threat of global terrorism, of bombs and gunmen and unprovoked attacks on soft targets.
On Feb. 13, people thought to be Islamic terrorists bombed a restaurant in the northern city of Pune, killing 17 people. Speculation followed that the location had been chosen for its popularity with Western tourists. The government warned that terrorists appeared to be targeting foreigners in India, and soon a specific advisory was issued for this former French colonial outpost, a popular tourist destination usually associated with yoga, spirituality and the quest for inner peace.
A team of commandos in combat gear was seen driving around town in a jeep, automatic rifles at the ready.
At the French Consulate, on the beach road, where middle-aged pensioners take their evening walks, security forces set up roadblocks and sandbags.
The police and extra security were evident at hotels and tourist attractions. In a depressingly familiar — yet in these parts, utterly new — routine, visitors were frisked, and bags were examined. More:
It’s hard to tell whether New Delhi really understands the economic cost of fighting ‘global warming.’ Mary Kissel from New Delhi in the Wall Street Journal:
“The climate world is divided into three: the climate atheists, the climate agnostics, and the climate evangelicals. I’m a climate agnostic.”
A direct—some would say brash—man with a penetrating stare, it’s hard to believe India’s Environment and Forests Minister, Jairam Ramesh, is agnostic about anything. This is the man who dressed down Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year when she pushed for India to adopt binding emissions targets. He was the first politician of a major nation to question the United Nations’ claim that the Himalayan glaciers were melting at a rapid pace. And he’s spearheaded his country’s very own climate-change research institute—a direct challenge to the U.N.’s now-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That record makes Mr. Ramesh one of the few policy makers in the world in a position to push a new, more economically rational approach to climate change—and debate the politics of it, too. It helps that he isn’t media-shy. And like many Indian men, Mr. Ramesh has a penchant for the dramatic: “You have unlimited time!” he tells me, hands outstretched, as we settle down to a chat in his darkened office, with a single spotlight shining on the minister himself. More:
Against all hope, secularism remains a myth. Meera Nanda in Himal Southasian. Meera Nanda’s most recent book is “The God Market: How globalization is making India more Hindu (2010)”.
Asha Dangol / Himal Southasian
The defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s general elections last year was greeted with relief by secularists and democrats everywhere. Not entirely unreasonably: they read the fact that the BJP lost a solid 3.4 percent of its previous poll share as evidence that Indian voters had rejected the majoritarian politics of Hindu pride and prejudice, peddled by the BJP and the rest of the Sangh Parivar. The general consensus is that the ideology of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has lost its appeal among the urban youth and middle classes – that secularism has won and “God has left politics,” to borrow the elegant title of a recent essay by Delhi journalist Hartosh Singh Bal. Market reforms and globalisation emerge as the stars of this saga. Both the friends and critics of the BJP agree that it is the fervour for making money in India’s roaring economy that doused the flames of Hindu nationalism from the hearts of the middle classes. But that is not all. The ‘free’ market, we are told by a section of influential Dalit intellectuals, will not only free India from the menace of communal violence, but will also lift the curse of caste oppression. It is fair to say that the gospel of globalisation is gaining ground in India.
The story about how the markets defeated the BJP goes as follows. Hindutva appealed to the middle classes and youth back in the bad-old-days of the 1980s and 1990s, when these groups were feeling beleaguered and angry due to the failures of Nehruvian socialism and ‘pseudo-secularism’, which, in their view, gave undue preference to Muslim and Christian minorities. But in the nearly two decades of economic liberalisation and foreign investments that began in the early 1990s, India has witnessed a great burst of economic growth. As a result, the Hindu middle classes are angry no more. Far from feeling beleaguered and discriminated against, they have become more cosmopolitan, more self-confident, and more willing to take on global challenges and seek out global opportunities. Indeed, so confident is the Great Indian Middle Class that it has claimed the 21st century as India’s Century. And so the critics ask: What use can such forward-looking people possibly have for the past glories of Hinduism, about which the stodgy old men in khaki shorts keep harping? This story has found great favour among the self-proclaimed Friends of the BJP, who want the party to drop Hindutva altogether, or at least to make it sound less communal, and emerge as a ‘normal’ pro-market, pro-defence, anti-‘minority-appeasement’, right-of-centre party. More:
Below are excerpts from major national budget speeches in the 63 years of India’s nationhood.
