Open Window: Issue Jan 15, 2008

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Contents

Follow Up

Covering the elections in Gujarat

How to cash in on a warming planet

National News 

Tata hopes to change the car market of India

SC says no to deletion of word ’socialist’ from Constitution

Hotel Industry included under Factories Act

President, Vice-President, Governors get a big pay hike

International News 

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project

No Respite from Financial Crisis in US

Culture 

Parallel Universe 

Special Feature 

An Study Finds Vaccine Preservative Is Not Linked to Risks of Autism

News Snippets

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Follow Up

Covering the elections in Gujarat Chennai, Jan 14 (PTI) Attributing the BJP’s victory in the just concluded Gujarat assembly elections mainly to a larger turnout of women, Chief Minister Narendra Modi said he had organized several conferences two months prior to the polls, to address their problems. There was a three per cent increase in the women voter turnout.” This is one of the major reasons for the success of the party,” Modi said when asked about the reasons for the electoral triumph. Addressing BJP workers here, Modi said he had taken systematic steps to address the problems of various sections – women, youth and farmers — in the prosperous western state.

How to cash in on a warming planet Riding high on its achievements, the Delhi Metro has added another feather in its cap when it became the first railway project in the world to be registered by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This feat would help financially by earning carbon credits, which is measured in terms of reduction of carbon dioxide by adequate measures. “This is the first time in the world that the UNFCCC has registered a project based on regenerating braking technology (RBT),” DMRC Chief Public Relation Officer Anuj Dayal said.

National News    

Tata hopes to change the car market of India

Last fortnight, Ratan Tata inaugurated the small car Nano in the automobile expo in New Delhi. The event was covered with great glam by both Indian and International media. From the Singur acquisition controversy to the present day, the project has come a long way. Marketed as the dream car of Ratan Tata, and targeting the urban middle class of India, the project has created both envy, and expectations. Without doubt, the project will have an enormous impact on the bottom-line of Tata Motors and possibly a significant impact on the car ownership pattern of India.

The critics of the project have been many. First, there was intense, but unsustained, opposition to the land acquisition in Singur where 12000 families were evicted without being given a notice in any meaningful sense and, each family received a lakh in compensation, on an average. Then the CPI(M) West Bengal government was criticized for land acquisition for a private player. The government quoted the archaic 1984 act to tell people that the government does not need to consult with people or obtain their consent before acquiring land. The critics of the car itself, though not having anything substantial against the car, lament the bad conditions of roads in India and the poor traffic. There is also a fear, expressed by this group that the environmental impact of the small car would be huge. Tata has tried to alley these fears and has said that the criticism is based on lack of information. The company sources said that the pollution caused by the car is less than that caused by a scooter, and that the car meets the safety norms. It should be obvious to anyone that the car is no doubt safer than a scooter. Also the traffic worry is an absurd reason to oppose Nano. It is well known that private transport is not an answer to the traffic woes of Indian cities and that alternate mass transport arrangements like mono rail, and metro are a must. But, it has been a government policy to encourage car sales. So as long as government has this policy, those who already have cars (and thus suffer bad traffic on the roads) probably, do not have a right of opposing others in buying a car.

Tata group sees huge potential for its small car venture. Talking about the project’s relevance to India’s rapidly growing middle class, Mr Ratan Tata said: “If you could position an all-weather car that was not a glorified scooter or a stripped down car, then I believe there would be a market potential for one million cars a year.” In a departure from tradition with regard to automobile dealership and marketing, the company plans small satellite units, with low breakeven points, where some cars could be assembled, sold and serviced.

Touching on the social dimension of the project, Mr Tata said the company would encourage local entrepreneurs to invest in these units and train them to assemble the fully knocked down or semi-knocked down components sent to them; this would also do away with the dealer and dealer’s margin. The assembly-cum-retail operation would be combined with low-cost service. Cutting down on cost, the Tata’s small car project would focus on large volumes, using more plastics for the body, replacing welding technology with modern-day adhesives and low-cost assembly. At the centre of the project would be a large volume unit for the manufacture of all high-volume parts.

Reaction of Indian Media

Indian Media has lauded the car in unequivocal terms. While Hindustan Times said, “For the 200,000 visitors at the Auto Expo 2008 in the Capital on Sunday, Hall Number 11 is invariably the first halt, to see the little Tata Nano that has raised aspirations of millions who now see themselves soon owning a car.”, other newspapers also ran stories detailing the enthusiasm of public and the high hopes raised by the car.

International Reaction

While international reaction was of mixed kind, conspicuous were the sarcastic comments by a section of press that seemed to be engaged in knit-picking over issues, not directly linked with Nano.

New York times ran headline: “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants” and noted that “Not unexpectedly, Indian environmentalists have assailed the car craze, particularly because of the country’s relatively relaxed emissions standards and the proliferation of diesel-powered cars.

“Even the usually nonconfrontational chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra K. Pachauri, has sharply criticized the small car boom, questioning Tata Motors in particular for devoting itself to building cheap cars rather than efficient mass transportation.”

Similarly, the Newsweek observed, “Tata’s Nano may put millions of new drivers on the roads. It also may herald a new source of pollution.”

Even the ceremony was derided in Reuters, “Tata introduced and then drove the car onto the stage in a media circus more worthy of a pop concert or an Oscar ceremony.”

Taiwan’s Ecooter

Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute has designed a concept car, named “Ecooter”, which is a four-wheel transporter designed for two persons, the driver and a passenger behind. It is only 1.1m wide (slimmer than regular cars with a width of 1.7m), 2.45m long and 1.5m high. James Wang, director of ITRI’s Intelligent Mobility Technology Division, says that the Ecooter sports a removable battery and fast charging mode which recharges 80 percent of the battery’s capacity in 15mins. A completely charged battery can take the vehicle over 100km, with a top speed of 65kph.

Ecooters specs are aimed more towards being eco-friendly than saving cost. The concept car features LED headlights and taillights, wireless communication and navigation. Instead of the traditional rearview mirror, the car features two cameras to give a clear and complete picture with no dead spots. A camera is also located in front to provide a clearer picture of road conditions ahead.

The ITRI MSL team spent 22 months to transform the Ecooter from a concept into a real product. Now the Ecooter is waiting to go from prototype to production.

Remembering Singur

On Jan. 21, 2007, Tata Motors had notional beginning of construction work on its Rs 1,000-crore small car plant in Singur at Hooghly district, which has been mired in protests and agitations for the past couple of months.

There was a large police presence in the area. The district administration had extended the period for prohibitory orders under Section 144 CrPC, which was first imposed on the area on November 30.

A Tata Motors release said that the company had taken “initial preliminary steps for the construction of the small car plant with the consent of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation.”

The company claimed that through contractors and sub-contractors it will deploy “appropriate and necessary” local people in various unskilled and skilled assignments. It also said that it had already taken steps to train people from the area for association with the project and that it was also organising groups of women from affected Singur families to supply food to the construction workers.

Location hunting – Tatas chose the site

Referring to the choice of Singur as the location for this greenfield car plant, the Tata Group Chairman said: “East India has been industrially ignored. Therefore I decided to locate the plant in West Bengal so more investment could flow in the region. It was a big leap of faith for us. This project will definitely improve the quality of life in the entire Hooghly district where the new plant is located.”

While there appears to be no difference of opinion in principle about the need for development of industries in West Bengal, the Tata project’s location has stirred up a controversy. The State government has pointed out that the Tatas made the final choice of the site from among five or six sites, including some in backward districts, presented to them.

Critics of the project were upset about double-cropped land being given away for industrial purposes. But according to the (revised) official statistics, out of the total project area of 997.11 acres, 910.61 acres is mono-cropped and only 39.08 acres is under more than one crop. The rest of the land is non-agricultural.

At a press conference, Ravi Kant, the MD of Tata Motors pointed out that some of the proposals from other States were more to the advantage of the company, “but Mr. Ratan Tata has a soft corner for West Bengal and therefore we are here”. In May, 2006, it was known that project of Tata Motors is almost certain to be located in West Bengal.

The Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, told reporters after the Managing Director of Tata Motors, Mr Ravi Kant, called on him at the State Government headquarters of Writers’ Buildings here on Friday.”It is final,” Mr Bhattacharjee told newspersons when asked if it had been finalised that West Bengal had been chosen as the site for the proposed small car project of Tata Motors.

Other major investments of the Tata Group in West Bengal include the Hooghly Metcoke plant in Haldia, Tata Metaliks pig iron plant in Kharagpur and the Tata Bearings plant, also in Kharagpur.

Compensation Details.

As reported in the national media, by the end of the first week of December 2006, more than 9,000 people had received the compensation.

The beneficiaries also include sharecroppers – 300 registered and 170 unregistered – who are entitled to 25 per cent of the compensation due to the land owners.

Senior Trinamul Congress leader Sougata Roy lamented the inadequacy of this compensation. Veteran peasant leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Benoy Konar, indicated that this amount was more than generous for those having average holdings of 10 decimals of land.

In an article in the Bengali daily Ganashakti (December 6), he furnished facts and figures to show that the compensation amount, if kept in fixed deposits in commercial banks, would earn for land-losers 10-15 times the earnings from their cultivation.

The total compensation payable is Rs 119 crore to approximately 12,000 people. On an average that means that each family got approximately Rs one lakh. The compensation package for farmers is another bone of contention. The State government says that keeping in view similar compensation awarded under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, it is generous. For land under a single crop, the rate is Rs.6 lakhs an acre; taking into account the solatium and the 10 per cent incentive, the final rate works out to Rs.8.40 lakhs an acre. For land under more than one crop, the rate is Rs.12 lakhs an acre.

Status report on land acquisition in Singur

On Jan. 2, 2007, the West Bengal Government released a status report on land acquisition in Singur providing details of the land acquired, chronology of land acquisition and payment of compensation to landowners and `bargadars’.

The status report enumerated in detail the important provisions of the Land Acquisition Act 1894, the “meaning of consent”, the pre-award and post-award consents to amount of compensation, declaration of award and possession, mutation and conversion of the acquired lands and compensation that has been paid.

According to the report, a total of 997.11 acres of land spread across five `mouzas’ in Singur, district Hooghly, has been acquired as on December 31, 2006. The process of land acquisition in Singur began with the publication of notifications under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act 1894 from July 20, 2006 onwards and was completed with the Declaration of Awards under Section 11 of the Act on September 23 and 25, 2006. Payment of compensation in accordance with the award began on September 25, 2006. The status report mentions that the “Act does not have any provision for the Collector to obtain individual consent of landowners to the acquisition nor is there any prescribed form for consent to acquisition”.

It adds that the State Government, “vide Govt Order No. 1703-LA-3M-07/06 Dated 6 June, 2006, made provision for consent award under Section 11 (2) of the Act, and prescribed the form in which such consents are to be submitted”.

It also states that “consent under Section 11(2) is a means of involvement of the citizen in determination of award. However, non-submission of consent in writing in terms of Section 11(2) does not prevent the Collector from declaring the award and acquiring the land… Not accepting the compensation after declaration of award for any part of land does not mean that the land for that part will not be vested in the Government”.

Opposition to the project

I will continue with the hunger strike and “see the matter to the end,” said Trinamool chief, Mamta Banarjee at the height of the Singur controvercy.

Opposition to the project has been without substantial leadership. Mamata Banerjee left no stone unturned to stop the project from taking off. She found an ally in Medha Patkar who also went on sympathy fast but aborted after unsuccessful attempts to visit Singur. The major agitators, however, were members of the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), a group with local influence, and naxalite student leaders. The Congress was ambivalent as usual. Initially throwing its weight behind Mamata’s agitation, it turned wary when visiting BJP president Rajnath Singh got a warm reception from the Trinamul Congress, his NDA ally.

Leaders of the State Congress later appealed to Ms. Banerjee to call off her strike. A motley group of notable personalities, including Trinamul Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, who is a principal opponent of the State government, Gandhian social activist Medha Patkar, some retired and disgruntled civil servants, and even a small section of the Left Front, appears to have strong reservations about different aspects of the project.

Size of acquisition – Details of the project

The mother plant would require 640 acre and the vendor park 290 acre. Already, nearly 55 vendors have agreed to come to Singur, with a promised investment of Rs 2,200 crore.

This is in addition to the Rs 1500-crore investment to be made by Tata Motors at the plant.

To speed up construction work, Tata Motors would switch from two-shift to three-shift operations, he said.

Initial target is 2.5 lakh cars in the first year of operation. The proposed plant is expected to generate employment for 2,000 people directly and 10,000 people indirectly.

Construction work on the 250,000 unit plant, which is expandable to 350,000, is going on in full swing, officials added.

High Hopes

Ravi Kant, managing director of Tata Motors, said this project will “kick-start” the re-industrialisation process of West Bengal. In Pune, the whole landscape has changed within three years of setting up our plant.” May be he was over-projecting the role of Tatas in the development of Pune, there is no denying the fact that, for government of west Bengal, the project has been very important.

For the Tatas also, this is a precious project as the world is watching its experiment of bringing out the cheapest and most fuel-efficient car.

As Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee put it, “The project will change the face of not only Singur, but also of the whole of West Bengal.”

Addressing a massive rally in Kolkata on December 3, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee appealed to those opposing the project to revise their stand. “It is not a matter of opposing the State government any longer; the project involves the very future of the State… There can be no going back, especially now that the people have given us the mandate to go forward. There cannot be any progress without industry and commerce,” he said.

Employment Generation – Training the people

On Jan. 4 , 2007 Tata Motors said it has selected a group of 11 trainees from Singur villages for 6-months training, according to a press release from the company.

The 11 trainees, all of whom have in the past attended Government-run Industrial Training Institute courses, have been selected out of the 21 candidates who responded to Tata Motors’ initiative and appeared for a written test and interview held on December 25, 2006, at Singur.

It will involve the setting up of first-tier ancillary units that Tata Motors itself will bring in to supply components. Beyond the first-tier ancillary units will be the second-tier units in the small and medium sector (SME), with forward and backward linkages, mostly run by local entrepreneurs and employing local workforce. These SME units are expected to be the largest provider of employment.

As a part of rehabilitating the PAP, the State government has organised a four-month training course for land-losers to impart skills as machinists, in welding, repairing two- and three-wheelers and automobiles, wiring of houses and repairing of electrical gadgets.

For women, the government has entered into agreements with Singer India Ltd for tailoring lessons and already 80 women have enrolled in two batches. The Insititute of Hotel Management, Catering Technology & Applied Nutrition will also start a course in catering for women soon. Moreover, Tata Motors has pledged to procure consumables such as gloves and aprons locally from women’s self-help groups.

Already more than 1,800 people, including land-losers and 443 landless persons, have enlisted for the training programmes. Agencies such as the Confederation of Indian Industry (Eastern region) and G4 Security Agency have evinced interest in training people as masons, machinists and security guards. The entire training cost would be borne by the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC).

Community development work in the region has also started in earnest. Programmes undertaken include increasing drinking water facilities, repairing school buildings, improving roads, re-excavating the Jhulka canal to improve irrigation potential in the adjoining areas and digging tubewells to improve the cropping intensity in the surrounding region. All this work is being executed with local labour comprising land-losers and landless workers. More than 2,000 man-days have been generated as of the first week of December. The task of fencing the area was also given to the local people, which generated more than 5,500 man-days.

SC says no to deletion of word ’socialist’ from Constitution

“WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and…………..” These are the opening lines of preamble of the Constitution of India. This in essence declares the values which are at the core of Indian democracy. There was a PIL seeking direction to delete the word “socialist” from the preamble of the Constitution on the ground that it was originally not there and adding the word amounted to re-writing it. Defining socialism as a means of public welfare, the Supreme Court on 8th January rejected this plea.

“Why do you take socialism in a narrow sense defined by communists? In broader sense, it means welfare measures for the citizens. It is a facet of democracy,” a three judge Bench headed by Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan observed. “It hasn’t got any definite meaning. It gets different meaning in different times,” the Bench observed.However, it agreed to hear the PIL which also sought to strike down the provision of Representation of People Act (RPA) requiring a political party to adhere to socialism for being recognized.The Bench, also comprising Justices R V Raveendran and J M Panchal, will look into the issue of derecognizing political parties which have wrongly shown allegiance to socialism in their manifesto despite their contrary objectives.The Court after hearing the contention of the petitioner issued notices to the Centre and the Election Commission.“It is contrary to the Constitution and to its democratic foundations that political parties be called upon to swear allegiance only to a particular mindset or ideology,” senior advocate Fali S Nariman, appearing for petitioner, Kolkata-based NGO Good Governance India Foundation. (PTI)

Hotel Industry included under Factories Act

The Ministry of Labor and Employment has decided to include the ‘Hotel Industry’ under the Factories Act. the rulebook of all the leading hotels would need a relook.“Hotel industry will have to work in a disciplined way with the inclusion of the industry under the ‘Factories Act’. The Act clearly says that the employees will work for eight hours in a shift and overstaying period will be paid and they have to do it,” said a high-level official in the Labor Ministry.“It is not only the time frame or shifts but the Industry will also probably have to look at the employee’s issues relating to health, safety, welfare facilities, working hours, employment of young persons and annual leave with wages which is all a part of ‘Factories Act’ with the inclusion,” confirmed a Ministry source. (PTI)

President, Vice-President, Governors get a big pay hike

A Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has taken decision on 10th January to increase the salaries of President and some other holders of Constitutional offices and it will be with retrospective effect from January one last year. Announcing the Cabinet decision, Information and Broadcasting Minister P R Dasmunsi said the hike was necessitated since the Vice President, who is the Presiding Officer of the Rajya Sabha, was getting less than Members of Parliament. The MPs got a salary of Rs 68,000.

The President will now get Rs one lakh each month while the Vice-President’s salary will be Rs 85,000. For the Governors of 28 states, the salary will be Rs 75,000. It was not immediately clear whether the Lieutenant Governors of the seven Union Territories will also benefit from the pay rise.The President, whose salary was last hiked in 1996, was getting Rs 50,000 while the Vice-President’s pay was Rs 40,000. Governors used to get Rs 36,000. Former Presidents’ emoluments were also doubled to Rs six lakh a year, while additional facilities were sanctioned for the spouses of late Presidents and Vice Presidents.Dasmunsi said the decision to increase the salary had been taken last year itself, but since the then President and Vice President were retiring, it was deferred.

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International News

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project

In the first week of January 2008, Intel announced to pull out of OLPC project. OLPC aimed to boost learning in poorer nations via a custom-built laptop intended to cost no more than $100.

History of OLPC Project

XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital in 1995. The idea of $100 laptop was first presented in 2005 by Negroponte at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the political, economic, and cultural elite of the world gather each year. The idea was well received and Google, AMD, Red Hat, News Corp among others joined hands to design the laptop. The XO or OLPC laptop was designed specifically for children and was made rugged to cope with conditions in developing nations and could be kept powered using a hand crank.

While initial aim was for a laptop costing only $100, the final versions that have been trialed in Nigeria and Uruguay cost $188. Costs were supposed to be kept low by governments ordering the XO laptop in shipments of one million, but large orders for the XO laptop have, so far, not materialized.

Conflict with Intel and Microsoft

The project has been a lightning rod for controversy largely because the world’s most powerful software and chip making companies — Microsoft and Intel — had long resisted the project, for fear, according to many industry executives, that it would compete in markets they hoped to develop.

After several years of publicly attacking the XO, Intel reversed itself and joined the organization’s board in July 2007, agreeing to make an $18 million contribution and begin developing an Intel-based version of the computer. Although Intel made an initial $6 million payment to One Laptop, the partnership was troubled from the outset as Intel sales representatives in the field competed actively against the $200 One Laptop machine by trying to sell a rival computer, a more costly Classmate PC.

“OLPC had asked Intel to end our support for non-OLPC platforms, including the Classmate PC, and to focus on the OLPC platform exclusively,” said Intel sposkesman Chuck Mulloy. “At the end of the day, we decided we couldn’t accommodate that request.” Prior to Intel’s involvement, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte criticised the chip firm for what he called its attempts to undermine the project’s work. He said Intel was selling its Classmate at a loss to make the XO laptop less attractive. Nicholas Negroponte described the situation as: “It’s a little bit like McDonald’s competing with the World Food Program.”

Former OLPC CTO aims to create $75 laptop

A “spin-out” from OLPC, the company, Pixel Qi is looking to create a $75 laptop and trying to advance low-cost computers and power-efficient laptops, mobile phones and other consumer electronics that are sunlight readable, Jepsen wrote on the company’sWeb site. Jepsen left OLPC two weeks ago to commercialize technologies she invented with OLPC, she said in an e-mail to the IDG News Service at the time. Apatentlists Jepsen as one of the inventors of a display system optimized for low-power operation.

As CTO, Jepsen was responsible for hardware development for the rugged and power-saving XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its environmentally friendly design and innovative display, hardware and networking features.

 

Her departure from OLPC spawned a debate, with critics charging that Jepsen was taking advantage of OLPC’s nonprofit inventions for personal gains, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a sinking ship.

Give One, Get One

In a bid to boost the numbers of laptops available, OLPC ran a “Give One, Get One” program in the US from 12 November to 31 December.

This allowed members of the public to buy two XO machines for $400 – one laptop for themselves and a second XO laptop would be donated to a child in developing country. OLPC said the success of this had helped it to launch programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan.

OLPC has so far shipped around 50,000 XO laptops to North American customers under the “give one, get one” program and more remain to be shipped, Bender said. The number of customers who ordered laptops under the program was not immediately available, but as many as 150,000 units may have been donated through the program.

For success of this project, the volume production is must. And programs like Give One, Get One are aimed at getting the numbers rolling by philanthropic schemes, even when they doesn’t look commercially viable for developing nations at the moment. Project has an edge for being the innovator in design and being non-profit in nature. It remains to be seen how the project scales up against competing commercial offerings.

No Respite from Financial Crisis in US

The financial wreck continues to unfold each day as some of the giants report higher losses.

Bloomberg reported that Bear Stearns’ CEO James “Jimmy” Cayne might resign as the securities firm’s shares languish following unprecedented losses from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Board members have been notified by Cayne, 73, that he will step down as CEO and remain chairman of the New York-based company, according to the person, who declined to be identified because the decision isn’t public.

Before this, Citigroup CEO Charles Prince and Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal were forced out after the sinking value of assets tied to mortgages eroded earnings. Bear Stearns’s fourth-quarter loss of $854 million was the first in its history and the company’s stock dropped 53 percent in New York trading during the past year, more than any Wall Street rival.     

While there is little likelyhood that these giant financial compnies would go down because of the sub-prime crisis, the damage is significant and will take time to heal.

Citigroup reported $10 billion losses for the quarter ended December 2007. Citigroup plans to announce a writedown of as much as $24 billion and layoffs that could total as much as 24,000 due to subprime and credit-related losses, CNBC reported on 14 Jan. The plans will be unveiled today by Citigroup’s new CEO, Vikram S. Pandit. There is also likely to be a sell off of non-core business in a bid to reduce the size and return to profitability, Mr Pandit indicated.

In November, Citi accepted $7.5 billion in new capital from the The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority only weeks after its former chief executive officer, Charles Prince, was forced out amid news of the heavy losses related to bad bets on mortgage securities and an ailing housing markets.

Merrill has already begun laying off people, but layoffs will be minimal. Eight hundred people are expected to leave, with a number of employees already heading for the exits because of diappointment at the size of bonuses. Merrill’s writedown is expected to be in the neighborhood of $12 billion to $15 billion. Merrill Lynch & Co. raised $6.6 billion by selling preferred shares to a group including the Kuwait Investment Authority and Japan’s Mizuho Financial Group Inc. after being battered by losses from subprime crisis.

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Special Feature

An Study Finds Vaccine Preservative Is Not Linked to Risks of Autism

Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old. This set of signs distinguishes autism from milder autism spectrum disorders (ASD) such as Asperger syndrome. There are a number of lobbies that have claimed that there is modern vaccination is the culprit behind the rise in the autism cases, but nothing conclusive has turned up either way.

Researchers from the State Public Health Department found that the autism rate in children rose continuously in the study period from 1995 to 2007. The preservative, thimerosal, has not been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for some flu shots.

Doctors said that the latest study added to the evidence against a link between thimerosal exposure and the risk of autism and that it should reassure parents that vaccinations do not cause autism. If there was a risk, the doctors said, autism rates should have dropped from 2004 to 2007.

One doctor said the focus should be on exploring possible causes of autism, including genetic links.

“Something else must be at play,” said Dr. Geschwind, who had no connection with the study. “And we need to know what that is if we’re really serious about preventing autism.”

The results of the study are in the January issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry. The study did not explore why autism cases increased.

Officials say one in 150 American children have autism, higher than other estimates. Researchers say it is unclear whether the increase stems from changes in classifying autism or whether the increase is actual.

News Snippets

Kerala’s Kannur registers the largest number of rioting cases

(PTI) Kannur in the Keralas’s north had 737 riot cases in 2006 and this is the highest number registered by any police district in the country. The district, a bastion of the Marxists for long, had been witnessing frequent clashes between the activists of CPI(M) and BJP-RSS with both sides claiming to have lost at least 150 cadres each.A number of political clashes were charged under relevant sections of Indian Penal Code relating to rioting and this is the reason behind this kind of figures, a Kerala government official said.The majority of the present state leadership of the CPI(M), including state party Secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, hails from Kannur. State Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan also hails from Kannur.

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Open Window: Issue 31 Dec, 2007

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Contents

Follow Up

India wants Rupee Loan

Climate Change Talks 

National News 

Covering the elections in Gujarat 

Machang Lalung dies 

The Hindu targets young adults with its new tabloid 

International News 

After Tsunami: Through the eyes of children 

How to cash in on a warming planet 

Putin: TIME person of the year 

French Worker’s Strike 

Culture 

Parallel Universe 

Special Feature 

Basix: an organization with a Difference?

News Snippets

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Follow Up

India wants Rupee Loan To attract foreign investment, countries in South America, Asia, and the Middle East peg their currency to the US dollar. As the dollar sinks to new lows, many countries are reconsidering their economic allegiance because it devalues and restricts their own currency, often resulting in inflation. Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have already taken steps to revalue their currencies. If enough governments decide to cut ties with the dollar, consequences could be serious: dollar could weaken further.

Climate Change Talks In Bali’s last, tension-filled hours, US Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky was openly booed by other participants when she said the US would reject the action plan the 187 other delegations had painstakingly negotiated in the preceding days. The representative of tiny Papua New Guinea stood up and publicly chided Ms. Dobriansky. Five minutes later, Dobriansky announced that the US would, after all, accept the plan. That announcement was greeted by well-deserved cheers. However, the meeting in Bali fell short of its initial aim since the US successfully resisted the imposition of quantitative quotas on the pollution of the atmosphere. The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. USA drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home.  But USA got approved the formula for developed countries as “commitment or mitigation actions”. In simple terms mitigation action is that the rich nations should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. This has the possibility of creating an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts.

National News

Covering the elections in Gujarat

The elections in the state are over and the results are well known by now. In the heat of the election campaigning, it was difficult to say what was biased and what unbiased, except for the remarks by the polititians, which are always biased. This article covers some of the aspects of the elections which did not get enough highlight in the noise of the election.

