MB Lal Book 9
108.
The long and short of open defecation
109.
Manning’s testimony leaked
online
110.
Sting
operation reveals money laundering by top banks
111.
Cern 99.9%
certain Higgs boson has been found
112.
The feeding frenzy of kleptocracy
113.
With Galaxy S4, will Samsung outsmart Apple?
114.
U.K.
115.
Quality of U.S.
116.
Inculcate best practices of foreign universities:
Pranab
117.
Rusbridger: people’s dependency on scribes reduced
118.
First colourful Holi for Vrindavan widows
119.
Tankers and the economy of thirst
120.
The past & present of Indian environmentalism
121.
Nick
D’Aloisio: 'It was a massive gamble but a good one’
The long and short of open defecation
March 14, 2013
You can learn a lot from measuring children’s height. How tall a child has grown by the time she is a few years old is one of the most important indicators of her well-being. This is not because height is important in itself, but because height reflects a child’s early-life health, absorbed nutrition and experience of disease.
Because health problems that prevent children from growing tall also prevent them from growing into healthy, productive, smart adults, height predicts adult mortality, economic outcomes and cognitive achievement. The first few years of life have critical life-long consequences. Physical or cognitive development that does not happen in these first years is unlikely to be made up later.
So it is entirely appropriate that news reports in India frequently mention child stunting or malnutrition. Indian children are among the shortest in the world. Such widespread stunting is both an emergency for human welfare and a puzzle.
Why are Indian children so short? Stunting is often considered an indicator of “malnutrition,” which sometimes suggests that the problem is that children don’t have enough food. Although it is surely a tragedy that so many people in India are hungry, and it is certainly the case that many families follow poor infant feeding practices, food appears to be unable to explain away the puzzle of Indian stunting.
‘ASIAN ENIGMA’
One difficult fact to explain is that children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa, even though people are poorer, on average, in Africa. This surprising fact has been called the “Asian enigma.” The enigma is not resolved by genetic differences between the Indian population and others. Babies adopted very early in life from India into developing countries grow much taller. Indeed, history is full of examples of populations that were deemed genetically short but eventually grew as tall as any other when the environment improved.
So, what input into child health and growth is especially poor in India? One answer that I explore in a recent research paper is widespread open defecation, without using a toilet or latrine. Faeces contain germs that, when released into the environment, make their way onto children’s fingers and feet, into their food and water, and wherever flies take them. Exposure to these germs not only gives children diarrhoea, but over the long term, also can cause changes in the tissues of their intestines that prevent the absorption and use of nutrients in food, even when the child does not seem sick.
More than half of all people in the world who defecate in the open live in India. According to the 2011 Indian census, 53 per cent of households do not use any kind of toilet or latrine. This essentially matches the 55 per cent found by the National Family Health Survey in 2005.
Open defecation is not so common elsewhere. The list of African countries with lower percentage rates of open defecation than India includes Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and more. In 2008, only 32 per cent of Nigerians defecated in the open; in 2005, only 30 per cent of people in Zimbabwe did. No country measured in the last 10 years has a higher rate of open defecation than Bihar. Twelve per cent of all people worldwide who openly defecate live in Uttar Pradesh.
So, can high rates of open defecation in India statistically account for high rates of stunting? Yes, according to data from the highly-regarded Demographic and Health Surveys, an international effort to collect comparable health data in poor and middle-income countries.
International differences in open defecation can statistically account for over half of the variation across countries in child height. Indeed, once open defecation is taken into consideration, Indian stunting is not exceptional at all: Indian children are just about exactly as short as would be expected given sanitation here and the international trend. In contrast, although it is only one example, open defecation is much less common in China, where children are much taller than in India.
Further analysis in the paper suggests that the association between child height and open defecation is not merely due to some other coincidental factor. It is not accounted for by GDP or differences in food availability, governance, female literacy, breastfeeding, immunisation, or other forms of infrastructure such as availability of water or electrification. Because changes over time within countries have an effect on height similar to the effect of differences across countries, it is safe to conclude that the effect is not a coincidental reflection of fixed genetic or cultural differences. I do not have space here to report all of the details of the study, nor to properly acknowledge the many other scholars whose work I draw upon; I hope interested readers will download the full paper at http://goo.gl/PFy43.
DOUBLE THREAT
Of course, poor sanitation is not the only threat to Indian children’s health, nor the only cause of stunting. Sadly, height reflects many dimensions of inequality within India: caste, birth order, women’s status. But evidence suggests that socially privileged and disadvantaged children alike are shorter than they would be in the absence of open defecation.
Indeed, the situation is even worse for Indian children than the simple percentage rate of open defecation suggests. Living near neighbours who defecate outside is more threatening than living in the same country as people who openly defecate but live far away. This means that height is even more strongly associated with the density of open defecation: the average number of people per square kilometre who do not use latrines. Thus, stunting among Indian children is no surprise: they face a double threat of widespread open defecation and high population density.
The importance of population density demonstrates a simple fact: Open defecation is everybody’s problem. It is the quintessential “public bad” with negative spillover effects even on households that do not practise it. Even the richest 2.5 per cent of children — all in urban households with educated mothers and indoor toilets — are shorter, on average, than healthy norms recommend. They do not openly defecate, but some of their neighbours do. These privileged children are almost exactly as short as children in other countries who are exposed to a similar amount of nearby open defecation.
If open defecation indeed causes stunting in India, then sanitation reflects an emergency not only for health, but also for the economy. After all, stunted children grow into less productive adults.
It is time for communities, leaders, and organisations throughout India to make eliminating open defecation a top priority. This means much more than merely building latrines; it means achieving widespread latrine use. Latrines only make people healthier if they are used for defecation. They do not if they are used to store tools or grain, or provide homes for the family goats, or are taken apart for their building materials. Any response to open defecation must take seriously the thousands of publicly funded latrines that sit unused (at least as toilets) in rural India. Perhaps surprisingly, giving people latrines is not enough.
Ending a behaviour as widespread as open defecation is an immense task. To its considerable credit, the Indian government has committed itself to the work, and has been increasing funding for sanitation. Such a big job will depend on the collaboration of many people, and the solutions that work in different places may prove complex. The assistant responsible for rural sanitation at your local Block Development Office may well have one of the most important jobs in India. Any progress he makes could be a step towards taller children — who become healthier adults and a more productive workforce.
(Dean Spears is an economics PhD candidate at Princeton University and visiting researcher at the Delhi School of Economics.)
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NEW DELHI: An undercover sting investigation across India has shown up startling videos of bank executives of three leading private banks - HDFC, ICICI and Axis - providing ready assistance to a reporter, posing as a minister's aide, for laundering black money into white through the banking system in clear contravention of banking norms and laws.
Shaken by the disclosure, the three banks asserted that they were committed to transparent and lawful banking norms, while saying that they have instituted inquiries into the allegations. Finance ministerP Chidambaram told the media that he had spoken to the chairman of two banks (the third, he said, was abroad). He added government wasn't jumping to conclusions of the basis of the disclosure.
The investigative website, Cobrapost, claimed on Thursday at a press conference here that it has collected hundreds of hours of secret video recording showing bank executives suggesting through various ways in the banking system, to launder money. It uploaded at least 45 tale-tell videos on its website and claimed these were of bankers in various cities, including Delhi, Kolkota, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur and Hyderabad.
Among the methods of laundering offered by executive on camera was insurance, where big-amount premium payments don't have to be reported by banks. The executives shown also suggest that the reporter posing as a high networth client deposit his cash in several smaller amounts to evade the attention of tax sleuths. Requirements like PAN card number and other KYC requirements are also offered to be short-circuited. Bank executives were also shown offering large lockers to stash huge amounts of cash (bank lockers can't be used for storing cash, according to the law.)
The website claimed that, given the number of bank executives who offered to launder money, it seemed this was a common practice in private banks for access to cheap deposits and added that the scale indicated that the top management of the banks could not be completely ignorant of the malpractices.
"Our investigation, conducted across dozens and dozens of branches of these banks and their insurance affiliates, across all five zones of the country, revealed...that these money laundering practices are part of a standard set of procedures within these banks," the site said in a statement.
"We talk about people stashing ill-gotten money in tax havens like Switzerland. But the fact is Switzerlands are here in India," it said. The investigation showed that the money laundering services are "being openly offered to even walk-in customers who wish to launder their illicit money," he said.
