"Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?"

Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?.

Interesting.

Infrastructure That Everyone Can Help Build

It is less costly to build too.  It can make a tremendous difference.  Attitude, our biggest infrastructure hurdle.

Stop the honking.  Please.

UK to India: Please Take Our Money

From the too funny-to-be-true department, the how-the-might-have-fallen department, and the bathos department:

India tells Britain: We don't want your aid

India’s Finance Minister has said that his country “does not require” British aid, describing it as “peanuts”.

Pranab Mukherjee and other Indian ministers tried to terminate Britain’s aid to their booming country last year - but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Bathos because the mighty idealism of aid to fight poverty may be rooted in the pure quid pro quo of modern  government-mediated commerce.

Cameron leads the attack on Indian decision on Rafale

Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday led an attack on India for selecting French firm Dassault Rafale for a mega deal to supply fighter jets ignoring British claims as MPs and the media accused New Delhi of “ingratitude,” arguing that Britain gave millions of pounds in aid to India.

India Faking It

Dazzling images do not a shining nation make

Each year, since then, India has had a major visual presence at Davos through cleverly pitched campaigns designed by highly creative advertising agencies.

The India visible in the branding images primarily exists in the consciousness of the elite. It is a world of neat shopping malls, expensive branded products, happy, prosperous consumers, skilled scientists and engineers, white coats, headphones, smooth highways, high rise buildings, glass facades and green grass that paves one's vision. The images could be from anywhere in the world, while the Indian setting is presented through cultural icons such as bindis, colourfully decorated elephants, Gandhiji's spectacles and Taj Mahal. In short, India is transformed into a global place while still retaining its cultural authenticity and ethnic appeal.

While this vision is a powerful tool to attract investors and tourists, it is also its biggest weakness. The images conjure a world that does not really exist outside the limits of the visual frames. Absent from the frames is the “other” India — the poor, the untouchables, the minorities, and all that is un-beautiful — the ruptured body of the nation that has not only failed to “catch up” with the progress, but in fact is seen as holding the nation back in its journey towards prosperity and global power.

It is not uncommon to hear stories of shock and disappointment upon arrival from the very members of the privileged global class that the Indian state so wants to attract. 

...

As the novelty of dazzling image campaigns levels out, India might need to rework its agenda — to focus on the actual production of a prosperous and equitable nation, rather than producing merely images of it.

The Russians Want Zero Nuclear Liability Too

Kudankulam clouds PM’s Moscow visit

Russian envoy to India Alexander M Kadakin told a news conference here last week that Moscow would expect that the NPCIL and JSC Atomstroyexport to strike a  deal for the third and fourth reactors at Kudankulum under the same terms and conditions as the ones applicable to the first and second. 

Moscow pointed it out to New Delhi that India had no legal regime for nuclear liability, when the intergovernmental agreement was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 or when the JSC Atomstroyexport and NPCIL clinched the deal for the first two reactors in 2002.

Looks slightly more justified than prospective zero-liability.

Indian Occupations - 2

As Mr Anna Hazare tilts at windmills in the national capital, other movements happen in the hinterlands and meet the brute force of the state, to be heard but faintly by the hyperventilating TV heads and the national press.

A letter from the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti dated yesterday:

Dear Friends, 

We are in terrible shock and disbelief having faced more than 500 armed goons engaged by one Mafia don Bapi Circle under the banner of Paradip Industrial development Council and patronized by the police and administration who forcefully entered the sile of our peaceful and non-violent protest around 1.30 pm today and started attacking us by using bombs and weapons. 

As a result, at least eight villagers of PPSS were injured and one of them has got serious injury. From the morning onwards, more than 2000 villagers were making a peaceful demonstration against the construction of a coastal sea road for POSCO. The private goons who had created a scene of terror yesterday did a repeat show today. Their own bombs apart from injuring our villagers did also result in killing a member of their own team.

We strongly condemn the conspiracy hatched by the Nabin Patnaik government to engage private militia in order to create a situation of crisis which would demand police intervention. We consider the act as cowardice and no democracy worth its name should tolerate such an act of violence perpetrated by hired goons. 

Though the situation is grim and our people are shocked, we are waiting with the same determination to protest peacefully even if the police after creating such a scene tries to enter the village to bulldoze our peaceful and democratic movement. 

We request you to please stand up and expose the unethical, unjust and undemocratic means that the state has been using to crush the movement and to make the movement discredited in the eyes of public who don't have a chance to know the real truth behind any act of conspiracy the police and the mafia are hatching everyday. 