Satta Bazaar and elections

Is there a link between the two? Even if there is, it might not be easy to establish. Kanchan Gupta, in The Pioneer points out the Satta Bazaar angle in Gujarat politics: The satta bazaar went on a roller-coaster ride during the last 72 hours before the results were declared. In the early stages of the campaign, the odds were heavily stacked against the Congress and most people were putting their money on the BJP. After exit polls suggested the Congress was on a comeback trail following the first round of voting, the odds were evenly balanced. The second round of exit polls, which gave Mr Modi a narrow victory margin, saw the odds tilting against the BJP. In the last 72 hours, there was heavy betting with punters putting their money on a Congress win. Newspaper estimates suggest that the bets amounted to Rs 2,400-crore. In the event, those who placed their money on the Congress lost heavily. Some people, though, have made a killing.

Congress’ dismal track record in Gujarat

Arun jaitly reportedly said: Since 1985, the Congress has not won a majority in Gujarat, either in the Assembly or in the Lok Sabha elections. The Congress has consistently lost every Assembly and Lok Sabha election. In five consecutive elections since 1990, Congress rivals — on four occasions the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and on one occasion the BJP and the Janata Dal — won nearly two-thirds of the Assembly seats. Except for West Bengal, the Congress has not had such a bad track record in any other state.

Media got it all wrong?

Mr Jaitly claimed that the media got the Gujrat trends all wrong. Here’s a state in which five out of six regions give a party a 14 per cent lead, yet not one reporter in this country caught it.

He also claimed that it was a failure of National Media more than the regional one. “What you have to do is switch to the regional TV channels. They have reporters at every counting centre and get it right. So while the national channels were showing BJP 40, Congress 30 in the first hour and a half, ETV Gujarati already had BJP 111, Congress 55.”

Is the EC biased?

Arun Jaitly leveled charges of bias against the Election Commission. He said, “The moment Modi gave a reply (to Sonia Gandhi’s comment), the Election Commission issued him a notice within 24 hours. For the next three days there was no notice to either Digvijay Singh or to Sonia Gandhi. Digvijay’s statement was reported in some (sections of the) electronic and print media and Sonia Gandhi’s was reported extensively. This was something the Election Commission had to take suo motu cognisance of. The commission, incorrectly, told the media that it had not taken note of these two speeches because it had not received a complaint.”

Winnability factor

It’s all about winning an election. It’s a war and the parties need formulae, tricks, propaganda etc. In the end, it boils down to the ‘winnability factor’. Mr Jaitly said, “Any party will use whatever ‘winnability’ factors it has in an election. When Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) leader we used his personality to improve our chances. When Mrs (Indira) Gandhi was the Congress party leader, they used her personality to win an election.

Also, the 2004 elections made one thing very clear: a national election is the net aggregate of state polls. The nucleus of an alliance is one of the two principal parties. If you have a strong nucleus you’ll have a strong United Progressive Alliance (UPA) or a strong NDA built around it. If you have weak Congress or a weak BJP, then you have a United Front kind of an experiment. The nucleus party must be strong enough to attract more allies.”

Modi is Pro-women?

In the last year, Modi came out with two schemes for women: the first scheme was that any girl child who goes to school will have a fixed deposit in her name. When she reaches Std VIII, she’ll get the amount with interest. The dropout rate collapsed. So he provided an incentive for the education of the girl child. Second, he got private sector medical practitioners, gynecologists, to deliver children in women’s homes and paid them for it. So infant mortality and maternal death rate came down. Modi didn’t announce the scheme: he held at least 28 women conferences, attended by 50,000-60,000 women each. He used his entire political and governmental machinery in every district for this.

There are 16 women elected to the Assembly of which 15 are from the BJP.

Chidambaram accuses Modi of bad fiscal management

He claimed that the Modi administration managed its fiscal affairs so badly that the State had run up an accumulated debt burden from Rs. 45,301 crore in 2001 to over Rs. 94,009 crore this year, and earned the dubious distinction of being one of the six “highly indebted States.” The others were West Bengal, Punjab, Rajasthan, Kerala and Maharashtra.

Gujarat spent a mere 31 per cent of the budgetary allocations for the social sector, ignoring the needs of the poor, marginal farmers and the other weaker sections, Mr. Chidambaram said.

Refuting Mr. Modi’s allegations of discrimination, he claimed that in the last four years since the UPA government came to power, the Centre had given Gujarat Rs. 14,000 crore as its share in Central taxes and about Rs. 10,000 crore towards plan and non-plan expenditure. This was “the highest amount paid to the State by the Centre” for any four-year block since Independence.

Moily on Modi

Congress media committee chairman Veerappa Moily described party president Sonia Gandhi as “Goddess Durga” and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as a “demon.”

“The major terrorist attacks — be it on the Akshardham temple, Parliament, the Raghunath temple and Amarnath pilgrims — took place during the National Democratic Alliance regime and despite POTA being in place. The demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Kargil war … with these incidents, India became vulnerable.”

Ad war

There were two insertions by the newly-created “Brahmins Utkarsha Samiti” appealing to vote out the “anti-Brahmin” Chief Minister, and expressing doubts about the former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s consent to publishing an advertisement with his appeal on Thursday to vote for Mr. Modi. The Bharatiya Janshakti Party also appealed to the people to vote against the Modi government.

Mr. Modi, at his public meetings on Friday in Kaira and other central Gujarat constituencies, promptly picked up the Masood Azhar issue and said the publication of the advertisement was proof of the Congress having “lost its head and sense of balance.”

He said it only proved that the Congress had no sentiments for the passengers aboard the plane hijacked to Afghanistan by terrorists.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, that earlier made its stand clear, inserted another advertisement in support of Mr. Modi. But most surprising was an advertisement in the name of a couple of voluntary organisations, which did not talk of any election but recalled the “sacrifices” made by many volunteers for protecting “cows and other innocent animals” during the Bakri-Idd.”

Machang Lalung dies

Machang Lalung, who spent 54 years in prison without trial, died at his ancestral residence at Silchang in Morigaon district on Tuesday night following a brief illness. He was 79. The reason of death was reported as “geriatric ailment”.  

He was released in July 2005 on the intervention of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) from the LGB Regional Institute of Mental Health at Tezpur. It was NHRC Special Rapporteur Chaman Lal who brought the shocking neglect of five undertrial prisoners, including Machang, at the hospital to the notice of commission. The other cases were that of Khalilur Rehman who has been lodged in the Mental Hospital for 35 years, Anil Kumar Burman a undertrial prisoner for 33 years, Sonamani Deb a undertrial prisoners for 32 years , and a woman Parbati Mallik who has been a undertrial prisoner for 32 years.

As per NHRC reports Machang Lalung was admitted on 14th April 1951 at the age of 23 years as a Undertrial Prisoner (UTP) of Guwahati jail u/s 326 IPC. As per official records for 15-16 years he was regularly produced before the Board of Visitors and at their instance letters were written from time to time to the Magistrate Kamrup and Guwahati showing him unfit to defend himself. The Board on 9th Aug. 1967 wrote to Magistrate Kamrup Guwahati informing that Shri Lalung was fit to stand trial. On 10th Aug.1967, the Superintendent wrote to the Secretary to the Govt. of Assam saying that he was fit for trial and should be taken back to the jail. The Secretary wrote back on 5th Sept. 1967 asking for particulars of his case. No reply was sent. Instead each year a letter was sent certifying his insanity. On 3rd Nov.1994, he was declared fit in a letter addressed to the CJM Guwahati. Nothing happened. His file then shows a letter dated 2nd Feb. 2002 from the Secretary to the Govt. of Assam to the Suptd. Jail Guwahati asking him to go through the jail records and produce the UTP before the Magistrate.  

He was finally freed in July 2005 after paying a token personal bond of one rupee. The Indian Express report on the case prompted a PIL, following which the Supreme Court directed the Assam government to pay Lalung an interim compensation of Rs 3 lakh apart from a monthly subsistence allowance of Rs 1000. The state government was also directed to arrange regular medical check-up and free treatment for him.  

The Assam Tribune pointed out that the tragedy of Machang epitomizes the inherent defects in the country’s judicial system, as Machang was made a prisoner without any trial for a petty offence. Ironically, when he was finally freed in 2005 following an intervention of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), his freedom was on bail only. In a sense, he never experienced true freedom before death ultimately cleared him of his bondage.  

“It was a strange life that our system forced upon this innocent man,” remarked Aneisha Sharma, whose 23-minute film Freedom at the Edge on Lalung earned accolades at the prestigious Boston International Film Festival earlier this year.

The Hindu targets young adults with its new tabloid

The Hindu group has started a tabloid for the IT and ITES persons. Named Ergo, it will be distributed free of cost in the IT corridors of chennai, to begin with.The paper will have a controlled circulation, meaning that it will be distributed only to the target audience — IT and ITES professionals in their twenties and thirties. This will be achieved by distribution along the IT corridor and at company cafeterias and atriums.  

Mr S. Karthik, Editor of the new paper, said that Ergo will stand for and promote a new kind of ‘always on’ journalism that will appeal to the 21st century readership.

Mr N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, said that it was a unique experience for a newspaper started in 1878 to let go and get a team of people in their twenties to create and run a newspaper meant for the new generation.  

Ergo will offer a variety of news, views and entertainment for the “work hard, party harder” kind of young adults. From money, sport and local news to entertainment and relationships, the freesheet will cater to the interests of the young urban professional. The tabloid will have a controlled circulation primarily along the IT corridor and in selected other areas. Ergo will also feature an extensive, interactive online portal that will host blogs, videos and podcasts to give readers a full multimedia news and entertainment experience.  

“Young readers think different, live differently, feel differently and expect differently,” said N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu. “Newspapers today have to engage their audience, be relevant and absorbing, and also be fun.” While Ergo will have a lot to offer to any young adult, it will be of particular interest to IT professionals, discussing not only career perspectives but even just the coolest gadgetry.  

“In south India, in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, a large number of young professionals have already made a mark in the IT and IT-enabled services sectors,” he added. “We wanted to do something relevant to them that will engage them.” 

Ergo itself will be put together by a young team, most of whom are in their early 20s. “While it is by no means the first freesheet in the world, we think it has special characteristics as far as India is concerned,” Mr. Ram said. “We’re very pleased about it so far, but the rest is up to the readers.”

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International News

After Tsunami: Through the eyes of children

Coming to terms with life after a disaster has struck is never easy. The effects are even more difficult for children, who have witnessed the tragedy. “Some children, after the tsunami, they lost their creativity and lost interest in normal life,” said Manan Kotak, a psycho-social program specialist for the American Red Cross in Aceh.” “They are always remembering the day of the tsunami and everything they lost,” he said.  

In reporting one such project, Jennifer Lubrani wrote for Red Cross, that as a way to help survivors cope with the emotional effects following the tsunami, the American Red Cross engaged communities through its Psychosocial Support Program (PSP), activities designed to help people overcome emotional distress after a disaster. Focusing attention on the emotional needs of the young, Psychosocial Support Program staff in Indonesia and Sri Lanka engaged 80 children, ages 6 through 14, to creatively document how their lives have changed and how their communities are recovering three years later. Children were provided disposable cameras to document family and friends, their surroundings, and things most important to them. The photography exercise was used to encourage children to express their lives and promote a renewed sense of community.  

The project resulted in thousands of images being captured and a collection of images that illustrate resilient youth and a community working together to move on with their lives. The images included smiling family members and friends, orange-robed Buddhist monks, fish sellers, fishers tending nets, a grandmother chewing leaf, the sea and coconut palms.  

“The psycho-social program was aimed at helping children survivors cope with their memories by telling them to focus on what is happy in their lives,” said Tom Alcedo, a US Red Cross representative in Indonesia. Some of the “through the eyes of children” photographs, which were taken three months ago, are displayed in the lobby of the Washington headquarters of the American Red Cross. They are also expected to be displayed at an exhibition in Jakarta next month.

Immigration is not only developed countries’ issue

The economic principle says that a free market requires free movement of capital as well as free movement of labor. Restrict any one of these two and you invite the danger of markets being manipulated by some powerful groups or governments. In recent past there have been deliberate efforts to manage global finance, which allows easy flow of capital across borders. But when it comes to easy flow of human labor, other factors like national politics, cultural identity and law and order issues, take prominence. The dilemma or double standard of willingness to take immigrants for the economic gains but trying to avoid the associated social cost; has become a common feature of modern day globalized world. And that includes illegal immigration as well; because economic gains are even more lucrative to overlook the increased social costs.  

There are 74 million “south to south” migrants, according to the World Bank, which uses the term to describe anyone moving from one developing country to another, regardless of geography. The bank estimates that they send home $18 billion to $55 billion a year. (The bank also estimates that 82 million migrants have moved “south to north,” or from poor countries to rich ones.)

This includes cases of: Nicaraguans building Costa Rican buildings, Paraguayans picking Argentine crops, Nepalis digging Indian mines, guarding Indian homes, Bangladeshis working as home-servants in India, Indonesians cleaning Malaysian homes, farm hands from Burkina Faso tendng the fields in Ivory Coast. Some save for more expensive journeys north, while others find the move from one poor land to another all they will ever afford.  

“South to south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people,” said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a researcher at Georgetown University. “These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don’t go.”  

Manuel Orozco of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, warned against viewing south to south migration solely in a negative light. He estimates that Haitians in the Dominican Republic send home $135 million a year. “Destination countries benefit from foreign labor,” Orozco said, while migrants get jobs. The challenge, he said, is to create policies that “promote development for both countries, while protecting migrants and their families.” “Just letting migration happen is not good enough,” he added.  

With rich countries tightening their borders, migration within the developing world is likely to grow. Last week a report in International Herald Tribune, revealed that from Ireland to Bulgaria, from Finland to Spain, detention camps for foreigners have mushroomed across the European Union. They have emerged mostly over the past decade, as the region has grown less and less welcoming to migrants. There are now 224 detention camps scattered across the European Union; altogether they can house more than 30,000 people – asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants awaiting deportation – who are often held in administrative detention for as long as 18 months. In a number of EU countries, there is no upper limit on detention length.  

How to cash in on a warming planet

The complex social, economic and political implications of climate change can all be leveraged by the latest global warming related innovations in the financial markets. So while the Bangladeshis would worry about the disappearing land, others (and possibly the Bangladeshis also) can earn on their global warming related investments. So the investors can stop worrying about flooded cities and immigration of millions of poor.  

Instead, they could focus on so many of the everyday money-making ideas created by the warming of our planet. For example, one could short the stocks of wineries in drought-prone areas such as Australia or California and bet on upstarts in Canada and England, where new wineries are sprouting as temperatures rise. Or, since ski resorts are seeing less and less snow, it might make sense to buy and hold manufacturers of snowmakers.  

HSBC’s Global Climate Change Benchmark Index tracks 300 equities, spans 34 countries (11 of which are emerging markets), and includes small, medium, and big companies. Simulations of the 45 months prior to its September debut show the index would have beaten the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) global index by 70%. In November, HSBC launched a fund in Europe that focuses on a subset of about 60 companies from the index. A U.S. version, the GIF Climate Change Fund, is due by April.  

Deutsche Bank’s DWS Climate Change Fund beat HSBC to the American market last November. It mirrors the German DWS Klimawandel fund, which since its launch last February is up 10.4%. For a lower-cost approach, stock pickers can follow the pros’ logic and make their own calls. Evaluating equities on their potential to capitalize on climate change is easier than untangling the complexities of global warming.  

UBS is another company that has launched a climate change index in the US market. Just like in the stock market, retail and institutional investors will also be able to buy exposure to, or short sell the index If temperatures rise, so will the value of the index.  

A recent report from PwC said the volume of weather derivatives traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange jumped from $9.7bn in 2004-5 to more than $45bn in 2005-6.  

The UBS index is based on weather derivative contracts for winter and summer traded on the CME. These “heating degree day” and “cooling degree day” contracts measure the difference between average daily temperatures and a given base in a number of cities around the world. The UBS index will be based on a few US cities, including New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Las Vegas, because these are the ones most actively traded on the CME. As the market continued to grow, cities in other regions such as London, Tokyo and Paris were likely to be added.

Putin: TIME person of the year

While declaring its choice for selecting Putin as TIME’s Person of the Year 2007, TIME magazine clarified that TIME’s Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest. At its best, it is recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world—for better or for worse. Putin is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability—stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a long time. Whether he proves to be a reformer or an autocrat who takes Russia back to an era of repression—this will be known only over the next decade. At significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nation’s prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power. For that reason, Vladimir Putin is TIME’s 2007 Person of the Year.  

Putin became Prime Minister On August 16, when the State Duma approved his appointment with 233 votes in favour (vs. 84 against, 17 abstained), while a simple majority of 226 was required, making him Russia’s fifth PM in less than eighteen months. On his appointment, few expected Putin, virtually unknown to the general public, to last any longer than his predecessors.  

Both in Russia and abroad, Putin’s public image was forged by his tough handling of the Chechen war. He assumed the role of acting President on December 31, 1999, when Yeltsin resigned from the top post. The subsequent elections saw his emergence as one of the popular leaders and the new President of the great country.  

His stay in the office has been far from uncontroversial. Amid the pulp reports that the women swoon over him and that he does not drink or smoke and all such personal glorifications, his political career has been one of turbulence. He opposed the war in Iraq vehemently and maintained a tough military stance on most of the issues involving neighborhood states. His relation with the west has been more and more confrontational – a reminder of the fact that Russia, and probably the west as well, has not been able to leave cold war behind.  

For example, Vladimir Putin recently said, “… these threats are not becoming fewer but are only transforming and changing their appearance. These new threats, just as under the Third Reich, show the same contempt for human life and the same aspiration to establish an exclusive dictate over the world.” This was interpreted by some Russian and Western commentators as comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany.  

Similarly an American journalist wrote that “Whether by waging cyberwarfare on Estonia, threatening the gas supplies of Lithuania, or boycotting Georgian wine and Polish meat, he [Putin] has, over the past few years, made it clear that he intends to reassert Russian influence in the former communist states of Europe, whether those states want Russian influence or not. At the same time, he has also made it clear that he no longer sees Western nations as mere benign trading partners, but rather as Cold War-style threats.”  

British historian Max Hastings described Putin as “Stalin’s spiritual heir” in his article “Will we have to fight Russia in this Century?”. Another British academic Norman Stone in his article “No wonder they like Putin” compared Putin to General Charles de Gaulle. Adi Ignatius argues that “Putin… is not a Stalin. There are no mass purges in Russia today, no broad climate of terror. But Putin is reconstituting a strong state, and anyone who stands in his way will pay for it.” In the same article, Hastings continues that although “a return to the direct military confrontation of the Cold War is unlikely”, “the notion of Western friendship with Russia is a dead letter”  

The stability inside Russia, as ensured by Putin, has among other things, suppressed freedom of press. This however is supported by the public as the polls conducted on the issue have indicated. There has been a sustained development in Russia with the economy growing by roughly 7% per annum in the tenure of Putin. However, as Greenspan argues, there is a possibility that the growth is spurred by the strong oil prices and is likely to create “Dutch disease” sort of economic condition unless proactive measures are taken.

French Worker’s Strike

The first trial of strength between President Nicolas Sarkozy and the French working class has ended by the end of November. After a ten-day walkout, the strikers returned to work under conditions in which the government refused to withdraw its reform of their pensions, the so-called régimes spéciaux. The trade unions are negotiating over the price of their surrender.  

The French and international business press have struck a triumphant note. Le Figaro declared that the reform of the régimes spéciaux, the “mother of all reforms”, has convinced public opinion, “that everything must change in this country”. Next on the agenda is “the reduction of the public sector, as well as reducing the budget deficit and the expenditures on social insurance”.  

The left press stresses that the strikers were not defeated in their struggle, but betrayed. The breaking of the rail workers strike has already had serious political consequences. Barely had the strikers returned to the work, when violent youth protests erupted in the suburbs. The strangling of the strike intensified the isolation of the most suppressed layers of society, whose future is inseparably bound up with the fate of the working class.

The betrayal of the trade unions

President Nicolas Sarkozy was prepared for the dispute over the regimes spéciaux since the spring so as not to suffer the same fate as Alain Juppé, who as head of government in 1995 made an initial attack on pensions, but was then forced to retreat and eventually resign from office following massive popular resistance.

Even before taking office, Sarkozy had met with the leaders of the most important trade union federations. He told them: “I want to tell you one thing immediately. I will carry out this reform (i.e. régimes spéciaux). The rest is a matter of negotiation.” (le Monde 26.11.) Since then he has cultivated his ties to the union leaders with a series of both public and private meetings, including dinner dates.

Unions, however, were not able to bring about an immediate end to the strike. The grass-roots resistance was too great. Possibly the strategy of attrition was used by unions—the strike was allowed to continue without support from above until it finally ran out of steam. Despite the considerable costs to the French economy, Sarkozy supported this strategy.

Proposed reforms include: the labour code, the merger of the employment exchanges with the unemployment welfare offices, private sector pensions, vocational training.

How the unions supported the sell out

The trade unions were already heavily discredited at the beginning of the strike. Open distrust of the leadership prevailed at strike meetings. Most discussions revolved around the issue of how to prevent a sellout by the trade union apparatuses. Resolutions were passed which warned of any deal made without prior to consultation with the rank and file.

During the past 12 years, French workers have undergone a series of experiences where the trade unions have intervened to demobilize social disputes and organized sellouts.

The result of the conflict in 1995 was not the success it is often claimed to be. At the time, hundreds of thousands of workers struck for three and a half weeks in the defense of social security benefits, pensions, health insurance and jobs. Millions took part in demonstrations. The most disputed part of the Juppé plan was withdrawn, but all his other measures remained in place. Prime Minister Juppé was able to hold onto his post for a period of time, and President Jacques Chirac was given the necessary breathing space to prepare a regulated change of government.

In 2003 the government renewed its reform (termed as attack by labor unions) on pensions and was able to impose its measures in the face of substantial protests.

In the course of the presidential election this year, the Socialist Party tried to overtake Sarkozy from the right on many issues. Following its defeat at the polls prominent members of the party switched directly into Sarkozy’s camp. In the course of the rail workers’ strike the Socialist Party did not even put up pretence of defending the interests of the workers. The party supports the essential point of Sarkozy’s reform, making workers covered by the special pensions work a minimum of 40 years, instead of the current 37.5, before receiving a full pension.

The discrediting of the trade unions and the official left parties has enabled the parties of the radical left to acquire considerable influence. Lutte Ouvrière and increasingly the LCR have become regular components of official French politics. In 2002, nearly ten percent of the electorate cast their votes for the presidential candidates of the two organisations—Arlette Laguiller and Olivier Besancenot. In this years presidential election, 1.5 million voters for Besancenot.

One day previously, the trade unions had entered into negotiations with management and the government and on the morning of the 22nd most of the general assembly’s of striking workers had voted to break off the strike. Nevertheless, Besancenot refrained from saying a single word about the betrayal of the trade unions and tried to portray the sellout as a success. He celebrated the strike as an expression of an unstoppable movement which will continue to grow and finally force Sarkozy to back down. The social movement was not at an end, it would continue and become permanent, he declared. Now the job was to “assemble the forces, to increase the pressure from the streets even more in order to rebuff the reforms”:

This sort of phrase mongering is the stock-in trade of every trade union bureaucrat. It is aimed at covering up one’s own responsibility and clouding the waters when it comes to drawing political conclusions.

An international perspective

In Germany, train drivers have taken strike action during the last six months for improved working conditions and wages. They confront a broad front of opposition comprising not only the government and management, but also the country’s major trade unions, the SPD and the Left Party, which are agitating against the demands of the train drivers and organizing open strike breaking.

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Culture

Parallel Universe

By:- Vikram Gakhar

Special Feature

Basix: an organization with a Difference?

Basix is an organization that believes in conducting social work like business. Whereas the government and NGO are believed to be largely corrupt and lack transparency, the model of Basix is worth a close look.  

The mission of the organization is to promote a large number of sustainable livelihoods, including for the rural poor and women, through the provision of financial services and technical assistance in an integrated manner. Basix claims that they strive to yield a competitive rate of return to its investors so as to be able to access mainstream capital and human resources on a continuous basis.  

Basix has a corporate structure, consisting of a number of companies. The website discloses that the unsecured loans have come from Ford Foundation and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The loans are rupee denominated and thus do not carry exchange rate risk. Also the interest rate is nominal at 1%. This appears contradictory to their claim of competitive rate of return, at least on the debt, if not in equity.

Bhartiya Samruddhi Finance Ltd.

Samruddhi is registered with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as a Non Banking Finance Company (NBFC), through which credit and technical assistance is delivered. This is the flagship company of the BASIX group. BASICS Ltd earlier owned nearly 100 percent of Samruddhi with an equity base of Rs 4.5 crore at its birth in the year 1997. Samruddhi expanded its equity base to Rs 20.6 crore in 2001. The additional equity came from the IFC, Shorebank USA; Hivos- Triodos Fund, Netherlands; the ICICI and HDFC in India. The investment by BASICS Ltd was also enhanced to Rs 9.7 crore, bringing its share of Samruddhi holdings to 47 percent. As on June 30th, 2007 Samruddhi was present in 6894 villages in 45 districts spread over Nine states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajahsthan, Chattisgarh and Delhi.

It had cumulatively disbursed over 5,61,600 loans worth Rs 589 crore. The outstanding as on June 30th, 2007 were Rs. 144 crores with 211,550 active loans. The company maintained a high portfolio quality with an on-time repayment rate of 98.7 percent and eventual repayment rate of over 99 percent, with some delay. The company also provides Agricultural & Business Development Services to about one third of its customers through Livelihood Promotion Agents (LPAs) and Institutional Development Services for producers like MACS for cotton producers, dairy cooperatives.

Krishna Bhima Samruddhi Local Area Bank Ltd

The mission of KBSLAB is “to be a sustainable local community based institution providing financial services to the underserved, particularly rural poor and women and to arrange provision of technical assistance and support services to the borrowers with the ultimate goal of promoting a large number of sustainable livelihoods in the area”.  

KBSLAB is the first micro-finance bank in the country which was incorporated under the Indian Companies Act of 1956 on February 19, 1999 and was granted license to carry on banking business by the Reserve Bank of India to operate in the districts of Mahabubnagar, Raichur and Gulbarga in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka under the Banking Regulation Act, 1949. The Bank operates through 11 Branches –in Mahabubnagar (Andhra Pradesh) and in Raichur and Gulbarga (Karnataka).  

As on March 31, 2006, KBSLAB had a loan outstanding of Rs 189 million and deposits of Rs 126 million. It is catering to more than 22,800 borrowers and 31,859 depositors. The recovery rate of the Bank stood at 95.5% as on March 31, 2006. The average direct loan size stood at Rs 11,276/-.

Indian Grameen Services

IGS is registered as a Section 25, not-for-profit company, involved in carrying out research and development for livelihood promotion.  