"The evidence is graphic, crystal-clear and clinching," the site said. "The investigation finds the banks and their managements systematically and deliberately violating several provisions of the Income Tax Act, FEMA, RBI regulations, KYC norms, the Banking Act and Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMLA) with utter disregard to consequences, driven by their desire to boost cheap deposits and thereby increasing their profits," the site said.
The investigation, code named Red Spider, was conducted across India and showed executives of these banks offering various options to wash black money into the banking system. In one instance, an ICICI manager offered to give the politician's henchman an NRI account if he had a passport showing at least a travel abroad.
Another video that purported to be that of a HDFC bank manager in Delhi showed the executive telling the reporter: "HDFC baitha hi hua hai black money khane ke liye (HDFC is here to eat up all the black money)." The site said ways suggested to transform the black money into white were "both imaginative in their range and brazen in their approach."
The bank officers were also shown offering to invest large amounts of cash in insurance products and gold, or to route the cash into various investment schemes of the bank. The officers suggested that the money be split into tranches to get it into the banking system without being detected, and many also suggested using "benami" accounts to facilitate the conversion. For a fee, some executives even offered to use accounts of other customers to channelize the black money into the system.
Some of these bank executives suggested that the black money be used to get demand drafts either from their own banks or from other banks to facilitate investment without it showing up in the client's account. They also suggested they can open and close multiple accounts at will to facilitate the investment of black money.
Cobrapost said it had hundreds of hours of raw video footage and was willing to hand them over to any authorized law enforcement agency that wants to look into the matter.
_____________________
These days there seems to be a generation gap in journalism, between mainstream and new media. The world of digital media is dominated by a generation that eats, sleeps, breathes and most importantly thinks online. For them their tablet is the writing pad and the Internet is pretty much the one-stop source for research. They do not labour over an article for days or rewrite endlessly in search of that perfect introduction.
LONDON: Physicists believe they may have found the elusive Higgs boson. The European Organizationfor Nuclear Research (Cern) said on Thursday that the new particle discovered last July is "looking like the God particle".
After analysing two-and-a-half times more data than was available in July, scientists from Cern's Large Hadron Collider said they found that "the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles". "In July we thought it looks like the Higgs boson," Albert De Roeck, head of the 700-strong Higgs Analysis Group, told TOI in London. "But now we are certain. In terms of quantum mechanics, we say these results are 3 sigma — which means the chances of we being wrong is as minute as 1 in a 1,000. I can say with 99.9% certainty that this is a Higgs."
He added: "One of the things we needed to be certain was the speed of the spin of the particle. In our terminology, we needed it to be zero. In July we thought it could be 1 or 2. But our latest data shows it is zero, as it is supposed to be with regard to the Higgs."
Tejinder Virdee from London's Imperial College said that though it looked like a Higgs boson, the team also felt it could be a brand-new particle — like a super electron. A former project leader of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, Virdee was leading the experiments to find the Higgs boson.
"The accuracy of our conclusions would be around 30% at present, which might look small but is good enough to say it is a Higgs," Virdee said. "However, a lot more data will be studied over the next few months to make a precise announcement. But it does look like the Higgs boson. Our experiments that will start in 2015 using higher amount of energy will say whether it is a single Higgs boson or multiple."
According to Virdee, it is yet to be determined whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics or the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories. "More insight into our findings will be made in Barcelona in May but the final, final set of findings that should confirm beyond doubt on the fate of the Higgs boson will be made at the European Physics Society meeting in Stockholm in July," Virdee said. _____________________________
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NEW DELHI, March 20, 2013
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March 25, 2013 06:16 IST
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Manning’s testimony leaked online
APSome supporters of Bradley Manning released a leaked audio recording on March 12, 2013, of him explaining why he sent hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. File photo
For the first time ever the voice of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has been heard around the world after a military court audio clip of the man charged with leaking a massive trove of secret government data, including confidential State Department cables, was posted on the Internet this week.
In contravention of the rules of the trial, under which all media are to be blacked out during the court martial proceedings against Mr. Manning in Fort Meade, Maryland, the Freedom of the Press Foundation published an audio clip and transcript of his statement to the court on February 28.
In the audio Mr. Manning can be heard explaining his motivation for leaking U.S. government data to online whistleblower Wikileaks, saying he wanted to show the American public the “true costs of war… and spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan”.
Describing his initial involvement in reading State Department classified cables, Mr. Manning added, “The more I read, the more I was fascinated with the way that we dealt with other nations and organisations. I also began to think the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn't seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.”
He also spoke of the U.S. Army video showing the July 2007 incident in Baghdad in which troops in an Apache helicopter can be seen attacking and shooting down a group of men including two journalists. Mr Manning said, “[They] dehumanised the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote ‘dead [expletive]’ unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.”
Commenting on the specifics of that incident he said, “At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.”
Mr. Manning was arrested in mid-2010 on suspicion of passing on the data to Wikileaks, and has been in prison in the U.S. since then, including in solitary confinement at times. He was arraigned in February 2012. On February 28, 2013, Mr. Manning pled guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him, facing a potential total sentence of up to 20 years. He was however said not to enter a plea for the charge of “aiding the enemy,” which could carry a life sentence for him.
Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder Daniel Ellsberg — who is also the 1971 whistleblower for the Pentagon Papers on the U.S.’ military engagement in Vietnam — said that while he did not know who precisely made the recording of Mr. Manning’s court statement, that person “has done the American public a great service”. He added that this marked the first time that the American public could hear Mr. Manning, “in his own voice explain what he did and how he did it”.
_______________________
Sting operation reveals money laundering by top banks
Shaken by the disclosure, the three banks asserted that they were committed to transparent and lawful banking norms.
Shaken by the disclosure, the three banks asserted that they were committed to transparent and lawful banking norms, while saying that they have instituted inquiries into the allegations. Finance ministerP Chidambaram told the media that he had spoken to the chairman of two banks (the third, he said, was abroad). He added government wasn't jumping to conclusions of the basis of the disclosure.
The investigative website, Cobrapost, claimed on Thursday at a press conference here that it has collected hundreds of hours of secret video recording showing bank executives suggesting through various ways in the banking system, to launder money. It uploaded at least 45 tale-tell videos on its website and claimed these were of bankers in various cities, including Delhi, Kolkota, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur and Hyderabad.
Among the methods of laundering offered by executive on camera was insurance, where big-amount premium payments don't have to be reported by banks. The executives shown also suggest that the reporter posing as a high networth client deposit his cash in several smaller amounts to evade the attention of tax sleuths. Requirements like PAN card number and other KYC requirements are also offered to be short-circuited. Bank executives were also shown offering large lockers to stash huge amounts of cash (bank lockers can't be used for storing cash, according to the law.)
The website claimed that, given the number of bank executives who offered to launder money, it seemed this was a common practice in private banks for access to cheap deposits and added that the scale indicated that the top management of the banks could not be completely ignorant of the malpractices.
"Our investigation, conducted across dozens and dozens of branches of these banks and their insurance affiliates, across all five zones of the country, revealed...that these money laundering practices are part of a standard set of procedures within these banks," the site said in a statement.
"We talk about people stashing ill-gotten money in tax havens like Switzerland. But the fact is Switzerlands are here in India," it said. The investigation showed that the money laundering services are "being openly offered to even walk-in customers who wish to launder their illicit money," he said.
"The evidence is graphic, crystal-clear and clinching," the site said. "The investigation finds the banks and their managements systematically and deliberately violating several provisions of the Income Tax Act, FEMA, RBI regulations, KYC norms, the Banking Act and Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMLA) with utter disregard to consequences, driven by their desire to boost cheap deposits and thereby increasing their profits," the site said.
The investigation, code named Red Spider, was conducted across India and showed executives of these banks offering various options to wash black money into the banking system. In one instance, an ICICI manager offered to give the politician's henchman an NRI account if he had a passport showing at least a travel abroad.
Another video that purported to be that of a HDFC bank manager in Delhi showed the executive telling the reporter: "HDFC baitha hi hua hai black money khane ke liye (HDFC is here to eat up all the black money)." The site said ways suggested to transform the black money into white were "both imaginative in their range and brazen in their approach."
