Rassegna della stampa internazionale sull’India
15 - 30 Agosto 2010
A cura di Giulio Carminati
glcarminati@gmail.com
Political and current affairs
Pakistan: flood relief
After The Deluge...
The swell of militant groups engaged in flood relief has everyone jittery
Amir Mir
Sep 06, 2010 OUTLOOKINDIA
When the mighty Indus swelled and spilled over its banks, gradually inundating nearly 20 per cent
of Pakistan, teeming millions from decrepit towns and remote hamlets scampered away to safety.
There were some, though, who were seen trekking in the opposite direction, wading into the watery
graves to rescue those marooned. These civilians, often sporting lush, unkempt beards and dressed
in pathan suits, were activists of militant organisations who had spontaneously come to the
assistance of beleaguered people reeling under a crisis unprecedented in Pakistan’s history. Nor did
their initial enthusiasm ebb in subsequent days—they remain in the forefront of non-government
endeavour to provide hot meals, clothes and medicine to the affected, collecting funds to finance
relief operations likely to last for months.
They have been hailed in some quarters as saviours who rushed to assist the hapless at a time when
government officials had scurried away. Yet, this samaritan act has stoked fears, here as well
abroad, about the agenda underlying the flood relief work. Wouldn’t they exploit popular sympathy
to widen their recruitment base? Even President Asif Ali Zardari said recently, “We are giving them
(victims) everything we’ve got. But there is a possibility that some negative forces will exploit this
situation. For example, extremist militants can take orphaned babies and put them in their terrorist
training camps.” In its August 17 editorial, the New York Times wrote, “In some areas, radical
Islamic charities have provided shelter and hot meals well before the beleaguered Pakistani
authorities could bring in food supplies. This is a battle for hearts and minds. It is one that
Pakistan’s government, and the United States, must not lose.”
Zardari and America’s worry arises from the sheer number of militant groups operating in the
flood-hit areas. Most of these groups were banned, but they have now emerged under new names in
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those areas facing the wrath of the Indus most. From Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JuD) to Jaish-eMohammed to Harkatul Mujahideen to Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to Harkatul
Jehadul Islami, they have organised relief camps in flood-affected parts of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber
Pakhtoonkhwa and Balochistan provinces. In addition, they are said to have collected millions of
rupees for relief operations.
The goodwill these militant groups have generated locally through this philanthropic turn is likely
to make it impossible for Islamabad to curtail the activities of Hafiz Saeed, whose JuD, the parent
body of Lashkar-e-Toiba, has harnessed its experience gained from years of charity work to
organise relief operations. Its efforts during the devastating quake of 2005 had helped it acquire a
humanitarian halo—and relief work for the thousands who fled the Swat Valley during the army’s
operation against the Taliban last year did its image no harm. In his recent Friday sermon, Saeed
urged philanthropists to support the JuD, “The nation needs to stand up and help the flood victims
through donations and relief work, as has been the case in the past.”
JuD’s Yahya Mujahid says 2,200 members are volunteering in the flood-hit northwest region,
south Punjab.
The JuD has been cautious in providing assistance—now under the adopted name of Tanzeem-eFalah-e-Insaniyat (Human Welfare Organisation)—but its volunteers haven’t tried too hard to
conceal their links to the parent organisation. They wear the badges of both organisations as they
bustle around in camps. JuD spokesperson Yahya Mujahid says over 2,200 members of the group
are working day and night in the flood relief efforts in the northwest region and south Punjab. As
Mujahid told Outlook, “Hundreds more have been dispatched to the flood-stricken areas of Sindh
and Balochistan along with dozens of trucks carrying medicines, camps, clothes, ration and clean
water.” As for the badges worn by volunteers, Mujahid says the JuD and the Tanzeem-e-Falah-eInsaniyat are two separate entities working in unison. But this explanation doesn’t have too many
takers.
Ataur Rehman, who heads the JuD’s relief operations in Punjab, denies that the group has any
ulterior motive in assisting the flood-ravaged people. As he puts it, “To work for humanity is the
true spirit of Islam, we don’t expect any reward. Had the government been sincere towards the poor,
it would have been the first to reach to the affected. When the floods came, it was we who carried
people on our shoulders to the boats and ambulances.”
Analyst Dr Hasan Askari Rizvi says the JuD has adopted a model that the Hezbollah perfected in
Lebanon, combining militancy with charity work. “The JuD too is doing this to create goodwill and
gain sympathy for its fighters active in India’s Kashmir. There is currently no law to stop volunteers
from doing humanitarian work.”
There are others, though, who feel the international media has been needlessly alarmist about the
involvement of militant groups in relief work. Among them is former foreign secretary Najmuddin
Sheikh, who feels there’s little evidence to suggest that the assistance provided by militant groups
constitutes a substantial proportion of the overall flood relief work. The bulk of the relief and
rehabilitation efforts, even though falling short of the country’s requirements, can be ascribed to the
state and international aid agencies. It consequently follows, he says, that the benefits accruing to
the jehadists too would be limited.
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But this won’t deter the jehadists from exploiting the natural calamity to their ideological
advantage. As Najmuddin says, “The jehadis can make the case that had they been in charge of
things, they would have done much better than the present government. They will also argue that
this is God’s wrath upon a nation that has chosen an inept government. But the fact is that the
magnitude of the devastation is simply unprecedented in Pakistan’s history.”
International outcry prompted the government to announce that it would disallow banned groups to
work in flood-affected areas. But Mujahid says no action has yet been taken nor is likely to be taken
considering the difficult times the country is passing through. As he argues, “Poor people just want
help, that’s it. The people in the flood-stricken areas, living in misery, can hardly have second
thoughts about taking help from us. Anyway, the government hasn’t banned us.” The group, indeed,
is only on Pakistan’s terror watch list even though the United Nations has banned it.
Interior ministry sources in Islamabad, however, say that directives were issued to all the four
provincial governments to prevent jehadi outfits from organising relief activities. They particularly
bemoan the reluctance of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) government of Punjab to counter the
jehadi groups. One source says Islamabad has already conveyed its displeasure to the Punjab
government over its failure to circumscribe Hafiz Saeed’s activities.
The role of militant organisations in the flood relief operations may have been a bit exaggerated, but
there still remains the larger question: hasn’t Pakistan learned from the cumulative effect of
allowing jehadi outfits free space?
EXCLUSIVE
Souter Takes The Call
As the Great Game repeats itself, India must wake up to Karzai’s new moves
William Dalrymple
AUGUST 30, 2010 OUTLOOKINDIA
In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain named Rev G.H. Gleig wrote a
memoir of the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War of which he was one of the very few survivors. It
was, he wrote, “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and
timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the
government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or
military, was acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat
of an army defeated”.
It would be difficult to imagine any military adventure today going quite as badly as the First
Anglo-Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that ended with an entire
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East India Company army utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of Rs 80 billion
and over 40,000 lives. But this month, almost 10 years on from NATO’s invasion of Afghanistan,
there were increasing signs that the current Afghan war, like so many before them, could still end in
another embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal
chaos, possibly partitioned and ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought
to overthrow.
Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being defeated by
the surge, are instead beginning to converge on, and effectively besiege, Kabul in what is beginning
to look like the final act in the history of Karzai’s western-installed puppet government. For the
Taliban have now reorganised, and advanced out of their borderland safe havens. They are now
massing at the gates of Kabul, surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahideen once did
to the Soviet-installed regime in the late ’80s. The Taliban controls over 70 per cent of the country,
where it collects taxes, enforces the sharia and dispenses its usual rough justice. Every month their
sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai’s government only
controls 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.
Last month marked a new low with the Taliban inflicting higher levels of casualties on both
civilians and NATO forces than ever before and regaining control of the opium-growing centre of
Marja in Helmand, only three months after being driven out by American forces amid much gungho cheerleading in the US media.
The Taliban are massing at the gates of Kabul, much as the US-backed mujahideen once did in the
late ’80s.
Worse still, there are unsettling and persistent rumours that Karzai is trying to reach some sort of
accommodation with elements in Pakistan that aid and assist the Taliban: the ISI head, Lt General
Ahmad Shuja Pasha, has secretly been shuttling to and from Islamabad to meet Karzai, and last
month, General Kayani, head of the Pakistani army, visited Kabul.
This followed the sacking of Amrullah Saleh, Karzai’s very pro-Indian security chief. Saleh is a
tough, burly and intimidating Tajik with a piercing, unblinking stare, who rose to prominence as a
mujahideen protege of Ahmed Shah Masood, the legendary, India-backed Lion of the Panjshir.
Saleh brought these impeccable credentials to his job after the American conquest, ruthlessly
hunting down and interrogating any Taliban he could find, with little regard for notions of human
rights.
The Taliban, and their backers in the ISI, regarded him as their fiercest enemy, something he was
enormously proud of. When I had dinner with him in Kabul in May, he spoke at length of his
frustration with the Karzai government’s ineffectiveness in taking the fight to the Taliban, and the
degree to which the ISI was still managing to aid, arm and train their pocket insurgents in
Waziristan, Sindh and Balochistan.
Saleh’s sacking in early June merited much less newsprint than last month’s sacking of General
Stanley McChrystal. Yet in reality, McChrystal’s departure reflects only a minor personnel change,
no important alteration in strategy. The sacking of Saleh, however, gave notice of a major and
ominous change of direction by President Karzai.
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Bruce Riedel, Obama’s Afpak advisor, said when the news broke: “Karzai’s decision to sack Saleh
and (Hanif) Atmar (head of the interior ministry) has worried me more than any other development,
because it means Karzai is already planning for a post-American Afghanistan.”
The implication is that Pakistan is encouraging some sort of accommodation between Karzai and
the ISI-sponsored jehadi network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, which could give over much of the
Pashtun south to Haqqani, but preserve Karzai in power in Kabul. The Americans have been party
to none of this, and administration officials have been quoted as being alarmed by the news.
India’s expulsion from Afghanistan, or at least a severe rolling back of its presence, can be
presumed to be a demand on the ISI shopping list in return for a deal. Under Karzai, India had
increasing political and economic influence in Afghanistan—it opened four regional consulates, and
provided around $662 million of reconstruction assistance. Pakistan’s military establishment has
always believed it would be suicide to accept an Indian presence in what they regard as their
strategic backyard, and is completely paranoid about the still small Indian presence—rather as the
British used to be about Russians in Afghanistan during the days of the Great Game.
MEA sources say there are less than 3,600 Indians in Afghanistan, almost all of them businessmen
and contract workers; there are only 10 Indian diplomatic officers as opposed to nearly 150 in the
UK embassy. Yet the horror of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker has led the ISI to risk
Pakistan’s own internal security and coherence, as well as its strategic relationship with the US, in
order to keep the Taliban in play, and its leadership under watch and ISI patronage in Quetta,
something the Wikileaks documents amply confirmed.
The horror of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker forces Pakistan to risk all to keep the Taliban
in play.
If it is true that Karzai is tilting away from NATO and India, and towards Pakistan, it would
represent a strategic victory for the Pakistani military, and a diplomatic defeat for India—though the
ISI will have to first deliver the Taliban, who still say they are unwilling to negotiate with Karzai. It
also remains to be seen whether Pakistan can be defended from the jehadi Frankenstein’s monster
its military has created: the recent bomb blasts in Lahore at the shrine of Datta Sahib would seem
further evidence to indicate not. The other question is whether India can succeed in its reported
attempts to resuscitate the Northern Alliance as a contingency against the Taliban’s takeover of the
south, possibly in conjunction with Russia, Iran and the Central Asian ‘stans’.
Either way, within Afghanistan, it’s a grim picture. Already, it’s now impossible—or at least
extremely foolhardy—for any foreigner to walk even in Kabul without armed guards; it is even
more inadvisable to head out of town in any direction except north: the strongly anti-Taliban
Panjshir Valley, and the towns of Mazar and Herat, are really the only safe havens left for nonAfghans in the entire country, despite the massive troops levels all over. In all other directions,
travel is only possible in an armed convoy. This is especially so around the Khoord Kabul and
Tezeen Passes, immediately to the south of Kabul, where around 18,000 East India Company
troops, many of them Indian sepoys, were lost in 1842, and which is today again a centre of
resistance against foreign troops.
***
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The trajectory of the current war is in fact beginning to feel unsettlingly familiar to students of the
Great Game. In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of sexed-up intelligence about a
non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was manipulated by a group
of ambitious, ideologically-driven hawks to create a scare—in this case, about a phantom Russian
invasion—thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and entirely avoidable war.
Initially, the hawks were triumphant: the British conquest proved remarkably easy and bloodless.
Kabul was captured in a few weeks, the Afghan army melted into the hills, and a pliable monarch,
Shah Shuja, was placed on the throne. For months the British played cricket, went skating and put
on amateur theatricals as if on summer leave in Simla; there were even discussions about making
Kabul the summer capital of the Raj. Then an insurgency began which slowly unravelled that first
heady success, first among the Pashtuns of Kandahar and Helmand, and slowly moving northwards
until it reached Kabul, making the occupation impossible to sustain.
“In the ’80s when we were killing Russians for them, we were freedom fighters. Now we’re just
warlords.”
What happened next is a warning of how bad things could yet become: a full-scale rebellion broke
out in Kabul; the two most senior British envoys were killed, one hacked to death by a mob in the
streets, the other stabbed by resistance leader Wazir Akbar Khan during negotiations. It was on the
retreat that followed, on January 6, 1842, that the 18,000 East India Company troops, and maybe
half that many Indian camp followers, were slaughtered by marksmen waiting in ambush amid the
scree of the high passes, shot down as they trudged through the icy depths of the Afghan winter.
After eight days on the death march, the last 50 survivors made their final stand at the village of
Gandamak. As late as the 1970s, fragments of Victorian weaponry and military equipment could be
found lying in the screes above the village. Even today, the hill is said to be covered with bleached
bones.
Only one man lived to tell the tale of that last stand (if you discount the fictional survival of
Flashman): an ordinary footsoldier, Thomas Souter, wrapped his regimental colours around him to
prevent them being captured, and was taken hostage by the Afghans who assumed that an individual
so colourfully clothed must command a high ransom. It is a measure of the increasingly pertinent
parallels between that war and today’s that one of the main NATO bases in Afghanistan was
recently named Camp Souter.
In the years following 1842, the British defeat became pregnant with symbolism. For the Victorian
British, it was the greatest imperial disaster of the 19th century. For the Afghans, it became an
emblem of freedom from foreign invasion, and the determination the Afghans have never lost to
refuse to be controlled by any foreign power. It is again no accident that the diplomatic quarter of
Kabul, the Afghan Chanakyapuri, is named after the general who oversaw the rout of the British:
Wazir Akbar Khan.
For Indians, who provided most of the cannon-fodder, the war ironically became a symbol of
possibility: although many Indians died on the march, it showed the British were not invincible, and
a well-planned insurgency could force them out; a few years later, in 1857, India launched its own
anti-colonial uprising, partly inspired by what the Afghans had achieved.
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This destabilising effect on South Asia of the failed Afghan war has a direct parallel in the
disastrous blowback from the war we currently see in Pakistan’s tribal territories. Indeed, the ripples
of instability lapping out from Afghanistan and Pakistan have now reached even New York: when
Faisal Shazad was asked by cia interrogators why he tried to bomb New York, he told them of his
desire to revenge those “innocent people being hit by drones from above”.
