India faces new threats to freedom of speech as technology advances and citizens gain more access to information.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 29, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — With a vibrant, critical press and a strong culture of dissent, India stands out as one of Asia's strongest champions of freedom of speech.
But even as new technologies give citizens greater power to exercise that freedom, the government is making efforts to the contrary.
On the one hand, Indian authorities are capitulating to extremist groups and political parties that demand the banning of books and films claimed to be offensive. On the other, they are flirting with outright curbs on freedom of speech — with new laws governing internet content and the print media.
It's a dangerous cocktail.
“The risk of abuse of these laws to silence speech is going to be very, very high.”
~Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch
In recent months, India drafted new rules for the web that will allow anyone to demand that internet sites and service providers remove supposedly objectionable content based on a sweeping list of criteria.
Charges of sedition were used to try to silence author Arundhati Roy and activist Binayak Sen, two of the country's most prominent citizens. Sen spent two years in jail before the Supreme Court freed him on bail this April.
Joseph Lelyveld's controversial biography of Gandhi joined the list of hundreds of books to be banned with little regard to their actual contents. And Maqbool Fida Husain, one of the country's most feted artists, died in exile imposed on him by legal harassment and death threats from extremist groups that objected to some of his paintings.
Even before the rules for internet speech were notified under the IT act in April, the Department of Information Technology had quietly blocked 11 websites, the Center for Internet and Society discovered through a recent Right to Information (RTI) request.
Bloggers and social media activists fear that the new rules, which also regulate posts on YouTube, Facebook and similar sites, will set off a constant battle against bans. While the law requires these sites to remove so-called "objectionable content" within 36 hours of receiving a complaint, critics say there's no mechanism for the site or initial user to defend the posting.
Moreover, the definition of objectionable content — which includes anything that is "harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, pornographic, libellous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, disparaging, racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, relating to money laundering or gambling" — is vague enough that anything at all might meet the criteria for a ban.
"It [the new list of rules] is in direct violation to the freedom of speech," Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court lawyer who specializes in cyber law, told the Times of India.
At the same time, even as the rapid expansion of television news channels, newspapers and magazines suggest that India's free press is as vital as ever, critics argue that certain stories have become more difficult to tell.
Early this year, the information and broadcasting ministry urged print publications to write more positive stories, even as it proposed amendments to the Press and Publications Act giving the state greater control over content. Among other measures, the amended law would allow local officials to suspend publication and bar anybody convicted of terrorist acts or any other act that endangers the security of the state from printing a newspaper or magazine.
And while the broadcast ministry continually calls for "self-regulation," other forces ensure that self-censorship remains rampant.
Various media outlets have begun the practice of accepting payment for certain types of news — even political reports — while journalists who expose crime and corruption regularly face violent attacks.
Though police this month apprehended several suspects in the slaying of a Mumbai crime reporter, most of the assaults on journalists go unremarked and unpunished, according to a recent report by the India-based Media Foundation. The alleged perpetrators range from political parties to corporate thugs to the police themselves, according to a press release.
Meanwhile, the legal and financial obstacles to reporting from India's poor rural areas are greater than ever, according to Shubhranshu Choudhary, a former BBC journalist who now runs a mobile phone-based radio news network in Chhattisgarh. Most rural Indians can't read the newspaper and can't afford television, for instance. But even though the government recently allowed FM stations and community radio, news broadcasts are still banned across the dial — apart from the government-friendly reports by state-owned All India Radio.
Newspaper reporters based outside of major cities are paid a percentage of the advertising revenue they collect, rather than a straight salary, so they are beholden to local corporations rather than their readers or editors. And, increasingly, television rating points (TRPs) rather than editorial standards define the value of news, Choudhary said, citing several television channels' recent decision to remove their reporters from Chhattisgarh — seat of a Maoist rebellion which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and others have described as the greatest threat to India's security.
"Chhattisgarh does not have even a single TRP box," Choudhary said. "They're very clearly saying, whatever happens in Chhattisgarh, why should we bother?"
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Calling BS (not Business Standard) on Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is controversial in India, but most of the time foreign writers treat her with kid gloves. She's famous, and she's good looking, and she makes good copy. But, folks, let's face it, a lot of water has gone under the bridge since she won the Booker Prize for the God of Small Things. These days, she's basically a pamphleteer, whose fame/notoriety rather than talent inspires India's top weeklies to assign 3,000 word "essays."
Read any of her recent articles with a gimlet eye, and you'll see what I mean.
Propaganda serves a purpose, of course, and I have a great deal of sympathy for Roy's politics. But even pamphleteering depends on at least a kernel of truth, and I'm afraid Roy may have stepped outside the lines with a recent statement to the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper -- like everybody else, dutifully grasping at the hem of her fame.
Stumping for India's Maoist rebels in an interview with Stephen Moss, Roy said that the reason that the rebellion doesn't get more ink is that the international media is in bed with the guy's pumping money into the country. “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination," Roy said. "So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.”
I have to call BS... and I don't mean Business Standard.
If any editor has ever turned down a story on the Maoists in my experience, it has been because they were too cheap to pay travel expenses, or because they thought readers were already following too many wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc), or because they weren't convinced that there was anything new to say -- which Roy would be right to dispute.
The Indepedent's Andy Buncombe gave Roy the benefit of the doubt, though he'd also never been told of such a ban (and, like me, has written plenty of negative stories about India). He asked around. Nope. Nobody he could turn up had heard of an injunction on bad news. Even more curious, most everybody has been the target of complaints that they don't write enough about India's five star hotels and (supposedly) sparkling new office buildings (the old "India basher" routine).
Here's Buncombe:
In the time I’ve been here, I’ve written about insurgencies, caste, poverty, farmer suicides, killings in Kashmir, Hindu terror cells, corruption (a number of times), honour killings, slums, land battles and homelessness. In the last 18 months, I’ve published three substantial pieces on the Maoists. My colleagues have done the same, travelling to Nyamgiri to write about the tribal people’s fight against mining company Vedanta, to the Maoist “infested” areas of Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, to Srinagar and Bihar, or working in Delhi where they highlighted the corruption and mis-management surrounding the Commonweath Games or else illegal child labour involved in the textile industry.
In an emailed reply to Buncombe's question on the subject, Roy said that she had heard about the supposed ban on bad news from two foreign journalists -- not "several." But they had told her the canard in confidence so she couldn't reveal their names.
Read any of her recent articles with a gimlet eye, and you'll see what I mean.
Propaganda serves a purpose, of course, and I have a great deal of sympathy for Roy's politics. But even pamphleteering depends on at least a kernel of truth, and I'm afraid Roy may have stepped outside the lines with a recent statement to the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper -- like everybody else, dutifully grasping at the hem of her fame.
Stumping for India's Maoist rebels in an interview with Stephen Moss, Roy said that the reason that the rebellion doesn't get more ink is that the international media is in bed with the guy's pumping money into the country. “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination," Roy said. "So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.”
I have to call BS... and I don't mean Business Standard.
If any editor has ever turned down a story on the Maoists in my experience, it has been because they were too cheap to pay travel expenses, or because they thought readers were already following too many wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc), or because they weren't convinced that there was anything new to say -- which Roy would be right to dispute.
The Indepedent's Andy Buncombe gave Roy the benefit of the doubt, though he'd also never been told of such a ban (and, like me, has written plenty of negative stories about India). He asked around. Nope. Nobody he could turn up had heard of an injunction on bad news. Even more curious, most everybody has been the target of complaints that they don't write enough about India's five star hotels and (supposedly) sparkling new office buildings (the old "India basher" routine).
Here's Buncombe:
In the time I’ve been here, I’ve written about insurgencies, caste, poverty, farmer suicides, killings in Kashmir, Hindu terror cells, corruption (a number of times), honour killings, slums, land battles and homelessness. In the last 18 months, I’ve published three substantial pieces on the Maoists. My colleagues have done the same, travelling to Nyamgiri to write about the tribal people’s fight against mining company Vedanta, to the Maoist “infested” areas of Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, to Srinagar and Bihar, or working in Delhi where they highlighted the corruption and mis-management surrounding the Commonweath Games or else illegal child labour involved in the textile industry.
In an emailed reply to Buncombe's question on the subject, Roy said that she had heard about the supposed ban on bad news from two foreign journalists -- not "several." But they had told her the canard in confidence so she couldn't reveal their names.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
India: deadly drug trials
A $400 million market for clinical trials puts desperate Indian patients at risk.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 19, 2011
CHENNAI, India — India's huge population, many of whom have hardly been exposed to medication, makes it one of the world's most promising markets for drug research.
But as the $400 million business accelerates, critics say it is exposing the dark side of the country's health-care sector.
"The regulations are weak, implementation is nonexistent, and ethics seem to be taken very lightly," said Anjali Shenoi, a researcher with a New Delhi-based women's health advocacy group called Sama.
"We feel like it is a growing problem, especially with India growing as a clinical trial hub, and more and more research being conducted by CROs [contract research organizations]."
Last week, the drug controller general of India — the top industry regulator — officially censured nine firms for failing to compensate the families of patients who died during clinical trials over the past year. But critics say the real story lies in the overall numbers, and the drug controller's tardiness in taking action.
According to the official figures, more than 1,500 Indians have died in the course of clinical trials since 2008 — 670 last year alone. And even though few of those deaths were reported to be treatment-related, there is no independent audit system to investigate the fatalities that occur during clinical trials.
Some see the booming industry as a ticking bomb.
Indians are desperate for affordable medical treatment. The government accounts for only 15 percent of health spending, and some two-thirds of patients pay the entire cost of care out of pocket. More than half of the poorest 20 percent of the population must sell property or borrow money to pay their medical bills, and yet, government spending on health care has declined.
Meanwhile, and instead of national health insurance or more widely subsidized health care, the government is promoting clinical research — the target of which is its poorest people.
Since India amended its laws governing drug research in 2005 to allow companies to conduct clinical trials in India at the same time as they are being conducted abroad, the research industry has expanded dramatically. Clinical trials are up to 60 percent cheaper to conduct in India than in developed countries, and companies are cashing in.
According to the drug controller, the number of Indian contract research organizations registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has nearly tripled since the early 2000s, from 60-odd to 150. And more than 1,000 clinical trials are officially registered with the Indian Council of Medical Research, though that number is low compared with the number of trials underway in the United States.
As high as Indian authorities are on the industry, critics say that the method of oversight — which relies on decentralized, independent ethics committees — is woefully inadequate.
Thousands of institutions are involved in drug testing, not only in major cities but in small provincial towns across the country, according to Amar Jesani of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. But while companies are required to register the trials themselves, there is no comparable system for registering the ethics committees charged with evaluating their research protocols.
Only a handful of the hundreds of ethics committees have any official accreditation, which means that most of the supposed watchdogs have never been evaluated or audited by any outside agency themselves. Most of them do not publish any details about the number of clinical trials they have evaluated or what methods are used to monitor drug testing.
"There's a complete mystery about how they function," Jesani said.
But they aren't functioning very well, a trickle of press reports suggests.
Last year, after seven young girls died during testing of a new vaccine for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease that can cause cervical cancer, Sama and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, another non-governmental organization (NGO), conducted a fact finding study. The NGO probe allegedly found evidence of serious ethical violations in the design and execution of the project — which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and carried out by PATH, an internationally respected nonprofit.
Sama and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan alleged that for "informed consent" researchers routinely relied on school officials, for example, claiming the parents of the research subjects were not available. Parents and girls who participated in the study said they were told that the vaccine would prevent uterine cancer — though they were not clear about what that meant.
Some may not have understood the nature of the project, as the NGO report quotes one mother as saying, "Since it was a vaccine being given by the government, we all trusted it blindly and considered it reliable, like any other vaccine that was given as part of the immunization program."
A subsequent government investigation found that the seven deaths were “most probably unrelated to the vaccine." And though it upheld most of the NGOs' findings in its report, the government described the ethical violations as "minor deficiencies" — downplaying the importance of informed consent, the most vital aspect of medical ethics for clinical trials.
PATH defended the way the study was conducted.
"PATH and its Indian collaborators worked with two ethical review committees in India and one in the United States to design study protocols and informed consent materials," Dr. Christopher Elias, president and CEO of PATH, said in statement following the controversy. "PATH is confident that these procedural safeguards informed and guided all aspects of study implementation and conduct."
Similarly, an independent study of clinical research sponsored by the Mumbai-based Center for Studies in Ethics and Rights, found that multinationals like GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca also skirted the boundaries of medical ethics.
Evaluating clinical trials of drugs for breast cancer, acute mania and schizophrenia, journalist Sandhya Srinivasan and researcher Sachin Nikarge found that the pharmaceutical companies took advantage of patients who were desperate for any kind of medical care and, in the case of psychiatric patients, probably incapable of providing genuine informed consent.
While AstraZeneca did not respond to the journalists' inquiries, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline defended their research practices.
"We have well trained physicians and scientists to explain protocols to patients and answer any questions to obtain and document informed consent ... with particular attention to relevant language, literacy, cultural and societal issues," Johnson & Johnson said in response to questions emailed by Srinivasan and Nikarge. "Our trials are open to internal and external audit. We don't enroll anyone for whom appropriate consent is not given."
"Global study protocols are ... designed to ensure appropriate local standards of care are provided to eligible participating patients," GlaxoSmithKline said in a similar statement.
Yet in each of the trials that Srinivasan and Nikarge investigated, they had concerns about whether some patients were denied effective treatments for their illnesses because of their participation in the research project.
For instance, the Center for Studies in Ethics and Rights report claims that psychiatric patients suffering from mania and schizophrenia were denied the normal treatment for their diseases and given placebos during clinical trials — likely because placebo-controlled studies are faster and more conclusive than studies that compare the experimental drug to an existing treatment.
And, though the company concluded it was “not considered treatment related," one schizophrenic patient in the placebo group committed suicide during the trial of an anti-psychotic manufactured by AstraZeneca, the report says.
"The moral of the whole story is the regulators are sleeping," Jesani said. "They are doing nothing."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 19, 2011
CHENNAI, India — India's huge population, many of whom have hardly been exposed to medication, makes it one of the world's most promising markets for drug research.
But as the $400 million business accelerates, critics say it is exposing the dark side of the country's health-care sector.
"The regulations are weak, implementation is nonexistent, and ethics seem to be taken very lightly," said Anjali Shenoi, a researcher with a New Delhi-based women's health advocacy group called Sama.
"We feel like it is a growing problem, especially with India growing as a clinical trial hub, and more and more research being conducted by CROs [contract research organizations]."
Last week, the drug controller general of India — the top industry regulator — officially censured nine firms for failing to compensate the families of patients who died during clinical trials over the past year. But critics say the real story lies in the overall numbers, and the drug controller's tardiness in taking action.
According to the official figures, more than 1,500 Indians have died in the course of clinical trials since 2008 — 670 last year alone. And even though few of those deaths were reported to be treatment-related, there is no independent audit system to investigate the fatalities that occur during clinical trials.
Some see the booming industry as a ticking bomb.
Indians are desperate for affordable medical treatment. The government accounts for only 15 percent of health spending, and some two-thirds of patients pay the entire cost of care out of pocket. More than half of the poorest 20 percent of the population must sell property or borrow money to pay their medical bills, and yet, government spending on health care has declined.
Meanwhile, and instead of national health insurance or more widely subsidized health care, the government is promoting clinical research — the target of which is its poorest people.
Since India amended its laws governing drug research in 2005 to allow companies to conduct clinical trials in India at the same time as they are being conducted abroad, the research industry has expanded dramatically. Clinical trials are up to 60 percent cheaper to conduct in India than in developed countries, and companies are cashing in.
According to the drug controller, the number of Indian contract research organizations registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has nearly tripled since the early 2000s, from 60-odd to 150. And more than 1,000 clinical trials are officially registered with the Indian Council of Medical Research, though that number is low compared with the number of trials underway in the United States.
As high as Indian authorities are on the industry, critics say that the method of oversight — which relies on decentralized, independent ethics committees — is woefully inadequate.
Thousands of institutions are involved in drug testing, not only in major cities but in small provincial towns across the country, according to Amar Jesani of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. But while companies are required to register the trials themselves, there is no comparable system for registering the ethics committees charged with evaluating their research protocols.
Only a handful of the hundreds of ethics committees have any official accreditation, which means that most of the supposed watchdogs have never been evaluated or audited by any outside agency themselves. Most of them do not publish any details about the number of clinical trials they have evaluated or what methods are used to monitor drug testing.
"There's a complete mystery about how they function," Jesani said.
But they aren't functioning very well, a trickle of press reports suggests.
Last year, after seven young girls died during testing of a new vaccine for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease that can cause cervical cancer, Sama and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, another non-governmental organization (NGO), conducted a fact finding study. The NGO probe allegedly found evidence of serious ethical violations in the design and execution of the project — which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and carried out by PATH, an internationally respected nonprofit.
Sama and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan alleged that for "informed consent" researchers routinely relied on school officials, for example, claiming the parents of the research subjects were not available. Parents and girls who participated in the study said they were told that the vaccine would prevent uterine cancer — though they were not clear about what that meant.
Some may not have understood the nature of the project, as the NGO report quotes one mother as saying, "Since it was a vaccine being given by the government, we all trusted it blindly and considered it reliable, like any other vaccine that was given as part of the immunization program."
A subsequent government investigation found that the seven deaths were “most probably unrelated to the vaccine." And though it upheld most of the NGOs' findings in its report, the government described the ethical violations as "minor deficiencies" — downplaying the importance of informed consent, the most vital aspect of medical ethics for clinical trials.
PATH defended the way the study was conducted.
"PATH and its Indian collaborators worked with two ethical review committees in India and one in the United States to design study protocols and informed consent materials," Dr. Christopher Elias, president and CEO of PATH, said in statement following the controversy. "PATH is confident that these procedural safeguards informed and guided all aspects of study implementation and conduct."
Similarly, an independent study of clinical research sponsored by the Mumbai-based Center for Studies in Ethics and Rights, found that multinationals like GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca also skirted the boundaries of medical ethics.
Evaluating clinical trials of drugs for breast cancer, acute mania and schizophrenia, journalist Sandhya Srinivasan and researcher Sachin Nikarge found that the pharmaceutical companies took advantage of patients who were desperate for any kind of medical care and, in the case of psychiatric patients, probably incapable of providing genuine informed consent.
While AstraZeneca did not respond to the journalists' inquiries, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline defended their research practices.
"We have well trained physicians and scientists to explain protocols to patients and answer any questions to obtain and document informed consent ... with particular attention to relevant language, literacy, cultural and societal issues," Johnson & Johnson said in response to questions emailed by Srinivasan and Nikarge. "Our trials are open to internal and external audit. We don't enroll anyone for whom appropriate consent is not given."
"Global study protocols are ... designed to ensure appropriate local standards of care are provided to eligible participating patients," GlaxoSmithKline said in a similar statement.