IGS is focusing on building the knowledge base required for supporting livelihoods and disseminating the knowledge so generated for building the implementation capabilities of various organizations playing a critical role in supporting livelihoods. IGS also carries out human resource and institutional development for the BASIX group as well as for and other rural/micro-finance and community / producers institutions. It also designed and developed financial products for extending credit, evolving distribution channels for delivery of its services and developing necessary systems for service delivery such as accounting and MIS.  

The main sub-sectors in which action research has been initiated are:

Dairy, Groundnut, Cotton, Soyabean

Rural electric power (distribution reforms).Water for irrigation (borewells, lift irrigation, drip systems, watersheds), Retailing and mutual marketing by self-help group.  

The financials of the company indicate that it might be passing through a rough patch as of now. Comparing the results of 2006-07 with the previous year shows that the worth of net assets has dropped to more than half. Income from all heads, except ‘others’, has dropped. This includes the contributions from different agencies and the revenues from internal activities.  

Expenditure on the other hand has increase, as compared to the previous year and is more than the income, which means that the company would have to aggressively search for more funds to avoid getting into debt, from a financial point of view.

News Snippets

German security officials seek ban of Scientology

Germany’s top security officials said Friday that they considered the goals of the Church of Scientology to be in conflict with the principles of the country’s Constitution and would seek to ban the organization. The interior ministers of Germany’s 16 states plan to give the domestic intelligence agency the task of preparing the necessary information to outlaw the organization, which has been under observation here for a decade on suspicions that it “threatens the peaceful democratic order” of the country.  

The ministers, and the federal interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, “consider Scientology to be an organization that is not compatible with the Constitution,” said Ehrhart Körting, interior minister of Berlin, who presided over a two-day conference. 

Sabine Weber, president of the Church of Scientology in Berlin, said she viewed the renewed attempt to ban the organization as a reaction to increasing acceptance of Scientologists in several European countries.

Scientology is a body of beliefs and related practices initially developed by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard in 1952 as an outgrowth of his earlier self-help system, Dianetics. Hubbard later characterized Scientology as an “applied religious philosophy” and the basis for a new religion. Scientology encompasses a spiritual rehabilitation philosophy and techniques, and covers topics such as morals, ethics, detoxification, education and management. The first Church of Scientology was founded in 1953.

New Zealand trying to save the kiwi

In the thousand or so years since humans discovered the remote islands that make up New Zealand, three out of four of the indigenous bird species have been driven to extinction, and until recently, it looked like the national icon – the kiwi – was headed the same way. But a project is under way that offers some hope of pulling the beady-eyed, flightless bird back from the brink.  

Hugh Robertson, who runs the Kiwi Recovery Program of New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, estimates that there were as many as five million kiwis when European settlers arrived in 1840 and that the population now stands at 75,000.  

“It’s because of people and introduced predators – ferrets, stoats, weasels, dogs, cats,” said Jeremy Maguire, manager of the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, just outside the town of Christchurch. “They are a species in decline, and if it continues at the current rate, they will become extinct.”

Thousands sought over child porn

German prosecutors are investigating 12,000 suspected members of a child sex abuse network on the internet – the biggest in the country’s history.  

A senior public prosecutor said the suspects were accused of downloading or possessing illegal images of children. The investigation, which has been going on for several months, also points to suspects in about 70 other countries.  

An internet provider in Berlin is said to have helped by alerting the inquiry to a huge amount of internet traffic.

“The material was analysed. Then we called for search warrants,” said Peter Vogt, head of the central office tackling child internet sex abuse. He was speaking to German radio station Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR).

The suspects include 300 under investigation in the eastern German state of Sachsen-Anhalt.

BMW laying off thousands of workers

BMW, facing rising costs and resurgent competition from rivals like Mercedes, plans to dismiss several thousand workers, its first significant layoff in at least a decade, the company said Friday.  

The cuts, which will fall mainly in Germany, are part of a sweeping campaign to restore profits at Bayerische Motoren Werke, which has hit an uncharacteristic rough patch after years of being the most successful German carmaker.  

The company declined to confirm a report on the Internet edition of Der Spiegel that 8,000 jobs would be eliminated. A spokesman, Bill McAndrews, said BMW would not disclose numbers until early next year.  

Layoffs have become common at German carmakers in the past few years, with Mercedes, Volkswagen and the Opel unit of General Motors all cutting thousands of workers. But BMW has had the opposite problem, trying to churn out more cars without bloating its payroll.  

A large number of those affected will be employees with temporary contracts, McAndrews said. BMW will also offer voluntary buyouts and negotiate more flexible working hours with its unions. Layoffs are unlikely in the United States, where BMW is increasing production.  

“This will be done with a BMW approach,” McAndrews said. “It will be socially acceptable.”

Bhutan holds its first elections

Bhutan holds its first parliamentary elections in December 2007, after a century of direct rule by the monarchy. The plan was devised by the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. As part of the transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, he handed power to his 27-year-old Oxford University-educated son in 2006.  

Mock polls in April and May of this year were held to familiarize a people unused to voting but turnout was low. Now the government is urging people to vote in large numbers and there will be more national polls to elect the parliament’s lower house in February and March.

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Newsletter: 2007-1215 Issue

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Contents

Follow Up

India to Promote Homeopathy

Governing The Corporations

National News

Indians have more faith in media?

Posco site again in controversy

India wants Rupee loan

Etc.

Media has ‘vested interests’ in attacking me: Ramadoss

Law to punish children who abandon elderly parents

International News

Recession Likely in US?

Climate Change Talks

Bush Announces Mortgage Agreement

EU-Africa Summit: Human Rights and Trade on the agenda

Culture

Madhubani Paintings

News Snippets

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Follow Up

India to Promote Homeopathy In the previous issue, the growing preference for homeopathy and its less talked about scientific validity was reported. With industry projections rising, a wide ranging debated covering all aspects of homeopathy becomes necessary. According to the study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), Indian homeopathy market is expected to top Rs.26 billion ($650 million) by 2010 and outpace the growth of pharmaceutical industry in the country. The study articulates that in the year 2006-07, about 50 million people opted for homeopathy. This number would exceed 100 million by the end of 2010, according to the study.

Governing The Corporations The necessary prerequisite for markets to operate effectively is that the competition should be free and fair. Since the natural inclination of the market players is to go towards monopoly, the watchdogs play an important role in detecting the malpractices which distort the markets. As per a report by BBC, supermarket firms Sainsbury’s and Asda have admitted that they were part of a dairy price-fixing group that earned about £270m extra from shoppers. The supermarkets, along with a number of dairy firms, have agreed to pay fines totaling some £116m after an Office of Fair Trading (OFT) probe. Cases against Tesco and Morrisons will continue after no deal was struck. The OFT said that in-store prices went up after the collusion, but the amount received by farmers did not increase. It also said the collusion saw customers being charged 3 pence extra for a pint of milk, 15p extra per quarter-pound of butter and 15p per half-pound of cheese. However, the firms insist that the farm gate price paid for milk did rise and that they were not ripping off customers.

National News    

Indians have more faith in media?

A poll conducted for the BBC World Service Service by the international polling firms GlobeScan and Synovate and their research partners in each country on the freedom of press found that as many as 44% respondents in 14 countries believed that press and media in their country is not free to report the news accurately without bias.

In some countries the poll shows concern over the ownership of private media. Strong majorities in Brazil (80%), Mexico (76%), USA (74%), and Great Britain (71%) believe that the concentration of media ownership in fewer hands is a concern because owners’ political views emerge in reporting. Interestingly 44% persons did not think that freedom of the press was very important to ensure a free society. As per the survey, Indians were more positive about the accuracy and honesty of government or publicly-funded news reporting than any other country surveyed. Fifty-seven percent of Indians give a “good” performance rating to public news organizations, compared with 39 percent globally. Private, for-profit news organizations are viewed more favorably, with 64 percent rating their performance “good” (versus 43% globally), although this is slightly less positive than the response in Africa.

Fifty-seven percent of Indians agree that growing consolidation of private media ownership is a major issue “because you often see owners’ political views emerge in the news”, while only 30 percent agree with the opposing view that “media owners do not interfere with the news content” (14% did not answer).

Fifty-five percent think “it is important that people like me have a say in what gets reported in the news”, while 33 percent think “decisions as to which stories get reported in the news are best left to news organizations”, with a further 12 percent unable to answer.

Posco site again in controversy

Reports indicated that the villagers around the proposed Posco plant site in Jagathsingpur district on Tuesday refused to meet social activist Medha Patkar.

Before this, the Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said Posco would provide jobs to the poor. About Medha Patkar’s involvement, he said: “Patkar often tours the state and opposes mega industries here. She should understand that mega industries are essential for the growth of the poor state like Orissa as they would generate huge revenue and employment for poor people here.”

Patnaik’s remark came ahead of Patkar’s proposed visit to the proposed Posco plant site near Paradip on Tuesday evening. Rejecting Patnaik’s claims, Patkar told PTI over the phone that she was convinced that mega industries could not generate employment as expected by him. “I know that only small and medium industries can provide jobs, not big ones. Therefore, we are opposed to the Posco project.”

The Narmada Bachao Andolan leader also said that the state government might get revenue from the Posco project, but it has to sacrifice a lot in the form of land, water, forest, mines and coastline. “I am convinced that the Posco project will in no way help the people or the state.”

India wants Rupee loan

The Maharashtra state government is seeking a loan worth some $3.5bn but is concerned about the fluctuations in the value of the dollar. If approved, it would be the first time the World Bank has agreed to such a loan in rupees.

This could signal an important change in the structure of international finance. Traditionally, the loans are denominated in US Dollar or some other ’stable’ currency. This is done because the liquidity of less stable currencies is in doubt and the market of the same is not properly developed, making it difficult to assess the true value of the loan amount. Some economists claim that it gives undue advantage to the developed nations, like US, who could print as many dollars as they wish to meet a loan obligation. As one economist pointed out some time back, the US could rain dollars with helicopters if it needs to, because all it takes is a printing machine at home. All that could be changing with the weakening of USD and relative strengthening of other currencies like INR.

Etc.

 

Media has ‘vested interests’ in attacking me: Ramadoss

By all indications, the relationship between Ramadoss and Venugopal appears to be one of personal feud. Unhappy over media’s coverage of him, the minister leveled casteist allegations against media.

In Delhi, Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss charged media with having “vested interests” in attacking him and said changes in the AIIMS were aimed at ridding it of casteism and politics.

Before this also he had charged the capital’s media with being biased against him as he was from the backward castes. “Absolutely (I was hurt). This (AIIMS) is not an issue between me and Dr P Venugopal (AIIMS Director) but it’s an issue between the government and the AIIMS,” he said.

He also said there was discrimination against SC and ST students in AIIMS. “If this is the attitude, I think it is better to change,” Ramadoss said. Asked about the political interference in the premium institute, he said, “this is why we want to restructure it, and it is not my personal agenda of getting rid of anybody, it is just a rubbish thing painted by the vested interest of the media.” “I want AIIMS to be All India Institute of Medical Science and not institute of political science. The institute is not for politics, only doctors should be there,” he added.

The Minister said, “Venugopal is now 66 years old. He can hardly walk and totally incapacitated both physically and mentally. He has absolutely no clue about what is happening in the institute.”

Law to punish children who abandon elderly parents

On December 6, the Parliament passed a bill that would ensure that elderly people are taken care of by their children failing which they would face penal action. The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, provide a three-month jail term if children do not look after old parents.

The new law, which provides for the setting up of many tribunals to provide speedy help to the old in distress, contains no room for appeal. “This has been done deliberately as they (the children) have a lot of resources which the old people do not have,” social welfare minister, Meera Kumar, said. The legislation also provides for the state to set up old age homes that the minister said should be the “last resort for the poor and the childless.” The bill applies to adult children with parents over the age of 60.

There is skepticism about the efficacy of law. Moreover, even such a law is needed for taking care of such essential duties, also comments a lot about state of the society at present. It’s ironic that a society which demands lesser government control; is inviting corrective action by government by being indifferent to its own responsibilities.

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International News

Recession Likely in US?

What is a recession?

The American National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months.” A recession may involve simultaneous declines in coincident measures of overall economic activity such as employment, investment, and corporate profits.

How does it impact India

The sectors which have direct relation to US economy are likely to get more impacted by a recession in US. These sectors include textiles, IT, ITES and other export intensive businesses. While the overall possible impact on Indian economy is hard to estimate, there is a good possibility that the sectors mentioned above will pass through a rough patch. For example, in the mild recession, the US witnessed in 2001, there was a marked decline in job growth and business in IT sector in India as well.

Is a recession likely?

Some economists believe that U.S. corporate profits are in a recession, and the entire economy may not be far behind. Slower sales and higher energy and labor costs maybe forcing companies to reduce spending and hiring. Their efforts to keep earnings from eroding even further raise the risk that the economy, already weakened by the steepest housing slide since 1991, may shrink sometime next year.

Caterpillar Inc., the world’s largest maker of bulldozers and excavators, in October said it expected the economy to be “near to, or even in recession” in 2008. There are others, including but not limited to the Fed chairman who have been droping the ‘R’ word more often of late.

How bad could it be

Some of the recessions throw millions of people out of jobs, drive many more into debt and create an extremely negative psychological environment. Recession of 1929 got escalated into something that economists call a “Depression”. It threw more than 25 percent of workforce out of jobs and lasted for many years. This was one of the extreme cases but not every recession causes as much hardship. In economics recession is considered to be an integral part of the economic cycle by most schools of thought.

Some important factors in managing recession are fiscal policy, monetary policy and evolution of new technology.

Alternate views

Some economists believe that the talk of the recession in US is a bugbear. The economy has shown surprising amount of resilience in the past and with the latest advances in fiscal, monetary and technological methods of managing recession a soft landing is more likely than a recession.

Interestingly the Left views recession as an entirely avoidable phenomenon and as something that exposes some of the fundamental flaws of Capitalism. This thought believes that crisis of overproduction is manifested in a recession. Further, this thought stresses that as concentration of wealth increases in a boom cycle, the purchasing power of people lags behind the production, creating a gap in the demand and supply. To some economists, the history of last few decades is a clear vindication of this theory as opening of new investment vistas in erstwhile closed economies has spurred the demand and thus helped manage the recession in the West, like never before since the days of colonialism. However there is some amount of controversy surrounding this view because alternate methods of discovering supply and demand have mostly eluded success.

Job Cuts

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley have announced some 25,000 job cuts so far this year. Claims for unemployment benefits jumped to a nine-month high in the week ended Nov. 24. Orders for non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft, a proxy for future business investment, fell 2.3 percent in October, the most since February, according to Commerce Department figures.

Disappointed Investors

Weaker business spending held back sales at Cisco Systems, the world’s biggest maker of networking equipment. That disappointed investors, who have pushed the company’s shares down more than 17 percent in a month’s time. Chief Executive Officer John Chambers said orders have slowed from Cisco’s top 25 U.S. customers, which include eight financial- services companies.

The biggest hit to the economy from fading financial profits may come from tighter lending standards. The Federal Reserve reported last month that banks were making it harder for businesses and consumers to borrow. Some analysts expect terms to tighten further.

Advanta, a Pennsylvania-based provider of corporate credit cards, cut its 2007 earnings forecast on Nov. 27 and withdrew its 2008 estimate as late payments rose.

“Higher delinquency rates will continue for some time,” Chief Executive Officer Dennis Alter told analysts. “What is not clear is where the economy and consumer behavior is headed.”

Climate Change Talks

Thousands of delegates from almost 200 nations attended the two-week UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on the Indonesian island of Bali. The summit took place on 3-14 Dec 2007.

There were more than 10,000 participants at the Bali conference. This included 5,037 representatives of 349 non-governmental organizations (NGOs). There were also 1,497 members of the press from 530 media organizations. Around 5,600 hotel rooms in the conference venue Nusa Dua resort were booked. The heart of the conference was the Bali International Convention Center (BICC) at The Westin Resort where all activities were centered. There are two conference halls with the capacities of 1,300 and 800 people respectively.

Big tents were erected around the venue compound for meetings and other side-events. To keep participants from sweating, the tents were also equipped with air conditioners. A media center was set up in the parking zone to accommodate over one thousand journalists flown in from all over the world. The media center was open 24/7, with the peak hours in the evening. An average of 270 reams of paper per day, with a peak of 300 reams per day in the second week of the meeting was consumed by the conference. 

Some may surely call the Bali conference, the biggest “global warmer event” held so far.

The agenda of the Conference

The president of the conference said, “Climate protection must form an integral part of sustainable economic development, and it is critical that we act and we act now,” he said.

Earlier this year, the IPCC published its Fourth Assessment Report (A4R), in which it projected that the world would warm by 1.8-4.0C (3.2-7.2F) over the next century. The report has been able to create a consensus in the governments across the world that the climate change is a result of human activity. The agenda was to consider how to cut greenhouse gas emissions after current Kyoto Protocol targets expire in 2012. Talks also focused on how to help poor nations cope in a warming world.

Climate for consensus?

At the top of the conference’s agenda is the need to reach a consensus on how to curb emissions beyond 2012. This marks the end of the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which commits industrialized nations to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by an average of about 5% from 1990 levels.

Critics of the existing framework say binding targets do not work, and favour technological advances instead. Recent studies show that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rising faster than they were a decade ago.

Meanwhile, US President George Bush – who favours voluntary rather than mandatory targets – issued a statement saying that the nation’s emissions had fallen by 1.5% in 2006 from levels in 2005. Mr Bush used the reduction as an endorsement of his climate policy, saying: “Our guiding principle is clear: we must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. We must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people.

However, the European Union backs the use of binding targets. The 27-nation bloc has already committed itself to cut emissions by 20% by 2020.

A number of observers believe the difference between the two economic powerhouses will result in the Bali conference failing to deliver a policy roadmap for “Kyoto II”.

Softening the blow

The conference is also scheduled to consider how to fund projects that will help developing nations deal with the impact of climate change.Ahead of the climate conference, another UN agency published a report criticising global efforts to date.

The UN Development Programme’s annual Human Development Report said funding currently amounted to $26m (£13m), roughly the same amount as the UK spent on its flood defences in a week.

“Nobody wants to understate the very real long-term ecological challenges that climate change will bring to rich countries,” said lead author Kevin Watkins. “But the near-term vulnerabilities are not concentrated in lower Manhattan and London, but in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh and drought-prone parts of sub-Saharan Africa. “Allowing the window of opportunity to close would represent a moral and political failure without precedent in human history.”

Mass demonstrations supporting tough standards

To coincide with the summit, parallel eco-marches are planned in 50 cities globally, including London, Cardiff, Glasgow and Belfast. A march in London will deliver a letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown calling for strong UK climate change law.

Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper said: “It is essential our politicians show the leadership required and ensure that the climate talks in Bali speed the world towards a low-carbon future and ensure the long-term security of generations to come.”

He called for a strong climate change law that cuts UK emissions by 3% a year and includes emissions from international aviation and shipping, as well as annual milestones.

U.S rejects stiff 2020 greenhouse goals

Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at U.N. talks in Bali on Monday as part of a “roadmap” to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009.

“It’s prejudging what the outcome should be,” chief negotiator Harlan Watson said of a draft suggesting that rich nations should aim to axe emissions of heat-trapping gases by between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

He said that Washington wanted the December 3-14 talks, of 190 nations with more than 10,000 delegates, to end on Friday with an accord to start two years of negotiations on a new global climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

A draft final text by Indonesia, South Africa and Australia says evidence by the U.N. climate panel demands cuts of 25-40 percent by rich nations to avoid the worst impacts of climate change such as more droughts, floods and rising seas.

“We don’t want to start out with numbers,” Watson told a news conference, adding that the 25-40 percent range was based on “many uncertainties” and a small number of scientific studies by the U.N. Climate Panel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Other countries such as Japan are also opposed, fearing such stiff goals would choke economic growth.

Low faith in biofuels for climate    

During the summit, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) presented a study on which technologies inspired the most confidence for tackling climate change. The survey consisted of 1,000 professionals in 105 countries, including people from governments, NGOs and industry.

Of 18 technologies suggested by IUCN, the current generation of biofuels came bottom of the list, with only 21% believing in its potential to “lower overall carbon levels in the atmosphere without unacceptable side effects” over the next 25 years.

Nearly twice as many were confident in the potential of nuclear energy, while solar power for hot water and solar power for electricity emerged as the most favoured low-carbon technologies.

Overall, respondents said increasing energy efficiency and reducing demand could produce more benefits than “clean” energy sources.

Although the EU and the US are attempting to boost the expansion of biofuels, recent evidence is equivocal about their potential.

Studies show they may produce only marginal carbon savings compared to conventional petrol and diesel.

In Indonesia and elsewhere, forests are being cleared for palm oil plantations, partly to produce biofuels. There is evidence that leaving forests intact results in greater climate benefits while protecting biodiversity.

Bush Announces Mortgage Agreement

It is not a secret anymore that the housing industry in US is in a serious slump. There are more sellers than the buyers and the overall sentiment is extremely negative. With many mortgage related business reporting heavy losses and the fear that US may enter a severe recession, at least, partly caused by the mortgage crisis, there has been some pressure of government to bail out the industry.

On Dec 6, President Bush announced an agreement with the mortgage industry today to freeze interest rates for up to five years for some of the two million homeowners who bought houses recently with subprime loans.

The president described the accord, hammered out after weeks of talks among Treasury Department officials, mortgage lenders and Wall Street firms, as a way to help deserving homeowners while keeping the housing slump from further affecting an economy that is basically sound.

The critiques point out that, the agreement would help only some of the most strapped homeowners.

“We should not bail out lenders, real estate speculators or those who made the reckless decision to buy a home they knew they could not afford,” Mr. Bush said.

The agreement would allow distressed borrowers who are current on their payments to keep their low introductory rates and escape an increase of 30 percent or more in their monthly payments when those rates expire.

Mr. Bush said, “In recent years, innovative mortgage products have helped millions of Americans afford their own homes, and that’s good. Unfortunately, some of these products were used irresponsibly.”

“Some lenders made loans that borrowers did not understand, especially in the subprime sector,” Mr. Bush went on. “Some borrowers took out loans they knew they could not afford. And to compound the problem, many mortgages are packaged into securities and sold to investors around the world.”

Democratic lawmakers and presidential contenders criticized it as too timid, and promoted more ambitious proposals of their own.

The agreement contains numerous limitations that would exclude many — if not most — subprime borrowers. It would apply to loans taken out between Jan. 1, 2005, and July 30, 2007, and scheduled to rise in 2008 and 2009. It would exclude those who are delinquent on their payments — about 22 percent of all subprime borrowers, according to First American LoanPerformance, an industry research firm.

Mortgage companies could also exclude borrowers who they conclude are making enough money to afford higher monthly payments. One estimate suggests that only about 12 percent of all subprime borrowers, or 240,000 homeowners, would get relief.

Mr. Bush said the Justice Department “will continue to pursue wrongdoing in the banking and housing industries, so we can help ensure that those who defraud American consumers face justice.” He also prodded Congress to enact legislation to make more loan assistance available through the Federal Housing Administration.

EU-Africa Summit: Human Rights and Trade on the agenda

African trade with China is forcing Europe to take Africa more seriously and not just as a collection of former colonial possessions. As if to herald the new role of the Africa on the global stage, the EU-Africa conference was held in Portugal last week.

Ghanaian President John Kufuor, who is also president of the African Union, said. “For almost 500 years, the relationship between our two continents had not been a happy one. It is to correct this historic injustice and inhumanity that this new relationship between Africa and the European Union is now necessary.”

Portuguese PM Jose Socrates said there would be no shying away from thorny issues like human rights. He acknowledged that Zimbabwe was a sticking point, but said dialogue would bring results. “This summit is a summit of equals,” he said. “We are equal in our human dignity… but also equal in terms of political responsibility.”

Activists are urging more action to solve the Darfur crisis and confront Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. Mr Mugabe is banned from the EU, but was invited to the summit after African leaders threatened to stay away. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is critical of Mr Mugabe’s human rights record, is boycotting the summit in protest. Previous efforts to hold the meeting failed over the question of Mr Mugabe’s attendance. Britain and other EU countries have accused the Zimbabwean president of economic mismanagement, failure to curb corruption, and contempt for democracy.

‘Human rights’ is one of five key topics that leaders are due to debate at the summit. The others are trade, immigration, the environment, and peace and security.

Also on the eve of the summit, Libyan leader Gaddafi – who has set up base in a tent outside Lisbon – called on Europe to compensate its former African colonies. “The riches that were taken away must be given back,” Mr Gaddafi said in a speech at Lisbon University. “If we don’t face up to that truth, we’ll have to pay the price one way or another – through terrorism, emigration or revenge.”

The EU is hoping to draw up a number of new Economic Partnership Agreements with former African colonies and regional blocs. The World Trade Organization wants the current preferential trade deals to expire at the end of the year. African representatives are concerned that the new agreements are unbalanced and that their countries will not be able to compete with subsidized European goods.

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Culture

Madhubani Paintings

Popular art is the expression of masses’ rich culture. For centuries, Madhubani paintings have been made by the women of villages in Mithila. The painting was traditionally done on freshly plastered mud wall of huts, but now it is also done on cloth, hand-made paper and canvas. As the style remained confined in a compact geographical area, the content and the style have largely remained the same. The style uses one and two dimensional imageries, and the colors used are derived from plants. Here are some sample paintings of Madhubani style.

News Snippets

IIT-B Plans Virtual Classroom

Starting January 2008, IIT-B (Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay) is planning to launch a virtual classroom, where live lectures will be broadcast online through Edusat, the satellite service catering exclusively to the field of education. The service will also enable engineering students from other colleges to access IIT-B lectures, plus interact with resident teachers at IIT-B.

IIT-B and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to transmit lectures to any of the 1,500 engineering colleges in the country, who are keen to access the service. In addition, these lectures will be made available to institutions in south-east Asian countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, or Bhutan by tuning in to the same frequency.

SC stays Sabarmati demolition

The supreme court on Tuesday restrained Gujarat government from demolishing some parts of Sabarmati Harijan Ashram Trust, where Mahatma Gandhi spent 13 years of his life during the freedom struggle, to pave way for roads.

Dyer’s portrait removed from Golden Temple

The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) removed the portrait of Sir Michael O’ Dwyer, who was Lieutenant Governor of Punjab during the Jallianwala bagh massacre of 1919, from the Sikh museum of the Golden Temple. The portrait of Sir Michael O’ Dwyer was installed in the Sikh museum and following an objection from NGO Shaheed-e-Azam Sardar Bhagat Singh Youth Front, the SGPC decided to remove it. Sir Michael Dyer was Punjab Lieutenant Governor and had supported Brigadier-General Dyer after the Jallianwala massacre on April 19, 1919 when the latter had opened fire at people during a prayer meeting there. Dyer was shot dead in London on March 13, 1940, by freedom fighter, Sardar Udham Singh, to take revenge for the Amritsar massacre.

Guatemala tightens adoption rules

The new law tries to eliminate mediators, create a federal adoption agency and prohibit birth parents from receiving financial compensation. The government has been under pressure to curb a controversial trade where intermediaries are paid up to $40,000 (£19,600) to arrange an adoption. Almost 5,000 Guatemalan babies were adopted by foreigners in 2006. The UN says most of the children went to the United States, making Guatemala the second largest source of children adopted in the US, after China.