The bank officers were also shown offering to invest large amounts of cash in insurance products and gold, or to route the cash into various investment schemes of the bank. The officers suggested that the money be split into tranches to get it into the banking system without being detected, and many also suggested using "benami" accounts to facilitate the conversion. For a fee, some executives even offered to use accounts of other customers to channelize the black money into the system.
Some of these bank executives suggested that the black money be used to get demand drafts either from their own banks or from other banks to facilitate investment without it showing up in the client's account. They also suggested they can open and close multiple accounts at will to facilitate the investment of black money.
Cobrapost said it had hundreds of hours of raw video footage and was willing to hand them over to any authorized law enforcement agency that wants to look into the matter.
Times Of India
Print vs digital: A new kind of journalist has arrived
"I am still an old fashioned pen and paper person!" Ask a young, online-media reporter and he/she will tell you how often one has heard this remark from seniors or colleagues from the world of print.
These days there seems to be a generation gap in journalism, between mainstream and new media. The world of digital media is dominated by a generation that eats, sleeps, breathes and most importantly thinks online. For them their tablet is the writing pad and the Internet is pretty much the one-stop source for research. They do not labour over an article for days or rewrite endlessly in search of that perfect introduction.
As mainstream media-houses expand their digital business units, there is now a clear difference in how these teams are approaching content.
Product centric perspective
The digital medium is one where content is totally interlinked with the product.
Reporters at a newspaper are not really expected to know how a printing machine operates! But in the digital space, content teams are expected to have knowledge about how search-engines work, be receptive towards trending-topics, drive the site's interactive elements, use multimedia tools for better packaging and in general be aware of what goes into the management of the site.
While a print journo will focus more on the language while framing a headline, a digital media person will think in terms of keywords, trending topics and ease of discovery for the user.
Writing style
Given that digital-content today is not only consumed on the computer, but across multiple platforms, writers are conscious about attention spans. While a print journalist may take pride over an elaborate article that spans over pages; in digital, brevity is the name of the game. Writers are conscious of the fact that their stories are being read on screens smaller than five-inches.
Some of the crafty expressions that would be a pleasure to read in print might not gel well with the digital consumer. Use of complicated phrases is also bad for content discovery, as the average user searches using terms from spoken English. For writers who switch from print to web, this is usually the biggest aspect they find hard to unlearn.
Feedback
The Internet is a ruthless medium and writers are usually not good at handling criticism. But due to the two-way nature of interaction on the web, online reporters are far more used to feedback, as compared to their print peers.
Most online-writers begin as bloggers, so they have an appetite for making as well as digesting nasty comments. But amidst all this commenting-noise there is also space for healthy, constructive criticism.
Web writers are accustomed to regular reality checks from users in case of errors or potentially polarising points of view. And due to this continuous stream of author-user interaction, web-writers are far more detached from their copy, flexible in style and less emotionally invested in their story.
Need for speed
Background research is of top priority to any good journalist. But online writers do not always have the luxury of time. In the era of phablets, digital teams have 24x7 access to their site. And page lineups change several times in response to trending topics. So content that may be 'hot' in the morning might be totally irrelevant by afternoon.
Which is why there are cases of irresponsible reporting, based on Twitter rumours, just to appear high on search. While basic rules of journalism do not change, content writers in the digital space have to have a strong sense of quality check, and constantly filter the information overload.
Convergence
Traditional media still has the advantage of infrastructure. Digital has the power of speed and multimedia presentation.
Unlike print, thinking purely in terms of text doesn't work here. So whether it is using a video from a TV bulletin or a slideshow of images, they all make for engaging tools to hook the reader, and provide a complete audio-visual experience. The packaging and aesthetics of the content are of supreme importance and digital journalists think of this aspect very seriously, while planning and publishing their story.
User generated content
The Internet exposes journalists to a plethora of user-generated content. At a time when camera-phones and social-media have made citizen journalism a reality, reporters have to pay attention to the voice of the reader.
So while purists may find Kolaveri Di trivial, news websites cannot ignore viral content. A print journalist may wait for viral content to become a rage, before considering it for a story - But the online counterpart has to identify a trend way in advance, and sense its viral potential much before mainstream media.
If print journos have to be alert about the world around them, the ones on the web have to be in touch with the sentiment of the online community, which can often be very unique from the real-world-view.
Way forward
Given the dynamic mature of the medium, and real-time access to analytics, content writers have to keep an eye on the performance of their story, and make tweaks based on traffic rankings and search results. These digital media reporters have earned their stripes in the age of social-media, where headlines are driven by trending hash-tags. And the speed, at which you publish your story, is almost as important as the story itself.
So while the Internet still reports the same facts as traditional media, the ones writing for the web care a lot more for user engagement than self-satisfying literary indulgence.
The digital journalist is a lot more in tune with what's on people's minds, and is perhaps more of an opinion moderator/aggregator rather than an opinion generator. News has become totally democratic and the digital medium is where journalists are truly talking to the people and not 'at them'.
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Cern 99.9% certain Higgs boson has been found
After analysing two-and-a-half times more data than was available in July, scientists from Cern's Large Hadron Collider said they found that "the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles". "In July we thought it looks like the Higgs boson," Albert De Roeck, head of the 700-strong Higgs Analysis Group, told TOI in London. "But now we are certain. In terms of quantum mechanics, we say these results are 3 sigma — which means the chances of we being wrong is as minute as 1 in a 1,000. I can say with 99.9% certainty that this is a Higgs."
He added: "One of the things we needed to be certain was the speed of the spin of the particle. In our terminology, we needed it to be zero. In July we thought it could be 1 or 2. But our latest data shows it is zero, as it is supposed to be with regard to the Higgs."
Tejinder Virdee from London's Imperial College said that though it looked like a Higgs boson, the team also felt it could be a brand-new particle — like a super electron. A former project leader of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, Virdee was leading the experiments to find the Higgs boson.
"The accuracy of our conclusions would be around 30% at present, which might look small but is good enough to say it is a Higgs," Virdee said. "However, a lot more data will be studied over the next few months to make a precise announcement. But it does look like the Higgs boson. Our experiments that will start in 2015 using higher amount of energy will say whether it is a single Higgs boson or multiple."
According to Virdee, it is yet to be determined whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics or the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories.
Rains or Not, India Is Falling Short on Drinkable Water
By GARDINER HARRIS
¶CHERRAPUNJI, India — Almost no place on Earth gets more rain than this small hill town. Nearly 40 feet falls every year — more than 12 times what Seattle gets. Storms often drop more than a foot a day. The monsoon is epic.
¶But during the dry season from November through March, many in this corner of India struggle to find water. Some are forced to walk long distances to fill jugs in springs or streams. Taps in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya State, spout water for just a few hours a day. And when it arrives, the water is often not drinkable.
¶That people in one of the rainiest places on the planet struggle to get potable water is emblematic of the profound water challenges that India faces. Every year, about 600,000 Indian children die because of diarrhea or pneumonia, often caused by toxic water and poor hygiene, according to Unicef.
¶Half of the water supply in rural areas, where 70 percent of India’s population lives, is routinely contaminated with toxic bacteria. Employment in manufacturing in India has declined in recent years, and a prime reason may be the difficulty companies face getting water.
¶And India’s water problems are likely to worsen. A report that McKinsey & Company helped to write predicted that India would need to double its water-generation capacity by the year 2030 to meet the demands of its surging population.
¶A separate analysis concluded that groundwater supplies in many of India’s cities — including Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai — are declining at such a rapid rate that they may run dry within a few years.
¶The water situation in Gurgaon, the new mega-city south of Delhi, became so acute last year that a judge ordered a halt to new construction until projects could prove they were using recycled water instead of groundwater.
¶On Feb. 28, India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, proposed providing $2.8 billion to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in the coming fiscal year, a 17 percent increase.
¶But water experts describe this as very little in a country where more than 100 million people scrounge for water from unimproved sources.
¶Some water problems stem from India’s difficult geography. Vast parts of the country are arid, and India has just 4 percent of the world’s fresh water shared among 16 percent of its people.
¶But the country’s struggle to provide water security to the 2.6 million residents of Meghalaya, blessed with more rain than almost any place, shows that the problems are not all environmental.
¶Arphisha lives in Sohrarim, a village in Meghalaya, and she must walk a mile during the dry season to the local spring, a trip she makes four to five times a day. Sometimes her husband fetches water in the morning, but mostly the task is left to her. Indeed, fetching water is mostly women’s work in India.
