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15 March 2007 -
News Updates
Lighting up rural India - Fortune
An unlikely vision - TIME
Pushing education in India - Business Week
China pushing India on the outer - The Australian
Chess came from India - The Australian
Lighting up rural
India
15
March 2007, Business 2.0 (Fortune Magazine), By Snigdha Sen
The rose pickers of one village outside
Bangalore,
India, typically got up before the sun, grabbed a basket with one hand and a
lamp with the other, and hurried to the fields so they could bring their
wares to market in time for the dawn crowds.
These were not the most obvious customers for
Harish Hande, a 37-year-old engineer with a dream of selling solar power,
not least because they seemed unable to pay for it. But Hande and his solar
energy company, Selco
India,
realized that the rose pickers were prime candidates for solar-powered
headlamps and partnered with local banks to help the workers get loans to
buy them. Wearing the charged lamps in the predawn darkness, the pickers can
work with both hands; they've doubled their productivity and boosted their
take-home pay and now have enough income to start paying down the headlamp
loans.
That's just one of the opportunities Selco has
brought to the southern state of Karnataka. Though foreign institutional
investment in
India
has increased 385 percent to $9.7 billion during the past five years,
according to the Confederation of Indian Industry, many workers are still
struggling - and Hande, who was inspired to form Selco in 1995 while
studying energy engineering at the
University
of Massachusetts at Lowell, believed solar power could help.
The
Bangalore
company has installed 65,000 solar lighting systems since its launch and had
sales of $3 million in its latest fiscal year, even though two-thirds of its
customers survive on less than $4 a day. Selco's customers range from poor
daily-wage laborers to institutions like schools and seminaries. All buy
solar panels at the same rate: about $450 for a 40-watt system that can
light several 7-watt bulbs for four hours between charges.
To make it work, Selco had to persuade rural
banks to lend hundreds of dollars to people, like the rose pickers, who have
almost no money - a tough sell. "Rural people don't pay, I was told," Hande
recalls. Now fewer than 10 percent of his customers default, and Indian
lenders have about $10 million available to rural customers for solar
financing.
Despite recent spikes in the price of solar
gear that have threatened the company's business model, Selco
India
continues to make ambitious moves to reach poor communities. Last year it
became the exclusive technology partner of Sewa Bank, which caters to
low-income female entrepreneurs. It plans to become a one-stop energy shop
providing services such as solar heating and cooking options to bank
members.
Here are some lessons from the company's
experience in tapping a market that many believed to be untappable. This
ignited the entrepreneurial spirit in people like R. Vijaya Kumar, who
drives a motorized three-wheel auto rickshaw. He uses the solar panel above
his 15-foot-square house on the outskirts of
Bangalore to
charge 30 small batteries that he lends to street vendors for 15 rupees per
battery per night. Kumar's battery rental business has boosted his monthly
income from 4,500 rupees to 13,000, leaving him with an extra 4,500 rupees
after his loan payment. Selco
India
has given birth to 16 such entrepreneurs, who work with about 750 street
hawkers, and the resulting excitement has driven demand for its products.
Company co-founder Neville Williams, who is now chairman of Maryland-based
Standard Solar, says the process taught him the value of selling a branded
experience, including product, installation, and follow-up services. "We are
bringing back the knowledge we gained in India to the United States," he
says.
Top of
the page
An Unlikely
vision
5
March 2007, TIME magazine, By Carolyn Sayre
Neuroscientists have long been convinced that the first few
years of life are a crucial period for brain development--a time when
connections between neurons are being forged at a prodigious rate as a baby
learns to make sense of the external world. Interfere with that process, and
you can cause permanent, irrevocable damage. If a child is born blind, for
example, it's pretty much over by age 6. You can fix the eyes, and they
might be able to perceive light and dark. Without the right visual circuitry
in place, though, there's no way to form images--the essence of true sight.
But then there's the patient known as S.R.D. Discovered by
researchers four years ago in Ahmedabad, India, she was a 32-year-old,
dirt-poor maid who had been born with severe cataracts. They were removed
surgically when she was 12--and within a year, despite what neuroscientific
dogma would have predicted, S.R.D. learned to see. Her case, described in
the December issue of Psychological Science, is forcing scientists to
rethink their long-held beliefs about vision. "There is a critical period
for perfect acuity," says Pawan Sinha, associate professor of neuroscience
at M.I.T. and a co-author of the paper. "But there is not a critical period
for learning to do complex visual tasks."
