How To Hire A Public Relations Consultant?

1. Situations when you should consider hiring a very small PR company or freelancer:

 Your budget is very small (eg. under $5,000 for a local
publicity project). Small agencies and freelancers have very low
overheads, often operating from a small home office. Many of them
are very competent writers, publicists and special events coordinators
and can deliver a decent project for relatively low hourly fees (let’s
say under $150 an hour).

 Your problem is relatively simple and doesn’t require a team of
people. A freelancer doesn’t have a staff of people who can be called
in at a moment’s notice. But he or she can do the job with the resources at hand.

 Your problem is purely local. A freelancer probably knows the local market well.

 Your situation isn’t urgent. A sole practitioner can’t juggle several
projects at once; he or she probably has other clients and you may
have to wait your turn. You’re not in a panic rush.

 You don’t need highly specialized skills. The average small
agency or freelancer usually is a generalist; a good competent generalist should be able to handle your needs.

2. Situations in which you should hire a larger (usually international) PR
company:

 You need help in one or more distant markets. An international
agency has representation, contacts and intimate local knowledge in
many markets.

 You need the support of allies. Let’s say you have a government
problem, in a western nation. Generally government isn’t going to meet
your needs unless you can meet theirs – in other words, mobilize your
allies and support for your position, so that what you want is politically
possible for the people in charge. International public relations agencies have the
resources and “reach” to line up allies and mobilize grassroots support
for your position.

 Your problem is complex and intractable. “All of us are smarter
than any one of us”: the international agency’s ability to tap the ideas,
experience and contact network of hundreds or even thousands of top-drawer
PR people around the world can put awesome thinking power at
your disposal. No matter how arcane or complex your problem, the
collective brainpower of the international agency has dealt with it – and
solved it – somewhere in the world.

 You are driven more by value than price. If the stakes are high –
the launch of a make-or-break product, the solution to a major
corporate crisis – you need the best people in the business …no matter where they reside. International agencies charge higher fees because they have to hire and retain top-tier people and pay the higher costs of expensive research and client support.

 You need a business partner, not a “supplier”. International
agencies are interested in building long term relationships with first-class
clients. The best firms don’t have to work at the bottom of the food chain – charging discount rates to companies nobody really likes.

3. How to evaluate the candidates

Follow these checklists and you’ll at least be able to draw up a good short list of
possible PR providers. Now proceed to interview them and make your choice based
on:
-Chemistry. A relationship with a PR company will most likely work out
if you “click” with the key people you’ll be working with. Did you like
each other? Did they seem to have a passionate interest in you and your problem? You’re going to be trusting them with sensitive information and depending on their competence and determination to help you. Were they objective … and candid?

-Thinking. Did they take the trouble to learn something about your
business, your industry, your competitors, or your problems? Did they ask smart questions? Did they make suggestions that were smart and creative, but also practical?

-Track record, as measured by client testimonials. PR professionals
are usually good talkers and presenters; the question is… can they deliver? Find out who their clients are and what they’ve accomplished for them. Ask for references and talk to those references honestly. Would they hire the firm again? No firm is perfect; what were their weaknesses?

The best people in public relations are looking for the same thing that you are: a
chance to work with business people who are smart, ethical, highly committed and
professional. You deserve each other.

How To Write A Comprehensive Public Relations Plan?

By M H Ahssan

The public relations plan is one of the most important documents you will produce in your career.

It has been said that public relations is the result of form and substance. While this is not exactly true, it does have some basis when you’re trying to persuade your client or boss to let you spend their money. How you say it (form) and what you say (substance) will likely determine your success or failure in getting your proposal accepted.

Let’s face it, clients and bosses are impressed by the way things look — just like you, they’re only human. All other things being equal, a well-organized and attractively prepared proposal will win out every time. (For the purposes of this document, the term “client” will be used from now on. You may substitute “boss” if your situation dictates it.)

So, what can you do to help ensure success? Well, there are a number of elements in an effective public relations proposal presentation of which you must be aware. Begin each section with the appropriate subheads:

Letter of transmittal
Executive summary
Situation analysis
Problem and consequences
Campaign goal
Audience identification and messages
Audience objectives
Strategies
Communication Tactics
Schedule
Budget
Evaluation plans
Pertinent research
Communication samples
Each of these elements is vital. Each plays an important role in building a logical, well-planned proposal. A detailed discussion of each follows.

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
This item is an adjunct to — and precedes — the actual plan. As simple as it may sound, you need to transmit your plan to the client or your boss. Standard accepted business practice dictates that you write a letter or memorandum of transmittal. Limit the transmittal letter/memo to a single page.

If you are submitting the plan to a client, use the following format:

A cordial opening paragraph stating that you are submitting “the attached plan for XXX campaign, as promised.” Follow this with a brief description of the plan, including the campaign’s “bottom line” — income expectations, expenses, net “profit” or loss — in other words, what your client is expected to lay out for the public relations campaign.
A reference to the executive summary that follows.
A statement that you either look forward to presenting the plan in person as a previously designated time and place, or will contact the client to arrange a meeting to discuss the plan.
Gracious words of “thank you” for the opportunity to submit the plan.
Two caveats: Spell the company’s and client’s names correctly, and double-check titles and addresses. You don’t want two strikes against you before the client gets to the meat of your proposal.

If you are submitting the plan to your boss, make sure to economize even further on your words. You can eliminate some of the opening and closing niceties.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Also an adjunct to the plan, this is a summary of your proposed campaign that covers several key points most likely to interest the executive who reads your plan. Here is a suggested format:

Executive Summary
The Problem: State here what you believe the problem to be.
Program Goal: State here what your ultimate goal is.
Target Audiences: (1) Your primary audience, (2) your secondary (intervening) audience(s), and (3) your tertiary (special) audience(s).
Audience Objectives: (1) What you expect your primary audience to do, (2) what you expect your intervening audience(s) to do, and (3) what you expect your special audience(s) to do.
Major Strategy: State your major strategy here, listing the key tactics that you will use in your campaign.

Recommended Budget: State your total anticipated income and sources, your anticipated expenses, and the anticipated net profit or loss.
Evaluation Plans: State how you expect to evaluate (and expect to know) whether or not you’ve achieved each of your campaign and audience objectives.

SITUATION ANALYSIS
The very first item in the plan itself should be an analysis of the current situation, based on results of your research. The situation analysis contains all of the information and data you collected about the internal and external environments.

Depending on how much research is required and has been conducted, and how complicated and/or involved the organization’s problems are, the situation analysis can run from one to three or more pages.

While a problem statement directs the planning effort to a particular set of conditions, the situation analysis provides details about internal and external contexts. It includes a literature review (which requires a bibliography of sources).

Use the following outline as a guide to writing the situation analysis:

The Situation Analysis: Information To Look For

INTERNAL FACTORS
Statements of the organization’s mission, charter, bylaws, history and structure.
Lists, biographical sketches and photos of key individuals -— officers, board members, and program managers.
Detailed descriptions of programs, products, services, etc.
Statistics about resources, budget, staffing and programs.
Summaries of interviews with key personnel about the problem situation.
Copies of policy statements and procedures related to the problem.
Complete descriptions of how the organization currently handles the problem.
Lists and descriptions of the organization’s controlled communication media.