1. 1947-1948
“The long-term effects of the division of the country still remain to be assessed and we are too near the events to take a dispassionate view. When the ashes of controversy have died down, it will be for the future historian to judge the wisdom of the step and its consequences on the destiny of one fifth of the human race.”
“Although this is the fourth year since the cessation of hostilities, the return of normal conditions, without which it is impossible to expand production and develop trade, seems still as far off as ever. Over large parts of the world, conditions remain disturbed and the progress of recovery from the ravages of the war is painfully slow. In Europe the impasse in Berlin, the civil war in Greece and the emergence of two rival camps among the countries that fought the war as allies are symptomatic of the abnormal conditions which still prevail.”
Does the astonishing volume of global remittances redeem the moral ambiguities of migrant labour? In camps, hospitals, beauty parlours and under doormats, John Gravois watches the money move. From The National:
Down the glass-fronted row of exchange houses along Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Street – the city’s unofficial remittance district, where hundreds of security cameras monitor a long, intermittent border-fence of plexiglas teller windows – Maridel Estrelles walked briskly one recent afternoon carrying a glossy faux-leather handbag and, as usual, a wallet full of other people’s money. Trying to keep pace alongside her was a young Bangladeshi man in a spread-collared shirt named Zilani, who carried a small, scuffed laptop folio with flimsy turquoise piping. They were rushing to catch a taxi to the Musaffah Industrial District, 30 minutes away, hoping to arrive there ahead of the clattering buses bound home for the labour camps at sundown.
A wholesomely pretty, disarmingly charismatic Filipina, Estrelles was dressed in a modest acrylic sweater, pale blue jeans and sandals, which slapped the pavement in double time as she walked. Without breaking stride, she called out cheerily to a cluster of blue-jumpsuited Bangladeshi construction workers sitting tiredly on a kerb, who blinked before recognising her and waving back. “Customers,” she explained, before stepping into traffic on Hamdan Street. More:
Dharavi, Mumbai, where population density reaches 1m people per square mile
From Prospect:
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.
Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up. More:
Ashok V. Desai on Dr K.N. Raj in The Telegraph, Calcutta:
I went first to Delhi in 1966 to be a corporate economist, and then moved over to a research institute. But when I decided to take a chair I was offered in the University of the South Pacific in 1973, Raj sought me out and said, “Ashok, you should not go; we need people like you in this country.” I was touched, and would have listened to him if it had not been for financial compulsions. Five years later, when I was in Sussex University, Raj again came to me and said, “I have now started a new centre in Trivandrum; come and join me.”
I listened to him and went. I saw something unique. Raj had got hold of Laurie Baker, who built him a beautiful, low-cost campus. He bought cheap bricks, and soaked them in water for a couple of days; if they did not disintegrate, he used them. He made large windows with wooden shutters; they gave ample cross-ventilation in the local humid climate, and obviated the use of glass. He scattered a few buildings on a hill; the woods separating them gave them a sense of privacy. And he built a tower to house the library; one could find a seat with a breathtaking view of the surrounding valleys, and get lost in books. Being on the campus, I could walk to the library at any time of the day or night. We could talk economics and much else in any of the many cosy corners. Students would walk into my home whenever they wanted sustenance, material or intellectual. The place was ideally designed for debating and creating economics. It was the DSchool model in a different environment. More:
Hambantota, Sri Lanka: For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China.
Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.
As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.
But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat. More:
India’s economic reforms have freed it from an era of punitive taxation and stifling regulation. The challenge now is to establish an inclusive social contract that cuts across divisions. Sunil Khilnani in Mint-Lounge:
A peculiar outcome of what many have called the “crisis of capitalism” over the past two years is that it has left capitalism remarkably unscathed. Indeed if anything, the recent shocks to this, our least-bad economic system, have worked to reinforce many of its less good aspects.