***
Last month, while researching my new book on the disaster of 1842, I only narrowly avoided the
same fate as my Victorian forbears. The route of the British retreat backs onto the mountain range
that leads to Tora Bora and the Pakistan border, an area that has always been a Taliban centre. I’d
been advised not to venture there without local protection, so had set off that morning in the
company of a tribal leader who was also a minister in Karzai’s government: a huge mountain of a
man named Anwar Khan Jigdalik, a former village wrestling champion who had made his name as
a Hizb-i-Islami commander in the jehad against the Soviets.
It was Jigdalik’s ancestors who inflicted some of the worst casualties on the British army of 1842,
something he proudly repeated several times as we drove through the same passes. None of this,
incidentally, has stopped him from sending his family away to the greater safety of Northolt.
Jigdalik drove himself in a huge suv; a pick-up full of heavily armed bodyguards followed. We left
Kabul—past the blast walls of the NATO barracks, built on the very site of the British cantonment
of 170 years ago—and headed down a corkscrewing road into the line of bleak mountain passes that
link Kabul with the Khyber Pass.
They promised full compensation, and so were allowed to burn the opium...but the money never
came.
It’s a dramatic, violent landscape: faultlines of tortured strata twisted in the gunpowder-coloured
rockwalls rising on either side. Above us, the dragon’s backs of jagged mountain tops were veiled
in an ominous mist. As we drove, Jigdalik complained bitterly of the western treatment of his
government: “In the ’80s, when we were killing Russians for them, the Americans called us
freedom fighters,” he muttered as we descended the first pass. “Now they just dismiss us as
warlords.”
At Sorobi, where the mountains debouche into a high-altitude ochre desert dotted with
encampments of nomads, we left the main road and headed into Taliban territory; a further five
trucks full of Jigdalik’s old mujahideen fighters, faces wrapped in keffiyehs and all brandishing
rocket-propelled grenades, appeared from a side road to escort us.
At Jigdalik, on January 12, 1842, some 200 frostbitten Company soldiers found themselves
surrounded by several thousand Pashtun tribesmen. The two highest-ranking British soldiers went
off to negotiate and were taken hostage, while a companion, James Skinner, son of Sikandar Sahib,
was murdered. Only 50 infantrymen could break out, under cover of darkness.
Our own welcome was, thankfully, somewhat warmer. It was my host’s first visit home since he
became a minister, and the proud villagers took their old commander on a nostalgia trip through low
hills smelling of wild thyme and rosemary, and up through mountainsides of hollyhocks and white
poplars. Here, at the top, lay the remains of Jigdalik’s old mujahideen bunkers and entrenchments.
Later, the villagers feasted us, Mughal style, in an apricot orchard: we sat on carpets under a trellis
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of vine and pomegranate blossom, as course after course of kebabs and mulberry pulao were laid in
front of us.
During lunch, as my hosts pointed out the various places in the village where the British had been
massacred in 1842, I asked them if they saw any parallels with the current situation: “It is exactly
the same,” said Jigdalik. “Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours.
They pretend to be our friends. They say, ‘We are your friends, we want democracy, we want to
help.’ But they are lying.”
“Since the British went, we’ve had the Russians,” said Mohammad Khan, our host in the village
and the orchard owner. “We saw them off too, but not before they bombed many of our houses.” He
pointed at a ridge full of ruined houses on the hills behind us. “Afghanistan is like the crossroads for
every nation that comes to power,” said Jigdalik. “We do not have the strength to control our own
destiny—our fate is determined by our neighbours.”
“Next it will be China. This is the last days of the Americans.”
“Each state in America is the same size as Afghanistan,” said Jigdalik, nodding in agreement with
his villagers. “If they’d wanted to help us, they could have. But we’re still in a miserable state. All
the money that came in: none of it was given to Afghans—just to their own contractors, or wasted
in corruption. What has been done with all the millions sent here? Can you see any improvements?
Now the moment has passed, their power is slipping.”
“So you think the Taliban will come back?”
“The Taliban?” said Mohammad Khan. “They are here already. At least after dark. Just over that
pass,” he pointed in the direction of Gandamak and Tora Bora. “That is where they are strongest.”
It was nearly 5 pm before the final flaps of naan were cleared away, too late to head on to the site of
the British last stand at Gandamak. Instead, we went to Jalalabad, where we discovered we’d had a
narrow escape: the feast had saved us from walking straight into an ambush. It turned out there had
been a huge battle that day between government forces and villagers supported by the Taliban at
Gandamak, on exactly the site of the British last stand. In Afghanistan, imperial history seems to be
repeating itself with uncanny precision.
The next morning in Jalalabad we went to a jirga, to which the grey beards of Gandamak had come,
under a flag of truce, to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I
heard, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity had helped give an
opening for the return of the once-hated Taliban.
As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the
previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. They promised full
compensation and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before planting
season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked for assistance to grow other crops. Promises
were made; nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the authorities that if they again
tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up,
about the same time as we were arriving at Jigdalik, the villagers were waiting for them, and had
called in the local Taliban to assist. Nine policemen were killed, six vehicles destroyed and 10
hostages taken.
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After the jirga, one of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green
tea. “Last month,” he said, “some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting.
One of them asked me, ‘Why do you hate us?’ I replied, ‘Because you blow down our doors, enter
our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight
back, we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British
left before you. It is just a matter of time.’”
“What did he say to that?”
“He turned to his friend and said, “If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?”
In truth, all the Americans here know their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.”
DELHI DEMENTED
Delhi is losing its sanity. The beautiful wide roads, the great monuments and gardens, the spring
flowers and clean air - where has it all gone?
Ankita Chawla DelhiThe writer, a recent pass-out from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia, Delhi,
is a freelance writer
29 Aug 2010 | HARDNEWS
I love Delhi. I love my city. And have forever defended its case when the sanity of the city has been
in question.
The saving grace was sometimes the 'extremist' weather and how the slightest change in
temperature was felt, such that it made Delhi transparent, despite the heat and the cold. The roads
were always wider, wide enough for the rickety DTCs, cars and cycle rickshaws. The air we could
breathe, it was cleaner. Delhi always seemed to go by slowly, at its own pace.
Chromatically greener, historically wealthier, geographically well-placed, art-ily proactive, and
architecturally blessed -- that is the Delhi I love to defend.
Sadly, I feel that my city is losing it. It's losing its sanity. It's losing its peaceful air to the loud
motor mayhem of millions of cars and SUVs, the infinite jams of slow madness and utter
helplessness with the infinite loss of time, space, rationality. It's losing its cultural inheritance to the
livid, aggressive, crude mannerisms of those who inherit it.
As I write this for Hardnews, Delhi is swarmed by a raging Yamuna, nothing but a static sewage
drain, and dengue is fast becoming an epidemic, with some hospital beds full. Plus, the jammed
streets, and a completely botched up Commonwealth Games, even as slums are floating in dirty
waters. What did they do with the crores spent on cleaning the Yamuna?
A large population of Delhi uses public transport, which includes the killer blue lines, the arrogant
autos and the, as yet limited in reach, messiah Metro. We have over-reaching men and dodgy
women with the strategically hidden safety pins in their hands -- to prick the prickly prick if he tries
to get too close. In peak hours, its back to back, shoulder to shoulder, but not so much as in the
battlefield, here it is the drudgery of everyday employment. While you escape the nauseas gases
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from the vehicles around, the pollution played out in this excruciatingly forced closeness inspires a
different sort of queasiness.
Whether you're inside a DTC or in an auto-rickshaw, it's a lot of pollution. This pollution is not
limited to the air around you. My date with the DTC luckily ended after my second year of college.
As if looking for ways to avoid being pinned down by sweaty, slimy MCP Delhi males in buses
wasn't a task enough, I tumbled from the steps one day. Running through traffic heading towards
me from each direction, shaken, I directed myself to what only seemed like a safer bet to commute
in the capital -- the scheming, cheating, unchanging, three wheeler mafia. Hence, starts my daily
disaster diary.
Delhi autos have been a struggle, despite the best wishes of the Delhi government and the Delhi
Police: from trying to get onto one, to pleading, begging, cajoling the auto-driver to please chalo
bhai, even if you going to the most accessible heart of the city; and if he agrees, so will he put the
revised higher rate meter down please? Then you enter the crazy road rage in a soulless city where
if you're not a sleek Honda today, you're neither significant, nor socially meaningful.
Autos are a great place to observe your city go by. They are a more exclusive mode of public
transport than the bus, but still in the midst of all the action. A typical scenario -- thick muddy
radials to your left, Priyanka Chopra to your right, and the meter which mostly remains a mere
accessory staring at you in the face. On a good day, the eleventh auto that cares to stop for a
passenger, might take you home with or without a bargain. Never mind the early morning
arguments with the drivers, they are closer to the ground, closer to the potholes that make the ride
bumpy, closer to the neighbouring exhaust pipes that make the lungs go crazy and the face sooty.
The green clean Delhi has grown from a smooth drive to a traffic terror zone. Getting out after nine
in the morning and five in the evening are a fool's errand. Even the auto rides cost you more,
because, "But madam there will be a jam that side" (that side refers to anywhere that traffic plies).
Traffic jams are a concept that seem to evade my mediocre common sense. There are cars, there are
the roads, and there are the traffic signals, why do you have to stop then? And with a long trail of
honking, smoking, raging vehicles behind you.
Jams aren't limited to festival seasons anymore. All you can see are cars and cars and cars, and
we're all packed together; airtight. Packed and trapped like sardines, or smoked sardines, if that is
how you like them. With a thousand plus new cars on the roads each day, plus the raging bulls of
SUVs with Haryana and UP nameplates, it's quite a dish out here, a lot of smoke and a lot of
choking fish.
Delhi roads were always the redeeming factor when it came to infrastructure. Wide circular pretty
Lutyen's Delhi was a drivers' paradise. Oh! What a breeze it was zipping through the circles in and
around CP. But those are all things of the past. The last downpour had me circling endlessly
through central and south Delhi, anxiety overriding the murky weather as I wondered if I'll ever get
home. Autowallas were definitely scarcer than a usual Delhi-day, but even pre-paid counters,
refused to get me one. I shelled a depressing amount when dial a cab finally dialled me one, two
hours later. All I could think of on my way home was, these waterlogged lanes, these broken
haggard roads, these schizophrenic traffic lights, these raging bulls -- thank god I couldn't find an
auto.
Revelry and rain notwithstanding, the best roads in the city have been split open for an experiment
that has failed, in most parts. Our naïve government must've really miscalculated a grand
expenditure-oriented project, the BRT. The widest one is now the many and not so wide, and the
10
open expanse of a road is now a lane specific botched wonder. Cars go through the bus lane, and
autos through the bike lane. But I'm not complaining. Hey, when I'm stuck on the BRT for 40
minutes minimum in an auto, service lane or not, I want to get home.
Delhi is forever outdoing itself. The Commonwealth Games are around the corner, and so are the
unfinished, epidemic-infested, roof-leaking, infrastructure projects. So is the rubble, the barricades,
the proof of the Indian politicians' and sports establishment's remarkable inefficiency,
unaccountability and an amazing thick skin. Plus, I care two hoots attitude which reeks of
corruption with every news byte. So where have all the millions of public money gone?
The big picture is that of a shamed government and a disaster waiting to happen. And when the
games begin, we'll either be quarantined as the ones doomed to live in traffic disaster, or Delhi will
have chock-a-bloc show to put up. I'm not sadistic, neither am I pessimistic, just hassled; it will cost
me a lot more to manage an auto then.
But what if there is no audience, no international tourists, no one to watch the game? Not even a
hired crowd, or school kids forced to become cheer leaders?
The population grows manifold. There are people everywhere, all the time. No one is alone in the
city, no one is isolated. The loud Hondas and Skodas and the swanky SUVs, the rickety buses and
the bumble-bee looking autos, carry people all around. These people are of all sorts and ticks. Some
yell, most of them abuse, some fall down the buses and are martyred for the cause of a simple man's
right to a journey back home.
Some (like me) walk for kilometres till a man in grey-blue would have the courtesy to say, "Yes
madam chalenge, lekin assi rupaye" (fine ma'am, I'll go, but It'll be 80 bucks) -- for a distance worth
Rs 30.
So they're all sorts, but what dominates Delhi roads is the rage. India is officially the most
dangerous place to drive in the world with 110m traffic violations a day in Delhi alone. Autos are
smaller than the Santro, so they abuse us, and we are bigger than the bicycle, so if bicycles mess
around, they are done for. Hence, what happens to the classic pedestrian is a chronicle of a Delhi
demented foretold.
ASIA: Banyan
In Kashmir freedom is much farther than a stone’s-throw away
Vale of tears
Aug 26th 2010 From The Economic Print Edition
OWAIS hardly looks like a serious danger to the security of India. Slender and frail, he says he is
17 but seems younger as he basks shyly in the praise of the men gathered in a garden in Srinagar,
summer capital of Indian-ruled Kashmir. But he is proud to show off the scars and stitch-marks that
cover his belly. He has just emerged from hospital, lucky to be alive. He took a bullet in an antiIndian protest on August 2nd in Kupwara, some 90km (56 miles) away. His uncle died that day, one
of more than 60 people, mostly young, killed in a wave of unrest that began on June 11th. Owais
and those like him have presented the Indian government with a new and perhaps insoluble
Kashmir crisis.
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They are self-proclaimed “stone-pelters”, named after their weapon of choice. Well-organised—on
Facebook, to a large extent—the pelters emerge at short notice to throw stones at police stations and
other targets, and get shot at. In response to their protests much of the Kashmir valley that
surrounds Srinagar has been shut down—both by hartals, or strikes, called by separatist leaders, and
by government-imposed curfews. On most days, Srinagar is a ghost town of shuttered shops and
empty streets. Paramilitaries point their rifles out from bunkers or lounge on street corners, idly
tapping their lathis (heavy batons) on their padded legs. On the one or two designated “shopping
days” each week, the traffic is gridlocked.
Setting the hartal “calendar” is Syed Ali Shah Geelani, an 81-year-old separatist leader. It is in his
garden that Owais waits. When the old man emerges, he kisses the boy on both cheeks and the
forehead, hugs him tight, and poses for a photograph with him. Mr Geelani seems a strange icon for
a movement of teen-aged Facebookers. Few share his Islamist pro-Pakistan ideology. And many
still seem to be ignoring his edict to give up throwing stones and stick to peaceful protest. But,
unlike other political leaders, Mr Geelani has never wavered in his refusal to compromise with
Indian rule. Sheer, cussed consistency has earned him a pivotal role. So have India’s past tactics to
divide its opponents. More moderate separatists, who have engaged in “dialogue” with India, have
had nothing to show for it, and ended discredited and compromised. This seems less clever than it
did at the time. Now Mr Geelani ignores a call for talks from India’s prime minister, Manmohan
Singh.
This is the third successive summer of big anti-Indian protests. For India, they have marred a
victory of sorts. The two-decade-long insurgency, backed by Pakistan, which has never renounced
its claim to all of Kashmir, is almost defeated. “Infiltration” across the “line of control” dividing
Indian and Pakistani bits of Kashmir, has fallen. The conflict is killing far fewer, though still 375
last year by one count, out of more than 40,000 killed since 1989 by the army’s reckoning, and
100,000 by the separatists’. When turnout in an election for the state government in 2008 reached
an unprecedented 60%, many Indians misread this as belated Kashmiri acquiescence in Indian rule.
Boys like Owais neither trained in camps in Pakistan, nor are they stooges of the militants and spy
agencies that have fuelled the war. They have grown up knowing nothing but insurgency. They may
fear the insurgents and dislike their methods. But they sympathise with their goal. They see Indian
troops in Kashmir as an often brutal occupying force. Why does Owais protest? “We are
oppressed.” What will it achieve? “Azaadi!” (Freedom!).