EXTERNAL FACTORS
Clippings from newspapers, magazines, trade publications, and newsletters tracing print media coverage of organization and problem situation.
Reports of radio, television and cable placements.
Content analyses of media coverage.
Lists of media, journalists, columnists, and free-lance writers who report news about the organization and related issues.
Lists and descriptions of individuals and groups that share the organization’s concerns, interests, and views (including their controlled print and broadcast media).
Lists and descriptions of individuals and groups that oppose the organization’s positions on the issues (including their controlled print and broadcast media).
Survey results of public’s awareness, knowledge, opinions, and behaviors related to the organization and problem situation.
Schedules of special events, observances, and other important dates related to the organization and problem.
Lists of government agencies, legislators, and officials with regulatory or legislative power affecting the organization and the problem situation.
Copies of relevant government regulations, legislation, bills pending, referenda, publications, and hearing reports.
Copies of published research on topics related to the problem situation.
Lists of important reference books, records, and directories, as well as their locations in the organization.
When you write the situation analysis, present your research findings in a logical and easily understood order. List results of client research, situational research, and audience research. If you have used the suggested outline above, you should have all of the necessary pertinent information you need.

ASSUMPTIONS
No matter how much research you’ve done, something always seems to be missing. If you’ve done your homework well, you should have no assumptions to present here.

In some cases, however, assumptions are inevitable and as a practical matter, unavoidable. So, when you write your situation analysis, you may need to make some assumptions about various aspects of the situation. If you must make assumptions, list them in a supplemental section, noting what missing information you can reasonably assume.

“A friendly media” is not a valid assumption. Professionals never make assumptions, especially about the news media.

PROBLEM & CONSEQUENCES
Based on your research, and particularly on your preliminary interviews with the client, you should be able to isolate the overriding problem, and determine what will happen if the problem is not solved.

The problem statement itself should be concise and very specific. If possible, write it in 25 words or less, using standard subject-verb-object order.

This step is crucial to your plan and to the success of your campaign. Mess up here and you will end up ‘way off course. Think of the problem statement as your starting course to the moon. One degree to the left or right, up or down, and you’ll miss the moon by thousands of miles.

It’s the same with the problem statement. Identify the wrong problems, and you may as well not even turn in your plan.

Get to the root cause of your problem, and try to identify exactly what attitude (what they think) or behavior (what they do) you need to influence.

Do you want attitudes crystallized, modified or reinforced? Be especially conscious of the ultimate behavior you want to evoke. Answer this question: “What exactly is it that we want them to do as a result of this campaign?”

And yet, proper problem identification and statement is still not enough. The client may recognize that there is a problem, but unless there is a consequence —- unless the client will lose something of value, whether it be profits, members, or quality of service — the client may remain unconvinced about your plan.

You must show the client what could result if something isn’t done to correct the problem identified above. Explain in one concise declarative sentence what the consequences will be.

CAMPAIGN GOAL
This is not a particularly difficult section to complete. But first, here’s a brief review of goals and objectives.

Goals are general directions, somewhat nebulous, that are not specific enough to be measured. Think of the word “go.” It has no end.

A good example is the signature line of the Star Trek television series: “To boldly go where no man (“no one” in Generations) has gone before.” You can’t measure it, and you probably will never know if the goals were accomplished, because once humans have gone somewhere, we’ve been there, and there are still other places to go since the universe is infinite and has no end.

Objectives, on the other hand, are specific and measurable. They can be output objectives, or they can be attitudinal or behavioral. But most of all, they can be measured. They are concise. They are specific. Think of the word “object.” You can touch it, it’s there, it’s actual, it’s finite.

Back to the goal. State your campaign goal simply and resolutely. State it confidently, with all the bravado you can muster, secure in the knowledge that the question, “Did you accomplish your goal?” can never be answered.

AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION & MESSAGES
Audience identification is vital to your campaign. You need to talk to the right people. You need to conserve valuable funds, time and manpower, and you cannot do this unless you target your publics carefully.

A word about publics, stakeholders and audiences: A “public” is a group of people with similar interests. “Stakeholders” are a special kind of public, composed of people who have a particular interest (or “stake”) in your organization. An “audience” is a public with whom you are communicating.

You need to find some intelligent answers to some equally intelligent questions.

Who exactly is going to be affected by your public relations campaign? Who exactly are you trying to persuade?
You’re going to need some cooperation from others; who will this be? Where are these people located? How can you find them? How can you get in touch with them?
The people you want to reach listen to opinion leaders; exactly who are these opinion leaders? Who and where are those credible, authoritative sources that your intended audience believes, and who can help you get your messages across?
Your audiences generally act the way you do -— they do the same things you do. What magazines and newspapers do they read? What radio stations do they tune in to? What TV shows do they watch? To what clubs and organizations do they belong? What professional associations do they join? What are their favorite charities? What are their children’s favorite participation sports?
So how to you reach them? Find out. Do your research.

Generally speaking, there are three types of audiences:

PRIMARY: This is the audience or public that you specifically want to influence. It’s the people whose behavior you’re trying to change. Influence them, and you’ve done your job well.
SECONDARY: These are “intervening” audiences. These are people who can intervene on your behalf and influence the primary audience. Convince them that you’re right, and they can help you get to the primary audience. You’ve heard of “third-party testimonials” that are more credible than your direct communication? Secondary audiences are those “third-party” people. Influence the secondary audiences and your job will become a bit easier. Their “endorsement” of your cause serves as their “testimonial.”
TERTIARY: (Pronounced “ter-she-arry”) These are “special” publics composed primarily of organized groups (e.g., clubs, councils, associations) that can mobilize quickly and endorse your cause. They usually have an established means of communication with their membership via newsletters and other media.
In your plan, identify who these people are, then prioritize them. Like the “inverted-pyramid” style of journalistic writing, audience prioritization will allow you to eliminate potential audiences from the bottom-up should the need arise because of budget cuts, time constraints or manpower reductions.

Once you’ve identified and prioritized your audiences in your plan, tell the client exactly what message you believe should be directed to each of the audiences you have selected.

Like the problem statement, your messages should be direct and declaratory, and they should articulate specific benefits to the audiences. Try out a number of messages, then settle on one per audience, selecting the one you consider most important to your campaign goal.

AUDIENCE OBJECTIVES
In this section, state exactly what your objectives are for each audiences you identified in the previous section. In general, there must be at least one objective per audience. This is usually sufficient. In come cases, however, you will have more than one objective for each audience.

Objectives should measure impact. Behavioral objectives are preferred (“Exactly what is it you want to get them to do?”), but the objectives can also be attitudinal (“What do you want them to think?”), or informational (“What do you want them to know that they didn’t know before?”).

Objectives also can measure your output — what you did. But unless output is central to your problem and contributes to solutions, try to keep these to a minimum.

State your objectives in specific and quantifiable (measurable) terms whenever possible. Set them in a time frame, and if you know what the budget is, tell the client what you expect the cost to be. The objectives should be reachable, they should be acceptable to the client, and they must be ethical.

A crystal-clear objective would read something like this: “Our objective is to deliver X results by Y date at a cost of Z dollars.”

Think of the goals as the treasure at the top of a stairway, and the objectives as the stairs.

STRATEGIES
In this section, you need to present a number of strategies, each of which will in itself solve the problem. This is one of the hardest sections to complete, especially for inexperienced practitioners who must rely on information provided by others, rather than on personal experience. However, it is so essential to the campaign’s success that every effort must be made to present excellent strategic alternatives.

There are four basic strategies:

Do nothing (inactive).
Do something only if necessary (reactive).
Do something before a problem arises (proactive).
Involve others in solving or heading off problems (interactive).
It may also be feasible to take a “multi-active” approach to solving the problem, in which case you would use elements from each basic type of strategy.

Whatever strategy is finally selected, know that it will help determine the success or failure of your proposed program. You may find it easier to select a strategy after reviewing the list of public relations initiatives (tactics, activities) that you will develop after conducting a number of creative brainstorming sessions.