Here in India, much has been made of the fact that the economy has gracefully survived the recession. Both the Indian government and our corporate managements responded nimbly, and the companies are now well placed to take advantage of new opportunities. That is all to the good.
Yet the language of crisis can also be a means of manipulation. Over the last two years, it’s been used to eliminate competition and consolidate sectors of the economy in the form of a few, massive players. After the global shake-out among investment banks, airlines and the automobile industry, the surviving players are not just big. They’re secure in the knowledge that they’re far too big to fail. Meanwhile they’ve parlayed the uncertainty about the financial climate into a trumping argument against worker concerns. They’ve pared costs, shed labour, reduced employment security. And now the citizen as consumer has less choice, the citizen as worker has more uncertainty, and a paradox has been laid bare. More:
When his overnight flight landed, Abdul Wahib walked out of Kochi’s palm-fringed airport and hugged his family. After 24 years of working in the United Arab Emirates, he was home. He carried a suitcase and a layoff notice: His well-paid job as a forklift operator at Dubai’s once-bustling port was terminated.
Wahib’s airplane was filled with Indian laborers, some fired by text messages, dozens owed months of back pay.
“My flight was full of shocked men, sad men. I could think only of my wife and two children back in India,” said Wahib, 48, who had saved enough to buy a three-bedroom house in a sleepy hamlet of coconut groves and banana trees in the southern state of Kerala. “I didn’t want to disappoint them. India has become a strong nation. But it’s migrants’ money that has pumped through our banks and villages. I hoped I could find good work at home.” More:
From CommGAP (The Communication for Governance and Accountability Program) at blogs.worldbank.org:
Imagine that you are an old lady from a poor household in a town in the outskirts of Chennai city, India. All you have wanted desperately for the last year and a half is to get a title in your name for the land you own, called patta. You need this land title to serve as a collateral for a bank loan you have been hoping to borrow to finance your granddaughter’s college education. But there has been a problem: the Revenue Department official responsible for giving out the patta has been asking you to pay a little fee for this service. That’s right, a bribe. But you are poor (you are officially assessed to be below the poverty line) and you do not have the money he wants. And the most absurd part about the scenario you find yourself in is that this is a public service that should be rendered to you free of charge in the first place. What would you do? You might conclude, as you have done for the last 1-1/2 years, that there isn’t much you can do…but wait, you just heard about a local NGO by the name of 5th Pillar and it just happened to give you a powerful ally: a zero rupee note.
In Doha last month, CommGAP learned about the work of 5th Pillar, which has a unique initiative to mobilize citizens to fight corruption. In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. I recently spoke with Vijay Anand, 5th Pillar’s president, to learn more about this fascinating initiative. More:
Traffic has become so bad in my home of Mumbai that I don’t bother to make friends on the north side of town anymore. I have to rudely refuse all dinner invitations from suburbanites because it takes more than two hours to reach them some days.
I’ve been monitoring Mumbai’s motorways for more than a decade: first from the front of a Honda scooter and recently from the back of a Hyundai Sonata. Back in the 90s there was already too much traffic but at least there was enough space to squeeze my Honda Kinetic past the idling cars. Today even that space is gone. The tightening knot of sub-compact cars, rickshaws and Tata trucks has expanded to the curb and beyond. Scooter-straddling families are stuck in the mess with the rest of us – except for the few that ride on the sidewalks.
I, like many Mumbaikars, am strangely proud of my city’s traffic mess. Any traffic story from anywhere else in the world, I can top. My best, awful story involves the traffic jam from hell in the late 90s. The 30 kilometers to the airport took seven hours – the last 30 minutes pushing my Padmini taxi through waist-high water. I still made my plane though. My flight’s crew was stuck in the same jam. More:
In 2001, Bhadli village was a wreck. An earthquake had destroyed most of its 325 houses. In this remote district of Kachchh, formerly called Kutch — a land of desert plains, rocky hills and cracked salt marshes in India’s western state of Gujarat — deaths totaled more than 12,000.