That is not on the cards, even if it were clear what it meant. Of the five parts of the former “princely
state” of Jammu & Kashmir, divided by the first India-Pakistan war in 1947-48, two are in Pakistan
(and a bit of one was ceded to China by Pakistan—illegitimately, says India). Of the three bits in
India, Hindu-majority parts of Jammu, along with Ladakh, with many Buddhists, would, given a
choice, probably stay in India. Only the Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley and adjacent parts of
Jammu seem hellbent on secession. In the valley, politicians dream of an independent country
linked to old Central Asian trading routes, looking anywhere but south over the mountains to Delhi.
Dream on. India has responded to the unrest in time-worn fashion: with extra troops, live bullets,
the detention of separatist leaders who might lead big processions and, now, search-and-cordon
operations to lock up suspected stone-pelters. Mr Geelani says protests will continue until India
accepts the “disputed” status of Kashmir. India will never do that: the official line remains that
Jammu & Kashmir, its only Muslim-majority state, is integral to its national identity: “the idea of
India”. It will not tolerate the circulation of maps (in most cases) that show Pakistan-controlled
Kashmir as, well, Pakistan-controlled.
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Finding India’s collective conscience
So, it is most likely that these protests will end as so many before them did: with India making no
more than token concessions. Fed up with the disruption, worried about keeping children out of
school, and appalled at the loss of so many young lives, Kashmiris will sooner or later have to go
back to life as usual, nursing their anger to take it out another day.
Eventually, however, India may have to contemplate a political solution, for two reasons. One is
that small cracks are already appearing in the national consensus behind its repressive policies. So
long as it was fighting Pakistan, even liberal Indian opinion seemed ready to tolerate a heavy hand
in Kashmir. Less so now that its troops are killing children armed only with stones. Secondly,
without change, the cycle of protests will resume. And at some point they will become so big that
they can only be contained by killing more of its citizens than a democracy can stand. Owais and
his classmates may be misguided, but they fear nothing, and “martyrdom” least of all.
A High-Tech Titan Plagued by Potholes
By VIKAS BAJAJ
August 25, 2010 The New York Times
PUNE, India — Call it India’s engineering paradox. Despite this nation’s rise as a technology titan
with some of the world’s best engineering minds, India’s full economic potential is stifled by
potholed roadways, collapsing bridges, rickety railroads and a power grid so unreliable that many
modern office buildings run their own diesel generators to make sure the lights and computers stay
on.
It is not for want of money. The Indian government aims to spend $500 billion on infrastructure by
2012 and twice that amount in the following five years.
The problem is a dearth of engineers — or at least the civil engineers with the skill and expertise to
make sure those ambitious projects are done on time and up to specifications.
Civil engineering was once an elite occupation in India, not only during the British colonial era of
carving roads and laying train tracks, but also long after independence as part of the civil service.
These days, though, India’s best and brightest know there is more money and prestige in writing
software for foreign customers than in building roadways for their nation.
And so it is that 26-year-old Vishal Mandvekar, despite his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering,
now writes software code for a Japanese automaker.
Mr. Mandvekar works in an air-conditioned building with Silicon Valley amenities here in Pune, a
boomtown about 100 miles east of Mumbai. But getting to and from work requires him to spend a
13
vexing hour on his motorcycle, navigating the crowded, cratered roads between home and his office
a mere nine miles away.
During the monsoon season, the many potholes “are filled with water and you can’t tell how deep
they are until you hit one,” he said.
Fixing all that, though, will remain some other engineer’s problem.
Mr. Mandvekar earns a salary of about $765 a month. That is more than three times what he made
during his short stint for a commercial contractor, supervising construction of lodging for a Sikh
religious group, after he earned his degree in 2006.
“It was fun doing that,” he said of the construction job. “My only dissatisfaction was the pay
package.”
Young Indians’ preference for software over steel and concrete poses an economic conundrum for
India. Its much-envied information technology industry generates tens of thousands of relatively
well-paying jobs every year. But that lure also continues the exodus of people qualified to build the
infrastructure it desperately needs to improve living conditions for the rest of its one billion people
— and to bolster the sort of industries that require good highways and railroads more than highspeed Internet links to the West.
In 1990, civil engineering programs had the capacity to enroll 13,500 students, while computer
science and information technology departments could accept but 12,100. Yet by 2007, after a
period of incredible growth in India’s software outsourcing business, computer science and other
information technology programs ballooned to 193,500; civil engineering climbed to only 22,700.
Often, those admitted to civil engineering programs were applicants passed over for highly
competitive computer science tracks.
There are various other reasons that India has struggled to build a modern infrastructure, including
poor planning, political meddling and outright corruption. But the shortage of civil engineers is an
important factor. In 2008, the World Bank estimated that India would need to train three times as
many civil engineers as it does now to meet its infrastructure needs.
The government has “kick-started a massive infrastructure development program without checking
on the manpower supply,” said Atul Bhobe, managing director of S. N. Bhobe & Associates, a civil
engineering design company. “The government is willing to spend $1 trillion,” he said, “but you
don’t have the wherewithal to spend that kind of money.”
Sujay Kalele, an executive with Kolte-Patil, a Pune-based developer of residential and commercial
buildings, said the company’s projects could be completed as much as three months faster if it could
find enough skilled engineers.
“If we need 10 good-quality civil engineers, we may get four or five,” Mr. Kalele said
Beyond construction delays and potholes, experts say, the engineering shortfall poses outright
dangers. Last year, for example, an elevated span that was part of New Delhi’s much-lauded metro
rail system collapsed, killing six people and injuring more than a dozen workers. A government
report partly blamed faulty design for the accident; metro officials said they would now require an
additional review of all designs by independent engineers.
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Vishal Mandvekar, 26, a civil engineer who writes software code for a Japanese automaker, says it
takes an hour to travel the nine cratered miles of road between home and his office in Pune.
Acknowledging India’s chronic shortage of civil engineers and other specialists, the national
government is building 30 universities and considering letting foreign institutions set up campuses
in the country.
“India has embarked on its largest education expansion program since independence,” the prime
minister, Manmohan Singh, said in a speech last year in Washington.
But the government may have only so much influence on what students study. And while the Indian
government runs or finances some of the country’s most prestigious universities, like the Indian
Institutes of Technology, fast-growing private institutions now train more students. About threequarters of engineering students study at private colleges.
Moreover, many civil engineers who earn degrees in the discipline never work in the profession or
— like Mr. Mandvekar — leave it soon after they graduate to take better-paying jobs in information
technology, management consulting or financial services.
Industry experts say a big obstacle to attracting more civil engineers is the paltry entry-level pay.
The field was considered relatively lucrative until the 1990s, when it was eclipsed by the pay in
commercial software engineering.
Ravi Sinha, a civil engineering professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, says
professionals in his field with five years of experience make about as much as their counterparts at
information technology companies. But those starting can make as little as half the pay of their
technology peers.
That is partly because of the lead set by government departments, where salaries for civil engineers
are often fixed according to nearly immutable civil service formulas.
And in the private sector, developers and construction companies have often been reluctant to pay
more and invest in the training of young engineers, because executives believe that new graduates
do not contribute enough to merit more money or that they will leave for other jobs anyway.
“If companies take a holistic view,” Mr. Sinha said, “they have the opportunity to develop the next
generation’s leaders.”
In fact, a construction boom in recent years has led to higher salaries in private industry. Kolte-Patil
now pays junior engineers $425 a month, nearly twice the level of five years ago.
Larsen & Toubro, a Mumbai-based engineering company that builds airports, power projects and
other infrastructure, offers Build India Scholarships for students who want to pursue a master’s
degree in construction technology and management. The program produces 50 to 60 graduates a
year, who are hired by the company.
“You don’t get the best quality in civil engineers, because today the first choice for students is other
branches” of engineering, said K. P. Raghavan, an executive vice president in L.& T.’s construction
division. “We are compensating with lots of training
15
India Tries Using Cash Bonuses to Slow Birthrates
By JIM YARDLEY
Saimah Khwaja contributed research from Maharashtra State.
August 21, 2010 The New York Times
SATARA, India — Sunita Laxman Jadhav is a door-to-door saleswoman who sells waiting. She
sweeps along muddy village lanes in her nurse’s white sari, calling on newly married couples with
an unblushing proposition: Wait two years before getting pregnant, and the government will thank
you.
It also will pay you.
“I want to tell you about our honeymoon package,” began Ms. Jadhav, an auxiliary nurse, during a
recent house call on a new bride in this farming region in the state of Maharashtra. Ms. Jadhav
explained that the district government would pay 5,000 rupees, or about $106, if the couple waited
to have children. Waiting, she promised, would allow them time to finish their schooling or to save
money.
Waiting also would allow India more time to curb a rapidly growing population that threatens to
turn its demography from a prized asset into a crippling burden. With almost 1.2 billion people,
India is disproportionately young; roughly half the population is younger than 25. This
“demographic dividend” is one reason some economists predict that India could surpass China in
economic growth rates within five years. India will have a young, vast work force while a rapidly
aging China will face the burden of supporting an older population.
But if youth is India’s advantage, the sheer size of its population poses looming pressures on
resources and presents an enormous challenge for an already inefficient government to expand
schooling and other services. In coming decades, India is projected to surpass China as the world’s
most populous nation, and the critical uncertainty is just how populous it will be. Estimates range
from 1.5 billion to 1.9 billion people, and Indian leaders recognize that that must be avoided.
Yet unlike authoritarian China, where the governing Communist Party long ago instituted the
world’s strictest population policy, India is an unruly democracy where the central government has
set population targets but where state governments carry out separate efforts to limit the birthrate.
While some states have reacted to population fears with coercion, forbidding parents with more
than two children from holding local office, or disqualifying government workers from certain
benefits if they have larger families, other states have done little.
Meanwhile, many national politicians have been wary of promoting population control ever since
an angry public backlash against a scandal over forced vasectomies during the 1970s. It was
considered a sign of progress that India’s Parliament debated “population stabilization” this month
after largely ignoring the issue for years.
“It’s already late,” said Sabu Padmadas, a demographer with the University of Southampton who
has worked extensively in India. “It’s definitely high time for India to act.”
The program here in Satara is a pilot program — one of several initiatives across the country that
have used a softer approach — trying to slow down population growth by challenging deeply
ingrained rural customs. Experts say far too many rural women wed as teenagers, usually in
16
arranged marriages, and then have babies in quick succession — a pattern that exacerbates poverty
and spurs what demographers call “population momentum” by bunching children together. In
Satara, local health officials have led campaigns to curb teenage weddings, as well as promoting the
“honeymoon package” of cash bonuses and encouraging the use of contraceptives so that couples
wait to start a family.
“This is how population stabilization will come,” said Rohini Lahane, an administrator in the
district health office.
India averages about 2.6 children per family, far below what it was a half century ago, yet still
above the rate of 2.1 that would stabilize the population. Many states with higher income and
education levels are already near or below an average of two children per family. Yet the poorest
and most populous states, notably Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, average almost four children per family
and have some of the lowest levels of female literacy.
An educated girl is your best contraception,” said Dr. Amarjit Singh, executive director of the
National Population Stabilization Fund, a quasi-governmental advisory agency. He said that
roughly half of India’s future excess population growth was expected to come from its six poorest
states.
Maharashtra is not in that category, but its population is still growing too fast. A farming district
ringed with green hills, Satara has three million people. A 1997 survey found that almost a quarter
of all women were marrying before the legal age of 18, while roughly 45 percent of all infants and
young children in the district were malnourished.
In response, the district began a campaign to reduce the number of child brides and more than
27,000 parents signed a written pledge agreeing not to allow their daughters to wed before age 18.
Within a few years, the marrying age rose and the rate of child malnutrition dropped. Today,
officials say about 15 percent of children are malnourished. But if couples were marrying a little
later, they were usually producing a child within the first year of marriage, followed by another
soon after. So in August 2009, Satara introduced its honeymoon package as an incentive to delay
childbirths. So far, 2,366 couples have enrolled.
“The response has been good,” said Dr. Archana Khade, a physician at the primary health care
center in the village of Kahner. “But the money is a secondary thing. It’s about the other things, for
better future prospects.”
Now, health officials in other states have come to Satara to study the program. Every day, auxiliary
nurses like Ms. Jadhav canvass villages to disseminate information about family planning and
solicit new couples for the honeymoon package. In India, a new couple usually resides with the
family of the groom and it is the older generation that represents Ms. Jadhav’s biggest challenge.
“The first time I go, they always defy you,” she said. “They say, ‘No, we don’t want to do that.’ The
older generation believes that the moment a couple gets married, they want a baby in their house.”
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Jadhav and Dr. Khade made their pitch to a 20-year-old bride, who
stared silently down as her mother-in-law hovered in an adjacent room of their farmhouse.
“You can delay your first pregnancy,” Dr. Khade said. “Have you talked to your husband about
family planning or when you want to have a child?”
17
“He doesn’t want to have children early,” the bride answered, almost in a whisper.
“Do you think your in-laws will be happy with your decision?” Dr. Khade asked.
The young bride was silent. Her in-laws did not know that she was already using birth-control pills.
Many experts emphasize that easing India’s population burden will require a holistic response
centered on improving health services and teaching about a full range of contraception.
Many rural women know little about family planning, and female sterilization is the most
commonly used form of birth control. During the 1990s, officials in the state of Andhra Pradesh
advocated sterilization of mothers after a second child, an approach that brought a sharp drop in the
birthrate but was criticized as coercive in some cases.
In Satara, the birthrate has fallen to about 1.9 children per family, partly because of the honeymoon
package, with many women opting for sterilization after their second child. Problems persist, such
as a sharp gender imbalance in Satara and many other regions of India because of a cultural bias
toward having sons. With more pressure to limit families to two children, female fetuses are often
aborted after a couple sees an ultrasound.
Yet the idea of waiting appeals to many women. One new bride, Reshma Yogesh Sawand, 25, said
she and her husband wanted to wait to have a child — and only one — in order to save money and
move to a bigger city.
“If I have just one,” said Ms. Sawand, who is taking a computer course and has a job selling
insurance policies, “I can take better care of it.”
FOCUS C-DAC
A guiding role
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing is conducting workshops on cyber security to
boost awareness of a cross-section of people.
Y. MALLIKARJUN
Volume 27 - Issue 18 Aug. 28, 2010 FRONTLINE
“I USED to give my name while interacting with others in open chat rooms earlier. But now I give a
fancy name, which is a cool thing these days,” said Hari Kumar J., a Standard XII student of
Kendriya Vidyalaya, CRPF, Barkas, in the Old City of Hyderabad.
He is one of the thousands of students who were made aware of the importance of cyber security,
thanks to the “Information Security Education & Awareness” (ISEA) programme launched by the
Department of Information Technology (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology)
to educate students, teachers, parents, housewives, government employees and others through
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workshops. While the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Hyderabad, was
entrusted with the task of executing the ISEA programme, several other institutions, such as the
International Institutes of Information Technology and universities, have been roped in to deal with
both awareness and educational issues, including introducing relevant courses on the subject. Some
M.Tech courses and PhD studies in information security are sponsored by the department.
Hari Kumar said he also learnt what “social engineering” was. “Social engineers are those who seek
and acquire personal details after gaining your acquaintance through online chatting. In most cases,
we give the details unwittingly. That's why we have been asked not to post anything in chat rooms,”
he said.
With the Internet becoming a tool for terrorists, hackers, fraudsters, criminals and disgruntled
employees to inflict economic and social damage, cyber security has become synonymous with
national security. Since it is the responsibility of every citizen to promote cyber security, the
awareness programme seeks to address the information security needs of individuals and
organisations, including businesses and Ministries.