Yet in each of the trials that Srinivasan and Nikarge investigated, they had concerns about whether some patients were denied effective treatments for their illnesses because of their participation in the research project.
For instance, the Center for Studies in Ethics and Rights report claims that psychiatric patients suffering from mania and schizophrenia were denied the normal treatment for their diseases and given placebos during clinical trials — likely because placebo-controlled studies are faster and more conclusive than studies that compare the experimental drug to an existing treatment.
And, though the company concluded it was “not considered treatment related," one schizophrenic patient in the placebo group committed suicide during the trial of an anti-psychotic manufactured by AstraZeneca, the report says.
"The moral of the whole story is the regulators are sleeping," Jesani said. "They are doing nothing."
Friday, June 17, 2011
Blame Gandhi: Did the great pacifist kill India, Inc.?
To avert a disastrous impending labor shortage, India needs to train 500 million skilled workers by 2022.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 17, 2011
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
NEW DELHI, India — Not too long ago, a scandal of sorts hit Indian newspapers.
Though millions of Indians remain unemployed or underemployed, the country's lagging brick-and-mortar industries had imported tens of thousands of Chinese workers — on business visas, no less — to build and operate power plants, steel mills and telecommunications towers.
"The Delhi airport was built by Chinese labor," said Dilip Chenoy, chief executive of India's National Skill Development Corporation, referring to the most prominent example of India's efforts to improve its dismal infrastructure.
But the uproar didn't last long for the simple reason that India can't afford to shut down.
Despite its huge working-age population, India faces a potentially debilitating shortage of skilled workers.
According to one emerging vocational education firm, only about 5 percent of India's 400-million strong labor force has received any formal training, compared with 70 percent in Germany and 95 percent in Korea. Importing skilled workers from China — on or off the books — is only the most dramatic manifestation of the problem.
Across the board, the shortage of skilled laborers has reduced productivity and cut into profits. Poaching workers from competitors has become a common practice that drives up wages, threatening to derail India's manufacturing revolution before it has even begun.
The wrong revolution
The crux of the problem is that India has never really industrialized.
India's service-related businesses account for more than half of GDP, while manufacturing contributes only 15 percent. And though China's economy is only four times larger than India's, its manufacturing sector is 50 times larger. Meanwhile, China has some 500,000 vocational training centers, compared with India's 10,000 obsolete Industrial Training Institutes.
Blame revolutionaries. Brutal Mao Zedong killed millions with his Great Leap Forward in China, but his drive for steel and obsession with collectivization arguably kickstarted the country's industrialization. China's ghastly Cultural Revolution terrorized intellectuals, but it also lionized laborers and solidified the building blocks of the nation.
Meanwhile, in India, there was Mohandas K. Gandhi, pacifist with a spinning wheel. Gandhi's insistence that his followers spin their own cloth as a protest against British imperialism laid the groundwork for decades of socialist policies.
While these policies provided the poor with jobs that saved them from starvation, they also discouraged technology and restricted companies from developing economies of scale. This more robust growth may have pulled India's masses out of poverty once and for all.
Gandhi's kinder, gentler revolution also left the caste system intact, assuring that there would be no prestige in physical labor for the rest of his century.
For decades India's industrial policies channeled Gandhi. Hundreds of products were reserved for small-scale companies to manufacture. Because these small-scale companies were too numerous to regulate, the policy effectively nurtured hundreds of thousands of sweatshops.
Thanks to India's ongoing economic reforms, many products — including some with a high growth potential, like apparel — are no longer reserved for small-scale industry. Still, many of the sweatshops persist.
Where large companies make money through economies of scale, sweatshops increase profit margins by paying low wages and cutting corners. And the Indian workers — and Indian industrialization drive — continue to pay the price.
That's because at the same time that India inadvertently created a breeding ground for sweatshops, it also passed strict labor laws that set minimum wages, mandate safety standards and make it very difficult to fire workers.
Sweatshops are only economically viable as long as they flout India's strict rules. But large companies can't fly under the radar and must comply. If they can't fire workers when the going gets tough, it doesn't make much sense to hire them in first place. What does make sense is contracting the work out to the very sweatshops that flout the rules.
The upshot is that only a handful of industries — like automobile and motorcycle manufacturing — have managed to attain economies of scale and begun to compete on the global stage.
More than 90 percent of India's work force is still employed in the so-called "unorganized sector," where neither safety standards nor minimum wage laws can be enforced. Where there is no money for boots and hardhats, there is surely none for technology or training.
"It varies a lot by sector, but we are seeing shortages anecdotally in several areas," said Ramya Venkataraman, head of the India education practice at the consulting firm McKinsey. "In some cases it [the skilled labor shortage] is constraining growth, and in some cases it is increasing the cost of doing business.
"At the current capacity, we'll be able to skill about 50 million people in 10 years," said Venkataraman, "versus the 500 million we need to train. So there's a severe shortage."
The opportunity in crisis
To avert disaster, India's normally ponderous policy makers have acted with speed and creativity.
Recognizing that the country needs to train 500 million skilled laborers by 2022 if its current economic growth is to continue, the government has mobilized private industry to solve its own impending crisis. A new corporation has emerged to identify and fund vocational education businesses, much like a development bank.
Economic planners may well have turned India's biggest headache into its most lucrative business opportunity — estimated at more than $20 billion.
Designed to help create large-scale, for-profit vocational training companies and funded with around $300 million in seed capital, India's National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has already lured companies like Global Talent Track, TeamLease Services and Manipal Education's IndiaSkills into the sector. The hook: NSDC offers low interest-rate loans and support in developing certification standards, providing financial aid for students and promoting vocational education.
Among the largest players, Centum Learning, an associate company of telecom billionaire Sunil Mittal's Bharti Group, has partnered with NSDC to form Centum Workskills India, a joint venture that aims to train 12 million people across 11 states by 2022. Similarly, Everonn Education has teamed up with NSDC to train another 15 million. And Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services has inked a joint-venture deal with NSDC to build 100 skill development centers over the next five years.
In all, NSDC has so far approved $150 million in funding for 29 ventures that will train 40 million youth in diverse trades over the next 10 years. But this isn't by-the-numbers government work — with companies looking to get their front feet in the trough. And it's not charity work, either.
With 51 percent private sector funding and eight out of 12 of its board members representing private industry, NSDC offers better terms than commercial banks, but it takes a hefty 27 percent stake in exchange. It also demands that its partners guarantee job placement for 70 percent of their trainees.
Meanwhile, the big guns aren't getting into the business out of so-called "corporate social responsibility." They're in it to make money.
"It's not easy to monetize this space, so the motivation cannot be only revenue and profit," said Sanjeev Duggal, chief executive of Centum Learning Ltd. "But definitely our objective is by our fourth year to be crossing 500 crores [$110 million] in revenue."
The most needed job skills indicate how high the stakes are for India's economy.
According to estimates by ICRA Management Consulting Services, by 2020 India's construction industry will need 33 million more skilled crane operators, electricians, welders, masons and so on; the textiles and clothing industry will need 26 million loom and sewing machine operators; and the automobile and autoparts manufacturing industries will need 35 million machinists, mechanics, salesmen, etc.
In short, India's aspirations of boosting manufacturing output to 25 percent of GDP by 2025 — creating 100 million jobs and bringing hundreds of millions more people out of poverty in the process — may well hang in the balance.
"We have to build in skill-training capacity now," said NSDC's Chenoy. "We can't wait. In the next two to three years we have to put in place a skill-training capacity of at least 40 million people a year."
By connecting training programs more closely to employers, India hopes to ensure that courses are designed to meet industry's needs and to introduce an effective certification system so that employers recognize the value of a trained and certified welder, say, and are willing to pay more for him than for an someone who went through the informal apprentice system.
Changing the image of skilled labor
But those in the vocational education market say there are many more challenges to overcome, starting with convincing young people that a marketable skill can be more valuable than a college degree — at least when industry considers three out of four engineering graduates unemployable.
"Over the years vocational training has always been looked down upon and thought of something that's meant for losers," said IndiaSkills' chief executive Hari Menon, who expects his business to grow tenfold in its second year of operations. "Everybody chases a Bachelor's of Commerce or Bachelor's of Arts, however unemployable that makes them."
The trouble is that India can't afford to rely on supply and demand in the labor market to drive young people into vocational education — that would mean the full impact of the crisis had already hit. That's why NSDC plans to blanket the country with ads designed to put the pride back in blue collar work, said Chenoy.
But it will take more than slogans. The private sector needs to overhaul vocational education, starting with knocking down the artificial wall between academic degrees and skills certifications, said Neeti Sharma, an executive at TeamLease, India's largest staffing company. Currently, there are no community colleges in India, so there's no such thing as a vocational "degree." Moreover, once a student enters the vocational track there's virtually no way for him to get back into the university stream — and vice versa.
That's why TeamLease is working in Gujarat to set up the country's first vocational university. Similarly, Global Talent Track, which has partnered with multinational computer networking firm Cisco Systems Inc. and some 900 colleges across 15 states, recently tied up with the University of Kashmir to train degree students with the job skills that employers are looking for.
"In this country, traditionally, skills and education have always followed two different paths," said Global Talent Track chief executive Uma Ganesh.
Without question, skilled workers get paid more than unskilled ones, and vocational training can mean the difference between work in the unorganized sector — without benefits or job security — and a future with a growing national firm. But even though training firms say their graduates earn 10 to 50 percent more as a result of their training, recruiting isn't easy.
Employers pay more for skills, but so far they haven't started paying extra for workers with training certifications, and students are still reluctant to pay for training outside of "glamor programs" like computer programming and flight attendant schools.
Moreover, the companies and nonprofits that offer vocational education programs say that government-funded programs that are free for students are only partly effective: It helps them get students through the door, but doesn't ensure that they graduate. According to the head of one vocational program, the dropout rate for students on complete scholarships is as high as 70 to 80 percent. It falls to 10 to 20 percent among students paying all or part of the fee themselves.
"Today, the biggest challenge is that industry is not mandating certification," said IndiaSkills' Menon. "So the prospective learners feel that I can always walk into a company and get a job, and even if I'm certified it doesn't create any differential or positioning for me in industry when it comes to pay."
Even young people who are desperate for jobs don't necessarily understand the value of skills training, said Girish Singhania, who started Edubridge Learning to bring rural Indians into the modern job market in 2009.
Recruiters have to be equal parts salesman and social worker to get prospects to enroll. After enrollment, the company has to cajole them to stay on to graduate, encourage them to migrate and take a job at the end of the program, and then coach them on the importance of working hard once they're on a company's roster.
"The most important challenge we face is the mindset of the people living in these areas," Singhania said. "The mindset is just to accept things as they are and not try to change their careers."
To make India an industrial powerhouse, the mindset of the entire country will have to change.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 17, 2011
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
NEW DELHI, India — Not too long ago, a scandal of sorts hit Indian newspapers.
Though millions of Indians remain unemployed or underemployed, the country's lagging brick-and-mortar industries had imported tens of thousands of Chinese workers — on business visas, no less — to build and operate power plants, steel mills and telecommunications towers.
"The Delhi airport was built by Chinese labor," said Dilip Chenoy, chief executive of India's National Skill Development Corporation, referring to the most prominent example of India's efforts to improve its dismal infrastructure.
But the uproar didn't last long for the simple reason that India can't afford to shut down.
Despite its huge working-age population, India faces a potentially debilitating shortage of skilled workers.
According to one emerging vocational education firm, only about 5 percent of India's 400-million strong labor force has received any formal training, compared with 70 percent in Germany and 95 percent in Korea. Importing skilled workers from China — on or off the books — is only the most dramatic manifestation of the problem.
Across the board, the shortage of skilled laborers has reduced productivity and cut into profits. Poaching workers from competitors has become a common practice that drives up wages, threatening to derail India's manufacturing revolution before it has even begun.
The wrong revolution
The crux of the problem is that India has never really industrialized.
India's service-related businesses account for more than half of GDP, while manufacturing contributes only 15 percent. And though China's economy is only four times larger than India's, its manufacturing sector is 50 times larger. Meanwhile, China has some 500,000 vocational training centers, compared with India's 10,000 obsolete Industrial Training Institutes.
Blame revolutionaries. Brutal Mao Zedong killed millions with his Great Leap Forward in China, but his drive for steel and obsession with collectivization arguably kickstarted the country's industrialization. China's ghastly Cultural Revolution terrorized intellectuals, but it also lionized laborers and solidified the building blocks of the nation.
Meanwhile, in India, there was Mohandas K. Gandhi, pacifist with a spinning wheel. Gandhi's insistence that his followers spin their own cloth as a protest against British imperialism laid the groundwork for decades of socialist policies.
While these policies provided the poor with jobs that saved them from starvation, they also discouraged technology and restricted companies from developing economies of scale. This more robust growth may have pulled India's masses out of poverty once and for all.
Gandhi's kinder, gentler revolution also left the caste system intact, assuring that there would be no prestige in physical labor for the rest of his century.
For decades India's industrial policies channeled Gandhi. Hundreds of products were reserved for small-scale companies to manufacture. Because these small-scale companies were too numerous to regulate, the policy effectively nurtured hundreds of thousands of sweatshops.
Thanks to India's ongoing economic reforms, many products — including some with a high growth potential, like apparel — are no longer reserved for small-scale industry. Still, many of the sweatshops persist.
Where large companies make money through economies of scale, sweatshops increase profit margins by paying low wages and cutting corners. And the Indian workers — and Indian industrialization drive — continue to pay the price.
That's because at the same time that India inadvertently created a breeding ground for sweatshops, it also passed strict labor laws that set minimum wages, mandate safety standards and make it very difficult to fire workers.
Sweatshops are only economically viable as long as they flout India's strict rules. But large companies can't fly under the radar and must comply. If they can't fire workers when the going gets tough, it doesn't make much sense to hire them in first place. What does make sense is contracting the work out to the very sweatshops that flout the rules.
The upshot is that only a handful of industries — like automobile and motorcycle manufacturing — have managed to attain economies of scale and begun to compete on the global stage.
More than 90 percent of India's work force is still employed in the so-called "unorganized sector," where neither safety standards nor minimum wage laws can be enforced. Where there is no money for boots and hardhats, there is surely none for technology or training.
"It varies a lot by sector, but we are seeing shortages anecdotally in several areas," said Ramya Venkataraman, head of the India education practice at the consulting firm McKinsey. "In some cases it [the skilled labor shortage] is constraining growth, and in some cases it is increasing the cost of doing business.
"At the current capacity, we'll be able to skill about 50 million people in 10 years," said Venkataraman, "versus the 500 million we need to train. So there's a severe shortage."
The opportunity in crisis
To avert disaster, India's normally ponderous policy makers have acted with speed and creativity.
Recognizing that the country needs to train 500 million skilled laborers by 2022 if its current economic growth is to continue, the government has mobilized private industry to solve its own impending crisis. A new corporation has emerged to identify and fund vocational education businesses, much like a development bank.
Economic planners may well have turned India's biggest headache into its most lucrative business opportunity — estimated at more than $20 billion.
Designed to help create large-scale, for-profit vocational training companies and funded with around $300 million in seed capital, India's National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has already lured companies like Global Talent Track, TeamLease Services and Manipal Education's IndiaSkills into the sector. The hook: NSDC offers low interest-rate loans and support in developing certification standards, providing financial aid for students and promoting vocational education.
Among the largest players, Centum Learning, an associate company of telecom billionaire Sunil Mittal's Bharti Group, has partnered with NSDC to form Centum Workskills India, a joint venture that aims to train 12 million people across 11 states by 2022. Similarly, Everonn Education has teamed up with NSDC to train another 15 million. And Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services has inked a joint-venture deal with NSDC to build 100 skill development centers over the next five years.
In all, NSDC has so far approved $150 million in funding for 29 ventures that will train 40 million youth in diverse trades over the next 10 years. But this isn't by-the-numbers government work — with companies looking to get their front feet in the trough. And it's not charity work, either.
With 51 percent private sector funding and eight out of 12 of its board members representing private industry, NSDC offers better terms than commercial banks, but it takes a hefty 27 percent stake in exchange. It also demands that its partners guarantee job placement for 70 percent of their trainees.
Meanwhile, the big guns aren't getting into the business out of so-called "corporate social responsibility." They're in it to make money.
"It's not easy to monetize this space, so the motivation cannot be only revenue and profit," said Sanjeev Duggal, chief executive of Centum Learning Ltd. "But definitely our objective is by our fourth year to be crossing 500 crores [$110 million] in revenue."
The most needed job skills indicate how high the stakes are for India's economy.
According to estimates by ICRA Management Consulting Services, by 2020 India's construction industry will need 33 million more skilled crane operators, electricians, welders, masons and so on; the textiles and clothing industry will need 26 million loom and sewing machine operators; and the automobile and autoparts manufacturing industries will need 35 million machinists, mechanics, salesmen, etc.
In short, India's aspirations of boosting manufacturing output to 25 percent of GDP by 2025 — creating 100 million jobs and bringing hundreds of millions more people out of poverty in the process — may well hang in the balance.
"We have to build in skill-training capacity now," said NSDC's Chenoy. "We can't wait. In the next two to three years we have to put in place a skill-training capacity of at least 40 million people a year."
By connecting training programs more closely to employers, India hopes to ensure that courses are designed to meet industry's needs and to introduce an effective certification system so that employers recognize the value of a trained and certified welder, say, and are willing to pay more for him than for an someone who went through the informal apprentice system.
Changing the image of skilled labor
But those in the vocational education market say there are many more challenges to overcome, starting with convincing young people that a marketable skill can be more valuable than a college degree — at least when industry considers three out of four engineering graduates unemployable.
"Over the years vocational training has always been looked down upon and thought of something that's meant for losers," said IndiaSkills' chief executive Hari Menon, who expects his business to grow tenfold in its second year of operations. "Everybody chases a Bachelor's of Commerce or Bachelor's of Arts, however unemployable that makes them."
The trouble is that India can't afford to rely on supply and demand in the labor market to drive young people into vocational education — that would mean the full impact of the crisis had already hit. That's why NSDC plans to blanket the country with ads designed to put the pride back in blue collar work, said Chenoy.
But it will take more than slogans. The private sector needs to overhaul vocational education, starting with knocking down the artificial wall between academic degrees and skills certifications, said Neeti Sharma, an executive at TeamLease, India's largest staffing company. Currently, there are no community colleges in India, so there's no such thing as a vocational "degree." Moreover, once a student enters the vocational track there's virtually no way for him to get back into the university stream — and vice versa.
That's why TeamLease is working in Gujarat to set up the country's first vocational university. Similarly, Global Talent Track, which has partnered with multinational computer networking firm Cisco Systems Inc. and some 900 colleges across 15 states, recently tied up with the University of Kashmir to train degree students with the job skills that employers are looking for.
"In this country, traditionally, skills and education have always followed two different paths," said Global Talent Track chief executive Uma Ganesh.