The quake also jolted the livelihoods of the area’s many skilled artisans, whose handicrafts include embroidery, block-printing, weaving and bandhani, a tie-dyeing technique particularly prized by India’s big-city designers.
After the disaster, aid poured in. Dozens of organizations rushed to build houses. Designers stepped up, placing more orders for clothing and accessories.
But those designers often dictated brand-new patterns that artisans struggled to follow. Two brothers in Bhadli, Aziz Khatri, 31 years old, and Suleman Khatri, 33, decided their future lay down a different road. Rather than supplying tie-dyed cloth to order as they had before the earthquake, they would travel 105 kilometers to an innovative design school called Kala Raksha Vidhyalaya, and return to make their own tunics, scarves and other products. More:
The Indian Express-Indicus Analytics study on how India will look in 2020:
The good:
* Fifty million more households in India will join the ranks of the middle class — defined by those earning between Rs 75,000 a year to Rs 10 lakh a year.
* The households-in-middle class number will jump from less than 120 million now to almost 170 million. Taking the accepted multiple of five people per household, this means that roughly 800 million Indians will be middle class out of an end-of-decade population of 1.3-plus billion.
And not-so-good (if there are no significant reforms):
By end-2019, UP’s standard of living will be what Pakistan’s was in 2005. And Bihar at the end of the decade will offer a standard of living comparable to what prevailed in Djibouti in 2005. MP in 2020? Like Republic of Congo in 2005.
Ten years later, the world is in panic mode again—and some economists think India will come to the rescue yet again. This time, it’s from the evolution of that nascent outsourcing model into the engine of a robust global player that can do more than serve U.S. companies; Indians can buy their products, too. Indeed, ask an economist who will replace the U.S. consumer and the answer increasingly seems to be … the Asian consumer.
The bookends of this decade are significant for India and its place in the new economic order. The backlash against outsourcing remains a very real threat, intensifying amid 10% unemployment in the U.S. But outsourcing—and the idea that companies must operate cheaply, efficiently, globally—has come to be an accepted, inescapable reality. More:
Syed Babar Ali, 83, a veteran businessman who helped create the Lahore University of Management and Science, wants to restore merit to Pakistani society. Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times:
Mr. Ali is an institution in Pakistan. He has started some of the country’s most successful companies. But perhaps his most important contribution has been his role in creating the Lahore University of Management and Science, or L.U.M.S., begun as a business school but now evolved into the approximate equivalent of Harvard University in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s biggest problem, he believes, is one of leadership. A corrosive system of privilege and patronage has eaten away at merit, degrading the fabric of society and making it more difficult for poor people to rise. The growing tendency to see government positions as chances to profit, together with the explosion in the country’s population, has led to a sharp decline in the services that Pakistan’s government offers its people.
“Nobody is bothered about the masses,” Mr. Ali said. More:
Islamabad: f you want a slice of peace and stability in a country with a reputation for violence and chaos, try Pakistan’s M2 motorway.
At times foreign reporters need to a give a nation a rest from their instinctive cynicism. I feel like that with Pakistan each time I whizz along the M2 between Islamabad and Lahore, the only motorway I know that inspires me to write.
Now, if the M2 conjures images of bland, spotless tarmac interspersed with gas stations and fast food outlets, you would be right. But this is South Asia, land of potholes, reckless driving and the occasional invasion of livestock.
And this is Pakistan, for many a “failed state.” Here, blandness can inspire almost heady optimism. More: [Image: defence.pk]
Traders seeking a break from volatile global markets may want to head to Bhutan’s bourse, where stocks are traded on just four computers — when they have not crashed — only twice a week.
“I’ve got one order to sell 2,820 shares,” said 23-year-old Deki Peldon, the only broker for today’s short trading hours in Thimphu, the capital of the tiny Himalayan kingdom.