This surprising insight had its genesis in 2002 when Sinha
traveled to his native
India --where nearly half
a million children suffer from blindness. Many of these cases would have
been preventable with the proper medical care, and, says Sinha, "I wanted to
help the children get treatment." So with funding from the National
Institutes of Health, he launched Project Prakash (it means "light" in
Sanskrit), a humanitarian initiative to help expand eye care in India.
He had little hope, though, of restoring vision to children
who were past the critical development period. While research with humans
has been very limited, experiments with animals have shown that if you place
a normal kitten, for example, in a completely dark chamber immediately after
birth, the kitten will become irrevocably blind. As a result, doctors in
developing nations are often reluctant to perform surgeries like cataract
removals on children. The risks--infection, mostly--outweigh the meager
rewards.
Evidently, though, nobody told the surgeons who operated on
S.R.D. And as Sinha and his colleagues discovered, it's a good thing. Even
though S.R.D.'s visual acuity topped out at 20/200--considered legally blind
in the U.S.--her
brain had, in defiance of theory, learned to interpret visual information.
One year after surgery, she could recognize her family's faces and identify
objects. And that's a very big deal. Dr. Suma Ganesh, a pediatric
ophthalmologist at the Dr. Shroff's Charity Eye Hospital in Old Delhi,
India, used to believe that operating on blind children past the critical
period was hopeless. But Project Prakash showed her that just isn't the
case. "Even if a blind kid, after an operation, manages to see up to three
meters, it makes a big difference," Ganesh says.
Important as the project has been to neuroscience, says
Yuri Ostrovsky, a graduate student at M.I.T. and lead author of the paper,
"the best thing about it is the humanitarian aspect." Project Prakash has
funded about half a dozen mobile eye camps--teams of ophthalmologists that
travel to remote areas of the country and provide eye care. The concept
itself isn't new, but unlike other camps, these are aimed just at children.
Still, the science is remarkable. Since hearing S.R.D.'s
story, the researchers have analyzed a total of 14 children and one adult at
the eye hospital. All of them have shown significant improvement in less
than a year. While most were treated surgically, the adult--a 29-year-old
man with congenital aphakia (an eye missing its lens)--just needed a pair of
glasses. Eighteen months later, he was able to see.
Although the
results are undeniable, it's still unclear what's going on in the patients'
brains. The researchers will start to explore this question next summer by
taking pictures of the brain before and after surgery using functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners. Since the brain devotes roughly
35% of its power to vision, they hypothesize that when this sense is
compromised, others, like smell and touch, take over the visual-processing
circuits. After surgery, they suspect, the sense of sight reclaims its
territory inside the brain.
Top of the page
Pushing
education in India
13 March 2007, Business Week, By Surendra K. Kaushik
India's long-term
success in software, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, engineering, textiles, art,
literature, music, movies, domestic and international trade, and indeed a
better running of the government and the public sector, is based on
knowledge-based production, distribution, and consumption of goods and
services. There is a direct link between education and standard of living in
modern times for all countries with per-capita income both above and below
India's. In general, the higher the percentage of college-educated people in
the total population, the higher the gross domestic product (as well as
per-capita income).
Norway, Sweden,
Denmark, Finland, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, and
Japan, for example, are on top of the economic game because a quarter or
more of their populations have college-level education. The other end of the
spectrum is represented by the poorest countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America, where less than 1% of the population boasts a higher education. In
India, the proportion is 4%.
So if India has set a
goal of becoming a "developed country" by 2020, at least 10% of its
population must have a college education—the minimum for any European Union
country. That is a tall order for a country that still suffers near 30%
illiteracy and where about one-fourth of primary-school-age children are not
in the classroom. I agree with readers who want the government to achieve
universal education for all of India's children. That is also the U.N.'s
Millennium Goal for education, but it doesn't look like India will achieve
it by the 2015 deadline.
The United Progressive
Alliance (UPA) government in India tried to enshrined the quota system (and
thus the caste system) in India's constitution in 2006. India's budget,
presented to Parliament in the first week of March, 2007, contemplates a
sizable increase in education spending but also reinforces the caste and
class system by allocating sums for people in different groups.
It is
interesting that the more than 10 million educated Indians around the globe
represent a wide range of education they received in different conditions in
India. It is their education, and not their caste, that made them successful
in the world. The main point is that the government should continue to
invest more and more into education for all, as well as providing incentives
for the private education system, until India achieves the 10%
college-educated benchmark—after which the system can be self-sustaining. By
that time, political and business leadership in India should have enough
courage to undo the caste- and religion-based quota system.