¶On a recent day, Arphisha, who has only one name, took the family laundry to the spring, which is a pipe set in a cement abutment. While her 2-year-old son, Kevinson, played nearby, Arphisha beat clothes on a cement and stone platform in front of the spring. Her home has electricity several hours a day and heat from a coal stove. But there is no running water. When it rains, she uses a barrel to capture runoff from her roof.
¶“It’s nice having the sunshine now, but my life is much easier during the monsoon,” she said.
¶Kevinson interrupted her work by bringing her an empty plastic bottle. “Water,” he said. Arphisha bent down, filled the bottle and gave it back to him. “Say, ‘Thank you,’ ” she said. “Say, ‘Thank you.’ ” When he silently drank, turned and went back to playing, Arphisha laughed and shrugged her shoulders.
¶In the somewhat larger town of Mawmihthied several miles away, Khrawbok, the village headman, walked nearly a mile on a goat path to point out the spring most residents visit to get drinking water. Taps in Mawmihthied have running water for two hours every morning, but the water is not fit to drink.
¶Khrawbok said that officials would like to provide better water, but that there was no money.
¶Even in India’s great cities, water problems are endemic, in part because system maintenance is nearly nonexistent. Water plants in New Delhi, for instance, generate far more water per customer than many cities in Europe, but taps in the city operate on average just three hours a day because 30 percent to 70 percent of the water is lost to leaky pipes and theft.
¶As a result, many residents install pumps to pull as much water out of the pipes as possible. But those pumps also suck contaminants from surrounding soil.
¶The collective annual costs of pumps and other such measures are three times what the city would need to maintain its water system adequately, said Smita Misra, a senior economist at the World Bank.
¶“India is lagging far behind the rest of the world in providing water and sanitation both to its rural and urban populations,” Ms. Misra said. “Not one city in India provides water on an all-day, everyday basis.”
¶And even as towns and cities increase water supplies, most fail to build the far more expensive infrastructure to treat sewage. So as families connect their homes to new water lines and build toilets, many flush the resulting untreated sewage into the nearest creek, making many of the less sophisticated water systems that much more dangerous.
¶“As drinking water reaches more households, all the resulting sewage has become a huge problem,” said Tatiana Gallego-Lizon, a principal urban development specialist at the Asian Development Bank.
¶In Meghalaya, efforts to improve the area’s water supply have been stymied by bickering among competing government agencies, said John F. Kharshiing, chairman of the Grand Council of Chiefs of Meghalaya. In one infamous example, the state built a pump near a river to bring water to towns at higher elevations.
¶“But they didn’t realize that the pump would be underwater during the monsoon,” Mr. Kharshiing said. “So it shorted out that first year, and it’s never been used since.”
¶Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting from Meghalaya State, India.
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The feeding frenzy of kleptocracy
Since 2005-06, taxes and duties for the corporate world and the rich have been written off at the rate of Rs.7 million a minute on average. Duties waived on gold and diamonds in the last 36 months equal the 2G scam amount
Forbes has just added an “errata” to Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s budget speech. The Minister had found a mere 42,800 people in the country with a taxable income in excess of Rs.1 crore a year. Or $184,000 a year. Forbes, the Oracle of Business Journalism, does not list taxable incomes. But it does put up a list each year of billionaires the world over. And in 2013, 55 Indians figure on that list, (up from 48 last year) with an average net worth of around Rs.190.8 billion. (See: http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/)Their total net worth is $ 193.6 billion. That’s…er, Rs.10.5 trillion. Chidambaram might want to compare notes with Steve Forbes. They could come up with a lot more names falling within his narrow super-rich spectrum.
The 55 wonder-wallets give India fifth rank in the world of billionaires on the Forbes List. Behind only the U.S., China, Russia and Germany. Our rank in the 2013 United Nations Human Development Index, though, is 136 out of 186 nations. With almost all of Latin America and the Caribbean, bar Haiti, ahead of us. (We have, though, elsewhere managed to tie with Equatorial Guinea.)
Class divide
Well, okay, the total worth of our megabucks mob comes to just over $193 billion. But a glance within reveals a grim class divide. At the bottom are the aam aadmi tycoons, barely scraping past the one billion-dollar mark. There are four of them, inches away from plutocrat penury, with only a mere billion to their names. There are 17 in all below the BPL (Billionaire Permanency Line), which seems to be $1.5 billion. Once you cross that threshold, you tend to be a permanent member of the club.
There’s another 12 in the magnate middle classes, between $1.5 and $2 billion. Next, the deluxe segment: 16 of them — above $2 billion, below $5.5 billion. And finally, the big boys — above $6 billion each. The top 10 are worth $102.2 billion. (A bit more than our fiscal deficit of $96 billion.) There is also a platinum tier. The top three account for a quarter of our total billionaire wealth, if Forbes is to be believed.
I’m not sure Forbes is to be believed. All these sound like grave underestimates. Meanwhile the Chinese and Russians have forged ahead of us on the List. (Steve, I demand a recount). Either the Chinese and Russians are up to no good, or Indian creative accounting is keeping our numbers down. This fiasco becomes particularly galling when we’ve all been investing so heavily in the growth of our super-rich and better-off. Some $97 billion in this year’s budget. You can express that as Rs.5.28 lakh crore (as our tables do). Or, as Rs.5.28 trillion. It’s just as obscene either way. (See:Statement of Revenue Foregone http://indiabudget.nic.in/ub2013-14/statrevfor/annex12.pdf). Heck, we deserve a better performance from our billionaires.
One of the biggest write-offs in this year’s budget is the customs duty on gold, diamonds and jewellery — Rs.61,035 crore. That’s more than what’s been written off on “crude oil & mineral oils.” Or even on “machinery.” The waiver on gold and diamonds in just the last 36 months is Rs.1.76 trillion. (Or what we lost in the 2G scam). I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that three new Indian entrants to this year’s Forbes Billionaires List are in the field of jewellery.
It’s not as if we haven’t been generous with them in other sectors, though. The latest write-off in corporate income tax is even higher at Rs.68,006 crore. The total revenue foregone this year (Rs.5.28 trillion), as others have pointed out, is greater than the fiscal deficit. But just look at what the write-offs on corporate tax, excise and customs duties add up to since 2005-06, from when the data begins: Rs.31.11 trillion. (That’s well over half a trillion dollars). It also means we’re writing off taxes and duties for the corporate mob and rich at a rate of over Rs.7 million every single minute on average.
But the budget has almost nothing worthwhile for, say, health or education where there’s a decline compared to allocations last year (in proportion to GDP). Ditto for rural development. And a micro-rise for food that will quickly be taken care of by prices.
Gee. It seems there’s no need for the super-rich to commit half their fortunes to charity. They are the charity we all of us support. End the lavish waivers, pay your taxes and we’d be in glowing fiscal health. Every other economic survey and/or budget has noted the obscene write-offs as a source of worry and said so. Recall that the Prime Minister and Finance Minister have both in the past promised to end this corporate feeding frenzy at the public trough. But it only gets bigger.
What gets smaller is India’s tax to GDP ratio. In Mr. Chidambaram’s own words: “In 2011-12, the tax-GDP ratio was 5.5 per cent for direct taxes and 4.4 per cent for indirect taxes. These ratios are one of the lowest for any large developing country and will not garner adequate resources for inclusive and sustainable development.” (Emphasis added) But he does nothing to correct that by way of raising revenue. Only by curbing expenditures in the social sector. He’s nostalgic, though, for a time when “in 2007-08, the tax GDP ratio touched a peak of 11.9 per cent.” That was when the write-off trough was much smaller.
Food security
What also gets smaller is the idea of food security in a nation where the percentage of malnourished children is nearly double that of sub-Saharan Africa. How do they get past the porcine gridlock at the budget trough?
Also getting smaller is the average per capita net availability of foodgrain. And that’s despite showing an improved figure of 462.9 grams daily for 2011. (Caution: that’s a provisional number). Even then, the five-year average for 2007-11 comes to 444.6 grams. Still lower than the 2002-06 figure of 452.4 grams.
It’s scary: as we warned last year — average per capita net availability of foodgrain declined in every five-year period of the 'reforms' without exception. In the 20 years preceding the reforms — 1972-1991 — it rose every five-year period without exception (see: Table 3).