Without question, skilled workers get paid more than unskilled ones, and vocational training can mean the difference between work in the unorganized sector — without benefits or job security — and a future with a growing national firm. But even though training firms say their graduates earn 10 to 50 percent more as a result of their training, recruiting isn't easy.
Employers pay more for skills, but so far they haven't started paying extra for workers with training certifications, and students are still reluctant to pay for training outside of "glamor programs" like computer programming and flight attendant schools.
Moreover, the companies and nonprofits that offer vocational education programs say that government-funded programs that are free for students are only partly effective: It helps them get students through the door, but doesn't ensure that they graduate. According to the head of one vocational program, the dropout rate for students on complete scholarships is as high as 70 to 80 percent. It falls to 10 to 20 percent among students paying all or part of the fee themselves.
"Today, the biggest challenge is that industry is not mandating certification," said IndiaSkills' Menon. "So the prospective learners feel that I can always walk into a company and get a job, and even if I'm certified it doesn't create any differential or positioning for me in industry when it comes to pay."
Even young people who are desperate for jobs don't necessarily understand the value of skills training, said Girish Singhania, who started Edubridge Learning to bring rural Indians into the modern job market in 2009.
Recruiters have to be equal parts salesman and social worker to get prospects to enroll. After enrollment, the company has to cajole them to stay on to graduate, encourage them to migrate and take a job at the end of the program, and then coach them on the importance of working hard once they're on a company's roster.
"The most important challenge we face is the mindset of the people living in these areas," Singhania said. "The mindset is just to accept things as they are and not try to change their careers."
To make India an industrial powerhouse, the mindset of the entire country will have to change.
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
India: yoga's inflexible guru
Analysis: How Baba Ramdev's hunger strike undermines the anti-corruption movement.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 8, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — The tragedy of Indian politics is that it usually plays as farce.
So it was this past weekend, when a police raid on a popular guru's hunger strike turned violent, and then abruptly comical. The guru dressed like a woman to escape but was nonetheless captured and whisked away to his Himalayan retreat.
Swami Baba Ramdev, a television yogi with a mass following in India, had organized the fast in New Delhi against corruption in India. He has called on the government to introduce tough anti-corruption legislation and to pursue billions of dollars in illegal funds abroad.
On Sunday, police dispersed the crowd of 40,000 people using batons and tear gas, leaving at least one protester in critical condition. Ramdev was exiled to the Hindu pilgrimage city of Haridwar, where he continues his fast to compel the government to bring back so-called "black money" stashed in secret foreign bank accounts.
A rustic and conservative figure, Ramdev has over the past five years built a health and philosophy empire comprising some 34 companies, which brought in an estimated $250 million last year, according to Indian press reports. Preaching simple yoga techniques, he has rapidly amassed an audience of millions for his televised yoga program, now supported by two broadcasting firms.
But by classing homosexuality as a psychological failing and making the unsubstantiated claim that his breathing exercises can cure cancer and HIV — not to mention grow hair — he has ensured that most of his followers are conservative, rural and small-town Hindus who are being steadily left behind in India's climb toward modernity.
As such, his presence may actually hurt the anti-corruption movement more than it helps — as he has insisted on measures that are impractical or irrelevant, such as eliminating notes higher than 50 rupees (about $1) in denomination, or introducing the death penalty for corrupt officials.
But as ridiculous as Ramdev makes the debate, like Rush Limbaugh, he raises the volume so much that he cannot be ignored. Gurus and babas — whose claims of asceticism inspire absolute trust from their followers — have often intervened in Indian politics, mobilizing mass movements to block the reform of religious laws and even bring down governments.
So it came as no surprise that within a matter of hours, nearly every politician felt compelled to take a position on Ramdev in order to gain or defend political capital. Nearly every opposition politician had something to say against the brutal crackdown, while the Congress slammed Ramdev and his attempt to enact laws without the inconvenience of votes.
Old-timers from the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) resurfaced to join the fun. A journalist tried to whack a Congress Party spokesman with his shoe (he was thrashed soundly for his trouble).
A delegation of opposition Bharatiya Janata Party leaders — so pleased with the way the wind was blowing that one of them broke into a jubilant jig outside Mahatma Gandhi's mausoleum — met the president to call for an emergency session of parliament to browbeat the government.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh delivered a defensive public apology for the crackdown. “It is unfortunate that the operation had to be conducted, but quite honestly, there was no alternative,” he told journalists.
And Ramdev himself, once again clad in his characteristic orange garb, again returned to center stage — via television news — to grin, roll his eyes and hint that a mysterious "secret mission" had caused his normally omnipresent right-hand man to disappear.
As mad as it sounds, however, the situation is serious.
Singh's Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government has been pounded by corruption accusations even before Ramdev began his fast, and neither its jailing of the former telecom minister nor its capitulation on including prominent members of civil society in the drafting of a powerful new ombudsman law has succeeded in muting the anger.
So, when Ramdev entered the fray, what had up to this point appeared to be a naive and altruistic effort turned overtly political.
Although Ramdev and the Hindu-nationalist RSS party have denied any affiliation, the guru's Hindu identity, his right-wing politics and his strong sense of nationalism make them natural allies. And with Ramdev's move to take over the anti-corruption movement — which was earlier championed by social activist Anna Hazare, who also launched an anti-corruption hunger strike — the symbolism of the struggle changed abruptly.
However critical he was of the government, Hazare, with his white suit and Gandhi cap, symbolized change from within the tradition of the Congress Party, though he is not a member. Ramdev's orange robes, on the other hand, stand for the BJP — known colloquially as "the saffron party" — even though Ramdev is not a BJP party member either.
The government's crackdown on Ramdev's fast has completed the movement's shift, and many observers are calling it a foolish miscalculation.
Until now, the anti-corruption agitation has existed outside mainstream politics, since the average Indian was convinced that the entire political class was equally corrupt.
Meanwhile, the BJP has been riven by factionalism and struggled to find an issue that would excite voters and make it stand out. Now, the BJP is not only united behind a popular issue, but in Ramdev it may also have discovered a new way to mobilize faithful Hindus.
The leading ideologues of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), who spearheaded the faith's first rise to power in the 1980s, have now taken prominent positions in the post-crackdown protests.
Former BJP president L.K. Advani, for instance — once accused of inciting the mob that destroyed the Babri mosque, believed to have been built at the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram — rose from the almost dead to lead the delegation that called for an emergency session of parliament.
Uma Bharti is another whose fiery speeches whipped up passions in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the Hindu-Muslim riots erupted across the country. She was invited to rejoin the BJP on Tuesday after more than five years in the wilderness, following her ousting for defying the party's central leadership in 2005. Other stalwarts are waiting in the wings.
That's where the farce turns tragedy again.
Hazare's protesters might have been naive to think another law could solve India's all-pervasive corruption problem. But at least they were sincere.
The entrance of saffron-clad Ramdev into the fray, and the scent of blood from the government's crackdown on his supporters has left behind, put an end to that sincerity, replacing it with cold, political calculation. It's no longer about fixing the problem, in other words, but using it to gain political mileage.
Thus, on Monday, representatives of Hazare's so-called "civil society" movement against corruption boycotted meetings to discuss the very law that Hazare had fasted to secure. Leaders of not only the BJP but also the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and Communist Party of India (CPI) declined to provide their views on six outstanding issues hampering the bill, sandbagging until an actual draft appears for them to oppose.
And the government itself, worried that the public is beginning to believe that it is stonewalling, now aims to push the bill ahead before July with or without Hazare's men.
Whatever form that law takes, and whatever chicanery it takes to pass it, the moment that it might have made a difference is over. Now it's just politics as usual.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 8, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — The tragedy of Indian politics is that it usually plays as farce.
So it was this past weekend, when a police raid on a popular guru's hunger strike turned violent, and then abruptly comical. The guru dressed like a woman to escape but was nonetheless captured and whisked away to his Himalayan retreat.
Swami Baba Ramdev, a television yogi with a mass following in India, had organized the fast in New Delhi against corruption in India. He has called on the government to introduce tough anti-corruption legislation and to pursue billions of dollars in illegal funds abroad.
On Sunday, police dispersed the crowd of 40,000 people using batons and tear gas, leaving at least one protester in critical condition. Ramdev was exiled to the Hindu pilgrimage city of Haridwar, where he continues his fast to compel the government to bring back so-called "black money" stashed in secret foreign bank accounts.
A rustic and conservative figure, Ramdev has over the past five years built a health and philosophy empire comprising some 34 companies, which brought in an estimated $250 million last year, according to Indian press reports. Preaching simple yoga techniques, he has rapidly amassed an audience of millions for his televised yoga program, now supported by two broadcasting firms.
But by classing homosexuality as a psychological failing and making the unsubstantiated claim that his breathing exercises can cure cancer and HIV — not to mention grow hair — he has ensured that most of his followers are conservative, rural and small-town Hindus who are being steadily left behind in India's climb toward modernity.
As such, his presence may actually hurt the anti-corruption movement more than it helps — as he has insisted on measures that are impractical or irrelevant, such as eliminating notes higher than 50 rupees (about $1) in denomination, or introducing the death penalty for corrupt officials.
But as ridiculous as Ramdev makes the debate, like Rush Limbaugh, he raises the volume so much that he cannot be ignored. Gurus and babas — whose claims of asceticism inspire absolute trust from their followers — have often intervened in Indian politics, mobilizing mass movements to block the reform of religious laws and even bring down governments.
So it came as no surprise that within a matter of hours, nearly every politician felt compelled to take a position on Ramdev in order to gain or defend political capital. Nearly every opposition politician had something to say against the brutal crackdown, while the Congress slammed Ramdev and his attempt to enact laws without the inconvenience of votes.
Old-timers from the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) resurfaced to join the fun. A journalist tried to whack a Congress Party spokesman with his shoe (he was thrashed soundly for his trouble).
A delegation of opposition Bharatiya Janata Party leaders — so pleased with the way the wind was blowing that one of them broke into a jubilant jig outside Mahatma Gandhi's mausoleum — met the president to call for an emergency session of parliament to browbeat the government.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh delivered a defensive public apology for the crackdown. “It is unfortunate that the operation had to be conducted, but quite honestly, there was no alternative,” he told journalists.
And Ramdev himself, once again clad in his characteristic orange garb, again returned to center stage — via television news — to grin, roll his eyes and hint that a mysterious "secret mission" had caused his normally omnipresent right-hand man to disappear.
As mad as it sounds, however, the situation is serious.
Singh's Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government has been pounded by corruption accusations even before Ramdev began his fast, and neither its jailing of the former telecom minister nor its capitulation on including prominent members of civil society in the drafting of a powerful new ombudsman law has succeeded in muting the anger.
So, when Ramdev entered the fray, what had up to this point appeared to be a naive and altruistic effort turned overtly political.
Although Ramdev and the Hindu-nationalist RSS party have denied any affiliation, the guru's Hindu identity, his right-wing politics and his strong sense of nationalism make them natural allies. And with Ramdev's move to take over the anti-corruption movement — which was earlier championed by social activist Anna Hazare, who also launched an anti-corruption hunger strike — the symbolism of the struggle changed abruptly.
However critical he was of the government, Hazare, with his white suit and Gandhi cap, symbolized change from within the tradition of the Congress Party, though he is not a member. Ramdev's orange robes, on the other hand, stand for the BJP — known colloquially as "the saffron party" — even though Ramdev is not a BJP party member either.
The government's crackdown on Ramdev's fast has completed the movement's shift, and many observers are calling it a foolish miscalculation.
Until now, the anti-corruption agitation has existed outside mainstream politics, since the average Indian was convinced that the entire political class was equally corrupt.
Meanwhile, the BJP has been riven by factionalism and struggled to find an issue that would excite voters and make it stand out. Now, the BJP is not only united behind a popular issue, but in Ramdev it may also have discovered a new way to mobilize faithful Hindus.
The leading ideologues of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), who spearheaded the faith's first rise to power in the 1980s, have now taken prominent positions in the post-crackdown protests.
Former BJP president L.K. Advani, for instance — once accused of inciting the mob that destroyed the Babri mosque, believed to have been built at the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram — rose from the almost dead to lead the delegation that called for an emergency session of parliament.
Uma Bharti is another whose fiery speeches whipped up passions in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the Hindu-Muslim riots erupted across the country. She was invited to rejoin the BJP on Tuesday after more than five years in the wilderness, following her ousting for defying the party's central leadership in 2005. Other stalwarts are waiting in the wings.
That's where the farce turns tragedy again.
Hazare's protesters might have been naive to think another law could solve India's all-pervasive corruption problem. But at least they were sincere.
The entrance of saffron-clad Ramdev into the fray, and the scent of blood from the government's crackdown on his supporters has left behind, put an end to that sincerity, replacing it with cold, political calculation. It's no longer about fixing the problem, in other words, but using it to gain political mileage.
Thus, on Monday, representatives of Hazare's so-called "civil society" movement against corruption boycotted meetings to discuss the very law that Hazare had fasted to secure. Leaders of not only the BJP but also the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and Communist Party of India (CPI) declined to provide their views on six outstanding issues hampering the bill, sandbagging until an actual draft appears for them to oppose.
And the government itself, worried that the public is beginning to believe that it is stonewalling, now aims to push the bill ahead before July with or without Hazare's men.
Whatever form that law takes, and whatever chicanery it takes to pass it, the moment that it might have made a difference is over. Now it's just politics as usual.
Monday, June 06, 2011
India: after Osama bin Laden
America's biggest victory in the war on terror changes nothing for India's lonely battle.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 6, 2011
Editor's note: The killing of Osama bin Laden has changed everything. Or has it? In this ongoing series Al Qaeda: What's Next?, GlobalPost senior correspondents worldwide investigate the uncertain future of global terrorism and religious extremism – from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Egypt, India, China, Africa, Southeast Asia, the former Soviet republics and beyond.
NEW DELHI, India — In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, India was torn between hopes and fears about how his death might change the rules of America's war on terror.
Initially, there appeared to be definitive proof that Pakistan's military establishment, if not its civilian government, was aiding and abetting terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda.
Given this proof, optimists in India's security establishment hoped that the U.S. might take aggressive steps to rein in the rogue state — perhaps even cut off the flow of military aid or move in to tackle Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.
At the same time, pragmatists feared the vacuum left by Osama would allow a new militant leader to emerge, one who would force India into the cross-hairs.
Worse, it looked like this new leader might well be Pakistan's Ilyas Kashmiri, Al Qaeda's third-highest commander. But preliminary reports of Kashmiri's death by U.S. drones on Saturday has all but quashed that expectation.
In the weeks since the bin Laden raid, however, Washington has backed off its accusations that the top brass of the Pakistani army or the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) played a role in hiding Osama.
And as Washington back-pedals, India's hopes wither, leaving only the fear behind.
When U.S. President Barack Obama visited India in November, he made much of the "strategic partnership" between the United States and India. Just last month, U.S. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano visited Mumbai and New Delhi to pay lip service to joint efforts in counterterrorism.
Despite these claims, however, Osama's killing has driven the point home: India is alone in its own war on terror.
"For decades, no movement of terror in India was acknowledged by the Americans," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
"Two thousand-plus people would be killed in a theater, and you'd be reporting two incidents, three incidents, five incidents with 20 killed, 25 killed — that's it. We used to laugh."
The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.
India has suffered more terrorism-related casualties than perhaps any other country since Sept. 11, 2001 — none of them directly related to Al Qaeda.
In more than half of the 21 incidents in which the attackers could be identified, they represented Pakistan-based terrorist organizations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) — all of which evidence suggests are supported, at least to some degree, by the Pakistani army and intelligence.
Confessed terrorist David Headley, testifying in the Chicago trial of an alleged co-conspirator, identified two active ISI officers who provided training and logistical support for the Mumbai attacks, though he later claimed that the spy agency's top leadership may not have known about the plan.
And from the U.S. diplomatic cables obtained and published by Wikileaks, it is clear that regardless of what they might have said publicly America's representatives in the region have never been naive about Pakistan's role in encouraging terrorists.
Yet almost before Osama's blood was dry, Washington signaled that it would continue to support its military regime, first with a damage control visit by Sen. John Kerry, and then with a surprise visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The message was clear.
"[Lashkar-e-Taiba chief] Hafiz Saeed is sitting pretty in [Pakistan], spewing venom, and the Obama administration is still thinking of devising the next financial fix to try and persuade Gen. [Ashfaq] Kayani to do the right thing," said Sumit Ganguly, a political scientist at Indiana University. "Our gullibility and cowardice in forthrightly confronting this duplicitous regime is simply boundless."
India's problem has never been Al Qaeda, and its enemy No. 1 was never Osama bin Laden, Ilyas Kashmiri or even Hafiz Saeed.
India's war on terror is a war against the military-intelligence establishment of Pakistan, which means that its enemy No. 1 enjoys the financial backing of the richest and most powerful nation in the world.
"Terrorism in India is a proxy war," said Sahni. "It's a covert war in which Islam has been used as a mobilizing force by the Pakistani army and Pakistani intelligence services and the Pakistani civil governments."
But even as America continues its policy of vociferously condemning and tacitly accepting Islamabad's insistent distinction between the terrorist groups whose efforts are focused on India and those waging global jihad, some of the most recent developments suggest that their ideologies are steadily converging. India-focused groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba may already be conducting joint operations with Al Qaeda itself.
Last week, for instance, Headley testified that he shifted allegiance from Lashkar to Al Qaeda at the urging of a former Pakistani military officer who told him Lashkar was "conducting the ISI's jihad and we should conduct God's jihad."
One of the central claims of the book published by Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad just before he was murdered last week was that it was actually Al Qaeda No. 3 Ilyas Kashmiri who sold the script for the Mumbai attacks to the ISI, which then tapped Lashkar-e-Taiba to carry it out.
And bin Laden himself may have been working to establish a "grand coalition" of Pakistan-based terrorist groups under the umbrella of Al Qaeda when he was killed, according to the Guardian.
"LeT is not a franchise [of Al Qaeda]. Neither is JeM or HuJI," Stephen Tankel, a terrorism expert affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"[But] these groups coordinate and collaborate with Al Qaeda to varying degrees. All of them are part of the global jihad. They are also heavily influenced, especially in LeT's case, by the bilateral India-Pakistan relationship," he said.
At least from India's perspective, that puts America — which is trying to play both sides — on the wrong one.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 6, 2011
Editor's note: The killing of Osama bin Laden has changed everything. Or has it? In this ongoing series Al Qaeda: What's Next?, GlobalPost senior correspondents worldwide investigate the uncertain future of global terrorism and religious extremism – from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Egypt, India, China, Africa, Southeast Asia, the former Soviet republics and beyond.
NEW DELHI, India — In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, India was torn between hopes and fears about how his death might change the rules of America's war on terror.
Initially, there appeared to be definitive proof that Pakistan's military establishment, if not its civilian government, was aiding and abetting terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda.