Mitchell Report on drug use in baseball

A report released by former Sen. George Mitchell, cited the use of steroids and Human Growth Hormone among all 30 major league teams in USA. The report also named more than 80 players as using performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. But some noted the evidence hinged mainly on two sources whose testimony was given in return for plea bargains in federal investigations.

Bush vetoes children’s health bill a second time

President George W. Bush vetoed a bill expanding a popular children’s health-care program for a second time. Pushed by the Democratic-led Congress but also supported by many Republicans, the bill was aimed at providing health insurance to about 10 million children in low- and moderate-income families.

Bush has said the funding level sought by the Democrats for the health program would have expanded it beyond its original intent of covering poor children and marked a step toward government-run health care. Democrats say the additional money is needed to help families who cannot afford to buy private health insurance but who earn too much to qualify for the Medicaid health care program for the poor.

Opportunity in Denmark?

In Europe, many view Denmark as an example of how to keep an economy thriving and a society equal. Denmark pays ample unemployment and welfare benefits but, unusually in Europe, imposes almost no restrictions on hiring and firing by employers. The mixture might have served Denmark well, as its economy barreled ahead in 2006 by 3.5 percent, one of the best performances in Western Europe. The country is effectively at full employment. But success has given rise to an anxious search for talent among Danish companies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is based in Paris, projects that Denmark’s growth rate will fall to an annual rate of slightly more than 1 percent for the five years beginning in 2009, reflecting a dwindling supply of a vital input for any economy: labor.

The problem, some employers and economists believe, has a lot to do with the 63 percent marginal tax rate paid by top earners in Denmark – a level that hits anyone making more than about $70,000. That same tax rate underpins such effective income redistribution that Denmark is the most nearly equal society in the world, in that wealth is more evenly spread than anywhere else. But today young Danes can easily choose not to pay for the system’s upkeep, once they have siphoned off what they need. For starters, as citizens of the European Union they are entitled to work in any of the 27 EU countries. Acknowledging the need to reduce the tax burden, the previous government approved slight reductions in taxes for lower earners, but has avoided promises of quick fixes.

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Newsletter: 2007-1130 Issue

Click Here to download complete Newsletter in PDF

Contents

Follow Up

123- Nuclear conundrum

Newspaper Readership Statistics

National News

Indigenous Technological Development Shows Promise

India to Promote Homeopathy

Muscle Power and Credit Card Industry

Examining Inflation Figures

Etc.

International News

Monitoring Millennium Development Goals

Emergency in Pakistan

Cancer Studies Wasted Millions

Turbulent Greenspan

Governing The Corporations

Culture

Open Source Science Fiction Movie

Book Review: Only Paranoid Survive

A Little Fable

Special Feature

Field Recordings: Share a Sound Experience

News Snippets 

 

Follow Up

123- Nuclear conundrum

The UPA-Left committee on the India-US Civil Nuclear Cooperation in its meeting has given the government limited consent in going for “talks with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) Secretariat for working out the text of the India specific safeguards agreement.” But this is a limited consent for discussions of an exploratory nature before finalizing or signing any draft agreement and the outcome will be presented to the committee for its consideration. The committee will finalize its findings.

The government and the Left parties also agreed to have a discussion on the India-U.S. civilian nuclear deal at the beginning of the winter session of Parliament starting on November 15. This decision removes one of the major inconsistency of the government’s stand, where it maintained that Indo-US nuclear deal is a boon for the country, but not important enough to be discussed in Parliament.

BJP which was so for showing ambivalence, changes track and goes for harsh criticism of the deal. Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha L K Advani on 29th November assured the nation that if the BJP-led NDA was given a mandate, it would re-negotiate the Indo-US civil nuclear deal or even drop it as it was detrimental to vital and long-term national interests. Raising another issue during debate in Parliament, Advani wanted to know from the government why it had backtracked from signing an agreement on supply of two additional reactors for Kudankulam, during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Russia. Though India had officially announced that it could not sign the agreement because of Russia’s insistence on India getting endorsement of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for the nuclear deal, it was reported by a leading newspaper that India had actually backtracked under US pressure.

Newspaper Readership Statistics

The findings of a newspaper readership survey were presented in the last issue of this newsletter. While the results of surveys are more debatable, here are some of the official statistics as reported by the Registrar of Newspapers for India. The data is based on the number of annual statements of the year 2005-06.

The publishers under Section 19D of the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867, are required to submit Annual Statements to the Registrar of Newspapers for India.

During 2005-06, 2074 new newspapers were registered.  As on 31st March 2006, there were 62,483 registered newspapers on record as against 60,413 at the end of March 2005.   The total circulation of newspapers increased from 15,67,19,209 copies in 2004-05 to 18,07,38,611 copies in 2005-06.
The highest numbers of newspapers were published in Hindi (4131), followed by English (864), Gujarati (775), Urdu (463) Bengali (445), and Marathi (328).

Among language dailies, Hindi leads with 942 newspapers followed by 201 in English.  The languages that published more than 100 daily newspapers were Urdu (191), Telugu (147) Marathi (130) and Gujarati (100). 

Circulation-wise, Hindi dailies maintained their dominance with 3,76,42,520 copies.  English Dailies followed with a circulation of 1,29,14,581 copies. Hindi newspapers continued to lead with 7,66,98,490 copies followed by English with 3,41,06,816 copies.  Gujarati Press with 98,44,710 copies came third.  Urdu and Malayalam language press closely followed with 92,17,892 and 82,06,227 copies respectively.

The Times of India, having six editions in English with a combined circulation of 25,42,075 copies came first among multi-edition dailies.  Dainik Bhaskar in Hindi having 18 editions, claiming a combined circulation of 21,81,948 copies stood second. Dainik Jagran, (Hindi) with 14 editions and a combined circulation of 21,11,316 copies, occupied the third position.

Among periodicals The Hindu, English weekly from Chennai topped with a circulation of 11,02,783 copies, while The Sunday Times of India, English weekly, published from Delhi came second with a circulation of 10,38,954 copies. Out of the total 6343 periodicals, 4238 dealt with News and Current Affairs, while 421 were dealing with Social Welfare.  Apart from these there were other periodicals, dealing with various subjects, such as Religion and Philosophy, Medicine and Health, Education, Finance and Economics, Literature and Culture, Children, Women, Law and Public Administration, Film, Commerce, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, Science, Sports, Engineering and Technology and Industry etc.

 

National News

Indigenous Technological Development Shows Promise

“India is termed as IT superpower, but performs poorly when it comes to being in control of core technologies. News of achieving excellence in fields like space science and supercomputing is a welcome step towards the path of indigenous development of emerging technologies.”

ISRO develops cryogenic engine technology

A crucial ground test of the indigenously-developed cryogenic engine that will replace the Russian-supplied upper stage of India’s three-stage Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) was carried out successfully on 15 November. The stage is powered by a regeneratively cooled cryogenic engine, which works on stage combustion cycle, developing a thrust of 15,620lb (69.5kN) in vacuum. Describing the 720s test as “completely successful”, Indian Space Research Organisation chairman G Madhavan Nair said: “It was a fantastic achievement that has boosted the confidence of ISRO.” With the indigenous cryogenic engine, the launch capability of GSLV, which is now around 2t, would be boosted to 2.5t “after some fine tuning”, he says.

ISRO took up the cryogenic upper-stage project in the 1990s after Russia, under pressure because of US concerns about proliferation of missile technology, dropped plans to transfer the technology to ISRO. Russia did supply a few cryogenic engine stages for the GSLV, the first two stages of which are derived from the modules of the Indian space workhorse, the four-stage Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

Commercialization plans in place

Tata Motors is gearing up to roll out India’s first hydrogen-fuelled vehicle in a partnership with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). This will be a mini-bus scheduled to debut in 2009. ISRO will provide its recently tested cryogenic engine technology. A car is tipped to be next in line. “We have been successful in adapting the system for a bus or car engine and are fine-tuning it. The vehicle will be ready in two years. It will emit only water vapour and will not pollute the environment,” ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair told in an interview.

The steep cost of fuel cells for such cars means a prototype can cost Rs 1 crore but once it is into mass production, prices could be comparable to petrol-driven cars. People working on the project said though the optimum fuel tank size and efficiency are yet to be arrived at, a ‘normal full tank’ hydrogen car can drive for about 300 km. The team is also working on prototypes mixing hydrogen with CNG for lower pollution and higher fuel efficiency.

A supercomputer from India ranked 4th in world

For the first time ever, India has placed a system in the top 10 of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites List with Computational Research Laboratories – a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons in Pune. The Tata supercomputer is called EKA, the system uses 14240 Intel’s high-speed (3 giga hertz) ‘quad-core’ Clovertown (Xeon 53xx) processors in nearly 1,800 computing nodes put together on a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. This supercomputer achieved 117.9 TFlop/s (`teraflops’ or trillions of calculations per second) performance. Though system is assembled using off-the-shelf components; the innovation the Tata researchers have made is in terms of software optimisation, routing technology, and cooling techniques to achieve higher speeds.

Supercomputing Vision of Dr. Narendra Karmarkar

Interestingly, however, the release from the Tata Group fails to make any mention of the main architect and prime mover of the project, Dr. Narendra Karmarkar, an alumnus of IIT Bombay. The CRL was established in July 2006 by a group of “like-minded alumni of IIT Bombay,” as the CRL website states. However, earlier this year, Karmarkar left the Tatas (along with his core team) when they fell apart following differences over the overall plan and the set of goals and objectives of the HPC project, which included that the first system should be given to the Indian government.

According to Dr. Karmarkar, only five percent of his ideas, which he had shared with the Tatas, have been made use of in the current architecture. “With even this, if it can make it to the fourth place, the system can surely make it to No.1 when all my ideas are incorporated,” he says. A key limiting factor in achieving very high computational speeds in current HPC parallel architectures is the bottleneck caused by the numerous interconnects between the many parallel processors. The new architecture, according to its inventor, Prof Karmarkar, uses a new theory of interconnects based on the mathematical principles of `projective geometry’ to overcome the problem. However, the initiative seems to be lacking collaborative effort between scientific communities, which is crucial for the success of a project of this scale.  

India to Promote Homeopathy

“Homeopathy is being questioned for its scientific validity since long time. There is very little debate on this, even when government of India officially decides in favor of its use.”

There are reports that India will promote homeopathy for bettering mother and child health in areas like anaemia, asthma and diarrhea. ‘Homeopathy is used by many people in India but the usage is very patchy. Through a concerted campaign, we are going to promote homeopathy across the country, especially for mother and child health promotion,’ joint secretary health V. Samuels said. Under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), the government has decided to promote this form of medicine at the national, state and district level. ‘All the hospitals and homeopathy practitioners will be brought under a network to facilitate the success of the program,’ Samuels said at a function.

Speaking at the Valedictory Session of the National Campaign on Homoeopathy – Workshop for Healthy Mother and Happy Child, the Union Minister for Health & Family Welfare, Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss said today, that these national campaigns being launched by the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) will be serving a very useful purpose of focusing attention on the urgent need to integrate the Indian Systems of Medicine and

Homoeopathy with mainstream health care in the country. He further noted that the integration of AYUSH services with mainstream health care has long been the stated policy of the

Government, but practical integration has not really taken place in most parts of the country, and that, by focusing on specific AYUSH interventions for common health and disease conditions, these national campaigns will generate more enthusiasm among health administrators for integrating Indian Systems of Medicine and Homeopathy with mainstream health care in the country.

It is a common knowledge that Homeopathy is unsupported by modern scientific research. The most ‘potent’ medicines are pure distilled water with not a single molecule of medicine even in millions of gallons of preparation. The idea that any biological effects could be produced by these preparations is inconsistent with the observed dose-response relationships of conventional drugs. The proposed rationale for these extreme dilutions – that the water contains the “memory” or “vibration” from the diluted ingredient – is also counter to the accepted laws of chemistry and physics and has failed to get any support from scientific community.

Any positive results obtained from homeopathic remedies may be purely due to the placebo effect, where the patient’s subjective improvement of symptoms is based solely on the power of suggestion, due to the individual expecting or believing that it will work. Critics cite the lack of viable scientific studies for the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies as evidence that they are not effective and that any positive effects are due to the placebo effect. They also contend that homeopathy is inherently dangerous, because homeopaths offer a false hope to patients who could be getting proper treatment.

However, the supporters say that millions of persons are benefiting from homeopathy, and that popularity of the same is a testimony of its curative powers.

Different countries have different stand on this system of medicine. While FDA of USA allows it on the pretext that placebos don’t harm anyone, some European countries as well as India have more favorable approach towards it.

It is worth noticing here that a few decades back, when Indian Parliament passed a bill allowing homeopathy to be considered as one of the national systems of medicine, the main supporting reason was its low cost – which was important in a country like India. Now that metros are dotted with 5-star homeopathy clinics, and the revenue flow is quite comparable with the allopathic clinics, the game has certainly changed.

Muscle Power and Credit Card Industry

ICICI Bank was slapped a fine of 55 lakh recently by a consumer court in Delhi. The reason was that the recovery agents of the bank mercilessly beat a person and threw him out of the car. The person sustained multiple fractures and was hospitalized for a long time.

While everyone who has ever held a credit card knows that the companies use force and intimidation to recover money, banks seem to think otherwise. In an interview published in Business Line, ICICI Bank’s Senior General Manager – Customer Service Phone Banking Group, Mr B. Madhivanan, said: “When a customer has skipped a payment (sometimes because of records not being updated), we treat it as a service issue. But when it becomes a question of intent to repay, not capability, we have no option but to hand it over to an agency. I can only say now service is the problem. One or two cases turn negative. We are sorry about it. We condone it. But if you look at the total number of complaints — it is in double digits — compare that with the total base of customers of 25 million. If we take 3 per cent as NPA, then we have about 7.5 lakh customers who have collection issues. I have got only about 50 complaints.”

Clearly, the Indian consumer is used to take things lying down. 50 complaints over a base of 9 million seem too low to be true otherwise. Other important implication of this passive attitude of the customer could be high interest rates he is forced to pay. The SGM gave an evasive reply to why interest rates were not coming down in response to stiff competition.

With average spends on credit cards at about Rs 30,000 per annum per card, and the high interest rate charged from the customer as well as the dealers, the credit card industry is obviously sitting on a huge profit even after discounting for NPAs.

Not that the central banker is not aware of these problems. Repeated warnings from RBI as well as by different courts have resulted in acceptance by the banks that the consumer is lured by false promises. However, Madhivanan cleverly put the blame on the customers, absolving the banks of any violation of ethics: “We are telling [customers], please understand what you are getting into. Don’t be naïve. As a culture, Indians don’t read — forget the fine print, even the core print. Please understand what you are getting into. In the developed world, education is mandated. We have started that process of trying to educate the customer.”

Recently, Indian Express ran an article that illustrated the loan recovery of the banks as a four stage process, the last stage of which was sending recovery agents to take possession of the asset under question. This kind of reporting creates a false impression that banks have right to use muscle power to recover asset if ‘everything else fails’. Contrary to this impression given by the banks and some of the newspapers, the legal stand, as propounded by various courts is that like any other institution in this country, the banks should also use the legal route, after which a court can pass directions to the law enforcement organs of the state, like police, to take appropriate action against the offender. The question being asked by citizens is: Under what pretext is this illegal recovery business being conducted under the very nose of the government?

Examining Inflation Figures

“In the hype around numbers, their relevancy is often left unquestioned. This article explores serious limitations of calculating one such index, Inflation.”

The 2.97 per cent year-on-year WPI increase for the latest recorded week ended October 27 is the lowest-ever since the 2.86 per cent level of July 20, 2002. The current headline inflation rate has, thus, touched a 275-week low. While that may seem impressive for the habitual number-cruncher or policymaker, it is unlikely to, however, cut ice with the common man.

To better understand these numbers, some background information will be helpful. At the national level there are four consumer price index numbers. These are:

q Consumer Price Index (CPI) for industrial workers (IW),

q CPI for Agricultural Labourers (AL),

q CPI for Rural Labourers (RL) and

q CPI for Urban Non-Manual Employees (UNME).

While the first three are compiled by the Labour Bureau in the Ministry of Labour, the last one is released by the Central Statistical Organisation in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. The CPI numbers are considered only partial indices as each caters to a specific segment of the population with different base years. The State-level CPI numbers lack uniformity with the oldest base year being 1939 (for a segment of Bihar). Fewer than 20 States compile and construct an index. Only a few States have base year after 1981-82.

The major concerns and discussions stem from the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) compiled by the Office of the Economic Advisor (OEA) in the Ministry of Industry on a weekly basis based on the price quotations collected by official and non-official agencies.

The problems of assessment

Even if the limitations of gathering reliable consumption data is overlooked, an inflation index based on average consumption data often doesn’t reflect the travails of the common man. Professor R. Vaidyanathan of IIM Bangalore has written articles highlighting these limitations and the reasons can be broadly summarized as follows:

q The index tracks the wholesale price only, whereas there is significant gap between wholesale and retail prices because of accessibility and various other local issues.

q Regional variations are not accounted for. For instance, wheat impacts people in the North more than in the South, and so on with different type of dals and oils.

q The weights given to the different components for calculating index, is not in sync with needs of common man. For instance, food items have around 22 per cent weightage in the WPI but it is well-known that they constitute more than 60 per cent of the consumption basket of the vast majority of people. To compare another set of data, the recent inflationary episode has been largely food articles-driven. While the annual WPI increase for the week ended October 27 may have been only 2.97 per cent, hidden within this overall number are corresponding rates of 11.68 per cent for edible oils, 12.92 per cent for tomatoes, 8.27 per cent for milk, 6.10 per cent for rice and, well, 108.76 per cent for onions!

q Though questionable for the lack of uniformity, CPIs are comparatively more relevant, where the combined weight of food is 40 per cent for UNME and 46 per cent for IW. The WPI-based annual inflation during September averaged 3.39 per cent, but the corresponding CPI rates were far higher: 7.89 per cent for agricultural and rural laborers (AL), 6.4 per cent for industrial workers (IW) and 5.74 per cent for urban non-manual employees (UNME).

q Another issue is the suppressing of price increase by government decisions or by subsidies, as in the case of kerosene, LPG, sugar or electricity. Hence, there can be a temporary freeze on the prices of some items to minimize logical rise due to demand-supply mismatch.

q The non-inclusion of a number of services in the WPI, distorts the real inflation picture. For instance, doctor’s fees have gone up by more than 100 per cent in the last three years as also the cost of education and rentals. Yet, most of these are not reflected in the WPI.

Etc.

By: Vikram Gakhar

International News

Monitoring Millennium Development Goals

“A slogan like making a world free of poverty and hunger by 2015 raises skepticism. This article tries to explore what is tangible and what needs to be done in this regard.”

The United Nations launched a new web site http://www.mdgmonitor.org/ on November 1, 2007 that will show how and where the world is succeeding or failing in meeting the Millennium Development Goals on ending poverty. The Millennium Development Goals derive from earlier OECD ‘international development goals’, and were

officially established at the Millennium Summit in 2000, where world leaders adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, from which the eight-goal action plan, the ‘Millennium Development Goals’, was particularly promoted. India is among one of the 192 nations who are signatory to this initiative.

The target

A listing of these goals as they appear in the declaration is important to gain perspective on priorities and scope of issues identified by world leaders.

Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Hunger and Poverty

q Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day

q Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

Goal 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education

q Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling

Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

q Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015

Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality

q Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate

Goal 5: Improve Maternal Health

q Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases

q Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS

q Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability

q Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources

q Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation

q Have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers

Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development

q Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, nondiscriminatory trading and financial system (includes a commitment to good governance, development, and poverty reduction; both nationally and internationally)

q Address the special needs of the Least Developed Countries (includes tariff- and quota-free access for Least Developed Countries’ exports, enhanced program of debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries [HIPCs] and cancellation of official bilateral debt, and more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction)

q Address the special needs of landlocked developing countries and small island developing states (through the Program of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States and 22nd General Assembly provisions)

q Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries through national and international measures in order to make debt sustainable in the long term

q In cooperation with developing countries, develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth

q In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries

q In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications technologies

Some unasked questions

Making the world free of poverty is a complex task, and probably that is what has led to design of these goals guided by management principles – the goals should be quantifiable, step based and palatable. Recently media campaigns have started in India with the aim to create awareness about these goals. In a typical style of making poverty reduction sustainable without losing commercial interest, the newly launched channel 9x from the INX Media has joined hands with Endemol India and the United Nations to put together a start studded musical reality show to create awareness about the MDGs in India. Though U.N. officials and outside experts have warned that achieving the goals set in 2000 by the target date of 2015 is looking increasingly difficult – even more so in the context of India there seem to be some obvious contradictions -, at the same time an effort of this proportion deserves good monitoring by the citizens of the world, so that it may not become a case of broken promises. Some of the observations are:

As per National Sample Survey of India, the official poverty line for urban areas was determined at Rs 538.60 per month and Rs 356.30 per month in rural areas for the period of year 2004-2005. On an average that comes to Rs 15 per day. That is way below $1 per day limit. Having a designer goal, that seems to arbitrary choosing a limit based on roundness of a number, shows a sign of insincere efforts. Moreover, it intends to compare between 1990 and 2015; a comparison of income for a period apart 25 years and without accounting for inflation.

UN-HABITAT’s annual report on the status of the world’s cities shows that number of slum-dwellers is expected to cross the 1 billion mark in 2007, which means that one in three city residents will live in inadequate housing with no, or few, basic services. That is going to put a lot of pressure on cities limited resources, and prevalent trend of development happening around few big cities will not be able to cope with this. This disparity threatens one of the key Millennium Development Goals: to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum-dwellers by 2020. The irony is that even if this goal is achieved, it will still be affecting only 10% or even lesser number of chosen group. That is aiming too low, for such an ambitious project. The basic problem seems failing to account properly for the fast changing world dynamics.  

One of the goal states, “Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, nondiscriminatory trading and financial system”. The present trading and financial system neither comes anywhere close to being predictable, nor are there any efforts towards making it predictable.

Emergency in Pakistan

“Emergency in Pakistan is being treated as a logical extension of Parvez Musharraf’s effort to hold on to power. This article explores some crucial issues, which may not be unknown; but not emphasized enough.”

In his address to nation after the declaration of Emergency, President and General Parvez Mushrraf cited two primary reasons which forced him to opt for emergency. These two reasons were the rise of militancy and the overreaching interference of judiciary. Mohammed Hanif, the head of the BBC’s Urdu Service gave an insight as to why Mushrraf can’t be trusted with his statement. According to him, to understand the difference between the general and the president, one only has to look at the lists of people detained and released on the night of the coup. The first people to be arrested after the imposition of emergency were not the leaders of Pakistani Taliban, nor their sympathizers in Islamabad. There was no crackdown on sleeper cells that have orchestrated a wave of suicide bombings across Pakistan. The people he has arrested in the last few days besides judges and lawyers have included peace activists, teachers, artists — basically the kind of people who have done more than anybody else to push ahead his avowed agenda of moving Pakistan away from religious militancy.

On the night he declared the emergency, General Musharraf released 28 Taliban prisoners; according to news reports, one was serving a sentence of 24 years for transporting two suicide bombers’ jackets, the only fashion accessory allowed in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled areas. These are the kind of people who on their off days like to burn down video stores and harass barbers for giving shaves and head massages. In what can be seen only as a reciprocal gesture, the Taliban released a group of army soldiers it had held hostage — according to the BBC, each soldier was given 500 rupees for good behavior.

Emergency or democracy: US doesn’t bother

The Time thinks that Bush does not care much about emergency in Pakistan. “The two [Bush and Musharraf] haven’t spoken since the dictator declared a state of emergency across the country Saturday, putting the Bush Doctrine at odds with Bush’s War on Terror. What communication there has been has hewed to the pattern of a schoolyard romance on the rocks. Instead of calling the Pakistani leader himself, Bush delegated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with the task of conveying a list of demands. “We expect there to be elections as soon as possible,” Bush asked Rice to tell Musharraf. Furthermore, Musharraf “should remove his military uniform,” said Bush.

The article further states that Musharraf has a uniquely powerful hold over the White House. The Bush Administration continues to insist it wants Musharraf to stay on the path to democracy, relinquish his position as head of the military as he promised and hold elections before January 15. But it is still unclear what happens if Musharraf doesn’t do any of these things. Bush’s pro-democracy goals for the country seem as much in conflict as ever with the U.S.’s other goal — to stamp out the Taliban in Afghanistan and dismantle terrorist networks operating inside Pakistan.

The U.S. has given Pakistan more than $10 billion in aid since 9/11, most of that directly to the Pakistani military to fund its efforts ferreting out al-Qaeda leaders taking refuge in ungoverned tribal regions that border Afghanistan. This cash, which comes to roughly $150 million a month in aid, is the U.S.’s only real leverage with Pakistan. Rice said Sunday that she would be reviewing the funding in light of Musharraf’s coup d’etat over his own civilian government.

Currently, the funding arrives either in the form of military equipment or as virtually unfettered cash, for Musharraf’s government to do with as it pleases. But the options are limited. The U.S. might get the Musharraf government to focus on counter-terrorism by cutting off money that would otherwise go toward paying down Pakistan’s debt. However, that might just help the Musharraf’s military in silencing the opposition. Pakistan watchers are concerned that U.S. money is being diverted from counterterrorism to anti-democratic crackdowns like this one.

Courts in lockdown

Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry – fired by Musharraf on Saturday – in a phone call to a gathering of lawyers urged them to go to “every corner of Pakistan and give the message that this is the time to sacrifice.” Musharraf’s declaration noted a “visible ascendancy in the activities of extremists and incidents of terrorist attacks” and it blamed a judiciary that was “at cross purposes” with his government’s efforts “to control this menace.”

Opposition leaders, however, suggested the judicial activism Musharraf was really targeting was an expected Supreme Court ruling that would bar him from another term as Pakistan’s president.

About 3,000 Pakistani lawyers, rounded up since Saturday, November 3; sit in jails across the country with no courts operating to which they can seek release. Pakistan has an estimated 12,000 lawyers. Police earned cash bonuses for beating and arresting hundreds of lawyers who had gathered outside of Lahore’s courthouse, police sources said.

Over 150 terrorist attacks in 2007

Some 667 people were killed and 1,821 others were injured in 157 terrorist attacked this year in Pakistan, which reflects the grim picture the country has to confront, according to Interior Ministry spokesman (Retd) Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema. The spokesman said that the difficulties were compounded by a lack of understanding in the higher echelons of the judiciary that the law enforcement and security agencies needed a little more room and leeway to deal with the extraordinary situation. Cheema said that the measures taken by the country’s leadership last Saturday came after thorough deliberations. He said that there was no other option but to act firmly to avert the mounting dangers to national security and integrity.

Making way for elections

On Nov 23, The Supreme Court in Pakistan has ordered the Election Commission to declare Gen Musharraf the winner of October’s presidential election. Pakistan’s Supreme Court, now staffed by judges seen as loyal to President Pervez Musharraf, has upheld the imposition of the emergency. “All acts and actions taken are also validated,” the new chief justice of the court, Abdul Hameed Dogar said, the Associated Press news agency reports.