Ah, but they’re eating a lot of better stuff, hence the decline in cereals and pulses.
So drone on the Marie Antoinette School of Economics and assorted other clowns. Eating a lot better? Tell that to the nation’s children — for whom sub-Saharan standards would be an improvement. Tell that to the famished in a country ranking 65 in the 79 hungriest nations in the Global Hunger Index (GHI). (Eight slots below Rwanda.) India’s GHI score in 2012 was worse than it was 15 years earlier in 1996. Tell it to Forbes. Maybe they could do a list of the most insensitive elites in the world. You know who’d top that one.
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With Galaxy S4, will Samsung outsmart Apple?
APThe new Samsung Galaxy S4 is presented at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Thursday.
Samsung has taken the smartphone war to Apple’s doorstep with the Galaxy S4, unveiled in New York City on Thursday night.
The feature-rich S4 is the Korean giant’s latest attempt to topple the current king, Apple, from its throne.
“Once you spend time with the Galaxy S4, I’m very confident that you’ll find how its innovations make your life simpler and fuller,” J.K. Shin, president of Samsung Mobile Communications, told a packed New York audience.
Mr. Shin’s statement marks a sharp difference from the previous attributes Samsung has marketed its line-up with, namely strong hardware and soft price points, and instead looks to break into the late Steve Jobs’ domain – software, features and the ‘smartphone experience’.
The shiny new ‘smart scroll and smart pause’ feature, for instance, monitors the user’s eye movements and behaves accordingly. Tilting the S4, while staring at it, will scroll the web pages up or down accordingly. On the other hand, the ‘moving beyond touch’ option allows scrolling through web pages or photographs with a simple wave of the hand.
While India will be one of the earlier countries to receive the phone, according to a company spokesperson, Samsung is looking at shedding its copycat label — something it has often be criticised of in India and the U.S.
The high-profile song and dance launch in Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall proved one thing, however. The stakes in this war have never been higher.
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March 19, 2013 01:44 IST
March 19, 2013 01:44 IST
U.K. deal on press norms retains independence
APLord Justice Brian Leveson poses for photographers as he holds the Report from the Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press. A file photo.
After months of bitter wrangling that threatened to tear apart the ruling Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition, political parties on Monday reached a deal on implementing the Leveson proposals to regulate the press in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
The deal came hours before a crucial vote in the Commons that might have resulted in a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister David Cameron. The Lib Dems and the opposition Labour party had joined hands to push for a law to ensure the independence of the proposed regulatory mechanism — a position fiercely opposed by Mr. Cameron and newspaper owners on grounds that it smacked of state intervention in press affairs. Finally, the three parties reportedly have agreed to the setting up of an independent regulator by a Royal Charter like the one that governs the BBC. Details were still fuzzy with the Labour party claiming that the charter would be “underpinned by statute” as recommended by Lord Justice Leveson in his voluminous report last November. The regulator would have enough “teeth” to punish erring newspapers, but “a free press has nothing to fear from what has been agreed”.
The Tories insisted there was no proposal for a statutory “underpinning” though a “safeguard” would be added to prevent politicians from “fiddling” with the arrangement in future.
“We’ve stopped Labour’s extreme version of the press laws… There is no statutory underpinning. What we’re talking about here is that there can be no change to the charter in future,” Culture Secretary Maria Miller told the BBC.
Mr. Cameron said: “What we wanted to avoid, and we have avoided, is a press law. Nowhere will it say what this body is, what it does, what it can’t do, what the press can and can’t do… So, no statutory underpinning but a safeguard that says politicians can’t in future fiddle with this arrangement.”
The Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said he was “delighted” with the agreement but did not elaborate on details. “We’ve secured the cherished principle of freedom of the press, which is incredibly important in our democracy, but also given innocent people the reassurance that we won’t be unjustifiably bullied or intimidated by powerful interests in the press without having proper recourse when that happens,” he said.
The group Hacked Off, which represents victims of media excesses and wants the Leveson proposals implemented in full, welcomed the deal.
Quality of U.S. news reportage goes down
In its annual ‘State of the Media’ report on American journalism, Pew Research Centre — an independent ‘fact tank’ — has highlighted a crisis in news reporting in the traditional media as a result of continued ‘erosion of reporting resources’. This is happening at a time when other ‘interest groups’ are ‘better equipped’, and have more ‘technological tools’ to push their messages.
The report says that in newspapers, estimates for newsroom cuts in 2012 ‘put industry employment down 30 per cent since its peak in 2000’, with less than 40,000 full-time professionals for the first time since 1978. On local television, ‘audiences went down…news stories have shrunk in length…and coverage of government has been cut in half’.
On cable news, coverage of live events fell, while interview segments and commentary, which cost less, increased. Story packages on CNN were cut in half from 2007 to 2012.
Among news magazines, the end of Newsweek’s print edition coincided with staff cuts, while Time ‘announced cuts of roughly 5 per cent’ in early 2013.
“This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to cover stories, dig deep into emerging ones, or to question information put into its hands,” said the research centre in a statement.
On the other hand, governments, campaign managers, business entities, public relations firms, have stepped up their offensive, with PR workers having out-numbered journalists on a ratio of 3.6 to 1 in 2008. “Distinguishing high-quality information of public value and agenda-driven news has become an increasingly complicated task.”
Alternate revenue
Traditional media outlets are finally veering towards a revenue model to leverage their online presence. In U.S., 450 out of 1380 dailies have started or announced plans for ‘paid content subscription or pay wall plan’.
The report says, “Digital subscriptions are seen as an increasingly vital component of any new business model for journalism.”
With its two-year old digital subscription scheme, The New York Times now has 640,000 online subscribers, and its circulation revenue has exceeded its advertising revenue. The trend of sponsored ads, which runs the risk of confusing the readers between news content and paid promotion, has increased.
But news organisations are struggling to tap into two new and growing areas of digital revenue — mobiles and local digital advertising. Six companies, none of which produce news, have garnered 72 per cent of the $2.6-billion mobile advertising revenue. Big players like Facebook and Google are diverting revenue away from local news.
TODAY'S PAPER » NATIONAL » NEW DELHI
NEW DELHI, March 20, 2013Inculcate best practices of foreign universities: Pranab
“Identify inspired teachers”:President Pranab Mukherjee at the 90th annual Convocation of Delhi University on Tuesday.
President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday said it was “unacceptable” that no Indian university has featured among the top 200 universities globally in the recent international rankings and that the only way forward was for the country’s universities to study and inculcate the “best practices” of foreign universities.
Delivering the 90{+t}{+h}Convocation Address of Delhi University, Mr. Mukherjee said “we must promote inter-disciplinary research through inter-university and intra-university collaboration through an interdisciplinary platform”.
The President’s speech on what universities should be doing for improvement and progress was reflective of what DU has already done in the recent past.
“Learning beyond textbooks”-- an element of the four-year undergraduate course -- also figured strongly in the President’s speech. “Every university should identify a group of 10 to 20 “inspired teachers” who can ignite the minds of the students to learn beyond the text books. If such teachers interact with each other as well as with the students, the quality of teaching could be enhanced,” he said.
The President praised Delhi University for its “cluster innovation centre” and said that innovation and research was also something where Indian universities were lagging behind.
In his address, Mr. Mukherjee also carefully spelt out what was wrong with higher education and the steps that needed to be taken to improve it. Retaining talent was not something the Indian system was good at and thereby it lost out to organisations outside the country. “By an adequate system of incentives we should be able to discourage this outflow of intellectual capital and at the same time encourage scholars of Indian origin working abroad to return to the country for determined periods of time,” he said.
Since enrolment rates for higher education were poor, he suggested this could be sorted out by improving the reach and quality of distance education by using better technology where lectures by good professors could be transmitted through communication technology.
Mr. Mukherjee also said that an alumnus’ interest in the university helped in its improvement. “Topics such as water, environment, health, education and urbanisation require in-depth data collection, analysis and research,” he said, ending his address by quoting Mahatma Gandhi.
Vice-Chancellor Dinesh Singh, while introducing the President, who is also the Visitor of the university, said that his very presence was an expression of his faith and support of education. The V-C also said that he would like Delhi University to be like what the ancient universities of Nalanda and Jagaddala were in their prime.