Given this proof, optimists in India's security establishment hoped that the U.S. might take aggressive steps to rein in the rogue state — perhaps even cut off the flow of military aid or move in to tackle Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.
At the same time, pragmatists feared the vacuum left by Osama would allow a new militant leader to emerge, one who would force India into the cross-hairs.
Worse, it looked like this new leader might well be Pakistan's Ilyas Kashmiri, Al Qaeda's third-highest commander. But preliminary reports of Kashmiri's death by U.S. drones on Saturday has all but quashed that expectation.
In the weeks since the bin Laden raid, however, Washington has backed off its accusations that the top brass of the Pakistani army or the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) played a role in hiding Osama.
And as Washington back-pedals, India's hopes wither, leaving only the fear behind.
When U.S. President Barack Obama visited India in November, he made much of the "strategic partnership" between the United States and India. Just last month, U.S. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano visited Mumbai and New Delhi to pay lip service to joint efforts in counterterrorism.
Despite these claims, however, Osama's killing has driven the point home: India is alone in its own war on terror.
"For decades, no movement of terror in India was acknowledged by the Americans," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
"Two thousand-plus people would be killed in a theater, and you'd be reporting two incidents, three incidents, five incidents with 20 killed, 25 killed — that's it. We used to laugh."
The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.
India has suffered more terrorism-related casualties than perhaps any other country since Sept. 11, 2001 — none of them directly related to Al Qaeda.
In more than half of the 21 incidents in which the attackers could be identified, they represented Pakistan-based terrorist organizations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) — all of which evidence suggests are supported, at least to some degree, by the Pakistani army and intelligence.
Confessed terrorist David Headley, testifying in the Chicago trial of an alleged co-conspirator, identified two active ISI officers who provided training and logistical support for the Mumbai attacks, though he later claimed that the spy agency's top leadership may not have known about the plan.
And from the U.S. diplomatic cables obtained and published by Wikileaks, it is clear that regardless of what they might have said publicly America's representatives in the region have never been naive about Pakistan's role in encouraging terrorists.
Yet almost before Osama's blood was dry, Washington signaled that it would continue to support its military regime, first with a damage control visit by Sen. John Kerry, and then with a surprise visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The message was clear.
"[Lashkar-e-Taiba chief] Hafiz Saeed is sitting pretty in [Pakistan], spewing venom, and the Obama administration is still thinking of devising the next financial fix to try and persuade Gen. [Ashfaq] Kayani to do the right thing," said Sumit Ganguly, a political scientist at Indiana University. "Our gullibility and cowardice in forthrightly confronting this duplicitous regime is simply boundless."
India's problem has never been Al Qaeda, and its enemy No. 1 was never Osama bin Laden, Ilyas Kashmiri or even Hafiz Saeed.
India's war on terror is a war against the military-intelligence establishment of Pakistan, which means that its enemy No. 1 enjoys the financial backing of the richest and most powerful nation in the world.
"Terrorism in India is a proxy war," said Sahni. "It's a covert war in which Islam has been used as a mobilizing force by the Pakistani army and Pakistani intelligence services and the Pakistani civil governments."
But even as America continues its policy of vociferously condemning and tacitly accepting Islamabad's insistent distinction between the terrorist groups whose efforts are focused on India and those waging global jihad, some of the most recent developments suggest that their ideologies are steadily converging. India-focused groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba may already be conducting joint operations with Al Qaeda itself.
Last week, for instance, Headley testified that he shifted allegiance from Lashkar to Al Qaeda at the urging of a former Pakistani military officer who told him Lashkar was "conducting the ISI's jihad and we should conduct God's jihad."
One of the central claims of the book published by Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad just before he was murdered last week was that it was actually Al Qaeda No. 3 Ilyas Kashmiri who sold the script for the Mumbai attacks to the ISI, which then tapped Lashkar-e-Taiba to carry it out.
And bin Laden himself may have been working to establish a "grand coalition" of Pakistan-based terrorist groups under the umbrella of Al Qaeda when he was killed, according to the Guardian.
"LeT is not a franchise [of Al Qaeda]. Neither is JeM or HuJI," Stephen Tankel, a terrorism expert affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"[But] these groups coordinate and collaborate with Al Qaeda to varying degrees. All of them are part of the global jihad. They are also heavily influenced, especially in LeT's case, by the bilateral India-Pakistan relationship," he said.
At least from India's perspective, that puts America — which is trying to play both sides — on the wrong one.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Delhi's rich race to rid themselves of their Bentleys
An alleged car smuggler exposes the dark side of India's red-hot luxury market.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Luxury automobiles have joined the litter along New Delhi's streets in recent weeks.
Following up on an anonymous tip last month, police recovered an Aston Martin and a Bentley gathering dust on the side of the road in Vasant Vihar, an upscale neighborhood favored by expatriates and wealthy Indians.
But the owners who abandoned their vehicles weren't simply looking for an upgrade, officials from New Delhi's Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) say.
They ditched the cars in the hope of avoiding prosecution in an ongoing probe into a New Delhi car dealer's multimillion dollar smuggling ring — which police allege involves a British businessman and diplomats from North Korea and Vietnam.
Already, some 40 luxury cars — including Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Hummers, Aston Martins, Rolls Royces and Bentleys owned by film stars, cricket players and politicians, police say — sit forlornly in a police impound lot.
And as investigators gradually uncover the details of the alleged international smuggling racket run by car dealer Sumit Walia, an intriguing story about the dark side of India's red hot luxury market is starting to emerge.
According to charges filed against Walia by the DRI and the Delhi Police, Walia allegedly bribed diplomats from North Korea and Vietnam — and perhaps other nations — to allow him to import cars in their names.
Because diplomats are allowed to import personal cars duty-free, the scheme helped him avoid customs duties, that otherwise run as high as 100 percent, when he sold the cars on to the real customers.
But that wasn't the only method Walia used, according to a police report filed by Benoy Berry, Burundi's Honorary Counselor in India. Berry claims that Walia simply stole two Range Rovers and a Porsche that Walia imported for him, and police say some of the other imported vehicles may have been stolen in Britain, France, Singapore and Japan before being brought to India.
Based on the cars recovered so far, the DRI estimates that the smuggling ring cost the treasury at least $2.5 million in taxes.
To be sure, Walia wouldn't have had a tough time finding customers.
Despite its hefty import penalties, India is the world's second fastest-growing market for luxury cars, behind China's. At the time police picked up the Bentley and the Aston Martin, Ferrari was due to open its first dealership in just a few days — joining the ranks of Rolls Royce, Lamborghini, and Bugatti and Maserati.
Legal sales grew by 60 percent last year, as the booming economy powered the purchase of some 16,000 high-end automobiles. Meanwhile, tax evasion is ubiquitous, with cash stashed in safety deposit boxes all over Delhi and every other Indian city, and as much as $1.4 trillion in so-called "black money" stashed in numbered accounts in tax havens abroad.
According to a report in the Indian Express, a local English-language daily, the DRI has asked the Ministry of External Affairs to discuss the alleged involvement of diplomats in the smuggling ring with the North Korean and Vietnamese embassies.
The DRI is also investigating the alleged involvement of Ashwin Kalra, a British citizen that Walia named as an associate upon his arrest. Kalra reportedly runs a U.K.-based company called A.K. International, which the authorities say may have supplied some of the automobiles involved in the case.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Luxury automobiles have joined the litter along New Delhi's streets in recent weeks.
Following up on an anonymous tip last month, police recovered an Aston Martin and a Bentley gathering dust on the side of the road in Vasant Vihar, an upscale neighborhood favored by expatriates and wealthy Indians.
But the owners who abandoned their vehicles weren't simply looking for an upgrade, officials from New Delhi's Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) say.
They ditched the cars in the hope of avoiding prosecution in an ongoing probe into a New Delhi car dealer's multimillion dollar smuggling ring — which police allege involves a British businessman and diplomats from North Korea and Vietnam.
Already, some 40 luxury cars — including Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Hummers, Aston Martins, Rolls Royces and Bentleys owned by film stars, cricket players and politicians, police say — sit forlornly in a police impound lot.
And as investigators gradually uncover the details of the alleged international smuggling racket run by car dealer Sumit Walia, an intriguing story about the dark side of India's red hot luxury market is starting to emerge.
According to charges filed against Walia by the DRI and the Delhi Police, Walia allegedly bribed diplomats from North Korea and Vietnam — and perhaps other nations — to allow him to import cars in their names.
Because diplomats are allowed to import personal cars duty-free, the scheme helped him avoid customs duties, that otherwise run as high as 100 percent, when he sold the cars on to the real customers.
But that wasn't the only method Walia used, according to a police report filed by Benoy Berry, Burundi's Honorary Counselor in India. Berry claims that Walia simply stole two Range Rovers and a Porsche that Walia imported for him, and police say some of the other imported vehicles may have been stolen in Britain, France, Singapore and Japan before being brought to India.
Based on the cars recovered so far, the DRI estimates that the smuggling ring cost the treasury at least $2.5 million in taxes.
To be sure, Walia wouldn't have had a tough time finding customers.
Despite its hefty import penalties, India is the world's second fastest-growing market for luxury cars, behind China's. At the time police picked up the Bentley and the Aston Martin, Ferrari was due to open its first dealership in just a few days — joining the ranks of Rolls Royce, Lamborghini, and Bugatti and Maserati.
Legal sales grew by 60 percent last year, as the booming economy powered the purchase of some 16,000 high-end automobiles. Meanwhile, tax evasion is ubiquitous, with cash stashed in safety deposit boxes all over Delhi and every other Indian city, and as much as $1.4 trillion in so-called "black money" stashed in numbered accounts in tax havens abroad.
According to a report in the Indian Express, a local English-language daily, the DRI has asked the Ministry of External Affairs to discuss the alleged involvement of diplomats in the smuggling ring with the North Korean and Vietnamese embassies.
The DRI is also investigating the alleged involvement of Ashwin Kalra, a British citizen that Walia named as an associate upon his arrest. Kalra reportedly runs a U.K.-based company called A.K. International, which the authorities say may have supplied some of the automobiles involved in the case.
India: atheism in the land of a thousand gods
A scrappy group of young Indians takes on karma — and dogma.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Lalit Mohan Chawla, a 19-year-old college student, was having doubts about God.
Every classroom had a picture of the late Sathya Sai Baba and every day the teacher forced him to meditate while imagining the guru's benevolent hand resting on his head — all this despite the troubling allegations of sexual misconduct in the guru's past.
The school yoga instructor talked about energy in a way that contradicted everything Lalit read in his science books.
"He said we had to use a [yoga] mat, to prevent our energy from flowing into the earth," Chawla said.
"I felt that was completely stupid. But if you do not bring a mat, you will be spanked. I got spanked once. Not because I refused to bring my mat, because I forgot to bring my mat. I never refused to bring the mat, I never refused to meditate. I mean, who wants a spanking — that's all." Lesson learned.
Years later Chawla is an atheist. And he is not alone.
Spurred by online social networks, atheist and "free thinker" support groups are mushrooming in India's major cities. The groups want to help non-believers — like Chawla, who hasn't told his parents — stick to their convictions in the face of societal pressures. Moreover, they hope to turn atheists into activists.
"We aim to register as a national organization, which requires us to have a presence in a number of states in the country. So, at present we are focused on building regional groups in the major cities," said Ajita Kamal, editor of the website, Nirmukta.com, that has spawned most of India's atheist social networks.
India — where millions throng to the spot where a statue of Ganesha is said to be drinking milk and an absolute faith in God's will trumps every traffic law — is renowned for belief.
But as a recent survey reveals, the Western perception of India's benign, hippie spirituality is a fantasy. Despite 60 years of democracy, India remains one of the world's most repressive societies, according to a global study published in Science last week. And even as political groups routinely use religion to stoke hatred and provoke deadly riots, the constitution and the law seem bent on intertwining — rather than separating — religion and the state.
Longterm, that's what the atheists, or free thinkers, aim to change.
"We want secularism to be defined in this country," said Aarti Tikoo Singh, a member of the Delhi Freethinkers. "So far nobody knows what it means. Everybody assumes that it means I have absolute freedom to religion, and that's how all the communities and individuals play this game. India is now the epitome of religiosity. Globalization has just pushed it even further. It's now a massive industry."
Just living day-to-day as an Indian atheist can be a challenge.
During a chat over coffee with some members of the Delhi Freethinkers, the discussion repeatedly circled back to the risk of falling back into religion to fit in or to please parents. Even those who had openly renounced God for clean, cold logic admitted that sometimes the power that ritual and convention hold over their parents is simply too hard to break.
"Many of us say that it is good to come out. It has helped the gay community. Now everyone is comfortable with gays," Chawla said. "I know I should come out. I know it's good. But I don't. I don't find sense in fighting with my family, arguing with my family all the time. So I compromise."
Even though Singh's parents had accepted her as an atheist, when she got married a few years ago her parents said she couldn't have a civil ceremony. To them, a civil ceremony would would have implied something was not right in the household.
In the end, she agreed to be married with the ceremony of her husband's Sikh faith.
"Their argument was, 'What will the relatives say?'" Singh recalls.
That's a bridge that 22-year-old Aayushi Awasthy has yet to cross, though she says she's resolved that religion won't play a role in her marriage, and she won't accept an arranged match.
She says being an atheist has empowered her in other ways. She has resisted parental pressure to go into teaching over business — which is what she really wants to do. "For me, there's no fear of the unknown," she said. "I'm not scared to go out in the dark."
Six percent of Indians said they had no religion in a recent survey. Still, self-described, out-of-the-closet Indian atheists are few in number — especially compared with the country's enormous population.
Set up in January, for example, the Delhi Freethinkers group has around 95 members (including Chawla) and expects to cross 100 before meeting again next month, while similar groups in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Pune and Kolkata have amassed at most a few hundred more members over the past six months.
But if you pull together older groups of the godless, from India's vibrant communist tradition, for example, and from the various organizations that have focused on exposing the fraudulent "miracles" that charlatan god men use to fleece the poor, it starts to look like scientific rationalism as a belief system is gaining a toe hold.
"Religion is indeed considered part of your identity in India, but that is changing, at least amongst the growing middle class, which is our demographic by virtue of the fact that we're organizing online," said Kamal.
"But we're focused on more than just religion. There are many other areas in which critical thinking and scientific skepticism are needed in India. Indeed, there are many self-identified atheists who gladly buy into illogical and/or pseudoscientific ideas."
To change that, India's new atheists are taking the battle from the masses to the classes, moving beyond the pioneering work that rationalists like Narendra Nayak and Sanal Edamaruku have done to debunk claims made by astrologers, tantriks and god men.
By organizing debates and discussion groups, the new activists aim to raise awareness about atheism — an Indian census taker will still object to writing "not applicable" under religion — among middle-class and wealthy Indians who have never questioned God, fate, or even astrology.
And before the end of the year, the Delhi group hopes to be running programs to teach school children to question and think, rather than accept and memorize.
"Our objective is not to tell others not to believe in God," said 67-year-old Rajesh Kher, who's stuck to his convictions for four decades. "Our goal is to get people to think."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - June 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Lalit Mohan Chawla, a 19-year-old college student, was having doubts about God.
Every classroom had a picture of the late Sathya Sai Baba and every day the teacher forced him to meditate while imagining the guru's benevolent hand resting on his head — all this despite the troubling allegations of sexual misconduct in the guru's past.
The school yoga instructor talked about energy in a way that contradicted everything Lalit read in his science books.
"He said we had to use a [yoga] mat, to prevent our energy from flowing into the earth," Chawla said.
"I felt that was completely stupid. But if you do not bring a mat, you will be spanked. I got spanked once. Not because I refused to bring my mat, because I forgot to bring my mat. I never refused to bring the mat, I never refused to meditate. I mean, who wants a spanking — that's all." Lesson learned.
Years later Chawla is an atheist. And he is not alone.
Spurred by online social networks, atheist and "free thinker" support groups are mushrooming in India's major cities. The groups want to help non-believers — like Chawla, who hasn't told his parents — stick to their convictions in the face of societal pressures. Moreover, they hope to turn atheists into activists.
"We aim to register as a national organization, which requires us to have a presence in a number of states in the country. So, at present we are focused on building regional groups in the major cities," said Ajita Kamal, editor of the website, Nirmukta.com, that has spawned most of India's atheist social networks.
India — where millions throng to the spot where a statue of Ganesha is said to be drinking milk and an absolute faith in God's will trumps every traffic law — is renowned for belief.
But as a recent survey reveals, the Western perception of India's benign, hippie spirituality is a fantasy. Despite 60 years of democracy, India remains one of the world's most repressive societies, according to a global study published in Science last week. And even as political groups routinely use religion to stoke hatred and provoke deadly riots, the constitution and the law seem bent on intertwining — rather than separating — religion and the state.
Longterm, that's what the atheists, or free thinkers, aim to change.
"We want secularism to be defined in this country," said Aarti Tikoo Singh, a member of the Delhi Freethinkers. "So far nobody knows what it means. Everybody assumes that it means I have absolute freedom to religion, and that's how all the communities and individuals play this game. India is now the epitome of religiosity. Globalization has just pushed it even further. It's now a massive industry."
Just living day-to-day as an Indian atheist can be a challenge.
During a chat over coffee with some members of the Delhi Freethinkers, the discussion repeatedly circled back to the risk of falling back into religion to fit in or to please parents. Even those who had openly renounced God for clean, cold logic admitted that sometimes the power that ritual and convention hold over their parents is simply too hard to break.
"Many of us say that it is good to come out. It has helped the gay community. Now everyone is comfortable with gays," Chawla said. "I know I should come out. I know it's good. But I don't. I don't find sense in fighting with my family, arguing with my family all the time. So I compromise."
Even though Singh's parents had accepted her as an atheist, when she got married a few years ago her parents said she couldn't have a civil ceremony. To them, a civil ceremony would would have implied something was not right in the household.
In the end, she agreed to be married with the ceremony of her husband's Sikh faith.
"Their argument was, 'What will the relatives say?'" Singh recalls.
That's a bridge that 22-year-old Aayushi Awasthy has yet to cross, though she says she's resolved that religion won't play a role in her marriage, and she won't accept an arranged match.
She says being an atheist has empowered her in other ways. She has resisted parental pressure to go into teaching over business — which is what she really wants to do. "For me, there's no fear of the unknown," she said. "I'm not scared to go out in the dark."
Six percent of Indians said they had no religion in a recent survey. Still, self-described, out-of-the-closet Indian atheists are few in number — especially compared with the country's enormous population.
Set up in January, for example, the Delhi Freethinkers group has around 95 members (including Chawla) and expects to cross 100 before meeting again next month, while similar groups in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Pune and Kolkata have amassed at most a few hundred more members over the past six months.
