India's bureaucracy is a bummer for the boom

June 26, 2006, The Age, Australia

Eric Ellis is South-East Asia correspondent for Fortune

Economic growth is yet to improve the ground-level conditions for business in India, writes Eric Ellis.

THAT India is booming is beyond dispute — 10 per cent growth last year to rival China, $200 billion in foreign reserves. Next stop, with The Bomb and a huge consumer market in hand, will be permanent membership of the UN Security Council.

You'll see its emergence as a global economic power; its start-up companies described in rapturous terms by the media. World leaders will exhort their businesses to harness its energy.

But what type of boom is it? After three weeks travelling and reporting around a country I know reasonably well and enjoy very much, I've concluded it's an uneven one, and even a dangerous one.

Let's start with flying, or using an Indian airport, as business travellers do. I write this column sitting on the floor of Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, delayed four hours for a flight. The filthy airport, regarded as one of India's better ones, may be a disgrace to her legacy but I think it's a fair reflection of it.

The Indian boom is a product of overdue deregulation, kick-started in 1991 by the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he was finance minister.

It was a wonderful thing after 40 years of the so-called "licence raj", the muddle-headed socialism the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, instigated and his daughter Indira did little to reform.

Governments administering the licence raj provided permits to a few companies to produce a single product or service. It held India back for years, created monopolies, bad products, rampant corruption and woeful infrastructure.

The so-called Bombay Club of tycoons got fat, lazy and protected. The system also discouraged entrepreneurship — one reason why Indians are among the world's most numerate expatriates, seeking to make their fortunes.

To foreign tourists, Hindustan Motors' Ambassador car, one of the motor world's heaviest vehicles, is a picturesque throwback to a colonialesque 1950s Morris Oxford. But to forward-looking Indians, it's an indictment on 50 years of the Indian car industry. Yes, there have been new cars in recent years, many of them sub-standard cast-offs from exhausted Western moulds as the industry deregulated.

But would you buy a Tata Indica? Ratan Tata, lionised by India's media as the father of its modern car industry, drives a Mercedes, or rather, has one driven for him.

Now Indira and Nehru's licence raj is history, the situation has completely reversed. New car models appear weekly, and the Indian airline industry is now a private free-for-all. But the creaking Indian bureaucracy can't keep up — it's too slow and cumbersome to improve the hopelessly undermanned and overcrowded airports and roads. The Indian military is also an obstacle, refusing to release its paranoiac grip over airspace, forcing civilian flights to follow tight and increasingly crowded routes lest someone steal a glance at a base.

Some $100 billion has been slated for infrastructure improvement, but there's not much evidence of it, as start-ups arrive daily. Delhi is supposed to be getting a new airport in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. It is now 2006, and this is India, so don't count on it.

The reason why I'm on the floor of the airport is that after an airport-wide search, I've finally found a "live" electricity socket to plug in my laptop. The other 15 sockets tested didn't have any current.

I got here from Kathmandu last night on a state-owned Indian Airlines flight that was delayed two hours, because of security checks, Nepal being in the grip of a Maoist insurgency that's no friend of Delhi. Few travellers quibble with the post-9/11 security burdens of air travel, but if the plane is scheduled to leave at 1700, why not do the security two hours earlier? That two-hour flight was one of the most dangerous I've ever taken, but most passengers didn't know that. About halfway through the flight, over Indian airspace, I saw a blue-liveried plane streak past the right wingtip, no more than 300 metres away. The internationally accepted distance standard is about 500 metres vertically and about five kilometres horizontally. This near-miss was more horizontal than vertical. Approaching Delhi, there were two alarming, aborted attempts at landing. The pilot explained that the airport was busy, and I'm not surprised. More than a dozen new airlines have been launched in recent years, overburdening an airport infrastructure that was already mayhem when there were just Indian Airlines, its big sister Air India and the relatively new Jet Airways in the market. Now there are carriers owned by a brewer (Kingfisher), two by textile companies (Go Air and Paramount) and one by a public relations agency (Magic Air).

The one new flyer that sprang from aviation roots, Air Deccan, is regarded by Indians as the worst of the lot. But what does a brewer bring to the aviation sector? Can you imagine flying VB Airlines? Or Antz Pantz Air?

Technology also has issues. "Incredible" India's image today is one of cutting-edge innovation. One of the best products I've seen is a nifty Reliance Industries broadband laptop card from India that connects to mobile cell towers. But try logging on to the net conventionally in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, which advertises itself as having the world's fastest broadband — "warp speed" — or being trapped in darkness in the elevator of an average but overbooked hotel you've paid $US200 a night for. Yes, Indian engineers are performing programming miracles in the back offices of Bangalore's myriad companies at a tenth the cost — and with twice the education — of their Western counterparts, but their skills aren't being evenly spread, or perhaps they are just reserved for penny-pinching Western clients, and dollar-hungry India Inc.

