|
India - News
Editorial
Opinion
Overview
Infrastructure
Demographics
Entertainment
Site
Map
Search site
Subscribe
Karmayogi
|
|
News Updates - 31 August 2006
Bush's love of India will outlast him - Financial Times
(MSNBC)
India's field of green - Fortune magazine
An awakening in Bihar - Business Week
Bush's love of India will outlast him
30 August
2006, Financial Times (MSNBC), By Edward Luce
When George
W. Bush was taking foreign policy lessons from the so-called "vulcans" (a
group of advisers led by Condoleezza Rice) in the 2000 US presidential
campaign, the subject of
India
arose: "A billion people and it's a democracy. Ain't that something?" said
the then-governor of
Texas.
What to some might have been a throwaway line about a faraway country was to
Mr Bush an instinctive statement of support for a nation that Washington now
routinely describes as a "natural ally". In spite of its continuing
prickliness over sovereignty,
India
has returned Mr Bush's overtures with interest.
The
burgeoning US-India relationship reached a high point early this year when
Mr Bush visited
New Delhi
for the first time and concluded an unprecedented deal that permits India to
derive all the advantages of being a signatory to the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty without actually joining it. In other words, Mr
Bush signalled that the US attached greater importance to India's emergence
as a civil and weapons nuclear power – and thus implicitly endorses New
Delhi's view of the NPT as a form of "nuclear apartheid" – than it did to
the principal mechanism for containing the spread of the world's chief
weapon of mass destruction. In diplomatic terms, what Mr Bush did amounts to
a sharp course correction.
In the US,
the House of Representatives last month waved it through and the Senate will
probably do so later this year. In India, Manmohan Singh's Congress
party-led coalition has been assailed by the opposition Hindu nationalist
BJP, which wishes it had concluded the deal so that it could take the
credit, and by the prime minister's allies in the communist bloc of parties,
which – being pro-China and anti-US – take a somewhat eccentric view of the
world. They oppose nuclear weapons for all countries (including India) but
make an exception for
China
and Iran. However, neither set of domestic opponents is likely to derail the
deal.
But the issue
has larger significance still. For the first time in US history, Washington
has declared specifically that it will sponsor another country's rise to "great
power" status – a slightly antiquated phrase but a clear statement
nonetheless of Mr Bush's aims.
Meanwhile NY Times reported, that the Bush
administration is organizing a business delegation to
India this
fall, potentially the largest such mission ever to a single country, an
administration official said, and one that underscores the economic
potential of a nation of 1.1 billion, with an annual growth rate of 8
percent. “That’s a reflection of interest in India,” the official, Assistant
Secretary of State Richard A. Boucher, said, referring to what could be a
delegation of up to 400 American business leaders planned in November. The
United States is India’s largest trading partner.
There are
three reasons to believe America's sponsorship of India will outlast Mr
Bush's tenure in the White House. First, In spite of achieving relatively
little in office, Manmohan Singh’s India is emerging rapidly as an economic
powerhouse. It is true that Mr Singh's government has been unable to advance
New Delhi's
economic reform agenda very radically, partly because of resistance from the
communist parties. India's booming services sector and an increasingly
competitive manufacturing export base, 7 to 8 per cent growth looks
sustainable even in years when the annual monsoon fails. This is good news
for US exporters, who have lobbying power in Washington.
Second, India
is a frontline ally in what looks to be America's increasingly long-term
battle with Islamist terrorist groups around the world. Many of the
Pakistan-based groups that target Indian security forces in the contested
province of Kashmir, and also civilians in cities such as Mumbai and New
Delhi, are linked to al-Qaeda. Increasingly,
Washington
sees India as the middle portion of a democratic axis of friends that
stretches from Israel to Japan.
Finally, a
rising India is seen as the best counterbalance to
China,
which is emerging rapidly as a world power – without the assistance of
external sponsors. With the approaching fifth anniversary of the September
11 terrorist attacks on America, many forget that Mr Bush spent his first
nine months in office thinking up ways to contain China, which he branded a
"strategic competitor". One such method was to boost funding for Star Wars
II, an anti-ballistic missile system that – if it ever worked – would partly
be aimed at blunting China's nuclear reach. India was one of the first
countries to welcome the system and request its protection whenever – or if
ever – the much-derided programme bore fruit. Mr Bush did not forget New
Delhi's immediate offer of support.