All main opposition parties have signed up for the January 8 parliamentary election, but former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both back in Pakistan after years of exile, have said they may still boycott the vote which is being organized under emergency rule.

Cancer Studies Wasted Millions

Charity is mostly well intentioned, but easy availability of money to those receiving charity may result in less than efficient use of the same. On November 20, BBC reported that millions of pounds of charity donations and taxpayers’ money have been wasted on worthless cancer studies.

Thousands of studies have been invalidated as some scientists are reportedly not carrying out simple and inexpensive checks to ensure they are working with the right forms of human tumour cells.

Earlier this year eminent cancer specialists from the UK and USA wrote to the US health secretary urging tough action to end this waste of time, effort and money. As per the report, the US authorities observed that there appeared to be “abundant evidence” that many studies and publications had been compromised.

While this is specific to cancer research, it may raise questions on the efficacy of charity based research for other medical ailments as well.  

Turbulent Greenspan

“The process of globalization has resulted in complex relationship between global finance and international politics. This article covers some thoughtful insights on this topic, as expressed by former Fed Chairman in his autobiography.”

The Age of Turbulence is the autobiography of the former Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan. To know how the Fed chairman saw international politics and finance, this book is a must read. The book is based on public information and yet the opinions of Greenspan differentiate this one from several others on the subject. Here are some of the rather unique excerpts from the book:

On Financial Crisis in other countries

U.S. played a role in bailing countries out of the financial crisis in 1990s. This is what Greenspan has to say about the crises and the handling by U.S.:

“In Late December, Mexico revealed that it was in the brink of financial collapse…

None of us had forgotten the Latin American debt crisis of 1982, when an $80 billion default by Mexico had triggered a cascade of emergency refinancing in Brazil, Venezuela,

Argentina, and other countries. That episode nearly toppled several giant U.S. banks, and had set back economic development in Latin America by a decade…

In the following weeks, the administration huddled with Mexican officials, the International Monetary Fund, and other institutions. The IMF was prepared to offer Mexico what help it could, but it lacked the funds to make a decisive difference. Behind the scenes I argued … that US intervention should be massive and fast. To forestall a collapse, Mexico needed sufficient funding to persuade investors not to dump pesos or demand immediate repayment of their loans. This was based on the same principle of market psychology as piling currency in a bank’s window to stop a run on the bank – something the U.S. banks used to do during crises in the nineteen century…

The [IMF] and other international bodies more than matched some $20 billion of guarantees from the Treasury [Of U.S.] to offer Mexico … $50 billion. These weren’t giveaways, as opponents had claimed; in fact the terms were so stiff that Mexico ended up using only a fraction of the credit… The [U.S.] actually profited $500 million on the deal.”

He also talks about the Asian crisis in 1997 placing special emphasis on S. Korea:

“A default by a nation of Korea’s size (of economy) would almost certainly have destabilized global markets. Major banks in Japan and elsewhere would likely have failed, sending additional tremors through the system. Shell-shocked investors would have withdrawn not just from East Asia but from Latin America and other emerging regions, causing development to stall. Credit would very likely have become much tighter in the industrialized nations as well.

About Creative Destruction

Greenspan says that creative destruction is the process of destroying the old in order to create new and is integral to the capitalism. While he concedes that this causes great discomfort to the masses, he says efficient reallocation of capital means that a sector that is not able to grow fast enough is punished. As an example, he quotes GM’s decision to cut 30000 jobs.

“…In expectation that the growth will continue, investors bid up the total market value of Google stock to eleven times that of GM’s. In fact, the General Motors pension fund owned Google shares – a textbook example of capital shifting as a result of creative destruction.

“…And then we arrived in Venice. As necessary as creative destruction is for material standards to improve, it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most cherished places are those that have changed the least over the centuries.

“…nothing is more stressful for people than the perennial gale of creative destruction. Silicon Valley is… an exciting place to work but its allure as a honeymoon destination has…gone largely unrecognized.”

Workers in Capitalism

While he is all praise for the ability of capitalism to deliver growth and raise the living standards of people, he also admits that the growing job insecurity is not a healthy trend.

“Most companies … maintained extra inventory and backup teams of employees…

Standby inventories and workers are all costs, and standby work hours produce no output. They produce no revenue or added productivity.

“Job insecurity, historically a problem mainly of blue collar workers, became an issue starting in the 1990s for more highly educated, affluent people. This came through dramatically in survey data: in 1991… 25% were afraid of being laid off. In 1995 and 1996… 46% were afraid.”

Stock Market

Stock Market, one of the most visible institutions of finance capital is all the more important today because most of the households are invested in the stock market. Greenspan returns to the questions related to stock markets again and again, and examines various aspects of the same. Some interesting observations are:

“America was turning into a share holders nation… at $9.5 trillion, [market] now was 120% as large as GDP. That was up from 60% in 1990, a ratio topped only by Japan at the height of its 1980s Bubble.

“…for most economists, price stability referred to product prices… but what about the prices of income earning assets, like stocks or real estates? What if those prices were to inflate and become unstable? Shouldn’t we worry about the price stability of nest eggs and not just the eggs that you buy at the grocery store?”

The following section is as relevant as it was at the time of 2000 dot com boom:

“How do you draw a line between a healthy, exciting economic boom and a wanton, speculative stock-market bubble driven by the less savory aspects of human nature? As I pointed out dryly to the House Banking Committee, the question is all the more complicated as the two can coexist: “The interpretation that we are currently enjoying productivity acceleration does not ensure that equity prices are not overextended.” An example that intrigued me was the epic, multibillion dollar competition involving Qwest, Global Crossing, MCI, Level 3, and other telecom companies. Like the railroad entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, they were racing to expand the Internet by laying thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable… There was nothing wrong with this … except that each competitor was laying enough cable to accommodate 100 percent of the projected overall demand. So while something of great value was being built, it seemed clear that most of the competitors would lose, the vale of their stock would plunge, and billions of dollars of their shareholders’ capital would evaporate”

On Americans

“America’s isolation runs so deep that people still haven’t let it go. There is always a presumption that since America is better, we should go it alone.”

He is ostensibly referring to the Monroe Doctrine propounded in 1823 which advocated neutrality of America in the military affairs of Europe. But the doctrine is anyway a history at least since 1900 when America attacked Philippines.

Nonetheless, he goes on to explain that there was a major shift in the thinking of fed in that it should not only look at internal issues but also at things like “warning signs of a possible international financial breakdown”. And once this thinking was clear, he goes on to tell:

“Behind the scenes,…I began to try to coordinate a policy response. We argued, quietly but urgently, for the need to increase liquidity and ease interest rates throughout the developed world.” This argument led to G7 issuing a joint policy statement on combating inflation and fostering growth.

Conclusion

Greenspan expresses his opinions on a variety of topics. In this, his praise of capitalism, limitations of managed economies like USSR, third world etc., and the ideological premises of market economics are the themes he keeps on visiting again and again. While it is difficult to agree with him on many of the opinions he expresses, the book is a must read for anyone who is interested in modern finance and international politics.  

Governing The Corporations

Advocates of free markets stress the need for governments to release control and let the corporations behave themselves under the aegis of corporate responsibility. However, in the past cases like Enron reinforce the need for active monitoring. As some events of past month indicate, governments have a far greater role in ensuring safety and well-being of workers and consumers than recommended by these advocates. 

Candy Scandal Stuns Japan

Akafuku has become the latest Japanese food company to be exposed for lying about the contents of its products, tampering with expiration-date labels and recycling ingredients. Akafuku, is a Japanese confectioner that had been selling bean-jam sweets here since 1707. On its 300th anniversary, its top-selling sweets were still indispensable gifts to bring back home or to the office after a trip to Ise Shrine, Japan’s holiest religious site.

According to a government investigation, for at least three decades Akafuku had systematically reused up to 90 percent of its unsold products, using the ingredients to make new sweets or passing them on to an affiliated confectioner. What is more, the company had forward-dated expiration date labels and had frozen and thawed the sweets. Noriyasu Hamada, the 11th president in the family-owned company’s history, first flatly denied reusing unsold goods but was forced to admit the truth within days. The prefectural authorities ordered Akafuku, which declined to answer questions for this article, to stop business on Oct. 19. It is not clear when or if Akafuku will be allowed to resume operations.

In a related investigation executives at a meatpacking company called Meat Hope were arrested for labeling ground pork, chicken and even rabbit as 100 percent beef. Separately, the 76-year-old president of Hinaidori, a poultry company, admitted to mislabeling his chicken products after he disappeared for several days in the mountains in a failed suicide attempt. The nearly daily disclosures have shaken Japanese consumers, who have long been willing to pay a premium for Japanese food products that were, or so it was said, safer than imported goods, especially from China.

EU officials propose ban on genetically modified corn seeds

European Union environment officials have determined that two kinds of genetically modified corn could harm butterflies, modify food chains and disturb life in rivers and streams, and they have proposed a ban on the sale of the seeds, which are made by Pioneer Hi-Bred, Dow Agrosciences and Syngenta. The preliminary decisions, reported by the International Herald Tribune, are circulating within the European Commission, the EU executive, which has the final say. Some officials there are skeptical about a ban that would upset the powerful biotechnology industry and could exacerbate tensions with important EU trading partners like the United States. Banning the applications for corn cultivation also would mark a bold new step for EU environmental authorities, who already are aggressively pursuing regulations on emissions from cars and aircraft that have set it at odds with the United States and angered industries.

The EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas cited research from 2007 showing that consumption of genetically modified “corn byproducts reduced growth and increased mortality of non-target stream insects” and that these insects “are important prey for aquatic and riparian predators” and that this could have “unexpected ecosystem-scale consequences.” Europabio, an industry group with 80 members including Syngenta, Pioneer and Dow, stated that the decisions “would be setting a precedent for EU officials to reject products based on non-verified scientific data”. A representative for Dimas replied that the EU was within its rights to make decisions based on the “precautionary principle,” even when scientists have found no definitive evidence proving products can cause harm.

A US jury takes aim at global wrong-doing

A US jury has awarded a total of $3.3m to six workers who claim they were left sterile by a pesticide used at a banana plantation in Nicaragua. Legal experts say the case is significant as it raises the issue of whether multinational companies should be held accountable in their home countries or in the countries where they employ workers.

The workers accused Dole and Standard Fruit Co and Dow Chemical Co of concealing the dangers posed by the pesticide, used in the 1970s. The harmful effects of Nemagon, banned in the US in 1977, include birth defects, damage to the liver and kidneys, and sterility in male workers. The case is the first of five lawsuits involving at least 5,000 agricultural workers from Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama, who claim they were left sterile after being exposed to the pesticide. Other growers and manufacturers are named as defendants.

 

Culture

Open Source Science Fiction Movie

An experiment in collaborative filmmaking, the new ‘Open Source Movie Project’ aims to create a full community of users who collaborate in the creation and execution of a short science-fiction film titled ‘Jathia’s Wager’. The initial script is about a young man living in an isolated community of humans, who must make a life changing decision about his future and his species.

The script was written as an experiment by Solomon Rothman. “I wanted people to get involved and let the collaborative process start happening long before the movie is shot”, says Rothman. Rothman will film his version of the movie and also that of five other community submitted entries, which will be chosen by majority vote from the community. When it’s time to film, he’ll put the casting videos online and involve the community as much as possible. After the movies are done, all the source files will be uploaded online for people to re-edit and reuse. After all the mixes have been released, he’ll put 5 of the top versions together and release a DVD showing the variants; it will also be available as a free download online.

At the moment it all looks mixed-up and the real challenge will begin when filming starts, because that will mean incurring hard expenses like camera, shooting, and production tools. There are already proposals to involve advertisers in different phases of the project to make this initiative financially sustainable. If the advertisement route is chosen, it might become a tight-rope walk for the team to ensure that the creative vision is not compromised. However the most interesting promise of it being open source is not only its making, but also when it is released finally. After the release, anyone interested can modify these movies as per his perspective; and that opens up a few interesting possibilities, barring serious limitations of getting same actors or recreating similar scenes.

It remains to be seen whether movies will derive any real benefit from this open source model. Though software programs have successfully been developed using the open source model, primarily because branching and merging fit naturally there, art forms like movies have often been driven by the creative vision of one individual and any interference in the process have proved to be counter-productive in the past.  

Book Review: Only Paranoid Survive

Author: Andrew S grove

Price: 600 INR

Reviewed By: Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Andrew S Grove, or Andy as he is popularly known, is one of the world’s most famous CEOs, who led Intel into the path of microprocessors. In this book he shares his experiences, which can be applied to individuals’ career as well as organizations. Andy introduces a term called ‘Strategic Inflection Points’ (SIP), which has got equal probability to make or break any business. The businesses who adapt these SIPs (paranoids) will be successful, failing which will cause them to shut shop. He explains how businesses are affected by many factors – which he calls ‘10X’ forces – which primarily drive the organization beyond the SIP. These 10X force could be in the form of new technology, innovation, economic reforms, business model etc.

Throughout the book, Andy explains his SIP and 10X concepts with the PC business as an example. In 1970s the PC business was a ‘vertical’ one which was heavily dominated by companies like Digital Electronic Corporation (DEC). By ‘vertical’ he means that the hardware, OS, software, support will be provided by the PC manufacturer himself. Companies like DEC were pioneers of this vertical business model and no-one could even question their domination.

However the 10X came in form of two major innovations:

1. Micro-processors: This innovation caused the computing to become de-centralized and the power shifted from mainframes to Personal Computers (PC). The cost of computing came down tremendously and lot of component manufactures (like memory, keyboard, disks etc.) emerged in the eastern world (Singapore, Malaysia, Japan etc.) from nowhere. Fueled by system integrators (like Compaq) the computing industry was going through 10X amount of change.

2. Software revolution: The first innovation lead to the change in the way people perceive software. From the ‘processor-tied’ approach the software became more of ‘usage-tied’ and Microsoft rode this wave big time. The perception of seeing software only as a ‘freebie’ with the hardware changed totally.

Now the only chance to stay in the business was to adapt to this change. Initially Intel was limited to memory chip manufacturing. When the 10X change happened in the computing industry, Andy made Intel exit from the memory business and move to the microprocessor business. This caused what is popularly known as ‘WINTEL’ phenomenon (Windows + Intel) and the rest is history.

After explaining this 10X, the author extends his discussion into people side. When such change is taking place in the industry, it’s extremely challenging to change the mindset of the people and make them work in the new technology. This is mainly because people still ‘perceive’ that the old technology (say mainframes) will be alive and PC cannot change the world. Taking people through this change is very challenging for any leader and he calls such changes ‘death-valleys’. He also talks about how important it is to listen to lower level employees, who he calls as ‘Cassandra’. These Cassandras would bring informal but important information about the 10X well before it is understood by the top management.

A Little Fable

It’s Kafka again. But this one is too short and sweet to be missed out for any reason.

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day.

At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.  

 

Special Feature

Field Recordings: Share a Sound Experience

What does a traveler do, once he reaches the travel destination? A common sight is people clicking photos to store the moments. Recording a video is often preferred to avoid missing that proverbial perfect pose. Often left behind in this process is a sense of sound. A place doesn’t possess unique sights only; it also has an abundance of unique sounds dispersed everywhere. You will see (or hear) the truth in this, if you have ever tried sitting idle on a river-bank with your eyes closed.

Project Quiet American is just such a project started by Aaron Ximm and located at http://www.quietamerican.org/. In his own words, “The world makes its own music, but we rarely listen with naive ears. Quiet American is the manipulation of sounds I hear and record. The project began as I grappled with what it meant to be a tourist in another culture. It continues as I grapple with what it means to be a tourist in my own. The opportunity, the thrill, and the risk of travel is being present to the world. My goal with Quiet American is to sketch in sound the experience of being in an unfamiliar place. The work on this site is not a replacement for travel. But if you are willing to listen, you may be transported.”

His other popular project is “One-Minute Vacations”, which consists of unedited recordings of someplace, sometime contributed by people around the globe.

The tools needed for field recordings are a decent microphone, a minidisc like audio recorder and a headphone to listen it back. Though your best bet might be to rely on your video camera or even better if your mobile phone supports audio recording feature – good quality portable audio recording equipments don’t come cheap, because of their limited demand.

So next time you go on a vacation, don’t forget to carry recording equipment, and lend your ears and prepare your mind for the listening experience. 

 

News Snippets

Dr. Kalam starts his own newsletter

Former President, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam has started his own newsletter. Considering the fact that he has a huge fan following in the IT workers’ community and school children it is surely going to touch a chord with this population. The newsletter can be accessed at

http://www.abdulkalam.com/kalam/jsp/ViewIssue.jsp

Pete Sampras wins, once again

Pete Sampras, 36, who won his 14th Grand Slam title five years ago, then retired from the pro tour, defeated No. 1 Roger Federer in the final of their three-match Asian exhibition series 7-6, 6-4. Federer won their first two matches 6-4, 6-3 and 7-6, 7-6.

EU agrees to publicly fund Galileo satellite project

The Galileo positioning system, which is a European Union project, that, when completed, will be a global navigational satellite system and, thus, a competitor of the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS). According to an EU report released Friday, November 23, 2007, the European Union countries will spend U.S. $3.55 billion on the Galileo project. The public finances will come from funds originally scheduled to be spent on other programs, primarily in agriculture, which had not yet been spent. The agreement to spend the money by the EU countries was reported not to have been voted on unanimously by its members. Germany reportedly voted against the deal. The original group of companies, collectively called European Satellite Navigation Industries, was placed in charge of developing Galileo. The group of companies finally disbanded after they refused to continue to pay for expanding expenses for the project.

A point to note here is the reason given for developing an alternate system. Though GPS is now widely used worldwide for civilian applications, it is originally a US military system with a contentious selective availability (SA) clause that could be enabled in particular areas of coverage during times of war, and therefore Galileo’s proponents argue that civil infrastructure, including airplane navigation and landing, should not rely solely upon GPS.

Alibaba.com Climbs on First Day of Trading

Shares of Alibaba.com, one of China’s biggest Internet companies, soared in early trading on Tuesday in China’s latest hot initial public stock offering. The public offering is expected to raise nearly $2 billion in Hong Kong, making its debut offering as large as Google’s 2004 I.P.O. in the United States. Alibaba is now valued at $21.5 billion, close to the market value of Yahoo, making it the most highly valued Chinese Internet company and one of the richest in the world. Alibaba.com, a business-to-business Web site that connects entrepreneurs in China with buyers worldwide, is one of the best-known Web sites in the world’s fastest-growing Internet market. China has more than 170 million Internet users, second only to the United States.

Chrysler to cut up to 12,000 jobs

Chrysler LLC said Thursday it plans to cut up to 12,000 jobs, or up to 15 percent of its workforce, as part of an effort to slash costs and match slowing demand for some vehicles. The automaker will cut 8,500 to 10,000 hourly jobs and 2,100 salaried jobs through 2008. The company already had begun cutting 1,100 temporary workers Wednesday. It will eliminate shifts at five North American assembly plants and cut four vehicle models from its lineup.

The cuts come in addition to the 13,000 layoffs Chrysler announced in February as part of a massive restructuring plan. Those cuts included 11,000 production jobs and 2,000 salaried jobs. The new round of cuts was expected to involve buyouts or early retirement packages similar to those made in February. Chrysler officials said falling demand for vehicles in the U.S. market made the cuts necessary. Chrysler’s sales were down 3 percent in the first nine months of this year, according to Autodata Corp., and the company said it expects sluggish sales to continue in 2008.

Pravda – A tabloid class apart

So one thought that Indian tabloids like TOI are the leaders when it comes to pulp fiction style of news reporting. The readers of Indian tabloids could consider subscription to Pravda to get more juicy pulp. Pravda was the official newspaper of communist party of Russia from 1918 onwards. It was shut down by Yeltsin in 1991. Whether the website http://english.pravda.ru/ is of the same paper is difficult to ascertain.

Here are some of the news headlines appearing on the front page.

· Oprah Winfrey finds herself amid sex scandal at her South African school

· Russian woman gives birth to her son at age 79

· Trial of man charged with killing his Russian-born estranged wife postponed

· Blind boy sees light again after baptism in Russia

· A-380 superjumbo jet offers double beds, privacy and champagne but bans sex onboard

· Thirteen terribly weird facts about women

· CIA feared alien invasion more than Soviet nuclear attack

· Saturn rings still remain mysterious for modern scientists

· Any life on Mars came from Earth

· Scientists examine psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich work on sexual energy

· Thirty-seven men arrested in Malaysia during a gay party

· Paris Hilton prefers beauty contest in Tokyo to Rwanda charity trip

· Woman injures man in attempt to commit suicide in Tokyo

· Men who drive black cars with teddy bears and stereos inside are irresistible for women

· Al-Qaeda prepares to blast USA on Christmas Eve

Newsletter: 2007-1031 Issue

Click Here to download complete Newsletter in PDF

Contents

Follow Up

• Cycling to health
• Zimbabwe: A Nation in Crisis

National News

• 123- Nuclear conundrum
• Wheat Import by India
• A Housing Scam of Rs 300 crore Exposed in Pune
• Recent Survey Results
• Magsaysay Award Winner of the year – P. Sainath

International News

• Strikes All the Way
• Etc.
• WTO Ruling against US Policy on Cotton Subsidies
• Field Trials Aim to Tackle Poverty

Culture

• NFDC: Films Under Production
• Great Paintings: Guernica
• Before The Law: A parable by Franz Kafka

Special Feature

• In the Pursuit of a Healthy Lifestyle

News Snippets

Click Here to download complete Newsletter in PDF

Follow Up

Cycling to health DMRC on Wednesday, October 17 initiated a scheme that allows commuters to hire bicycles to travel between metro stations and their destination. The scheme, started on a pilot basis at Vishwavidyalaya station of Delhi University, will be replicated at the other metro stations depending on the response.

Zimbabwe: A Nation in Crisis Zimbabwe’s trade and investment ties with neighboring South Africa remain very strong, a report has found. The report concludes that South Africa has seized new opportunities from Zimbabwe’s decline, and has also gained from the influx of Zimbabwean skills – doctors, nurses, engineers and teachers who’ve made a move to South Africa. As a result, the South African firms operating in Zimbabwe are making good profits, even if these are undermined by inflation, the report adds.

 

National News

123- Nuclear conundrum

In past month or so, country has been flooded with thousands of articles on 123-Nuclear Power agreement. One interesting thing about the whole episode is the hype created around the deal, without either the left or the government indulging in some meaningful talk. It all really started when the PM gave a cowboy’s statement in Kolkata, that dared Left to withdraw the support as the 123 deal was more sacrosanct than the government itself. The message, which would not be expected from a statesman, was that whether government falls or not is immaterial, what is important is the deal.

“Nuclear Deal – Over hyped by a US loving media? What are the concrete benefits that India derives from the deal – the article questions”

So a deal, which would have been just one of the deals in the ongoing reform process became the hottest national issue. The left obviously hit badly reverted back with tough stand, as any other stand would have surely impacted its vote bank.

While political circles were busy defining the stand on something they had never considered important so far, another very interesting thing happened. Media donned the role of mobilizing public opinion on the issue. Nowadays, even a child knows that media is highly political so it was not surprising. What was surprising was the intensity of propaganda – the media camps – BJP, Congress, Left, Indian Americans, came out openly in defending their positions, notwithstanding the fact that they hardly knew what they were trying to defend.

It became one confused muddle where newspaper columns were being filled so that the reader gets the opinion of the camp in the morning. Arguably, two things emerged out of the rhetoric of the metro oriented media – 1. Indian Left is working as an agent of China and hence is an enemy of the nation. 2. The nuclear deal is the best thing happening to the country in last 1000 years. None of the two claims were ever substantiated by anything meaningful. But as it became apparent that the nation doesn’t really care about the rhetoric against left, the anger of the media got converted into frustration and then lament and outright pleading.

Economic times for example carried headline – “US crestfallen, mystified by N-deal development”, as if the success of the deam is most important for US. Similarly, TOI, Indian Express etc, carried out articles accusing Left, and harping on the usefulness of the deal, without ever defining in what sense the deal will be useful. The common man of the US may not give a whisker about India and the cleavage of Hillary may any day be more important a news item, as reported in Indian Express, a section of the press clearly thinks otherwise.

In such a scenario, this article examines some of the tenets of the nuclear power.

The cost of nuclear power

Market believes in maximization of profit and free flow of capital. Economics reins supreme. So what is the cost of the nuclear power? Different estimates in India put it in the range of Rs. 2/kWh. This is costly as compared to most other forms of electricity generation like coal based.

Another study by MIT in 2003 puts the cost at 6.7 cents/KWh. To this should be compared the cost coal based plant (4.2 cents) and gas based ones (5 cents).

The 50% higher cost means that any business that tries to operate in nuclear energy generation will go bankrupt. Possibly this is the reason that there is no new nuclear plant in US for last 30 years, as mentioned in Economic and Political Weekly.

The energy security

The rate of growth of electricity generation in the years from 1947 to 1990 – was 7.5%. This was the same period when state control seemed to cripple industrial growth and arguably resulted in the pitiable growth of the whole country – insultingly called the Hindu rate of growth.

As the growth of power is essential for growth of economy, it would be safe to assume a required growth of 10% in electricity generation in the current era of economic boom.

In 2000, national electricity production was at 100 GW. Share of nuclear energy was 3% and the share of renewable energy sources like wind energy was 3.5%. Here it can be mentioned that civilian nuclear energy program has been pursued in India since 1950s whereas renewable sources of energy have been more or less neglected by the official energy program of the government even till date.

Calculations will show that, we can expect electricity production of 672GW in year 2020 (assuming 10% annual compounded growth). So the projected added contribution of 20GW of nuclear power will still result in a paltry 3% of the total power needs.

We have shown clear leadership in wind energy with companies like Suzlon making to the top 50 stocks and winning orders from across the globe. However, this direction of power sufficiency has been totally ignored by the media.

‘Other’ benefits

Of late, media is talking of ‘other’ benefits. Editorials are being written about how the deal may not mean much in direct terms but a lot in indirect terms. The basic argument here is that the deal will take Indo-US relations to new levels that would enable India to benefit more in areas like space research, satellites, missiles etc. While this appears like a sound reasoning, it would have had much more credence had it come out of the political establishment or the government. As long as the government officially does not vindicate such stand, it remains the dream of newspaper editors.

Freeing up coal blocks

On October 27, Indian Express carried front page news in west India edition, titled: “Energy on his mind, deal on pause, PM frees coal blocks”. Most of the national newspapers simply ignored the news that claimed addition of 68GW of power – 3.5 times what was promised by the 123 deal. Even the Indian Express article, in a typical case of ambivalence and contradiction implied that had the deal been through, the coal blocks would not have been freed.

The question is, how may such opportunities (coal based, wind energy etc.) are being ignored by the government that is willing to accept downfall on the 123-issue.

