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News
updates - 15 December 2005
India on the road to 21st century - NY Times
Power for three - Newsweek International
India to stop theft of lore - Washington Post
Yogis endure and transcend pain - SF Chronicle
India on the road into the 21st century
11 December 2005, New York Times, By Amy Waldman
The
Indian government began a 15-year project to widen and pave some 40,000
miles of narrow, decrepit national highways, with the first leg, budgeted at
$6.25 billion, most of it to be completed by next year. It amounts to the
most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and the
British building of the subcontinent's railway network the century before.
The effort echoes the United States' construction of its national highway
system in the 1920s and 1950s. The arteries paved across America fueled
commerce and development, fed a nation's auto obsession and created suburbs.
They also displaced communities and helped sap mass transit and deplete
inner cities.
"The
perception of
India
earlier was that it cannot be in the rank of other fast-growing nations,"
said Sudheendra Kulkarni, who was an aide to BJP's Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the
former prime minister who championed the project. With the highway, Kulkarni
said, "People began to see that
India
is transforming."
For
India,
one of the world's fastest-growing economies and most rapidly evolving
societies, the results may be as radical. At its heart, the redone highway
is grafting Western notions of speed and efficiency onto a civilization that
has always taken the long view. The new highway is certain to push
India's
competitiveness. These micro gains make for macro benefit: some $1.5 billion
a year in savings, by one World Bank estimate, on everything from fuel costs
to faster freight delivery. More intangibly, the highway may turn
India
into a society in a hurry.
In
the 50 years after independence, the government built just 334 miles of
four-lane roads. The first stage of the highway project has been dubbed the
Golden Quadrilateral. The four- and six-lane quadrilateral runs 3,625 miles
through 13 states and
India's
four largest cities: New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and
Mumbai, formerly Bombay.
Nationalists also hope the highway will further cohere a country that is
home to 22 official languages, the world's major religions, several
separatist movements, and 35 union territories and states, many more
populous than European nations.
An
American-style interstate unfurls through villages where mud-brick buildings
rarely rise above two stories and women still cook with buffalo dung. The
highway is smooth, wide, flat and incongruous: an ambitious road amid
still-humble architecture, a thoroughfare from this century amid scenery
from a previous one. Drivers no longer pass through towns, but pass by them,
or where the highway soars into the air, over them.
The
highway was conceived in 1998, soon after a Hindu nationalist-led government
took power. Former aides say the move was essential to Vajpayee's
nationalist vision of a secure, competitive
India.
To circumvent
India's
entrenched bureaucracy, Vajpayee empowered an autonomous authority to
oversee the highways, streamline the contracting process and privilege the
private sector.
Where crops once grew along the Golden
Quadrilateral, gas stations are sprouting. Reliance Industries Ltd., one of
India's
largest private conglomerates and a petroleum giant -- is planning 5,000
stations. Perhaps more than any other company, it has grasped the highway's
commercial potential. The growth of gas stations suggested the way
India's
agricultural society is yielding not to an industrial economy, but a service
one. Fifty percent of
India's
gross domestic product is now in the service sector, compared with 25
percent apiece for manufacturing and agriculture.
The founding elites of independent
India
were British-educated. Today, the ambitious young pursue degrees from
Wharton and Stanford, with some 80,000 Indian students in the United States.
Two million Indians live there, working as doctors, software engineers, and
motel owners along America's highways. No surprise, then, that the United
States has shaped the ideas of what
India's
highway can be. A construction official, B.K. Rami Reddy, who has a daughter
in America, described one stretch of finished roadway in southern
India:
"You really feel like you are in the U.S., it is so nice. When you go on
that road, you feel you are somewhere else."
Reddy's
boss, P. Nageswara Rao, predicted that with the highway and
India's
accompanying rise, by 2010 or 2020, "Indians may not feel the need to go
abroad. This highway will really change the face of
India,"
he said.
Top of the page
Power for Three
12 December 2005, Newsweek International, By George Wehrfritz
That a Sino-Japanese
chat is not possible exposes the implausibility of Asian political unity any
time soon. The Chinese have an idiom that captures the essence of such
unions: "Same bed, different dreams."
Beijing's cynical approach
toward relations with Tokyo is part of the problem, to be sure. But the
underlying futility is rooted in the fact that Asia is now graced by three
contending big powers. Despite the hype of a "Chinese century," a more
realistic forecast has China, Japan and India jostling for influence for
decades to come. Call it tripartite Asia.
China has yet to
translate its economic clout into a coherent case for regional leadership.
Japan, its own economy firmly on the mend after a painful "lost decade," is
not the shrinking violet it appeared to be just a few years ago. And India,
anchored in the south, is rising too. Like China, it's a continental
economy, with more than a billion people, and a declared nuclear power. Like
Japan, it embraces democracy, not authoritarianism, though its modern
history of nonalignment contrasts with Japan's steadfast alliance with the
United States.
Can the Big Three
come together? Maybe for a photo op, but there's little hope for more
substance than that; each is too busy reacting to the others. Take the issue
of Asia's representation on the U.N. Security Council. Right now, only China
holds a permanent seat, but both India and Japan want in, and they've
hitched their bids together. Beijing has signaled that it would welcome New
Delhi but not Tokyo, a position India can't accept.
The precondition for
any meaningful meeting of minds in Asia must be substantive dialogue on real
issues, such as the potentially destabilizing impact of a military conflict
over Taiwan. India, Japan and China could change the dynamic.
Top of the page
India Builds Database to Stop Theft of Lore
23
December 2005, Washington Post/ Houston Chronicle, By Gavin Rabinowitz
For
thousands of years Indian villagers have used an extract from seeds of the neem tree as an insecticide. So when a U.S. company patented a process for
producing the substance in 1994, India reacted with outrage. After spending
millions of dollars in legal fees to successfully overturn the patent,
India's government now is creating a 30-million-page database of traditional
knowledge to fend off entrepreneurs trying to patent the country's ancient
lore.
The
database project already has caught the interest of others. A South African
team recently visited and a Mongolian mission is coming in January, said V.K.
Gupta, chairman of India's National Institute for Science Communication and
Information Resources. The database, called the Traditional Knowledge Data
Library, will make information available to patent offices around the world
to ensure that traditional remedies are not presented as new discoveries.
The
government also has successfully challenged patents on the use of the spice
turmeric to heal wounds and rashes and a patent on a rice strain derived
from India's famed Basmati rice. Currently it is difficult for overseas
patent office researchers to prove purported innovations are really based on
old lore because, while the information is widely published in India, it is
often in ancient languages like Sanskrit or modern regional languages like
Tamil. "We decided we have to break the language and access barrier," Gupta
said. He convened a group of 150 experts in traditional medicine,
scientists, doctors, patent lawyers and computer programmers to put together
the database of traditional knowledge.
Instead
of laboriously translating the manuscripts, the scholars structured the
texts into classifications widely used by patent examiners. The texts are
then entered in the database, where specially developed software translates
them into Hindi, English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish. "We created
knowledge conversion software that converts local names of diseases and
plants into modern names," Gupta said.
More
than 1,500 yoga poses have been catalogued, too. That's because yoga poses
also have been patented abroad. A patent researcher can search the database
using key words or phrases. So if the plant aloe vera is entered, the
traditional term Kumari will come up with a list of its known medicinal
uses. More than 10 million pages already have been loaded into the system
and 20 million more will be available by the end of 2006, Gupta said.
Several international patent offices have applied for access to the
database.
The
issue is not just a matter of national pride. It also has financial
implications. A pharmaceutical company, for instance, could develop a
medicine from a treatment long-used by an indigenous group and reap big
profits while also charging those very people to use it. So India wants to
ensure that profits arising from traditional knowledge are shared with local
people.
Top of the page
India's yogis endure and transcend pain, propelled by divine urgings
2 December 2005, San Francisco Chronicle, By John McMurtrie
The clash of ancient
traditions and modern civilization is at the center of "Naked in Ashes," an
inspirational film that documents the hermetic lives of a handful of Indian
yogis. Covered in ashes that symbolize life's impermanence, the Hindu holy
men, amid the chaos of their urban surroundings stand out.yogis. Covered in
ashes that symbolize life's impermanence, the Hindu holy men, amid the chaos
of their urban surroundings stand out.
Director
Paula Fouce (a Buddhist whose family has deep roots in Hollywood's past)
doesn't hide her reverence for the yogis in her earnest documentary, which
opens a window into a little-seen world of men who have given up almost
everything in their lives to commune with their gods and carry out good
deeds.
Many
yogis live along the crowded banks of the Ganges River, where they wash away
their sins and survive on charity. Their devotion is remarkable: One yogi
has kept a fire alive for 12 years; another has stood for months on end,
severely injuring his leg in the process. In the film's most beautiful
images, yogis travel barefoot through snow in a pilgrimage to the mountains.
Shiv Raj Giri, an
aging yogi at the heart of the film, speaks sagely about how we must protect
the environment and better our welfare. "These days, things are out of
balance," he says. "We are lost in this ocean of miseries."
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