Please join hands with us, stand by us and support our cause. Please circulate the message as widely as possible. We shall inform you the ongoing development here. 

Hoping for more solidarity from you.

Prashant Paikary

Spokesperson,

POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti

A bit dated (July 2011) report from NDTV.

Largest democracy indeed.

Relatedly:  Indian Occupations, FDI - Takes Away More Than It Gives?

Durban Drubs India

The climate turned against India at Durban

The Indian position ever since the COP in Bali, Indonesia (2007) when the Bali Action Plan was adopted, has been that it would abide by the Action Plan to follow “measurable, reportable and verifiable” measures to effect reductions in the emission intensity of its GDP growth but would not agree to being subjected to any legally binding instrument to do so.

With the decision in Durban, this position is no longer acceptable and hence emission reductions, either absolute or in the form of intensity reduction, will no longer be allowed to be voluntary but will be governed by some form of arrangement which will have legal force. This is a development that has gone against India.

But out of adversity comes ... something   or the other...  Here's looking forward to clean air a planet that still works, for at least our kids.

Telecom Manufacturing Base in India: Why Is It Missing?

Make in India

The Indian market for telecom equipment – from switches, routers and base station systems to microwave radios, optical fibre links and mobile handsets – was estimated at Rs 54,675 crore in 2009-10. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reckons that just over 12 per cent of this demand was met through domestic value addition. The balance comprised imports, whether in final product form or as parts for local assembly. Moreover, the size of the market is projected to grow to Rs 108,096 crore in 2015-16 and Rs 170,091 crore by 2019-20. Much of it would be powered by the increased rollout of 3G mobile services in the immediate short-term, followed by the more advanced 4G wireless broadband networks.

That such demand can be overwhelmingly met through imports is neither a feasible nor a desirable proposition. It is, indeed, quite incredible how a country with the world's second largest telecom subscriber base of 900 million-plus (from a mere 40 million a decade ago) has not leveraged these numbers to build a robust manufacturing base at home.

 Never too late to start.

"Market economy? Or, market society?"

Market economy? Or, market society?  S Gurumurthy takes on the FDI in multi-brand retail question.

"India's income inequality has doubled in 20 years"

India's income inequality has doubled in 20 years

NEW DELHI: Inequality in earnings has doubled in India over the last two decades, making it the worst performer on this count of all emerging economies. The top 10% of wage earners now make 12 times more than the bottom 10%, up from a ratio of six in the 1990s.  

Moreover, wages are not smoothly spread out even through the middle of the distribution. The top 10% of earners make almost five times more than the median 10%, but this median 10% makes just 0.4 times more than the bottom 10%.  

... 

Wage inequality has driven more general income inequality in the country. India has got more unequal over the last two decades-India's Gini coefficient, the official measure of income inequality, has gone from 0.32 to 0.38, with 0 being the ideal score. In the early 1990s, income inequality in India was close to that of developed countries; however, its performance on inequality has diverged greatly since then, bringing it closer to China on inequality than the developed world.

There is evidence of growing concentration of wealth among the elite. The consumption of the top 20% of households grew at almost 3% per year in the 2000s as compared to 2% in the 1990s, while the growth in consumption of the bottom 20% of households remained unchanged at 1% per year.  

In comparison, the income of the bottom 20% of households in China grew at double the rate in the 2000s as compared to the 1990s, while the increase for the top 20% of households was much slower. In Brazil, household incomes have been growing faster among the poorest households than among the richest for the last two decades.  

‘Reigniting a new political imagination’

Arundhati Roy visits Occupy Wall Street.  Her take on the two-party situation in the USA and the virtually two-party system back home:

Even in India, we have the same problem. We have a right wing that is so vicious and so openly wicked, which is the Baratiya Janata party (BJP), and then we have the Congress party, which does almost worse things, but does it by night. And people feel that the only choices they have are to vote for this or for that. And my point is that, whoever you vote for, it doesn’t have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It’s just an artificial theater, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you’re supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you’re trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company. 

...but it happens everywhere, and it will continue to happen. Even I know that if I go back to India, and tomorrow the BJP comes to power, personally I’ll be in a lot more trouble than with the Congress [party] in power. But systemically, in terms of what is being done, there’s no difference, because they collaborate completely, all the time.

 I like that metaphor:  two kinds of washing powder owned by the same company.  Nice.

Why The Sudden FDI Decision?

Ekalavya's take: Maunam Mohanam.  

This leads to the question that all the clever Indians have never asked: what is the US asking for in return for bringing Pakistan to heel? 

