from Anooja Debnath:
In India, what goes up must keep going up
With a faltering economy, political gridlock, high interest rates, delayed monsoons and an epic power outage that has plunged half its 1.2 billion population into darkness, optimism is a sparse commodity in India.
Just not when it comes to rising house prices.
'What goes up a lot must keep going up' was the conclusion from the very first Reuters Indian housing market poll this week. And it sounded very familiar.
Past experience shows that respondents to housing market polls - whether they be independent analysts, mortgage brokers, chartered surveyors - tend to cling to an optimistic tone even as trouble clearly brews below the surface.
That was the case before the historic U.S. housing market crash that sent prices plummeting by more than a third and triggered the financial crisis. Five years later the market is still trying to find its footing.
Spin the globe over to South Asia.
India's two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, have become prohibitively expensive for average people to purchase property without stretching themselves financially. Average Indian house prices have doubled over the past five years.
from Photographers Blog:
Solar power nightlight
By Adnan Abidi
Near my house in Delhi at Deenu bhai’s tea stall, I noticed a very young visitor; 7-year-old Sohail. He was Deenu bhai's relative visiting him from Aligarh for the summer breaks. Before leaving for work, I enjoyed a cup of tea at Deenu bhai’s, and as usual, I was sipping a steaming hot cup of tea with a snack when I saw Sohail with a drawing book.
Hot summer mornings keep away a lot of lazy lads who otherwise are found gossiping at Deenu bhai’s place. I was finding no such company, so I asked Sohail what he’s been up to. He showed me a few landscape drawings, which were mostly village scenes with huts and animals, with the sun rising at a location painted in yellow.
I am no art critic, and couldn’t actually make out anything in those drawings. But I recalled my childhood days, and compared it with Sohail’s to figure out a similar thought process in both of our generations. Neither of us have ever imagined a typical Indian village scene during or after sundown.
from The Human Impact:
Prostitution: their bodies, their rights
It is seen as a job no woman would want to do. A job no woman would willingly do.
Yet, spending time in one of Asia’s largest red light districts gives a view of prostitution that jars with what many feminists, gender rights activists and, in fact, society in general believe.
The Sonagachi district – a labyrinth of narrow bustling lanes lined with tea and cigarette stalls, three-storey brothels, and beauty parlours – in the east Indian city of Kolkata raises eyebrows with many who know this place.
It is a place for “fallen women” or “potita” as they say in Bengali, the local language.
Here, heavily made-up women clad in bright saris stand outside dark doorways, leading up narrow staircases into small rooms furnished with just a bed and perhaps a television.
Earning an average of 15,000 rupees ($270) a month, living in often unhygienic conditions and having sex with random men who wander the alleys looking for “love” doesn’t sound like much of a job.
from The Human Impact:
Acid attacks: the faceless women you can’t forget
Since I met her over a week ago, I have been unable to forget.
Every morning as I put on my lipstick and black eyeliner in front of the mirror, I am reminded of her face. Or lack of it.
Sonali Mukherjee, 27, is one of hundreds of women across the world who have lost their faces, and their will to survive, as a result of one of the most heinous crimes against women I have come across: Acid violence.
Nine years ago, three men broke into Sonali's home in the east Indian city of Dhanbad as she slept, and threw concentrated acid over her face.
The highly corrosive chemical caused 70 percent burns to her face, neck and arms and melted away the skin and flesh on her nose, cheeks and ears - leaving her almost blind and partially deaf.
Sonali, who was a 17-year-old college student at the time of the attack, had rejected their sexual advances for months and when she threatened to call the police, they took their revenge.
Despite multiple painful skin reconstructive surgeries, she still looks nothing like the photographs taken before the attack - a smiling pretty, confident, young woman who took pride in her appearance and who wanted to be a teacher in India's poor and marginalised tribal areas.
Wary of stocks, Indians cling to safe havens
Sometimes people suspect that the grass is greener in the next field … but they’re not always right.
Consider this. India’s gross domestic product has grown about 7 percent on an average per year for the past nine years. Its industrial growth has been steadily rising since then. Buoyed by economic growth, the country’s capital markets also offered itself as an attractive and inflation beating investment option.
That means that someone who invested at the end of 2002 in the BSE’s benchmark index, Sensex, would have made a 418 percent return on his portfolio by July 11 (just a random date). It sounds like the Madoff plan, but it’s not. The Sensex’s value on Dec 31, 2002 was 3377.28 which rose manifold to 17489.14 on July 11, 2012. Our market had its fair share of ups and downs, but it remained focused and depicted the country’s growth story.
However, that “someone” who made the 418 percent return most likely was not one of us. The average Indian investor has been satisfied with, and probably still wants, investments with a fixed return that comes from safer havens. According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research, Indians were called “wise savers but poor investors”. The statement found its base in the statistics that its Indian household Investor Survey revealed.
According to the survey, only 10.74 percent of households were investors (up from 7.4 percent in 2001-2002) while 89 percent were either saving in fixed income or are still clinging to their savings accounts. About 46 percent of urban households preferred to save, compared to 21 percent who chose investing.
In 2002, this was not a bad idea. India’s GDP grew at 3.7 percent that year compared with 2001. But in 2003, it jumped to 8.37 percent because of services (mostly financial, real estate and business services) and manufacturing sector which together drove this transition to a higher growth trajectory.
In the same year, the amount of foreign money entering India’s capital markets rose sevenfold. Most of this came from foreign institutional investors, who poured in 304.6 billion rupees ($5.5 billion), compared to 36 billion rupees ($665 million) a year earlier. They bought the Indian growth story; why didn’t we?
I dont agree with the conclusion. Here’s why: Over 20 years Fixed Deposits have beaten the Sensex. In this calc, FDs were renewed every year while Sensex was buy-and-hold. If Long term FDs were used then the returns would have been higher. Its always easy to take any period of time to prove the case. If you take 2009 -2012, Equities were the worst off despite heavy FII inflows in 2010.
Also, “Investment” does not take into the account the vast Gold Reserves which Indian Households have which beat any fiat currency denominated investments.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Thirsty South Asia’s river rifts threaten “water wars”
As the silver waters of the Kishanganga rush through this north Kashmir valley, Indian labourers are hard at work on a hydropower project that will dam the river just before it flows across one of the world's most militarised borders into Pakistan.
The loud hum of excavators echoes through the pine-covered valley, clearing masses of soil and boulders.
The 330-MW dam shows India's growing focus on hydropower but also highlights how water is a growing source of tension with downstream Pakistan, which depends on the snow-fed Himalayan rivers for everything from drinking water to agriculture.
Islamabad has complained to an international court that the dam in the Gurez valley, one of dozens planned by India, will affect river flows and is illegal. The court has halted any permanent work on the river for the moment, although India can still continue tunneling and other associated projects.
In the years since their partition from British India in 1947, land disputes have led the two nuclear-armed neighbours to two of their three wars. The next flashpoint could well be water.
"There is definitely potential for conflict based on water, particularly if we are looking to the year 2050, when there could be considerable water scarcity in India and Pakistan," says Michael Kugelman, South Asia Associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
The problem with India/Pakistan conflicts is not water or Kashmir or Muslim/non-Muslim issues. It could well be vanilla ice cream versus chocolate ice cream. All that is needed is an issue that can be used to maintain the status quo of stalemate between the two countries. Who gains in this? On the Pakistani side, its military machinery gets to keep the country under its control by diverting all attention towards an enemy maintained at all costs. The more the issues, the more the conflicts. The more the conflicts, the more the power hold. On the Indian side, it helps divert public attention away from domestic issues as well. At the people level, I am sure there is a better understanding and maturity in both nations. But the power brokers on both sides will never let anything settle down. Finally it will break down through a terrible war at the end of which everyone will be left to wonder why all the animosity was there in the first place. Five years of civilian government in Pakistan has helped a lot in smoothing things out. Continued rule under civilian authorities will reduce jingoism and hopefully the leaders of the two countries will figure out ways to solve issues diplomatically.
India’s presidency and a daughter’s defiance ignored … for now
Party politics is pragmatic if nothing else: if you don’t do what the party wants, you’re out … unless you’re Agatha Sangma.