Top of the page
China
lobby keeps India on the outer
10/ 15/ 17 March 2007,
The Australian, By
Bruce Loudon/ Dennis Shanahan/ By Greg Sheridan
The Australia-Japan
joint declaration on security, signed in Tokyo on March 13, has annoyed
China. Indeed the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman immediately criticized
the Australia-Japan joint declaration, as did Chinese academics. Meanwhile,
the US had proposed widening the trilateral security dialogue between Japan,
the US and Australia to include India. This is an extremely good idea and
would bring the four great democracies together and that would encircle
China.
Given that the
US is the world's
sole superpower,
Japan is the second
largest economy in the world, and
India is the second
largest nation and the largest democracy on the globe, this is absolutely
splendid company for
Australia
to join and
India
is as natural a friend as
Australia
could have in
Asia.
An arrangement like this with
India is gold for
Australia.
If we don't join it, it will happen without us.
India's military
power, economic growth and geographic position would significantly offset
China's emerging
power, which is of concern to many in the Bush administration. The
disclosure of this plan that would close the back door on
China is likely to
cause deeper concern in
Beijing,
which is already accusing the
US of attempting
to contain its growth and influence.
One of the sources of
possible inertia towards India are the nuclear non-proliferation ayatollahs,
who cannot abide India having nuclear weapons, though they are utterly
relaxed about China possessing them. This sentiment has often played the
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade false. I can remember talking to a
senior DFAT man just after India conducted nuclear tests in 1998. The
Americans will never accept this, he told me, India will never get away with
it. Of course the
US
accepted it in about five minutes and Canberra spent several years repairing
its relationship with
Delhi.
The idea for an
institutionalized India-Japan-US-Australia dialogue came up first in the
wake of the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. On the US's initiative, the
four nations formed the core group to deliver aid to devastated populations
as fast as possible. They co-operated superbly and they unconsciously and
unintentionally also made a significant geo-strategic point.
Meanwhile, INDIA is
set to expand its military ties with Israel following a secret visit to the
Jewish state by the chief of India's 1.2 million-strong army. General JJ
Singh is believed to be in Israel discussing training for elite special
forces, joint military exercises and anti-terrorism and anti-infiltration
strategies - all issues that go to the heart of India's current security
problems with its Islamic neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Until now,
Indian leaders - despite Israel's emergence as the second-biggest arms
supplier to the country after Russia - have been wary of openly building
ties with Israel for fear of inciting unrest among the country's 150 million
Muslims and the displeasure of leftist groups within the ruling United
Progressive Alliance coalition.
Top of the page
Chess came from
India,
experts claim
12 March 2007, The Australian,
By Jeremy Page
THE riddle of the origins of chess has baffled enthusiasts and historians
for decades, with countries from China to Ireland claiming to have invented
the game. Now a research team claims to have moved a step closer to proving
that chess originated in the 5th century, around the northern Indian city of
Kanauj when it became the capital of the Maukhari kingdom, the dominant
force in the region.
The team of four believes that terracotta warriors, horses, chariots and
elephants found in the area are not toys, as long assumed by Indian experts,
but pieces used in a strategic board game called chaturanga. Chaturanga is
generally considered to be the predecessor of chess, which evolved into its
current form when transferred to Europe in the 15th century, but its precise
origins remain a mystery. Renate Syed, an Indologist from Munich University,
who was on the team, has already claimed to have found textual proof that an
Indian King Sharvavarman, who ruled there from 560 to 585, transferred
chaturanga to contemporary Persian ruler, Khusrau Anushirvan, in lieu of
saltpetre, a type of gunpowder in the 6th century.
That thesis caused some consternation in Iran, where many historians argue
that the Persians invented the game, which they called chatrang, and
transferred it to India. It also ruffled feathers in China, where many
believe that chess originated from a board game called xiangqi, which is
mentioned in documents from the Warring States Period (403-221 BC).
Dr Syed told The
Times. “I am quite sure about the origin of chess — the king, the place, the
time.” The Indian poet Bana also mentions in one of his works that
chaturanga was played in Kanauj around 630, using a board of 64 squares
called the ashtapada. Other countries that claim to have invented chess
include Egypt, Greece, Italy and Russia.
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