This flowering of entrepreneurship has made Indians richer than they've ever been. I'm fascinated by it, I love India and I think it will muddle through. But as I fly and drive around it, I just hope its long-overdue boom doesn't kill me.

India is transit hub for human trafficking : UNDP survey

India has become a key destination and transit hub for human trafficking from East Europe and other places, says a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) sponsored study released here Thursday.

Delhi and Mumbai are the favourite destinations for human trafficking from various regions, says the study conducted by NGO Shakti Vahini as part of its project on prevention of Trafficking, HIV and AIDS (TAHA) in women and girls. The NGO works under UNDP India.

'Trafficking occurs from Egypt, Brazil, Azerbaijan, Russia and several other Eastern European countries,' said the TAHA study. Lots of women are brought from these places to India from where they are trafficked to other places, it said.

Shakti Vahini director Ravi Kant painted a gloomy picture of human trafficking in the country.

The study said 72 percent of human trafficking is for commercial sex, 80.26 percent of trafficking of women takes place in Bihar - most of it happening during migration for labour - and 12.36 percent of the total trafficking is due to family traditions.

'Madhya Pradesh is prominent among the states where women get into sex work and thus get trafficked because of family traditions. Ninety five percent of the women in Madhya Pradesh in commercial sex are due to family traditions. So are 51.79 percent in Bihar,' said the study.

'Although Mumbai and Goa are the favourite destinations for paedophilic activity, where children are trafficked, tourist destinations in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Orissa are also not far behind,' Kant said.

Out of the 593 districts in India, 378 or 62.5 percent are affected by human trafficking. The study found that domestic violence, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, unsafe migration and child marriage are the major reasons for the increasing rate of illegal human trafficking.

While 43 percent of the total women trafficked are minors, 44 percent of the women are into flesh trade due to poverty.

Interestingly, in Kerala, which claims the highest rate of literacy and has a matriarchal tradition, violence is often used to push women into flesh trade.

Of the total women who are into sex work in the country, 60 percent are from the lower and backward class, which indicates the pathetic living condition of the communities. In Madhya Pradesh, 96.7 percent of the women sex workers are from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.

Although the rate of increase in human trafficking is alarming, Kant said only 7.7 percent of police officials in the country consider it an issue of high priority. 'More than half (54.8 percent) of police officials think that it is not an issue at all,' he said.

While Kant pointed out that the country did not have any effective legislation in place on human trafficking, Manjula Krishnan, economic advisor to the women and child development ministry, said the government would focus on prevention, rescue, rehabilitation and sensitisation to fight the menace.

Sensing the seriousness of the issue, Femina Miss India World Natasha Suri and Femina Miss India Earth Amruta Patki, who attended the function, said they would make efforts to create awareness about the issue.

'I can represent the youth,' Suri said.

TAHA has initiated efforts with local communities in 300 districts across 11 states to create awareness among the people that trafficking is closely linked to the spread of HIV and AIDS.

New Delhi, June 22, 2006, (IANS)

Indians tail monkey man for healing powers!

Kolkata, June 20, 2006

Thousands of people are flocking to an impoverished village in West Bengal to worship a man they believe possesses divine powers because he climbs up trees in seconds, gobbles up bananas and has a 'tail"!

Devotees say 27-year-old villager Chandre Oraon is an incarnation of the Hindu god Hanuman -- worshipped by millions as a symbol of physical strength, perseverance and devotion.

"He climbs up trees, behaves like a monkey and is a strict vegetarian, but he is no god and his condition is just a congenital defect," says Bhushan Chakraborty, the local medical officer.

Tucked away in a hamlet in Banarhat, over 650 km north of Kolkata, devotees wait for hours to see or touch Oraon's 13-inch tail, believing that it has healing powers.

Doctors said the 'tail' -- made up of some flesh but mostly of dark hair -- was simply a rare physical attribute.

"It is a congenital anomaly, but very rarely do we find such cases," B Ramana, a Kolkata-based surgeon, said.

Indian Express Report

Shining India - The False Facade of A Nation

June 16, 2006

John Pilger is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker and one of the truly great ones of our time. For nearly 50 years, he's courageously and brilliantly done what too few others in his profession, in fact, do - his job. John has also been a war correspondent, is the author of 10 books and is best known in his adopted country Great Britain for his investigative documentaries exposing the crimes of US and Western imperialism.