Around 455 students, including an orthopaedic student, were conferred doctoral degrees at the Convocation. Prof. Singh declared the Convocation closed after he had delivered the traditional commandments to “follow your conscience and lead a life of rectitude with courage and honesty”.
March 20, 2013 02:43 IST
March 20, 2013 02:43 IST
Rusbridger: people’s dependency on scribes reduced
The HinduAlan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian, at the Press Club in Mumbai on Tuesday. Photo: Vivek Bendre
“They are not the sole experts on issues”
The open platform that the Digital Age has provided to the people has turned thousands of those who use even a single mobile phone into a journalist, said Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief of the widely read British newspaper and websiteThe Guardian.
“The dependency of people, organisations, NGOs on journalists to tell their stories to others has been greatly reduced in this Digital Age. Every person who holds a Twitter account or even a mobile phone can go out telling a story, turning into a journalist. The future of print journalism lies in accepting the importance of Digital Age,” said Mr. Rusbridger. He was speaking at the special programme held by the Mumbai Press Club on “The Future of Journalism in a Digital Age.”
Sharing a number of experiences of reporters of The Guardian in the extensive use of the Internet to acquire information, understand issues and even to create sources, he said the notion that a journalist was the sole expert of any issue was rapidly becoming redundant.
“Claiming that out of 900 people who watch a particular drama, it is only a journalist who can write better than others is an overstatement. The transition from a mere publisher of a story to a platform giving better inputs by involving larger audience will also bring money with it.”
Explaining the present scenario of the print industry in western world, Mr. Rusbridger said that unlike in India, the industry was suffering a 10 per cent annual decline in revenues for the past 15 years. “In such a scenario, becoming brave, aggressive and smarter than others in the use of digital technology is the only way to survive,” he said.
“In India, however, the desperate situation which western print media is facing hasn’t yet arrived. But in the next two decades, a similar situation will surely hit India, when digital technology will be the only possible remedy,” he said.
Today's Paper » NATIONAL
March 25, 2013 06:16 IST
First colourful Holi for Vrindavan widows
This Holi came with a difference for the widows and abandoned women living in Vrindavan, near Mathura.
Unlike earlier years, when these women — addressed respectfully as ‘ mayyas’ or ‘matas’ — played Holi only with ‘Thakurji’ (Lord Krishna), this time it was a riot of colours, flowers and lots of people to celebrate with.
In a departure from tradition, hundreds of widows gathered to play Holi with one other with flower petals and gulal(coloured powder).
The spirit of Holi was palpable across the five government-run shelter homes where Sulabh International has been giving stipend, arranging for food and providing healthcare facilities to the women.
Around 800 women participated in the festivities on Sunday that marked the first day of the four-day celebrations. The celebrations were held at the 100-year-old Meera Sahbhagini ashram.
To add more colour, dozens of former conservancy workers were brought to the ashram. “Life has changed so much for us ever since we gave up conservancy work,” says Sheela Athwale. She started doing the work from the age of 7, but gave it up in 2006 when Sulabh imparted skills to them and sent their children to school. Many like her were imparted training for cutting and tailoring, and other crafts.
“You will not believe it, I have been to New York and Paris with Sulabh,” Ms. Athwale said with a glitter in her eyes. There were 115 families involved in conservancy work in her town in Alwar while the adjoining Tonk district had over 200. None exists now.
“In an effort to bring widows to the mainstream and help in their social assimilation, we have organised several events to encourage them to participate in Holi celebrations at Vrindavan,” founder of Sulabh Bindeshwar Pathak said.
As part of the celebrations, traditional “Raas-Leela” dance and other programmes have been organised at the ashrams. “I used to play Holi earlier also but not with so many people,” said an old and frail Rajdhwoni, her white outfit totally pink at the end of the celebrations.
Sulabh is working for the empowerment of these widows. In August 2012, the Supreme Court directed the U.P. government to ensure at least proper cremation and last rites for the widows in Vrindavan.
The court suggested that Sulabh can be contacted for help. Since then, the NGO is taking care of these widows by providing them healthcare and a monthly allowance of Rs. 2,000. They are now learning English and earning by way of jobs such as making agarbathis and garlands.
Among the widows are many who lost their husbands at 16 or 17 and have since lived an obscure life, abandoned by their families. “I want to ensure that no widow is found begging on the streets,” said O.P. Yadav, district probation officer of Mathura, who participated in the function.
March 27, 2013 16:04
Tankers and the economy of thirst
The water markets of Marathwada are booming. In the town of Jalna alone, tanker owners transact between Rs.6 million and Rs.7.5 million in water sales each day
Thirst is Marathwada’s greatest crop this season. Forget sugarcane. Thirst, human and industrial, eclipses anything else. Those harvesting it reap tens of millions of rupees each day across the region. The van loads of dried-out cane you see on the roads could end up at cattle camps as fodder. The countless “tankers” you see on the same roads are making it to the towns, villages and industries for profit. Water markets are the biggest things around. Tankers are their symbol.
Thousands of them criss-cross Marathwada daily, collecting, transporting and selling water. Those contracted by the government are a minority and some of them exist only on paper. It’s the privately-operated ones that are crucial to rapidly expanding water markets.
MLAs and Corporators-turned-contractors and contractors-turned-Corporators and MLAs are vital to the tanker economy. Bureaucrats, too. Many own tankers directly or benami.
Water commerce
So what is a tanker? Really, just sheets of mild steel plate rolled into big drums. A 10,000-litre water tanker consists of three sheets of 5 ft x 18 ft, each weighing 198 kilograms. The rolled drums are welded together. These can be carried by trucks, lorries and other large vehicles, mounted on them in different ways. Smaller carriers transport cylinders of lower capacity. A 5,000 litre container can go onto the trailer of a big van. It comes all the way down to 1,000 and 500-litre drums that move on mini-tractors, opened-up auto rickshaws and bullock carts.
As the water crisis deepens, hundreds of these are fabricated across the State each day. In Jalna town of Jalna district, there are about 1,200 tankers, trucks, tractors, auto rickshaws flitting about with containers of different sizes. They shuttle between their water sources and desperate sections of the public. The drivers bargain with clients on cell phones. However, the largest amount of water goes to industries that buy in bulk. “The tanker owners transact between Rs.6 million to Rs.7.5 million in sales each day,” says Laxman Raut of the Marathi daily Loksatta. “That’s what this single sector of the water market is worth — in this single town.” Raut and his fellow reporters have tracked this region’s commerce in water for years.
Tanker technology
Container sizes vary. But in this town “their average capacity works out to around 5,000 litres. Each of these 1,200 does at least three trips a day. So they carry in all some 18 million litres of water in 24 hours. At the going rate of Rs.350 per thousand litres, that works out to over Rs.6 million a day. The costs can go up depending on whether the use is domestic, or for livestock, or industry.”
Scarcity drives the tanker economy. Tankers are being made, repaired, rented, sold and bought. One busy spot we hiten route to Jalna is Rahuri in neighbouring Ahmednagar district. It costs roughly Rs.30,000 to make a 10,000-litre tanker body here. It sells for twice that sum. In Rahuri Factory, a small industries area, we get a crash course in tanker tech. “Each 5 ft x 18 ft sheet of MS Plate is 3.5 mm thick (called Gauge 10),” explains Shrikant Melawane who owns a fabricating unit. He shows us the “rolling machine” on which each plate has to be manually rolled.
“The 10,000-litre one weighs close to 800 kg,” he says. The three sheets of mild steel it requires cost roughly Rs.27,000 (at Rs.35 a kg). Labour charges, electricity and other expenses total a further Rs.3,000. “It takes a whole day to make one 10,000-litre tanker,” he says. “This season has been busy. We’ve made 150 (of differing sizes) in three months.” There are four units like his within a radius of one kilometre, churning them out at the same pace. And 15 within a three-kilometre radius of Ahmednagar town, on the same job.
“The biggest ones — 20,000-litre tankers, go to cattle camps and industrial units,” says Melawane. “The 10,000-litre ones go to the cities and big towns. The smallest ones I’ve made carry just 1,000 litres.” The little ones “are bought by small horticulturists. Mostly tiny pomegranate growers who cannot afford drip irrigation. They take these drums on bullock carts and I’ve seen them do the watering manually.”