“It’s taken 2 to 3 weeks to find a buyer.”
Welcome to the Royal Bhutan stock exchange, where just four brokers work and which will trade about $3 million shares this year, about what many financiers may deal with in the blink of an eye. The average daily trade in New York is more than 1 billion.
In a Buddhist country where national wealth is measured by Gross National Happiness — an idea that spiritual and environmental health are just as important as material well-being — the exchange is crawling slowly along as the country and its $1.3 billion economy tentatively embraces globalization. More
It is not just the print media that is guilty of publishing news for cash. Television news channels are equally guilty of selling editorial space. Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit says he was shocked when a news channel in Delhi approached him with a package to cover Rahul Gandhi’s visit to the East Delhi constituency during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
“Imagine my surprise and shock when the reporter actually negotiated the price of Rs 2.5 lakh for an hour of live coverage,” says Dikshit. “The channel even said they would arrange the crowds.” The MP said he was equally taken aback when a leading Hindi daily made an offer for positive coverage of his campaign. “Packages for print and TV for a three-day coverage varied between Rs 12 and Rs 20 lakh,” Dikshit elaborates. “You watch your opponent misusing the media and you’re forced to part with the money. I won’t take names but everyone is involved.”
In fact, campaign managers of the Congress say money had to be spent for the Delhi assembly elections last year when a TV channel insisted on projecting a lesser tally for the Congress in its opinion polls. “The tally improved after the channel was paid off,” reveals a campaign manager. “In fact, the last three days before the actual poll dates, money had to be spent on the channels to ensure good coverage.” More:
Fed up with foreign companies patenting traditional medicine from India, the country’s top scientific body is compiling a giant database of everything from yoga positions to medicinal fruit juice. An AFP report at Physorg.com:
The initiative has had early success since going public in February, repelling two foreign patent applications in July — one for a skin cream based on melon extract and another for a cancer medicine based on pistachios.
Another 30 cases are being examined worldwide, drawing on the database which aims to prove medical precedents and therefore undercut attempts by companies to patent knowledge that has been passed down over generations in India.
V.K. Gupta, the head of this library, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), told AFP he hoped the database would provide a cheap and easy system to prevent “wrong patents” based on Indian naturopathy.
“Nobody in the world has a right to take our knowledge, repackage it and claim it as theirs,” said Gupta, who works for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The TKDL already contains 30 million pages and more than 200,000 medicinal formulas derived from herbal and mineral-based treatments originating in India and abroad, such as ayurveda, unani, siddha, as well as yoga techniques. More:
Indians fret that Bangalore, and India more broadly, will remain a low-cost satellite office of the West, rather than a hotbed of entrepreneurship. Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times:
In the United States and Europe, people worry that their well-paying, high-skill jobs will be, in a word, “Bangalored” — shipped off to India.
People here are also worried about the future. They fret that Bangalore, and India more broadly, will remain a low-cost satellite office of the West for the foreseeable future — more Scranton, Pa., in the American television series “The Office,” than Silicon Valley.
Even as the rest of the world has come to admire, envy and fear India’s outsourcing business and its technological prowess, many Indians are disappointed that the country has not quickly moved up to more ambitious and lucrative work from answering phones or writing software. Why, they worry, hasn’t India produced a Google or an Apple? More:
We began by buying soap made at an ashram in Gangotri, the Himalayan mouth of the river Ganga at the Dastkar handicraft mela. We traipsed through the sarees displayed at the Chinmaya Mission mela, and enjoyed the root-beer at the American Women’s Association mela, and bratwurst with beer at the German Mela. This morning we’re back from the Delhi Commonwealth Wives Association mela, where we bought woolen slippers and hats at a stall run by the wives of diplomats from Kyrgyztan.
Diverting as these outings are, they’re just sideshows to the real mela event of the season, the India International Trade Fair. The IITF, as it is universally referred to, is promoted by a government body and held in a specially-constructed fair grounds called Pragati Maidan, literally ‘Progress Pavillion.’ More:
Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.