Freedom Next Time is John's newest book just published and the fifth one of his I've read. The others were magnificent, and when I learned a new one was due out, I couldn't wait to read it knowing it would be vintage Pilger and not to be missed. I wasn't disappointed and am delighted to share with readers what it's about. What else, as John himself says in his opening paragraph: "This book is about empire, its facades and the enduring struggle of people for their freedom. It offers an antidote to authorized versions of contemporary history that censor by omission and impose double standards." Indeed it does, and John devotes his book to exposing the crimes of empire in five countries. I'll cover each one in a separate section.

Chapter Three: Shining India - The False Facade of A Nation Where Over One Third of the People Live in Desperate Poverty

John explains how India is a nation of stark contrasts, and the country's richest city, Bombay, may show it best. At one extreme is a thriving business community of maritime trade, merchant banks and two stock exchanges. At the other is a city of one million humans per square mile and typified by the "rail roads" district foreigners and outsiders know nothing about. It teems with desperate people living under conditions "barely describable - a packing case for a home with sewage "ebbing and flowing in the monsoon." John asks how can a nation with memories of "great popular struggle" and democracy allow this. The answer is its leaders chose to sell its sovereignty to the neoliberal model of a global economy dominated by giant transnational corporations, especially those in the US.

The rise of the Hindu nationalist (proto fascist) BJP-led government in the 1990s accelerated the process. It removed the barriers in place to protect Indian industry and opened the country to invasion by foreign predatory corporations that took full advantage. The result is a nation that could be a poster child for how an adopted economic model got it all wrong and caused mass human misery. It's seen in an increase in "absolute poverty" to over one third of the population or about 364 million people. John explains that although India's growth rate is high, "this is about capital, not labour, about liberated profits, not people." He also exposes the myth of India being a high-tech juggernaut. While the nation has risen to "pre-eminence" in computer and other technology, the new "technocratic class" is tiny. Also, the so-called consumer boom has benefitted at most about 15% of the population.

Over two thirds of the people live in rural villages and depend on small scale agriculture for their livelihood and survival. These people have been devastated by the nation's embrace of the Western economic model. It's caused a hidden epidemic of suicides among them because they can't compete with agribusiness. Those opting for a less severe solution are forced off their land in a futile attempt to seek refuge among the teeming masses in the cities. The result is growing poverty, deprivation and extreme human misery on a massive scale. Because of its huge population of over one billion, India stands out as a warning of the kind of future people everywhere will face unless a way is found to reverse a failed economic model that enriches the few, devastates the many and is strangling the ability of the planet to continue sustaining the abuse afflicted on it.

A Summation

John has once again written a brilliant and magnificent book. Everyone should read it to learn from this great man what was and is ongoing in the five countries he chose to cover from among the many he knows well from having witnessed events around the world first-hand over his long career. He explains what few others do or would dare to help us understand how peoples' lives everywhere have been affected by the US economic model that's based on militarism and imperial expansion to control the world's markets, essential resources and cheap labor with no challengers to its dominance allowed. That's one message the book imparts. But it also breathes a special hope that the human spirit is indomitable and will find a way to overcome adversity and oppression and be able to endure. John believes a time of deliverance is ahead because committed people everywhere will never give up working for it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago a visit his blog site at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

Are Hard Drugs Hitting a New High in India?

Tuesday, 13 June 2006

A lurid political family's scandal has many wondering if an upper-class drug scene is an inevitable consequence of the country's economic boom

By BENJAMIN SIEGEL/NEW DELHI

Time.COM, Monday, Jun. 12, 2006

The tabloidesque story is straight out of Hollywood: a politician's son is wheeled into the hospital after a night of partying, only a month after his father, a leading politician, was gunned down by his brother. The doctors admit that the prodigal son's blood is swimming with traces of cocaine, opiates, barbiturates and cannabis, among other substances. It's on the cover of every paper, with one daily dedicating half its front page to a graphic-novel style recreation of the fateful, bacchanalian night of partying.

But this isn't L.A. It's New Delhi, and the patient is Rahul Mahajan, son of Pramod, former leader of the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, who was killed in a family dispute last month. In this conservative city of 14 million, corruption scandals may be routine, but designer drugs have historically seemed as easy to find as steak.

And yet, for the past week, the Indian media have been playing up the Mahajan scandal as emblematic of a hidden hard drug scourge among India's elite. Exposés detail how cocaine is purportedly all the rage among chic Delhi denizens, with posh South Delhi neighborhoods singled out as coke, acid, and ecstasy hotbeds. Journalists routinely quote anonymous socialites, designers, and models on the drug scene at clubs, raves, and even weddings. One paper went so far as to list Bollywood stars living in Bombay who are rumored to have hefty coke habits. A particularly juicy allegation making the rounds is that wealthy Indians frequently use 500 rupee notes — worth around ten dollars — to snort the stuff.