Indian-Americans to persuade BJP, Left to accept deal

The Hindu reported that concerned over the opposition of civilian nuclear deal in India, a group of Indian-American community leaders are planning to travel to New Delhi to convince the BJP and the Left parties to accept the deal as it was in the best interests of the two countries. “Many of us are planning a trip to New Delhi in November to meet leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Brajesh Mishra, Prakash Karat and others to exchange ideas,” chairman of the Dallas based U.S.-India Forum, Ashok Mago told PTI over telephone. The newspaper also stated that Mr. Mago and his organization were instrumental in lining up the Texas Delegation in the House of Representatives and the Senate to vote for the Hyde Act.

There are some questions here –why were these gentlemen working so hard to see that the deal was a success? How much money did they pour into this ‘working hard’ and why?

In a nutshell, the problem with the present muddle can be summarized in one sentence. While in the US, the news reporting culture and the awareness of the people forces the interest groups to fight in open, In India we still have a culture where every interest is converted into national interest (or against the same) and the hidden lobbying, horse trading and corruption in the business world is ignored.

No doubt, we do not know who the beneficiaries of the deal are. To 75% Indians it doesn’t matter– they will be losers anyway.

 

Wheat Import by India

In 2006-07, India imported 6.7 million tones of wheat for around $1.3 billion, as its reserves were depleted. At the same time, wheat production in India is up 8% this year. India’s wheat purchase program has attracted strong criticism from both supporters and opponents of the Congress-led coalition government who say imports at sky high prices were not necessary when domestic production was high. The key issues surrounding this debate are:

Procurement of wheat by FCI falls

A case study of wheat procurement trend in 2006 suggested that with more and more states making pro-corporate sector

“Wheat imports are mired in controversy and US, of all the countries, is not able to meet Indian Quality norms.”

changes in the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act, the presence of the corporate sector was certain to increase, and displace public procurement. Secondly, the officially minimum support price (MSP) at which grain was to be procured was set just 1.6 per cent higher than the previous year, despite wholesale prices rising 4.3 per cent in the previous year (and fuel prices rising at more than twice that rate). Thus the corporate sector was able to bid just slightly higher than the MSP, and buy up the grain. Many peasants with less holding power disposed of their grain to private traders without much bargain, albeit at slightly higher rate than MSP.

Total public procurement, at 9.2 million ton, was thus just 13.3 per cent of the wheat crop – a historic low. Was the crop so small that it was not possible to procure more? Last year, when the crop was smaller, the Government procured 14.8 million ton. In 2000-01, when the crop was the same size as this year, it procured 20.6 million ton. In the words of Sharad Pawar himself, “Large purchases by private traders, including multinational corporations, have been a contributory factor for the low level of wheat procurement this year.” Perhaps for the first time since the creation of the FCI, private trade held far more wheat than the Government. Inevitably, the Government was now much less able to control open market prices. Domestic private hoards and international traders held the whip hand.

Pawar blames NDA government

“The BJP, which is accusing the government of allowing private traders to purchase wheat, should clarify who purchased the stock in its states. And the decision to allow private purchase of wheat was that of the NDA government,” he countered.

At the same time, the BJP- and NDA-ruled states had asked for 83.5 lakh ton under the PDS, which the UPA government had released, he said. “The marginal contribution by these states and their demand for PDS stocks caused the shortfall in the central pool. This situation left the government with no choice but to import,” Mr Pawar added.

Questions over tendering

In May 2007, the State Trading Corporation (STC) rejected the first tender for import, which worked out to around Rs 1,050 per quintal because the trend in the global market suggested that the price could soften after August 2007. Another reason to cancel the tender was that the FCI’s internal assessment estimated that domestic farmers still had stocks of 10 lakh ton, which were ready to sell for a better MSP, Mr Pawar said. “So, we declared a bonus of Rs 50 per quintal and purchased 10 lakh ton. By canceling the import tender, we also saved Rs 250 crore,” the minister pointed out.

But the agriculture minister was rather unconvincing in his arguments about the second tender for imports floated by the STC within a month, which cost the government almost 45% more than the cancelled one. Moreover, this price was almost double the price, which government offered to its own farmers. “Prices in the global market keep on fluctuating. It’s not an unusual thing,” was all he said when asked the reason why the government went for costly imports. The experts attributed reason for the price increase to the shortfall in wheat production due to bad weather previous year in Canada and European countries. Also the fact that India was bound to import such a large amount, made the international grain traders to hike the prices.

USA fails to meet quality norms

International grain traders demanded, and obtained, repeated relaxations of the quality norms for wheat imports with regard to pesticide levels and the presence of pests, weeds and diseases. The purpose of these norms is to ensure that the grain is fit for human consumption, and that various pests, weeds and diseases absent in India not be allowed to spread to Indian wheat. The latter would seriously harm its food security. The US and other importers objected to the norms prescribed for the first tender, who they claimed had prevented US firms from bidding. Canada, the European Union, Russia and Australia also pressed for revision of the norms. Thus, subsequent tender further relaxed the norms to allow 100 banned quarantine weed seeds per 200 kg of samples from a single consignment. Even then USA wheat failed to meet quality standards. “Moreover, Indian consumers do not like red wheat from USA. But any transparent procedure for import cannot exclude certain countries. That has been an issue to contend with,” says food secretary Nanda Kumar.

Infuriated at being excluded, the US government said in July: “India’s very low weed seed standard is nearly impossible for any global exporter to meet, raising questions about the reliability of India’s import inspection process. …There is no doubt that India’s current standards translate into higher bread and flour prices for Indian consumers. The total cost savings to India from relaxing norms and including US wheat in tenders last year would have resulted in $65 to $85 million in savings.”

 

A Housing Scam of Rs 300 crore Exposed in Pune

There are three aspects to this reported scam:-

1. A farmer files a complaint of land grabbing on the builder.

2. A corporator had been blackmailing the builder that latter’s corruption will be exposed unless they get 2.5 crore.

3. The builder files extortion complaint with the police.

4. He is arrested for land grabbing.

While the spice tale of the corruption, manipulations and accusations will unfold in coming days, here is a brief overview of what lead to the arrest of Pradeep Ruwal – the builder whose projects dot the landscape of the city.

“Housing market boom hides many scams. Could the arrest of reputed builder in Pune be the tip of the iceberg?”

Pune based construction firm, Amrut Runwal Multi-Housing Private Limited, allegedly executed forged power of attorney in the name of 278 farmers in Manjri, near here, to avail a loan of Rs 300 crore from a multi-national bank, anti-extortion cell of the city police said on Friday, October 26.

Pradeep Runwal of the Amrut Runwal Ltd was arrested along with two others following a complaint of cheating filed by a farmer from Manjri with the Kothrud police here.

Police suspects a bigger racket behind this involving employees from the sub-registrar’s office and other related government offices, besides private agents in Manjri, Barge was quoted as saying.

The scam could involve nearly Rs 1000 crore. “The land involved is 108 acres, while 35 of the 278 names of farmers in the power of attorney were found to be that of persons long dead. This needs a thorough investigation,” said Barge.

Meanwhile in a related development, the anti-extortion cell has booked Congress corporators, Anil Jadhav alias Anya Don and Shankar Pawar, besides Shivaji Gadade, husband of Maharashtra Navniram Sena (MNS) corporator Chhaya Gadade, along with two others for attempting to extort Rs 2.5 crore from the firm by threatening to expose their illegal transactions.

Runwal Multi-Housing Private Limited vice president, Sanjay Raisoni, had registered a complaint with the Deccan Gymkhana Police a couple of days ago against the corporators, Gadade, Satish Dhotre and Shivaji Chaugule, who were threatening to expose the company.

Barge said Chaugule was a former employee who had worked with Amrut Runwal firm for 11 years. He had assisted Runwal in executing the power of attorney to seek a loan of Rs 450 crore. The bank sanctioned Rs 300 crore. Chaugule was sacked in August and started demanding Rs 50 lakh to “keep his mouth shut.”

When his threats failed, Chaugule reportedly joined hands with the corporators in blackmailing the builder. However, Runwal recorded the conversation and approached the anti-extortion cell. Barge said the corporators and their accomplices were summoned for questioning at the Deccan Gymkhana Police Station three days ago. They have reportedly confessed to making the extortion demands.

 

Recent Survey Results

Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2007

Results of round 2 of the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2007 are out. Here is a summary of the readership of leading publications in lacs:

English

Times of India	136 lacs
Hindustan Times	61 lacs
The Hindu	53 lacs
The Telegraph	30 lacs
Deccan Chronicle	30 lacs

Hindi Newspapers

Dainik Jagran	536 lacs
Dainik Bhaskar	306 lacs
Amar Ujala	235 lacs
Hindustan	132 lacs
Rajsthan Patrika	109 lacs
Punjab Kesari	76 lacs
Aaj	235 lacs

Regional Languages Newspapers

Ananda Bazar Patrika	158 lacs
Gujrat Samachar	85 lacs
Vijay Karnatka,	99 lacs
Malyalya Manorma,	129 lacs
Lokmat	109 lacs
Daily Thanthi	207 lacs
Eenadu	209 lacs
Ananda Bazar Patrika	142 lacs

Magazines

India Today	71 lacs
Readers’ Digest	49 lacs
General Knowledge Today	44 lacs
Filmfare	37 lacs
Competition Success Review	33 lacs
Saras Salil (fortnightly)	106 lacs
Grih Shobha	79 lacs
India Today (Hindi)	70 lacs

The readership survey was conducted on 350 (Print) Publications, 150 TV channels and 15 radio stations. Indian Readership Survey is based on samples from 24 states and 91 cities covering 250,000 respondents. It should be noted that these survey findings are different from the actual sales which are likely to be relatively lower.

National Health Survey Findings

Infant mortality (per 1000 live births)	57
Fertility (number of children)	2.7
Anemia in children (6-59 months)	70%
Anemia in women	55%
Children receiving all the recommended vaccines	44%
Married Women Facing Domestic violence	40%
Women who think they are beaten justifiably	20%

The final report of the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) conducted in 2005-06 in the country’s 29 states contains good news and bad as compared to the NFHS-2 of 1998-99. While women are having fewer children and infant mortality has declined over the seven-year period, anemia and malnutrition are still widespread among children and adults. For the first time the NFHS has collected information relating to men and unmarried women. The exercise involved interviews with around 2,30,000 women (15-49 years) and men (15-54 years), the testing of more than 1,00,000 women and men for HIV and 2,15,000 adults and young children for anemia. Following table summarizes some of the findings.

Invest India Incomes and Savings Survey 2007

With a sample of over one million households, the ‘Invest India Incomes and Savings Survey 2007′ claims to be the most comprehensive study ever of individual financial behavior, preferences and outlook. It contains profiles and portfolios of India’s 321 million paid workforces.

The survey report is available to you at a price of Rs.185,000 / US$ 4750 per copy. No points for guessing who would be buyers of the report. Some of the salient features of the report, made available public are

1. 4.2m Indians invest – roughly 1.4% of the total work force under study

2. Individual earnings have gone up remarkably – 30% since 2004-5. This looks extraordinary as this would imply that lower half of country has sank further in last two years and the upper half has grown rich at double the rate of GDP growth.

3. Women constitute only 12% of paid work force

4. Indian earners saved 30% of their income in 2006

 

Magsaysay Award Winner of the year – P. Sainath

Palagummi Sainath is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, literature, and creative communications arts. To his millions of fans, he needs no introduction. He is a development journalist – a term he himself avoids, instead preferring to call himself a ‘rural reporter’ or simply ‘reporter’ – and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of Globalization in India. He spends between 270 and 300 days a year in the rural interior (in 2006, over 300 days) and has done so for the past 14 years. He is the Rural Affairs Editor for ‘The Hindu’, and contributes his columns to ‘India Together’, where they are archived. His work has won praise from the likes of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen who referred him as “one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger”.

The economic reforms launched in 1991 constituted a watershed in India’s economic history and in Sainath’s journalistic career. He felt that the media’s attention was moving from “news” to “entertainment” and consumerism and lifestyles of the urban elite gained prominence in the newspapers which rarely carried news of the reality of poverty in India. “I felt that if the Indian press was covering the top 5 per cent, I should cover the bottom 5 per cent”, says Sainath.

“Why does Fashion week gets more footage than starving and suicides of thousands? The journalist to take up the cause of the later gets the long due award”

He quit Blitz and in 1993 applied for a Times of India fellowship. At the interview he spoke of his plans to report from rural India. When an editor asked him, “Suppose I tell you my readers aren’t interested in this stuff”, Sainath riposted, “When did you last meet your readers to make any such claims on their behalf?”

He got the fellowship and took to the back roads in the ten poorest districts of five states. It meant covering close to 100,000 km across India using 16 forms of transportation, including walking 5,000km on foot. He credits two sympathetic editors at the Times with much of his success in getting the articles published in their present form, since it is one among the very newspapers that has been accused of shifting the onus from page one to page three. The paper ran 84 reports by Sainath across 18 months, many of them subsequently reprinted in his book, Everybody Loves A Good Drought.

For more than two years, the book remained No.1 amongst non-fiction bestsellers on diverse lists across the country. Eventually, it entered the ranks of Penguin India’s all-time best sellers. It is considered THE handbook for NGO activists, with its direct reporting style and sharp focus on social and economic cleavages in society. Typically Sainath, he gave all the royalties from this huge best-seller to fund prizes for young rural journalists.

Canadian documentary film maker Joe Moulins made a film about Sainath titled “A tribe of his own”, and when the jury at the Edmonton Film Festival picked its winner, it decided to include Sainath in the award along with the maker of the film because this was ‘an award about inspiration.’ As a reporter, he proved the power of the Press repeatedly. In one state after another, the bureaucracy and politicians acted upon his stories, preferring this to confrontation or denial. Today, more than any other journalist in India, he has been responsible for the attention brought to the raging farmers’ suicides in the country. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Agriculture Commission in Andhra Pradesh to suggest ways for improving agriculture in that state.

Trivia: He is the second Indian to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award, equivalent of the Asian Nobel Prize in the category of journalism, literature and communication. The first was the eminent Times of India cartoonist R K Laxman, who got the prize in 1984.

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International News

Strikes All the Way

Those who have long memory would remember that not long ago, Indian newspapers used to be occupied with trade unions, strikes and protests. The supporters of the right to strike believed that these activities raise the political consciousness of masses and help make a better tomorrow for everyone. The opponents pointed out the terrible loss of productivity and general anarchy as reasons enough to oppose strikes.

“Strike is a complex issue – people not just against rich owners but against each other. There was a series of massive strikes last month – this is something to take note of”

There would have been a status quo for a long time to come, had the end of cold war not warranted India’s change in policies. There are two key changes that have taken place since then – 1. Media has more or less neglected reporting strikes. 2. Indian courts have taken a stand that all forms of strikes should be made illegal.

This month however saw large scale worker unrest across the globe and this article details these events.

France

The rail strike brought France to a standstill on Thursday, October 18. Amongst train drivers, participation was 90 percent. They were joined by local transport workers, postal workers, museum employees and workers of the state gas and electrical companies. Less than one out of twenty long-distance trains was running and the Paris Metro was completely paralyzed. The strike was the biggest labour walkout in France for more than a decade. Participation on Thursday was higher than in 1995, when railway workers paralyzed the country for three weeks and finally forced the prime minister at the time, Alain Juppé, to withdraw a plan to slash the rail workers’ pension plan. That strike undermined the government and led to Juppé’s resignation.

In an interesting turn of event, the President announced that he and his wife have agreed to a divorce at around the same time. Not surprisingly, the news of a single divorce dwarfed the news of strike in the international and national media of France.

On October 27, Air France, Europe’s biggest airline, was forced to cancel 444 flights out of 1,263 as cabin crews walked out to support claims for pay raises and night bonuses. Eighty-four percent of flight attendants have joined the action, the CGT union said. This was the scene at third day of a five day long strike.

Germany

A one-day strike by train drivers paralyzed large parts of the suburban and regional railway network in Germany on October 12. Between 50 to 85% trains in the country failed to run. Deutsche Bahn scrambled to organize buses, but according to the ADAC national traffic service, the country’s famed autobahn freeways were clogged.

GDL had called the daylong strike in line with its struggle Deutsche Bahn over its demands of a cut in the working week by one hour to 40 hours and a pay increase of up to 31 percent for its members. It has rejected a 4.5 percent raise that Deutsche Bahn agreed to in July in talks with two other unions, Transnet and GDBA. Deutsche Bahn carries some 5 million passengers daily.

Finland (Proposed)

Nearly 13,000 nurses across Finland are threatening to resign next month in a pay row, trade union officials say. The Union of Health and Social Care Professionals (Tehy) is demanding a 24% wage increase for its members over 28 months, rejecting employers’ 12% offer.

Tehy says half of its 124,000 staff are struggling to survive because of low pay, and many now want to work abroad. If no compromise is found, the mass resignations will cripple Finland’s healthcare system, the union warns.

Tehy’s Jaana Reijonaho told the BBC News website that 12,800 members would quit on 19 November if their demand for higher wages was not met. “Hospitals will be paralyzed, especially big ones where many of our members are employed,” Ms Reijonaho said.

Nurses in Finland’s public sector say they are poorly paid and often have to cope with huge workloads.

Israel

On October 10, The Middle and High School Teachers’ Association has declared a general, unlimited strike, covering all middle schools and high schools in the Jewish sector. The teachers said a statement by the organization,” are prepared to strike for weeks, even months if necessary.” Finance Minister Ronnie Bar said on October 8 that since the Finance and Education Ministries have already come to a new wage agreement, no additional fund would be allocated to any settlement with the teachers.

USA

New York taxi drivers were on a daylong strike for the second time in two months on October 27, 2007. The Taxi drivers are protesting Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to install satellite navigation systems in their vehicles and machines that take credit cards, the cost of which will partially have to be paid by them.

The film and television industry, one of America’s biggest and arguably its most important export, faces a far greater problem in a brewing dispute between the studios and their writers over pay. With the current contractual arrangements due to expire at the end of this month and little progress being made in talks that have been dragging on for nearly a year, the possibility of a strike is growing by the day. For the US entertainment industry the effects of a strike could be catastrophic. The last time the writers walked out, in 1988, it lasted five months and cost the industry an estimated $500m (£250m).

UK

Unions are set to launch a strike ballot unless the BBC agrees not to send out letters seeking volunteers for redundancy. The threat comes after BBC Director General Mark Thompson announced plans to axe 2500 jobs in a bid to bridge a £2 billion funding.

Srilanka

Reported on October 28, teachers are going ahead with a two-day strike in schools throughout the island as the dead-lock between the National Salaries and Cadres Commission (NSCC) and the teachers’ unions continues. The strike, to be held, is expected to cripple functions of most schools in the country, except in certain parts of the Northern and Eastern Provinces where the teachers would not be taking part in the protest campaign. Ceylon Teachers’ Service Union secretary Mahinda Jayasinghe said mere statements from the Government that the salary anomalies would be resolved by the end of this year cannot be accepted.” The Prime Minister discussed with us and promised to resolve the problem but he didn’t even send a letter confirming us that he is working on the matter. We only received a letter from his coordinating secretary saying that the Cabinet was informed,” he said.

India

Around 200 Bajaj Auto Limited (BAL) workers took out a morcha from the Kamgar Putla to the district collectorate on Thursday, Oct 18 in Pune. Their demand is that BAL management re-open the Akurdi plant and take back the over 2,000 workers. “We are first going through the collector and if there is no outcome, we are ready for a hunger strike before the collector’s office,” said Nair.

In Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, crisis looms large in the public health sector as there seems to be no end in sight to the non-cooperation strike by government doctors which has now crossed 17 days.

In Hyderabad, about 45,000 employees of the Postal Department working in the State will join the nation-wide strike on October 30 called by the All-India State Government Employees’ Federation and Coordination Committee of Central, State and Public Sector Employees, Teachers and Workers. The strike is against privatization of the pension scheme and Government’s indifferent attitude to 12 demands of the employees.

Etc.

WTO Ruling against US Policy on Cotton Subsidies

The WTO ruled on 15 October that the US had failed to bring subsidies and export credit guarantees to US cotton farmers into conformity with the WTO. Brazil hailed the ruling, saying US subsidies had hit world prices, hurting farmers in Brazil and elsewhere.

In 2005, the WTO ruled that U.S. cotton subsidies violate WTO rules and gave the U.S. until September 2005 to reduce them. In response, the USDA agreed to reform export credit programs to comply with the ruling, and Congress eliminated the Step 2 cotton export subsidy program in 2006. But these programs represent only 10% of the overall cotton subsidy programs and some of the most trade distorting programs, like the counter cyclical payments were left untouched. In September 2006, Brazil asked for a WTO “compliance panel” to determine whether the US has done enough to comply with the ruling. Today, the WTO has confirmed that the U.S. has failed to reform its agricultural subsidies enough to comply. “Not only did the House of Representatives completely ignore the WTO ruling in passing its version of the 2007 Farm Bill, but it elected to take the brazen step of reinstating subsidies for cotton that were eliminated by the previous Congress, parsing the language to try to slide the subsidy under the WTO screen,” said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. “Indeed, the cotton lobby, representing about 20,000 mostly large producers, has continued to fare well at the expense of the American taxpayer and family farmers both here and in Africa.”

The office of the US Trade Representative in Washington, which is considering an appeal, argues the subsidies are above board. “We are very disappointed with these results. We continue to believe that payments and export credit guarantees under our programs are now fully consistent with our WTO obligations,” the trade official said

Brazil has reserved the right to impose annual sanctions of up to $4bn on the United States but would probably seek less in retaliatory measures because the US has removed some of the offending subsidies, AP notes.

Oxfam official Gawain Kripke told the BBC that the ruling would also have a beneficial impact on African cotton farmers, if Brazil is successful in reducing American cotton subsidies.

But if they are not then small countries, like Mali or Burkina Faso, wouldn’t really hurt American producers very much.

“The truth is that it takes a bigger country to really make the US comply, because the market has to be big enough that the US is worried about it,” he said.

 

Field Trials Aim to Tackle Poverty

Some of the rich have always known how to help the poor. They are always bursting with new ideas and money. So, what happens when hoards of PhDs and marketing MBAs come together to help the poor? Obviously, they set up lab in the heart of developed world.

Do these new mandarins think that the society is yet another lab experiment? May be it is or may be it will be. After all, 200 years of science and technology has brought about more changes than 10000 years of ice age.

A lab based at the MIT, Cambridge, has more than 60 projects on the go in 21 countries this year. Established in the

year 2003, the lab has seen a tremendous growth. And now World Bank is inspired to put US$14.9-million in the methodology pioneered by the lab. The methodology in the question is randomized trial, more commonly associated with drug safety tests, to assess what works and what doesn’t in development and poverty interventions.

While formulaic approach to social issues has long been discarded as useless, it does not prevent MIT from taking a ‘formula drug’ approach to it. None the less, some of the observations are interesting enough to mention.

One of the studies, involving more than 30,000 youngsters in rural Kenya, found that deworming children reduced the number of days taken off school by 25% – you would say obvious but well the mandarins had to prove it.

Another study, in India, showed that hiring young local women to help at schools with underperforming students significantly increased test scores, and was six times cheaper than the computer-assisted learning already being tested.

Yet another of the non-scalable study: Treated with insecticide, bed nets are one of the main new tools for controlling malaria, but debate has raged over whether widespread use is best encouraged by handing the nets out free, or charging for them to encourage responsibility. In a trial set up in Kenya, the price at which pregnant women could buy nets was randomized. Results come down firmly on giving nets out free. She found that people who got free nets used them just as responsibly as those who paid for them. Moreover, charging even 75 cents reduced net use by 75%.

The lab is also exploring procrastination, which can actually be a major public-health problem asbut many patients don’t pick up their test results. The lab has found that giving people as little as 10 cents as a reward for picking up their results on the day they are ready significantly increases compliance.

The lab is currently brainstorming similar ideas to improve tuberculosis (TB) treatment. Patients with TB often stop taking drugs as soon as they feel better. With mobile phones now more common in poor countries, the researchers have come up with an idea. A text message reminds patients to take their pill. On opening the pill wrapper they get a code that gives them three minutes’ free call time. “I’d love to test this in a randomized trial,” says Glennerster.

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Culture

NFDC: Films Under Production

National Film Development Corporation of India is the central agency established to encourage the good cinema movement in the country. The primary goal of the NFDC is to plan, promote and organize an integrated and efficient development of the Indian film industry and foster excellence in cinema. Over the years NFDC has provided a wide range of services essential to the growth of Indian cinema. The NFDC (and its predecessor the Film Finance Corporation) has so far funded / produced over 300 films. These films, in various Indian languages, have been widely acclaimed and have won many national and international awards.

The notable contribution of NFDC has been nurturing and supporting the talent pool in Indian cinema. Some of the big names of Indian cinema like Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Saeed Mirza, Goutam Ghosh, Mrinal Sen, Govind Nihlani, Budhadev Das Gupta, Girish Kasarvalli, T.V. Chandran are NFDC regulars. Just to refresh memories, the list includes movies like ‘Ek Doctor Ki Maut’, ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron’, ‘Suraj Ka Saatwan Ghoda’, ‘Mammo’, ‘Dharavi’, ‘Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro’. Though in recent years, the momentum seems missing. Hindi section is even worse, and ‘Raghu Romeo’ is the movie to name, if we look for recent films. NFDC has never been short of throwing surprises at the audiences. A recent DD-1 telecast of little-known movie ‘Rui Ka Bojh’ (made in 1997, starring Pankaj Kapoor) generated surprisingly good viewer responses. In 2003, we have Murali Nair’s Malayalam film ‘Arimpara’ being selected for screening in the prestigious ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of Cannes.

NFDC has consistently tried to bring positive changes in the film-making in country. A recent example would be NFDC’s proposal for co-production initiative via Film Bazaar 2007 being organized alongside International Film Festival of India (IFFI) scheduled in Goa on Nov 24-26. This is an interesting Co-production Market, organized simultaneously will offer selected directors/ producers the opportunity to present their feature film projects (in all languages and at any stage of production) to co-producers, bankers, funds, sales agents, distributors, TV stations, buyers and other potential financiers from India and abroad. At this Market, 15 pre-selected projects drawn from all over India will be presented to all Film Bazaar participants from India and abroad.

In 2007, NFDC made 30 of its movies available online through Jaman, a movie download service focused on independent and world cinema.

Looking forward, below are listed the films, which are currently under production.

Lucky Red Seeds (Writer & Director: Anjali Menon)

Lucky Red Seeds represent the memories seen through the young eyes of Vicky- one of the millions of Indian children raised outside their country. In the mid 1970s, 10-year-old Vicky arrives in Kerala, India to attend his grandfather’s funeral. Vicky’s ancestral home is a beautiful cavernous house in a rural Kerala village. The disjointed big family has come together at the otherwise desolate home. The traditional funeral rites of sixteen days, lay the perfect ground to relive all their mutual quirks and past tensions. Decades later Vicky returns to his ancestral home to tell us about those sixteen days that left indelible impressions on all their lives. His adult reflections are juxtaposed against the childhood visual narrative – bringing to life the magic of childhood and a past era.

Bubble Gum (Director: Sanjivan Lal)

Bubble Gum is a coming of an age story set in a small industrial town of Jamshedpur in India. It is coming-of-age story not only for Vedant but also his parents who realize how their effort was definitely helping their handicap son integrate well into the mainstream of life but at the same time was isolating their otherwise normal son towards becoming a handicap!

Sanskar (Director: Nabyendu Chatterjee)

An academician high status, loved and respected by all, admired by many for his great qualities, died suddenly far away from his personal surroundings. He died in the arms of a prostitute incognito. The shocking revelation, the unbelievable disgrace of the situation and the total absurdity of the fact created a quake of such magnitude in his close circle of family and friends that long nourished relations began to crack and crumble. His old father, wife, son, friends and colleagues faced a meaningless catastrophe with utter disbelief and with astounded inertia began to evaluate their long relationship with him with hatred and pain. Love waned, faith evaporated, respect disappeared; on the ugly ruins of values only, a bewildered rage prevailed in search of truth.

Via Darjeeling (Director : Arindam Nandy)

The age-old Bengali tradition of “Adda” – where friends gather to exchange stories & gossip over drinks & dinner. In one such meeting, five friends discuss the incident of a honeymoon and a missing husband. “One story, Multiple endings” – what actually happened?

Bioscope (Writer & Director: KM Madhusudhanan)

Bioscope, the film, depicts the inner meaning of moving images. It is a story about Diwakaran, and what became his very close friend, the ‘bioscope’. Traveling through villages, he erected tents and screened early films strips using a projector, known at the time as ‘bioscope’. How did Diwakaran’s inner self start burning like a furnace? How were these early moving images received in the interior villages at the dawn of the 20th century, before the first film was made in Kerala? Bioscope takes us to that realm where history, dreams and memories come together.

Great Paintings: Guernica

“ This piece marks the beginning of coverage on Arts, literature and culture “

Is art political? Is it always political? Can the artist be political and yet create apolitical art? These questions are difficult to answer. The great painter Pablo Picaso said: “The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? … In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death”

This issue presents this painting along with a small description of the same.

Guernica is an immense black and white great mural painted in oil by Pablo Picasso. It depicts the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. It symbolizes the horrors of war its destruction and its cruelty. Guernica is full of hidden images and themes. Almost every line and shape in it is meaningful either in the context of what it represents or what it is concealing. The painting became a symbol of Basque nationalism during the Spanish transition to democracy. It was displayed at the “Republican Spain Pavilion” during the 1937 World’s Fair. Guernica rapidly became a world-renowned symbol of civilian suffering.

 

Before The Law: A parable by Franz Kafka

While Anurag Kashyap may or may not have been inspired by Kafka in christening John Abraham as ‘K’ in No Smoking, but many film reviewers have written that similarities with Kafka’s novel The Trial are more than mere coincidence. Kafka’s words speak more than anything about him, and here is a sample of his work. This is a parable, which a priest narrates to ‘K’ in the novel The Trial.

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

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Special Feature

In the Pursuit of a Healthy Lifestyle

A shift in the thinking of health-behavior researchers makes it official. “Most health-behavior researchers have long abandoned the concept that willpower is sufficient for people to change unhealthy behaviors,” says clinical psychologist Cynthia Castro, PhD, a researcher at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “Instead, people need specific behavioral skills and an environment conducive to healthy choices. They also need the confidence to change their bad habits.”

This shift is indeed helping to explain why we often fail in changing our habits towards better health, despite making up a concrete action plan. Avoiding short-term unpleasantness is favored over long-term health benefits. Avoiding unpleasantness is an emotional response, while long-term health benefits are a cognitive plan. The emotional side of our brain has far more influence over our rational thought processes than the other way around. Part of this is a result of evolution: The affective system is a much older part of the brain, which we share with all animals, than the relatively young cognitive part, known as the prefrontal cortex.

Obesity is not individual’s fault

“Research throws new light on the limitations of will power and the role the environment and the biological makeup plays in fighting habits “

The largest ever UK study into obesity, backed by government and compiled by 250 experts, reported that obesity is not individual’s fault. Obesity, the authors concluded, was an inevitable consequence of a society in which energy-dense, cheap foods, labour-saving devices, motorized transport and sedentary work were rife. In this environment it was surprising that anyone was able to remain thin, Dr Susan Jebb of the Medical Research Council said, and so the notion of obesity simply being a product of personal over-indulgence had to be abandoned for good. “The stress has been on the individual choosing a healthier lifestyle, but that simply isn’t enough,” she said. From planning our towns to encourage more physical activity to placing more pressure on mothers to breast feed – believed to slow down infant weight gain – the report highlighted a range of policy options without making any concrete recommendations. Industry was already working to put healthier products on the shelf, the report noted, while work was advanced in transforming the very make-up of food so it was digested more slowly and proved satisfying for longer.

A willpower workaround

The experts recommend manipulating the environment to limit the bad choices and make the good choices available. For example, people say they know they are full when the plate is empty or when everyone else is finished. So Wansink suggests using smaller plates during dieting. “It’s a lot easier to change your environment than to change your mind. The best diet is the diet you don’t know you’re on,” he says.

One of the biggest skills people need, says Castro, is setting clear, specific goals that are realistic and give them something tangible to shoot for. “Someone who’s saying, ‘I want to lose 3 pounds’ doesn’t tell you how. Instead you’d want to say, ‘I’m going to go out and walk 30 minutes every day’,” she says. Instead of trying to “eat better,” people can set the goal, “I’m going to stop eating foods out of vending machines.”

She says once people have a taste of success, they learn to want it. “I don’t put as much credence in the concept of willpower. You have to build in confidence. Confidence is part of the learning process.”

Surrounding oneself with like-minded souls is key, says Humphreys. “The behavior and opinions of the people around us are important. Most people who drink too much hang out with other people who drink too much,” he says.

Willpower isn’t completely out the door, however. Stanford psychophysiologist Gross asked students to complete math problems in the presence of loud, funny skits playing on a monitor. The students performed better when told to think of the math exercise as a challenge to their willpower. “If we think of temptations such as candy bars as tests of our willpower, then we see these temptations in a whole new light, and are much better able to stick to our guns,” Gross says.

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News Snippets

TCS gets $1.2b Nielsen contract

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, India’s top software services exporter, said on Thursday it had signed a $1.2 billion contract with Nielsen Co, sending its shares up nearly 5 percent.

Brazil declares dengue epidemic

Brazilian Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao has formally declared a dengue epidemic. By September, the government had recorded 480000 cases of dengue fever, a 50 percent increase from the same period last year.

BSNL to offer new services

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) awarded Nokia Siemens Network a contract for deploying Broadband access across 7000 Indian villages in India.

Naxal attack in Jharkhand

At least 17 people, including the son of former chief minister Babulal Marandi, were killed while four were injured in a Maoist attack in Jharkhand’s Giridih district early Saturday, police officials said. The incident took place in Chilkhari village of Giridih district, about 290 km from state capital Ranchi. Jharkhand Chief Minister on Saturday termed the naxal attack at Chilkhadih, in which 17 people were killed including former Jharkhand chief minster’s son, as a ‘conspiracy’ and said he had spoken to his Bihar counterpart Nitish Kumar seeking assistance for joint raids as the spot is near the inter-state borders.

No marriage without a gazetted officer’s blessings

The Supreme Court has asked the State Governments to make marriage registration mandatory, but a reality check reveals that the process is full of harassment for the common men by the very fact that instead of a nominal amount of Rs 150-200 for getting the registration done, one has to end up coughing up Rs 8,000-10,000. Under various marriage Acts, a Gazetted officer has to depose before the court that the particular marriage did take place. There are several such requirements, which make marriage registration a cumbersome process. So, when you decide to get married, don’t forget to invite a Gazetted officer. Because, no amount of evidence or witnesses could get you the marriage registration certificate, unless a Gazetted officer testifies before the court.

US panel weighs OTC drugs for kids

Over-the-counter cough and cold medicines that have been widely used for decades should not be given to children under 6 years of age, a U.S. advisory panel recommended on Friday. The panel said manufacturers need to conduct clinical trials to show the medicines actually work for children. Members said evidence from studies was lacking and it was inappropriate to keep relying on adult data to suggest the medicines benefit kids. “The studies that are available do not demonstrate efficacy,” said panel member Dr. Robert Daum, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will consider the advice as it weighs complaints from pediatricians that the medicines do not work and can be dangerous for young children. A group of pediatricians and public health officials have petitioned the FDA to restrict sales for children younger than 6 years old. They are alarmed by reports of deaths, seizures, hallucinations and other problems in some children who took the medicines. Makers said the products are safe and effective, when given as directed, to children aged 2 and older. Last week, major manufacturers voluntarily pulled 14 cough and cold products for children up to age 2.

Bush asks Congress for war funds

US President George W Bush has asked Congress for an extra $46bn to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and finance other national security needs. Some of the money is needed to repair equipment already in use. It brings the overall amount of war funds the president requested for the next budget year to nearly $200bn.

Trusts raid public health cash in panic

NHS trusts across England siphoned off almost £100m from government funds intended to combat obesity, alcohol abuse and sexually transmitted infections as a panic measure to escape financial crisis, public health chiefs revealed.

Dr. Watson in soup over racist remarks

Dr. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, and later headed the American government’s part in the international Human Genome Project, was quoted in The Times of London last week as suggesting that; overall, people of African descent are not as intelligent as people of European descent. In the ensuing uproar, he issued a statement apologizing “unreservedly” for the comments, adding “there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

This is a fortnightly newsletter by the community for the community. If you like it, become a contributor. If you don’t like it, still become a contributor – to make it better. To contribute send a mail to vaishviki@gmail.com with ‘Contribute’ in the subject line. For a list of contributors, please visit http://vaishviki.blogspot.com/

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Newsletter: 2007-1015 Issue

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Newsletter Oct 31 2007

In lieu of editorial:

A few words are warranted in lieu of an editorial.

The commercial news media has butchered the concept of news and has reduced it to pulp fiction. Maybe majority of readers too are in accord with this format of news, else commercial news media business won’t be thriving so much after all. But there are others who feel the lack of depth, paucity of coverage and obscene intrusion of commercial interest in news as unwarranted. This newsletter is a joint effort by the community, for the community that is fed up of meaninglessness. This is a community led effort to create quality content for those who care for it. Your support, patronage and contribution are an absolute must for success of this effort. So enjoy reading and let us know how you feel about this newsletter.

Contents

Sethusamudram Project

Etc.

FDI in Retail Sector in India

Economic Status of Muslims

Mayawati Sacks Thousands of Police Recruits

Zimbabwe: A Nation in Crisis

Huge Protest in Japan over WWII Reference in Textbook

Separatists Threat to Turkey: A Timeline Report

US Leads Arms Sale Business

Young Children in Sports

Unsung Sportsmen

The Fastest Man on No Legs

Indian Cinema Person: P. Sheshadri

Cycling to Health

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National News

Sethusamudram Project

The project proposes to make a navigable way through Adam’s Bridge in order to cut costs and time. Because of a belief by a section of people that this is the site where Hindu God Ram built a bridge the project has become controversial. There is an extensive reporting of events and stands in media. Here is snapshot of the key events so far.

Center files controversial affidavit and then changes track: Next hearing in January

New Delhi: Sep 14: The Centre on Friday informed the Supreme Court that it would consider executing the Sethusamudram shipping channel project through an alternative alignment so that the 30-km-long Ramar Sethu/Adam’s Bridge could be protected from damage.

The feasibility of alternative alignments would be considered in three months, Additional Solicitor-General Gopal Subramaniam told a Bench consisting of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justice R.V. Raveendran. It was hearing a batch of petitions filed by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy and others seeking a direction to protect and declare Ramar Sethu a national monument.

In view of this, he said, the Centre and the Archaeological Survey of India decided to withdraw the entire counter-affidavits filed on September 10/11 and sought permission to do so. He said, “The Central government is also keen that its decisions bind and bring society together, rather than cause any disruption in the religious and social psyche of one true India.”

The Centre had stated in one affidavit that the studies conducted by the Geological Survey of India between December 2002 and 2005 also conclusively established that Adam’s Bridge was a natural geological formation comprising compact clay, calcareous sandstone and fossiliferous limestone.

Recording the submissions, the Bench extended till January 2008 the August 31 interim order, which said “the dredging activity may be carried out, but till September 14 the alleged Adam’s Bridge/Ramar Sethu shall not be damaged in any manner.”

It posted the matter for further hearing in the first week of January 2008.

Congress: BJP started the project

Congress on Wednesday sought to put the BJP on the mat on the Ram Sethu issue, saying the Sethusamudram project had been started during the tenure of the erstwhile NDA. AICC General Secretary, Digvijay Singh, wondered why the BJP and the VHP had not protested when the then Minister, Vijay Goel, had started implementing the project.

Opposing the Project

While the Right wing has been opposing the project in the name of religion, the protest has come from another quarter – the environmentalists.” The Sethusamudram project can cause problems to Sri Lanka’s coastal and marine life,” Malith Mendis, a member of the Sri Lankan delegation to study the project has said. Mendis, the CEO of Lanka Hydraulic Institute, said if the project goes ahead, there will be considerable changes in the currents and that can affect marine life. The project to create a shipping channel, dredging 167 km across the Palk Straits and Adam’s bridge connecting Bay of Bengal and Gulf of Mannar, is estimated to cost Rs 2,400 crore. Environmental scientists and geologists who had come under the banner of ‘The Movement Against Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project’ said the Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar area was not only fragile with respect to tectonic movements, but also highly sensitive for higher heat flow manifestations coupled with seismically vulnerable nature.

Captain (retired) H Balakrishnan of the Indian Navy adds a mariner’s view of the project. He says, if you take global shipping trends today, to reduce operating cost, they go in for larger ships of the order of 60,000 deadweight tonnes and above. A 60,000 deadweight tonne carrier will need anything in excess of 17 metres of draft. And as far as tankers go, the days of the super tanker are gone and you see only very large crude carriers of the type of 150,000 and 185,000 tonnes. It makes more sense to have such big tankers as in one voyage, you are bringing in more cargo and reduce your operating cost. None of these big ships will ever be able to use the Sethu Samudram.

Balakrishnan further adds that benefit in terms of reduction time of travel ignore some crucial points. When you go through Sethu Samudram, the point to be remembered is, you cannot proceed at the speed at which you are sailing at sea. The reason is the shallow water effect or what we call the ‘Squat Effect’. So, the moment you enter Sethu Samudram, you have to reduce the sped by 50 per cent or more depending on the conditions prevailing at that particular time.

Tamilnadu observes Bandh despite SC orders

Karunanidhi’s called for a strike on 1st Oct but changed the name to a fast after a Supreme Court order scuttling his plans. A day after the stay on the Tamil Nadu bandh called by the DMK-led Democratic Progressive Alliance for today, demanding speedy implementation of the Sethusamudram project, DPA leaders, led by Chief Minister M Karunanidhi began a state-wide day-long fast to press for the same.

The Chief Minister had clarified yesterday that the fast was not against the Apex Court ruling. “The hunger strike is for removal of ‘Nandis’(obstacles) for the speedy implementation of the project,” he told reporters. Instead of the bandh we will be observing fast, he said. While the Chief Minister and DPA leaders observed the fast in front of the government guest house, workers of the alliance observed it in front of all district and taluk headquarters in the state.

Speakers at the DMK-led Democratic Progressive Alliance’s day-long fast criticized the judiciary, saying that ‘the judiciary should stay within its limits.’

In another development, Karunanidhi claimed that Ram was a Drunkard. Quoting Nehru, he said Ramayana is a fictional work. This statement also created a controversy with heated exchanges coming from both sides.

AIADMK stages demos, demands dismissal of DMK govt.

Chennai, Sept. 26 (PTI): The opposition AIADMK, led by its supremo Jayalalithaa, today staged a statewide demonstration, protesting against Chief Minister M Karunanidhi’s remarks against Lord Ram and sought the dismissal of the DMK Government for having “violated the Constitution by hurting the sentiments of Hindus.”

Making it clear that the AIADMK was not against the implementation of the Sethusamudram project, she said the DMK had launched a misinformation campaign that her party was working against the project.

 

Etc.

FDI in Retail Sector in India

On October 10^th thousands of retailers, hawkers and wholesalers from Maharashtra gathered at Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest FDI policy in retail. In several states of the country like UP, Bihar, Kerala and West Bengal people have been protesting for fear of livelihood. The protestors fear loss of millions of jobs while the supporters who happen to be big corporate and a section of government believe that FDI in retail would bring in efficiency and reduce the cost and ultimately benefit both the producers and consumers.

There are reports that farmers in UP had come out in favour of the store chains being opened, and consumers have benefited from lower prices. Supporters of the free trade say that Small traders have already begun adjusting their prices, reducing them to match the new competition and that these developments are good for the economy.

Though FDI in retail trade is as yet restricted, the Government of India has a more liberal policy towards wholesale trade, franchising, and commission agents’ services, thus preparing the ground for FDI in retail as well. Foreign retailers have already started operations in India through various routes: (i) joint ventures where the Indian firm is an export house; (ii) franchising (e.g. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Nike); (iii) sourcing of supplies from small-scale sector; (iv) ‘cash and carry’ operations (Giant in Hyderabad, Metro in Bangalore); (v) non-store formats – direct marketing (Amway). Large international retailers of home furnishing and apparels such as Pottery Barn, The Gap and Ralph Lauren have made India one of their major sourcing hubs. Up to 100 per cent FDI is allowed in ‘cash and carry’ operations. The Great Wholesaling Club Ltd is one such example.

In February 2002, the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, opened a global sourcing office in Bangalore. In November 2006, it announced its entry under a joint venture with the Indian corporation Bharti. For the time being, Bharti is to own the chain of front-end retail stores, while the two firms will have an equal share in a firm that will engage in wholesale, logistics, supply chain and sourcing activities. This is seen as a preliminary step by Wal-Mart pending the removal of all restrictions on FDI in retail trade. Thus major retail chains like WalMart and Tesco have already opened their procurement centers in India. For large-scale procurement operations, they will have to make substantial investments in infrastructure and develop an efficient supply chain. By opening retail chains in the host country they would like to exert monopoly

power, eliminating other major buyers from the market.

The wide food variety and rich heritage of textile and other handicrafts makes India a very attractive source of supplies for retail giants. Wal-Mart procured goods worth $1.5 billion from India in 2004, which is expected to touch $2 billion this year. From India, Wal-Mart mainly sources home furnishings, T-shirts, night-suits etc. It has also been reported that Wal-Mart has already proposed to the West Bengal government to take over the fresh food markets of in and around Kolkata. Though the government has not accepted the proposal as yet, it has not rejected it either. Global supply chains have created new opportunities for labour-intensive exports from low-cost locations. The result is a dramatic growth in the number of producers, heightening competition among the world’s factories and farms for a place at the bottom of the chain. At the top end, however, market share has tended to consolidate among a few leading retailers and brand names.

Such an imbalance between intensely competing producers and relatively few buyers in the global market puts the small suppliers at the receiving end. The owner of a Brazilian shoe factory, facing intense international competition to sell to leading footwear retailers in Europe commented: “We don’t sell, we get bought”. Since supermarkets increasingly control food retailing, the world’s farmers are competing for a place in their supply chains. It can be good business, especially for farmers selling top-quality and out-of-season produce. But fresh produce is a risky business. And the extreme imbalance in negotiating power between a handful of supermarkets and the world’s farmers means that most of the gains from trade are captured at the top. Supermarkets are pushing price and payment risks onto farmers and growers, controlling packaging and delivery requirements, squeezing producers’ margins, and focusing on technical, not ethical standards. While the African producers as a whole get only 9 per cent of the retail price of an exported apple, the overseas retailers in UK corner a 42 per cent share.

Economic Status of Muslims

The issue of opportunities to the muslims and their social economic status is a controversial one. A section believes that since Islam doesn’t believe in caste there should not be any caste based reservation for muslims. Another section states that caste is a reality in India and there are many muslim castes present in the social hierarchy and this reality cannot be ignored. While there is a debate on the very rationale on reservation policy the Sachar Committee was setup by the UPA government on March 9th, 2005 to study the Socio-Economic and Educational status of the Muslims in India. The committee brings out some important data about muslims which shows that muslims are indeed backward in terms of their representation in many areas.

The presence of Muslims has been found to be only 3% in the IAS, 1.8% in the IFS and 4% in the IPS. The share of Muslims in employment in various departments is abysmally low at all levels. Muslim community has a representation of only 4.5% in Indian Railways while 98.7% of them are positioned at lower levels. Representation of Muslims is very low in the Universities and in Banks. In no state does the representation of Muslims in the government departments match their population share. Their share in police constables is only 6%, in health 4.4%, in transport 6.5%. The committee recommends that there is need to ensure a significant presence of Muslims especially in those departments that have mass contact on a day to day basis or are involved in sensitive tasks and also that targeted programmes are required to be put in place. The coverage of Muslims in ICDS programme is poor in most states. For the Maulana Azad Education Foundation to be effective the corpus fund needs to be increased to 1000 crores. Total allocation in the four years 2002 to 2006 for Madarsa Modernization Scheme is 106 crores. The information regarding the Scheme has not adequately percolated down. Even if the share of Muslims in elected bodies is low they and other under represented segments can be involved in the decision making process through innovative mechanisms.

Some may question: Will more Muslims in the country’s police force help spread communal harmony? The centre seems to thinks so. The Government has written a letter (written by the Department of Personnel and Training), which is of advisory nature and not binding on the states. It suggests that the states must increase the postings of policemen in Muslim-dominated areas in the country. A.A Khan Former IGP, Maharashtra said the police force functions the best in India because it’s a secular police force. The moment we start listing a part of the police force as Hindus and the other as Muslim, we are bringing sectarianism in the force, which is reprehensible. Syed Shahabuddin said that “it is important to see that in every thana which is sensitive, we must have a balanced police force. I do not want exclusively Muslim thanas or exclusively Hindu thanas”.

Mayawati Sacks Thousands of Police Recruits

The Mayawati Government of Uttar Pradesh on 30 Sep, 2007 sacked 7,400 more recruits and suspended 7 more IPS officers. With this, the Mayawati government had sacked a total of 17,848 police and PAC recruits, besides suspending 25 IPS officers of the rank of the IG, DIG and the SSP. Earlier, 6,504 and 3,964 recruits had been sacked in two installments after an inquiry committee detected irregularities in their selection. They were recruited in places like Etawah, Gorakhpur, Allahabad, Varanasi, Bareilly, Kanpur Dehat, Kannauj, Jhansi, Mainpuri, Ghazipur and Sonebhadra.

Principal Secretary (Home) J.N. Chamber told journalists that the action was based on the findings of the panel in the recruitment of constables conducted by 18 selection boards at different places in Uttar Pradesh.

Mr. Chamber said that among the 7,400 dismissed recruits were 1,900 PAC and 1,200 Police Radio Headquarters constables, who were undergoing training after the selection.

He said cases would be filed against the suspended officers and they would also face departmental inquiry.

Junior-level police officers who were members of the 18 recruitment boards were also hauled up by the probe panel. The official said departmental action would be initiated against them.

During the Mulayam regime, police recruitments were conducted by 55 selection boards, which were headed by IPS officers. The probe panel had submitted its report on the selections made by 43 boards.

In all, 22,000 police constables were recruited during Mr Yadav’s term. Officials say an investigation into the selection of an additional 12,000 police is likely to be completed by the end of this month. It is expected to have similar results. The government says it will recruit new police officers within six months.

Sympathizing with the sacked recruits and suspended police officers, the Chief Minister said on Oct 10, 2007 that efforts would be made to re-employ those eligible when fresh recruitments were made. Her statement comes a day after reports said the sacked policemen were coming together in Etah, Agra, Aligarh and Allahabad.

The allegations

The irregularities which have come to the light include, the answer books of selected candidates was written by some other persons, marking of identification/chest numbers against the rules, irregularities in assigning codes on answer sheets, giving more marks than the maximum marks, tampering while copying the marks attained in the tabulation sheet. Cutting/overwriting/erasing was detected in mark sheets of different examinations, signatures of examiners were not found in mark sheets and cutting/overwriting were not counter signed in many cases. Irregularities in giving marks in the physical efficiency exams and tabulation/broad sheets were prepared only for the selected candidates. Besides, absence of psychologist during the exam interview of candidates in groups and anomalies in giving marks in interview came to light. In the inquiry report, it was found that in the objective type examination for the recruitments at Radio Headquarters the wrong answers were corrected with another ink after white fluid on O.M.R. sheet and many O.M.R. sheets were filled with only one ink. Under the conspiracy, a private company M. Cubetron was given the contract for scanning O.M.R. sheet, while this facility and capacity was available in the technical service branch of police department. Besides, the nominated selection committee was kept away from the work of scanning and making results. The selection committee also did not sign the results of main written examination.

A political conspiracy?

Yadavs comprise about nine per cent of the total population of Uttar Pradesh. But Yadavs in the UP police force far surpass the figure, fuelling suspicions of ‘Yadavisation’ of the country’s largest police force. The Uttar Pradesh Police, according to the data, has around one lakh constables, more than 20 per cent of which are Yadavs. Sources in the Home department confirmed that out of the total 17,600 recruits in the civil police, 36 per cent were Yadavs. The appointments were made by 41 boards constituted by the Mulayam Singh government.

The Court’s stand

The court has stopped the government of Uttar Pradesh state from filling vacancies caused by the dismissal of thousands of police.

Justice Rakesh Tiwari of the Allahabad High Court has asked the state government to explain on what grounds the police were dismissed.

Nearly 1,000 officers have challenged their dismissals in the court, saying that the move was politically motivated and arbitrary.

 

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International News

Zimbabwe: A Nation in Crisis

What’s going on with Zimbabwe’s economy?

Once considered the best economy of Africa, Zimbabwe is in deep financial trouble. In many stores, the shelves are nearly empty much of the time and prices are skyrocketing for what goods remain as hyperinflation sets in. About four out of five people are estimated to be out of work – at least as far as the official economy is concerned. The situation is so bad that about 3,000 people a day are thought to be crossing Zimbabwe’s borders into neighboring countries.

And increasingly, many Zimbabweans are dependent on support from relatives and friends abroad to keep food on the table and roofs over their heads.

Hyperinflation – what’s that?

This is what happens when the value of money plummets. On Aug 1, 2007 the government was forced to introduce a 200,000 Zimbabwean dollar bill—which is worth only about $1 dollar U.S. on the black market. In Zimbabwe’s case, the near-5,000% annual rate of inflation means that a loaf of bread bought today is about 50 times more expensive – in cash terms – than it was a year ago. And prices are continuing to accelerate, in some cases doubling in weeks – or even, on occasion, days. Wages, on the other hand, are nowhere near keeping up. One correspondent recently told the BBC News website that one candle can cost twice the official government wage for a farm worker, while the price tag for a single banana is 15 times what she paid seven years ago for a four-bedroom house. Another effect is that people simply do not hang onto money. As soon as it is earned, it must be spent – because prices will have risen sharply even by the following day. Currency in circulation went up from a factor of 11,000 in 2006 to a factor of 12 million in July this year. Even worse, independent estimates put real inflation closer to 25,000 percent and the IMF has forecast it reaching 100,000 percent by the end of the year.

Not just a human tragedy

Wildlife has been nearly wiped out on Zimbabwe’s former private game ranches in the seven years since President Robert Mugabe began seizing and dividing the areas into small plots, a conservation group says. Some 90 percent of animals have been lost since 2000, while the country has seen an estimated 60 percent of its total wildlife killed off to help ease massive economic woes, the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said in a report issued in June. As a result of shortage of food stuff, the subsistence farmers who moved in private game ranches—often dubbed “war veterans” by the regime—began to hunt wildlife that had thrived, and in many cases, been protected on the ranches. Part of the reason for the decline is that poachers from neighboring countries have entered Zimbabwe to hunt its animals. Another is the booming trade in bush meat. “It’s a matter of survival,” said George Kampamba, coordinator of the conservation nonprofit WWF’s African Rhino Program. “For people to really survive, now that poverty levels are so high, they have to do what they’re doing—which is the bush meat trade.”

The battle for land and present crisis

In 1979, renewed negotiations in London led to the Lancaster House Agreement which paved the way for independence in April 1980. Mugabe, who won a landslide victory in the first free election, promised to resettle blacks on white land.

Independence saw the transfer of power from whites to blacks, but not land. Thousands of settlers opted for Zimbabwean nationality after independence. Britain gave the new government £44m for resettlement projects. But the UK says much of the land ended up in the hands of Mr Mugabe’s associates rather than the poor. Other international donors have stopped funding government land reform for similar reasons. Under the Lancaster House constitution the Zimbabwe Government was prohibited for compulsory acquisition of white land for a period of 10 years.

In 1997 Mugabe announced a hit list of 1,500 farms set for compulsory acquisition. He said Britain should foot the bill for compensating the white farmers because Rhodesian colonists had stolen the land from blacks in the first place.

Almost all of Zimbabwe’s 4,000 white farmers have had their farms listed for acquisition. Under a new law, they must leave their land and homes before receiving compensation.

As hundreds of farms were taken over; sometimes by local people, often by senior government officials – production, and export, of grain and tobacco collapsed. Huge spending on involvement in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo was also a drain on the public purse. The result was a food crisis, and a battering for the economy as foreign exchange earnings slumped – both from farming and from tourism, amid violence surrounding the land reform program.

The struggle for power to rule

However western media seem to be having a different opinion. It is claimed that land reforms in this period were done by Robert Mugabwe’s ZANU-PF party, to revive its losing political strength. It is not the land issue, which must be addressed. It was, rather, the dual challenges from the labor unions (the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions) and the National Constitutional Assembly on the one hand, and the creation of a new national political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, on the other. The ZCTU forced the reversal of an agreement between Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe War Veterans Association to levy all taxpayers to provide the war veterans with increased benefits. The NCA proposed a new constitution, which then led ZANU-PF to call their own National Constitutional Commission to write a new constitution. That draft constitution was defeated in a national referendum in February 2000.

The referendum was followed by the Parliamentary elections in which the Movement for Democratic Change received almost a majority of votes cast and were narrowly defeated by ZANU-PF in an election marked by violence, farm invasions, forced rallies for farm workers, etc. This pattern was then followed for the Presidential election of April 2002 in which President Mugabe was re-elected.

The Sanctions

In a report published on Oct 3, 2007 by Zimbabwe central bank, it is argued that western economic sanctions were hurting ordinary people, the poor and even the unborn. In its first detailed policy statement on sanctions, the central bank disputed claims from Britain and the United States that their “targeted sanctions” — like travel bans on top officials — did not hurt most Zimbabweans. The drying up of development project finance and hard currency loans from international institutions has had “far reaching effects on the majority of the people since 2000,” the report said.

Pregnant women were unable to obtain medication when necessary and lives were lost through the absence of hard currency needed for medical equipment, drugs and food, the central bank said. “Three quarters of the equipment in hospitals in the city of Harare are not functional and this has had serious repercussions on the ordinary people,” it said. The landlocked nation’s transport system was grinding to halt; children were unable to get to school and workers walked to their jobs because of gasoline shortages. It noted that U.S. computer companies refused to sell equipment to a main university in eastern Zimbabwe, and “the sanctions have thus spilled over” to technology critical for the learning of future generations.

Many charities and aid agencies closed down in Zimbabwe and even the World Health Organization moved its regional headquarters out of Zimbabwe, the central bank said. Loans from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank that kept the economy afloat stopped after 2000 in disputes over economic policy and loan repayment arrears.The report said that donor grants fell from about US$140 million a year in the 1990s to about US$40 million (€30 million) last year. Foreign direct investment went down from about US$100 million (€72 million) a year in the 1990s to about US$20 million (€14.5 million) year since 2000.

Western officials argue loan support, development aid and investment disappeared not because of sanctions but because of fears about levels of risk — worsened by corruption, mismanagement and threats of property seizures — and concern over Zimbabwe’s human rights record. Britain, the former colonial power, the United States and other Western countries insist the sanctions they have applied to protest violations of human and democratic rights are travel bans on President Robert Mugabe and his inner circle and restrictions on their foreign-held bank accounts — measures designed not to affect the poor.

 

Huge Protest in Japan over WWII Reference in Textbook

More than 100,000 people in Japan have rallied against changes to school books detailing Japanese military involvement in mass suicides during World War II. The protest, in Okinawa, was against moves to modify and tone down passages that say the army ordered Okinawans to kill themselves rather than surrender. Okinawa’s governor told crowds they could not ignore army involvement.

Some conservatives in Japan have in recent years questioned accounts of the country’s brutal wartime past. Saturday’s rally was the biggest staged on the southern island since it was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, according to the Kyodo News agency.

When US soldiers invaded Okinawa at the end of World War II, more than 200,000 people died. Hundreds of them were Japanese civilians who killed themselves. The textbooks, intended for use in high schools next year, currently say that as the Americans prepared to invade, the Japanese army handed out grenades to Okinawa residents and ordered them to kill themselves. Many survivors insist the military told people to commit suicide, partly due to fears over what they might tell the invaders and because being taken prisoner was considered shameful. The governor of Okinawa, Hirokazu Nakaima, told crowds the episode should not be forgotten. “We cannot bury the fact that the Japanese military was involved in the mass suicide, taking into account of the general background and testimonies that hand grenades were delivered,” he said. Japan’s Kyodo news agency said Saturday’s rally was the biggest staged on the southern island since it was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972.

Separatists Threat to Turkey: A Timeline Report

30 Sep, 2007

Twelve people have been killed after Kurdish separatists ordered them off a bus in south-east Turkey and opened fire.

Civilians and armed guards were said to be among the victims of the ambush, and just two passengers survived. The attack, in Sirnak province near the Iraqi border, followed the killing of a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader.
The Turkish government in Ankara says 4,000 PKK fighters are operating from the Iraqi side of the border. Turkey has been considering crossing the border to pursue the group. But on Friday Iraq denied Turkey permission to pursue armed separatists onto Iraqi territory. Instead they signed a wide-ranging deal, pledging to prevent finance, logistical support and propaganda for the PKK.
The PKK has been fighting for autonomy in south-eastern Turkey since 1984 and more than 30,000 people have been killed in the conflict. The PKK has been labeled a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US and the EU.

07 Oct, 2007

Kurdish fighters from the separatist group, PKK, have killed 13 Turkish soldiers in an attack close to the country’s border with Iraq. It is one of the heaviest losses the Turkish military has sustained in clashes with the group. Reports say only one PKK fighter was killed.
The Turkish military shelled the border area in an attempt to prevent the fighters from fleeing to northern Iraq. Ankara says about 3,000 PKK fighters are based in Kurdish-run north Iraq.

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford says there have been almost constant clashes between Turkish forces and the PKK since thousands of troops were deployed in the border region earlier this year. She says this latest ambush will increase military pressure on the Turkish government to send troops across the border.

08 Oct, 2007
All day Turkish news anchors have been reading out the names of 13 soldiers killed in Sirnak by the PKK. There have been pictures of their families clutching photographs of young men in uniform.
This summer, pro-Kurdish politicians were elected to parliament for the first time in 15 years. The inclusion of the DTP party lifted hopes that the Kurds’ complaints could be addressed in a peaceful, democratic forum instead. But the Sirnak attacks are likely to hinder that, particularly as the DTP refuses to label the PKK as terrorists. Those arguing for an exclusively militaristic approach are gaining the upper hand again.

09 Oct, 2007

The Turkish government is seeking parliamentary approval for a possible cross-border military operation to hunt down Kurdish separatists in Iraq. However Iraq said that the best way to confront the rebels was through a security accord signed with Turkey last month.

The US also warned Turkey against making an incursion into northern Iraq. “If they have a problem, they need to work together to resolve it and I am not sure that unilateral incursions are the way to go,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

10 Oct, 2007

Several people have been injured by a bomb attack in south-east Turkey. Policemen and civilians were injured when a device was thrown at a police vehicle in the city of Diyarbakir. The attack came as Turkish warplanes and helicopter gunships bombed suspected positions of Kurdish rebels near the Turkish-Iraqi border.

12 Oct, 2007

Oil prices surged to a new record high above 84 USD in New York following reports of increasing tensions between Turkey and the Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq who reside near some of the world’s largest crude oil pipelines. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier he was ready to ‘act’ against Kurdish bases in northern Iraq despite international pressure against any such incursion. Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, many of which are located in the north of the country, the same place where it is suspected the PKK has its bases.

But many analysts doubted that the supply of oil would be affected even if Turkey does get parliamentary approval for a cross-border military operation to hunt down rebels. Instead, they believed that rising tensions in the region encouraged commodity traders to bid up the oil price, which jumped on Thursday after it emerged that US crude oil stockpiles fell last week.

13 Oct, 2007

Two senior US officials have flown to Turkey hoping to stem deterioration in the two Nato allies’ relationship. Eric Edelman, an ex-US ambassador to Ankara, and Assistant Secretary of State Dan Fried are to hold talks with top Turkish foreign ministry officials. The US has criticized Turkish threats to stage cross-borders raids on Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq.

US Leads Arms Sale Business

The United States retained its lead in the value of actual arms deliveries in 2006, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service. The report says that the United States signed $16.9 billion worth of arms contracts last year, or 41.9 percent of the global arms market. Russia ranked second behind the U.S. with $8.7 billion in deliveries, or 21.6 percent of the market. With $3.1 billion worth in deliveries, Britain is No 3 on the list of world’s top arms sellers.

Taking into account that China and India are the major exporters of Russian-made arms and equipment, authors of the report stress the point that Russia “has also achieved a certain success” in signing new contracts for the supply of its arms to other parts of the world.

The United States ranked first in the value of actual arms deliveries made to developing countries last year. It delivered about $8 billion worth of arms to the region. Russia ranked second with $ 5.5 billion in deliveries, followed by Britain ($ 3.3 billion). The global arms sales totaled $ 40.3 billion in 2006 – down from $ 46.3 billion in 2005, according to the report.

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Sports

Young Children in Sports

The

craze of making children work to their physical limits is seen across the nationalities. In India Budhia, his mentor and his mother have been creating news for the long running stints of Budhia, a young five year old kid. There are reports that in China a father made his daughter swim with her hands tied to her back in chilly river. Huang Daosheng said that “her swimming skills are perfect and she insisted on doing this”. News photos showed Huang Li, wearing a skirted swimsuit, being picked up out of the water by her father. Her ankles were tied together with string and her hands were bound by a strip of cloth. A newspaper report said the girl was so cold her face had turned blue.

The father, a teacher who enjoys swimming, coaches his daughter and said the family does not have enough money for her to have a better coach. The girl Huang Li started the sport when she was six and her father said her goal is to one day swim across the English Channel.

This past summer, 8-year-old Zhuang Huimin ran 3,560 kilometers (2,212 miles) from her home on the southern island province of Hainan to Beijing in 55 days, her father trailing behind her on a motor scooter. The run drew criticism from some media commentators as being excessive for a young child.

Unsung Sportsmen

The world cup victory of the Indian cricket team has resulted in a bonanza of crores of rupees for each of the players. It appears that there is a considerable resentment among players of other sports who feel that they are being neglected.

World champion, Advani has lodged his protest to step-motherly treatment meted to non-cricketing fraternity. Some of the leading sportspersons of Karnataka on Sunday rallied around Pankaj Advani who declined to accept the Ekalavya Award conferred by the state government stating it was a “too little too late.”

Swimming champions Nisha Millet and Shikha Tandon and former hockey player Ashish Ballal, who came out in Advani’s support, agreed that due recognition had not been given to the cue sports stalwart who had not only won the world title but had won several other prestigious awards in his career.

Viswanathan Anand certainly can’t complain about the Tamil Nadu state government. They gave Rs five lakh to Dinesh Karthik but they have given five times that amount to the world chess champion. Of course that Rs 25 lakh is well deserved, given that Anand won the world title for the second time, while Karthik was just one member of the 20-20 world cup winning squad. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi who announced the reward, also announced a total of just under Re one crore for 28 other sportspeople from the state.

So a rather fair govenrmnet in terms of treating other sports people at par with or higher than cricketers.

A bunch of tribal students of Orissa have lifted an international trophy in rugby, a game almost alien to the vast majority of the population in India. The boys from Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) in Bhubaneswar have beaten 10 nations to win the Tour aid Under-14 International School Rugby Tournament at London’s Scottish Rugby Club on Saturday. Jungle Crows, as they were named, defeated South Africa in the final by a huge margin of 19-5.

Led by captain Bikash Chandra Murmu, the KISS team, which represented India in the tournament, started off as underdogs playing a foreign game on a foreign turf. But they went on to stun Zambia, Swaziland, Kenya and Romania in the Group B setting up a title clash with South Africa. South Africa, among the top rugby playing countries, had beaten Cambodia, Rwanda, Maldova and Kazakhstan in its Group A tier.

The team, which draws its name from Kolkata Jungle Crows, its sponsor, was trained by England Rugby Association coach Paul Walsh as well as Sellen Tudu and Sanjay Patra of Kolkata.

 

The Fastest Man on No Legs

Oscar Pistorius (born November 22, 1986) is a South African Paralympics runner. Known as the “Blade Runner” and “the fastest man on no legs”, Pistorius is the double amputee world record holder in the 100, 200 and 400 meters events. His first strides were choppy Sunday, a necessary accommodation to sprinting on a pair of j-shaped blades made of carbon fiber and known as Cheetahs. Pistorius was born without the fibula in his lower legs and with other defects in his feet. He had both legs amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old. At 20, his coach says, he is like a five-speed engine with no second gear. He is one of a handful of runners around the globe who could make the Olympic qualifying time for 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. He is less than a second away, but he may not be allowed to run in Olympics even if he qualifies. His artificial lower legs, while enabling him to compete, have also generated claims that he has an unfair advantage over other runners.

The issue opens a fascinating debate as to what is fair, what is a ‘level playing field’ and what is ‘open’ competition. Is it fair that Ian Thorpe was born with size-17 feet that act as flippers in the pool, that Michael Phelps has an unnaturally large arm span of 200cm (compared with his height of 193cm)? Neither of these physical advantages could be achieved by training. Is it fair that men over 7ft have such an advantage in basketball because they don’t have to look up to see the net? Or that Willie Carson barely had to diet to keep his weight down as a jockey? Some people are naturally more flexible than others, some are stronger than others and some have sharper vision and faster reflexes.

Far from being a case of disabled equals disadvantaged and inferior, Pistorius’s condition raises the fascinating concept that disabled equals unfair advantage. His case could change the perception of disability sport forever.

There are those who would argue that if Pistorius is allowed to compete, what is to stop athletes putting springs in their shoes to create the same upsurge he enjoys? In truth, the only way they could duplicate the sensation and the effect is if they chopped off their lower limbs. That might make a few think twice, although, given the propensity of some elite athletes to chance their health in favor of enhanced performance, it is not out of the question.

Disabled or Too-Abled?

Robert Gailey, an associate professor of physical therapy at the University of Miami Medical School, who has studied amputee runners, asserts that a prosthetic leg returns only about 80 percent of the energy absorbed in each stride, while a natural leg returns up to 240 percent, providing much more spring. He further adds, “There is no science that he has an advantage, only that he is competing at a disadvantage.”

Foremost among the I.A.A.F.’s concerns is that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs may make him taller than he would have been on natural legs and may unfairly lengthen his stride, allowing him to lower his best times by several seconds in the past three years, while most elite sprinters improve by hundredths of a second.

Pistorius, whose stated height is 6 feet 1 ¼ inches while wearing his sprinting prosthetics, says that the devices are within an allowed range determined by the length of his thighs. The peak length of his stride, he said, is 9 feet, not 13 feet as some I.A.A.F. officials suggest.

Another concern is raised by the IAAF communications director, Nick Davies, is: ‘If you don’t have calf muscles or shins or feet, you obviously cannot have any lactic acid there, and therefore you cannot experience the problems of tiring that other athletes do because of it. If you’ve got a guy who reaches top speed in the 400m after 150m but then keeps it for the rest of the race that’s wrong. No one does that in athletics. Not even Jeremy Wariner is capable of doing that.’

Pistorius argues: ‘I have the same ratio of blood per muscles in my body as everyone else, and the only way you’d get less lactic acid would be if that ratio was less.’

There are many disadvantages to sprinting on carbon-fiber legs, Pistorius and his coach said. After a cumbersome start, he needs about 30 meters to gain his rhythm. His knees do not flex as readily, limiting his power output. His grip can be unsure in the rain. And when he runs into a headwind or grows fatigued, he must fight rotational forces that turn his prosthetic devices sideways, said Ampie Louw, who coaches Pistorius.

“With all due respect, we cannot accept something that provides advantages,” said Elio Locatelli of Italy, the director of development for the I.A.A.F., urging Pistorius to concentrate on the Paralympics that will follow the Olympics in Beijing. “It affects the purity of sport. Next will be another device where people can fly with something on their back.”

Among ethicists, Pistorius’s success has spurred talk of “transhumans” and “cyborgs.” Some note that athletes already modify themselves in a number of ways, including baseball sluggers who undergo laser eye surgery to enhance their vision and pitchers who have elbow reconstruction using sturdier ligaments from elsewhere in the body. At least three disabled athletes have competed in the Summer Olympics: George Eyser, an American, won a gold medal in gymnastics while competing on a wooden leg at the 1904 Games in St. Louis; Neroli Fairhall, a paraplegic from New Zealand, competed in archery in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles; and Marla Runyan, a legally blind runner from the United States, competed in the 1,500 meters at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. But Pistorius would be the first amputee to compete in a track event, international officials said.

Performance Unleashed

The following are three time comparisons between Pistorius’s times and the Olympic winning times over the same distance:
400m

• 44.00 – 2004 Olympic gold (men)

• 46.56 – Pistorius – world record (March 17, 2007)

• 47.8 – 1928 Olympic gold (men)

200m

• 19.79 – 2004 Olympic gold (men)

• 21.58 – Pistorius – world record (April 5, 2007)

• 22.0 – 1920 Olympic gold (men)

100m

• 9.85 – 2004 Olympic gold (men)

• 10.91 – Pistorius – world record (April 4, 2007)

• 11.2 – 1906 Olympic gold (men)

Pistorius’s time of 46.56 in the 400 earned him a second-place finish in March against able-bodied runners at the South African national championships. This seemingly makes him a candidate for the Olympic 4×400-meter relay should South Africa qualify as one of the world’s 16 fastest teams.

Limits and Accommodations

Historically, the I.A.A.F. has placed limits on devices that assist athletes. It prohibits an array of performance-enhancing drugs. And it does not allow wheelchair athletes into the Olympic marathon, given that wheels provide a clear advantage in speed.

But the governing body has also embraced technological advances. For instance, it permits athletes to sleep in tent-like devices designed to simulate high altitude and increase oxygen-carrying capacity.

“There is no real grounds to say he should not be allowed to compete” in the Olympics, said Juan Manuel Alonso of Spain, who heads the I.A.A.F.’s medical and antidoping commission. “We’d like to have more information and biomechanical studies.”

In 2007, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) amended its competition rules to ban the use of “any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device”. It claimed that the amendment was not specifically aimed at Pistorius, and is monitoring his track performances using high-definition cameras to determine whether he actually has an advantage.

His own fear, Pistorius said, is that the governing body, which has not contacted him, will ban him on supposition, not science. “I think they’re afraid to do the research,” Pistorius, a business student at the University of Pretoria, said. “They’re afraid of what they’re going to find, that I don’t have an advantage and they’ll have to let me compete.”

“You have two competing issues — fair competition and basic human rights to compete,” said Angela Schneider, a sports ethicist at the University of Western Ontario and a 1984 Olympic silver medalist in rowing. The I.A.A.F. must objectively define when prosthetic devices “go from therapy to enhancement,” Schneider said. The danger of acting hastily, she said, is “you deny a guy’s struggle against all odds — one of the fundamental principles of the Olympics.”

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Entertainment

Indian Cinema Person: P. Sheshadri

Kannada film Thutturi directed by P. Sheshadri got the National Award for the best film on environment conservation for year 2006. Incidentally, this is his fourth National Film Award in a row. The young director, who started out as a journalist, believes in a style that is easy and reaches out to a large number of people.

The choices made by him during his career are what helped him giving his best as a film director. During the mid-’80’s, he took up a sub-editor’s job with Suddi Sangaati. Even as he was on the film beat he had a fascination for the visual medium. Clearly he was in awe of the big screen’s potential. “I would go out of my way to meet people, interact with them. Never did it merely as duty.” Those 10 months on the beat was bliss. But how long could one survive on cerebral pleasures? Keeping the hearth burning on a salary of Rs. 1,000 was tough. “Also, it was a killing routine. A gruelling eight hours with hardly any productivity, and sometimes humiliating too. I longed to do something path-breaking.”

Friends stood by him, urged him to follow his instincts and take the plunge. Seshadri started working as film director Nagabharana’s assistant. Like many bright talents in the industry, Seshadri’s learning didn’t happen in the classroom of a film institute, watching the best of films and reading the best of film literature. All his learning was happening on the sets. Nevertheless, he was watching a lot of cinema and formulating his own thoughts, though he did miss someone with whom he could hold intelligent discussions. But he has no regrets. “When I did my journalism course, I thought I was prepared to work as a journalist. Eventually, I realised that my formal training had nothing to do with demands on field.” He extends the same logic to his filmmaking. “When you see my films you realise that I’m not in any groove. My style is very individualistic and don’t stick to a formula.”

In his first big move towards film making, when he wrote the dialogues and screenplay for a Kannada film, he found that there were too many changes made in what he had created. “It was then that I realised that the captain of the ship was the director. If there was a way to directly reach the people with what I wanted to say, it had to be as a director.” Sheshadri had no illusions about the world of cinema when he made his first film, Munnudi. He knew how difficult it was to get a producer to finance his film and then distribute it. “I had no delusions that I could be part of the Gandhinagar network. One thing was very clear when I made my first film; we had to look after every stage of the making— from the direction to production, post-production and finally getting it to the people.”

For Munnudi & Athithee, Sheshadri and a group of close associates formed a film co-operative called ‘Nava Chitra’ consisting of nine people and repeated the effort with another group called Mitra Chitra for Beru. Each person invested money in the film and this included the cast, cinematographer, editors, music director and the technicians.

With a meagre budget of Rs 15 lakhs, Sheshadri went on to make Munnudi, which got him his first National award. “Only by investing in the film would everybody get a feeling that it belonged to him. It was in everybody’s interest to economise and work on a tight schedule. Anything that cost more than Rs 50 had to be paid for by cheque. Everybody tried to cut costs in his or her department.”

Athithee (The Guest) cost a little more (Rs 18 lakhs) and was helped by the fact that actor Prakash Raj did not charge a fee. Sheshadri says that more than getting big producers to finance the so-called ‘art’ films, it would help if big-budget actors volunteered to work in one such movie a year. “We call them ‘crowd-pullers’. If they act in such movies, then their faithful fan following would ensure that more people would come to cinema theatres.”

Thuthoori is the first Sheshadri-directed film that was not financed through his co-operative group. It would seem an interesting wait to see what happens in the life of this dedicated filmmaker. He certainly has many more stories to tell.

The Fantastic Four

Munnudi (Preface) is the story of a mother of a teenaged girl who lived in a small village on the coast of Arabian Sea, who raised the first dissident cry against a ritual where every woman of the village was to go to bed as temporary wife with a new husband annually.

Athithee (The Guest) is an attempt to examine flashes of humanity of a young man totally immersed in the cult of terrorism. The film revolves around two such characters – a terrorist and a well meaning doctor and examines how they affect each other.

Beru (The Root) is an attempt to give a wake-up call to raise the consciousness of society about corruption and bribery in the country’s governing system. It reflects the degradation of moral values, lack of commitment and the overall apathy of the public.

Thuttoori (Bugle) is a film by children and for children. Unlike other children’s films that have mostly adults in their cast and are tediously moralistic, this one has mostly children and their battle against the system. Today’s children, among other things, have a big problem of finding a space to play. Thuttoori addresses this issue in a playful manner.

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Special Feature

Cycling To Health

While in India, cycle is mostly seen as poor man’s choice, things are different elsewhere. Though four decades back Copenhagen was a car town, in 1962 the city created its first pedestrian street, the Stroget, and since then Copenhagen has been allocating more and more of its public space to bicycles, pedestrians and people who just want to relax. Danish urban designer Jan Gehl says that the single biggest key to the change has been the development of the city’s extensive bicycle network and that the Copenhagen of great public spaces that we see today would not be possible without bicycles.

Bikes are everywhere. Thirty-six percent of citizens commute by bicycle even though it is cold and rainy for much of the year. Except for young children, hardly anybody wears a bike helmet. Young children do get around the city by bike, usually accompanied by a parent. There is currently some debate about helmets underway and a local group is pushing helmet legislation. The city’s goal is to get its cycling mode share up to 40 percent in the next few years.

Wide, busy thoroughfares, the favorite routes of motorized traffic, are also some of the very best biking roads. Cars and bikes have it in common — go fast and straight for long stretches without having to stop and start lots of times. People seem to ride their bikes fast and with extraordinary confidence that no car or truck is going to open a door or hang a right turn into their path. Danish moms can be seen hauling two kids and groceries. People have all kinds of different bikes and they use them for everything; carrying two kids, delivering mail, hauling shopping bags and large piece equipment.

One can see bicycles in the space that is given to parking in other cities. This really seems to be where the ultimate choice lies when it comes to building a strong urban bicycle infrastructure. Forty-five years ago the City of Copenhagen made their choice. It appears that every year since then, the amount of land dedicated to parking space in the city center has been reduced, 2 or 3 percent annually. The changes have continued and people continue to enjoy the results.

While our cities are not really safe for biking, Pune, once known for its love of cycling, is still producing enthusiasts. Pune Cycle Pratisthan has been campaigning about cycling for years now. It has contributed to increasing public awareness about cycling in cities eclipsed by cars. It has organized regular rallies, and has engaged local municipality in creating better infrastructure for cycling. The recent cycling rally of 450 kilometers in Leh was testimony to the tough willpower and physical fitness of the team.

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