From wells, tanks, reservoirs
So where’s the water coming from? From rampant groundwater exploitation. From private borewells — some newly drilled just to exploit the scarcity. These could run out as the groundwater crisis worsens. Speculators have purchased existing dug wells that do have water in order to cash in. Some bottled water plants in Jalna town bring it all the way from Buldhana (in Vidarbha) — itself a high water-stress district. So the scarcity should spread to other regions fairly soon. Some are looting water from public sources, tanks and reservoirs.
The tanker owner buys 10,000 litres for between Rs.1,000 and Rs.1,500. He sells that quantity at Rs.3,500 — pulling in up to Rs.2,500 on the deal. If he has a captive source like a working borewell or a dug well with water, then his costs are even less. And close to nil if he is looting public water sources.
“More than 50,000 (medium and big) tankers have been made across the State this year,” says former Member of Parliament (and ex-MLA) Prasad Tanpure. “And don’t forget the existing thousands from previous years. So it’s anyone’s guess how many are in action now.” Tanpure, a political veteran here, knows the water scene well. Other estimates place the new tanker numbers at one lakh.
Even 50,000 new tankers would mean that fabricators in the State have done close to Rs.2 billion worth of business over the past few months. Of course, some have taken a hit on other fronts as “construction work stands suspended. No grills, beams, nothing else,” says Melawane. But there are also those jumping into this lucrative market. Back in Jalna, Suresh Pawar, a tanker-maker himself, says: “There are over 100 fabricators around this town. That includes 90 who had never done this work before but are doing it now.”
In Shelgaon village of Jalna district, farmer (and local politician) Deepak Ambore is spending around Rs.2,000 a day. “I get five tanker-loads of water daily to my 18 acres, including my five-acre mosambi orchard. I have to borrow from asahucar.” Why spend so much when the crop seems doomed? “Right now, just to keep my orchard alive.” Moneylending rates here can be 24 per cent a year or higher.
Things are awful but not at their worst. Not yet. Many in Jalna have lived off tankers for years now. Only the dimensions of the crisis and the numbers of tankers have exploded. The worst is a long way off yet and it isn’t just about rainfall. Except for some. As one political leader puts it cynically: “If I owned ten tankers, I’d have to pray for drought this year, too.”
psainath@mtnl.net.in
March 27, 2013
The past & present of Indian environmentalism
Polluted skies, dead rivers, disappearing forests and displacement of peasants and tribals are what we see around us 40 years after the Chipko movement started
On the 27th of March 1973 — exactly 40 years ago — a group of peasants in a remote Himalayan village stopped a group of loggers from felling a patch of trees. Thus was born the Chipko movement, and through it the modern Indian environmental movement itself.
The first thing to remember about Chipko is that it was not unique. It was representative of a wide spectrum of natural resource conflicts in the 1970s and 1980s — conflicts over forests, fish, and pasture; conflicts about the siting of large dams; conflicts about the social and environmental impacts of unregulated mining. In all these cases, the pressures of urban and industrial development had deprived local communities of access to the resources necessary to their own livelihood. Peasants saw their forests being diverted by the state for commercial exploitation; pastorialists saw their grazing grounds taken over by factories and engineering colleges; artisanal fisherfolk saw themselves being squeezed out by large trawlers.
Social justice and sustainability
In the West, the environmental movement had arisen chiefly out of a desire to protect endangered animal species and natural habitats. In India, however, it arose out of the imperative of human survival. This was an environmentalism of the poor, which married the concern of social justice on the one hand with sustainability on the other. It argued that present patterns of resource use disadvantaged local communities and devastated the natural environment.
Back in the 1970s, when the state occupied the commanding heights of the economy, and India was close to the Soviet Union, the activists of Chipko and other such movements were dismissed by their critics as agents of Western imperialism. They had, it was alleged, been funded and promoted by foreigners who hoped to keep India backward. Slowly, however, the sheer persistence of these protests forced the state into making some concessions. When Indira Gandhi returned to power, in 1980, a Department of Environment was established at the Centre, becoming a full-fledged Ministry a few years later. New laws to control pollution and to protect natural forests were enacted. There was even talk of restoring community systems of water and forest management.
Meanwhile, journalists and scholars had begun more systematically studying the impact of environmental degradation on social life across India. The pioneering reportage of Anil Agarwal, Darryl D’ Monte, Kalpana Sharma, Usha Rai, Nagesh Hegde and others played a critical role in making the citizenry more aware of these problems. Scientists such as Madhav Gadgil and A.K.N. Reddy began working out sustainable patterns of forest and energy use.
Through these varied efforts, the environmentalism of the poor began to enter school and college pedagogy. Textbooks now mentioned the Chipko and Narmada movements. University departments ran courses on environmental sociology and environmental history. Specialist journals devoted to these subjects were now printed and read. Elements of an environmental consciousness had, finally, begun to permeate the middle class.
Changing perception
In 1991 the Indian economy started to liberalise. The dismantling of state controls was in part welcome, for the licence-permit-quota-Raj had stifled innovation and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, the votaries of liberalisation mounted an even more savage attack on environmentalists than did the proponents of state socialism. Under their influence the media, once so sensitive to environmental matters, now began to demonise people like Medha Patkar, leader of the Narmada movement. Influential columnists charged that she, and her comrades, were relics from a bygone era, old-fashioned leftists who wished to keep India backward. In a single generation, environmentalists had gone from being seen as capitalist cronies to being damned as socialist stooges.
Environmentalists were attacked because, with the dismantling of state controls, only they asked the hard questions. When a new factory, highway, or mining project was proposed, only they asked where the water or land would come from, or what the consequences would be for the quality of the air, the state of the forests, and the livelihood of the people. Was development under liberalisation only going to further intensify the disparities between city and countryside? Before approving the rash of mining leases in central India, or the large hydel projects being built in the high (and seismically fragile) Himalayas, had anyone systematically assessed their social and environmental costs and benefits? Was a system in which the Environmental Impact Assessment was written by the promoter himself something a democracy should tolerate? These, and other questions like them, were brushed off even as they were being asked.
Steady deterioration
Meanwhile, the environment continued to deteriorate. The levels of air pollution were now shockingly high in all Indian cities. The rivers along which these cities were sited were effectively dead. Groundwater aquifers dipped alarmingly in India’s food bowl, the Punjab. Districts in Karnataka were devastated by open-cast mining. Across India, the untreated waste of cities was dumped on villages. Forests continued to decline, and sometimes disappear. Even the fate of our national animal, the tiger, now hung in the balance.
A major contributory factor to this continuing process of degradation has been the apathy and corruption of our political class. A birdwatcher herself, friendly with progressive conservationists such as Salim Ali, Indira Gandhi may have been the Prime Minister most sensitive (or at least least insensitive) to matters of environmental sustainability. On the other hand, of all Prime Ministers past and present Dr. Manmohan Singh has been the most actively hostile. This is partly a question of academic background; economists are trained to think that markets can conquer all forms of scarcity. It is partly a matter of ideological belief; both as Finance Minister, and now as Prime Minister, Dr. Singh has argued that economic growth must always take precedence over questions of environmental sustainability.
An environmentally literate Prime Minister would certainly help. That said, it is State-level politicians who are most deeply involved in promoting mining and infrastructure projects that eschew environmental safeguards even as they disregard the communities they displace. In my own State, Karnataka, mining barons are directly part of the political establishment. In other States they act through leaders of the Congress, the BJP, and regional parties.
In 1928, 45 years before the birth of the Chipko movement, Mahatma Gandhi had said: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
The key phrase in this quotation is ‘after the manner of the West.’ Gandhi knew that the Indian masses had to be lifted out of poverty; that they needed decent education, dignified employment, safe and secure housing, freedom from want and from disease. Likewise, the best Indian environmentalists — such as the founder of the Chipko movement, Chandi Prasad Bhatt — have been hard-headed realists. What they ask for is not a return to the past, but for the nurturing of a society, and economy, that meets the demands of the present without imperilling the needs of the future.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the finest minds in the environmental movement sought to marry science with sustainability. They sought to design, and implement, forest, energy, water and transport policies that would augment economic productivity and human welfare without causing environmental stress. They acted in the knowledge that, unlike the West, India did not have colonies whose resources it could draw upon in its own industrial revolution.
In the mid-1980s, as I was beginning my academic career, the Government of Karnataka began producing an excellent annual state of the environment report, curated by a top-ranking biologist, Cecil Saldanha, and with contributions from leading economists, ecologists, energy scientists, and urban planners. These scientific articles sought to direct the government’s policies towards more sustainable channels. Such an effort is inconceivable now, and not just in Karnataka. For the prime victim of economic liberalisation has been environmental sustainability.