Aah! Oh! Well! Hmm… 

Oh dear! Never thought of that.

Anything's possible.  

Incredible India

Ban on ‘made snana’ at Kukke lifted

The district administration on Monday lifted the ban imposed on the controversial ‘made snana’ ritual, which involves devotees rolling over the food left over by Brahmins - in the belief that it would rid them of various ailments - at the Kukke Subramanya temple as part of the three-day Champashashti Jatrotsava.

Hope Markandeya Katju doesn't read this.  It may trigger an attack.  

"Why are women's health outcomes in India so poor?"

Why are women's health outcomes in India so poor?

Those graphs tell a story.  Sri Lanka is much much better than India on most women's health parameters and on health-care spending.

Builders Selling Foreign Fantasies

Of global dreams and local angst

What helps fortify the fantasy, and for the sceptic a sense of disbelief, is the usage of language itself. Developers of residential complexes eating up rich farmlands for lifestyle homes have begun reinventing English. 

One can still find residential complexes with indigenous names such as “Samarth Nagar” but the globalisation bug has bitten deep; developers cannot resist adding the suffix, “Heights” or “Residency”. But the more adventurous ones invent in a way that would have made Shakespeare, no mean coiner of new words, wince. 

Hoardings beckon you to “Capriccio”, “Apostrophe”, “Mont Vert”. The developers of “Wisteriaa” are taking no chances with the name of a flower. The extra letter of the alphabet could change fortunes. The creator of “Euthania” stops short of mercy killing. If that phonetic resemblance rattles the sensitive home-buyer, “Invicta” should compensate. 

At a surface level, this play with the English language appears crude and the work of demented builders. But it expresses the way globalisation transforms itself into a new creature of post-modernity that at first sight seems obviously syncretic.

Those are some surreal names.  May not be as bad in Bengaluru, though it may be that I'm not paying enough attention.  Some I can think of, with a little help from Google : more than three flavors of apartments named 'Gardenia'.  Venezia, Parkridge, Passiflora.  The following, while not torturing English, nonetheless are a bit on the fantasy side.  For instance, we have our own choice of Elysium's and one 'Manhattans' (yes, it is the plural.  Buy one get some free!) and our own Riviera.  We have transplanted Knightsbridge, Notting Hill, Kensington Gardens, Wellington Park here.  We have an apartment named 'perfumed toilet water' ('Canopy Cologne'),  one named after peafowl ('Confident Pavo').  And much before all that we got our own historical 'Acropolis'.  

For a country reputed to have that has 30 crore gods and goddesses and more than a few languages, we are running short of names for our apartments!  Then again, selling dreams requires that we go beyond the familiar.  Familiarity, contempt...

Competition Dumbing Down Media Content

Perils of press freedom

The competition for readers, listeners and viewers in order to grab advertising has led to a dumbing down of content with sensationalism, trivialisation, titillation and, sometimes, local or national chauvinism crowding out more serious and worthwhile content. Trial by the press and publication of unverified allegations against people, communities and institutions has become commonplace. Publish and be dammed, it is, with little regard to privacy, the right of reply or correction. 

It certainly hasn't improved media content. 

Safe Nuclear Power?

A former defense missile scientist takes on some myths: Nuclear power: Myths about low cost, safety and emission.  

Prediction Time

TCA Srinivasa Raghavan of Business Line does the predicting:

If the Congress manages to form a government in UP, or even manages to win enough number of seats, Rahul Gandhi would have “proved” that he is a mass leader in his own right, one to be reckoned with. 

The path will be then cleared for him to become Prime Minister and to force an early election in the first half of 2013 on the perfectly legitimate grounds that he needs his own team. 

The BJP under Advani will find it hard to come up with a fitting riposte. It needs Narendra Modi but will acknowledge it only after another resounding defeat. 

If Rahul fails in UP, it will be business-as-usual. Manmohan Singh will continue as Prime Minister till 2014; Rahul will become Congress President and the 2014 general election will be a nightmare for the Congress.

Let's see.

Creating Vast Net Wealth

Link.

India continues its rise as an economic superpower, creating vast net wealth along the way. After analyzing data from a wide range of government and banking sources, alongside conducting detailed explorations of proprietary research and media reports, Wealth-X estimated the presence of at least 8,200 individuals or families in India worth more than US$30 million. The collective net worth of India’s ultra high net worth category is at least US$945 billion when accounting for shares in public and private companies, residential and investment properties, art collections, planes, cash and other invertible assets.

Putting Growth In Its Place

Link.  Amartya Sen &  Jean Dreze take on the growth vs human development argument.