But if you pull together older groups of the godless, from India's vibrant communist tradition, for example, and from the various organizations that have focused on exposing the fraudulent "miracles" that charlatan god men use to fleece the poor, it starts to look like scientific rationalism as a belief system is gaining a toe hold.
"Religion is indeed considered part of your identity in India, but that is changing, at least amongst the growing middle class, which is our demographic by virtue of the fact that we're organizing online," said Kamal.
"But we're focused on more than just religion. There are many other areas in which critical thinking and scientific skepticism are needed in India. Indeed, there are many self-identified atheists who gladly buy into illogical and/or pseudoscientific ideas."
To change that, India's new atheists are taking the battle from the masses to the classes, moving beyond the pioneering work that rationalists like Narendra Nayak and Sanal Edamaruku have done to debunk claims made by astrologers, tantriks and god men.
By organizing debates and discussion groups, the new activists aim to raise awareness about atheism — an Indian census taker will still object to writing "not applicable" under religion — among middle-class and wealthy Indians who have never questioned God, fate, or even astrology.
And before the end of the year, the Delhi group hopes to be running programs to teach school children to question and think, rather than accept and memorize.
"Our objective is not to tell others not to believe in God," said 67-year-old Rajesh Kher, who's stuck to his convictions for four decades. "Our goal is to get people to think."
Sunday, May 29, 2011
India: new life for old-school folk music
Technology meets tradition in a new record label that's trying to popularize folk music in today's India.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - May 29, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — As a young girl, Shefali Bhushan studied Hindustani classical music. But in 2000, when the 39-year-old, New Delhi-based music promoter started her first record label, Beat of India — more or less by accident — it was India's haunting, vibrant folk music that captivated her.
"I had been trying to do some music-related programs for television," Bhushan said. "But they didn't want to commission anything. A friend of mine who's also involved with Beat of India, NK Sharma, suggested we do something like this because it hasn't really been done in our country in any organized way."
"Something like this" meant a six-year-long talent search in India's small towns and villages, making field recordings in huts and fields, schools and community centers, with what might have been the last generation of genuine folk performers.
"That was the most difficult part, and continues to be, because it's very difficult to find the authentic, better artists of any practicing genre," Bhushan said.
"We found in our experience that the All India Radio stations in the local areas and some of the more knowledgeable program executives were the best sources of information, because over the years they have dealt with a lot of the artists."
Many of these musicians had never earned a living from singing and playing, and their remote houses weren't always easy to find, Bhushan recalls.
On one field trip, the team went to several villages with the same name asking for a washer man, or dhobi, called Babu Nandan Dhobi who'd they heard was a human lexicon of washer folk songs. When they finally found the 70-something-year-old musician, he was fast asleep in the tiny hut on his farm plot.
"We had to shake him awake almost, and he was completely shocked," Bhushan said. "He didn't know who we were or why we were there — three or four people from a city standing on top of him at his cot."
But soon after, when the musician had sent a boy to buy sweets for his guests and learned why they'd come, he began to explain how the rhythm of wet clothes striking against the river rocks makes the natural beat of the washerfolk's songs.
"He just started demonstrating for us with an imaginary cloth," Bhushan said. "And he continued to sing many, many songs for us."
Bhushan's unwitting tribute to John Lomax didn't go unrewarded — and neither have the musicians.
After a short stint giving away music downloads for free and hoping for charitable donations, Bhushan, Sharma and another partner, Prabhat Agarwal, started the Beat of India record label to print CDs and, subsequently, sell music downloads. Individual tracks — now archived by region, style, genre and other categories — sell for just $0.69.
All the artists receive an upfront payment that's significant relative to their income, and Beat of India pays a royalty fee of 10 percent from the sales of individual tracks and custom CDs. Moreover, the publicity has helped a number of the artists get gigs playing at large venues in urban India and even abroad, and several have been asked to record songs for films.
More recently, the musicology company has licensed 10 compilation albums to a local music distribution firm, Frankfinn, with better reach in physical stores. And Beat of India has also licensed a number of songs to an international aggregator that sells content onward to heavyweights like iTunes.
Sales are modest so far, but that was never the goal.
"Our focus was to try to popularize the folk music of India," Bhushan said. "You can't find the original sound, and there are a lot of people who are interested. We know from our own experience that it's really phenomenal, dynamic music. So [giving it a larger profile] has been the objective from the beginning."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - May 29, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — As a young girl, Shefali Bhushan studied Hindustani classical music. But in 2000, when the 39-year-old, New Delhi-based music promoter started her first record label, Beat of India — more or less by accident — it was India's haunting, vibrant folk music that captivated her.
"I had been trying to do some music-related programs for television," Bhushan said. "But they didn't want to commission anything. A friend of mine who's also involved with Beat of India, NK Sharma, suggested we do something like this because it hasn't really been done in our country in any organized way."
"Something like this" meant a six-year-long talent search in India's small towns and villages, making field recordings in huts and fields, schools and community centers, with what might have been the last generation of genuine folk performers.
"That was the most difficult part, and continues to be, because it's very difficult to find the authentic, better artists of any practicing genre," Bhushan said.
"We found in our experience that the All India Radio stations in the local areas and some of the more knowledgeable program executives were the best sources of information, because over the years they have dealt with a lot of the artists."
Many of these musicians had never earned a living from singing and playing, and their remote houses weren't always easy to find, Bhushan recalls.
On one field trip, the team went to several villages with the same name asking for a washer man, or dhobi, called Babu Nandan Dhobi who'd they heard was a human lexicon of washer folk songs. When they finally found the 70-something-year-old musician, he was fast asleep in the tiny hut on his farm plot.
"We had to shake him awake almost, and he was completely shocked," Bhushan said. "He didn't know who we were or why we were there — three or four people from a city standing on top of him at his cot."
But soon after, when the musician had sent a boy to buy sweets for his guests and learned why they'd come, he began to explain how the rhythm of wet clothes striking against the river rocks makes the natural beat of the washerfolk's songs.
"He just started demonstrating for us with an imaginary cloth," Bhushan said. "And he continued to sing many, many songs for us."
Bhushan's unwitting tribute to John Lomax didn't go unrewarded — and neither have the musicians.
After a short stint giving away music downloads for free and hoping for charitable donations, Bhushan, Sharma and another partner, Prabhat Agarwal, started the Beat of India record label to print CDs and, subsequently, sell music downloads. Individual tracks — now archived by region, style, genre and other categories — sell for just $0.69.
All the artists receive an upfront payment that's significant relative to their income, and Beat of India pays a royalty fee of 10 percent from the sales of individual tracks and custom CDs. Moreover, the publicity has helped a number of the artists get gigs playing at large venues in urban India and even abroad, and several have been asked to record songs for films.
More recently, the musicology company has licensed 10 compilation albums to a local music distribution firm, Frankfinn, with better reach in physical stores. And Beat of India has also licensed a number of songs to an international aggregator that sells content onward to heavyweights like iTunes.
Sales are modest so far, but that was never the goal.
"Our focus was to try to popularize the folk music of India," Bhushan said. "You can't find the original sound, and there are a lot of people who are interested. We know from our own experience that it's really phenomenal, dynamic music. So [giving it a larger profile] has been the objective from the beginning."
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
India education: Dalit student suicide
Caste-discrimination is undermining India's efforts to uplift the oppressed through quotas in higher education.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - May 24, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Jaspreet Singh, a young student from a caste once considered "untouchable" by other Hindus, was in his last year of medical school when his life began to fall apart.
A talented student, and his family's brightest hope for clawing their way into the middle class, he was stunned to find that he had failed community medicine, one of his easiest subjects. But he was even more devastated by the alleged reason: His professor was determined to flunk him because of his caste.
Like most students from the Dalit castes, Singh had suffered the sly digs and subtle slights of his classmates in silence for years at the Goverment Medical College (Chandigarh). His professor's alleged claim that he would never allow Singh to get there was the last straw.
Singh hung himself from the ceiling fan in the bathroom in the college library, writing in his suicide note that he could no longer bear the insults and discrimination he'd endured from two fellow students and his community medicine professor, Dr. N.K. Goel. (All three have been charged with abetting Singh's suicide, which is a crime under the Indian penal code, but no ruling has been issued and the accused maintain that they are innocent).
"The college says he couldn't cope with the coursework, but he did fine in all his other subjects," said Jaspreet's sister, Balwinder Kaur. "In surgery he got 80 percent marks."
Sadly, cases like Jaspreet's are all too common, according to the Insight Foundation, a group of young Dalits who are working to eliminate discrimination in India's higher education system.
No official effort has been made to determine how many of the more than 16,000 school and college students who have killed themselves over the past four years hail from India's historically oppressed castes, and only one study, covering only the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, has investigated discrimination on campus.
But the Insight Foundation believes that a disproportionate number of the students committing suicides are Dalits, and its members allege that caste discrimination, a dirty secret, is ubiquitous at India's top universities — even as the government works to expand access to higher education with quotas, or reservations, for historically oppressed groups.
"The problem which we face in elite institutions is much worse," said Anoop Kumar, the Insight Foundation's national coordinator, and a Dalit himself. "These elite institutions are considered to be very prestigious, and the Dalit students who enter there are thought to be intruding into that space through reservations — they don't deserve to be there, this is such a competitive place, this is such a meritorious place, and these guys have come through quota. So the hatred and hostility is much more."
It just might be possible that hostility marks an inflexion point for Indian society not unlike white America's reaction to the desegregation of schools in the 1960s.
To break the stranglehold of caste — which has endured for thousands of years, defeating the efforts of religious reformers, missionaries and civil rights activists — India made the persecution or segregation of the erstwhile untouchables illegal and introduced a quota system that reserved 22.5 percent of university placements and government jobs for the so-called "Scheduled Castes and Schedule Tribes" in the 1950s.
But in recent years, since the rise of caste-based political parties in the 1990s has begun to ensure those reservations are enforced, and other laboring castes have won their own job and education quotas, the shakeup in the social order has resulted in a backlash from among high caste Indians. At the All India Institute for Medical Sciences (AIIMS), for instance, where there are 50 Dalit students, hundreds of doctors staged protests and hunger strikes against the expansion of the quota system to reserve an additional 27 percent of placements for students from the laboring castes known legally as the "other backward classes," or OBCs.
Their argument: reserving half or more of the seats in India's limited universities has made it nearly impossible for high-caste students to win a place, and the quotas are eroding the high standards that have earned the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and AIIMS an international reputation for producing leaders like Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of Pepsi, and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, among thousands of others.
That was the environment that another Dalit suicide victim, Balmukund Bharti, confronted when he won a place at AIIMS through the quota system in 2006.
Persecution forced Bharti to move out of his dorm room to bunk with other Dalit students. His professors and classmates allegedly marked him out as a "quota student" at every turn. And one of his instructors allegedly told him flat out, "You are not worthy of becoming a doctor," according to his parents, who also say that AIIMS never notified them after their son's first, unsuccessful, suicide attempt. (AIIMS did not respond to an interview request or questions sent by email).
"Suicide is just an indicator of the malaise that is there," said Kumar of the Insight Foundation, which has documented nearly 20 cases of discrimination-related suicides by Dalit students, and posted video testimonies from their parents and relatives on Youtube and various web portals.
Kumar cites the high drop out rate among Dalit students, the dearth of Dalit faculty, and the large number of unfilled quota seats as evidence that the whole education system is shot through with caste-discrimination.
Indeed, while in every other instance institutions and individuals alike cultivate a disingenuous, willful blindness to caste — refusing to compare the performance of low-caste students on anonymous tests to their performance in one-on-one evaluations, for instance — your caste is the very first thing that the university learns about you on the first day of class, Kumar says.
On his own first day at university in Uttar Pradesh, a professor asked each student to stand up and tell everyone his name, his hometown, and his rank on the standardized test that governs college admissions, which meant that he had to announce to the entire assembly that he had gained entry through the quota system, and therefore that he was a Dalit.
The Bahujan Samaj Party's Kumari Mayawati had just become the first Dalit chief minister of the state, and the professor concluded with a message for all the quota students. You had better study hard, he said, because Mayawati won't be marking your exams.
"From the first day, they identify you as a reserved category student, or a quota student, and hence, they believe you are inherently weak," Kumar said. "At the same time, they're telling you that you can't approach them for help."
Many Dalit students excel despite the obstacles, of course. But the obsession with so-called "merit" — as defined by standardized tests that are biased in favor of wealthier students — obscures the fact that most quota students are fighting their way out of small towns. Their parents have no money for expensive prep courses. And despite attending 10 years of school in a regional language, they're expected to make the transition to English without extra help.
"We want to break this myth of merit," Kumar said, referring again to Balmukund Bharti, whose parents are destitute laborers from one of India's poorest regions. "For us, the real merit is that a student from such a backward area and such a backward family, through working hard, made it to AIIMS at all."
Apparently, the university officials who would sympathize with that point of view are few and far between, suggests a health ministry-mandated investigation into discrimination at AIIMS led by Sukhadeo Thorat, a Dalit academic.
The Thorat Commission report found that the institute had not established legally required measures like a grievance cell for discrimination complaints or remedial programs to help low-caste students overcome language problems and other academic difficulties. Noting that half of a students' grade is based on "internal assessment" by instructors, the commission also found that Dalit students said their examiners made sure to inquire about their caste background, then made themselves inaccessible and spent less time with them than with their upper caste classmates.
AIIMS later formed its own committee to investigate the Thorat Commission's findings, and refuted them out of hand, filing suit in the Delhi High Court against the health minister, his secretary and three members of the Thorat committee, demanding around $10,000 in compensation for alleged defamatory remarks.
So it's not surprising that the institution has implemented few, if any, of the Thorat Commission's recommendations, according to a source close to the situation.
But the Insight Foundation is not going to let the issue lie.
Fresh out of meetings with an official from India's Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment — which is tasked with the fight against religion- and caste-based discrimination — Kumar said that the group is pushing the government to act, and plans a nationwide protest next month if it doesn't move swiftly enough.
Time could well be of the essence. When the government compelled GMC (Chandigarh) to get an independent group of professors to recheck the exam that Jaspreet Singh had failed, he passed with flying colors.
But a posthumous medical degree isn't worth much to his devastated family.
"We are still trying to get justice. We are still fighting in court," said Singh's sister. "[Professor] Goel should be dismissed and put behind bars so no other student faces something like this."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - May 24, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Jaspreet Singh, a young student from a caste once considered "untouchable" by other Hindus, was in his last year of medical school when his life began to fall apart.
A talented student, and his family's brightest hope for clawing their way into the middle class, he was stunned to find that he had failed community medicine, one of his easiest subjects. But he was even more devastated by the alleged reason: His professor was determined to flunk him because of his caste.
Like most students from the Dalit castes, Singh had suffered the sly digs and subtle slights of his classmates in silence for years at the Goverment Medical College (Chandigarh). His professor's alleged claim that he would never allow Singh to get there was the last straw.
Singh hung himself from the ceiling fan in the bathroom in the college library, writing in his suicide note that he could no longer bear the insults and discrimination he'd endured from two fellow students and his community medicine professor, Dr. N.K. Goel. (All three have been charged with abetting Singh's suicide, which is a crime under the Indian penal code, but no ruling has been issued and the accused maintain that they are innocent).
"The college says he couldn't cope with the coursework, but he did fine in all his other subjects," said Jaspreet's sister, Balwinder Kaur. "In surgery he got 80 percent marks."
Sadly, cases like Jaspreet's are all too common, according to the Insight Foundation, a group of young Dalits who are working to eliminate discrimination in India's higher education system.
No official effort has been made to determine how many of the more than 16,000 school and college students who have killed themselves over the past four years hail from India's historically oppressed castes, and only one study, covering only the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, has investigated discrimination on campus.
But the Insight Foundation believes that a disproportionate number of the students committing suicides are Dalits, and its members allege that caste discrimination, a dirty secret, is ubiquitous at India's top universities — even as the government works to expand access to higher education with quotas, or reservations, for historically oppressed groups.
"The problem which we face in elite institutions is much worse," said Anoop Kumar, the Insight Foundation's national coordinator, and a Dalit himself. "These elite institutions are considered to be very prestigious, and the Dalit students who enter there are thought to be intruding into that space through reservations — they don't deserve to be there, this is such a competitive place, this is such a meritorious place, and these guys have come through quota. So the hatred and hostility is much more."
It just might be possible that hostility marks an inflexion point for Indian society not unlike white America's reaction to the desegregation of schools in the 1960s.
To break the stranglehold of caste — which has endured for thousands of years, defeating the efforts of religious reformers, missionaries and civil rights activists — India made the persecution or segregation of the erstwhile untouchables illegal and introduced a quota system that reserved 22.5 percent of university placements and government jobs for the so-called "Scheduled Castes and Schedule Tribes" in the 1950s.
But in recent years, since the rise of caste-based political parties in the 1990s has begun to ensure those reservations are enforced, and other laboring castes have won their own job and education quotas, the shakeup in the social order has resulted in a backlash from among high caste Indians. At the All India Institute for Medical Sciences (AIIMS), for instance, where there are 50 Dalit students, hundreds of doctors staged protests and hunger strikes against the expansion of the quota system to reserve an additional 27 percent of placements for students from the laboring castes known legally as the "other backward classes," or OBCs.
Their argument: reserving half or more of the seats in India's limited universities has made it nearly impossible for high-caste students to win a place, and the quotas are eroding the high standards that have earned the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and AIIMS an international reputation for producing leaders like Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of Pepsi, and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, among thousands of others.
That was the environment that another Dalit suicide victim, Balmukund Bharti, confronted when he won a place at AIIMS through the quota system in 2006.
Persecution forced Bharti to move out of his dorm room to bunk with other Dalit students. His professors and classmates allegedly marked him out as a "quota student" at every turn. And one of his instructors allegedly told him flat out, "You are not worthy of becoming a doctor," according to his parents, who also say that AIIMS never notified them after their son's first, unsuccessful, suicide attempt. (AIIMS did not respond to an interview request or questions sent by email).
"Suicide is just an indicator of the malaise that is there," said Kumar of the Insight Foundation, which has documented nearly 20 cases of discrimination-related suicides by Dalit students, and posted video testimonies from their parents and relatives on Youtube and various web portals.
Kumar cites the high drop out rate among Dalit students, the dearth of Dalit faculty, and the large number of unfilled quota seats as evidence that the whole education system is shot through with caste-discrimination.
Indeed, while in every other instance institutions and individuals alike cultivate a disingenuous, willful blindness to caste — refusing to compare the performance of low-caste students on anonymous tests to their performance in one-on-one evaluations, for instance — your caste is the very first thing that the university learns about you on the first day of class, Kumar says.
On his own first day at university in Uttar Pradesh, a professor asked each student to stand up and tell everyone his name, his hometown, and his rank on the standardized test that governs college admissions, which meant that he had to announce to the entire assembly that he had gained entry through the quota system, and therefore that he was a Dalit.
