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India - News
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News Updates - 15
January 2006
Low-cost lamps brighten the future of rural
India Until just three months ago, life in this humble Maharashtrian village KHADAKWADI, without electricity would come to a grinding halt after sunset. Inside his mud-and-clay home, Ganpat Jadhav's three children used to study in the dim, smoky glow of a kerosene lamp. And when their monthly fuel quota of four liters dried up in just a fortnight, they strained their eyes using the light from a cooking fire. That all changed with the installation of low-cost, energy-efficient lamps that are powered entirely by the sun. "Children can now study at night, elders can manage their chores better," Jadhav says. "Life doesn't halt anymore when darkness falls." The lights were installed by the Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation (GSBF), a Bombay-based nongovernmental organization focused on bringing light to rural India. Some 100,000 Indian villages do not have electricity. The GSBF lamps use LEDs — light-emitting diodes — that are four times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. After a $55 installation cost, solar energy lights the lamp free of charge. LED lighting is an example of a low-cost technology that could allow the rural poor to leapfrog into the 21st century. As many as 80 million people in India light their houses primarily with kerosene. The fuel is dangerous, dirty, and — despite being subsidized — consumes nearly 4 percent of a typical rural Indian household's budget. LED lamps, or more specifically white LEDs, are believed to produce nearly 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp and almost 50 times the amount of useful light of a conventional bulb. If manufactured locally, the cost of his LED lamp could plummet to $22, because there would be no heavy import duties. "But we need close to $5 million investment for this," says importer Chaddha. "This technology can light an entire rural village with less energy than that used by a single conventional 100-watt light bulb. The rural markets would be able to afford it, if they had access to micro-credit." says Dave Irvine-Halliday, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary in Canada and the founder of Light Up the World Foundation (LUTW). In villages neighboring Khadakwadi, the newly installed LED lamps are a subject of envy, even for those connected to the grid. Those connected to the grid have to face power cuts up to 6 or 7 hours a day. Constant energy shortages and blackouts are common because of a lack of power plants, transmission, and distribution losses caused by old technology and electricity theft from the grid. A GSBF official instructs Jadhav and his family to clean the lamp regularly. LED systems require far less maintenance, last longer, and as villagers jokingly say, generate "no electricity bills." The lamps provided by GSBF have enough power to provide just four hours of light a day. But that's enough for people to get their work done in the early hours of the night and is more reliable than light generated off the electrical grid.
HOLLYWORLD - New India ink Hollywood's search for new mythologies now extends to the Indian subcontinent. One of the world's greatest stories, India's Ramayana, is being retold as a post-apocalyptic comic book, in "Ramayana Reborn," with an animated television spinoff for kids titled "The Seven Sounds." This is the brainchild of the newly launched Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation, an entertainment partnership between British billionaire Richard Branson, bestselling New Age author Deepak Chopra, film director Shekhar Kapur ("Bandit Queen" and "Elizabeth") and India's leading licenser of comic books, Gotham Entertainment Group, which has brought "Spider-Man" and "X-Men" to India. Gotham Chopra, Deepak's 30-year-old son, a former Channel One TV personality, author and producer, and the new venture's chief creative officer says "We felt that interest in this Asian-edged content, this is the growing wave. Richard, as a big Western billionaire, recognized that the future of entertainment is in the East, not necessarily in Hollywood." India is not a traditional comic powerhouse but where there will be an estimated 550 million teenagers by the year 2015. Despite the fact that India has a mature entertainment business, with movies and sports, it's had no big comic business. Virgin Comics is already in development on ‘Shakti’, which will focus on Indian content. Shakti means "power" in Hindi, and titles in the line include "Devi," which means "goddess". Chopra describes the character as "Asia's first super woman. She wears the different faces of the goddess." Another story line concerns a 19th century English soldier who becomes a disciple of a sadhu, or Indian wise man, who trains him to become a spiritual warrior. "A lot of people, like my father and Shekhar, they're tired of India being relegated to being this backroom, this place for outsourcing. They both felt that India has this incredible pool of talent, and [wanted to], if they could, be part of the creative renaissance." He added: "My father is writing a novel on the life of Buddha. We're doing the companion graphic novel."
Beaming In Salvation In his modest home in the eastern Indian city of Asansol, Jati Shanker rises before the sun. The 56-year-old engineer heads for the living room, switches on the television and spreads a blanket on the concrete floor. Soon his wife, a teacher, joins him. They watch Swami Ramdev, a young saffron-clad Hindu guru, demonstrate yogic postures and pranayama (rhythmic breathing exercises) while offering simple exhortations on healthy and peaceful living. Each day the Shankers follow his instructions carefully for an hour. "Our lives have become so much better since we started watching Swami Ramdev's program about six months ago," says Shanker. "I am already off my daily hypertension drug." Like the Shankers, millions of Indians are now turning to television as a source for inner peace. Free-market reform may be bringing new prosperity, but it is also creating unprecedented levels of anxiety and stress. To help Indians cope, many gurus and instructors have started spiritual TV programs to encourage healthy and peaceful living. In short order, spiritual channels have become not only a palliative for stressed souls but also a path to fiscal salvation for their promoters. Since its 2001 launch, the Aastha network, India's premier spiritual channel, has seen its domestic viewership climb from 27 percent of the 62 million Indian households wired for cable and satellite to more than 48 percent in 2005. Aastha — whose main attraction is Swami Ramdev and discourses on yoga and alternative therapies, is also available in high-Asian-population markets like the United States and Canada. Last August the Mumbai-headquartered CMM Broadcasting Network put Aastha on Britain's BSkyB direct-to-home platform. There is a thirst for programs based on Indian spiritualism, tradition, devotion, yoga and meditation. Spiritual channels have taken their place alongside entertainment, news and game shows as a staple of Indian television. Aware of the stations' rampant popularity, regular news and entertainment channels now slot early-morning spiritual programs into their daily schedules. Sometimes the spiritual channels televise events like the seven-to 10-day early-morning yoga camps that Swami Ramdev holds in football stadiums, ministering to thousands of people with chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, obesity and arthritis. Though the channels initially attracted a huge following among senior citizens and housewives, they have garnered younger viewers recently—particularly those who are too busy to attend regular discourses at temples and satsangs, Hindu religious gatherings. "Our spirituality gives immediate benefits to the practitioners—physical, mental and emotional," says Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, another prominent face on all spiritual channels. "It doesn't say you have to follow this and that. Instead, it encompasses all the philosophies of the world." And you don't even have to leave your couch.
Teeing Off Amid Peaks at 8,000 feet There is the type of golf tourist, for whom a course's rating or championship pedigree is barely relevant. For these golfers, the main thing is that the course be situated in the most outlandishly spectacular setting imaginable. The idea is to be someplace so sublimely beautiful that the game of golf is just an excuse to spend five tranquil hours walking in paradise. One such place is the Himalayas, where a handful of courses are scattered among the old hill stations thousands of feet in the air, framed by towering mountain peaks. In lush Kashmir, there are the Gulmarg Golf Club, built in 1904 and which, at 8,960 feet, calls itself the world's highest green golf course; the Naldehra Golf Club near Shimla, a lofty gem; and 8,100 feet high near Darjeeling, India, the Senchal Golf Course, from where you might see Everest in the distance. These and a course among the tea gardens of Assam, India, make up the entirety of golf in the Himalayas. They are few and far between, hard to get to, and utterly breathtaking in their awesome beauty - the kind of places where your 70-yard slice doesn't matter a whit. Top of the page
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