Do not — repeat, do not — use the terms “inactive,”"reactive,” “proactive,” “interactive,” or “multi-active” in your plan, unless the client fully understands the terms and initiates their usage. The words can be considered public relations jargon and often are meaningless to the client. Don’t use these words as crutches in an attempt to avoid explaining your strategy in detail.

State that each strategy, when considered on its own merits independently of the other alternative strategies, is a viable option to be judged on its own strengths, and will definitely solve the problem. Eliminate any approach you believe will not solve the problem on its own. If a combination of approaches can solve the problem, list the combination as a strategic alternative.

Each alternative strategy will attain all of the objectives listed earlier. Again, each individual solution must be feasible, appropriate and acceptable. All possible solutions should be considered and presented — unless, of course, your particular problem is one of those rare cases that has but a single solution. No, strike that notion. Don’t be tempted by this intriguing possibility. Assume that your problem has two or more solutions.

Discuss all of the pros and cons of each strategy considered.

In doing so, try to offer options to the client. If you can identify business risks and opportunities, you give the client an opportunity to exercise informed judgement. Clients need viable options — they need to know each option’s advantages and disadvantages — in order to make decisions based on fact instead of emotion.

Clients don’t want to “shoot from the hip.” They want to make rational decisions.

Remember, you must take careful aim in everything you do in public relations. Don’t shoot from the hip: you could end up with powder burns on your butt.)

Finally, tell the client what your recommended approach or strategy is. Be sure to tell the client why you recommend this particular strategy, and be prepared to defend your choice under withering fire and challenge from the client. You can’t fake this part. It may be helpful to refer to the pros and cons you listed for each strategic alternative.

COMMUNICATION TACTICS
This is the section in which you tell the client exactly what communications initiatives you propose. If you have conducted some creative brainstorming, you should have developed a “shopping list” of possible tactics that will achieve your previously stated objectives.

Look at each tactic from the standpoint of what it will do to achieve your objectives.

Your tactics will include:

ACTION EVENTS: Non-written tactics such as special events, demonstrations, exhibits, parades, community contributions (manpower, talent, advice, money) and other non-verbal activities. Separate your action events into message tactics (which will be used to get your message across to the audience) and media tactics (how you will utilize the news media to publicize your action events).

COMMUNICATIONS TACTICS: Verbal tactics (oral and written) that use words or pictures. These include newsletters, flyers, news releases, brochures, direct mail, advertising, themes, slogans, the World Wide Web (WWW), and other initiatives that use words and language as their basis. As with your action events, separate communications initiatives into message tactics (which will be used to get your message directly to the audience), and media tactics (how you will utilize the news media to communicate your messages).

When presenting your tactics in this section, be sure to provide a brief one- to three-paragraph description of each tactic, especially noting the audiences to which the tactic is directed, the message you expect the audience to receive, your reasons for selecting this particular tactic (cite your research, focus group results, etc.), and the anticipated results.

SCHEDULE
You must show that you have thought through the plan to the smallest details. In this section, present your planning calendar. Be specific and comprehensive. Include specific dates whenever possible.

Tell the client exactly when you’re going to conduct the action events and communication tactics you noted earlier. Also, tell the client who will be doing the work.

List milestones and deadlines for each of the events and tactics. Plan writers always note when communication products and activities will culminate, but often forget milestones and deadlines.

For example, don’t just say that a brochure will be delivered to the office on July 17. You must also include milestones and deadlines, and let the client know that initial copy drafts are due on May 2, that three days are required for initial editing, that second drafts are due on May 10, that two more days are required for editing, that the final draft is due on May 17, and that final copy approval is due on May 19.

The client also must know that final copy is due at the typesetter on May 21, that the graphic designer needs two weeks to work on the design, that the printer needs the camera-ready art and layout by July 1, and that a minimum of 10 days is required before the printed brochure can be placed on the client’s desk.

Each of the dates above should be included in your schedule. Do this for each initiative. You may either present a separate calendar for each tactic, or combine them into a comprehensive timetable. Ideally, you should do both.

Don’t forget to correlate once again the events with the audiences you expect to address, and what you expect to accomplish.

Finally, don’t forget to include any research you will be conducting, as well as on-going and end-of-project evaluation dates.

BUDGET
An axiom: It is not easy to compile a budget.

Putting a budget together is especially difficult when you are working on a hypothetical case, or if you are not sure of the client’s requirements (“Why don’t you present three scenarios — minimal, moderate and optimal — and we’ll pick the one we can afford”).

This may seem incredible, but the client often has absolutely no idea how much is available for your campaign. More often than we suspect, the client may simply be “fishing” for a cheap way to obtain some publicity for the company. Or, the client may want to know how much a pet project would cost if it were done correctly.

That said, you must have a budget section. You must have an accurate representation of how much things are going to cost. The information may be close at hand (e.g., previous experience, other plans, informative co-workers), or … you may have to make a lot of phone calls.

Separate your anticipated income from your proposed expenses, and present both totals. Finally, give the client a bottom-line figure. Tell the client exactly what the campaign is going to cost. An excess of income over expenses will result in a profit to the client; an excess of expenses over income will result in a cash outlay by the client.

Now . . . don’t you wish you had taken accounting in college?

EVALUATION PLANS
If you have planned your campaign correctly, your communication and action tactics will have been performed according to schedule, and will have cost exactly (or pretty close to) what you said they would cost. You will have reached all of your identified audiences and persuaded them to do exactly what you wanted them to do.

You would have attained all of your objectives, which ultimately means that you have achieved your primary goal. And, if it is not too bold to say, you will have solved the client’s public relations problem, and those dire consequences you predicted earlier will not come to pass.

But how do you know whether or not you’ve succeeded? You must measure your accomplishments. How do you measure those results?

You do it by measuring two phases of your campaign:

IMPACT: Ask yourself what behavioral or attitudinal changes the campaign effected. Impact measurement documents the extent to which you achieved the outcomes spelled out in your objectives for each target public. It also tells you to what extent your overall program goal was achieved.

OUTPUT (or implementation): In other words, what did you DO? How much effort went into carrying out the campaign? How many publications and releases were prepared and distributed? How many column inches and minutes of air-time coverage did you get? How many people were exposed to your message?

Emphasize impact — impact is paramount. Emphasize output only if the communications “products” are central to your problem and contribute to solutions.

Tell the client exactly how you are going to measure the results of what you did, and how they relate to your objectives.

Remember, you cannot evaluate effectively unless you have good objectives. If you don’t have good objectives, then you have nothing to measure against.

PERTINENT RESEARCH
Create a “Tab A” and submit your research results. In this section, include client, situational, and audience research results (clippings, polls, interviews, library research, or summaries of research found elsewhere — with appropriate source identification). Include anything you deemed essential while compiling your situation analysis.

COMMUNICATION SAMPLES
Create a “Tab B” and include descriptions and/or rough layouts of recommended communications materials (i.e., news releases, public service announcements, speech outlines, statements, institutional ads, brochure dummies).

For each news release, list names of news organizations to which they will be delivered, and their deadlines. Be sure to use a wide variety of communication channels and methods, properly timed and coordinated.

Remember also that actions and events generally are more effective than written or oral communications alone. You should strive to keep verbal communications to a minimum, and make imaginative and creative actions and events a key part of your campaign.

A LAST WORD
Finally . . .

No typos. Bind all work neatly. Personalize the transmittal letters if you know the names of the selection committee members. No typos. Use a computer and laser printer. Meet deadlines. Use an easily readable font typeface (minimum 12-point font). Use good paper, don’t skimp.