If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country’s hereditary ruler.
It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying. More:
How Dubai’s dream sank in a sea of debt
From the Sunday Times:
As he flew from Dubai to London last Sunday, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum had plenty on his mind.In the four years since he had become ruler of Dubai, Maktoum had grown used to courting world leaders to visit and invest in his desert emirate. They admired the economic growth he had fostered as Dubai, fast running out of oil, turned itself into a tourism and finance hub.
Maktoum knew that on this trip he would have to strike a more humble tone. After an audience with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, he met Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson. The damaging effect of the global economic downturn on Dubai’s growth was on the agenda. The sheikh brought reassurances that angry British contractors, caught up in the emirate’s construction collapse, would eventually get paid.
Maktoum also knew that a bigger test to international relations was brewing. But there were few clues until he had jetted out of London. More:
Bling City is dead, but the desert dream lives on
From the Guardian:
A yachtsman friend of mine was sailing the blue waters of the Persian Gulf off the shimmering coast of Dubai recently when he came across a disturbing phenomenon: The World was dissolving before his eyes.
It was not the grog. Three years ago, when Dubai’s debt-fuelled boom was at its height, the emirate launched its most ambitious project yet – a gigantic offshore replica of the planet Earth, made from sand dredged from the deserts and beaches of Arabia, with countries and continents carved out among a man-made archipelago of 300 islands. It was called simply The World.
Like most things in Dubai, it was for sale. Wealthy celebrities with $20m or so of loose change could buy Britain or France or Australia and erect their own secluded fun palace by the sea. More:
By its recent chaotic standards, Pakistan had quite a good 2009. Admittedly, more than 2m people were displaced by fighting between the army and Taliban militants. The economy was in the doldrums. And a threat of political crisis, pitting President Asif Zardari against his main rival, Nawaz Sharif, loomed. Yet his government, a coalition led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), looked stable. An injection of IMF cash—and a promise from America of an extra $1.5 billion a year—kept its creditors at bay. And the army, despite much suffering, won the biggest victories of a floundering eight-year campaign on its north-west frontier. Without catastrophic violence—an important assassination or a terrorist attack in India—Pakistan will be messy, but stable after this fashion, in 2010.
The army will also make a bit more progress against the militants. Goaded into action in early 2009, after the Taliban seized areas of North-West Frontier Province alarmingly close to Islamabad, it pushed them back ruthlessly. Compounding the Taliban’s troubles, their supreme leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who was responsible for a two-year suicide-bomb spree (and allegedly for the 2007 murder of Mr Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto), was killed by an American missile last August. And in October the army launched an assault on his former fief, in South Waziristan. Alas, it has shown no interest in pursuing members of the other Taliban, Afghanistan’s former rulers, who have found refuge in Pakistan. More:
Jennifer Burns in Foreign Policy on the surprising popularity of a libertarian hero in India.
Ayn Rand
In recent years, the so-called “Howard Roark effect” has swept across wealthy Indian society. Shortly after winning Miss India Earth, the country’s top beauty pageant, in 2005, Niharika Singh cited The Fountainhead as her favorite book. “Ayn Rand helped me win the crown,” she declared. Other stars, including biotech queen Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, actress Preity Zinta, and soccer-player-turned-dancer Baichung Bhutia have all credited Rand with helping them succeed.
Beyond personal inspiration, however, the Indian excitement for Rand today is linked to a larger enthusiasm for the country’s inchoate but powerful drive for development and wealth. Since the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, India has seen a gradual shift away from socialism, much appreciated by Rand’s fans. Vikram Bajaj, a 45-year-old entrepreneur who considers himself an objectivist, has lived through Rand’s evolution from an ignored outsider to a popular prophet of capitalism. When he discovered Rand, taxation rates for high earners were hovering at 85 percent of income; now, with her books widely available, that upper rate is only 30 percent.