Corporate interests
A wise, and caring, government would have deepened the precocious, far-seeing efforts of our environmental scientists. Instead, rational, fact-based scientific research is now treated with contempt by the political class. The Union Environment Ministry set up by Indira Gandhi has, as the Economic and Political Weekly recently remarked, ‘buckled completely’ to corporate and industrial interests. The situation in the States is even worse.
India today is an environmental basket-case; marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, falling water-tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests. Meanwhile, tribal and peasant communities continue to be pushed off their lands through destructive and carelessly conceived projects. A new Chipko movement is waiting to be born.
(Ramachandra Guha’s books include How Much Should a Person Consume? He can be reached at ramachandraguha@yahoo.in)
Nick D’Aloisio: 'It was a massive gamble but a good one’
The 17-year-old has just netted £20 million for his app, Summly. It’s a big relief to his parents, who allowed him to quit school
10:40PM GMT 26 Mar 2013
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He’s the 17-year-old boy genius who this week sold Summly, the smartphone app he created from his bedroom while revising for his GCSEs, to Yahoo! for a rumoured £20 million. He is friends with Stephen Fry, has hung out at Ashton Kutcher’s house, worked with Yoko Ono, and even done a deal with Rupert Murdoch. But there’s only one question I want to ask Nick D’Aloisio: has he got a new shoulder bag yet? During a recent radio interview, the bag topped the list of things he wanted to buy with his new fortune.
He laughs. “The whole of Twitter is talking about my bag. I couldn’t believe it. Mine is broken; it’s old and the strap’s not working. Someone asked me what I was going to buy now that I have all this money and I said, 'Well, I really need a new shoulder bag.’ It wasn’t like, 'What shall I get myself to celebrate? Oooh, I know, a man bag!’ ”
The young tech millionaire also wants to buy a shiny pair of Nike trainers. Like any London teenager, looking good is a priority for D’Aloisio. Unlike his peers, however, so are computer coding, investor portfolios and the multimillion-pound deal he has just brokered with one of the world’s biggest technology companies.
Tousle-haired D’Aloisio, dressed in magenta trousers and a white T-shirt emblazoned with a question mark, turns up to our meeting an hour late. It’s not his fault – he’s been up since 5am, politely sitting his way through back-to-back interviews, radio slots and international TV appearances. Halfway through our chat, he dashes out to speak to an Australian television company, all the while slugging a lurid orange energy drink from a can to help him stay awake.
When the Telegraph Saturday Magazine first interviewed D’Aloisio, over a month ago, the Yahoo! deal was just a rumour – and his free‑to‑download app was still in its infancy. Has he changed, now that he’s a multimillionaire? “No way,” he blurts, between gulps. “I don’t feel like a different person. My motivation has always been to do technology apps and companies, not making money. Just because the money’s come, nothing’s changed.”
D’Aloisio (full name Nicholas D’Aloisio-Montilla, although he drops the double-barrelled part because D’Aloisio is just, well, cooler) was born in London to expat Australian parents – Lou, a commodities trader, and Diana, a lawyer – in 1996. The family moved back to Melbourne shortly after Nick was born. When he turned seven (and his brother, Matthew, was three), the D’Aloisios relocated to Wimbledon, south-west London, where they have been ever since.
It was here, at the desk in his bedroom, aged 15, that D’Aloisio came up with the idea for Summly, a news summarisation application that shortens longer web articles into three concise paragraphs, making them easier to read on the screen of a smartphone. The app, which has been downloaded a million times and summarised 90 million articles since its launch in 2011, claims to save users enough reading time every day to take a long, hot bath.
The idea came to D’Aloisio when he was revising for his mock history GCSE. Frustrated by the number of irrelevant articles that kept coming up in web searches, he began experimenting with ways to filter information. “I’m impatient,” he explains, “like a lot of my generation. If this or that isn’t interesting to me, I’ll stop reading. I don’t have the tolerance. I want to know what content is appropriate to me – and I want to know quickly. That’s what Summly does.”
It’s easy to forget you’re talking to a 17-year-old when D’Aloisio gets going. Constantly shifting, almost bouncing, in his chair, he’s endearingly passionate about technology – and what the future holds for start-ups like his. Intelligent without being geeky, he throws phrases like “3D rendering” and “product road maps” into conversation, stopping to explain with great patience when my eyes glaze over in confusion.
He’s interested in more than just computers, too. At school (he’s on sabbatical from King’s College School in Wimbledon, having stopped full-time classes last year to concentrate on Summly), he’s studying for A-levels in maths, physics and philosophy. He’s learning Russian and Mandarin, and one day hopes to read PPE at Oxford. His Yahoo! deal involves a full-time job at the company’s London office, with schoolwork confined to the evenings. Too much for a teenager to handle?
“Education is something that naturally interests me, so I’ll be OK,” he insists. “If it doesn’t work out with school, I can go back when I’m 20 – or whenever.” And your parents didn’t mind you giving up classes? “I talked about it with them and my headmaster and we decided it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it would be silly not to run with it. Now, looking back, I can say it was a massive gamble. But it was a good gamble.”
D’Aloisio’s interest in technology started young. “I’ve always liked small details; weird, esoteric things,” he reveals. “I’m quite obsessive so I really go into depth. Computers became one of those passions.” Aged five, he became mesmerised by galaxies and the solar system, memorising entire constellations by heart. At nine, he got his first computer – and aged 10, he was trying out cutting-edge movie software, in a bid to emulate the programmes he watched on TV. He taught himself coding at the age of 12.
Before Summly, he came up with other smartphone apps, including SongStumblr, a music discovery program, and Facemood, which predicted the mood of a user through Facebook status updates. Summly, first called Trimit, appeared in Apple’s App Store in November 2011. It was downloaded 30,000 times and quickly came to the attention of Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing, the world’s eighth richest man, who offered D’Aloisio $300,000 for a share. When the money came through on his 16th birthday, D’Aloisio became the youngest person ever to receive venture capital investment.
“Li Ka-shing was the dream investor,” says D’Aloisio. “It’s a credit to him that he took a gamble on a kid and it worked out OK.”
Wealthy backers including Kutcher, Fry and Ono came on board within months. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation was one of 250 online publishers to sign up. A year down the line, he still giggles at the mention of his celebrity backers. “It is a bit weird. Meeting Rupert Murdoch was definitely scary.” He falters. “I don’t say they’re my friends – I don’t know if they’d call me a friend. They’ve all been great.”
Famous friends aside, D’Aloisio’s life is normal – ish. He hangs out with schoolfriends at weekends, plays rugby and cricket (“I was on the A-team when I was 14, but I’m not so good now”) and has time for a girlfriend, whom he’s been seeing for 10 months. His mother accompanies him on business trips to Hong Kong, Korea and New York. None of this stops comparisons to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, or hides the fact that he has been named one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” entrepreneurs to watch. Does he feel pressure to succeed?
“I’ve never thought, 'Oh God, I’m a failure if I don’t sell my company’,” he says. “When I was 15, I was naive. There is a story that when Li Ka‑shing phoned up, I asked when we should meet – before or after school. People ask me if my age has helped me do well, but Summly has been subjected to so many due diligence tests. The technology works.”
D’Aloisio’s hopes for the future are as ambitious as you’d expect. He wants to invest the bulk of his money; he likes the idea of “angel investing” – that is, giving financial backing and expertise to another tech start-up. He plans to raise awareness of the importance of computer coding – a subject he hopes will one day be taught in schools. He’d like to expand Summly (which has now closed down, before being integrated into Yahoo!’s software) beyond news – “We’ve looked at summarising Wikipedia, books, blog posts; you name it,” he reveals.
These are all long-term goals, however. Like most of his generation, D’Aloisio is enjoying right now. When he and I part, he’ll tear off to catch a flight to New York, for yet another packed day of press appearances and publicity. What’s next, after that, for the whizz kid from Wimbledon? “I’m really looking forward to starting at Yahoo!. It’s exciting. Ten years from now, I might still be there. I might be at university. I might be in a totally different industry.”
He looks down at the question mark on his T‑shirt and grins. “In other words, I have absolutely no idea.”