Remember: The “class” projected by your proposal is reflected in the perception that the client has on your “excellence” as a public relations professional.

Look professional, and you will be viewed as professional.

How Solar Eclipses Work?

By M H Ahssan

A solar eclipse is a celestial phenomenon that does not occur very often, but they are fascinating to watch when they do. On those rare occasions when you are in the right place at the right time for a full solar eclipse, it is amazing.

What Is a Solar Eclipse?
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes in a direct line between the Earth and the sun. The moon’s shadow travels over the Earth’s surface and blocks out the sun’s light as seen from Earth.

Because the moon orbits the Earth at an angle, approximately 5 degrees relative to the Earth-sun plane, the moon crosses the Earth’s orbital plane only twice a year. These times are called eclipse seasons, because they are the only times when eclipses can occur. For an eclipse to take place, the moon must be in the correct phase during an eclipse season; for a solar eclipse, it must be a new moon. This condition makes solar eclipses relatively rare.

Types of Solar Eclipses
The moon’s shadow has two parts: a central region (umbra) and an outer region (penumbra). Depending upon which part of the shadow passes over you, you will see one of three types of solar eclipses:

- Total – The entire central portion of the sun is blocked out.
- Partial – Only part of the sun’s surface is blocked out.
- Annular – Only a small, ring-like sliver of light is seen from the sun’s disc.

If the umbra passes over you, the entire central portion of the sun will be blocked out. You will see a total solar eclipse, and the sky will darken as if it were night time. During a total solar eclipse, you can see the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona. In fact, this is the only time that you can see the corona, which is why astronomers get so excited when a total eclipse is about to occur. Many astronomers travel the world chasing eclipses.

If the penumbra passes over you, only part of the sun’s surface will be blocked out. You will see a partial solar eclipse, and the sky may dim slightly depending on how much of the sun’s disc is covered.

In some cases, the moon is far enough away in its orbit that the umbra never reaches the Earth at all. In this case, there is no region of totality, and what you see is an annular solar eclipse. In an annular eclipse, only a small, ring-like sliver of light is seen from the sun’s disc (“annular” means “of a ring”).

How to Watch a Solar Eclipse
Never look at the sun directly — doing so can damage your eyes. The best way to observe the sun is by projecting the image. Here is one way to project the sun’s image:

- Get two pieces of cardboard (flaps from a box, backs of paper tablets).

- With a pin or pencil point, poke a small hole in the center of one piece (no bigger than the pin or pencil point).

- Take both pieces in your hand.

- Stand with your back to the sun.

- In one hand, hold the piece with the pinhole; place the other piece (the screen) behind it.

- The sunlight will pass through the pinhole and form an image on the screen (see How does a pinhole camera work? for details on this process).

- Adjust the distance between the two pieces to focus and change the size of the image.

Enjoy observing!

International Literacy Day – Sustain the commitment

By Jaya Shankar VS

Globally, the International Literacy Day is celebrated on September 08 every year. First proclaimed by UNESCO in 1965, the first International Literacy Day was celebrated on September 08, 1966. Through this Day, UNESCO reminds the global countries of the status of literacy and adult learning.

The theme for this year’s International Literacy Day is “The Power of Literacy.” This means that this year, the spotlight will be on the empowering role of literacy and its importance for participation, citizenship and social development. Literacy and Empowerment is the theme for the 2009-2010 biennium of the United Nations Literacy Decade. In January 2002, the United Nations General Assembly, through a resolution, proclaimed the ten year period beginning 1 January 2003 as the United Nations Literacy Decade. According to the UN, in declaring the Decade, it aims to increase literacy levels and to empower all people everywhere and international community recognised that the promotion of literacy is in the interest of all, as part of efforts towards peace, respect and exchange in a globalising world.

Despite many and varied efforts, the literacy figures across the world look alarming. According to UN statistics there are close to four billion literate people in the world today. And some 776 million adults lack minimum literacy skills, which mean that one in five adults are still not literate; 75 million children are out-of-school and many more attend irregularly or drop out. About 35 countries have a literacy rate of less than 50% or a population of more than 10 million people who cannot read nor write. 85% percent of the world’s non-literate population resides in these countries, and two-thirds are women and girls.

What is literacy?
The definition of literacy and a literate person according to UNESCO is wide and does not stop to mean the ability to read and write only. A literate person is one, who can with understanding both read and write a short simple statement relevant to his everyday life, and capable of critical understanding of men’s situation in the world. Literacy is not an end in itself but a means of personal liberation and development and extending individuals educational efforts involving overall inter-disciplinary responses to concrete problems. Literacy is way of acquiring skills to improve their economic status and general well being and imbibing values of national integration, conservation of environment, women’s equality, observance of small family norms, etc.

Why literacy is important?
Literacy is not just about learning, it is an empowered tool to eradicate poverty and a means for social and human development. Educational opportunities depend on literacy. Literacy is at the heart of basic education for all, and essential for eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, curbing population growth, achieving gender equality and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy. There are good reasons why literacy is at the core of Education for All (EFA). A good quality basic education equips pupils with literacy skills for life and further learning; literate parents are more likely to send their children to school; literate people are better able to access continuing educational opportunities; and literate societies are better geared to meet pressing development.

Hence literacy is seen as an effective way to enlighten a society and equip it to facing the challenges of life in a better way, raise the standard of personal living, innovate and help change the society.

Total literacy needs combined efforts
According to the UN, literacy is a human right and a cause for celebration. While the world community has made rapid progress in the literacy programmes in their respective regions, achieving total literacy is still an elusive target. Apart from the customary bottlenecks being experienced in some countries like population growth, infrastructure inadequacies and other factors, the grim repercussions of the present economic crisis has also slowed down the progress of the total literacy drive.

According to the UN, it calls for a combination of ambitious goals, sufficient and parallel efforts, adequate resources and strategies, and continued estimation of the work in progress and renewed political will and for doing things differently at all levels – locally, nationally and internationally – and an understanding of the present economic crisis and continued support to achieve the goal of total literacy around the world.

Literacy in India
In India, the literacy rate is still far from being satisfactory. According to the UN Millennium Development Goals Indicators, the literacy rate in the country is still below the global threshold levels of 75 percent. While there has been a marked improvement in literacy in India since independence thanks to the many efforts by the government and NGOs alike, the progress is however being pulled back by the rapid increase in population, poverty, gender discrimination, malnutrition, lack of infrastructural facilities, qualified teachers and the most recent economic crisis.

Government initiatives and challenges
Among the various initiatives by the government for providing education to children and youth, the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan scheme was envisioned in 2001 with a view to ensure that all children in the age group 6–14 years attend school and complete eight years of schooling by 2010. However, there is a glitch here. The government’s recent promise to enact the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, which seeks to make education a fundamental right of every child in the age group of six to 14 years, needs to be amended to also include children between 0-6 years of age. The reason is poverty. In many Indian towns and villages, children, by the time they reach 6 years of age, the poverty in their families force their parents to send them to petty jobs instead to schools for primary education! To avoid this from happening, the bill in its present avatar needs to be amended before it is enacted into law. Other programmes by the government include the adult education programme, and the district primary education programme.

Another reason for the unhealthy literacy rate in India is the increasing percentage of school dropouts, particularly at the primary and upper primary levels. Again, poverty in families is the main reason for this. To arrest this downward trend in literacy development, the government is running the mid-day meals programme since 1995 to attract children to schools.

Sustain the literacy initiatives
During this period of global economic slowdown, the governments and private players have to be cautious in not to downplay the significance and importance of literacy programmes in their respective countries. Continuous funds flow has to be ensured along with efforts to continue the existing programmes and quicker launching of future initiatives should be considered. This calls for stringent laws to remove the bottlenecks and help the progress and success of literacy programmes.