Barun Mitra is the founder and director of the Liberty Institute, which hopes to be India’s equivalent of the United States’ libertarian Cato Institute and has recently received a grant from an American foundation to launch a Web initiative promoting “Ayn Rand in India.” He has been a Rand devotee since the early 1980s and even met his wife through a Rand discussion group. More:
Impact of recession on Indians with H1-B visas in the US. From the Wall Street Journal
Since nearly 40 percent of all H-1B visa holders are from India , the mounting layoffs are hitting Indian professionals particularly hard.
An estimated 16,000 to 20,000 Indian nationals have returned home, says Arvind Panagariya, an economics professor at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
H-1B visa holders say they feel they are in a state of limbo, ready to pick up and move wherever the economy or work takes them. Lives have been disrupted, and some said they were under tremendous stress to pay back mortgage loans for buying houses and cars. Many had children born on U.S. soil and wonder how their children will adjust to Indian schools and a different way of life.
It is one of the major vulnerabilities for professionals on the H-1B visa. “The moment you don’t work, you’re out of status, you have no grace period,” said immigration attorney Tahmina Watson. Workers can either leave the country within a matter of days, or convert to a B1/B2 tourist visa, which doesn’t allow them to work, but buys them a few months to sell their homes and cars, make travel arrangements or find a new school for their children. More:
Punjab, known for its prosperous wheat farmers, is set to transform into a banana state after the unqualified success of a small experiment with the fruit. From Hindustan Times:
The banana trial started two years ago on a small 10-acre patch of land. The very first crop, says Mewa Singh, a Ludhiana farmer, gave a net profit of Rs 1,50,000 per acre, dramatically lucrative for farm investors. Officials say the average profit per acre for wheat and paddy is no more than Rs 30,000.
Today, Singh is busy handling 2 or 3 enquiries every day about the viability of the crop. He has also become the president of the nascent Banana Growers’ Association.
Punjab rode to riches on the back of high-yielding varieties of wheat which helped the state’s hardy farmers, but that is linked to procurement prices supported by the government. New crops like bananas can suddenly alter this landscape. More
Mumbai: In what has been a bad year for airlines everywhere, Air India has suffered from a series of particularly painful – and at times embarrassing – misfortunes.
The struggling government-owned carrier’s already uneven reputation has been further tarnished in recent months by rats on a plane, a strike by senior pilots and a midair fistfight between pilots and flight attendants. In September, a flight to Riyadh was grounded after a passenger saw sparks coming from an engine.
The embarrassing chain of events and the airline’s dire financial situation – it is expected to lose more than $1 billion in the current business year, and the government tentatively pledged about $1.1 billion in bailout money to it recently – has prompted many to ask: Why is the Indian government still running an airline? More:
Bannon Automotive has secured an exclusive North American licensing deal with Reva Electric Car Co. of Bangalore, India, to assemble the NXR. Reva cars are now sold across Asia and Europe. Bannon will price an entry-level, two-seat version of the Reva at about $17,000. Equipped with a lead-acid battery, it will have a top speed of 55 mph and a maximum range of about 50 miles on a single charge.
From the New York Times:
With the first big wave of modern electric cars due to arrive in the next few years, the battle to attract manufacturing plants is heating up.
Last week, Reva, an Indian maker of electric cars, announced that it planned to open an assembly plant in Upstate New York to build a three-door plug-in hatchback called the NXR, in partnership with a local company.
New York officials welcomed the decision as a recognition of the state’s emerging battery-technology cluster and manufacturing skill. More here, here and here.
Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic, is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. From the Washington Post:
We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population’s educational top tier?precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy’s innovation and growth. And it isn’t just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right?it’s not just about green cards.
What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a “better quality of life” than what they had in the U.S. (There was also some reverse culture shock?complaints about congestion in India, say, and pollution in China.) When it came to social factors, 67% of the Chinese and 80% of the Indians cited better “family values” at home. Ability to care for aging parents was also cited, and this may be a hidden visa factor: it’s much harder to bring parents and other family members over to the U.S. than in the past. For the vast majority of returnees, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element. More:
