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News Updates - 31 October 2005
Companies can't copyright yoga - Chicago Tribune
Beguiling India beckons - Seattle Times
On the Road to repair - Fortune magazine
Indian government says companies can't copyright yoga
27 October 2005, Chicago Tribune, By William Weir
Having watched Western entrepreneurs raid its ancient culture for years --
claiming everything from yoga poses to Basmati rice as their own -- the
Indian government is fighting back. Over 50 Indian researchers are poring
through thousands of pages of ancient texts and are cataloging the
information into a database. V.K. Gupta, who's heading up the effort, says
he came up with the idea for the database as a way to protect his country's
culture from opportunistic businessmen. "This kind of database will stop
future wrongs," says Gupta, director of the National Institute of Science
Communication in New Delhi. "A lot of people are happy that we are trying to
protect our traditional knowledge," he says. "The only people who are not
happy are those who would misappropriate this knowledge, and of those, I
don't think we care."
How can you stake claim to something that's been around for thousands of
years? When money's involved, Gupta says, people will always try.
The Indian government started working on its database in 2003, known as the
Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, when Western businesses started
borrowing from India's holistic system of medicine, and plants were being
patented and copyrighted. More recently, Indian officials have turned their
efforts to preventing the copyrighting of actual yoga poses, or asanas, that
have been part of Indian culture for thousands of years. So far, more than
1,500 yoga poses have been entered into the database.
"It's just one of the weird ways that intellectual property rights are being
used," says Kuriakose, who specializes in the legalities of protecting
traditional knowledge. "It shows how dangerous it can get." To many in the
yoga community, claiming ownership of certain postures seems rather
un-yogic. But yoga is a $3 billion-a-year industry in the United States,
including instruction and equipment (Nike
has even marketed a shoe for yoga, which is overwhelmingly done barefoot).
So maybe copyrighting and franchising was all but inevitable.
Top of the page
Beguiling India beckons
28 October 2005, The Seattle Times Editorial, By Richard Celeste/ Geoffrey
Garrett
Will
India be the next China? While Washington continues to focus on the politics
of nuclear energy and weapons, American investors are fascinated by India's
beguiling economic potential. India may well take the baton from China as
the world's fastest-growing big economy in the coming decade. But Americans
need to understand that there are critical differences between these two
giants of the developing world that have huge implications for U.S. politics
and economy.
Whereas
China has become the world's low-cost manufacturer, the key to India's
future is in exports from its service sector. And notwithstanding all the
hand-wringing in the U.S. over outsourcing of low-skilled jobs in call
centers and back-office accounting, the growth engine for India's economy is
high-skilled/high-value-added services. Indian IT firms such as Infosys and
Wipro innovate as well as the best American firms, but at much lower cost.
Microsoft and Intel understand. They are investing in India not to make
products developed at home but rather to develop new products that will be
manufactured elsewhere (in China, for example).
Software
is not a mere "industry" in the traditional sense of steel or textiles, to
focus on two of China's strong suits. An uber-industry, software is
increasingly in everything. Consider the automobile, the poster child of
20th-century manufacturing. Today's cars don't have much in common with the
Model T. They are designed on computer screens, manufactured by robots, and
drive using a dizzying array of intelligent features — all made possible by
software.
If
potential global demand for software is so great, can India supply it?
India's pool of English-speaking and well-trained engineers is already much
larger than that in the U.S. and it is growing all the time. India doesn't
need to build telephone landlines to feed its software habit. The wireless
industry, powered by software, is doing the job at warp speed. There are
about 40 million Indian landline-phone subscribers; the number of cellphone
subscribers is already over 60 million — and increasing at more than 3
million a month.
Software
and wireless phones in India are private-sector industries, and they have
piqued the interests of global capital. American venture capitalists have
already made India the new frontier. If venture capital is a leading
indicator, foreign direct investment into India (today about $5 billion a
year) may soon catch up to China's more than $50 billion. There is also more
to the Indian economy than IT. The public-health system is in disrepair, but
India's private hospitals are going gangbusters.
Apollo
Hospitals is a booming company now positioned to provide sophisticated
elective surgical procedures in India to patients from around the world,
combining highly skilled doctors with low-cost operating theaters. According
to a recent Pacific Council on International Policy-Observer Research
Foundation study, open-heart surgery costing $18,000 in the U.S. can be
performed for $4,500 in India.
Even
Indian manufacturing shows signs of taking off. Tata Motors, for example, is
currently selling about 40,000 vehicles a month. Indian demand for
automobiles will mushroom in coming years, and with it comes demand for
better roads. Even if the Indian government can't build them, foreign
investors are lining up to do so.
The
implications of Indian development for the U.S. are clear. Americans
shouldn't obsess about the loss of low-skilled service-sector jobs to India.
The real threat posed by India is to the heart of the American innovation
economy. To turn this into a win-win situation, the U.S. should promote the
kind of people-to-people links that have made so much money for
Indian-American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Such links
have also contributed to the profitability of U.S. firms like GE, Ford and
Texas Instruments. The U.S. should also use these linkages as a platform for
building better government-to-government relations with India. President
Bush's agreement this past July relaxing restrictions on sharing civilian
nuclear technology with India is a good first step. But relations between
the world's two largest democracies should be strengthened to ensure that
the dynamism of the Indian economy serves the interests of both countries,
rather than exacerbating tensions between them.
Top of the page
On the Road to Repair
20 October 2005,
Fortune magazine,
By John
Elliott
Take a drive out of
Delhi, and it
is possible to see both
India's
past and its future. Head east to
Agra,
home of the Taj Mahal, and it can take an hour to travel the first 20 miles.
But head south toward
Delhi's
airport and its modern satellite Gurgaon, and on to Mumbai, and much of the
road—at least the sections not under construction—is a modern multilane
highway. It used to require as much as a week to drive the 885 miles from
Delhi to Mumbai; now the drive is just a day or two.
For anyone accustomed to
India and the
way things happen — the country's new highways are a miracle. India's
3,625-mile Golden Quadrilateral highway is former Prime Minister AB
Vajpayee’s dream project, at about 85% completed, runs in a diamond linking
Delhi with the country's three other largest cities—Mumbai, Chennai, and
Calcutta. Built in six years and within its $6.25 billion budget, the Golden
Quadrilateral marks the beginning of a $60 billion series of road projects
that could challenge America's Interstate Highway System for both size and
economic impact.
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