All the media attention has left a few lone voices wondering if a high-class drug scene is an inevitable consequence of India's recent economic growth and newfound wealth. It's no secret that there are drug-fueled raves on the outskirts of Delhi, and just last week, Indian authorities seized 200 kilograms of cocaine from a South African ship in a Bombay port. Authorities and journalists alike point fingers at India's Nigerian community, who they claim arrive on easily-obtainable student visas before beginning to deal cocaine and heroin to the wealthy. In the capital, four cocaine busts have been made this year — after nine busts in the whole of 2005. But the number of arrests may soon grow in the wake of the Mahajan scandal.

Soft drugs traditionally don't raise too many eyebrows in India — a vast swath of the population, from government ministers to saffron-clad Hindu holy men, occasionally consume bhang, a potent and popular cannabis tincture. But India's wealthy have hitherto frowned upon hard drugs, looking upon them as the purvey of the country's poor. For years, India has grappled with "brown sugar" —low-grade heroin produced locally or imported from Afghanistan or Burma — that has left a trail of overdoses and HIV infections in its wake.

While scandal-watching in India can often seem like a national pastime, this recent, rather breathless coverage of the party drug scene conveys a naivete that is almost endearing. Journalists are reporting that heroin is usually snorted, and while it's strange that papers are printing cocaine's street price, what's stranger still is that their estimates are all over the place. One paper reported matter-of-factly that cocaine "makes one euphoric and enhances sexual prowess on consumption," and boasted that "one can dance all night long after consuming it."

Last year, after a cocaine bust in a swanky Delhi restaurant, a Narcotics Control Bureau officer confidently declared that most of the cocaine users in the capital are fashion designers and hairdressers. But in a country of a billion, with more and more money to spend, it's becoming very clear just how much bigger and more diverse the market for hard drugs really is.

Millions breathe cancer-causing air in India: report

Jun 3, 2006 , Krittivas Mukherjee

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Millions in India breathe air loaded with cancer-causing chemicals and toxic gases present at levels that are thousands of times higher than permissible limits, an independent report said on Saturday.

India, one of the most polluted countries in the world, does not even have a standard for many harmful chemicals and gases, and thus no monitoring nor regulation for them, the report said.

The study by the Community Environmental Monitors (CEM), an independent environmental and health agency, is India's first comprehensive national survey of ambient air that based its findings on a two-year survey carried out in 13 locations.

"As India is poised to nearly double its industrial capacity in the coming years, our nation is pathetically behind in terms of its infrastructure to safeguard its environment or the health of people from air pollution," said CEM's Shweta Narayan.

The study found that millions of Indians in cities and villages were exposed to at least 45 dangerous chemicals, including 13 carcinogens, some of which were present at levels 32,000 times higher than globally accepted standard.

Last month, the World Bank said pollution was growing rapidly in India and China because of inefficient investment in energy.

India is mainly dependent on coal for its energy, but has about 15 nuclear power plants and is under pressure to increase energy production to meet a furious pace of industrialization.

"Air pollution monitoring and regulation is primitive, and the world's fourth-largest economy has no standards for some of the most toxic and commonly found air pollutants," said Narayan.

The samples were taken from residential areas and public thoroughfares in or near industrial areas, effluent discharge channels, smoldering garbage dumps and toxic waste facilities.

The chemicals found targeted virtually every system in the human body - eyes, central nervous system, skin and respiratory system, liver, kidneys, blood, cardiovascular system, reproductive system, the report said.

To reduce air pollution, the Indian government is actively encouraging the use of compressed natural gas by vehicles -- a move that has resulted in a few cleaner cities -- and piped natural gas by households.

But the country has refused cuts to greenhouse gases imposed by the Kyoto Protocol, saying such a cap would hamper its furious pace of industrialization.

India is exempt from the mandatory cuts because, like China, it is considered a developing nation.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

Indian woman marries cobra for 'love'

ATALA, India, June 2, 2006 (UPI ) --

An Indian woman says she loves her new husband and knows he returns her feelings -- even though he happens to be a snake.

More than 2,000 people turned out Wednesday to celebrate the wedding of Bimbala Das, 30, to a cobra that lived on an ant hill near her home in the village of Atala, the Times of India reported Friday.

Das said she fell in love with the snake and knew it felt the same about her, even though they could not transmit their feelings in the usual manner.

"Though snakes cannot speak nor understand, we communicate in a peculiar way," she explained to the newspaper. "Whenever I put milk near the ant hill where the cobra lives, it always comes out to drink."

The woman's new husband was not actually at the Hindu wedding, however. A brass replica of the cobra was used as a stand-in during the ritual and processional, the newspaper said.

© Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved