bhutan overland

A Nepal-based company makes truck travel comfy.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
Sept. 11, 2010

THIMPHU, Bhutan — About a mile from the India-Bhutan border, in the trash-strewn West Bengal town of Jaigaon, driver Nick Fulford wrestled with the gears of an enormous green-and-white Mercedes-Benz truck.

He heaved and slammed the stick shift as he wrenched the wheel around to swerve past bicycle rickshaws, scooters and unwary pedestrians. A big, ruddy bloke who looks like James Dean's less-fit cousin, he was probably the only United Kingdom national driving a big rig in India.

He was looking for the border, and, naturally, considering that I was navigator, he was lost.

"There was a sign back there that said something about immigration," I said.

"Do you think that's it? That can't be it. There'll be a checkpoint or something," Nick said.

He was right. But so was I. You can't actually enter Bhutan by accident. There is an ornate gate of sorts, with a couple guards in front of it. But they sent us back around the block — no small feat with an eight-ton tractor trailer in a small Indian town — to get our visas checked. The immigration officials were the friendliest I have ever met. About 20 minutes later, we rolled into Bhutan, the first group of "overlanders" to do it in a big rig.

This Bhutan journey is one of around a dozen trips that Australian truck driver-turned-entrepreneur Ben Grayling designed for his new company, Kathmandu-based Best of Asia Overland. Beginning in Kathmandu, the trip runs through Nepal's Chitwan National Park and India's Darjeeling and Gangtok before winding up the Bhutanese
mountains to Thimphu. But Grayling has developed a new model for overlanding.

Derived from an Australian stockmans' term for cattle drives, overlanding throughout the world relies on heavy trucks and off-road vehicles. But while its toughness has given it a cult following among young, once-in-a-lifetime adventurers, the hardships of its journeys have prevented traveling by truck from evolving into a very lucrative
business.

A web community devoted to overlanding lists about 30 companies, the vast majority focused on Africa. The largest company, Dragoman, with its 25 trucks, only attracts around 4,000 clients a year. Grayling believes that's because the group size for the journeys is large, most trips are spent camping out, and travelers are assigned chores to keep the truck rolling. So to tap into the new market represented by
today's more adventurous older travelers, his company offers smaller, more comfortable boutique journeys — some of which will see the passengers "roughing it" in five-star hotels.

“We're basically trying to create a new market,” said 43-year-old Grayling, who worked for seven years as a driver and expedition leader for Dragoman before starting BOA.

Snowy, the refitted truck used on our pioneering journey into Bhutan, is equipped with room for only 14 passengers — giving the interior the spacious, sociable feel of an American retiree's “recreational vehicle” rather than an off-roading tour bus. There's a powerful air conditioning system, wet bar and refrigerator, and when fully
operational BOA-contractor Andrej Kmet — a Slovenian telecom whiz who was one of the eggheads behind the webcast of the first madman to ski down Everest — promises that Snowy will offer WiFi access and VoIP by tapping into local GPRS and 3G networks along the routes.

To complete the package, for itineraries that include a 25-night road trip from Kathmandu to Llasa, a 21-night haul through the deserts of Rajasthan, and a two-week tour of the "creme de la creme" of Nepal, among others, BOA has identified four- and five-star hotels like Nepal's Dwarikas and The Last Resort, India's Fateh Garh and Ajit Bhavan and Tibet's Hotel Manasarovar and Yak Hotel. “We offer the best
accommodation that's available,” Grayling said.

It's a bit like "flashpacking" — where laptop-toting backpackers rough it out on public transport so they can afford to crash in flash hotels. But the idea is also to take seasoned travelers off the beaten track. So Bhutan, which only opened its borders to tourism in 1974, was a natural choice.

Even if it has some ominous Big Brother-type aspects, the erstwhile king's commitment to expanding “gross national happiness” rather than gross national product has so far protected the country's natural beauty and cultural heritage. With a $200 per day minimum for foreigners, only around 25,000 tourists visit the country each year.
And Bhutan still has only one airport and no railway, so the only way to see the country is by road.

But in Asia's hinterlands, and especially India, there's no way to avoid discomfort. On this exploratory trip, passengers endured 16-hour drives and had to criss-cross India and Nepal by plane just to get started, thanks to political unrest in Kathmandu. Some of the Indian hotels were grotty, or just a step above. And we may have eaten one too many meals at the region's ubiquitous roadside "dhabas" for the
Saks Fifth Avenue crowd's tastes. In other words, it's still overlanding.

"We're going to call them boutique trips," Grayling said. "[As for] luxury, I'm not sure that quite works out. On all our trips there is some form of camping. But it's not your sleeping bag on the ground. In India, we have a camel safari where we use permanent tented accommodation, and on our high road to Lhasa trip, where we do actual camping, because we go to Mount Kailash, we've got a support vehicle
and crew, so when we arrive at the camp, everything is already set up, and the meal is being cooked."

Fortunately, there are no plans afoot to prevent passengers from playing navigator.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100909/bhutan-thimphu-tourism-overlanding?page=0,1

US Open final is no "ping pong diplomacy" moment

There's a lot of hype surrounding the other sort of mixed double -- Indo-Pak -- making it to the finals of the US Open. But it's just that: hype. The fact is that individual Indians and Pakistanis have always been able to get along. Many of them are members of the same extended families. Cricketers are pretty amicable (OK, since neutral referees have been introduced), with folks like Shoaib Akhtar apparently preferring India over his homeland, thanks to the presence of a seemingly unending bevy of starlets. Same goes for Bollywood. Ok, India doesn't embrace Pakistan cinema or TV, but it certainly goes the other direction, and Pakistanis reportedly love folks like Shah Rukh Khan.

So why hasn't that brought peace to the Subcontinent? Because war and peace aren't decided by regular folks watching tennis and going to the movies. Or even, it seems, by elected officials.

Games construction spurs Delhi dengue outbreak

Commonwealth Games must battle spread of deadly fever.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
September 5, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — With about a month to go before the opening ceremony of the already controversial 29th Commonwealth Games [2], Delhi bears the look of a mammoth construction site, as plucky migrant laborers scurry to build — and rebuild — roads and stadiums as they melt under the concrete- and asphalt-withering rains of the monsoon. But the worst news is yet to come.

Delhi's big dig has left stagnant water all over the city, breeding a huge swarm of aedes mosquitoes just in time for dengue fever season. As a result, Delhi is suffering a major epidemic at the absolute worst possible time. Already more than a thousand "official" cases of dengue fever have been reported, while independent reports suggest that the reality could be almost double that number. Malaysia and Australia have issued travel advisories and expressed concerns about their athletes, according to press reports [3], and at least 20 countries have written to Indian officials for reassurance. Worse still, Indian health officials say that the disease is set to peak just in time for the opening ceremony.

"This year, due to the construction activities for the Commonwealth Games, and the monsoon, which was a little bit delayed, there are innumerable breeding places for the aedes mosquito," said Dr. Kalpana Baruah, an official with India's National Vector Borne Disease Control Program. "Mosquito density has gone very high, and [because] we are having this virus circulating already in the area, immediately the dengue cases started pouring in. Now every day we are getting almost 60 to 70 new cases."

Even at those numbers, Municipal Corporation of Delhi officials say people's fears are exaggerated. "If you see the incidence of this disease in Thailand, it's much higher, and there has been no problem of visitors in Thailand," said Dr. N.K. Yadav, chief medical officer of the MCD health department. "Moreover, we are more proactive, and we are taking all preventive measures in the Games area and all over Delhi. I don't see any reason for alarm."

Nevertheless, alarm there is. And that's bad news for the games' planners, who oversold the event's ability to attract tourists — claiming they'd recoup most of the costs from travelers — before spending spiraled to $4.6 billion, or nine times the original estimate. So far, England's Queen Elizabeth and a host of top athletes have said they have prior commitments, and just 16,000 of the 170,000 tickets allotted for sale abroad have found takers. Mounting fears about dengue won't make selling the rest any easier.

Commonwealth Games Federation chief executive Mike Hooper downplayed the threat last week, saying that not a single member country had approached him with worries about dengue.

Meanwhile, in damage control mode at a press conference, Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the organizing committee, told reporters that 1,800 doctors will be on call to deal with dengue cases, and, separately, MCD officials announced they plan to fog the games venues with heavy duty insecticide.

Dengue results in extremely high fevers, and can be deadly, though the mortality rate has dropped considerably since 1996, when Delhi's worst outbreak saw more than 10,000 people infected and more than 400 killed. Transmitted by the aedes mosquito, the disease is endemic to India, along with virtually all of south and southeast Asia, but serious outbreaks are cyclical, waxing and waning with the monsoon and government enthusiasm for control programs. Even a mild case is misery. And there is no vaccine, and no real treatment, apart from paracetamol and fluids.

So far, around a thousand official cases of dengue have been reported in and around Delhi.

But because of a disagreement over testing methods and other factors, many cases go unregistered in the government tally. A recent television station survey [4], for example, found nearly 1,500 cases in just two area hospitals.

To fight back, local schools have told students to wear winter uniforms — with long-sleeved shirts and long pants. And there has been a run on mosquito repellent as local residents seek to protect themselves from the insects that carry the disease. Sales of mosquito-repelling sprays and lotions have doubled, according to local pharmacists, and supplies are beginning to run short.

The good news is that so far the death rate is low, with only three confirmed fatalities so far, according to the health department of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. But that's hardly inspiring to residents who can now add a deadly outbreak of disease to a list of games-related woes that includes the improper diversion of funds from programs for the historically oppressed Dalit caste, the expulsion of beggars and street vendors, and a day-and-night battle against colossal traffic jams.

Now, according to a poll conducted by the Times of India newspaper, a whopping 76 percent of residents say the whole exercise was a waste of money, while nearly half believe the fiasco and corruption of the preparations for the great showcase of India's rise has already damaged the country's image abroad.

With that in mind, and dengue-toting mosquitoes in the air, maybe it's just as well the queen won't be coming.

In Kashmir, inshallah, there will be football

A new documentary on Kashmir offers the opposite of "Invictus."

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - August 28, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — When Oscar-nominated director Ashvin Kumar traveled to Kashmir for the first time, in 2009, to research a possible feature film, he discovered a true story that was more inspiring than fiction. He dropped everything and settled in to make a documentary.

Next month, the resulting film, "Inshallah, Football" [2] will premiere at the prestigious Pusan International Film Festival in Korea. The documentary tells the story of a young Argentinean coach who founds a soccer academy in Srinagar to bring so-called "stone pelters" off the killing streets and onto the soccer field. He places many of his players with local professional leagues.

But when he manages to get the team captain an opportunity to train with a professional club in Spain, Kashmir's troubled history emerges to block his efforts, as the government of India denies the boy a passport because two decades earlier his father had joined a militant separatist struggle for an independent Kashmir. At the eleventh hour, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah intervenes on the boy's behalf.

"It's the story of three remarkable men — one is his father who fought for his beliefs, another about the football coach who's come all the way from Argentina to start this football academy, and this young man who is struggling to play football," said Kumar.

That was a summer of hope. When I spoke with coach Juan Marcos Troia (aka "Marco") shortly after Kumar finished filming in 2009, Marco told me happily that his International Sports Academy Trust had trained about 1,000 young men from all over Kashmir — taking at least 50 from the armies of stone-throwing street protesters that plague local police.

He'd stuck it out even after he'd been beaten up by soldiers on the street just five minutes away from the soccer field, after they stopped him for questioning and suspected that he was only pretending to be a foreigner. He'd brought his wife and two daughters with him to Kashmir. The two girls attended school in Srinagar, despite soldiers and curfews, like ordinary Kashmiris. And Marco believed he was making a difference.

"I have seen how it [soccer] is helping to change the mentality of some of the officials in the government and how it's changing the mentality of the people," Troia said at the time. "It's very interesting to see in only two-and-a-half years, how much our program has helped not only football, but also the development of the society."

This summer, as Kumar readies his film, "Inshallah, Football" for Pusan, that hope has been crushed. Spiraling out of control since June, Kashmir seems locked into an escalating pattern of violence, as local residents take to the streets to protest the deaths of innocent civilians, only to see more of their number gunned down by the security forces. Over the past two months, more than 60 civilians have been killed, most of them teenagers. Sport is the last thing on anybody's mind, as local journalists bitterly describe decades-long careers as nothing more than "obituary writing."

"Everything has completely stopped," Kumar told me in a recent phone interview. "There's no chance of anybody getting anywhere. Marco had trained about 1,000 boys and he had them playing in professional leagues. The idea was to send all 11 players to train in Brazil on a scholarship. But in essence, I think the program has ground to a halt."

That makes his film more important than ever. And selection for the Pusan festival promises to attract a wider audience for a story that Kumar hopes will cut through what he describes as a simplistic, blinkered attitude about Kashmir.

"For me, it's a great opportunity," Kumar said. "It's Asia's biggest festival, and it's the right kind of place to show a film like this because it opens up a debate about Asia."

Following the lives of 18-year-old Basharat Bashir and his former militant father, "Inshallah, Football" offers an unusually hopeful perspective on Kashmir's cycle of violence.

But the contemporary events that now form the backdrop for its release make the hope it offers bittersweet. This summer's deadly confrontations have illustrated tragically that, where Kashmir is concerned, India keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Thus, even as the Indian government struggles to win the loyalty of Kashmiris, the film illustrates, it is undermined at every turn by its inability to trust in its own democratic ideals.

And instead of a cricket bat or a soccer ball, local boys pick up stones to throw at the police.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100826/kashmir-ashwin-kumar-sports

CrackBerry addicts rejoice: No ban in India. For now.

To avoid being shut down, BlackBerry maker said it would allow access to encrypted messages.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
August 31, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — A corporate lawyer who deals with high-profile clients in the United States and Europe, Sunila Awasthi lives by her BlackBerry. But in the wake of an Indian government move to gain access to BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's proprietary encryption technology, she fears she may be spending more late nights at the office.

"Our main concern is confidentiality," Awasthi told GlobalPost. "We advise foreign companies in different jurisdictions and different time zones, so it's very convenient to access confidential information [by BlackBerry]. But if that confidentiality is discontinued, that convenience goes away instantly."

At least where the Indian government is concerned, that's what's about to happen. At an eleventh hour meeting with government officials Monday, Research in Motion (RIM) caved in to India's demands for access to users' emails and other data to avoid an immediate ban on its encrypted data services.

Under the agreement, RIM will immediately implement systems to grant "lawful access by law enforcement agencies" to customer data, India's Home Ministry said in a statement. The
regulatory bodies will evaluate the feasibility of this arrangement for the next 60 days, even as India presses forward with demands to force not only RIM, but also Google and Skype to set up servers for hosting customer accounts in India — which would facilitate easier access to private data and wire tapping of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) phone calls.

In the meantime, Indian market leader Nokia pre-empted trouble with the announcement that it would move servers for its "push mail" service to India and allow access to India's security agencies.

"The processes here are very transparent, not opaque like in countries like China," said Pankaj Mohindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association. "They've been given sufficient time by the government, and I think they've done the right thing."

BlackBerry is already starting to look like the Compuserve of the smartphone era thanks to Google's Android operating system, so the blow to its U.S. Department of Defense-certified encryption couldn't come at a worse time. And the leverage that India has exerted as the world's fastest growing mobile market is likely to provide more ammunition for other countries — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Lebanon — which have also sought access to BlackBerry's encrypted data.

BlackBerry addicts like Romil Ratra, general manager of an international hotel, are just happy that they can keep thumbing. Was he relieved to hear RIM had averted a ban? "Very relieved," he said.

Ratra, whose been using a BlackBerry since the brand was first launched in India, says he uses his device constantly. "I'm on the phone a lot, plus I'm a social media addict, between Twitter and Facebook, and a million other things that keep coming up," he said.

"I'm not one of those guys who puts it off when I go to sleep; I leave it on."

In that respect, India is like everyplace else. But it does have some special characteristics that make some of the million-odd BlackBerry users a wee bit wary that the government has extorted its way to
getting the key to the code.

Awasthi, the lawyer, doesn't trust the government to keep her secrets, she says. India doesn't have any privacy laws that cover emails, apart from the general constitutional protections, and the precedent set for voice calls is hardly encouraging.

According to a recent expose by Outlook India, a weekly magazine, India's intelligence services routinely monitor citizens' mobile phones with technology that allows them to pluck conversations out of the air. Those checks and balances that do exist are flouted or manipulated to facilitate questionable wire taps — and wire tapping doesn't require a warrant. Police can get access to a variety of mobile information without a court order.

But it's not just criminals who come under the scanner. Monitoring systems around top hotels routinely pick up conversations between prominent corporate leaders discussing sensitive business dealings. And the only recourse available is too little, too late.

"You can say that we have the fundamental right to privacy under the constitution, but that means I have to go to the Supreme Court every time I want to see it enforced," said Awasthi. "That's not a
practical solution."

Other BlackBerry users are more sanguine about sharing their private data with government spooks.

"I'm not sure exactly how to react," said Ratra. "I don't think I'm happy that somebody is going to be able to monitor my mails, [but] if it's something that BlackBerry is already doing for North America, or Canada, or other countries, there's no reason that they shouldn't do it here."

Hardeep Sachdeva, another corporate lawyer, agrees. He argues that concerns that confidential information could leak from behind the government firewall are unfounded. Moreover, the difficult task of preventing terrorist attacks — not just investigating them after the fact — justifies some curtailment of citizens' fundamental right to privacy.

"Every system provider in this country should provide access to the authorities to ensure that the security of the nation is not compromised," Sachdeva said. "I don't see why BlackBerry should be an
exception."

But who will monitor the monitors? As recently as this April, when opposition Bharatiya Janata Party leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy argued that Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance government was misusing wiretaps to spy on political adversaries, and even their own unruly allies. "In the garb of tracking terror, the government is tracking politicians and even their cabinet ministers," Rudy said.

Lucky for them, most Indian pols aren't big on email.

It's Rush Limbaugh's India

A liberal guru can't compete with India's new televangelists.

By Jason Overdorf
July 27, 2010
GlobalPost

NEW DELHI, India — Dressed in a long, orange kurta, orange pajamas and a bright orange turban, Swami Agnivesh looks every bit the haranguing fanatic.

But India's latest televangelist is cut from a different cloth. In a forest of Rush Limbaugh-style conservatives, Agnivesh is the sole voice of India's fast-fading social liberalism on TV. Or was. The crusader has just been canceled.

"From March 1968 till today I've been deeply involved with the struggle of the people, with the main focus on issues of social justice," Agnivesh said. "I felt that in order to consolidate an ideological perspective around these movements, struggles, agitations, which are all directed towards social change, I need a platform by which I can reach millions of viewers and engage them in discussion, debate and dialogue."

At 74 years old, Agnivesh speaks with a quiet, measured voice. As the president of the World Council of Arya Samaj — an affiliate of the Hindu reform movement that was founded in the 19th century to eradicate the caste system — his "sermons" are as much about politics as they are about religion.

Frustrated with religious leaders' opaque platitudes and increasingly commercial bent, not to mention the news channels' preference for shouting matches featuring the same old rogue gallery of party hacks, he set out to open substantive debates about the causes underlying caste discrimination, illiteracy, poverty, corruption and more. And he did it by passing the microphone to people whose voices had never been heard on Indian TV: including the Dalits who scrape human excrement from primitive toilets for a living, AIDS patients and lepers.

"We got an extensive response, not only through letters and emails," said Agnivesh. "But in my travels throughout the length and breadth of the country, people would walk up to me, shake hands and talk about the latest episode. I could see from their faces that it was impacting the minds of the people."

An ascetic who took monastic orders in 1970, Agnivesh is most famous for his decades-long fight against bonded labor. But he has also crusaded against female feticide, the liquor mafia and sati — a practice in which widows are encouraged, or forced, to immolate themselves on their deceased husbands' funeral pyres. On TV, he adopted the talk show format to send out his message for 52 episodes, playing devil's advocate instead of preaching.

"The strength of this program was that we took up issues that were not being taken up by the mainstream media and demonstrated through this talk show that there is more than one side to the truth," Agnivesh said.

There were some of the usual hijinks, too, of course. He theatrically touched the feet of a Dalit woman on one episode. But what was striking about the show was that he encouraged his underprivileged guests to talk for themselves, rather than banging on for them.

The fact that the government and the Maoists agreed to make him the go-between for peace negotiations in May — until his Maoist interlocutor was killed in controversial circumstances in June — is testament that he came off as fair, reasonable and honest. But fair, reasonable and honest doesn't sell.

Agnivesh's message of social reform cuts against the grain in modernizing India, where the upwardly mobile masses are increasingly looking to conservative leaders to explain their new world. That's why his show first migrated from the state-owned general interest channel, Doordarshan, to Lok Sabha TV — a channel primarily dedicated to the live broadcast of parliament — and was eventually canceled, while his most prominent competitors continue to amass million-dollar television empires.

"[The new conservative evangelism] marries the notion of what the audience feels to be traditional with consumption and individualism," said Santosh Desai, a prominent media analyst and CEO of Future Brands. "It sits really well with the Indian middle class, which is trying to make sense of the world around them. It assuages a lot of anxiety about change, by giving it a sort of spiritual sanctity."

Freed from state control in the 1990s, Indian cable has moved from soap operas to game shows to reality TV. Along the way, spiritual India's preoccupation with gods and gurus has inspired a bouquet of religious channels, too. They run the gamut from homegrown Sanskar TV, which broadcasts Hindu sermons and devotional music, to Power Vision, an all-God-all-the-time Christian channel that broadcasts in Hindi, Malayalam and English.

But in contrast to bygone gurus like the Hare Krishna movement's Swami Prabhupada or Beatles inspiration Mahesh Yogi, who sought to explode and transform society, India's new preachers are essentially conservative protectors of tradition. And the biggest stars of televangelism are its most controversial ideologues: Hinduism's Baba Ramdev and Islam's Zakir Naik.

Both televangelists appeal to a young, new India that's embracing commercialism and trying to make sense of a rapidly changing socio-economic landscape. Ramdev is more like self-help star Tony Robbins than Pat Robertson; he promises viewers tangible, individual benefits, like any brand, says Desai.

Similarly, Naik offers an imminently practical and useful service for Muslims. "He seems to have connected with the middle class Muslims ... [because] he tries to show that Islam is not incompatible with modern ideas," said Mujibur Rehman, a professor at New Delhi's Jamia Milia University.

"They are propagating themselves," said Agnivesh. "With each show, they are getting a little more followers, a little more power in that sense and, also, a little more money."

Their self-promotion, if that's what it's all about, can take an ugly turn. After claiming simple breathing exercises could cure cancer and AIDS, Baba Ramdev drew liberal ire — and additional fans — by opposing India's progressive move to decriminalize homosexuality. He went on to claim he could turn any erring lad butch with his yogic arts, and promptly announced he was forming his own political party.

For his part, Zakir Naik's opaque statements in support of terrorism and Osama bin Laden — though he claims they've been taken out of context — got him banned from entering the United Kingdom and Canada this June.

Arguably, this is reactionary radicalism in the guise of the rational. Whether the effect is intentional or not, Naik's propensity for inflammatory statements like "every Muslim should be a terrorist," make him a dangerous influence. And Ramdev's peddling of prejudice and superstition is perhaps more dangerous still in a country already flirting with Hindu fundamentalism.

"It's too much to say that Hindu right revivalism is directly linked to this, but certainly it softens up the audience for the revivalist agenda to some extent," said Desai. "In that respect, although it's couched in the language of modern, it has the effect of the other kind."

Indeed, with every bombshell, India's conservative gurus have grown more popular. Ramdev's programs reportedly attract an audience of more than 85 million people, and his yoga and homeopathic medicines businesses bring in $40 million a year. Meanwhile, Naik claims an audience of 50 million for his program on Peace TV, and one of India's top newspapers ranks him the country's third-most powerful guru, after Ramdev and the Art of Living's Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

At the same time, Agnivesh's most radical statements helped get his show canceled. He didn't just call out the government on the Maoist issue. He came out against Hinduism's massively important kumbh mela — a ritual bath in the Ganges that attracts millions of pilgrims — and threatened to launch a Right to Information inquiry into the huge sums that the government spends on the celebration. And he pilloried Dalit leaders, like the present Congress Party speaker of the Lok Sabha, who rise to power based on their caste affiliation and then abandon the empowerment agenda for party politics.

Sometimes, when the truth sets you free, it also leaves you unemployed.

India population: Is sterilization the answer?

Millennium Development Goals could push India back to a "sterilization first" policy.

By Jason Overdorf
July 14, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — Every year in India, shanty towns mushroom in the cities, cities sprawl into farmland and the country increases by the population of Australia.

Every day, every minute, on trains and buses, on sidewalks and streets, the country squeezes and shrinks and sucks in its breath to push too many people into too little space.

India has fallen behind in the race to meet the Millennium Development Goals for reducing its birth rate by 2015. Only about half of India's 26 states have reached the targeted level of two children per mother.

In large, economically depressed states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, an average woman still bears four children over her lifetime. This means India will surpass China to become the world's most populous country by 2030. The continuing swell threatens the environment and places a tremendous burden on government services.

But obsession with the Millennium Development targets is pushing India back to incentive-based family planning, something the country first visited in the 1970s — where dangerous sterilization operations for women are too often presented as the first, and sometimes only, option for birth control.

Critics of India's repackaged population control program say the cure may be worse than the disease.

"There's a great hurry to again set targets from above to be followed by everyone. And that's again creating problems," said A.R. Nanda, executive director of NGO Population Foundation of India and the former health secretary who wrote India's population policy in 2000.

The main worry? India's National Population Stabilization Fund has brought back controversial, incentive-based sterilization, among other initiatives aimed at reducing the birth rate.

While sterilization in and of itself isn't new to India, for the first time the country is outsourcing the work to private clinics — a move that has raised concerns about poor and illiterate women of rural India being pressured or fooled into going under the knife without fully understanding the risks, consequences and alternatives.

Cash rewards threaten to turn operating theaters into veritable assembly lines. The fund's Santushti scheme offers private sector payment of 15,000 rupees per operation and hospitals and clinics get 500 rupees extra per case if 30 cases are done on a single day in a fixed facility.

These factors make it more likely women will be denied their right to make informed choices about their medical care and increase the chances of surgical complications, said Abhijit Das, a former fellow in Population Innovations at the MacArthur Foundation who now heads an NGO called Healthwatch Uttar Pradesh.

"When you create an incentive system, it privileges one solution over the other and encourages them to cut corners," Das said. "And we've had very bad experiences with that in the past."

In the 1970s, the Indira Gandhi government pursued an aggressive, target-based sterilization program that featured similar incentives for participants, as well as compulsory vasectomies for men with two or more children. Because of widespread corruption and abuses, however, many other men were tricked or forced to get the operation, and many women, too, were compelled to undergo much more dangerous sterilization procedures.

According to Dr. Amarjit Singh, who heads the National Population Stabilization Fund, it is making progress in getting people to use alternative forms of birth control, like intrauterine devices — a form of birth control that uses an object inserted into the uterus to prevent fertilization — in traditional problem states like Bihar and Orissa, which now have effective and proactive governments.

In Bihar, for instance, the number of women using the devices — an essential part of the population program in China, where 60 percent of women use them — climbed from around 40,000 in 2009 to around 200,000 last year.

The fund has also leveraged India's recent Right to Education legislation with innovative schemes to encourage girls to stay in school, which not only means a delayed start to their childbearing years but also increases the likelihood that they will use birth control.

And private-public partnerships have helped reduce the number of home births by increasing the number of facilities available to poor women. But the general perception remains that uneducated villagers can't be trusted to use other birth control methods and female sterilization is the only foolproof solution.

"In certain states, it's still a very male-dominated society, so there's no certainty that women can ensure that a condom can be used. An IUD is a good alternative," said Singh, referring to the acronym for intrauterine devices. "But until we're able to increase use, then sterilization is the focus."

According to the latest National Family Health Survey, 37 percent of Indian women have undergone sterilization, compared with 1 percent of men, while just 3 percent are on the pill and only 5 percent use condoms.

The figures can be mind-boggling. Along with the 150,000-odd women who were fitted with intrauterine devices in Bihar last year, for instance, another 150,000 went for sterilization operations.

"Repeated surveys done in India say that in most cases sterilization is the first method [of birth control] people are using — which should not be the case," said Das. "About one-fourth of the people [in a recent national health survey] did not have any information about a second method and about a third of that one-fourth did not have any information about the safety of the sterilizaton procedure. So there is no informed choice."

That focus on sterilization has its own dangers.

Although activists pushed the Supreme Court to mandate minimum safety and quality standards for sterilization in 2005, there is no real monitoring mechanism to ensure that facilities adhere to the norms. Surgeries are no longer performed in cattle sheds. But Das said that infections and other complications are still common. All too often women die under the knife as tired surgeons rush through operations in hastily erected rural camps.

Although international figures suggest that about one in 200 female sterilization operations fail — resulting in unwanted pregnancies and other difficulties — in India that number is likely much higher.

Moreover, the focus on sterilization for birth control pushes women to have children early and then go for sterilization operations at 22 or 23 years old, which studies show makes them more vulnerable to various gynecological problems — and four times more likely to undergo a hysterectomy later in life.

As the world takes fearful stock of India's growing numbers, it should remember that those figures represent human beings, says the Population Foundation's Nanda. And focus on the progress that has been made and why it has been made, rather than putting the country in the cross-hairs again.

"No such scare mongering should be done," he said. "The fertility rate has come down. When we started, it was around six. It has come down to 2.5 or 2.4, and it will reach 2.1 in another five or 10 years, maximum. In some states it may go a little later, but that should not lead us to do things that will cause problems for women."

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100713/population-growth-sterilization-millennium-development-goals

kashmir's web: is a contested region set to explode?

Analysis: Things are getting ugly in one of the world's most dangerous places.

By Jason Overdorf

NEW DELHI, India — With thousands of armed police and paramilitary soldiers patrolling the deserted streets of Kashmir, it's hard — or maybe sad — to say that things are back to normal.

Late Tuesday night, New Delhi deployed the army to quell protests in Kashmir for the first time since 1990, after police bullets allegedly killed three more civilians, bringing the total for the month to 15. By Wednesday, the machinery of the government had regained a tenuous control over the Kashmir valley with a strict curfew that barred all civilian personnel, including the media, from the street.

But hundreds — and in some cases thousands — of people defied orders and went back onto the streets after darkness fell. As soon as the authorities rotated security forces from a pacified area to a problem zone, torch-carrying protesters poured back onto the streets shouting, "India, go back" and "We want freedom." And once again, in the Batmaloo area of Srinagar, police could only disperse demonstrators by firing live ammunition in the air.

On Thursday the curfew was extended, with no end in sight.

Nighttime protests and anti-India slogans shouted from the minarets of mosques harks back to the volatile Kashmir of the militancy plagued 1990s. Facebook and other social networking sites are brimming with outpourings of rage, bordering on hatred for India's security forces, from Kashmiri youth. And the moderate, or pro-India, as they are known locally, political parties in Kashmir, as well as the civil administration, stands marginalized, with People's Democratic Party leader telling a local national television channel, "Mainstream parties will become irrelevant if the situation in Kashmir doesn't change."

"Right now, definitely the mood on the streets is very volatile," said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a prominent separatist leader. "The anger is quite high. It's brimming with hatred."

Kashmir has been seething since early June [2], when news surfaced that army officers had allegedly murdered three innocent boys, then claimed they were militants killed during a gun battle near the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Yet as the anger escalates, New Delhi's only solution has been to counter violence with more violence. And now, with locals taking the streets to demand the curtailing of the draconian powers granted to the army and the gradual demilitarization of Kashmir, all the government can think to do is order the troops out of the barracks and into the streets. The fear of the army — which unlike the police and paramilitary forces may shoot to kill with impunity, thanks to the loathed Armed Forces Special Powers Act — so far has been enough to end the violence. But local observers say that in the long run that fear will stoke, rather than suppress, the anger in Srinagar and the surrounding valley.

"When there's discontent, you bring in the army. When there's more discontent, you give the army more power. But it's a vicious cycle," said Kashmir University's Professor Noor Ahmad Baba.

With as many as 500,000 troops deployed amidst the houses and schools of its towns and villages, Indian-administered Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world. Until 2009, the number of boots on the ground had grown steadily since 1989, when a militant separatist insurgency began with the aid of Pakistan.

But following a decline of violence since 2006, India had been following through on the promises it made to the people on its side of the border and slowly withdrawing troops from the state. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, as many as 30,000 soldiers were pulled out in 2009. New Delhi acknowledged the unofficial end of militancy, and Kashmir was "normalized." Now, observers say, that brief glimmer of hope has been snuffed out.

The situation looks as grim as ever. In a show of power Wednesday, the army conducted a flag march in Srinagar's most volatile areas, deploying bullet- and mine-proof vehicles. Local police allegedly confiscated television cameras and beat up journalists trying to cover the continuing protests. And by all appearances, it looks as though this is how New Delhi hopes to restore order in Kashmir, as the central government continues to insist that the problems in the Srinagar valley are the doings of Pakistan, the paid troublemakers of radical separatist leaders, or just about anybody in the range of a pointing finger. Case in point: Home Secretary G.K. Pillai told a high-level meeting of security officials late Wednesday that the current problems are due to anti-nationals and vested interests, who should be dealt with sternly.

To local Kashmiris, that sentiment guarantees that the efforts will fail. They argue that the army has indeed succeeded in rooting out militancy. But acting sternly has alienated people and created a new set of foes — especially among the generation that grew up during the suppression of the insurgency, today's stone throwers — that India cannot fight with bullets.

"Public protest is rooted in public discontent, and separatist politics is based on that discontent," Baba said. "If not for that, there would be no separatist politics in Kashmir. It's more that the politicians are driven by the situation on the ground than that they are driving the situation."

Indeed, most of Kashmir's separatist leaders have been jailed over the past few weeks, and others, like Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, are under house arrest.

And it is hard to imagine a handful of teenage stone-throwers were able to convince hundreds of doctors and paramedics employed by Srinagar's main tertiary care hospital to take over the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences compound Thursday, shouting anti-India slogans, in protest against the army intervention.

"Maybe they'll continue with their oppressive methods, and it will quiet down for awhile," said Farooq, who is chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of separatist political parties. "But then it will start again. You can't hack at the leaves, you have to get to the roots of the problem."

And there's the rub. To do that, New Delhi would have to admit that Islamabad isn't the only troublemaker in Kashmir.

With Parvaiz Bukhari in Srinagar.

with one eye on china, india moves into africa

India's Bharti bid redefines the race for the African continent.

By Jason Overdorf
Global Post, June 21, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — When Sunil Mittal, the 52-year-old chairman of Bharti Enterprises, recently announced the Indian mobile company's successful acquisition of Kuwait-based Zain's African operations, he flagged off the next stage in the so-called “race for Africa” between India and China.

This leg will be much more than a modern-day great game played for political influence and access to natural resources. And in this contest the tortoise may be set to sprint past the hare.

“The Indians are in there for the long haul, integrating economically, socially and politically,” said Harry Broadman, the author of "Africa's Silk Road: China and India's New Economic Frontier." “I think India is the sleeper. These are the businesses that are operating under the radar and will have a much more durable impact on the African economy, arguably, than the Chinese.”

With the $10.7 billion purchase, Bharti becomes the world's fifth largest mobile service provider in the world by number of subscribers, gaining 42 million customers and establishing a presence in 15 African countries. And Mittal, who helped to drive down Indian call rates, making talk time cheaper in India than in any other country in the world, is confident that he can redefine the African market. Given that African callers pay 10 times the Indian rate for talk time, his first step is likely to be a price war.

After an initial flurry of enthusiasm, skepticism has emerged about the impact Bharti's foray into Africa will have on the company's bottom line. Hard-nosed financial analysts have pointed out the difficulties involved in integrating operations from 15 different countries with different languages, cultures and regulations, and Standard & Poor's has already lowered Bharti's credit rating.

But long before it's confirmed as a success or failure, the merger could be even more important, symbolically, for India Inc., for whom Mittal has already played trend setter in countries like Bangladesh, where Bharti's purchase of Warid Telecom inspired a wave of similar deals.

Traditionally, India has been viewed as — and considered itself — a laggard in Africa, where China's deep-pocketed state-owned enterprises have snapped up land, oil and development projects. And the numbers have supported that view. As of April, for example, China had committed $8 billion dollars in investment, compared with India's $2 billion. Meanwhile, trade between China and Africa dwarfed trade between Indian and Africa by a third.

But Mittal believes that the sun has set on the era of state-supported investment, and Indian firms don't need financial aid to compete. “The government just needs to improve air connectivity with Africa, even if that means giving money to Air India,” he said in a post-merger interview with India's Financial Express newspaper. “And the industry would flock to Africa.”

He may be right. Over the past several years, as companies and investors have woken up to African economic growth, the profile of their investments in Africa has changed, said Broadman. While the conventional wisdom has credited resource-rich countries like Nigeria for Africa's growth, he argues in a recent paper, from 1998 to 2008 the most sustained progress came from non-resource dependent countries, where real gross domestic product grew 5.6 percent per year. China and India — whose investments in Africa are growing much faster than those of western nations — have taken note.

“You are seeing a diversification [in their investment], whether it's in consumer products, environmental cleanup products, or food processing,” Broadman said.

That diversification may shift the balance in favor of India.

Because of India's deeper historical engagement and greater cultural affinity with Africa, and because Indian investment on the continent is spearheaded by entrepreneurs, India's projects are more thoroughly integrated with the local economy. Where Chinese firms operate in enclaves, import Chinese workers and source inputs from companies back in China, their Indian counterparts more often build local supply chains and merge more thoroughly with the community. A recent survey, for example, found that almost half of ethnically Indian business owners in Africa had taken local citizenship, while 96 percent of ethnically Chinese owners had retained their Chinese nationality.

In extractive industries, and perhaps even in some types of manufacturing, this kind of going native may not be terribly important. But for sales and marketing — and for service industries like telecommunications — it's likely to prove essential.

Copyright 2009 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/100618/one-eye-china-india-moves-africa

Aging in India: Not the same old story

Demise of India's joint family system sparks boom in Florida-style retirement communities.

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost
June 13, 2010 08:50

NEW DELHI, India — When 72-year-old Dr. Ram Das Agrawal decided he was ready to give up his Chhattisgarh medical practice a few years ago, he was eager to find a community where he could live out his remaining years in peace, without worrying about health care, safety, or the daily hassles of maintaining a home in India.

Shortly after his daughter married and moved to Alwar, Rajasthan, she helped her father find the solution. Among the first real estate complexes of its kind in India, Ashiana's Utsav at Bhiwadi is a 640-unit community for senior citizens where Agrawal not only enjoys the security of corporate-managed maintenance, 24-hour medical care on call and similar benefits, but also plays in table tennis tournaments and sings with a music club.

“It's beyond what I imagined,” Agrawal said. “I'm happy.”

India's economic boom is gathering momentum, like a snowball rolling downhill. But the country's strivers are fighting harder than ever for a piece of the pie — working longer hours, migrating to new cities or emigrating to richer lands. Today fewer than 40 percent of Indians live in so-called “joint families,” traditional arrangements where brothers shared the family home with their parents even after they'd married and had families of their own, according to real estate consultancy Jones LaSalle Meghraj.

To compensate, the rising middle class is turning to a new real estate phenomenon: Florida-style retirement communities.

“Their children have gone abroad or to other cities for jobs, and the parents are all alone,” said Santosh Dhamdhere, marketing manager at Atashri, a retirement community in Pune, Maharashtra. “Initially, when we started we were skeptical and had a low response. But now it is selling like hotcakes. There is a big market that is untapped.”

Untapped, and growing. It's true that India is one of the youngest countries in the world, and getting younger. By 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan. But thanks to higher life expectancy, India's elderly population is growing rapidly, too. The current elderly population of about 81 million people will nearly double to 150 million by 2020, with even more rapid growth in the numbers of people more than 80 years old, according to Help Age India, a non-profit organization that works on elderly-related issues.

To meet the projected demand, real estate developments for older people are mushrooming on the outskirts of cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune and Kochi. Paranjape Construction's Atashri Foundation has completed four retirement communities and has a fifth nearing completion around Pune, for example, and has typically sold all 100-200 units within a month of a new project launch.

Ashiana Housing has retirement resorts in Bhiwadi, Jaipur and Pune, with around 1400 one-, two- and three-bedroom units in total. Similarly, the Dignity Foundation operates a 25-acre project “for active and productive living for senior citizens” 90 kilometers from Mumbai (Bombay), while Riverdale Retirement Resort-home, in Kochi, Kerala, among others, operates an American-style assisted living facility.

“If you look at the top-seven cities in the country and the current working stage, on that basis, if you convert that into square footage for retired couples, I wouldn't be surprised if demand exceeds 5 to 6 million square feet,” said Sanjay Dutt, chief executive, business, at Jones LaSalle Meghraj.

A gleaming forest of golden-colored condominiums, Utsav at Bhiwadi, where Dr. Agrawal lives, offers myriad services that are tailor-made for older Indians who might not otherwise be comfortable living alone.



A single-gated community, the complex is more stringent about security than ordinary real estate developments — instituting a closed-circuit TV system, background checks for house maids and an internal postal system to eliminate the usual incessant to-and-fro of private couriers, for instance. Every flat has emergency call buttons to summon help, and there's a nurse on the site 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And all the normal residential amenities — vegetable vendors, grocer, gardener, and so forth — are vetted and provided by Ashiana. The atmosphere is a lot like a college, with a student-union-like community center that boasts a theater, game room and restaurant, and an activities director organizes a series of events every month to encourage residents to build friendships and avoid feeling isolated.

“We've addressed all the fears of senior citizens,” said A. Gonogopadhyay. Ashiana Housing's corporate vice president, he was a key driving force in pioneering the retirement community concept, and now he's a resident. “Once you know you have that support,” he said, “you get extra vigor.”

Sadly, only a handful can afford this kind of care. Units at Ashiana's Bhiwadi complex range in price from around $40,000 to $65,000, for example, making them affordable for the upper middle class but out of reach for most Indians.

At the same time, new wealth has eroded the foundations of traditional values. Once the source of wisdom, child care, and financial support, many in India's older generation, who struggled to earn in a month what today's salaried class makes in a day, are viewed as obsolete. For the poor, health care for the aged is unavailable in most places, and with only two medical colleges across the entire country teaching geriatric care, that's unlikely to change soon. Worse still, only about 10 percent of the population has any form of pension, while another 12 million older people from below-poverty-line families get a stipend of about $5 a month.

“In India, old people have to work till they die,” said Mathew Cherian, Help Age India's chief executive.

Ageing isn't easy for the middle class, either. With the adoption of American-style retirement communities and nursing homes, Indian elders, and their children, have begun to confront some American-style problems. Retirees don't always find the paradise of card games, bingo, and like-minded company that their children imagine for them in retirement communities. Children living abroad feel guilty that they don't call and visit often enough, and their sequestered parents feel deserted and isolated.

“There's a lot of bitterness,” said Help Age India's Cherian.

“Feelings of isolation are always an issue as age advances, but it's a question of your own attitude also,” said Agrawal, who has clearly applied the lessons he learned treating patients to his own life.

Source URL: http://web1.globalpost.com/dispatch/health/100604/retirement-communities-india

India: Bollywood does Hitler

What's up with all the Nazi symbols in India?

By Jason Overdorf
Global Post - June 11, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — You wouldn't expect a woman named Savitri Devi to be interred next to George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. But Devi was no ordinary Hindu.

“Where Savitri Devi really hit the money was after World War II, when neo-Nazism morphed into a globalized form,” said British historian Nicholas Goodricke-Clarke. “It was talking about the white races against the colored people of the world, so therefore her globalized view of Aryans uber alles, transcending the limits of German nationalism, gave the post-War neo-Nazi movement an enormous fillip.”

Born Maximine Portaz in Lyon, in 1905, the French-Greek writer took the name Savitri Devi around the same time she devoted her life to Nazism and joined India's Hindu nationalist movement. Pop-philosopher, pseudo-academic, spiritualist and fascist, she penned “A Warning to the Hindus” to stir anxiety over the supposed threat posed by Christianity and Islam. She worked tirelessly to reconcile Hitler's cherished theory of the Aryan master race with the Hindu religion, and even argued that the Fuhrer was a living incarnation of Vishnu – one of Hinduism's principal deities. And, at least in part, it worked.

In a curious twist of fate — and ideologies — the weird love affair between a mostly brown nation and the world's most diabolical racist has turned out to be mutual. This week, for instance, Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, the director of a soon-to-be-released Bollywood biopic on Hitler, promised to reveal the Fuhrer's “love for India” (with singing and dancing?).

By all accounts, the film, which is titled “My Friend Hitler” and stars Bollywood stalwart Anupam Kher, is not hagiography, and Kumar, who said that an international release is planned for the film, is obviously courting controversy.

But it's inescapable that he's also aiming to tap the subcontinent's continuing infatuation with Hitler for box office returns. The dictator's autobiography, Mein Kampf, is a perennial best-seller here, where it is read by management students searching for business tips and budding Hindu nationalists seeking the inspiration behind Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh ideologue M.S. Golwalkar, whom historian Ram Guha aptly calls “the guru of hate.” And a few years back, nobody batted an eye when a restaurant called “Hitler's Cross” opened in cosmopolitan Mumbai, which has its own proponents of ethnic nationalism in the Shiv Sena and its offshoots.

"As a leader, [Hitler] was successful,” Kumar said at a press conference for the upcoming film, according to local news reports. “Why did he lose as a human being, what were the problems, what were the issues, what were his intentions, this is what we want to show."

So how did brown people come to love Hitler, and white supremacists come to love a brown country?

Devi found a ready audience for her deification of Hitler in wartime Calcutta, Goodricke-Clarke, author of a biography titled “Hitler's Priestess,” said in a phone interview. The local population, perhaps ironically, saw the Axis Powers as their future liberators. As Devi was preaching Hitler as Vishnu, Bengali freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose was arranging a meet with the Fuhrer in Berlin and forming his rebellious Indian National Army to fight with the Japanese against India's British colonizers. And Devi herself helped reconcile Hinduism's all-embracing ideology with the Hindu Mission's message of ethnic nationalism. A neo-paganist, she saw in Hindu India the living antecedent for the destroyed Egyptian and Greco-Roman cultures she admired and idealized, according to Goodricke-Clarke. “She related to this idea that the Indo-European people were the ones who came closest to perfection, and she saw Hindu India as the last place in the world that still celebrated the ancient pagan pantheon,” the historian said.

Later in life, though she settled in India, Devi fell out with the leaders of Hindu nationalism, Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst, a staunch defender of India's right, maintains in a recent article. He argues that the Hindu nationalist movement broke from Nazism early and definitively, when its founder VD Savarkar pledged support for the Allies and later for the formation of Israel. Moreover, he claims in a recent book, “The racial theory of caste is now a marginalized doctrine, championed only by people with a political agenda. It is espoused by white racists in the West and by ethnic separatists in India, strongly patronized and tutored by Christian missionaries.”

For neo-Nazis, Devi may have been the first person to claim that the Holocaust never happened. Her half a dozen-odd books, not including a memoir of her favorite cats, provided new pseudohistorical support for the theory of a mythical master race of fair-skinned Indo-Europeans. But, more importantly for neo-Nazi ideologues like Matt Koehl, Bill White, and James Mason — not to mention Charles Manson — Devi's writing helped to establish a kind of religious framework for Nazism. In 1982, shortly before her death, neo-Nazi publisher Ernst Zundel issued what must have seemed a tantalizing advertisement for a series of taped interviews with Devi and a new edition of her most influential work, “The Lightning and the Sun.”

“The Hitler cult revealed,” the notice read. “Discovered alive in India, Hitler's guru!”

India's castes: Don't ask, don't tell, don't count?

For the first time in 80 years India may get a true tally of an ancient system.

By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
June 5, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — The 2,000-year-old Hindu caste system remains the most powerful force in Indian society.

Friendships, business ties and marriages live and die according to its dictates. Political parties carefully script their election tickets according to its mathematics. And an increasing number of government policies — including spiraling quotas for government jobs and university education — follow its logic.

But it's not polite to talk about it, and might even be dangerous to quantify it.

Yet in an unexpected turn, earlier this month the coalition-leading Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh caved to pressure from opposition leaders and agreed to add a survey of India's myriad castes to the 2011 census, which began April 1. Weeks after the decision, jostling and debate rages on as India's politicians reflect over the potential upheavals that may result.

Many here fear that a new understanding of the various groups' numbers could disrupt the current political structure, while the upper crust fears another wave of escalating quotas will make it even more difficult for a young upper caste person to get a university education. But the momentum of caste politics makes a reversal seem impossible.

Broadly speaking, the caste system has Brahmins and Kshatriya at the top of the social order, followed by the trading castes known as Baniyas and scores of laboring castes such as the Yadavs, and beneath them all the erstwhile untouchables, whom the constitution calls the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

But the last official tally of the different groups was done in 1931, and present policies are based on extrapolations from those figures. An official count will no doubt have far-reaching and unpredictable implications.

Significantly, the caste census promises to determine just how many people belong to the country's so-called “Other Backward Classes,” or OBCs, who have made dramatic political gains since the Mandal Commission was formed “to identify the socially or educationally backward” in 1979.

Extrapolating from the 1931 census figures, the Mandal Commission estimated the number of OBCs at 52 percent of the population. It then went on to recommend that OBCs be included in the quota system for government jobs and higher education that had already been established for the erstwhile untouchables, and recommended increasing the proportion of reserved places from 22.5 to 49.5 percent of the total.

“[The] caste social order of the Hindu society and a large number of the other religious groups is oppressive,” said Rangarajan. “This is one way to open up some space. There is no magic wand. I see the caste census as part of that. It's fact finding.”

The caste census proposal is now sequestered in a council of ministers tasked with developing a plan for implementing the count – which the home ministry has argued could bring the whole census project crashing down, as the inclusion of caste might prompt people to fudge the numbers to ensure their group gets a healthy share of government benefits.

The new tally might justify a hike in spending for OBC welfare and scholarships, and it could have a dramatic impact on the controversial quota system.

Working backwards, the Supreme Court verdict on Mandal commission set a ceiling of 50 percent on job and education quotas and subtracted the existing reservations for untouchables to determine the quota for OBCs at 27 percent. But an official count is likely to spark fresh demands to make these quotas proportional to each group's representation in the population.

Already, the OBC leaders of the drive for the caste census, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Sharad Yadav, have stepped up their rhetoric. “In 20 ministries and 18 deparments, there is not a single OBC in the [highest paid] Group A category,” Sharad Yadav argued during a recent parliament session.

meet india's tampon king

(Note: Article refers to sanitary napkins, not tampons, as the editors' headline suggests)

By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 20, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — Not long ago, women in the small south Indian town of Coimbatore were convinced that 47-year-old A. Muruganantham was some kind of pervert.

After a failed attempt with his wife and sisters and a cockeyed do-it-yourself effort with a football bladder full of goat's blood, he'd finally hit upon a surefire way to test the low-cost sanitary napkin he was developing for India's poor. He was passing out free pads to college girls and collecting their used napkins for study. And he had a storeroom full of them. When his mother saw it, she burst into tears and packed her things to move in with his sister.

“Everybody claimed I am a psycho, [that] I am using this as a trump card to get close to girls,” said Murugantham, who taught himself English in the course of his research — partly to get past the telephone answering systems he encountered when he called U.S. suppliers. “Before going across that automatic, it will cost 300 and 400 rupees. The moment the operator starts speaking, it will cost 300 and 400 rupees. Then the person will speak in slang English, 'OK,' because this is a material that is only used by big companies.”

Nobody thinks he's a psycho anymore.

In 2006, Muruganantham, a high school dropout, perfected a machine for making low-cost sanitary napkins against all odds. Along the way he'd taught himself English, recruited local college professors to help him draft letters and surf the web for suppliers, worn panties (not to mention a sanitary pad and a football bladder full of blood), and spent many times the cost of his TVS Motors moped on laboratory analyses. He even invented an alter ego to get past the gatekeepers at the U.S. firms that supplied the pine wood-based cellulose — not cotton — that he discovered was the raw material he needed.

“The moment they hear that somebody is calling from some remote place, in India, they will ask, 'Who are you?' So I said I am a millionaire in Coimbatore. We are going to start the napkin company, so we want raw materials,” said Muruganantham.

Eventually, he triumphed. Capable of producing around 120 pads per hour, the machine Murugantham developed costs only about $2,500 — a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Procter & Gamble (P&G) spend on their plants. And while output of 120 pads an hour hardly offers much in the way of economies of scale, Muruganantham's invention has created its own business model for small “self help groups” of low-income women — creating jobs that earn them twice what they made as ordinary laborers.

“It is an innovative way of addressing the issue of female hygiene and is accessing a market that the Kotex product made by Kimberly-Clark currently does not access,” said a spokesman for Kimberly-Clark.

But even as Muruganantham has intrigued multinationals, earned accolades from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) and the National Innovation Foundation and inked a deal with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to supply his machines to women's self-help groups in Africa, a controversial Indian government scheme threatens to squash his grassroots movement.

According to local newspaper reports, the government is finalizing plans to supply free and “highly subsidized” sanitary napkins to India's poor. The program is being designed to cover 200 million rural women, using 100 sanitary napkins each per year, at an estimated cost of around $450 million. No details are available yet regarding the supplier, but in India, as in the rest of the world, virtually the only major manufacturers of sanitary napkins are multinationals P&G, J&J and Kimberly-Clark.

“This is a 'first of kind' program where public-private partnership is being explored to bring high quality products to rural poor at affordable rates,” said the Kimberly-Clark spokesman. “The proposed model would envisage a complete reworking of the value chain to drive costs down. The intent is for the project to be self sustainable over a period of time. The Indian government is in talks with all the major sanitary napkin manufacturers — and nothing is finalized as yet.”

Muruganantham doesn't see it that way.

“What I am telling is that if the government permits me we are able without subsidy to provide the napkins,” Murugantham said. “Already, we can make napkins for 1 rupee, 50 paise. If the government comes, we can reduce that by 50 percent.”

And if the government guarantees orders from rural women, the scheme won't cost the state a penny, Murugantham believes. With orders in hand, the women will be able to get small-business loans from local banks, enabling local entrepreneurs to set up 100,000 manufacturing units across India.

But can a grassroots invention really compete with some of the world's largest multinational companies?

Because of poverty and social stigmas surrounding menstruation, today, most Indian women use rags or even scraps of gunny sack instead of modern sanitary napkins — which are unavailable or too costly. For the government, this represents a public health crisis, raising the likelihood that millions of women will suffer reproductive tract infections or even cervical cancer. And for the big napkin makers, it represents a huge, untapped market that promises to keep the business growing for decades.

“Realizing the huge business potential of converting the homemade napkin users to branded napkins,” J&J launched its Stayfree Secure brand in India in 1997, and the low-cost product was the largest selling sanitary napkin in the Indian market within four years, according to the company's web site.

Riding on its Whisper brand, first launched here in 1989, P&G's feminine hygiene division notched growth of 26 percent last year, according to the company's annual report, generating sales of around $100 million.

The future lies in cracking the market comprising the urban and rural poor. Describing a partnership with the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) to teach rural women of Rajasthan about reproductive health — now set to be expanded in Muruganantham's home state of Tamil Nadu — P&G's annual report concludes, “Significantly, the program has been able to convert 85 percent of cloth users to sanitary pad users who used WHISPER.”

"P&G and Johnson and Johnson look at this issue merely in terms of sales turnover,” said PC Vinoj Kumar, a crusading journalist. “But as a social entrepreneur Muruganantham's business model has socio-economic objectives. It creates employment for thousands of rural women, apart from promoting use of sanitary napkins.”

One of the first to discover Muruganantham's invention, Kumar recently launched a Facebook campaign against the government's plan to subsidize sanitary napkins, which he suspects will be sourced from one of the three multinationals that control the world market. In March, one of his campaigners filed a Right to Information (RTI) request seeking “copies of all files related to this scheme right from the initiation of the scheme, to any consultations held with any external agencies, the basis on which the scheme was announced and any other relevant details.”

But according to Kumar, the government's reply simply stated the obvious: “This is to inform you that currently the Ministry, Health & Family Welfare does not have a scheme to provide free sanitary napkins for women living below poverty line. Further, discussions for formulation of the same as well as an assessment of various modalities is taking place in the ministry, after which, the scheme would be proposed.”

In case you're not fluent in the lingo, that's bureaucratese for buzz off: The ministry provided none of the files related to the plan or any other details requested under India's RTI law. Now Kumar plans a letter-writing campaign to approach the president, the prime minister, the health minister and the finance minister and ask them to consider Muruganantham's proposal before finalizing the free sanitary napkin scheme.

Meanwhile, Murugantham's not standing still.

His napkin machines are already in place in more than 200 locations across India, where they are empowering local women, and taking the stigma away from menstruation and feminine hygiene by turning it into a lucrative trade. Though many have flourished, some self-help groups have floundered without management expertise — raising doubts whether a legion of grassroots organizations could truly handle the mammoth job of supplying sanitary napkins to the country. But Murugantham argues that if the government supports him instead of P&G or J&J, his machines cannot only solve India's feminine hygiene crisis but also provide employment for a million women.
That's radical thinking from the bottom of the pyramid. The question is: Will the government squash it and make a mockery of the much ballyhooed “decade of innovation?”

Source URL: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100519/tampons-india-health

GlobalPost: Incest, or star-crossed love?

A north Indian caste wants laws changed to match honor-killing codes.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 5, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — When a Haryana court handed down the death sentence to five family members this spring for murdering a young couple who'd married in violation of an arcane incest taboo, women's rights activists hailed the decision as a landmark judgment.

But now a new challenge from the village councils that order such killings threatens to bring more violence.

“They say those who marry despite blood and milk ties will be killed,” said Jagmati Sangwan, an activist with the local chapter of the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA).

Following the capital sentence awarded March 30 to the five family members who hacked 23-year-old Manoj and 19-year-old Babli to death on the orders of the local khap panchayat, or caste council, groups of defiant leaders from similar councils across Haryana have rallied to protest. Members of the dominant Jat caste of agrarian land owners, they called for an amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act to put it in accordance with their beliefs on incest.

The general population has little sympathy for the Jat cause, even though there are already separate sets of laws for marriage among Hindus, Muslims and Christians — some of which, like the provision for polygamy in the Muslim code, are often criticized as anti-women.

So there's little chance that the legislature will entertain Jat's call for a constitutional amendment. But in a country already divided on caste, religious and regional lines, the dispute threatens to throw gunpowder straight into one of the flash points of conflict over the modernization of India.

“If you look at both the khap panchayat violence and the intercaste violence, I think they're reaching a peak,” said Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist from the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi).

The drive appears to be gathering momentum. On April 13, a group claiming to represent 36 khap panchayats from across Haryana, parts of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and even Delhi met in the city of Kurukshetra, where they pledged support to the men sentenced to death for murdering Manoj and Babli.

They promised to collect 10 rupees (about 25 U.S. cents) from every family in Haryana to pay for top lawyers for the death row inmates, vowed to block roads and highways with demonstrations, and threatened to surround the parliament and Haryana state assembly if action was not taken to amend the marriage act. A week later, a similar group met in Haryana's Jind district to serve an ultimatum to the state's parliamentarians and assemblymen: Introduce a bill in support of our call for a ban on marriages we deem to be incestuous, or face statewide protests.

Then, on May 2, Sarvjatiya Sarvkhap Maha Panchayat, an umbrella body of khap panchayats, decided to surround the residence of local member of parliament Naveen Jindal to force him to support their cause, even as former Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala on Monday backed the demand of khap panchayats to ban same gotra marriages — suggesting that the proposed change to the Hindu Marriage Act could become a compelling issue for state polls.

“It's very funny that the [marriage] law was passed in 1955, and they are now demanding a change,” said sociologist Prem Chowdhry, author of a seminal book on honor killings in Haryana. “Obviously, all these years they have gotten away with murder, and the state and the judiciary have not been able to do anything. For once the judiciary acts, and they cannot take it: they want to change the law itself.”

For the Jat caste of rural north India, the rapid social changes that have accompanied India's economic rise represent a terrifying threat to their traditional dominance. Political reforms have introduced democratically elected councils to replace the traditional leaders — reserving places for women at the helm. Job and education quotas for lower castes have helped young people from erstwhile untouchable castes to earn more money than their onetime betters. The supremacy associated with owning farmland is fast being eroded by industrialization and urbanization. And by fighting to prevent women from marrying better educated partners instead of ignorant ones from clans with traditionally higher status, the khaps are fighting a rearguard action to preserve the static value system that for centuries has prevented upward mobility by tying status to land.

“Many of these marriages have been regular arranged marriages. The parents know they are violating these gotra [clan] rules, but they're doing it because there is obviously a shift in Indian society from [valuing] land to education and employment of a different kind,” explained Kaur. “The khaps want land to remain the basis of social negotiations and social rankings.”

The backlash can be violent.

In states like Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh, AIDWA estimates that was many as 10 percent of all murders are so-called “honor killings,” in which families execute young men and women for violating the marriage rules set down by these khap panchayats. Screamer headlines like, “DAD KILLS PREGNANT DAUGHTER AND LOVER,” have grown commonplace in the vernacular press.

But the blood runs for other reasons, too.

In typical incidents this month, five people, including two children, supposedly jumped under the wheels of a speeding train because the local council had ordered the man to pay a fine tantamount to a year's wages as punishment for an extramarital affair. And a few hundred kilometers away, a father and daughter from one of the Dalit castes once considered untouchable were allegedly burned alive — along with 25 empty huts — following an argument between a Dalit and a Jat who threw stones at his dog.

“They are trying to make their presence felt in a context where they are increasingly becoming irrelevant,” said Surindher Jodhka, professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Basically the patriarchal caste elders do not have much authority in the village, but within their community the patriarchy wants to exert its will by controlling the sexuality of their women.”

At least some of the khaps' problems may be self-created. According to sociologists, the khaps comprise rich landowners who use their power to suppress women, Dalits and the poor. But in perpetuating and reinforcing cultural obsessions with masculinity and the purity of their blood, the unsanctioned councils are virtually compelling the younger generation to rebel. Thanks to the skewed sex ratio stemming from female feticide, marriageable women are few and far between.

But the khaps' blind allegiance to ancient incest taboos makes marriage nearly impossible. Under traditional law, it is forbidden to marry someone from the same village on the theory that somewhere in the forgotten past you might have a common ancestor; it's forbidden to marry anyone from the same gotra, or clan; and it's forbidden to marry anyone from neighboring villages with whom your mob has formed a brotherhood pact, called bhaichara. In today's more mobile society, that makes getting married almost impossible. As many as a fourth of the region's men remain bachelors. Some go as far afield as Kerala, in India's deep south, to import short-term, child-bearing brides. Others risk death to defy an incest taboo they see as outdated.

And now India's courts have begun to protect them.

Source URL: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100428/india-incest

bedroom renegade

Preface
Shobhaa De’s sex-filled novels and socialite lifestyle enthrall and infuriate Indians in equal measure. Her critics call her books trashy and newspaper columns inane, but supporters say she has done much to get a conservative nation talking about sex and feminism.

writer
Jason Overdorf
Monocle (April 2010, Vol. 4, Issue 33)

To hear Indians tell it, author Shobhaa De has built an empire on smut. Billed as “the Jackie Collins of India” since an editor at Time magazine’s India bureau coined the phrase decades ago, De is renowned for writing her strong heroines into sex scenes that would make Madonna blush. But even a dip into de’s novels makes it clear her books are only the means to an end; the author’s masterwork has been her construction of her public self – and the performance of her life.

A columnist for four different newspapers, a near-constant blogger and the author of 16 books, De has managed to hold India’s attention for nearly 40 years through a mix of poise, savvy and ruthlessness – and a prodigious knack for self reinvention. “The performance comes easily and effortlessly,” she says. “The performance also gives me a sense of separation from the self. It’s a performance and I know it’s a performance, so it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t touch me.”

Born Shobha Rajadhyaksha, the daughter of a bureaucrat, De parlayed her remarkable beauty into a career as a model, then as an editor at a film magazine, and finally, somehow – a marriage, divorce- and-remarriage later – emerged as what the Indian press describes as a socialite. “By that they mean, you’re glamorous, and you’re seen at some of the best evenings and soirees in India, and internationally, and it sets you apart from the ordinary hack,” says De.

The author of Socialite Evenings, Starry Nights, Sultry Days, and so on, De describes herself as a compulsive writer, for whom writing is “almost like a physical need”, and her free-flowing, often contradictory, seemingly unedited prose reflects this quality. She probably writes too much. Her blog, columns and books range from the cuttingly savage to the self-congratulatory and banal. But she has an unerring understanding of her audience’s fantasies, anxieties and prejudices, and her self-created celebrity makes her most inane, throwaway remarks important because Shobhaa De has said them.

Her romance novels are perennial best-sellers – so much so that then-editor of Penguin India David Davidar once reprimanded staff sniggering over one of her manuscripts, “Don’t laugh; her books pay your salaries.” And her provocative columns not only attract a legion of loyal readers, they often make headlines of their own – as when debutante Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor responded to a characteristic De savaging by calling her “a 60-something porn writer”. Suffice
to say, De didn’t dissolve into tears. “I love spats,” De says. “I’m sure I have [made enemies], but that’s not my concern. If they think of me as an enemy, then that’s their problem, not mine.”

Relaxed on the sofa in her opulent apartment overlooking the Malabar Hill neighbourhood, De is dressed casually, eschewing the glam saris she trots out for photo shoots and public appearances. With flowing black hair, high cheekbones and a powerful nose, she is indeed a beautiful woman – by appearance, closer to 45 than 62. To the rest of India, she says, she represents “a woman who has lived life on her own terms, and done so fearlessly”. In person, she’s charismatic enough to pull it off without sounding like an ass. but it is obvious why her critics have focused on the faults that have prevented her from gaining literary respect,
rather than the strengths that have brought her commercial success.

Sex is part of the formula, no doubt. Written 10 years before Bollywood depicted its first on-screen kiss, one of her lesser novels begins, “Prem liked to make love in public places,” and the scene that follows delivers the goods. But the sex in De’s novels is neither exciting nor unusual enough to warrant much attention – even in reputedly conservative India – and Bollywood actresses such as Zeenat Aman and Rekha have lived more provocative lives. De’s shock value came because she performed her public persona as the author of the fantasy, rather than its object, and she overturned the bedroom hierarchy by writing and acting out all India’s fears about female sexuality. “She has not only lived an unconventional life,” says literature professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair. “She has talked about it and written about it.”

“I think what people found extremely shocking was not even the [sex] scene itself,” De recalls. “But the idea that a woman could walk out of a marriage because she is bored with the man, not because he is a wife-beater or an alcoholic or insane or impotent or any of the usual reasons that could be condoned for leaving a marriage. When I wrote Surviving Men, a lot of men refused to bring that book home for their wives, or forbade them from reading it, because they felt I was putting ideas into their heads.”

De’s supporters find something subversive in her life, perhaps even more than in her books. “She is the other in every woman,” says Prem K Srivastava, a literature professor at Delhi University. “No woman can ever dare to do what she does. She can only dream and fantasise about writing what Shobhaa De writes.”

In recent years, De’s drive to reinvent herself has been relentless. She’s written a sort of self-help book, a Thomas Friedman-esque paean to the new India, and a work of fiction for young adults. But she has a new novel in the works, and she’s not ready to shed her reputation as a sex symbol yet. “I’m going to go back to it with a vengeance,” she says.

http://www.monocle.com/sections/affairs/Magazine-Articles/Bedroom-renegade/

India: radioactive in Delhi

A mysterious radiation leak exposes the dangers of recycling.

By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
April 20, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — In the post-apocalyptic West Delhi junk market of Mayapuri, Ram Kumar sits with a group of laborers like himself in the scant shade provided by a ramshackle shed.

Due to a mysterious radiation leak that has sent seven neighborhood residents to the hospital with radiation poisoning over the past week, business is slow, and there's no work for these loaders. But Kumar says he has no choice but to wait.

“You can't see it (radiation), you can't feel it, you can only imagine how contaminated the air is here,” said Kumar. “Everyone thinks of leaving, but where would we go?”

Recycling is big business in India, which imports as much as 3 million tons of scrap metal each year. But this week's radiation poisonings have shifted focus, temporarily, to the flip side of the fortune: Along with the towering heaps of steel and copper comes a mountain of hazardous waste — asbestos, lead, mercury and, it turns out, potentially deadly radioactive materials.

“Under metal scrap, almost everything comes in — be it radioactive material, be it ammunition, be it e-waste, hazardous waste, toxic waste,” said Kushal Yadav, head of the toxins unit at New Delhi's Centre for Science and Environment, a non-government think tank. “We don't really know what's coming in. It's only when such incidents happen that we come to know.”

On April 7, shop owner Deepak Jain and four others were hospitalized with radiation sickness after they were exposed to what initial press reports described as a bright, shining metal object. Subsequent investigations by the country's atomic energy regulators identified the radioactive material as Cobalt 60 — a metal used in the sterilization of medical equipment and for radiotherapy.

Before long, the team of scientists discovered 11 different sources of radiation in Mayapuri's scrap heaps, and an anonymous source at one of the investigating bodies told India's Mail Today newspaper that the Cobalt 60 was believed to be part of a larger, yet undiscovered consignment of metal.

This is not the first such incident, and will by no means be the last. Last year, high levels of radioactive metal were found in a shipment of stainless steel elevator buttons which were exported to Germany. And not long ago, a railway worker was seriously irradiated when he pocketed a shining object he discovered on the job.

Radiation poisonings are just the tip of the iceberg. Exposure to other forms of hazardous medical, electronic and industrial waste is so commonplace that no one keeps statistics about the associated health problems.

“In this incident around 10 people have been affected, but this is only a case where you have seen acute exposure,” said Yadav. “In terms of chronic exposure, which is happening over long periods of time, there are hundreds of thousands of workers exposed to tiny amounts of toxins every day, and it's affecting their health. This is never documented anywhere.”

According to a recent study by the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, only half of the 400,000 kilograms of hospital waste that India generates each day is treated before its disposal. Toxic Links, an NGO, estimates that as much as 50,000 tons of electronic waste is illegally imported each month, bringing with it lead, mercury, cadmium, beryllium and other hazardous materials, while Indian industry generates 6 million or 7 million tons of hazardous waste per year. On Indian shores, poor laborers — even children — climb its mountains in rubber sandals and tear it to pieces with their bare hands. And they do it for next to nothing.

Kumar and the other loaders in Mayapuri earn between $2 and $5 a day heaving clapped out drive shafts, truck tires, axles, steel pipe and all manner of scrap onto trucks and wagons. It's brutally hard work in one of the hottest Aprils on record — the mercury already nearing 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in the lee of the dilapidated warehouse, a hairdryer wind sandblasts the ragged workers with grit. The air smells of ozone and sweat and scorched metal. The danger is as bald-faced as the filth.

“Getting hurt is part of the job,” said Kumar.

Shop number DII-32, where the first pin made of radioactive Cobalt 60 was discovered, is now shuttered, a stack of Delhi Police barricades forgotten against the wall. But the scrap dealers on either side are still watching their workers sift and sort wire and pipe. Nobody seems unduly worried about being irradiated. The national Atomic Energy Regulatory Board has given the all-clear signal after repeated sweeps of the area. And, if anything, the shop owners are defensive about the safety of their trade.

“It's perfectly safe,” one dealer said. “Why should I be worried? I'm sitting in my shop. I don't have the hobby of going around with my notebook.”

With not a spot of grease on him, he's probably never in his life touched a piece of the scrap he sells.

Source URL (retrieved on April 21, 2010 02:19 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100419/india-garbage-delhi-radiation

the good capitalist

Fabindia's William Bissell plans to reinvent India's companies.

By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
April 11, 2010

NEW DELHI, India — India's rural cooperatives helped save millions from starvation. But with little incentive to grow and invest, small farmers and cottage craftsmen stayed small. Fabindia's William Bissell offers a new solution.

A slim and bookish 41-year-old, Bissell's side parting and earnest manner give him the air of a boy scholar. But he doesn't keep his ideas locked up in an ivory tower. A curious mix of devout capitalist and social reformer, Bissell first turned the village-based textile export company he inherited into a multimillion-dollar retailer. Then he turned it into a laboratory for an idea that could transform rural India.

In 2007, Bissell hived off a substantial portion of Fabindia's assets to create a new firm dedicated to investing in and promoting community-owned companies comprising the retailer's rural artisan suppliers. The scheme is based on an innovative system that makes workers into shareholders and creates its own micro stock exchange. And if Fabindia can work out the kinks, it could translate the old idea of agrarian cooperatives into fast-growing firms capable of simultaneously unleashing capitalism's unrivaled energy and reigning in its destructive appetites.

“I'm a communitarian. That's where the philosophical underpinning comes from,” said Bissell. “What's interesting to me is how to use capitalism, the way it organizes capital and information and shares and distributes wealth – because it is a fairly comprehensive ideology – to produce beneficial outcomes for society.”

Founded in 1960 by William's father, John Bissell, an American who'd worked as a consultant for the Ford Foundation, Fabindia arose as an export firm that marketed India's rich heritage of handloom fabrics to the world. The company began to shift focus to the domestic market in 1976, when it opened its first retail outlet in Delhi.

But it was after William took over in 1998 that the firm really took off. In less than a decade, the young entrepreneur built Fabindia into a 112-store, $75 million retailer with outlets in Rome, Dubai and Guangzhou, expanding the product line to include designer clothes, jewelry, home furnishings, body care products and organic foods — all without straying from the company's socially conscious roots. Giving usually staid handicrafts a slick, modern spin, it's Pottery Barn meets The Body Shop meets Pier One — the company is incredibly popular with ordinary Indians, posh socialites and Western expatriates alike.

But Bissell isn't resting on his laurels. He is reinventing the company again.

The essentials of Fabindia's new business model are simple. Bissell first created Artisans Microfinance (AMFL), an investment company, which identified and helped fund 17 community-owned firms that Fabindia calls “supplier-region companies,” or SRCs. Many of these firms had at their core non-profits and cooperatives that had been Fabindia suppliers for two generations.

But when they were restructured, their artisan-workers bought shares in the future — and a guaranteed piece of Fabindia's pie. By tapping the locals and angel investors, Fabindia got a 50-percent boost in investment. More importantly, the SRC shares have already appreciated 50 percent and more, said Prableen Sabhaney, a Fabindia spokesperson. Returns like those – and the jobs they generate – could spell an end to rural poverty and the ills of urban migration.

Hiving off management responsibilities to shareholder-owned companies promises to make Fabindia more efficient, too. Now, instead of dealing with more than 700 individual suppliers, the corporation only deals with 17 SRCs. That already means it can handle larger volumes and theoretically gives smaller artisans and suppliers a better chance to showcase their products locally and break into the retailer's supply chain.

But there have been growing pains. In some cases, instead of looking for new sources for products, the SRCs took the easiest route — resting on their laurels and relying on supplier companies that were almost as large as the community-owned units themselves.

“We had too many carrots and not enough sticks,” Bissell said. “Now we've given some of their suppliers the ability to come to us directly to make the SRCs feel that they need to sing for their supper. Because just sitting around and expecting checks to roll in is not the model that we had in mind.”

Bissell's community-owned companies represent a marked change from the rural cooperative. Currently, Fabindia still owns about half the stock of the SRCs. But within five to seven years Bissell plans to reduce that to about a fourth, as artisans, employees and outside investors pick up more stock.

Unlike in traditional cooperatives, however, where members have equal voting rights regardless of their investment or productivity, SRCs will reward the artisans who hold larger stakes in the units with a larger say in how they are run. Shareholders also reap rewards from the company's growth in direct proportion to how much — and how early — they invested. That means that, like cooperatives, the SRCs provide a vehicle for small, cash-starved rural artisans to pool their money to expand and modernize their operations. But unlike cooperatives, they give the savviest and most successful of the bunch a very strong motive to invest.

“The person who uses the cooperative most benefits the most as well — not the person who started the cooperative and took the risk. So that basically means that nobody individually will take the risk,” said Vineet Rai, the founder of Aavishkaar. Unlike cooperatives, which also prohibit outside investors, the shareholder system of Fabindia's community-owned companies encourages entrepreneurial investment by promising a larger payoff to the early movers when the firm grows.

And that could mean rapid growth for rural India, too.

Source URL
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100329/india-economy-companies-fabindia