The Bahujan Samaj Party's Kumari Mayawati had just become the first Dalit chief minister of the state, and the professor concluded with a message for all the quota students. You had better study hard, he said, because Mayawati won't be marking your exams.
"From the first day, they identify you as a reserved category student, or a quota student, and hence, they believe you are inherently weak," Kumar said. "At the same time, they're telling you that you can't approach them for help."
Many Dalit students excel despite the obstacles, of course. But the obsession with so-called "merit" — as defined by standardized tests that are biased in favor of wealthier students — obscures the fact that most quota students are fighting their way out of small towns. Their parents have no money for expensive prep courses. And despite attending 10 years of school in a regional language, they're expected to make the transition to English without extra help.
"We want to break this myth of merit," Kumar said, referring again to Balmukund Bharti, whose parents are destitute laborers from one of India's poorest regions. "For us, the real merit is that a student from such a backward area and such a backward family, through working hard, made it to AIIMS at all."
Apparently, the university officials who would sympathize with that point of view are few and far between, suggests a health ministry-mandated investigation into discrimination at AIIMS led by Sukhadeo Thorat, a Dalit academic.
The Thorat Commission report found that the institute had not established legally required measures like a grievance cell for discrimination complaints or remedial programs to help low-caste students overcome language problems and other academic difficulties. Noting that half of a students' grade is based on "internal assessment" by instructors, the commission also found that Dalit students said their examiners made sure to inquire about their caste background, then made themselves inaccessible and spent less time with them than with their upper caste classmates.
AIIMS later formed its own committee to investigate the Thorat Commission's findings, and refuted them out of hand, filing suit in the Delhi High Court against the health minister, his secretary and three members of the Thorat committee, demanding around $10,000 in compensation for alleged defamatory remarks.
So it's not surprising that the institution has implemented few, if any, of the Thorat Commission's recommendations, according to a source close to the situation.
But the Insight Foundation is not going to let the issue lie.
Fresh out of meetings with an official from India's Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment — which is tasked with the fight against religion- and caste-based discrimination — Kumar said that the group is pushing the government to act, and plans a nationwide protest next month if it doesn't move swiftly enough.
Time could well be of the essence. When the government compelled GMC (Chandigarh) to get an independent group of professors to recheck the exam that Jaspreet Singh had failed, he passed with flying colors.
But a posthumous medical degree isn't worth much to his devastated family.
"We are still trying to get justice. We are still fighting in court," said Singh's sister. "[Professor] Goel should be dismissed and put behind bars so no other student faces something like this."
Friday, May 20, 2011
How the Delhi Metro tamed India
On Delhi's subway system, which will be larger than London's Underground by 2021, there is no shoving or shouting.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - May 19, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — At the tail end of rush hour on a typical Monday morning, commuters stream out of the Delhi Metro station at Nehru Place, a teeming shopping district.
The station is a gleaming, mirror-finish high-rise, and the commuters in their office garb and ladies in saris stride out of it in brisk, orderly fashion; no shoving, no shouting, and no spitting.
In any other Asian city — Hong Kong, maybe, or Singapore — the rush-hour scene at the Metro would be nothing remarkable. But this is Delhi, where the few things that work the way they're supposed to — the mobile phone networks, pizza delivery and the five star hotels — stand out as exceptions.
And the Metro, a government-run project, has been, since the first line opened for business in 2006 under budget and three years ahead of schedule, something of a miracle. Five years later, with the third phase of a four-stage construction schedule, the system has upheld that high standard — and promises to be bigger than the London Underground when it's finished in 2021.
"When the new stations were built, I just went there to see how they looked," said Sajjad Mohammad, a 26-year-old aspiring screenwriter who uses the Metro to commute to Delhi from the satellite city, Noida, across the Yamuna River. "It's good to see public property that's nicely designed — not like the regular trash that Delhi has."
In a city where nothing is ever finished, and everything is under repair — broken concrete and rebar flung haphazardly on the roadside rather than carted away when a job is "finished" — the Metro is just about the only public facility where the label "world class" reflects reality.
But the achievement is bigger than that. From punctuality to cleanliness to civility to rule enforcement, the government-owned Delhi Metro Rail Corporation is rapidly transforming a city that most foreign visitors, frankly, dismiss as a rude, aggressive basket case.
To be sure, the problem isn't licked yet.
Despite better safety standards than are typical for India's construction industry — a Metro project is one of the few sites where workers wear hard hats — more than 100 people, including 93 workers, have been killed by accidents since the project began in 1998.
At least one study has shown that the Metro's impact on non-riders — especially the very poor — has been negative. Construction has displaced people and the more costly train system has in some places caused the government to reduce the number of buses.
There is still a big gulf between the showpiece stations at upscale destinations like Khan Market — a shopping area popular with the elite — and less glamorous stops in lower middle-class neighborhoods. And regular riders complain about overcrowding during peak hours.
But according to a recent study by the government's own Central Road Research Institute, the Metro has already kept some 160,000 vehicles off the roads, easing congestion and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and eliminated more than 100 fatal road accidents per year.
And while those figures are debatable, the new addition to Delhi's public transport system has undeniably acted as a stimulus for urban renewal and reduced the pressure on residential and commercial hot spots by creating a new logic for real estate development.
Property prices near stations have increased by 22 percent or more, far-flung residential areas have become viable overnight, according to a study by the Gujarat-based Center for Environment Planning and Technology.
"The connectivity is so quick and the trains are so clean and so cool. It’s so easy to commute to the main city of Delhi," said 41-year-old Sanjana, who commutes to her job at an economic think tank from the satellite city of Gurgaon each morning.
"It's changed what it's like to live in Gurgaon. You no longer feel that you're living in a different city," she said.
And even the city's moribund colonial center, Connaught Place, has begun to re-emerge as an entertainment and shopping destination since the Rajiv Chowk — a central interchange point — became the network's busiest station.
That said, the Metro's biggest impact might be cultural.
In almost every other facet of life, India's rapid growth and associated modernization has widened the gap between economic classes. No one who earns more than $200 a month takes the bus, and the focus on infrastructure for the car-driving rich — flyovers and cloverleafs to unsnarl routes between commercial hubs — has exacerbated the rift, forcing the poor to dart across "signal free" thoroughfares between speeding cars.
In contrast, although it's still out of reach for the destitute, the Metro throws people from virtually all walks of life together — a tiny egalitarian island in a city of self-professed VIPs throwing their weight around.
"It’s an absolute mix of people and there is no issue whatsoever," said Sanjana, noting that the Metro has eschewed the Indian Railways' system of first-, second- and third-class compartments.
"Your plumbers and electricians and blue collar workers are taking it, and there’s no hesitation. People will open up their laptops and work and there may be someone from a completely different background sitting next to them."
For the seasoned Delhiwallah, the experience can be almost eerie. At peak rush hour, train compartments are silent, but for the trilling of the occasional mobile phone. The roadways' ubiquitous altercations are almost unknown, and for women passengers, peer pressure successfully curbs the dreaded routine of catcalls, harassment and groping referred to locally as "eve teasing."
"They are used to these open buses where they can spit out the window and push people around and pick fights," said Mohammad.
"But you put them in a modern, air-conditioned environment, and suddenly there's this whole thing about matching up to the environment. If there are two or three people traveling together, they don't even talk. The moment they get out of the station they start to talk again. It's really funny."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - May 19, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — At the tail end of rush hour on a typical Monday morning, commuters stream out of the Delhi Metro station at Nehru Place, a teeming shopping district.
The station is a gleaming, mirror-finish high-rise, and the commuters in their office garb and ladies in saris stride out of it in brisk, orderly fashion; no shoving, no shouting, and no spitting.
In any other Asian city — Hong Kong, maybe, or Singapore — the rush-hour scene at the Metro would be nothing remarkable. But this is Delhi, where the few things that work the way they're supposed to — the mobile phone networks, pizza delivery and the five star hotels — stand out as exceptions.
And the Metro, a government-run project, has been, since the first line opened for business in 2006 under budget and three years ahead of schedule, something of a miracle. Five years later, with the third phase of a four-stage construction schedule, the system has upheld that high standard — and promises to be bigger than the London Underground when it's finished in 2021.
"When the new stations were built, I just went there to see how they looked," said Sajjad Mohammad, a 26-year-old aspiring screenwriter who uses the Metro to commute to Delhi from the satellite city, Noida, across the Yamuna River. "It's good to see public property that's nicely designed — not like the regular trash that Delhi has."
In a city where nothing is ever finished, and everything is under repair — broken concrete and rebar flung haphazardly on the roadside rather than carted away when a job is "finished" — the Metro is just about the only public facility where the label "world class" reflects reality.
But the achievement is bigger than that. From punctuality to cleanliness to civility to rule enforcement, the government-owned Delhi Metro Rail Corporation is rapidly transforming a city that most foreign visitors, frankly, dismiss as a rude, aggressive basket case.
To be sure, the problem isn't licked yet.
Despite better safety standards than are typical for India's construction industry — a Metro project is one of the few sites where workers wear hard hats — more than 100 people, including 93 workers, have been killed by accidents since the project began in 1998.
At least one study has shown that the Metro's impact on non-riders — especially the very poor — has been negative. Construction has displaced people and the more costly train system has in some places caused the government to reduce the number of buses.
There is still a big gulf between the showpiece stations at upscale destinations like Khan Market — a shopping area popular with the elite — and less glamorous stops in lower middle-class neighborhoods. And regular riders complain about overcrowding during peak hours.
But according to a recent study by the government's own Central Road Research Institute, the Metro has already kept some 160,000 vehicles off the roads, easing congestion and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and eliminated more than 100 fatal road accidents per year.
And while those figures are debatable, the new addition to Delhi's public transport system has undeniably acted as a stimulus for urban renewal and reduced the pressure on residential and commercial hot spots by creating a new logic for real estate development.
Property prices near stations have increased by 22 percent or more, far-flung residential areas have become viable overnight, according to a study by the Gujarat-based Center for Environment Planning and Technology.
"The connectivity is so quick and the trains are so clean and so cool. It’s so easy to commute to the main city of Delhi," said 41-year-old Sanjana, who commutes to her job at an economic think tank from the satellite city of Gurgaon each morning.
"It's changed what it's like to live in Gurgaon. You no longer feel that you're living in a different city," she said.
And even the city's moribund colonial center, Connaught Place, has begun to re-emerge as an entertainment and shopping destination since the Rajiv Chowk — a central interchange point — became the network's busiest station.
That said, the Metro's biggest impact might be cultural.
In almost every other facet of life, India's rapid growth and associated modernization has widened the gap between economic classes. No one who earns more than $200 a month takes the bus, and the focus on infrastructure for the car-driving rich — flyovers and cloverleafs to unsnarl routes between commercial hubs — has exacerbated the rift, forcing the poor to dart across "signal free" thoroughfares between speeding cars.
In contrast, although it's still out of reach for the destitute, the Metro throws people from virtually all walks of life together — a tiny egalitarian island in a city of self-professed VIPs throwing their weight around.
"It’s an absolute mix of people and there is no issue whatsoever," said Sanjana, noting that the Metro has eschewed the Indian Railways' system of first-, second- and third-class compartments.
"Your plumbers and electricians and blue collar workers are taking it, and there’s no hesitation. People will open up their laptops and work and there may be someone from a completely different background sitting next to them."
For the seasoned Delhiwallah, the experience can be almost eerie. At peak rush hour, train compartments are silent, but for the trilling of the occasional mobile phone. The roadways' ubiquitous altercations are almost unknown, and for women passengers, peer pressure successfully curbs the dreaded routine of catcalls, harassment and groping referred to locally as "eve teasing."
"They are used to these open buses where they can spit out the window and push people around and pick fights," said Mohammad.
"But you put them in a modern, air-conditioned environment, and suddenly there's this whole thing about matching up to the environment. If there are two or three people traveling together, they don't even talk. The moment they get out of the station they start to talk again. It's really funny."
Saturday, April 30, 2011
India: soldiers under stress
A soldier turned on his own unit in Kashmir, killing 4 and raising specter of morale crisis in Indian army.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 30
NEW DELHI, India — An Indian soldier stationed in Indian-administered Kashmir opened fire on his own unit Thursday, killing four comrades and again raising the specter of a morale crisis in the world's second-largest standing army.
“In an unfortunate incident today [Thursday] morning, Havildar [Sgt.] Abhay Kumar, for unexplained reasons, fired at his own colleagues resulting in the death of one junior commissioned officer and three other ranks," local newspapers quoted army spokesman Lt. Col. J.S. Brar as saying.
Apparently triggered by Sgt. Kumar's anger over a public dressing down he received from a superior officer, the alleged fratricide was the first incident of fragging in Indian-administered Kashmir in two years. Various measures have been implemented to ward off such incidents and to boost troop morale "such as constant counseling by superiors and religious teachers, regular rest, yoga and other such means," according to Brar.
But as India simultaneously reduces the numbers of boots on the ground in the disputed territory and seeks a better engagement with the local population to win hearts and minds, the shooting raises concerns that despite a lull in militant activity, the psychological pressure on soldiers is as great as ever.
"The soldiers come to Kashmir from mainland India," said Noor Ahmad Baba, a professor at Kashmir University. "They come from a different sociocultural context. They have no empathy with the people, and the people have no empathy with them. The people of Kashmir don't trust them and they don't trust us."
After a rash of fragging incidents in 2006, which saw 23 cases of fratricide among the country's armed forces, the Indian army took a number of measures to relieve the pressure on soldiers in fraught areas like Kashmir, where the government is battling separatists.
Along with a pay raise and an increase in food rations for troops stationed above 12,000 feet, the army liberalized its leave policy to allow soldiers to deal with family problems — a major source of stress, according to a study by the Defence Institute of Psychological Research.
And though both suicides and fratricides continued — there were 520 such cases between 2006 and 2009, according to a statement given in parliament by the defense minister — as of last year the new measures had brought suicides down to an all-time low and virtually eliminated fragging.
But according to Dr. Rajat Mitra, a psychologist who specializes in violent behavior, the army's efforts have been mainly cosmetic. Untrained and inexperienced psychologists were dispatched to treat troops in the field and counseling programs were designed to meet deadlines rather than to provide real help, he said. One military officer asked Mitra to recommend someone less-experienced when he objected to the timebound, goal-oriented therapy program, Mitra said.
Moreover, even though introducing yoga classes might sound touchy-feely, no effort has been undertaken to change the culture of command — in which officers are disdainful toward the feelings of their men and reluctant to treat them humanely.
"In this situation, the [soldier] was humiliated in front of other people and he was teased about it," Mitra said. "The same thing could have been done by him in a more gentle and empathetic manner, and it would have been more effective."
Interestingly, there is little correlation between the fierceness of combat and these incidents, as suicides and fratricides spiked in Kashmir even as militant violence waned. In fact, studies found, it was most often grinding problems with family members left back home that drove soldiers to violence — not the fear of battle or post traumatic stress disorder.
Through interviews with around 200 officers and 900 soldiers stationed in Kashmir, Col. K.C. Dixit, a research fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, found that most cases of violence and suicide stemmed from problems like marital discord, property disputes and heavy debts rather than stress related to policing an insurgency-affected region.
In 2008, for instance, 13 out of 18 suicides and attempted suicides resulted due to domestic problems, two from failed love affairs and two due to previously diagnosed psychological disorders. Only one case was traced directly to the stress of active duty.
Nevertheless, in at least one respect, so-called "operational stress" is likely to get worse before it gets better as India seeks to turn its million-man army into a modern fighting force.
There is a wide cultural gap — sustained by an inherently prejudicial system — between soldiers and officers, though it has never been linked officially to morale problems.
According to Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta of the Brookings Institution, India suffers an "acute shortage" of junior officers because the country's economic rise has made a military career less attractive for the middle class. The army leadership has resisted reforming the system to allow enlisted men to win commissions based on performance in the field.
"Even if you are good, you cannot hope to rise, so there is a deep sense of frustration," said Mitra. "There's a feeling of us versus them. That runs very deep."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 30
NEW DELHI, India — An Indian soldier stationed in Indian-administered Kashmir opened fire on his own unit Thursday, killing four comrades and again raising the specter of a morale crisis in the world's second-largest standing army.
“In an unfortunate incident today [Thursday] morning, Havildar [Sgt.] Abhay Kumar, for unexplained reasons, fired at his own colleagues resulting in the death of one junior commissioned officer and three other ranks," local newspapers quoted army spokesman Lt. Col. J.S. Brar as saying.
Apparently triggered by Sgt. Kumar's anger over a public dressing down he received from a superior officer, the alleged fratricide was the first incident of fragging in Indian-administered Kashmir in two years. Various measures have been implemented to ward off such incidents and to boost troop morale "such as constant counseling by superiors and religious teachers, regular rest, yoga and other such means," according to Brar.
But as India simultaneously reduces the numbers of boots on the ground in the disputed territory and seeks a better engagement with the local population to win hearts and minds, the shooting raises concerns that despite a lull in militant activity, the psychological pressure on soldiers is as great as ever.
"The soldiers come to Kashmir from mainland India," said Noor Ahmad Baba, a professor at Kashmir University. "They come from a different sociocultural context. They have no empathy with the people, and the people have no empathy with them. The people of Kashmir don't trust them and they don't trust us."
After a rash of fragging incidents in 2006, which saw 23 cases of fratricide among the country's armed forces, the Indian army took a number of measures to relieve the pressure on soldiers in fraught areas like Kashmir, where the government is battling separatists.
Along with a pay raise and an increase in food rations for troops stationed above 12,000 feet, the army liberalized its leave policy to allow soldiers to deal with family problems — a major source of stress, according to a study by the Defence Institute of Psychological Research.
And though both suicides and fratricides continued — there were 520 such cases between 2006 and 2009, according to a statement given in parliament by the defense minister — as of last year the new measures had brought suicides down to an all-time low and virtually eliminated fragging.
But according to Dr. Rajat Mitra, a psychologist who specializes in violent behavior, the army's efforts have been mainly cosmetic. Untrained and inexperienced psychologists were dispatched to treat troops in the field and counseling programs were designed to meet deadlines rather than to provide real help, he said. One military officer asked Mitra to recommend someone less-experienced when he objected to the timebound, goal-oriented therapy program, Mitra said.
Moreover, even though introducing yoga classes might sound touchy-feely, no effort has been undertaken to change the culture of command — in which officers are disdainful toward the feelings of their men and reluctant to treat them humanely.
"In this situation, the [soldier] was humiliated in front of other people and he was teased about it," Mitra said. "The same thing could have been done by him in a more gentle and empathetic manner, and it would have been more effective."
Interestingly, there is little correlation between the fierceness of combat and these incidents, as suicides and fratricides spiked in Kashmir even as militant violence waned. In fact, studies found, it was most often grinding problems with family members left back home that drove soldiers to violence — not the fear of battle or post traumatic stress disorder.