The government has to step up its efforts in the implementation of policy decisions for tougher laws to abolish child labour, effective implementation of compulsory primary education in rural and urban areas, solving infrastructural problems, providing adequate and continued training to teachers, introducing and sustaining many practical literacy schemes, hassle-free government support to private players and NGOs in literacy initiatives, curbing the commercialisation of education and higher education in particular, and a unified code of conduct for schools, academic institutions and colleges and more importantly the political will to do it. And the International Literacy Day on September 08 is just the perfect day to reiterate our commitment for total literacy and help people get out of poverty, and malnutrition and provide equal employment opportunities and put the world back on its tracks of development.

Step by step process on earning a good income selling articles for content marketing!

Step by step process on earning a good income selling articles for content marketing!

Writing content and selling articles used for content marketing is a very good way to make money on the internet. Good fresh content will always be in demand. In this article I will show you why unique content is always in demand and how you can earn a comfortable living online writing content for web and selling articles it to the highest bidder by auctioning it.

These are some of the various ways unique content is used:

As a content writer

1. You can write content to sell it. So others can use it.

2. You can write content to establish yourself as an expert in any field.

3. You can use content to drive traffic to your website or your squeeze page via content marketing.

As a webmaster for SEO and for content marketing

1. You need keyword rich content to put up on your website for content marketing so that the search engines send you free traffic.

2. You can use articles and submit it to article sites so that you can get free traffic and also increased search engine rankings due to the back links it generates.

3. You can use articles which revolve around the content of your website so that you get relevant traffic.

4. You can use articles and put up Adsense code on it to display content relevant Google ads and earn an income from that.

As an affiliate or email marketer

1. You can use keyword rich articles for content marketing and promote products without even having a website.

2. You can use articles to bring people to your squeeze page and collect their email id’s to who you can market again and again.

3. Email marketers need a constant source of new content to email their list members

Why fresh unique content is always in demand?
You might have heard of the phrase “content is king”. That’s because in today’s Internet world, content is the most important factor that drives traffic to your website. Search engines index the content on your website and will drive traffic to your website if the keywords that you use in your content shows up in search queries when anyone searches on the Internet. This is basically content marketing.

Search engines love unique and original constant source of content updated frequently as compared to duplicate content. Websites with fresh unique constant content will always keep getting a good amount of free traffic send by Google and other search engines.

So how do you actually start selling articles?
I will now show you step by step way on how you can earn online selling articles using Buynsellcontent.com.

Step 1
Create your account: Before you start to make money buying and selling articles you will have to first create an account with Buynsellcontent.com.

Step 2
Create your Paypal account: Once you finish up your signing up process with our website, then to withdraw your payment you will need to create a Paypal account. Once you create your Paypal account you would need to add it in your admin area so that your withdrawals will be sent automatically to that Paypal address.

Step 3
Submit your original article: Once you have logged into your account, you can click on “sell content”

You will see the form that you could fill up to submit content to us. Type in your article Title, choose the category and the subcategory. Write a short summary of your content and add the keywords. Add your main content to the text box and choose if you want to hide partial content.

Now fill up the price that you would like to sell your content for, choose the number of days that you want it to be auctioned for and put a tick next to “agree to TOS” and click on submit.

The article is instantly displayed on the website for sale and if you have subscribers signed up for your new article alerts, they will also receive alerts with your new article link.

Once the minimum 5 day auction period is over and the article is still not sold, then it will be automatically moved from the auction area to the “ready to buy” area where the minimum bid price that you had set will become the sale price of that particular article. Your article will be displayed on the website and on your profile as long as it gets sold.

All new content that is posted will automatically go through a 5 day auction period. That is in order to give equal opportunity for all those who would like to buy that particular article.

Step4:
The Article gets sold: Once the article is sold, it will be removed from the website and the funds will be credited to your account. You will also receive an email when your article gets sold.

Now the buyer will get an option to leave a feedback and a rating score for you. The feedback option will keep blinking on his profile till he submits the feedback for you.

Step5:
Request a withdrawal: You will need to add your Paypal email id in your profile. You can request a withdrawal. Once it is approved the funds will be instantly credited to your Paypal account.

What kind of articles should you write to sell?
Write keyword rich articles on topics that are in demand. Internet marketing / doing business online, making money topics, how to information etc are the hottest selling topics nowadays. Other topics that are in demand are: self help / personal growth, weight loss / fitness topics, dating / relationships, everyday problems, hobbies and crafts, recipes, online shopping etc.

Remember these articles will be used by webmasters or affiliate marketers mainly for content marketing to promote their products, so you should write keyword rich articles. Every article of your should focus on one or two keywords sprinkled across the article in its proper density. Ideal keyword density is a keyword repeated 4 – 5 times in an 800 word article. Also the title of the article should have the same keyword.

How to find out hot topic to write about?

You could Use Google Trends to pick some highly searched keywords to place into your article. http://www.google.com/trends

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

You could go to:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in keywords there to check. Whichever keywords that have high search volumes and the advertiser competition is good are pretty in demand. If you write articles revolving around those keywords it will sell faster.

You can further narrow down to more profitable niches by searching for that particular keyword in quotes on Google: example “article writing” and look for keywords that have fewer number of competing websites.

To find out more hot selling article topics to write about, go to http://www.ezinearticles.com and click on any category that you’re planning to target. Let’s say your niche is “Writing and speaking / writing” Click on any of the articles and scroll down the page till you reach the “Most Viewed Ezine Articles in the Writing-and-Speaking: Writing Category (90 Days)”

Write articles on similar subjects revolving around those keywords.

Another option is that you could go to go articles http://www.goarticles.com/top-rated.html and look for the top rated articles for ideas.

Another way is that you could visit social news websites such as Digg.com, Yahoobuzz.com, and Propeller.com etc and look for the articles that receive a high score or diggs from readers. Articles on similar topics would be easier to sell.

How to promote your profile page to get more sales?
All the content you post will be displayed on your profile page. All you need to do is promote your profile page. Your interested buyers can go through your articles and bid for it if it is new or can buy your older articles from the ‘content ready for sale area”

Your profile page visitors can also subscribe to receive new article alerts automatically whenever you submit new articles. If you have lot of subscribers signed up to receive alerts, then it can raise the bid price to a good amount during the bidding frenzy as there will be a lot of your subscribers bidding to buy your content.

To promote your profile page, the easiest way is to do is by content marketing. It is by creating marketing articles that you could use submit to all the article directories out there, with a byline informing the readers to visit your profile to buy articles that you have put up for sale.

To see a list of article directories that you could submit you could visit this link I have compiled for you.

Article directories according to page rank

Wishing you all success in your article selling efforts.

ADVERT: Make money online by writing articles

We are looking for well written articles on financially related topics. We are a financial news blog and are looking for newsy, informative articles. Specifically we are looking for articles reporting on a financial or economic article in the news, money making, money management, money saving or budgeting tips, lists of things to do to modify your home in a money saving fashion, articles on protecting your credit and managing your home in a money-saving manner. We have found that lists, such as top 10 lists, are bringing in more views. Please remember that the theme of our blog is News & Finance Education. We are not looking for financial “stories” but rather, articles that are educational, informative or newsworthy.

Articles must be politically and religiously neutral. There can be no prejudice or derogatory language or ideas conveyed in the articles. We do not print articles that contain information on products or topics that are illegal, immoral, unethical or that deal with drugs, or gambling or alcohol in excess. All articles must be original content and not published anywhere else. We have a system that searches the net and checks for similarly written content.