With about 4,000 malwares flooding the Internet on a daily basis, the awareness campaign seeks to
update knowledge of participants on issues such as Internet ethics, password threats, online
predators and computer viruses. As the list of stakeholders is limitless, the awareness campaign
adopted a coordinated approach involving various organisations, including the National Association
of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the Computer Society of India and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs).
The participants at the workshops learn several aspects of cyber security, covering a wide gamut of
issues right from observing Internet ethics to handling suspicious e-mails. For instance, they are
told about the various techniques hackers use to retrieve passwords. Hence, for a password to be
strong, it should not have dictionary words but must have a combination of alphabets, numbers and
characters. It must contain both upper- and lower-case characters and should not be based on
personal information such as the names of family members or pets. The password has to be changed
regularly and different passwords have to be used for different logins. The “Remember Password”
feature of applications should never be used.
After attending one of the workshops organised by C-DAC in Hyderabad, Suma, a teacher at
Kendriya Vidyalaya at Golconda in the city, has been able to bar students from logging onto social
networking sites and indulging in chatting while in school. Previously, students used to go to such
sites clandestinely but now a parental control bar has been introduced to block them, she said.
Besides, the workshop taught participants how to prevent misuse of one's credit card while making
online transactions.
As children are highly receptive to ideas, they need to be made to understand the pros and cons of
Internet use, especially the importance of Internet ethics and the possibilities of enhancing their
knowledge by seeking correct information. The workshops feature cartoon characters, quizzes and
comic books so that they would be interesting to children.
In the workshops for school students, it was found that 75 per cent of them were aware of aspects
such as social networking and chatting but had no inkling of what activities were likely to lead them
or their families into trouble. However, after attending the workshop, they realised the importance
of constantly updating anti-virus software, scanning copied or downloaded files, avoiding sharing
personal information and passwords with others.
19
The effectiveness of such workshops – 122 have been organised so far all over the country – was
revealed in surveys conducted in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Jammu. It was found that before
children attended workshops on cyber security-related issues 92 per cent of them were willing to
provide personal details while chatting online; the figure came down to a mere 8 per cent after they
had attended workshops.
Similarly, in the pre-workshop survey, 27 per cent of children said they would inform elders before
providing personal details online; this percentage went up to 73 per cent in the post-workshop
survey. Before participating in workshops, only 4 per cent of the children surveyed said they would
take their parents' permission before meeting a person with whom they had chatted online. The
figure zoomed to 82 per cent post-workshop.
Another important spin-off of the workshops was the desire of the participants to educate and
motivate others on the need to observe cyber security. So far, workshops have covered as many as
20,000 students and 5,000 teachers across the country. The focus of upcoming workshops will be
small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the general public and NGOs, for instance, those running
computer service centres in rural areas.
Parental guidance
C-DAC also invited parents to attend a part of the workshops conducted at schools because they
will not be in a position to guide their children on the do's and don'ts of the cyber world if they
themselves are not familiar with Internet usage, its policies and ethics.
Parents were repeatedly told that they ought to have an open mind while dealing with their children.
A friendly atmosphere at home will enable kids to discuss freely with their parents any Internet
material that troubled them. Parents, in turn, could teach them about the extent of the information
needed to be taken from the Internet and the importance of licensed contents. Parents were told that
observing cyber security protocols was similar to taking general security measures in day-to-day
life; for instance, not replying to or downloading anything from mails from unknown sources was
simply like ignoring strangers.
To a question in a pre-workshop survey whether parents guided their children when they used the
Internet, 89 per cent replied in the negative. But after attending the workshop, 85 per cent answered
in the affirmative.
While individuals faced cyber threats such as e-mail snooping, organisations encountered problems
such as data theft and “distributed denial of service”, a kind of cyber attack in which various
computers are used to target a particular server or network. With the Internet and the intranet
playing a major role in communications, employees who are not aware of security aspects could
cause losses to their company/organisation. During the workshops for employees, cyber attacks
were simulated and the countermeasures needed to prevent them were outlined.
Ch. A.S. Murty, of C-DAC and coordinator of the ISEA programme, pointed out that cyber attacks
basically took place because operating systems were vulnerable. “For instance, it was found that
one popular operating system had more than 60,000 vulnerabilities. Attackers understand these
vulnerabilities and write exploits to steal data,” he said.
According to information posted on the website of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team
(CERT-In), as many as 3,678 Indian websites had been defaced from the beginning of this year up
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to May 31 – 2,223 .in sites, 1,177 .com sites, 167 .org sites, 94 .net sites and 17 others. Last year,
more than 6,000 websites were defaced.
In the light of such attacks on websites and as part of the ISEA programme, C-DAC Hyderabad is
conducting one-week or two-week training courses for Indian government information technology
staff on cyber security, its risks and the countermeasures. The programme, titled “e-Suraksha – A
Practical Approach in Network Security”, covers issues such as network security concepts,
vulnerability analysis, attacks and management, and the role of cryptography in network security.
Portal on security
As part of its endeavour to create information security awareness among various sections, the
Department of Information Technology has created a portal (www.infosecawareness.in). The part
dealing with children gives details about ethics and guidelines. Similar useful tips are available for
parents, students, government employees, NGOs, women and system administrators. Demonstration
videos that could help in the installation of various anti-virus, anti-spyware software and tools are
also available. C-DAC has developed brief flash and cartoon movies for children, which can be
downloaded from its portal.
The section on how to “secure your PC” gives guidelines regarding updating the operating system
regularly to prevent malware coming into the computer, installing up-to-date anti-virus software
and firewalls and the need to use strong passwords.
Internet addiction
The section on Internet addiction says Internet addiction disorder (IAD) or Internet overuse or
problematic computer use or pathological computer use is excessive computer use that interferes
with daily life. It points out that because of the engaging nature of Internet communications and
interactive games, many children and teenagers have trouble keeping track of time when they are
online.
Some of the psychological symptoms of those addicted to the Internet are having a sense of wellbeing or euphoria while at the computer; inability to stop the activity; craving to spend more and
more time at the computer; neglecting family and friends; feeling empty, depressed and irritable
when not at the computer; lying to family and friends about activities; and problems at school or
work.
In addition to the awareness programmes, C-DAC conducts six-month training courses for students
interested in cyber security issues. A special course on certification in networking is being offered
in collaboration with the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad, according to D.K.
Jain, Director, C-DAC, Hyderabad.
Students interested in joining the course, which has an intake of 20 for each batch, can appear for
the common entrance test conducted across the country. Four batches have been covered under the
certificate course so far, and C-DAC ensured placements for all the candidates who passed. In
addition, it was in talks with NASSCOM and the cyber crime wings of the police department to
take up awareness programmes and conduct cyber security weeks in various cities and towns to
educate people on cyber fraud. The aim is to reach out to a larger section of people.
With the objective of generating information security awareness among Indian citizens and to
enable them to use cyber space safely, C-DAC has brought out posters, brochures, a cyber security
21
guide book, an open source cyber security tool kit for home users, schoolchildren and housewives.
It also extends help through its web portal to anybody facing problems such as cyber attacks. CDAC has also designed several tools and products to contain cyber attacks on individual and
networked personal computers. These are available at nominal prices.
Cyber safety weeks
Ch. A.S. Murty said that C-DAC in association with police departments would conduct cyber safety
weeks in various metropolitan cities for the general public. NASSCOM and the Data Security
Council of India will also participate in the programme. Following a pilot workshop in Chandigarh
for SMEs in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), it was planned to
conduct such events all over the country. National quiz programmes and painting/drawing contests
for students are also proposed to be held across the country.
China and India
Contest of the century
As China and India rise in tandem, their relationship will shape world politics. Shame they do not
get on better
Aug 19th 2010 From The Economist Print Edition
A HUNDRED years ago it was perhaps already possible to discern the rising powers whose
interaction and competition would shape the 20th century. The sun that shone on the British empire
had passed midday. Vigorous new forces were flexing their muscles on the global stage, notably
America, Japan and Germany. Their emergence brought undreamed-of prosperity; but also carnage
on a scale hitherto unimaginable.
Now digest the main historical event of this week: China has officially become the world’s secondbiggest economy, overtaking Japan. In the West this has prompted concerns about China overtaking
the United States sooner than previously thought. But stand back a little farther, apply a more Asian
perspective, and China’s longer-term contest is with that other recovering economic behemoth:
India. These two Asian giants, which until 1800 used to make up half the world economy, are not,
like Japan and Germany, mere nation states. In terms of size and population, each is a continent—
and for all the glittering growth rates, a poor one.
Not destiny, but still pretty important
This uncharted territory that should be seen in terms of decades, not years. Demography is not
destiny. Nor for that matter are long-range economic forecasts from investment banks. Two decades
ago Japan was seen as the main rival to America. Countries as huge and complicated as China can
underachieve or collapse under their own contradictions. In the short term its other foreign
relationships may matter more, even in Asia: there may, for instance, be a greater risk of conflict
between rising China and an ageing but still powerful Japan. Western powers still wield
considerable influence.
22
So caveats abound. Yet as the years roll forward, the chances are that it will increasingly come
down once again to the two Asian giants facing each other over a disputed border (see article). How
China and India manage their own relationship will determine whether similar mistakes to those
that scarred the 20th century disfigure this one.
Neither is exactly comfortable in its skin. China’s leaders like to portray Western hype about their
country’s rise as a conspiracy—a pretext either to offload expensive global burdens onto the Middle
Kingdom or to encircle it. Witness America’s alliances with Japan and South Korea, its legal
obligation to help Taiwan defend itself and its burgeoning friendships with China’s rivals, notably
India but also now Vietnam.
This paranoia is overdone. Why shouldn’t more be asked from a place that, as well as being the
world’s most-populous country, is already its biggest exporter, its biggest car market, its biggest
carbon-emitter and its biggest consumer of energy (a rank China itself, typically, contests)? As for
changing the balance of power, the People’s Liberation Army’s steady upgrading of its
technological capacity, its building of a blue-water navy and its fast-developing skills in outer space
and cyberspace do not yet threaten American supremacy, despite alarm expressed this week about
the opacity of the PLA’s plans in a Pentagon report. But China’s military advances do unnerve
neighbours and regional rivals. Recent weeks have seen China fall out with South Korea (as well as
the West) over how to respond to the sinking in March, apparently by a North Korean torpedo, of a
South Korean navy ship. And the Beijing regime has been at odds with South-East Asian countries
over its greedy claim to almost all of the South China Sea.
India, too, is unnerved. Its humiliation at Chinese hands in a brief war nearly 50 years ago still
rankles. A tradition of strategic mistrust of China is deeply ingrained. India sees China as working
to undermine it at every level: by pre-empting it in securing supplies of the energy both must
import; through manoeuvres to block a permanent seat for India on the United Nations Security
Council; and, above all, through friendships with its smaller South Asian neighbours, notably
Pakistan. India also notes that China, after decades of setting their border quarrels to one side in the
interests of the broader relationship, has in recent years hardened its position on the disputes in
Tibet and Kashmir that in 1962 led to war. This unease has pushed India strategically closer to
America—most notably in a controversial deal on nuclear co-operation.
Autocrats in Beijing are contemptuous of India for its messy, indecisive democracy. But they must
see it as a serious long-term rival—especially if it continues to tilt towards America. As recently as
the early 1990s, India was as rich, in terms of national income per head. China then hurtled so far
ahead that it seemed India could never catch up. But India’s long-term prospects now look stronger.
While China is about to see its working-age population shrink (see article), India is enjoying the
sort of bulge in manpower which brought sustained booms elsewhere in Asia. It is no longer
inconceivable that its growth could outpace China’s for a considerable time. It has the advantage of
democracy—at least as a pressure valve for discontent. And India’s army is, in numbers, second
only to China’s and America’s: it has 100,000 soldiers in disputed Arunachal Pradesh (twice as
many as America will soon have in Iraq). And because India does not threaten the West, it has
powerful friends both on its own merits and as a counterweight to China.
A settlement in time
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The prospect of renewed war between India and China is, for now, something that disturbs the sleep
only of virulent nationalists in the Chinese press and retired colonels in Indian think-tanks.
Optimists prefer to hail the $60 billion in trade the two are expected to do with each other this year
(230 times the total in 1990). But the 20th century taught the world that blatantly foreseeable
conflicts of interest can become increasingly foreseeable wars with unforeseeably dreadful
consequences. Relying on prosperity and more democracy in China to sort things out thus seems
unwise. Two things need to be done.
First, the slow progress towards a border settlement needs to resume. The main onus here is on
China. It has the territory it really wants and has maintained its claim to Arunachal Pradesh only as
a bargaining chip. It has, after all, solved intractable boundary quarrels with Russia, Mongolia,
Myanmar and Vietnam. Surely it cannot be so difficult to treat with India?
That points to a second, deeper need, one that it took Europe two world wars to come close to
solving: emerging Asia’s lack of serious institutions to bolster such deals. A regional forum run by
the Association of South-East Asian Nations is rendered toothless by China’s aversion to
multilateral diplomacy. Like any bully, it prefers to pick off its antagonists one by one. It would be
better if China and India—and Japan—could start building regional forums to channel their
inevitable rivalries into collaboration and healthy competition.
Globally, the rules-based system that the West set up in the second half of the 20th century brought
huge benefits to emerging powers. But it reflects an out-of-date world order, not the current global
balance, let alone a future one. China and India should be playing a bigger role in shaping the rules
that will govern the 21st century. That requires concessions from the West. But it also requires
commitment to a rules-based international order from China and India. A serious effort to solve
their own disagreements is a good place to start.
India and China
A Himalayan rivalry
Asia’s two giants are still unsure what to make of each other. But as they grow, they are coming
closer—for good and bad
Aug 19th 2010 | From The Economist Print Edition
Beijing, Delhi and Tawang MEMORIES of a war between India and China are still vivid in the
Tawang valley, a lovely, cloud-blown place high on the south-eastern flank of the Himalayas. They
are nurtured first by the Indian army, humiliated in 1962 when the People’s Liberation Army swept
into Tawang from next-door Tibet. India now has three army corps—about 100,000 troops—in its
far north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which includes Tawang.
With another corps in reserve, and a few Sukhoi fighter planes deployed last year to neighbouring
Assam, they are a meaty border force, unlike their hapless predecessors. In 1962 many Indian
troops were sent shivering to the front in light cotton uniforms issued for Punjab’s fiery plains. In a
weeklong assault the Chinese seized much of Arunachal, as well as a slab of Kashmir in the western
Himalayas, and killed 3,000 Indian officers and men. Outside Tawang’s district headquarters a
roadside memorial, built in the local Buddhist style, commemorates these dead. At a famous battle
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site, below the 14,000-foot pass that leads into Tawang, army convoys go slow, and salute their
ghosts.
In wayside villages of solid white houses fluttering with coloured prayer-flags, China’s two-week
occupation of Tawang is also remembered. Local peasants, aged 60 and more but with youthful
Tibetan features, light-brown and creased by the wind, recall playing Sho (Tibetan Mahjong) with
the invaders. Many say they remember them fondly: the Chinese, they note, helped get in the wheat
harvest that year. “They were little men, but they were always ready to help. We had no problem
with them,” says Mem Nansey, an aged potato farmer. The Chinese withdrew to Tibet, their
superiority established but their supply lines overstretched, barely a fortnight after they had come.
“We weren’t sorry to see the back of them, either,” says Mr Nansey, concerned, it seems, that no
one should doubt his loyalty to Delhi, 1,500km (930 miles) to the west.
His ambivalence is widely shared. China and India, repositories of 40% of the world’s people, are
often unsure what to make of each other. Since re-establishing diplomatic ties in 1976, after a postwar pause, they and their relationship have in many ways been transformed. The 1962 war was an
act of Chinese aggression most obviously springing from China’s desire for western Aksai Chin, a
lofty plain linking Xinjiang to Tibet. But its deeper causes included a famine in China and
economic malaise in both countries. China and India are now the world’s fastest-growing big
economies, however, and in a year or two, when India overtakes Japan on a purchasing-powerparity basis, they will be the world’s second- and third-biggest. And as they grow, Asia’s giants
have come closer.
Their two-way trade is roaring: only $270m in 1990, it is expected to exceed $60 billion this year.
They are also tentatively co-operating, for their mutual enrichment, in other ways: for example, by
co-ordinating their bids for the African oil supplies that both rely on. Given their contrasting
economic strengths—China’s in manufacturing, India’s in services—some see an opportunity for
much deeper co-operation. There is even a word for this vision, “Chindia”. On important
international issues, notably climate-change policy and world trade, their alignment is already
imposing.
Their leaders naturally talk up these pluses: at the summit of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India,
China) in Brasília in April, for example, and during celebrations in Beijing earlier this year to
commemorate the 60th anniversary of India’s recognition of the People’s Republic. “India and
China are not in competition,” India’s sage-like prime minister, Manmohan Singh, often says.
“There is enough economic space for us both.”
China’s president, Hu Jintao, says the same. And no doubt both want to believe it. The booms in
their countries have already moved millions out of poverty, especially in China, which is far ahead
on almost every such measure of progress (and also dismissive of the notion that India could ever
rival it). A return to confrontation, besides hugely damaging the improved image of both countries,
would plainly jeopardise this movement forward. That is why the secular trend in China-India
relations is positive.
Yet China and India are in many ways rivals, not Asian brothers, and their relationship is by any
standard vexed—as recent quarrelling has made abundantly plain. If you then consider that they are,
despite their mutual good wishes, old enemies, bad neighbours and nuclear powers, and have two of
the world’s biggest armies—with almost 4m troops between them—this may seem troubling.
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Forget Chindia
There are many caveats to the recent improvement in their relationship. As the world’s oil wells run
dry, many—including sober analysts in both countries—foresee China-India rivalry redrawn as a
cut-throat contest for an increasingly scarce resource. The two oil-gluggers’ recent co-operation on
energy was, after all, as unusual as it was tentative. More often, Chinese state-backed energy firms
compete with all-comers, for Sudanese oil and Burmese gas, and win.
Rivalry over gas supplies is a bigger concern for Indian policymakers. They fear China would be
more able to “capture” gas by building massive pipelines overnight. Water is already an object of
contention, given that several of the big rivers of north India, including the Brahmaputra, on which
millions depend, rise in Tibet. China recently announced that it is building a dam on the
Brahmaputra, which it calls the Yarlung Tsangpo, exacerbating an old Indian fear that the Beijing
regime means to divert the river’s waters to Chinese farmers.
As for Chindia, it can seem almost too naive to bother about. Over 70% of India’s exports to China
by value are raw materials, chiefly iron ore, bespeaking a colonial-style trade relationship that is
hugely favourable to China. A proliferating range of Chinese non-tariff barriers to Indian
companies, which India grumbles about, is a small part of this. The fault lies chiefly with India’s
uncompetitive manufacturing. It is currently cheaper, an Indian businessman says ruefully, to export
plastic granules to China and then import them again in bucket-form, than it is to make buckets in
India.
This is a source of tension. India’s great priority is to create millions of jobs for its young, bulging
and little-skilled population, which will be possible only if it makes huge strides in manufacturing.
Similarly, if China trails India in IT services at present, its recent investments in the industry
suggest it does not plan to lag for long.
Yet there is another, more obvious bone of contention, which exacerbates all these others and lies at
the root of them: the 4,000km border that runs between the two countries. Nearly half a century
after China’s invasion, it remains largely undefined and bitterly contested.
The basic problem is twofold. In the undefined northern part of the frontier India claims an area the
size of Switzerland, occupied by China, for its region of Ladakh. In the eastern part, China claims
an Indian-occupied area three times bigger, including most of Arunachal. This 890km stretch of
frontier was settled in 1914 by the governments of Britain and Tibet, which was then in effect
independent, and named the McMahon Line after its creator, Sir Henry McMahon, foreign secretary
of British-ruled India. For China—which was afforded mere observer status at the negotiations
preceding the agreement—the McMahon Line represents a dire humiliation.
China also particularly resents being deprived of Tawang, which—though south of the McMahon
Line—was occupied by Indian troops only in 1951, shortly after China’s new Communist rulers
dispatched troops to Tibet. This district of almost 40,000 people, scattered over 2,000 square
kilometres of valley and high mountains, was the birthplace in the 17th century of the sixth Dalai
Lama (the incumbent incarnation is the 14th). Tawang is a centre of Tibet’s Buddhist culture, with
one of the biggest Tibetan monasteries outside Lhasa. Traditionally, its ethnic Monpa inhabitants
offered fealty to Tibet’s rulers—which those aged peasants around Tawang also remember. “The
Tibetans came for money and did nothing for us,” said Mr Nansey, referring to the fur-cloaked
Tibetan officials who until the late 1940s went from village to village extracting a share of the
harvest.
26
Making matters worse, the McMahon Line was drawn with a fat nib, establishing a ten-kilometre
margin for error, and it has never been demarcated. With more confusion in the central sector,
bordering India’s northern state of Uttarakhand, there are in all a dozen stretches of frontier where
neither side knows where even the disputed border should be. In these “pockets”, as they are called,
Indian and Chinese border guards circle each other endlessly while littering the Himalayan
hillsides—as dogs mark lampposts—to make their presence known. When China-India relations are
strained, this gives rise to tit-for-tat and mostly bogus accusations of illegal border incursions—for
which each side can offer the other’s empty cigarette and noodle packets as evidence. In official
Indian parlance such proof is grimly referred to as “telltale signs”. It is plainly garbage. Yet this is a
carefully rehearsed and mutually comprehensible ritual for which both sides deserve credit, of a
sort. Despite several threatened dust-ups—including one in 1986 that saw 200,000 Indian troops
rushed to northern Tawang district—there has been no confirmed exchange of fire between Indian
and Chinese troops since 1967.
Hands extended—and withdrawn
It would be even better if the two countries would actually settle their dispute, and, until recently,
that seemed imaginable. The obvious solution, whereby both sides more or less accept the status
quo, exchanging just a few bits of turf to save face, was long ago advocated by China, including in
the 1980s by the then prime minister, Deng Xiaoping. India’s leaders long considered this
politically impossible. But in 2003 a coalition government led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party—which in 1998 had cited the Chinese threat to justify its decision to test a nuclear
bomb—launched an impressive bid for peace. For the first time India declared itself ready to
compromise on territory, and China appeared ready to meet it halfway. Both countries appointed
special envoys, who have since met 13 times, to lead the negotiations that followed. This led to an
outline deal in 2005, containing the “guiding principles and political parameters” for a final
settlement. Those included an agreement that it would involve no exchange of “settled
populations”—which implied that China had dropped its historical demand for Tawang.
Left, India, right, China, saluteYet the hopes this inspired have faded. In ad hoc comments from
Chinese diplomats and through its state-controlled media—which often refer to Arunachal as
Chinese South Tibet—China appears to have reasserted its demand for most of India’s far northeastern state. Annoying the Indians further, it started issuing special visas to Indians from
Arunachal and Kashmir—after having denied a visa to an Indian official from Arunachal on the
basis that he was, in fact, Chinese. It also objected to a $60m loan to India from the Asian
Development Bank, on the basis that some of the money was earmarked for irrigation schemes in
Arunachal. Its spokesman described a visit to Tawang by Mr Singh, ahead of a general election last
year, as “provocative and dangerous”. Chinese analysts warn against understanding from these hints
that China has formally revised its position on the border. But that is India’s suspicion. And no one,
in either country, is predicting a border settlement soon.
In fact, the relationship has generally soured. Having belatedly woken up to the huge improvements
China has made in its border infrastructure, enabling a far swifter mobilisation of Chinese troops
there, India announced last year that it would deploy another 60,000 troops to Arunachal. It also
began upgrading its airfields in Assam and deploying the Sukhois to them. India’s media
meanwhile reported a spate of “incursions” by Chinese troops. China’s state-controlled media was
more restrained, with striking exceptions. Last year an editorial in the Global Times, an Englishlanguage tabloid in Beijing, warned that “India needs to consider whether or not it can afford the
consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” Early this year India’s outgoing national
27
security adviser and special envoy to China, M.K. Narayanan, accused Chinese hackers of attacking
his website, as well as those of other Indian government departments.
Recent diplomacy has brought more calm. Officials on both sides were especially pleased by their
show of unity at the United Nations climate meeting in Copenhagen last December, where China
and India, the world’s biggest and fourth-biggest emitters of carbon gas, faced down American-led
demands for them to undertake tougher anti-warming measures. A slight cooling in the AmericaIndia relationship, which President George Bush had pushed with gusto, has also helped. So, India
hopes, has its appointment of a shrewd Mandarin-speaker, Shivshankar Menon, as its latest national
security adviser and special envoy to China. He made his first visit to Beijing in this role last
month; a 14th round of border talks is expected. And yet the China-India relationship has been
bruised.
Negative views
In China, whose Communist leaders are neither voluble nor particularly focused on India, this
bruising is mostly clear from last year’s quarrel itself. The Chinese, many of whom consider India a
dirty, third-rate sort of place, were perhaps most obviously to blame for it. This is despite China’s
conspicuous recent success in settling its other land disputes, including with Russia and Vietnam—
a fact Chinese commentators often cite to indicate Indian intransigence. Chinese public opinion also
seems to be turning against India, a country the Chinese have been wont to remark on fondly, if at
all, as the birthplace of Buddhism. According to a recent survey of global opinion released by the
BBC, the Chinese show a “distinct cooling” towards India, which 47% viewed negatively.
In garrulous, democratic India, the fallout is easier to gauge. According to the BBC poll, 38% of
Indians have a negative view of China. In fact, this has been more or less the case since the defeat
of 1962. Lamenting the failure of Indian public opinion to move on, Patricia Uberoi, a sociologist at
Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, notes that while there have been many Indian
films on the subcontinent’s violent partition, including star-crossed Indo-Pakistani romances, there
has been only one notable Indian movie on the 1962 war: a propaganda film called “Haqeeqat”, or
“Truth”, supported by the Indian defence ministry.
Hawkish Indian commentators are meanwhile up in arms. “China, in my view, does not want a rival
in Asia,” says Brajesh Mishra, a former national security adviser and special envoy to China, who
drafted the 2005 agreement and is revered by the hawks. “Its main agenda is to keep India
preoccupied with events in South Asia so it is constrained from playing a more important role in
Asian and global affairs.” Senior officials present a more nuanced analysis, noting, for example,
that India has hardly been alone in getting heat from China: many countries, Asian and Western,
have similarly been singed. Yet they admit to heightened concern over China’s intentions in South
Asia, and foresee no hope for a settlement of the border. Nicholas Burns, a former American
diplomat who led the negotiations for an America-India nuclear co-operation deal that was
concluded in 2008, and who now teaches at Harvard University, suspects that over the past year
China has supplanted Pakistan as the main worry of Indian policymakers. He considers the ChinaIndia relationship “exceedingly troubled and perturbed” and thinks that it will remain “uneasy for
many years to come”.
Fear of encirclement
28
For foreign-policy realists, who see China and India locked in a battle for Asian supremacy, this is
inevitable. Even fixing the border could hardly mitigate the tension. More optimistic analysts, and
there are many, even if currently hushed, consider this old-school nonsense. Though both India and
China have their rabid fringe, they say, they are rational enough to know that a strategic struggle
would be sapping and, given each other’s vast size, unwinnable. Both are therefore committed, as
they claim, to fixing the border and fostering better relations. Yet there are a few impediments to
this—of which two are most often cited by analysts in Beijing and Delhi.
One is represented by the America-India nuclear deal, agreed in principle between Mr Singh and Mr
Bush in 2005. Not unreasonably, China took this as a sign that America wanted to use India as a
counterweight to China’s rise. It also considered the pact hypocritical: America, while venting
against China’s ally, North Korea, going nuclear (which it did a year later), was offering India a free
pass to nuclear-power status, despite its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Indian
analysts believe that China, in a cautious way, tried to scupper the deal by encouraging some of its
opponents, including Ireland and Sweden, to vote against it in the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a 46member club from which it required unanimous approval.
This glitch reflects a bigger Chinese fear of encirclement by America and its allies, a fear
heightened by a recent burst of American activity in Asia. The United States has sought to
strengthen security ties with South-East Asian countries, including Vietnam and Indonesia. It has
also called on China, in an unusually public fashion, to be more accommodating over contested
areas of the South China Sea—where America and India share concerns about a Chinese naval
build-up, including the construction of a nuclear-submarine base on the Chinese island of Hainan.
In north-east Asia, America has launched military exercises with South Korea in response to North
Korea’s alleged sinking of a South Korean warship in March. Some Chinese analysts, with ties to
the government, consider these a direct challenge to China.
China is deeply suspicious of America’s military campaign in nearby Afghanistan (and covertly in
Pakistan), which is supported from bases in Central Asian countries. It is also unimpressed by a
growing closeness between India and Japan, its main Asian rival. Japanese firms are, for example,
expected to invest $10 billion, and perhaps much more, in a 1,500km “industrial corridor” between
29
Delhi and Mumbai. In 2007 Japanese warships took part in a naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal,
also involving Indian, Australian and Singaporean ships and the American nuclear-powered vessels
USS Nimitz and USS Chicago, which was hosted by India and was the biggest ever held in the
region.
This seemed to back a proposal, put about by American think-tankers, for an “axis of democracies”
to balance China. Officially, India would want no part of this. “We don’t want to balance China,”
says a senior Indian official. But, he adds, “all the democracies do feel it is safer to be together. Is
China going to be peaceful or not? We don’t know. In the event that China leaves the path of
peaceful rise, we would work very closely together.”
India also fears encirclement, and with reason. America’s Pentagon, in an annual report on China’s
military power released on August 16th, said China’s armed forces were developing “new
capabilities” that might extend their reach into the Indian Ocean. China has also made big
investments in all India’s neighbours. It is building deepwater ports in Pakistan and Bangladesh,
roads in Nepal and oil and gas pipelines in Myanmar. Worse, it agreed in 2008 to build two nuclearpower plants for its main regional ally, Pakistan—a deal that also worried America, who saw it as a
tit-for-tat response to its nuclear deal with India. (China has become Pakistan’s biggest supplier of
military hardware, including fighter jets and guided-missile frigates, and in the past has given it
weapons-grade fissile material and a tested bomb design as part of its nuclear support.)
Muffling Tibet
Hawkish Indians consider these Chinese investments as a “string of pearls” to throttle India. Wiser
ones point out that India is too big to throttle—and that China’s rising influence in South Asia is an
indictment of India’s past inability to get on with almost any of its neighbours. Under Mr Singh,
India has sought to redress this. It is boosting trade with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and sticking,
with commendable doggedness in the face of little encouragement, to the task of making peace with
Pakistan. That would be glorious for both countries; it would also remove a significant China-India
bugbear.
The other great impediment to better relations is Tibet. Its fugitive Dalai Lama and his
“government-in-exile” have found refuge in India since 1959—and China blames him, and by
extension his hosts, for the continued rebelliousness in his homeland. A Tibetan uprising in March
2008, the biggest in decades, was therefore a major factor in last year’s China-India spat. It led to
China putting huge pressure on India to stifle the anti-China Tibetan protests that erupted in India—
especially one intended to disrupt the passage of the Olympic torch through Delhi en route to
Beijing. It also objected to a visit to Tawang by the Dalai Lama last November, which it predictably
called a “separatist action”. This visit, from which leftover banners of welcome still festoon the
town’s main bazaar, perhaps reminded China why it is so fixated on Tawang—as a centre of the
Tibetan Buddhist culture that it is struggling, all too visibly, to control.
Mindful of the huge support the Dalai Lama enjoys in India, its government says it can do little to
restrict him. Yet it policed the protest tightly, and also barred foreign journalists from
accompanying him to Tawang. India would perhaps rather be spared discreet balancing acts of this
sort. “But we’re stuck with him, he’s our guest,” says V.R. Raghavan, a retired Indian general and
veteran of the 1962 war. Indeed, many Indian pundits consider that China will never settle the
border, and so relinquish a potential source of leverage over India, while the 75-year-old lama is
alive.
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A dangerous childAfter his death, China will attempt to control his holy office as it has those of
other senior lamas. It will “discover” the reincarnated Dalai Lama in Tibet, or at least endorse the
choice of its agents, and attempt to groom him into a more biddable monk. In theory that would end
a major cause of China-India discord, but only if the Chinese can convince Tibetans that their
choice is the right one, which seems unlikely. The Dalai Lama has already indicated that he may
choose to be “reborn” outside China. There is talk of the important role Tawang has often played in
identifying incarnations of the Dalai Lama, or even that the 14th may choose to reincarnate in
Tawang itself.
For the abbot of Tawang’s main monastery, Guru Tulku Rinpoche, that would be a great blessing.
“If his holiness chooses to be born in Tawang, we would be so happy,” he says in his red-carpeted
monastic office, as half a dozen skinny lads file in to be inducted into monkhood. Silently, they
prostrate themselves before the abbot, while he scribbles down their new monastic names. Outside
his window, the early morning sun sparkles through the white clouds that hang low over Tawang. It
is hard to think that this remote and tranquil spot could have caused such a continent-sized ruckus.
Yet, if the abbot has his wish, it will cause a lot more trouble yet.
Floods in Pakistan
After the deluge
Outsiders’ cautious reaction to the disaster so far is less heartless than it seems. But now is the time
to help
Aug 19th 2010 From The Economist Print Edition
THE United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, swooped low over the massive swamp that
used to be central Pakistan and said he had never before seen anything quite so terrible. Flood
waters that gushed from the Indus river, which divides the country north-to-south, had inundated
villages, towns and whole districts. The immediate toll can be measured in loss of human life,
livestock, crops and food stores, and in destroyed homes and irrigation systems. Worse will come if
disease and hunger take hold. Some cases of cholera have already been reported. Millions of the
displaced are at risk of diarrhoea, malaria and other mundane killers. The UN’s boss was surely
right in saying that the “unprecedented floods require an unprecedented response.”
Some argue that outsiders should already have done more. The floods are nearly a month old. By
contrast, within a couple of weeks of the earthquake in Haiti, governments and other donors had
made grand pledges of help and foreign agencies were jostling to aid the victims. Outsiders were
similarly generous after a tsunami struck Asia in December 2004. Sudden disasters invite instant
sympathy and speedy assistance. Floods, like famines, are often slower-building horrors. Yet their
victims still deserve the world’s support.
That sounds a compelling indictment. In fact the picture is more complicated. To begin with, the
memory of previous aid triumphs is highly selective: the initial response to Haiti was chaotic and
not all that promised cash arrived. The flawed arithmetic of disaster response tends to equate need
for aid with the immediate death toll. Although some 20m Pakistanis may be affected, the official
count of those known to have perished is 1,475. Roughly as many were killed by recent landslides
and floods in north-east China. The figure is less than 1% of the numbers killed by Haiti’s quake or
by the Asian tsunami (over 220,000 in each case, most of them as disaster struck).
31
Nor has Pakistan made itself an easy place to help. Its president, Asif Ali Zardari, went on with a
tour of Europe partly to promote his son’s political career as the floods swamped ever larger
swathes of his country. He left his prime minister to oversee flood relief, claiming to be raising
awareness overseas of Pakistan’s plight. At home, however, rage has been building among flood
victims. The armed forces, rather than civilian politicians, took the lead in rescue efforts and in
organising tours for the camera crews whose pictures prick consciences.
Some donors still have bad memories of an earlier disaster, in 2005, when an earthquake struck the
Pakistan-run bit of Kashmir, killing nearly 80,000 people. Foreign governments and charities
promised some $6 billion in aid, to be spent by Pakistani officials and by local and foreign NGOs.
Some, inevitably, was wasted or stolen. More troublingly, some local charities, such as Jamaat-udDawa, which had links to extremists, ended up claiming credit for the relief work. And that is
before taking into account the credible worries that Pakistan’s spies support elements of the Taliban
in Afghanistan and have done too little to rein in Islamist terror directed at India.
Stopping bad by doing good
At this point, though, the West’s caution risks becoming not just heartless but counterproductive.
After all, concerns about the government’s probity have not stopped the delivery of massive
military aid to it. And the people who need help are not the government, but the ordinary Pakistanis
whose livelihoods have been washed out by the floods. Nobody will gain if the sodden field is left
to groups with extremist ties (see Banyan). Indeed, the West still has an opportunity not just to save
lives but to win over minds.
In Pakistan the greatest need will be in the coming weeks and months, as flood waters recede,
homes and roads need to be rebuilt and fields have to be replanted. That gives donors time to find
effective ways to co-ordinate their help—ways that, where possible, should bypass Mr Zardari’s
loose-fingered friends. Already there are signs of progress. Some $3 billion has been offered by the
World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, the UN has set up a fund and donations from
governments are starting to flow. America, a provider of much military and other aid to Pakistan, is
lending helicopters and providing other help, hoping to show ordinary Pakistanis that it is not the
hostile bully many of them believe it to be.
India, Pakistan’s traditional foe, could also turn disaster into opportunity. Some have described the
current floods as the worst battering Pakistan has taken since the man-made disaster of partition
from India in 1947. India itself has suffered recent floods and has offered some help (Pakistan is
unsure whether to accept). Delivering it could show that India genuinely wants its troubled
neighbour to recover and to prosper. A little money now could go a long way.
ECONOMIC NEWS
BHEL taps into IIT's R&D expertise for desalination
Aug 30, 2010 Business Standard:
Chennai: Public sector major the Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited’s (BHEL) two units — Tiruchi
and Ranipet — have collaborated Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM) for joint research
32
and the focus would be sea water desalination and pollutant control systems which would be a great
boon for the public and society at large, according to BHEL’s senior official.
O P Bhutani, director (engineering, research and director), said aimed to strengthen research and
other collaborative projects with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM). He added that
research with academic institutions has been identified as a critical success factor by BHEL.
“This collaborative research with academic institutions would go a long way in meeting the
growing technology needs which were becoming increasingly unavailable through technical
collaborations with other companies,” he added.
BHEL is continuously benchmarking its wide range of products to identify technology gaps and
focus its R&D towards finding solutions to fill the gaps to ensure that its products are of the best
global standards, he added.
“This new initiative would be an ideal platform and could catalyst technology development and
would go a long way towards attaining the country’s goal of self-reliance in all fields. It would also
help us to realise the dream of being the first to put up ultra-super-critical power plants in line with
the Government’s vision for India,” said Bhutani.
The areas of research and developmental will include once-through super critical steam generators
of large capacity; Modeling and Analysis; scale up, material characterization; frontier technologies
including utilisation of nano materials, fuel cells and bio-mass; zero emission technologies; and
distributed power. The joint research will also focus on sea water desalination and pollutant control
systems which will be a great boon for the public and society at large.
Especially, in view of stiff global competition in the area of once-through super critical power
plants of capacity of 660 Mw and higher, where technology is a major factor, collaborative research
with academic institutions has been identified as a critical success factor by BHEL. Further, joint
research with academia is pursued as an effective mode of know-why generation.
Bhutani noted in 2009-10, BHEL has invested Rs 829 crore on research and development, an
increase of 20 per cent compared to previous year and 2.4 per cent of the turnover.
Source IBEF
USAID to collaborate in clean-tech energy initiatives
Aug 30, 2010 The Hindu Business Line
Hyderabad: USAID through its clean-tech energy initiatives is stepping up its presence in India by
partnering stakeholders and mentoring and working with the policy makers.
Through the Environmental Cooperation-Asia Clean Development and Climate Programme (ECOAsia), a programme of the US Agency for International Development's Regional Development
Mission for Asia (USAID/RDMA), it aims to catalyse policy and finance solutions for clean energy,
according to Mr Peter du Pont, Chief of Party, Environmental Cooperation, Asia.
Dependence on coal
33
Addressing a workshop here today, Mr du Pont said analysis of global pattern of energy
consumption and fresh capacity addition shows there will continue to be greater dependence on coal
as a fuel for power generation.
By 2030, the energy from coal will contribute to about 51 per cent of the total energy generated, as
against 48 per cent now, that too when the capacity would be significantly higher.
Research insights
Quoting research insights, Mr du Pont said that the cost of a unit of power generated in one part of
the world varies from another depending upon the location and conditions.
Even within the US, there is wide variation.
A study by a North Carolina University professor has hinted at the cost of a unit of power generated
by a nuclear company and a solar power project is working out quite close to one another.
“As someone associated with the energy interests in China, India, Thailand and the Philippines, I
believe there is a case to bring about integrated approach to development of the power sector rather
than focussing or laying thrust on one segment, be it nuclear or renewable. The demand side
management, by deployment of energy-efficient lighting as attempted in Thailand has effectively
saved about 300 MW of power,” he said.
Cost savings
“India could consider demand side management to bring about cost savings,” he felt.
The Team Leader, Clean Energy Finance, ECO-Asia, Mr Suneel Parasnis, said that the Private
Finance Advisory Network (PFAN) is working with about 100 Indian entrepreneurs, majority of
them interested in solar power generation.
Projects shortlisted
“We have shortlisted about 15 projects for mentoring and helping them to next phase of business,
including networking for project finance through private equity deals. Each of these projects
requires funding ranging from $1-75 million,” he said.
Source IBEF
Shriram to tap wind power in Lanka, Croatia
Aug 30 2010 The Economic Times:
Chennai: Chennai-based Shriram Group has firmed up plans for tapping the wind energy potential
in overseas markets. Orient Green Power (OGPL), an associate company of Shriram EPC (SEPC) is
setting up wind power ventures in Sri Lanka and Eastern Europe.
T Shivaraman, CEO & MD told ET OGPL has picked up 87% stake in Power Lanka (the rest held
by a local partner), which will commission and operate a 10.5-mw wind power project. Work on the
34
Rs 80-crore venture at Puttakulam will commence shortly. Power purchase agreement has been
signed with the Sri Lankan government for a price of Rs 10 per KWH for 20 years.
OGPL will have the earlier mover advantage as the wind energy sector is yet to be tapped in the
country. It will also be a lucrative venture as there are no subsidies and power is purchased at
market rate. Puttalam is one of the best wind locations in the country and PLF is expected to be
more than 28%, Mr Shivaraman said. Wind turbines will be supplied by SEPC’s associate
company, Shriram Leitner, which has its facility near Chennai.
OGPL is also promoting another venture in Sri Lanka for developing 100 mw of wind farms over
the next two to three years. The final agreement with board of investments (BOI) in Sri Lanka was
signed early this month. This will help the project to get tax concessions and other investment
incentives.
He said OGPL also has plans to tap opportunities in Central and Eastern European countries.
Through its subsidiary, Orient green power Europe (OGPE) has acquired 52% stake in
Vjetroelektrana Crnobrdo, (VCB) a company based in Croatia. It got an approval for building and
operating a 10.5-mw wind power project. This is part of OGPL’s plan to establish wind farms in
Europe. The balance 48% is held by local partner Tecoi.
Croatia is endowed with vast wind potential. The average wind speed at a height of 50 meters at the
wind sites is around 8 m/s whereas the total identified wind potential of the country is more than
3000 mw. Currently the installed capacity is less than 100 mw.
Croatia is a designate EU country and also has obligations with respect to purchase of power from
renewable energy. This project is located in Sibenik, one of the best wind locations in the country. It
is located at a distance of 150 km from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. The power produced from the
wind farm would be purchased at a price of e10.4 cents per KWH.
OGPL proposes to use 1.5-mw Leitwind turbines for the project. The project cost is expected to be
e16 million. Apart from this, OGPL is developing 60 mw of wind farms in the same area. Other
farms under development in Europe include 20 mw in Hungary at Magyarkerestur near the Austrian
Hungarian border, 18 mw in Czech Republic at Detrichov near Brno. The total project cost for these
projects is expected to be e2.2 million.
Copyright © 2010, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Source IBEF
Arianespace keen to widen launch window with ISRO
European major's rocket Vega to be tested this year.
Aug 30, 2010 The Hindu Business Line
“ISRO has been successful on its own in marketing the PSLV and signing direct agreements with
customers.... We also have some prospects and we could consider it as a back-up for Vega.”
35
Bangalore: Arianespace, the big brother of global satellite launch providers, plans to co-market its
long-term associate ISRO's PSLV, as a future ‘back-up' for its third rocket, the new light-lift Vega,
according to Arianespace's Chairman and CEO, Mr Jean-Yves Le Gall. Vega is due to be tested this
year.
His company also wants to include ISRO's bigger GSLV rocket in their old joint-marketing
agreement once the GSLV reaches commercial stage, Mr Le Gall told Business Line. He was in
Bangalore for the just-ended CII-ISRO conference — the Bengaluru Space Expo 2010.
Tie-up
The France-led European major and ISRO tied up in 1998 to jointly bid for launch contracts or for
Arianespace to pass on its surplus low-end orders to PSLV. Ariane5, its workhorse vehicle, has a
huge backlog and is booked for the next three years, while it also focuses on hoisting large satellites
weighing 6 to10 tonnes.
Vega, Arianespace's third vehicle, is expected to make its first flight later this year or in 2011, and
is meant to put 1500-kg class Earth observation satellites in near-Earth orbits. The PSLV, which
costs at least 20-30 per cent less than others, is believed to be an attractive choice worldwide.
Europe and the US apart, only Russia, Japan, India and China, have commercial launch capabilities.
One report estimated the global launchers market at $4 billion in 2008.
According to Mr Le Gall, the PSLV, flown nearly 20 times including for the Chandrayaan-1 lunar
mission, is now an established vehicle and an attractive low-cost option for satellite operators.
Orders
Asked why the agreement between ISRO and Arianespace had not fetched any orders so far, Mr Le
Gall said, “ISRO has been successful on its own in marketing the PSLV and signing direct
agreements with customers.... We also have some prospects and we could consider it as a back-up
for Vega.”
ISRO's commercial arm Antrix has so far won 25 contracts of small foreign satellites ranging from
a few kilos to around 300 kilos, but all as secondary or ‘piggy-back' passengers. ISRO is yet to win
a solo launch order, largely due to geopolitics.
An industry observer said European satellite operators preferred a European launcher, while the US,
a large-scale builder and user of commercial satellites, does not allow their launch on an Indian
launcher. (The two Governments are trying to resolve this issue.)
Mr Le Gall said, “Some 20-25 satellites come up for launch every year and we sign about half of
them. We signed nine this year. Competition for Arianespace today is mainly the Russian Proton
launch vehicle” that is marketed by the US company, ILS, he said. With 60 per cent of the market
share and three products that can meet any category of satellites, Arianespace is expected to remain
the leader.
The 30-year-old company accounts for 283 or half of all commercial launches to date. It aims at 10
missions a year using Ariane 5, Soyuz and Vega. (Arianespace will soon commercialise the
celebrated Russian Soyuz rocket for global contracts by enhancing it to 3-tonne capability and
launching it from its Guiana spaceport. Soyuz has made a record 1750 missions since 1957 from
Kazakhstan and Russia.)
36
Cost vs quality
Launch costs rule around $20,000 a kg to orbits of 36,000 km.
Asked how Arianespace as a leader was addressing a growing need for cutting costs, Mr Le Gall
said lower cost would also lower quality and his company would not compromise its success record
for this; it could be possible with Vega and Soyuz.
Arianespace looked at ISRO as a partner with ties going back to the 1983 APPLE launch, Mr Le
Gall said.
“So far, we have launched 14 important missions for ISRO and are now preparing to launch two
more satellites — the GSat-8 early next year and the GSat-10 a little later.”
Source IBEF
India to add 100 Mw solar power capacity
Aug 26, 2010 Business Standard
Mumbai: The new and renewable energy ministry has signed power purchase agreements for solar
capacity of as much as 100 megawatts to speed up solar power capacity addition in the country.
New and Renewable Energy Minister Farooq Abdullah today said his ministry had received around
300 applications from various companies for the construction of solar projects. The ministry has
also sought expressions of interest from companies to construct solar capacity to the tune of 700
Mw. This is a big development in the sector as the country had set up only 7-8 Mw of solar energy
last year.
“We have also approved yet another 25 Mw for off-grid power,” said Deepak Gupta, secretary of
the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. Off-grid power would help supply power to areas like
villages, border areas and other remote places which are not connected to the solar grid, he added.
The government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission has recommended the implementation
of an installed capacity of 20,000 Mw by the end of the 13th Five Year Plan, in 2022. While this
will be implemented in three stages, the first stage would involve setting up 1,100 Mw of grid solar
power and 200 Mw capacity of off-grid solar applications utilising both solar thermal and
photovoltaic technologies, by March 2013.
Meanwhile, on the controversy over allowing Chinese equipment in the country’s solar power
space, Abdullah said he was not against the use of Chinese equipment to build massive solar
capacity. “There is good Chinese equipment and bad Chinese equipment. We want to get the best
technology to India. However, we are also encouraging domestic manufacturing of equipment,” he
added.
The ministry also said that 12,000 Mw of wind power capacity was in the pipeline, and it planned to
scale up to 48,000 Mw in another 15-20 years.
37
Source IBEF
ABB opens 4th wind power generator unit at Vadodara
Aug 24, 2010 The Hindu Business Line
Bangalore: Power and automation technology major ABB, on Monday, launched its fourth global
wind power generator factory at Vadodara. The factory will supply wind power generators for
Indian and global markets.
The new factory — employing around 150 people — will produce up to 100 units a month, with a
rating of up to 2.5 MW.
Mr Ulrich Spiesshofer, head of ABB's Discrete Automation and Motion business, said, “With our
comprehensive portfolio for the industry we are proud to contribute to the generation of clean
power that will help countries meet their growing needs for electricity while reducing their
emissions.”
India is currently the world's fifth-largest user of wind power. ABB supplies a variety of
components and solutions for wind turbine manufacturers and operators: robots that paint the
blades, motors, drives, transformers and low- and medium-voltage equipment located in the nacelle
and the products and systems that connect the power to the grid.
Source IBEF
India is the favoured offshoring location for British firms
Aug 24, 2010 The Hindu Business Line:
London: India is the overwhelming favourite destination for offshoring by British companies,
according to a joint study published over the week-end by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development and KPMG.
In their annual Labour Market Outlook, the firms found that one in 10 British firms were looking to
offshore work outside the UK, and that 65 per cent of those were planning to offshore to India in the
12 months to June 2011. That compares to just 36 per cent to China, and 29 per cent to Eastern
Europe.
As expected, the largest chunk of jobs being moved to India and elsewhere is in the IT sector. Four
in 10 IT companies plan to relocate jobs to other countries, but other sectors are playing a growing
and significant role.
38
Nineteen per cent of financial, insurance and real estate companies are planning to relocate jobs,
representing a significant trend shift, the survey of 598 human resource professionals in the UK
found.
“The surprising element in all of this is the wide range of sectors in which jobs – and highly skilled
jobs are being moved abroad,” said Mr Gerwyn Davies, public policy adviser to the CIPD. The
figures lend weight to recent fears of a skills shortage in the UK, despite high levels of
unemployment, suggesting that firms have no alternative to going abroad to find needed skills.
‘Growing reality'
“The simple truth is that there simply aren't enough qualified people in the UK. This is now a reality
and a growing reality,” said Mr Davies.
Back in June, the Office of Budget Responsibility, an independent body set up by the new coalition
government, warned that changing demographics in the UK – as a result of falling immigration –
could dampen economic growth as a result of a skills shortage.
The CIPD study also points to the potential problems that the government's plans to introduce an
immigration cap could have. According to Mr Davies, that a small but significant minority of
respondents to the survey said they were considering moving jobs abroad under the proposed
system.
“One company that hired linguists from the Far East said that if they were unable to bring them to
the UK, they would be unable to carry on with existing operations and would be forced to move
jobs to one of the other global centres,” said Mr Davies.
The British coalition government has stuck to the Conservative Party's election pledge of
introducing an annual immigration cap that would take net immigration back to 1990s levels of
“tens of thousands” rather than “hundreds of thousands” beginning next year. The government has
tried to assuage fears, including during Prime Minister David Cameron's visit to India, through
pledges to work closely with firms to ensure they were able to bring the skilled workers they needed
into the country.
Still, the fear is that with EU regulations preventing any restriction on workers from the EU,
including Eastern Europe, the clampdown will fall overwhelmingly on workers from outside,
including India and China
.
Source IBEF
Raffles Millennium opens design college in Hyderabad
Aug 23, 2010 The Hindu Business Line
Hyderabad: Raffles Millennium International (RMI), a joint venture of Educomp Solutions Ltd and
the Singapore-based Raffles Education Corporation Ltd, has opened its design college campus here.
39
The college will offer a Bachelors degree and diplomas in fashion design, graphic design, interior
design and multimedia, Mr Harpreet Singh, Executive Director, Educomp Raffles Higher Education
Ltd, told newspersons here on Saturday.
“The certificate of degree and diploma would be given by Raffles Education Corporation Ltd,
which has a wide recognition in Europe and other parts of the world,'' he said.
The fee for the three-year programme is between Rs 13 lakh and Rs 16 lakh. “After second year, if
any student prefers to study abroad, they can do so as we follow the credit transfer system,” he said.
The students, however, would have to bear the additional expenses on account of it.
On the placement opportunities, Mr Singh said the focus of the institution was more on imparting
entrepreneurial skills. “The students who complete our course will be well-equipped to start their
own ventures such as boutiques,” he said.
RMI has campuses in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Australia,
Singapore, China, Malaysia and New Zealand.
Fortis to make Singapore hub for global expansion
Aug 24, 2010 The Hindu Business Line
Hyderabad: Fortis Healthcare Ltd is finalising plans to make Singapore its base for international
operations even as it steps up presence in the domestic market adding about 10 hospital projects
within two years.
The Fortis Managing Director, Mr Shivinder Mohan Singh, said the company is keen to make
Singapore its hub for international expansion plans, particularly in Asia.
“We also see Singapore playing a role in the company's plans, particularly fund raising, as we step
up presence in the international market,” he said.
Addressing a press conference here on Monday, he said that it is to be a smaller company rather
than make a large acquisition and then go bankrupt.
The company has been approached by several global healthcare companies expressing interest to
partner, particularly in Asia.
There is no change in the company's domestic market plan.
“After Parkway, the only thing that has changed is that we will have to find another vehicle for
international growth. There is enough opportunity. Opportunities for growth are available through
acquisition, greenfield projects and management control. We are evaluating all options,” he said.
One can get to a $1 billion business by acquiring today. But the company may not exist later, unable
to manage finances. Any such move has to be financially viable, he said.
“We are set to add about 10 hospital projects over the next 24-30 months. Of them, four will be
operational before this fiscal end. Once all the projects are operational, we will have a capacity of
8,000 beds,” he said.
40
Referring to insurance related issues with regard to healthcare, he felt that IRDA needs to come out
with a comprehensive approach for the health insurance business that evolves a common framework
for all stakeholders.
The issue of cashless transactions and charges is overhyped.
Source IBEF
Emerging logistics hub near Chennai
Aug 23, 2010 The Hindu Business Line
Oragadam is turning into a twin town of Sriperumbudur and an automobile and FMCG centre in its
own right.
India has been experiencing significant development over the last decade, continuously clocking a
growth rate of around 8-10 per cent. Logistics costs in India are high at 13-14 per cent of GDP
compared to 8-9 per cent for developed countries.
The Government has been promoting the logistics sector by allowing 100 per cent FDI, eliminating
CST, introducing VAT, improving multi-modal transportation through projects such as dedicated
freight corridor, encouraging public private partnership (PPP), and allowing 100 per cent incometax exemption for port development projects.
Several logistics parks have come up across major cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and
Hyderabad and are witnessing significant investment in infrastructure. Of these, Chennai clearly is a
major logistics hub, and has been attracting huge investments.
Connectivity Benefits
Oragadam, being close to Chennai, is one of the fastest growing industrial towns. It owes its
strategic advantage to a large manufacturing presence, demand base, supplier presence, established
infrastructure and excellent multi-modal connectivity.
It is connected through major roads such as Oragadam Industrial Corridor Road, East Coast Road,
NH-44, NH-45, outer ring road passing through it along with access to the major sea port (Chennai
port), railway station (Chennai Central) and an International airport within 25 km. NH-4 provides
great connectivity to Bengaluru through the upcoming Ranipet-Walajabad 200 ft road and to major
western (Mumbai) and northern cities.
Currently, freight from the west and north gets warehoused in Poonamallee. However, with the
emergence of Oragadam as a hub, modern logistic parks in this area are going to provide stiff
competition to Poonamallee's existing warehouses. In addition Oragadam, is connected to Kolkota
(NH 5) through the ring road. NH 45 provides great hinterland connectivity to major cities in south
India such as Tiruchi, Madurai, Tirunelveli and Kanyakumari.
Auto, FMCG Hub
41
Oragadam, has seen some major investments by large Indian and global players (automotive,
FMCG/durables, and industrial products) during the last few years due to a special boost provided
by the Tamil Nadu government and establishment of the SIPCOT Industrial Estate covering
approximately 2,000 acres. Across the automotive industry, Oragadam represents an excellent hub
for manufacturing and distribution, as more than six automotive OEMs and over 50 suppliers are
located in close proximity (less than 20 km) of each other in the Oragadam-Sripeumbudur cluster.
This would enable supply of domestic and imported parts in a just-in-time approach. Automotive
components and sub-assemblies can be shipped from various parts of India and from ports (for
imports) to logistics hubs, then assembled and supplied just-in-time to the OEM for assembly.
It has reputed companies such as Nissan-Renault, Mercedes, Daimler, Delphi-TVS, Komatsu, GKN
Driveline, Apollo tyres, Sundaram Auto Components Ltd., to name a few. Renault Nissan has setup a car-making 640 acres facility near Oragadam with a planned investment of Rs 4,500 crore and
full ramp-up capacity of 400,000 units per year.
Oragadam, could be a regional manufacturing and distribution point for FMCG products such as
biscuits, chips, juices, personal care products, household hygiene products etc. and consumer
durable products such as fridge, microwave, TV and air conditioners.
Nokia Siemens Networks recently commenced the manufacturing of 3G products locally at its
Oragadam facility and announced investments amounting to Rs 110 crore over the next two years.
Sanmina-SCI Corporation, a leading global electronics manufacturing services (EMS), set up a
state-of-the-art technology manufacturing campus in the Oragadam Hi-Tech Special Economic
Zone (SEZ).
In addition, Oragadam has the advantage of being close to Sriperumbudur, which is home to large
manufacturing companies such as Hyundai, Ford, Saint Gobain, Nokia, Dell, Flextronics and
Samsung. A six-lane highway road (SH57) is being constructed to connect these twin towns.
Indian logistics players such as DHL, Realtime Logistics, ShriKailash Logistics plan to set up their
respective logistics hubs in this region.
Source IBEF
PC reach doubles in 3 years: Intel
Aug 20, 2010 Business Standard:
New Delhi: PC penetration in India has doubled in the last three years and desirability continues to
be on the upswing among the urban population, said a study.
Now, one in every four urban household has a personal computer.
The study by Intel and IMRB revealed that PC penetration has increased from 19 per cent to 38 per
cent across SEC A, B and C in India over the last three years. The study also said PC desirability is
on the rise across all sections, and by over 100 per cent in SEC C.
The study, India Urban Consumer Segment Nationwide Study 2009-2010, was conducted across 82
cities sampling over 19,000 households.
42
“This is an exciting time for the Indian PC market and our study reiterates the same. We have
always believed that the personal computer is a multi-functional device that consumers can use to
work, learn and play. Most importantly it helps people to take full advantage of today’s
technological advances and prepare for tomorrow’s challenges,” said R Sivakumar, managing
director, sales & marketing, Intel South Asia.
“The jump is across user profiles, socio-economic segments as well as town classes,” said Prakash
Bagri, director of marketing for Intel South Asia.
The study said more and more first-time buyers are buying notebooks. In 2009 the percentage of
non-owners opting for notebooks has doubled to a whopping 31 per cent while those opting for a
desktop PC stayed relatively flat at 44 per cent.
Source IBEF
BHEL, IITM to take up joint research
Aug 19, 2010 Business Standard
Chennai: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) units at Tiruchi and Ranipet will collaborate with
the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM), for joint research in sea water desalination and
pollutant control systems.
O P Bhutani, director (engineering R&D), BHEL, who was here to inaugurate the company's R&D
Gateway, said the company was looking to strengthen joint research and other collaborative projects
with IITM. He said research with academic institutions had been identified as a critical success
factor by BHEL.
"This new initiative will be an ideal platform and can catalyse technology development. It would
also help us realise the dream of being the first to put up ultra-super-critical power plants in line
with the government’s vision for India,” said Bhutani.
Source IBEF
Tata-Sikorsky venture to roll out aerospace components from Nov
Aug 18, 2010 The Hindu Business Line:
Hyderabad: The Tata-Sikorsky joint venture to manufacture aerospace components and systems at
the Aerospace Park on the outskirts of Hyderabad will start rolling out products from November.
Announcing this at MAN'EXE, the 7th leadership series on manufacturing excellence organised by
the CII here on Wednesday, Mr Kanna Lakshminarayana, Minister of Industries, Andhra Pradesh,
said the new industrial policy (2010-15) announced by the State would give a big thrust to
manufacturing.
43
The State has come up with several incentives, has the lowest power tariff for industries and the
largest number of notified SEZs (Special Economic Zones), over 50. It is also looking at the
National Manufacturing Investment Zones, being proposed by the Centre, he said.
Tata Advanced Systems, the Tata Group company, formed the venture with Sikorsky Aircraft, US,
to manufacture aerospace components in India. As part of it, they set up a manufacturing unit at the
Aerospace & Precision Engineering SEZ (special economic zone) at Adibatla village to begin
making components and assembling Sikorsky S-92 helicopter cabins. It will also make components
for other aerospace OEMs.
Transforming india
In his keynote address, Dr V. Sumantran, Executive Vice-Chairman, Hinduja Automotive and
Board of Director of Ashok Leyland said a “Combination of planning and entrepreneurship was a
must for India to achieve the goal of transforming into a happy, developed country.”
He cited two recent headlines: By 2015, Indian GDP will cross China's and India to emerge a
Detroit of the East.
While they read great and achievable, there is cause of concern, because we tend to celebrate too
early. These are goals which need tremendous work and effort to achieve. India needs relentless
investments in infrastructure, especially power and energy to drive the high growth rates.
He listed several advantages the country has in terms of the large youth force and low cost demand
driving innovation and frugality, an old world virtue internalised amongst the people that could be
channelized for the growth story.
Trump card
Dr Sumantran said India's trump card would be IT-enabled manufacturing. Cloud competing, he
said, makes small and medium enterprises competitive. However, he expressed concern about the
general lack of high quality across industries. This has to be addressed.
Earlier, the Chairman of CII-AP, Mr Shakthi Sagar, in his welcome, said India was emerging as a
manufacturing hub with more companies shifting their units.
The national manufacturing policy and the manufacturing investment zones should provide an
impetus.
Source IBEF
Domestic airlines registered a 17 per cent growth during January-July 2010
Aug 19, 2010 IBEF
New Delhi: India’s domestic airlines witnessed a surge of nearly 500,000 passengers in July 2010 in
comparison to the corresponding period in 2009.
It is the 7th consecutive month for the domestic airline industry to report an increase in the
passengers flown in comparison with the same period in 2009.
44
As per the latest data collated by the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the domestic
airlines flew 17.56 million passengers during January-July 2010 as against 14.53 million passengers
carried during the same period in 2009, thereby, registering a 17 per cent growth.
In-Arabia Solutions starts A'bad operations
Aug 18, 2010 Business Standard
Mumbai/ Ahmedabad: UAE-based In-Arabia Solutions Ltd, an online forex brokerage offering
services in over 70 currency pairs, today launched its operations in India with opening office of its
subsidiary — In-Arabia Solutions (India) in Ahmedabad. The new arm will act as customer support
center of the group also having other subsidiary in USA and clients in more than 120 countries.
Jay Trivedi, Managing Director, In-Arabia Solutions (India), said, “We have 8000 plus customer
base worldwide so we have decided to start our customer support center from Ahmedabad. In trade,
In-Arabia Solutions’ weekly liquidity is about $ 600 million. We also have plans to set up offices in
Africa as well as in China by the end of this year.”
The daily turnover of the global Forex market is pegged at $ 4 trillion, which is 81 times higher than
the volume of New York Stock Exchange, Trivedi added.
The Dubai-headquartered company was set up by first-generation entrepreneurs in 2009. The group
has also registered a bank in Mauritius — In-Arabia Finance Ltd and a retail banking arm in New
Zealand — In-Arabia Investment Ltd.
Source IBEF
Govt allows cotton exports without licence from Oct 1
Aug 18, 2010 Business Standard
New Delhi: The government today allowed export of cotton with effect from October 1 without the
required licences even as it needs to be registered with the authorities concerned, said a notification
issued by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), which is under the Ministry of
Commerce and Industry.
The government has also removed the export duty of '2,500 a tonne on raw cotton which it had
imposed on April 9. On the back of steep rise in the prices of cotton and ballooning exports, the
registration of cotton export was stopped from April 19 and only those under licence were allowed.
"Export duty on cotton has been removed and export will be allowed under the Open General
Licence from October 1 onwards,” said Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar. The textiles
commissioner’s office would now start registering export contracts from September 1.
45
He also said that officials from the ministries of commerce, textiles and agriculture would meet next
month to review the status of cotton production and demand for the item, both in domestic and
overseas markets. The officials would also determine the quantum of exports.
Source IBEF
TN unveils rural BPO policy
Aug 18, 2010 Business Standard:
Chennai: The Tamil Nadu government has unveiled a Rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
policy, adopting an incentive-based approach to encourage establishment of BPOs in rural areas.
The new policy is an outcome of the success of rural BPO units in Sanasandiram Chennathur
panchayat in Hosur block, three years ago.
“Tamil Nadu being a major Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Hub and with the
ICT industry now expanding to Tier II, Tier III cities, and towns and indeed into villages in Tamil
Nadu, it is indispensable to have a comprehensive Rural BPO policy to increase employment in the
rural areas of state,” the state government's order said.
The two forms of subsidy - capital and training -- will be given to BPO units located in village
panchayats. A BPO unit can avail itself of both categories of subsidy and may get a total of Rs 7.5
lakh.
The state Information Technology department, will play the role of a facilitator in exchanging
information with the BPO industry. It will also help to find interested institutions, both educational
and otherwise, which would want to partner with BPO units.
A 15 per cent capital subsidy will be provided on investment subject to a maximum of Rs 3 lakh to
any unit that is functioning for a minimum of three years and that has been directly employing a
minimum of 100 trained persons in the unit.
This subsidy will be back-ended and paid in three equal installments at the end of each year. As for
the training subsidy, the cost of training would be shared by the government and the company
concerned. The government will provide Rs 1,500 per month per person for three months, the
duration of a normal period of skill building training for a BPO unit.
Source IBEF
Mercedes-Benz upbeat on sales in tier-III cities
Aug18, 2010 The Hindu Business Line
New Delhi: German luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz is bullish about sales in the tier-III cities of
India, and plans to expand presence in these markets.
By next year, Mercedes will be present in four to five more tier-III cities, including Bhubaneswar
and Indore. It currently has 56 touch points in 26 cities.
46
“The mindset in the tier-III towns is shifting and people are now beginning to invest in luxury cars,”
said Dr Wilfried Aulbur, Managing Director and CEO, Mercedes-Benz India.
There is a possibility of 15-20 per cent sales coming from tier-II and III towns, according to Mr
Debashis Mitra, Director, Sales and Marketing. While the auto industry is growing at 25-30 per cent
this year, the luxury car segment grew at 50 per cent and Mercedes showed a growth of 75-80 per
cent, said Mr Mitra.
It will take a decade for India to become a key market for the automaker, said Dr Aulbur.
“We have a bullish mindset about India and are confident that we will be able to maintain a doubledigit growth rate for the next four-five years,” he said. The focus is to make sure that the duty
structure is suitable so that sales can happen. The company will follow a conservative, but
aggressive growth path, he added.
Mercedes-Benz launched its E-class Cabriolet in India at Rs 64.5 lakh(ex-showroom Delhi). The
four-seater convertible with a soft top has a 3.5-litre engine and comes with an aircap. The Cabriolet
is the seventh offering from the E-class range of Mercedes.
Growing at nearly 150 per cent, the E-class range has sold more units (12,700) than the SUV, which
comes a close second, followed by the S-class and C-class, growing at 26 per cent and 46 per cent,
respectively. Mercedes has lined up a couple of more launches for India this year, said Dr Aulbur,
without divulging further details.
As far as the commercial vehicles segment goes, the company sold nine buses last year. However, it
has sold 53 buses from January to July this year.
Source IBEF
Books / Reviews
CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR
BY
MADHUSREE MUKERJEE
TRANQUEBAR | PAGES: 352 | PRICE: 495
History: bengal famine
Churchill’s Famine?
A new book indicts Britain’s wartime PM for millions of deaths in the 1943 Bengal famine
Sheela Reddy
Sep 06, 2010 OUTLOOKINDIA
Madhusree Mukerjee, physicist and former editor of Scientific American, “currently a housewife”
living in Germany with her husband and son, has a curious way of writing books: she catches hold
of any subject that she wants to learn about, no matter how difficult or complex, and doesn’t let go
47
until she’s ferreted out whatever it takes to answer her questions as a rank outsider. She puts it
down to her training in scientific method—Mukerjee lived in Calcutta until she moved to the US to
study physics, receiving her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1989. “As a physicist, you
are trained to simplify problems so that they become more comprehensible,” she says in a telephone
interview from near Frankfurt in Germany.
The first time she strayed away from science journalism was when she decided to learn about the
aboriginals in the Andamans islands. “I felt at some point that I understood pretty well the basics of
science, but there was a lot about the human environment that I didn’t understand.” For a start, she
decided to explore the stories she had heard while growing up in Calcutta of how freedom fighters
dumped on the Andamans islands escaped head-hunting savages. “I wanted to understand the reality
of that.” It led Mukerjee to the Andamans and her first book, The Land of Naked People:
Encounters with Stone Age Islanders, relating the devastating experiences of the hunter-gatherers as
they come face to face with modern civilisation.
After finishing that book, the next question—and book—was already approaching. “My basic
question was: I now understood how the world treats aboriginal people but I don’t really understand
the origins of poverty.” But poverty being such a complex subject, the scientist in Mukerjee
determined to break it down to “its least possible dimension—food”. “I felt that if I can understand
famine, I will understand poverty.” To make it even simpler for herself, Mukerjee decided to study
the Bengal famine of 1943.
Churchill, the book alleges, denied Australian food supplies to the walking dead of the famine by
cutting down shipping in the Indian Ocean (Photograph by AP)
Like any beginner, Mukerjee assumed that everything to be known about the Bengal famine was
already known. “I thought I had to just go and study it.” But questions formed in her mind that she
couldn’t find answers to in any book: could Churchill’s government in London have prevented the
famine which took a toll of some three million lives? More importantly, did Churchill deliberately
choose to deny food relief to starving Indians? “When I started researching this book—Churchill’s
Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War Two—a couple of
American historians told me this was not a useful venue to explore because there couldn’t have
been a possibility at that point in the war, when the situation was so desperate, of sending relief to
India.”
But Mukerjee didn’t give up. She spent years going through the papers in the national archives of
UK, finding out that Churchill’s War Cabinet shot down Viceroy Linlithgow’s plea to send grain to
India to ward off a catastrophe in July 1943. There was more than enough grain in Australia to feed
Indians, but Churchill claimed there was a severe shortage of ships to take the grain to India.
Mukerjee then launched another hunt, this time through the papers in UK’s ministry of war
transport, to see if there was any truth in Churchill’s claim.
That is when she discovered the scale of Churchill’s prejudice and callousness towards Indians. Far
from a scarcity of shipping, Churchill had at his command such a profusion of ships that there was
not enough cargo to fill them. Some of the surplus ships were being used to supply white bread to
the UK and the rest to stockpile food in preparation for Britain’s planned liberation of the Balkans.
The other excuse to not undertake wheat import to India during the famine was the War Cabinet’s
conviction that “Bengalis would sooner starve than eat wheat”.
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Of the 6,00,000 tonnes of grain the viceroy requested to avert disaster, India received less than five
per cent. Even that stayed in Calcutta for the “priority class”, with small amounts sent to districts
for official use. Worse, even at the height of the famine, when hundreds of thousands of villagers
crawled towards Calcutta and other towns and died in masses on the streets, 71,000 tonnes of rice
was being exported on the directions of the War Cabinet to feed rubber tappers in Ceylon.
“I wanted to understand the famine’s human aspect. I had no idea the book would end up targeting
Churchill to this extent.”
Mukerjee holds Churchill responsible for “deliberately deciding to let Indians starve”. He was also
partly to blame for causing the great famine, she says. “Churchill contributed to the famine by
removing the shipping from the Indian Ocean area in January 1943, even though India was already
suffering.” With neighbouring Burma under Japanese occupation, and almost all of south-east Asia
under their thrall, the British disabled and impounded all transport in the coastal regions (much of it
in erstwhile East Bengal), including boats and bullock carts, to prevent its use by the enemy. “The
government in India was already demanding imports because of shortages, saying that if we don’t
get imports, there’s going to be a catastrophe. Even then, Churchill removed the shipping. And that,
to some extent, is explained by a kind of panic that was generated in the War Cabinet. They reduced
shipping to 40 per cent of what it was, and (claimed) there were no ships to transport grain to India
from Australia, where there was plenty. Once the Indian officials realised that there wasn’t any
shipping, and they were rapidly running out of wheat even for the army, they panicked and lifted all
price controls. They started buying at whatever price was demanded and that actually destroyed
market conditions. The price of rice went through the roof; the famine began. By February-March
you’re already seeing starvation deaths,” Mukerjee says. “At that point, it was just callousness (on
Churchill’s part). It was basically preserving Britain at all cost, even at the cost of Indian lives.”
Mukerjee blames Churchill’s almost insane hatred of Indians and the Indian freedom movement for
not only the famine but also for the bloody Partition that followed. While some critics, like Max
Hastings in the Sunday Times, have accused her of exaggerating Churchill’s role in the Partition,
Mukerjee says: “If Churchill hadn’t been there, things might have gone very differently. For
instance, soon after Churchill became prime minister and appointed Leopold S. Amery as secretary
of state for India, Amery suggested that they reach an accomodation with the Congress. But the
price to pay would be the promise of independence. Churchill shot it down. If it hadn’t been
Churchill as PM at that time but someone like Lord Irwin, they might have been more amenable to
an agreement. Then, we wouldn’t have had the Quit India movement, wouldn’t have had Gandhi,
Nehru, Patel, the entire Congress leadership spending the war years in prison, leaving Jinnah as the
only significant politician outside prison. Jinnah looked powerful—obviously you look powerful
when the powers back you. And he used that to his advantage to push through his idea of Pakistan.”
Churchill also had a hand, Mukerjee says, in sabotaging the Simla talks in 1945 by urging Jinnah to
hold out for everything he wanted. “Jinnah told a couple of friends: ‘they are telling me to hold on
to the demand that every Muslim has to be a Muslim League voter.’ That was more than even the
British could give.”
And yet, Mukerjee says, when she started out, “I had no idea that the book would end up targeting
Churchill to the extent it did”. What she was trying to do, she says, “was to understand the famine
from the human aspect”. So, her first priority was to find eye-witnesses. “This was very difficult.”
Her family still lived in Bengal, but were of little use: as part of the middle class, protected either
49
through ownership of land or jobs in the railways and industry, they hadn’t suffered during the
famine. Then she met a remarkable woman, Ashoka Gupta, who was involved with famine relief
and was with Gandhi during the Noakhali riots in 1946. “We saw wave after wave of women and
children coming, and some old people. They came along the road, falling, limping, getting up,
falling again,” Gupta recounted. “There was a hospital behind our house, and every morning some
mothers would have left their babies on the steps, in the hope that they would be saved.” Brothels
saved the lives of some thousands of the millions of children under ten who were starving during
the famine.
The trail that began at Gupta’s door eventually led Mukerjee to a village, Kalikakundu, where a
freedom fighter, Chitto Samonto, not only shared his experiences with her but took her around to
meet the elderly people who told their horrific stories—babies abandoned “like stray cats”, children
picking undigested grain from faeces, corpses lying in such big heaps on Calcutta’s streets that
disposal became a problem.
Not all Britishers were as callous as Churchill. Mukerjee found the famine account of one British
soldier, Clive Branson, particularly moving. In her book, Mukerjee quotes from his letters home as
their train entered Bengal: “One long trail of starving people. Men, women, children, babies, looked
up into the passing carriage in their last hope for food.... As we pulled towards Calcutta, for miles,
little children naked, with inflated bellies stuck on stick-like legs, held up empty tins towards
us...the ordinary, decent people in England must do something—this is their Empire.”
Unfortunately, Branson never reached home: he was killed in the war. “It’s tragic,” Mukerjee says,
“that someone like him should have to die whereas someone like Churchill exits the war so
triumphant.”
The book took Mukerjee seven years to research and write. “It’s been a huge amount of research
distilled into a small book. It took time, and I had the time to understand everything with a great
deal of depth. I think no one has looked at the famine at such depth.”
But with her second book finished, the questions are still coming. “I now want to understand how
imperialism works in the present-day world because I don’t think it ever went away.” So on to Book
Number Three.
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