Through interviews with around 200 officers and 900 soldiers stationed in Kashmir, Col. K.C. Dixit, a research fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, found that most cases of violence and suicide stemmed from problems like marital discord, property disputes and heavy debts rather than stress related to policing an insurgency-affected region.
In 2008, for instance, 13 out of 18 suicides and attempted suicides resulted due to domestic problems, two from failed love affairs and two due to previously diagnosed psychological disorders. Only one case was traced directly to the stress of active duty.
Nevertheless, in at least one respect, so-called "operational stress" is likely to get worse before it gets better as India seeks to turn its million-man army into a modern fighting force.
There is a wide cultural gap — sustained by an inherently prejudicial system — between soldiers and officers, though it has never been linked officially to morale problems.
According to Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta of the Brookings Institution, India suffers an "acute shortage" of junior officers because the country's economic rise has made a military career less attractive for the middle class. The army leadership has resisted reforming the system to allow enlisted men to win commissions based on performance in the field.
"Even if you are good, you cannot hope to rise, so there is a deep sense of frustration," said Mitra. "There's a feeling of us versus them. That runs very deep."
Friday, April 22, 2011
India's untouchables make millions
Members of the lowest caste have proven themselves as entrepreneurs and India's elite is turning to them for business advice.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 22, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Not long ago, some of India's most influential economic planners sat down with a group of Dalits — India's erstwhile untouchables — to get, of all things, some business advice.
Though brutally oppressed for thousands of years, Dalits have benefited from education and job quotas in recent years. Some have struck out on their own to become entrepreneurs — and successful ones at that.
India's Planning Commission, which formulates the government's five-year spending plans, is taking notes.
"To be honest, the Planning Commission was stunned to find out the scope and size of our businesses," said Milind Kamble, a 43-year-old construction business owner who heads the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"We told them we are also contributing to GDP also and generating employment also."
India's Dalit castes were once forced to perform jobs that the Hindu religion deems polluting — like sweeping floors, making shoes and cleaning toilets.
And even though India outlawed untouchability in 1950 and established quotas in government, higher education and public sector jobs, Dalits still suffer from social and economic discrimination, according to a recent book by economist Sukhadeo Thorat. Dalits are still twice as likely to be wage laborers than Indians from other castes, for instance, and they are still routinely denied access to tea shops, water pumps and barber shops.
However, since the economic liberalization of 1991 — when India dismantled the planned economy system of quotas for manufacturing — a growing number of the Dalits have — without connections or capital — had varying degrees of business success.
"Including mine, most of the big Dalit-owned businesses are 15 years old," said Kamble. "With the emergence of globalization and the disappearance of the License-Permit Raj, many opportunities appeared and many of us jumped on them. Multinationals started rushing in, and business expanded in a big way."
The 30 Dalit business owners who met with the Planning Commission — which formulates the five-year plans that map out for the government how best to spend its resources — are just the tip of the iceberg, the Dalit chamber of commerce claims.
According to a spokesman, the Maharashtra-based organization has more than 1,500 members. Kamble estimates that there are 10 times that number of Dalit entrepreneurs across India. Combined, their companies generate about $4.5 billion in revenue and employ more than 50,000 people. And apart from gaining access to education through mandatory "reservations," they built their businesses without government help.
"The Planning Commission was stunned when they asked how many of us used government schemes to build their businesses," said Kamble. "Only one entrepreneur from Mumbai raised his hand and described how he'd applied for $20,000, spent three years visiting government offices to chase his money and finally got $15,000."
For the government advisory body, that was more inspiring than depressing — considering the increasing clamor for the expansion of welfare programs, escalating demands for establishing education and job quotas for more and more groups, and calls to extend the job quota system to the private sector as well as government jobs.
"The Dalits reframed the topic from give me the grants and reservations ..." said Boston Consulting Group's India chairman Arun Maira, a member of the Planning Commission since 2009. "Any time someone starts to make suggestions from a very practical exposition of their own situation ... that's a very interesting conversation to have."
Local press reports suggest that the Planning Commission is now considering measures such as launching executive training programs for Dalit business owners at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management, raising the limit on loans offered to Dalit businesses through the main government program for encouraging industries run by economically weaker sections of society and making Dalit entrepreneurs eligible for special lending rates from key state banks.
But according to Surinder Jodhka, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University who recently conducted a study of first-generation Dalit entrepreneurs, the Planning Commission is trying to present a picture that looks rosier than the reality warrants — precisely because of the renewed calls for state intervention that threaten efforts to liberalize the economy further through labor reforms and other measures.
"There are of course [Dalits] who are doing very well," Jodhka said. "But the absolute numbers in proportion to the Dalit population is statistically insignificant. To see it as a trend or something which is going to become a routine thing is an overstatement."
Meanwhile, the obstacles preventing most Dalits from pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps go way beyond discrimination.
Most Dalits have almost no assets, so startup loans are nearly impossible to get — even when the government announces a special scheme. As new entrants, they lack the familial and social connections on which most small-scale businesses depend — a problem that can be exacerbated by prejudice. And in a country where trade has always been connected to caste, many find it difficult to master the intangible "style" of the marketplace. They simply don't fit in.
Take the case of 68-year-old Ratibhai Makwana, who heads an Ahmedabad-based plastics conglomerate called Gujarat Pickers. With more than $20 million in annual revenue, Makwana's company has been growing more than 10 percent per year for the past three years. But it wasn't easy getting started.
When his father tried to break into leather manufacturing — a natural extension of a traditional "polluting" occupation — in 1962, banks refused to grant him a loan. When they expanded into textiles, their association with leather-making meant that they had to deal with high-caste middlemen rather than sell directly to the mills. And once they were granted a distributorship, their high-caste rivals organized a boycott.
"This all happened because I was a Dalit," Makwana said.
Rajender Gaikwad, the 49-year-old head of GT Pest Control, tells a similar story. Once a sprayer himself, today he employs 400 people in four Indian states, has already opened for business in Singapore and plans to enter Malaysia and Thailand soon. But he faced plenty of obstacles along the way.
"I had no money. I used to take money from money lenders even on high interest rate of sometimes 20, 25 percent," Gaikwad said. "And back when my business was still small, a lot of the checks people used to give me would bounce. People were not giving me my hard-earned money."
Those stories don't surprise Jawaharlal Nehru University's Jodhka. Surveying prosperous regions in Punjab, he found that lack of access to loans or capital forced most Dalit entrepreneurs into businesses like running a small grocery shop or an agency for a cooking gas distributor. Fewer than 2 percent operated more capital-intensive enterprises such as hotels or factories.
"People need jobs. People need secure employment," said Jodhka. "Entrepreneurship is fine ... but it's tough. Whatever has happened over the last 70 to 80 years has been due to state policies — the new Dalit middle class, Dalit politics, etc. If you ask them, they all give credit to reservations."
However committed they are to self-reliance, Kamble, Makwana and Gaikwad agree. All three of them argued that India's system of job and education quotas must be continued for 10 to 25 years to complete the uplift of the oppressed castes.
All three also suggested that the government could redefine the conventional wisdom about quotas to include not just jobs and seats in universities, but also business loans, tax breaks and advantages in the tender process for government contracts.
"This is only the beginning," said Gaikwad. "Businessmen are coming forward, but they need support from the government. If the government supports entrepreneurs, then there will be lot more people like me."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - April 22, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Not long ago, some of India's most influential economic planners sat down with a group of Dalits — India's erstwhile untouchables — to get, of all things, some business advice.
Though brutally oppressed for thousands of years, Dalits have benefited from education and job quotas in recent years. Some have struck out on their own to become entrepreneurs — and successful ones at that.
India's Planning Commission, which formulates the government's five-year spending plans, is taking notes.
"To be honest, the Planning Commission was stunned to find out the scope and size of our businesses," said Milind Kamble, a 43-year-old construction business owner who heads the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"We told them we are also contributing to GDP also and generating employment also."
India's Dalit castes were once forced to perform jobs that the Hindu religion deems polluting — like sweeping floors, making shoes and cleaning toilets.
And even though India outlawed untouchability in 1950 and established quotas in government, higher education and public sector jobs, Dalits still suffer from social and economic discrimination, according to a recent book by economist Sukhadeo Thorat. Dalits are still twice as likely to be wage laborers than Indians from other castes, for instance, and they are still routinely denied access to tea shops, water pumps and barber shops.
However, since the economic liberalization of 1991 — when India dismantled the planned economy system of quotas for manufacturing — a growing number of the Dalits have — without connections or capital — had varying degrees of business success.
"Including mine, most of the big Dalit-owned businesses are 15 years old," said Kamble. "With the emergence of globalization and the disappearance of the License-Permit Raj, many opportunities appeared and many of us jumped on them. Multinationals started rushing in, and business expanded in a big way."
The 30 Dalit business owners who met with the Planning Commission — which formulates the five-year plans that map out for the government how best to spend its resources — are just the tip of the iceberg, the Dalit chamber of commerce claims.
According to a spokesman, the Maharashtra-based organization has more than 1,500 members. Kamble estimates that there are 10 times that number of Dalit entrepreneurs across India. Combined, their companies generate about $4.5 billion in revenue and employ more than 50,000 people. And apart from gaining access to education through mandatory "reservations," they built their businesses without government help.
"The Planning Commission was stunned when they asked how many of us used government schemes to build their businesses," said Kamble. "Only one entrepreneur from Mumbai raised his hand and described how he'd applied for $20,000, spent three years visiting government offices to chase his money and finally got $15,000."
For the government advisory body, that was more inspiring than depressing — considering the increasing clamor for the expansion of welfare programs, escalating demands for establishing education and job quotas for more and more groups, and calls to extend the job quota system to the private sector as well as government jobs.
"The Dalits reframed the topic from give me the grants and reservations ..." said Boston Consulting Group's India chairman Arun Maira, a member of the Planning Commission since 2009. "Any time someone starts to make suggestions from a very practical exposition of their own situation ... that's a very interesting conversation to have."
Local press reports suggest that the Planning Commission is now considering measures such as launching executive training programs for Dalit business owners at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management, raising the limit on loans offered to Dalit businesses through the main government program for encouraging industries run by economically weaker sections of society and making Dalit entrepreneurs eligible for special lending rates from key state banks.
But according to Surinder Jodhka, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University who recently conducted a study of first-generation Dalit entrepreneurs, the Planning Commission is trying to present a picture that looks rosier than the reality warrants — precisely because of the renewed calls for state intervention that threaten efforts to liberalize the economy further through labor reforms and other measures.
"There are of course [Dalits] who are doing very well," Jodhka said. "But the absolute numbers in proportion to the Dalit population is statistically insignificant. To see it as a trend or something which is going to become a routine thing is an overstatement."
Meanwhile, the obstacles preventing most Dalits from pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps go way beyond discrimination.
Most Dalits have almost no assets, so startup loans are nearly impossible to get — even when the government announces a special scheme. As new entrants, they lack the familial and social connections on which most small-scale businesses depend — a problem that can be exacerbated by prejudice. And in a country where trade has always been connected to caste, many find it difficult to master the intangible "style" of the marketplace. They simply don't fit in.
Take the case of 68-year-old Ratibhai Makwana, who heads an Ahmedabad-based plastics conglomerate called Gujarat Pickers. With more than $20 million in annual revenue, Makwana's company has been growing more than 10 percent per year for the past three years. But it wasn't easy getting started.
When his father tried to break into leather manufacturing — a natural extension of a traditional "polluting" occupation — in 1962, banks refused to grant him a loan. When they expanded into textiles, their association with leather-making meant that they had to deal with high-caste middlemen rather than sell directly to the mills. And once they were granted a distributorship, their high-caste rivals organized a boycott.
"This all happened because I was a Dalit," Makwana said.
Rajender Gaikwad, the 49-year-old head of GT Pest Control, tells a similar story. Once a sprayer himself, today he employs 400 people in four Indian states, has already opened for business in Singapore and plans to enter Malaysia and Thailand soon. But he faced plenty of obstacles along the way.
"I had no money. I used to take money from money lenders even on high interest rate of sometimes 20, 25 percent," Gaikwad said. "And back when my business was still small, a lot of the checks people used to give me would bounce. People were not giving me my hard-earned money."
Those stories don't surprise Jawaharlal Nehru University's Jodhka. Surveying prosperous regions in Punjab, he found that lack of access to loans or capital forced most Dalit entrepreneurs into businesses like running a small grocery shop or an agency for a cooking gas distributor. Fewer than 2 percent operated more capital-intensive enterprises such as hotels or factories.
"People need jobs. People need secure employment," said Jodhka. "Entrepreneurship is fine ... but it's tough. Whatever has happened over the last 70 to 80 years has been due to state policies — the new Dalit middle class, Dalit politics, etc. If you ask them, they all give credit to reservations."
However committed they are to self-reliance, Kamble, Makwana and Gaikwad agree. All three of them argued that India's system of job and education quotas must be continued for 10 to 25 years to complete the uplift of the oppressed castes.
All three also suggested that the government could redefine the conventional wisdom about quotas to include not just jobs and seats in universities, but also business loans, tax breaks and advantages in the tender process for government contracts.
"This is only the beginning," said Gaikwad. "Businessmen are coming forward, but they need support from the government. If the government supports entrepreneurs, then there will be lot more people like me."
Thursday, April 07, 2011
The Shiva Rules: India's nuclear nightmare?
Critics say India is woefully unprepared to handle the world's largest nuclear plant.
By Jason Overdorf
April 7, 2011
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
JAITAPUR, India — When Vijay Raut talks about the government's plans to throw the villagers of Madbad off their land to make way for the world's largest nuclear power plant, his voice quickly rises in volume. The tendons stand out in his neck as he describes how government officials and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) have trampled local resistance.
“Is this a democracy?” demands Raut, who was jailed along with some 18 protesters after what local police termed a riot in early March. “They came and started the survey without even explaining the purpose properly to us. Then they would not let us talk as a single voice. When they came to negotiate for the land in 2006-07, if at all you could call it that, they would not let us even stand around as a group. Individual farmers were called in to tell them their land was being acquired.”
Residents like Raut have strong incentives to fight. As yet undiscovered by travelers, this part of the Konkan coast in the Indian state of Maharashtra — about 150 kilometers from foreign tourists' beloved Goa — rivals the beauty of romantic locales like Puerto Vallarta. But local fishermen and mango farmers are not the only ones who should be concerned.
When the United States inked a controversial civilian nuclear agreement with India in 2008, the biggest fear for Americans was that the pact would encourage other would-be nuclear weapons states by letting India skate past the non-proliferation treaty. But after the near-meltdown in meticulous Japan last month, it's beginning to look like the real risk may come from the reactors themselves — even as the world's nuclear industry looks to India and China to spark a renaissance in nuclear power.
Can India handle disaster?
"In contrast [to Japan], in India we are most disorganized and unprepared for the handling of emergencies of any kind of even much less severity," said A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), in an email to GlobalPost. "The AERB's disaster preparedness oversight is mostly on paper and the drills they once in awhile conduct are half-hearted efforts which amount to more [of] a sham."
India suffers from an increasingly worrisome shortage of electricity. Today, the country faces a shortfall of around 10 percent. Blackouts, or "power cuts" due to load shedding, are a daily reality in most areas, and nearly half the households in the country don't have electricity. Meanwhile, demand for power is rising more than 10 percent a year due to industrialization and rising incomes.
But is the country's plan to dramatically increase its production of nuclear power the solution?
In Jaitapur, a cluster of villages about 375 kilometers from Mumbai, New Delhi has inked an agreement with France's Areva Group to build the first two of a planned six Evolutionary Pressurized Reactors (EPR), each capable of producing 1,650 megawatts of electricity, in what promises to be the world's largest nuclear power facility when it is completed.
But according to the plans dangled before the nuclear industry in the course of negotiating the India-U.S. civil nuclear pact, that's only the first step in a breakneck sprint. In 2008, India boosted its forecasts for nuclear power production from a target of 20 gigawatts by 2020 to 275 gigawatts by 2050 to entice the nuclear suppliers' group to grant a waiver allowing it to import civilian nuclear technology and fuel. After getting the waiver, it boosted the target again, to 455 gigawatts by 2050 — a hundredfold increase in its present capacity.
The speed of that expansion is frightening — especially considering India has already had several near misses.
India's track record
According to Benjamin Sovacool, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, "the Tarapur nuclear power plant suffered a partial meltdown in 1979; a fire and explosion forced the closure of the Narora power plant in 1993; the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station at Kota leaked radioactive water into a lake for two months until it was detected in 1995; and, in December 2006, one of the pipes carrying radioactive waste from the uranium enrichment facility at Jadugoda burst and distributed highly radioactive materials as far as 100 km away."
India's nuclear establishment has repeatedly downplayed the risks at its facilities since the Fukushima crisis, and the regulatory board's chairman, S.S. Bajaj, disputed some of the reports cited in Sovacool's paper. "India has not experienced any accident in its nuclear power plants involving release of radioactivity in public domain," Bajaj said in an emailed reply to questions from GlobalPost.
"The worst accident was the Narora fire in 1993, which resulted in station blackout. Operators were able to successfully implement the necessary emergency operating procedures, and cool the core safely. Based on the experience from this event, detailed reviews and upgradations [sic] were carried out at all [nuclear power plants] in India," he said.
The need for an independent regulator
Safety is hardly the only issue of concern when it comes to India's plans for nuclear expansion.
Even as the central government debates changes to land acquisition laws that led to deadly riots in West Bengal in 2007, it's steamrolling ahead with a forcible "land grab" in Maharashtra to smooth the way for the first big-ticket nuclear project signed after the India-U.S. nuclear pact.
In what critics allege is quid pro quo for French support for the move to let India bypass the non-proliferation treaty, India granted the contract to Areva without inviting tenders from competitors — potentially making the green power generated by the project too costly for ordinary Indians to afford.
And the lines separating India's nuclear industry and its nuclear regulator are too blurry to allow for independent assessment of risks.
“It is probably time to have an independent regulatory authority which is separate from the Department of Atomic Energy, something on the lines of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said in an interview with the Indian Express earlier this month, following claims that conflict of interest influenced the regulatory board's radiological impact assessment for the Jaitapur project. On Wednesday, he wrote a letter to the prime minister opposing large nuclear parks like the one proposed for Jaitapur, saying "Jaitapur will have 10,000 MW capacity. Is it wise?"
Even before the disaster at Fukushima, Areva's plans for Jaitapur had prompted serious questions from Indian anti-nuclear groups like the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP). Apart from general objections related to the size and potential impact of the project in the case of an accident, the coalition drew attention to Areva's design for the pressurized reactors — which it criticized as an "untested" technology.
The safety of the reactors' failsafe controls been called into question by nuclear regulators in Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States. And the pressurized reactor projects that Areva has underway in Finland and France have been plagued by delays caused by apparently basic errors in construction — like failing to pour concrete or weld steel structures to technical specifications. Scholars opposed to nuclear power agree.