Price of the articles
The minimum we pay for an article is $15 then, with the calculations and traffic, we go up from there. The amount is calculated by a complicated mathematical formula that factors in total unique traffic to the article for a 7 day period and the total number of unique back links at the time of payment calculation. For those who submit articles and whose articles develop a readership or attract a significant amount of other sites linking to our own, we then may pay more to motivate that author to produce more content. It is advisable to promote your articles to get paid more.

BUM Marketing with Written Articles
You can submit articles into our system also in exchange for commission rather than getting paid directly. You can make up to $65 or so per conversion from your articles.

Article submission requirements
Because of IRS requirements, we need to have a signed W-8 (International writers) or W-9 (U.S. writers) on file for each writer. We send a 1099 to you at the end of the year if you live in the U.S. and receive more than $600 in income from our program. We do not report information to any country outside the U.S. If you live outside the U.S., you will be responsible to pay any taxes or fees for your own country’s reporting requirements.

Before submitting your first article, if you are a U.S. writer, please go to http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf for a W-9 or, if you are not a U.S. writer, go to http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8ben.pdf for a W-8.

Either mail or fax the signed form to us.

You may fax it to:
(866) 934-5342

Or you can mail it to:
Global Edge Marketing
PO Box 710
Spokane, WA 99210-0710

We cannot accept digital signatures or e-signatures and we cannot accept these forms scanned and emailed to us.

You are also required to have either a PayPal or Google Checkout account in order for you to receive your payment.

All articles submitted are deemed written by someone not employed by us nor in any type of contractual relationship with us. We do not control where or how the content is produced or even if the content is submitted by the original author. We do not accept copyrighted materials.

Pay per post writing guidelines
525 words is the minimum article size.
Break up your article with subtitles. This makes the article more readable. See our blog for examples.

Keywords: You must use one keyword in 5 places. Make sure, when you use the keywords, they’re used in a comfortable, natural way. Do not use them just to use them. The keywords choices to use are:
Pick from a list of these keywords:
Cash Advance
Cash Advance Loans,
Installment Loans,
Instant Payday Loans,
Military Loans,
No Fax Cash Advance,
No Fax Payday Loans,
Online Cash Advance,
Online Payday Loans,
Payday Cash Advance Loans,
Payday Loans,
Personal Loans,
Quick Payday Loans,
Short Term Loans,
Credit Repair,
Debt Relief,
Installment Loans,
Debt Consolidation,
Mortgage Loan Modification, or
Credit Cards

You should add as many helping words as possible such as: instant, online, faxless, no fax, no faxing, no credit check, without credit checks, same day, direct deposit, quick, fast, easy, secure, safe, today, cash, money, lenders, lending, etc.

Example: if you pick “payday loans” keep this as your target keyword throughout the article. Use whichever keyword you pick 5 times in your article including your title. Modify the keyword by adding the helping words. Example: “fast payday loans,” “payday loans quickly,” “same day payday loans,” etc.We highly recommend you spend time reading our posts because many articles are being rejected for writers not carefully following the guidelines below.

The 160-character maximum summary: Along with your article, you must include your summary. When people do a search for a certain topic, the search engines list different articles for the user to choose from. The different articles display the 65 character maximum title and this description. This is your sales pitch. This description is what you are using to get people to click to view your article. Remember, your pay goes up the more your article is viewed. This must contain your keyword.

The 5 places to use the keyword are:
In the maximum 65 character title
In the first sentence of the first paragraph
In the middle of the article, somewhere
Within the last paragraph
In the 160-character maximum summary

Pen name. You submit a pen name the first time you submit an article. The pen name should be a real name, i.e. Samantha Jones. It does not have to be your real name, but it does have to look like a real name. We can no longer accept a pen name like “Payday Loan Writer.” Please use the same pen name every time you submit an article. Please do not use multiple author names, pen names, email addresses or PayPal accounts. If we discover you are using multiple accounts, we will no longer be able to accept articles from you.

Profile. The first time you submit an article, we will require a short profile. If you go to our website and click on any of our authors, you should find a profile as an example. It doesn’t have to say a lot, but does have to let the reader know a little about you. You do not have to re-submit your profile after we accept your first article.

Along with your article, you must include:
A W-8 or W-9 before submission of your first article.
Your pen name
The first article should include your profile.
Your email address and the PayPal or Google Checkout numbers to deposit funds into if the article is accepted.
The article title, 65 characters or less, that grabs the reader’s attention
The 525+ word article
The 160-character maximum summary of your article
Frequently Asked Questions
There are some technical aspects to the articles that must be followed that are unique to our site. The articles have to meet a certain standard of professionalism as well as clarity of thought. The articles must be written in accurate English.

What type of writers work the best?
Many of the best writers we have found are just regular people expressing common sense thoughts and ideas while talking about current events. The more technical the articles the less “regular” people will enjoy reading them. Don’t feel you have to be overly qualified to get your articles accepted.

Do we buy every article submitted?
Because we pay per article, we retain the right to require as many revisions as necessary to make the article acceptable to our standards. Submitting an article does not entitle you to payment nor does it create any type of agreement with us. The articles that we choose to publish are the articles you will be paid for. If we reject an article from our purchase selection process, then you will be notified and given the reasons. You will be able to resubmit the article as many times as necessary in order to make it acceptable for purchase unless it was rejected as duplicate content or for illegal, immoral, or for other contractual reasons.

What are my rights for purchased articles?
Once an article is purchased by us we then hold exclusive rights to the article and may edit, revise, and publish the written content in any manner that we wish. Once the written content is submitted to us, the one who submitted it to us grants total and complete ownership of the article to us without restriction or license.

Can I be from a country outside of the U.S.?
It is fine if you live outside of the U.S. but you have to be able to write to a U.S. audience in perfect English. It is O.K. to write about anything, worldwide, as long as a U.S. audience would be interested in it and as long as you follow our guidelines and use our keywords. You have to have a PayPal or Google Checkout account to deposit funds into. You will have to complete a W-8. Please see the section above called, “Article Submission Requirements.”

Right to request written declarations
We have the right to require a written declaration from anyone who submits an article that the article is submitted for purchase lawfully and not in violation of any other agreement or the rights of any other third party. Violations of copy right laws or any other law, regulation, or rule immediately nullifies any assumed obligation to purchase or pay for that written content.

Failure to comply
Any failure to comply with these rules causes the immediate forfeit of all rights and all money due or owed for purchased content regardless if it is from submissions in the past, present or future. Submitting articles in violation of our rules or any law or contract entitles us to immediate reimbursement via the PayPal system.

How To Write A Solution – Savvy Sales Letter to To Get Clients

By M H Ahssan

Too many sales letters are shaped into paper airplanes and flown into trash cans
because freelancers write sales letters that sell their services. These
freelancers have never listened to the quietly- whispered secret that says their
sales letters should sell solutions, not services, to yield the best results.

Solutions are jewels; they shimmer in sales pieces.

Prospects will peruse your sales letter if they discover you have a solution (or
solutions) to their existing or future problem or problems.

To write a “solution-savvy” sales letter follow the copywriter’s adage: write
“client-centered” copy. Zero in on the prospect, his business, his needs, his
problems. Then pitch yourself as the freelancer who can fulfill his needs and
solve his problems. Crown your claims with clients whom you’ve worked for and
specific results you’ve achieved on solving similar problems.

Here are four softly-whispered secrets to write a solution-savvy sales letter:

• SECRET #1: FOCUS ON THE CLIENT’S NEED OR PROBLEM.