She is the daughter of Purno Sangma, former speaker of India’s lower house of Parliament, who was forced to resign from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) after refusing his boss’s order to withdraw his bid to become India’s next president. The NCP, a key ally of the Congress party, which rules India under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a coalition government, backs the Congress nominee for the post, ex-Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
Agatha Sangma, an NCP member and representative of the Tura constituency in the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya, is:
- India’s youngest member of parliament, elected in 2008 at the age of 27
- the youngest ever junior minister (state and rural development, 2009)
She invited the ire of her bosses when she announced her support of her father’s candidacy in public forums and accompanied him to meet the chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu, J Jayalalithaa, to seek support for his presidential run. The poll is on July 19.
Her comment to reporters on why she supports her father instead of the party’s choice sounds like rhetoric. She said that it is time the country got a president from one of India’s “tribes.” Since her father’s name was proposed by a tribal forum, which included her, Agatha Sangma’s support should not be seen as coming from the government or the NCP.
the great Indian comedy at its best. No politician care about the welfare of the common man. they can be sacrificed as a pawn in their game. Ideological flip flop is OK as long as it get them the Votes. It is OK to claim they represent tribal s, even though they have not done anything for their upliftment after being many years in power. NCP and Miss Sangma will kiss and make up as soon as election are over, after all the need each other make fool of poor and uneducated tribal people they represent.
To Indian women: Forget freedom, follow rules
Anyone looking for stories of outrages committed against women in India this month doesn’t need to look far. Just after an attack on a woman in the northeast city of Guwahati, and a plea by an Islamist group in Jammu & Kashmir for female tourists to dress more conservatively, a group of village elders in Baghpat district of Uttar Pradesh has released some new rules to ensure that women stay safe. The only loss they’ll suffer is individual freedom:
- Women cannot use mobile phones in public
- Women under the age of 40 cannot go outside without a male relative to accompany them.
- Women should cover their heads in public.
- Village boys cannot play songs or music on their mobile phones in public.
The village elders, known as a khap panchayat, took the actions, they said, to prevent sexual harassment. The result, of course, is to punish women pre-emptively by restricting their liberties in the name of protecting them from men who cannot be trusted to restrain themselves.
The Uttar Pradesh government said that the panchayat has no legal authority to enforce such rules, and that people should report attempts to do so. When the police tried to step in, a crowd of people beat them up.
Famed educator,Begam Rokeya Hossain of Calcutta back in the early 20th c., already wrote a book suggesting that men should keep hijab and stay at home while women did the world’s business.
Of course, she has been conveniently forgotten.
An atom of doubt at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant
Opponents of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, under construction in Tamil Nadu, are raising fresh questions about the plant’s safety because of Indian government documents that they say reveal a problem in the design of one of the two reactors.
The reactor’s design differs from the plan that Russia and India came up with when they agreed to build the reactor in 1988, according to the documents published by India’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.
The design of the reactor pressure vessel, which contains the reactor coolant and core, was not supposed to have welds in its core region, the bulletin said. The vessel has two welds there, it said.
People who live near the Kudankulam plant and the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy called this deviation a “serious breach of contract” that exposes the plant to high failure risk and a higher possibility of offsite radiological contamination.
“This is a breach of contract by the supplier in Russia. NPCIL (Nuclear Power Corporation of India) officers who knew [about] this breach are guilty of causing future financial loss by choosing lower quality equipment,” said Nityanand Jayaraman, environmental researcher and member of the Chennai Solidarity Group for Kudankulam Struggle.
RS Sundar, the plant’s site director, denied that it was a “breach of contract”. “The original discussion between Indian and Russian governments on procuring reactor vessels without welds was based on futuristic thinking,” he told me. “But that was not possible technologically at the time of procurement.”
Addressing safety, Sundar said, “all the 400-plus light water reactors in operation across the globe [have] welds in the core zone.”
This is the first time that the nuclear establishment is openly accepting that the core of plant does contain welds. When the activists raised this issue few months back, there was stoic silence on part of the scientists.
However, the article fails to ask certain fundamental questions. How can an agreement as important as this be based on “futuristic thinking?” So will these scientists strike a deal for flying saucers and stuff like that if some Russian company proposes? And then come back and say,” No. The flying part was not possible so we bought just the saucer.”
The callousness with which the scientist has replied is condemnable. Apart from the aspect of security itself, the plant has been the locus of some of the worst anti-democratic crackdown in the country. Thousands have been booked for sedition and other grave charges just for standing up against the State.
Energy out of this plant might power lights across the country but it is moving citizens into dark ages by ridiculing democratic values.