Areva's growing pains
"The previous design from Areva [the N4, four units built in France in the late 1990s] had design flaws that were only discovered after plant completion, and the construction record at Olkiluoto and Flamanville is awful," said Stephen Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich. "Until Areva has units built to time and cost and they are operating reliably, why [should India] take the risk?"
In an emailed response to queries from GlobalPost, Areva said that the safety authorities who questioned the designs for pressurized reactors said the issues identified "do not put into any doubt the overall safety of the EPR reactor itself" and added that the U.K.'s Health and Safety Executive has already accepted its designed modifications.
Concerning its construction problems, the company declined to specify the cost overruns that errors and delays entailed. But it pointed out that its added experience since means it is unlikely to face the same problems in India. Arguing that even its first installation has proceeded swiftly in comparison with other "first of its kind" reactors, the company said that the two pressurized reactor projects in China it began subsequently are "well within schedule and budget" and will be finished in less than 50 months.
"This shows the impressive learning curve of the new EPR reactor series, which NPCIL [Nuclear Power Corporation of India] will also benefit from in India," according to the company email.
"Isn't it amazing that the world's largest nuclear builder ... is arguing teething problems?" said Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based energy consultant who opposes nuclear power. "This is supposed to be a mature technology, even if the design has been modified. This is not a revolutionary reactor, it's called an evolutionary reactor. One wonders if after 40 years of operational experience and building experience, how much time do they need to get over teething problems?"
The local opposition
In Jaitapur, they wonder why their land should be the proving ground. Unlike the villages of so-called "backward regions" where India is pushing ahead with equally controversial mining projects, the towns and villages of the area that will be affected by the Jaitapur project are thriving — even in places the government's Environmental Impact Assessment classifies as "barren land," locals say.
From the baking hot, rust-colored inland hills, land owners cut porous, red laterite stones to sell to builders across the state for about 50 U.S. cents a brick, generating ready capital that they use to lay down topsoil and plant mango trees — which the hard stone below allows them to irrigate with well water or water brought in tankers.
The unique conditions make the area famous for the Alphonso variety, known as "king of the mangoes," which India recently agreed to export to the U.S. in exchange for Harley Davidson motorcycles. There is evidence of this thriving industry everywhere around the affected villages — whether it's mango saplings, workers mining stone or constructing new buildings, or the burnt ground that identifies a plot where diggers will soon begin to cut laterite.
As for the agricultural potential of the land already acquired for the project, the government has cordoned of the area, and does not even allow journalists to enter it for inspection.
In short, it's a place to which economic development is coming organically, where unemployment is not an issue, and where locals fear industrialization could kill the golden goose — considering that buyers already recognize that the mangoes produced here are superior to those grown closer to the highway. Milind Desai, a local doctor turned anti-nuclear activist, says that's why only 112 out of more than 2,000 farmers in the proposed plant zone have accepted checks from the government for their property (which has already been taken over without their consent).
"People here are happy with their economic situation," said Desai, who was also jailed by the local authorities earlier this month. "We're not looking at high salaries, but neither are people waiting on street corners to try to pick up jobs doing day labor."
The Nuclear Power Corporation maintains that the Jaitapur facility will cause no significant damage to the local environment, and Areva argues that both the site location and several innovations in the design of its pressurized reactors will make the Jaitapur project much less vulnerable to natural disasters than the older reactors of Fukushima — incorporating a double concrete shell to protect the reactor building, housing the fuel pool in a separate building protected by its own double shell, and incorporating three independent cooling systems to prevent overheating in the event one of them fails, for example.
But the manner in which India's nuclear agencies and state-owned NPCIL have pursued clearances for the project suggest that neither the project's cost, nor the rights of local residents, nor the impact to the environment nor the safety of a reactor design were ever considered as serious questions. They were simply hoops to jump through along the way.
What about due diligence?
Beginning in 2005, for example, when the agency responsible for developing India's nuclear power capabilities, the Department of Atomic Energy, authorized the head of NPCIL to push ahead with the Jaitapur project, the all powerful nuclear agency more-or-less granted the company the right to override any opposition to set up the plant in an open letter addressed “to whomsoever it may concern.”
The letter had its desired effect with all government agencies quickly falling in line, and “fast-tracking” work on the project. Records of meetings held by the Expert Assessment Committee for nuclear power, for example, are shallow enough to imply that they viewed their evaluation of the project as a formality.
At the final Nov. 15, 2010, meeting in which the project was granted “partial” environmental clearance, one of the conditions put forth by the assessment committee reads as follows: “The requisite prior clearance from AERB for the plant design and their safety shall be obtained.”
Two weeks earlier, at a meeting held Oct. 28, the committee had requested a huge list of information including details of how the plant would be decommissioned, the rehabilitation and resettlement plan, and how much water and land would be used by the project. On the same day the committee had also visited the project site for the first time. In this context, the sudden partial clearance granted to the project suggests that the committee was passing the buck rather than exercising due diligence in assessing risks.
Is safety is more than an afterthought?
Areva has been chosen, the site for the plant has been selected, the environmental impact assessment has been completed and the land has already been forcibly acquired from the locals by the government. Yet according to an email from the chairman of India's nuclear regulator, the official safety review of Areva's design for pressurized reactors has not even begun.
"AERB’s formal review of [the] EPR [design] will commence once we get an application from NPCIL along with the detailed Safety Analysis Report," Chairman S.S. Bajaj said by email. "So far AERB’s involvement has been limited to giving comments on [the] draft Technical Assignment document being discussed by NPCIL with Areva."
Meanwhile, the environment minister isn't the only one to suggest that the nuclear regulatory board lacks the muscle to do its work independently. Konkan Bachao Samiti, a local non-governmental organization at the forefront of opposition to the Jaitapur project, told GlobalPost that in one of their meetings with officials from the assessment committee, one of the officials clearly mentioned that the agency was under pressure from the French government.
Further, the NGO claimed that regulatory board refused to sign the minutes of the meeting saying that they did not have recordings of the meeting. The NGO also said that board always recorded their meetings. More recently, Greenpeace India claimed to have obtained evidence through a Right to Information request showing that the Jaitapur site is located in a level 4 seismic zone according to the Geological Survey of India, not level 3 as senior officials with NPCIL said data from the Indian Metrological Department indicates.
"In the case of earthquake engineering, the [NPCIL] strategy is to have their favorite consultants cook up the kind of seismicity data which suits them, and there is practically no independent verification of their data or design methodologies," according to former AERB chairman Gopalakrishnan, who commented prior to the allegations by Greenpeace. "A captive AERB which reports to the [Department of Atomic Energy] makes the overall nuclear safety management in India worthless."
For many, that will make India's dreams of expanding its nuclear power production a hundredfold over the next 40 years sound like a nightmare.
Additional reporting by Praveen Kurup in Mumbai.
By Jason Overdorf
April 7, 2011
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
JAITAPUR, India — When Vijay Raut talks about the government's plans to throw the villagers of Madbad off their land to make way for the world's largest nuclear power plant, his voice quickly rises in volume. The tendons stand out in his neck as he describes how government officials and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) have trampled local resistance.
“Is this a democracy?” demands Raut, who was jailed along with some 18 protesters after what local police termed a riot in early March. “They came and started the survey without even explaining the purpose properly to us. Then they would not let us talk as a single voice. When they came to negotiate for the land in 2006-07, if at all you could call it that, they would not let us even stand around as a group. Individual farmers were called in to tell them their land was being acquired.”
Residents like Raut have strong incentives to fight. As yet undiscovered by travelers, this part of the Konkan coast in the Indian state of Maharashtra — about 150 kilometers from foreign tourists' beloved Goa — rivals the beauty of romantic locales like Puerto Vallarta. But local fishermen and mango farmers are not the only ones who should be concerned.
When the United States inked a controversial civilian nuclear agreement with India in 2008, the biggest fear for Americans was that the pact would encourage other would-be nuclear weapons states by letting India skate past the non-proliferation treaty. But after the near-meltdown in meticulous Japan last month, it's beginning to look like the real risk may come from the reactors themselves — even as the world's nuclear industry looks to India and China to spark a renaissance in nuclear power.
Can India handle disaster?
"In contrast [to Japan], in India we are most disorganized and unprepared for the handling of emergencies of any kind of even much less severity," said A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), in an email to GlobalPost. "The AERB's disaster preparedness oversight is mostly on paper and the drills they once in awhile conduct are half-hearted efforts which amount to more [of] a sham."
India suffers from an increasingly worrisome shortage of electricity. Today, the country faces a shortfall of around 10 percent. Blackouts, or "power cuts" due to load shedding, are a daily reality in most areas, and nearly half the households in the country don't have electricity. Meanwhile, demand for power is rising more than 10 percent a year due to industrialization and rising incomes.
But is the country's plan to dramatically increase its production of nuclear power the solution?
In Jaitapur, a cluster of villages about 375 kilometers from Mumbai, New Delhi has inked an agreement with France's Areva Group to build the first two of a planned six Evolutionary Pressurized Reactors (EPR), each capable of producing 1,650 megawatts of electricity, in what promises to be the world's largest nuclear power facility when it is completed.
But according to the plans dangled before the nuclear industry in the course of negotiating the India-U.S. civil nuclear pact, that's only the first step in a breakneck sprint. In 2008, India boosted its forecasts for nuclear power production from a target of 20 gigawatts by 2020 to 275 gigawatts by 2050 to entice the nuclear suppliers' group to grant a waiver allowing it to import civilian nuclear technology and fuel. After getting the waiver, it boosted the target again, to 455 gigawatts by 2050 — a hundredfold increase in its present capacity.
The speed of that expansion is frightening — especially considering India has already had several near misses.
India's track record
According to Benjamin Sovacool, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, "the Tarapur nuclear power plant suffered a partial meltdown in 1979; a fire and explosion forced the closure of the Narora power plant in 1993; the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station at Kota leaked radioactive water into a lake for two months until it was detected in 1995; and, in December 2006, one of the pipes carrying radioactive waste from the uranium enrichment facility at Jadugoda burst and distributed highly radioactive materials as far as 100 km away."
India's nuclear establishment has repeatedly downplayed the risks at its facilities since the Fukushima crisis, and the regulatory board's chairman, S.S. Bajaj, disputed some of the reports cited in Sovacool's paper. "India has not experienced any accident in its nuclear power plants involving release of radioactivity in public domain," Bajaj said in an emailed reply to questions from GlobalPost.
"The worst accident was the Narora fire in 1993, which resulted in station blackout. Operators were able to successfully implement the necessary emergency operating procedures, and cool the core safely. Based on the experience from this event, detailed reviews and upgradations [sic] were carried out at all [nuclear power plants] in India," he said.
The need for an independent regulator
Safety is hardly the only issue of concern when it comes to India's plans for nuclear expansion.
Even as the central government debates changes to land acquisition laws that led to deadly riots in West Bengal in 2007, it's steamrolling ahead with a forcible "land grab" in Maharashtra to smooth the way for the first big-ticket nuclear project signed after the India-U.S. nuclear pact.
In what critics allege is quid pro quo for French support for the move to let India bypass the non-proliferation treaty, India granted the contract to Areva without inviting tenders from competitors — potentially making the green power generated by the project too costly for ordinary Indians to afford.
And the lines separating India's nuclear industry and its nuclear regulator are too blurry to allow for independent assessment of risks.
“It is probably time to have an independent regulatory authority which is separate from the Department of Atomic Energy, something on the lines of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said in an interview with the Indian Express earlier this month, following claims that conflict of interest influenced the regulatory board's radiological impact assessment for the Jaitapur project. On Wednesday, he wrote a letter to the prime minister opposing large nuclear parks like the one proposed for Jaitapur, saying "Jaitapur will have 10,000 MW capacity. Is it wise?"
Even before the disaster at Fukushima, Areva's plans for Jaitapur had prompted serious questions from Indian anti-nuclear groups like the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP). Apart from general objections related to the size and potential impact of the project in the case of an accident, the coalition drew attention to Areva's design for the pressurized reactors — which it criticized as an "untested" technology.
The safety of the reactors' failsafe controls been called into question by nuclear regulators in Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States. And the pressurized reactor projects that Areva has underway in Finland and France have been plagued by delays caused by apparently basic errors in construction — like failing to pour concrete or weld steel structures to technical specifications. Scholars opposed to nuclear power agree.
Areva's growing pains
"The previous design from Areva [the N4, four units built in France in the late 1990s] had design flaws that were only discovered after plant completion, and the construction record at Olkiluoto and Flamanville is awful," said Stephen Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich. "Until Areva has units built to time and cost and they are operating reliably, why [should India] take the risk?"
In an emailed response to queries from GlobalPost, Areva said that the safety authorities who questioned the designs for pressurized reactors said the issues identified "do not put into any doubt the overall safety of the EPR reactor itself" and added that the U.K.'s Health and Safety Executive has already accepted its designed modifications.
Concerning its construction problems, the company declined to specify the cost overruns that errors and delays entailed. But it pointed out that its added experience since means it is unlikely to face the same problems in India. Arguing that even its first installation has proceeded swiftly in comparison with other "first of its kind" reactors, the company said that the two pressurized reactor projects in China it began subsequently are "well within schedule and budget" and will be finished in less than 50 months.
"This shows the impressive learning curve of the new EPR reactor series, which NPCIL [Nuclear Power Corporation of India] will also benefit from in India," according to the company email.
"Isn't it amazing that the world's largest nuclear builder ... is arguing teething problems?" said Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based energy consultant who opposes nuclear power. "This is supposed to be a mature technology, even if the design has been modified. This is not a revolutionary reactor, it's called an evolutionary reactor. One wonders if after 40 years of operational experience and building experience, how much time do they need to get over teething problems?"
The local opposition
In Jaitapur, they wonder why their land should be the proving ground. Unlike the villages of so-called "backward regions" where India is pushing ahead with equally controversial mining projects, the towns and villages of the area that will be affected by the Jaitapur project are thriving — even in places the government's Environmental Impact Assessment classifies as "barren land," locals say.
From the baking hot, rust-colored inland hills, land owners cut porous, red laterite stones to sell to builders across the state for about 50 U.S. cents a brick, generating ready capital that they use to lay down topsoil and plant mango trees — which the hard stone below allows them to irrigate with well water or water brought in tankers.
The unique conditions make the area famous for the Alphonso variety, known as "king of the mangoes," which India recently agreed to export to the U.S. in exchange for Harley Davidson motorcycles. There is evidence of this thriving industry everywhere around the affected villages — whether it's mango saplings, workers mining stone or constructing new buildings, or the burnt ground that identifies a plot where diggers will soon begin to cut laterite.
As for the agricultural potential of the land already acquired for the project, the government has cordoned of the area, and does not even allow journalists to enter it for inspection.
In short, it's a place to which economic development is coming organically, where unemployment is not an issue, and where locals fear industrialization could kill the golden goose — considering that buyers already recognize that the mangoes produced here are superior to those grown closer to the highway. Milind Desai, a local doctor turned anti-nuclear activist, says that's why only 112 out of more than 2,000 farmers in the proposed plant zone have accepted checks from the government for their property (which has already been taken over without their consent).
"People here are happy with their economic situation," said Desai, who was also jailed by the local authorities earlier this month. "We're not looking at high salaries, but neither are people waiting on street corners to try to pick up jobs doing day labor."
The Nuclear Power Corporation maintains that the Jaitapur facility will cause no significant damage to the local environment, and Areva argues that both the site location and several innovations in the design of its pressurized reactors will make the Jaitapur project much less vulnerable to natural disasters than the older reactors of Fukushima — incorporating a double concrete shell to protect the reactor building, housing the fuel pool in a separate building protected by its own double shell, and incorporating three independent cooling systems to prevent overheating in the event one of them fails, for example.
But the manner in which India's nuclear agencies and state-owned NPCIL have pursued clearances for the project suggest that neither the project's cost, nor the rights of local residents, nor the impact to the environment nor the safety of a reactor design were ever considered as serious questions. They were simply hoops to jump through along the way.
What about due diligence?
Beginning in 2005, for example, when the agency responsible for developing India's nuclear power capabilities, the Department of Atomic Energy, authorized the head of NPCIL to push ahead with the Jaitapur project, the all powerful nuclear agency more-or-less granted the company the right to override any opposition to set up the plant in an open letter addressed “to whomsoever it may concern.”
The letter had its desired effect with all government agencies quickly falling in line, and “fast-tracking” work on the project. Records of meetings held by the Expert Assessment Committee for nuclear power, for example, are shallow enough to imply that they viewed their evaluation of the project as a formality.
At the final Nov. 15, 2010, meeting in which the project was granted “partial” environmental clearance, one of the conditions put forth by the assessment committee reads as follows: “The requisite prior clearance from AERB for the plant design and their safety shall be obtained.”
Two weeks earlier, at a meeting held Oct. 28, the committee had requested a huge list of information including details of how the plant would be decommissioned, the rehabilitation and resettlement plan, and how much water and land would be used by the project. On the same day the committee had also visited the project site for the first time. In this context, the sudden partial clearance granted to the project suggests that the committee was passing the buck rather than exercising due diligence in assessing risks.
Is safety is more than an afterthought?
Areva has been chosen, the site for the plant has been selected, the environmental impact assessment has been completed and the land has already been forcibly acquired from the locals by the government. Yet according to an email from the chairman of India's nuclear regulator, the official safety review of Areva's design for pressurized reactors has not even begun.
"AERB’s formal review of [the] EPR [design] will commence once we get an application from NPCIL along with the detailed Safety Analysis Report," Chairman S.S. Bajaj said by email. "So far AERB’s involvement has been limited to giving comments on [the] draft Technical Assignment document being discussed by NPCIL with Areva."
Meanwhile, the environment minister isn't the only one to suggest that the nuclear regulatory board lacks the muscle to do its work independently. Konkan Bachao Samiti, a local non-governmental organization at the forefront of opposition to the Jaitapur project, told GlobalPost that in one of their meetings with officials from the assessment committee, one of the officials clearly mentioned that the agency was under pressure from the French government.
Further, the NGO claimed that regulatory board refused to sign the minutes of the meeting saying that they did not have recordings of the meeting. The NGO also said that board always recorded their meetings. More recently, Greenpeace India claimed to have obtained evidence through a Right to Information request showing that the Jaitapur site is located in a level 4 seismic zone according to the Geological Survey of India, not level 3 as senior officials with NPCIL said data from the Indian Metrological Department indicates.
"In the case of earthquake engineering, the [NPCIL] strategy is to have their favorite consultants cook up the kind of seismicity data which suits them, and there is practically no independent verification of their data or design methodologies," according to former AERB chairman Gopalakrishnan, who commented prior to the allegations by Greenpeace. "A captive AERB which reports to the [Department of Atomic Energy] makes the overall nuclear safety management in India worthless."
For many, that will make India's dreams of expanding its nuclear power production a hundredfold over the next 40 years sound like a nightmare.
Additional reporting by Praveen Kurup in Mumbai.
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