As a freelancer writing for this client’s business and industry, you should know
the type of needs and problems the client faces regularly — or could face in the
future. Zero in on a specific need or problem that is hurting the client’s
profitability or productivity. (Note: prospects are more motivated to contact you
if you pitch yourself as a freelancer who has a solution to a present problem,
rather than a future or potential problem).

• SECRET #2: FOCUS ON THE BENEFITS OF SOLVING THE PROBLEM OR MEETING THE NEED.

Tell the prospect what he and his business can gain if his problem is solved.
Usually, it means an increase in profitability or productivity. Maybe both. Also
stress the possible consequences of not taking action now to solve this problem.

• SECRET #3: WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

Here is where you present your solution. First, describe the service you are
recommending. A press kit? Direct mail package? A series of ads?

— Tie it into the client’s needs. The client may have a new product to promote; he
needs a low-cost marketing method that will produce lucrative results.

— Stress your uniqueness to undertake this task. Why you — and not someone else?
What qualifications do you brandish and what type of specific results have you
achieved for similar businesses with the same type of problem?

— Offer secondary solutions that also may work to solve the client’s problem.
These secondary solutions also may be alternatives that the client’s competition
is using; if this is the case, point out their weaknesses and emphasize why your
primary solution is better.

• SECRET #4: THE “CLIENT-CENTERED” CONSUMMATION.

The closing of your sales letter should show the client that the benefits
predictably outweigh the costs. If the client is investing $6,000 for you to write
a DM package, the client doesn’t just get a DM package; he receives exposure for
his new product, generates new leads and sales, targets specific segments of his
market, increases his company’s profit, etc.

Secondly, recommend a call-for-action schedule. Tell the client when you’re
available, how long the project will take, and when he can expect it by.

Here’s a list of common solutions that clients often seek.

Your solution is the:

* least expensive
* best value
* most reliable
* most advanced

Your solution offers:

* the most flexibility
* the highest return for the client’s investment
* the highest quality
* the most competent controls to measure results
* Your solution saves time
* Your solution will produce the highest customer/client satisfaction
* Your solution eliminates or automates the most labor-intensive operations
* Your solution profits on new or emerging trends

ADVERT

My 25 Best Advertising Concepts

By M H Ahssan

5 Ideas for Creative Customer Advertising

You can’t do business in the modern world without effective advertising. It is a necessary evil that is costly and time consuming. Effective ads have the potential to increase your business reach and your revenue stream.

No matter what the size of your business, you certainly can’t afford to let your customer advertising efforts slide in any way. Developing effective ads takes a combination of strategy and creativity. Here are five tips that can help you enhance your customer advertising campaign:

Shoot for a target.

Effective advertising begins with understanding the individuals who purchase your products and services, or those who have the potential to do so. Identify and shoot for a target audience with your customer advertising rather than creating a campaign that is more broad or generic.

Focus on unique strengths.

Customer advertising is a competitive endeavor. You need to evaluate what the competition is offering and focus on what you have that they don’t. The unique strengths of your business might include special product lines that aren’t available in the industry, customizable products or service packages, or a customer loyalty program. Highlight these types of strengths in your ads.

When and where.

Effective ads are strategically located in the right place at the right time. The right places are determined largely by your target audience. Realize that your target audience is diverse and don’t limit your customer advertising to one medium, such as television or radio. Rotate the timing of your ads to reach a broader audience.

Measure results.

You won’t know how effective advertising is unless you implement a tracking and measurement system. One way to do this is by incorporating coupons into print ads, therefore allowing you to track where customers saw your effective ads.

Another way is by including a statement like, “Mention this ad and get an extra 10% discount.” These tactics are extremely effective, and evaluating the results of your customer advertising initiatives is easier to measure if you use them.

Invest in the best.

Effective ads take time and money to develop. Customer advertising is the one area of your business budget that should not be cut, nor should it be trimmed or neglected in any way. Because customer advertising is ultimately what drives sales, look for ways to beef up your advertising budget regularly. Some advertising outlets these days also take more time than money.

Invest time in developing a Craigslist advertising campaign and make use of other free spaces, like community bulletin boards and word of mouth.

The ultimate goal of all these tips is to generate interest and get customers walking through your doors or visiting your website. Customer advertising is an ongoing process that must be revised, revisited and revamped on a regular basis to maximize effectiveness.

Fresh, new ads pique the interest of your existing consumer base and enhance the likelihood that a new business relationship will form with potential customers.

Internal Communication Strategies for Your Business

Simply put, an organization’s productivity is increased with effective communication strategies. It states what the company expects from the employees, and what the top management will be doing in return. It provides people with a specific direction that they can work towards, principles that they need to stick to, and clearly defines the processes required for accomplishing the job.

Every business has to spend time, money and effort on effective communication strategies toward their employees, whether when launching a new management system for performance, a new program for payment, or just to share the company’s values and mission.

Align Communication with Goals
In other words, communication strategies are about the alignment of communication with the goals of the business. Companies do not have a face, but they do have an image, which they need to maintain by consistently delivering to their customers. A company’s employees are the means by which its services and products are actually delivered; therefore, it is vital for employees to know what the company wants to achieve. It is necessary for them to be aware of what they need to accomplish – in terms of both the brand image of the company and goals.

In addition, a good communication strategy is not just about addressing employees. Guidance should be provided to the people who are responsible for the implementation, along with tips which they can use in sharing the message. It should be focused on all the levels of the company – from the top to the bottom.

Delivery is Critical
Of course, the method of delivery is also crucial. Utilizing all the channels of communication to the full extent possible is essential. Whether you use executive forums, newsletters to employees, the intranet, employee surveys, or business meetings, you need to ensure that you get across the right message to the right people in the most efficient way. Especially if you hold a leadership position in your company, it is quite clear core messages of the organization, like strategies, goals and performance, can never be over-communicated. While the quality of the communication is indeed important, the quantity is also vital.

In a nutshell, the best communication strategies for your business should incorporate the following:

Integration: Connecting the present communication with what is happening in the company and the other modifications that employees are being affected by.

Keep it Succinct: Make sure that your message is not overcomplicated. Keeping it simple makes for clarity.

Be Straightforward: Don’t be ambiguous about what you want to convey. Honesty is really often the best policy to adopt.

Address your Target: Just as it is required for marketing your products externally, you need to segment your audiences and target your message according to the requirements of each group of employees.

Make it Personal: Help your employees to understand how they are affected personally. When people know exactly what’s in it for them, they respond more effectively.

Make it Memorable: Ensure that your message is striking enough to stand out from the many communications employees receive every day.

Use Multimedia: Utilize various media and methods to get your message across. Take the help of your marketing department to learn about the various means you can employ.

Focus on Being Results-Oriented: Make an assessment of how effective your communications are and devise follow-up strategies according to the results. Incorporate your successful measures as a part of the overall strategies of communication.

Businesses these days are constantly looking for ways to grow their brand image, using new ideas and initiatives in the market, creating innovative ways for building their business, and pushing boundaries. And as they go about doing all that, having effective strategies for communication is growing in importance. By communicating effectively, you ensure that your employees are with you all the way to achieve the goals you want.

Changing Corporate Culture for Business Success

If you are a small business owner, no doubt at some point you have worked for someone else. Ask yourself- how many times have you observed that the corporate culture of the company in which you worked was not conducive to success?

Corporate culture can and should be changed if necessary – although this requires strong leadership skills and painstaking effort.