Five years
later, New Delhi presides over a growing economy that is exciting US
investors. India also possesses a growing nuclear arsenal (thought to be at
least 100 warheads) that will expand with the help of Mr Bush's deal. There
are many peculiarities to this strange relationship – and many critics as
well. One certainty is that it will be an increasingly important fixture on
the global stage in years to come.
As
‘The Economist’ recently reported “Keep watching India’s growth toward
superpower status—just one part of the inevitable rise of Asia!”
Top of
the page
India's
field of greens
30 August 2006, Fortune magazine, By John Elliott
Emaan Singh Mann is a happy farmer, because FieldFresh, a new company that
plans to become India's first large-scale exporter of produce, has leased 90
acres of his land to grow vegetables that need less water than the wheat,
rice, and sugarcane he used to cultivate. FieldFresh will pay him slightly
more than the $30,000 a year he was getting, and it hires his tractors as
well as pays his workers.
"I might have got out of agriculture," says
Mann, 35, who is the son of a prominent local politician and who opened a
computer-assisted-design school in nearby
Chandigarh 18
months ago as a hedge. Now okra and chilies grown on Mann's land go to a
warehouse for cooling, then travel 200 kilometers by road in a refrigerated
truck to Amritsar, where they're put on a flight to
Britain.
That may not seem a big deal, but for
India
it is a second Green Revolution, which could become as important as the
first.
Until recently, like tens of millions of other
farmers, Mann had been forced by law to sell his produce at mandis, a
network of local markets originally introduced to protect poor farmers from
exploitation but now controlled by cartels of traders, bureaucrats, and
moneylenders. He would be paid the official minimum price or less for his
produce, but no one would tell him what vegetable varieties sold well or
show any interest in improving quality. The produce would then be sent via
other middlemen on a slow and often hot journey to retail customers. En
route, according to estimates by agriculture expert Abhijit Sen, a member of
India's planning commission, between 30% and 40% of it would rot before it
got to market.
With few refrigerated packing centers, no
regional distribution network, and an inefficient fleet of trucks,
India
couldn't sustain large-scale vegetable production, let alone an export
business. Now market pressure - the potential for export and a rapidly
growing domestic demand for reliable produce from new supermarket chains--is
driving change.
"Organized supermarkets have to have an
organized back end," says Lynn Forester de Rothschild, founder and CEO of
E.L. Rothschild, a British investment firm owned by a branch of the
Rothschild banking family. E.L. Rothschild is a fifty-fifty investor in
FieldFresh with Bharti Enterprises, one of
India's two
biggest telecom operators, which is planning to set up a nationwide retail
chain, probably with
Britain's
Tesco, as well as an export business. "There is a compelling case for India
to feed the world, using inherent strengths that haven't been exploited at
all," says Bharti chairman Sunil Mittal.
FieldFresh leases 4,200 acres on 78 farms in
Punjab, producing beans, snow peas, carrots, okra, baby corn and other
vegetables for export to Europe and the Middle East. In other parts of India
it is buying produce on contract from farmers, guaranteeing to pay market
prices, though farmers are free to sell elsewhere. This contract system will
probably become FieldFresh's main business model once farmers have learned
to produce consistently high-quality crops using new seeds, fertilizers, and
techniques the company provides.
The benefits are already visible: "It has had
an astounding impact on my village," says Mann, "with more employment and
higher family earnings alleviating a lot of social problems - and I'm
learning new ways of doing things."
With low wages of $1 to $3 a day in a
labor-intensive business,
India has a
clear cost advantage over many producing countries. But FieldFresh's initial
export attempts last year proved disastrous. Fifteen out of 20 containers of
grapes, as well as shipments of mushrooms and okra, were wasted because of
poor-quality skins, pest attacks, or airport delays. "It was a learning
phase," says Mittal, who has persuaded the government to set up India's
first perishable-produce centers at airports in Delhi and Amritsar and to
relax lengthy and often corrupt customs procedures.
Reliance, one of
India's two
largest industrial groups, has even bigger plans. In June its chairman,
Mukesh Ambani, announced a $5.6 billion multiyear investment in agriculture
and retail. He aims to make a new company, Reliance Retail, the dominant
player in the sector. Ambani says he wants to deliver "better returns for
the Indian farmer and producer by connecting them directly to Indian and
global consumers, and lower prices and better product quality for
consumers." He is already growing mangoes on land adjacent to Reliance's oil
refinery at Jamnagar and plans to become India's biggest mango exporter,
selling 3,600 tons annually within five years
With 77% of
India's
population relying on agriculture for a living, improvements in efficiency
and new markets have the potential to benefit large numbers of people. The
initiatives by Bharti, Reliance, and other companies will undoubtedly bring
advantages of scale that have largely been missing in a nation where the
average land holding is only 2
acres and 60% of agricultural output is consumed by farmers'
families.
India's
Agriculture Secretary, Radha Singh, is backing the big companies' entry into
vegetables and fruits because of the obvious growth potential and the impact
they can have on farmers' performance. She is also encouraging states to
relax the mandis' monopoly and improve infrastructure.
Top of the page
An Awakening in
Bihar
21
August 2006, Business Week magazine (USA)
Every
April, some 230,000 Indian youths sharpen their pencils and sit for the
intensely competitive entrance exam to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)
-- the seven prestigious schools that train India's top-notch engineers and
entrepreneurs. After the grueling six-hour test, only 5,000 students are
offered a place in the IITs. Most come from middle-class backgrounds and
prepare for the exams through private coaching. But in the past few years, a
small group of desperately poor, talented students have made it into the
IITs, thanks to the Ramanujan School of Mathematics.
The
school, named after a famous Indian mathematician, is even more intense than
the IITs themselves. Located in Patna, the capital of Bihar, one of India's
least developed states, the Ramanujan School trains just 30 students a year
to take the IIT exam. Anand Kumar, 33, a local mathematician, and Abhayanand,
52, Patna's deputy director general of police and a lover of physics,
founded the school in 2003 to help promising locals get ahead in the
caste-based society.
They
scoured Bihar's least privileged communities for 30 bright students to coach
for the exam, providing free lessons and housing. They call their group the
Super 30. "Intelligence is not birth-specific," says Abhayanand. In the
first year, 16 of the group made it into the IITs. The next year, 22 made
it. "This year," Kumar says confidently, "all 30 will get into the IITs."
Santosh
Kumar, 19, is one of this year's Super 30, and his story is typical of his
classmates. He's from Dumari, a village in the Bihata district, about 22
miles from Patna. Nearly all the village's 3,000 residents scratch out
meager livings as farmers. Santosh's sister and three brothers studied up to
10th grade but then returned to the fields.
Santosh
wanted more. His school had no roof, no doors, and no teachers half the
time, but he borrowed books and tutored two young students for 70 cents a
month. He also sold vegetables the family cultivated in a nearby market
town. "I didn't even know which subjects I was good at, and I'd certainly
never heard of IIT. No one had," he says. Then an eighth-grade teacher
noticed his mathematical talent and encouraged him to study further. Santosh
saw that "education was the only way out of poverty," he says. "I went to
Anand Kumar and told him: 'I dream of IIT, but I have no money.' He gave me
his test, and I came second in the class. [He] let me into his Super 30 --
free," Santosh recalls.
For seven months,
Santosh studied every morning for four hours, then sat down for a three-hour
test in math, physics, and chemistry, and after a break studied three more
hours. From six to nine in the evening, he attended a class in the same
subjects and prepared for the next day's test until 2 a.m. His work paid off
last spring, when he won a coveted seat at the IIT in Kharagpur, near
Calcutta. (He ranked 3,537 out of the 5,000 students chosen.) Santosh now
aims to earn a doctorate in chemistry and become an inventor. His hero is
Abdul Kalam, India's current President and father of the nation's missile
program. Just as important, Santosh is on track to be the first person from
Dumari to graduate from university, making him a hero in the eyes of his
village.
Top of the
page |
|
31 Aug '06
15 Aug '06
31 Jul'06
15 Jul'06
30 Jun'06
26 Jun '06
15 Jun '06
News Updates
31 May '06
15 May '06
30 Apr '06
15 Apr '06
31 Mar '06
15 Mar '06
28 Feb '06
31 Jan '06
15 Jan '06
|