Corporate Culture Models: Lasting changes can be integrated into the culture of the organization using either of the two models of corporate culture. The first type is a diagrammatic representation of the corporate culture in a geometric form of a polygon, which focuses on each element of the corporate culture like “achievement.” The other type is more of a descriptive or textual description, defining the elements of the culture in simple words. Both of them have their own advantages and drawbacks, so depending on your needs and requirements, choose the one that suits you the most.

The Pros and Cons: Although the former model is very helpful in giving a brief idea, and a great help in remembering the different elements of the culture since it is a diagrammatic representation, the drawback of this type of model is that it does not provide you with the relevant and necessary details. In order to implement the required cultural changes, it is important to focus on the details. Very often, it requires an experienced consultant to interpret the picture based on the model and devise ways to bring about the required changes. The cultural web model or the theory of planned behavior is a fine example of this type of model.

The cultural web model comprises of six main elements of the corporate culture like power structure, organizational structure, rituals and routines, symbols, control systems, and myths and stories. This model is very useful since it can be used for developing a plan to change not merely individual constituent elements but a combination of them. It is also easy enough for the employees to comprehend it by themselves and perform their own analysis.

Implementing Changes: You can implement changes in the existing corporate culture, but for that you need to set realistic goals for the company and define ways to achieve these goals. You need to find ways at every level that will enable you to achieve both long and short term goals. Distribute tasks into teams so that combined efforts will make it possible to achieve them faster.

Accountability of management in fulfilling their responsibility towards the achievement of goals and eliminating business proposals that did not contribute effectively towards the achievement of goals is also important. Focusing on mistakes and the reasons behind unsatisfactory results, training and promotion are other factors that contribute towards the achievement of the goal.

The best part about using such models of corporate culture is that it requires very little professional help from consultants since it can easily be interpreted by the people working in the organization.

Does Your Business Have an Internal Communications Strategy?

As a business grows, internal communication becomes even more important.

The most effective communication tools for your business will depend on the number of employees to which information must be disseminated.

Here are some internal communication tips and methods. Apply the ones that fit your business and make adjustments as your business grows.

Meetings and Conference Calls
While this may seem like the simplest method for getting information out quickly, it does have some flaws.

Unless you can bring every single employee into the meeting, then you still have to make sure that, after the meeting, the other employees are made aware of the information that was covered.

Also, you will need to provide written materials covering the information as not everyone will retain everything that is said in a meeting.

Similar to a meeting, conference calls allow employees at different locations to join together at once. The same problems that exist with meetings exist with conference calls.

Meetings and conference calls are a good starting point for delivering information, and they can also be a good follow-up tool once information has been made available.

They can provide a venue for employees to ask questions and gain clarification, but meetings and conference calls should not be the sole method of your internal communications strategy.

Memos
Good old memos. Someone has probably conducted a study about what percentage of internal memos are actually read.

It’s likely that number is not 100%. Memos work well for quick notes about non-vital information, but for more serious matters, it’s not the best choice.

Emails
Delete. Delete. Delete. Oops! I didn’t mean to delete that one!

Everyone has accidentally deleted or overlooked an important email. It’s hard not to when one considers the sheer volume of emails most people receive daily.

Also, no matter how many mandates you put out about the frequency with which employees must check their email, there is bound to be at least one employee who fails to do so.

Still, when information must get out quickly, email is a good way to get the news to many, if not all, of your employees.

Newsletters
Newsletters provide a method of internal communication where all of the “big” company news can be put in one place.

Of course, the newsletter is not the place to advertise about changes in policies or to announce that there will not be any raises next year.

For lighter news, however, it is a good tool to keep in your communication toolkit.

Paycheck Inserts
Perhaps less effective than in the days before direct deposit (you remember…when the pay envelope contained an actual check instead of just a stub), pay check inserts are still a fairly good way to make sure that a good number of employees will see a piece of communication.

You’ll notice that it seems that none of the communication methods sound very good. That is because, on their own, none of them are going to be as effective as you’d probably like.

The best internal communications strategy is one that is multi-tiered and includes some or all of the methods listed above.

By providing the information in multiple ways, you are more likely to reach every employee that needs the information.

Are Corporate Communicators Hopeless in Social Media?

Have you ever heard someone say something that made you immediately cringe, even though you knew that person was partly right? I had that reaction while listening to an episode of SocialMediasphere.tv in April. The topic was “social media rock stars” and featured Amber Naslund. Naslund was asked if she had to replace herself as director of community at Radian6 (which monitors and analyzes social media for PR and advertising efforts), what would she look for in a candidate? The first thing she said she wouldn’t want was someone with a communication background.

Ouch! Here’s her response: “I actually probably don’t want somebody with a communications background … the truth is there’s a lot of preconceived notions in corporate communications that are very, very difficult to undo, and part of the reason that social media is struggling for adoption inside established companies is that they’re having trouble jettisoning old ideas about how and what to communicate to their customers.

“… I came up through a nonprofit fundraising background…. We were taught that connecting with donors about the story behind the organization was what was going to compel them to support it. I go back to those tenets a lot in my community work.

“So I would probably look for a grassroots, nonprofit-type person who is really plugged in to the people and not so much plugged in to their MBA textbook that’s collecting dust…. And I’d look for somebody that has a bunch of unrefined skills … with kind of a fresh slate, because I don’t want somebody whose ideas I have to undo.”

My initial reaction to Naslund’s answer was to wince and recoil. I’ve got six years of corporate communication under my belt (and a shelf of dusty MBA textbooks, for that matter), and now a “social media rock star” is telling me I’m not likely to be a good fit for a social media job?

But Naslund’s basic tenet is that a lot of corporate communicators still want to control how, when and what is communicated to customers. We’re trying to fit a square social media peg into a round corporate communication hole, and it’s not working. We rely on models, rules or PowerPoint slides to define effective communication. I admit that I sometimes tend to fit communication strategies into my company’s current operating framework, rather than challenging that framework and looking for more effective ways of reaching customers. Sometimes I get caught up in the process of communication and forget to focus on telling a compelling story.

Teachers Day – Time to clean up the system!

By Jaya Shankar VS

In some 100 countries around the world, the Teachers Day is an occasion to thank and appreciate the vital and lasting contribution that teachers make to our lives, to education in general and to development of the society at large. It is also a day to spread the awareness about the importance of teachers in one’s life, and to garner support for them so that the future generations will continue to be guided by the inimitable qualities of a teacher. Today, it is equally important to identify the challenges in providing education, and work towards in cleaning up the system.

Teachers Day in India and World Teachers Day
India celebrates Teachers Day on September 05 every year on the birth anniversary of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second President of India, and a renowned academic philosopher and an illustrious statesman. When he served as the President of India between 1962 and 1967, his students and friends wanted to celebrate his birthday in a grand way every year. However, as a mark of respect for his passion for teaching and academics, Dr. Radhakrishnan insisted that it would be a privilege to him if his birthday was observed as Teachers Day. Thus, the Teachers Day was born.

The UNESCO observes the World Teaches’ Day annually on October 5 since 1994. This is an occasion to commemorate teachers’ organisations worldwide. According to the UN body, World Teachers’ Day commemorates the anniversary of the signing in 1966 of the UNESCO/ILO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers. It is an occasion to celebrate the essential role of teachers in providing quality education at all levels.

How it is celebrated!
In most countries, schools and colleges remain open on Teachers Day. However, unlike other working days, this day is marked with celebrations to honour the teachers, a day of thanks and remembrance and even fun filled activities for teachers! At some schools in India, the teachers are given a day off from teaching while the senior students take up the responsibility of teaching as a token of appreciation for their teachers.

Dr.S.Radhakrishnan, one man, many roles
Born on September 5, 1888, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was a professor, an academician, a philosopher and perhaps one of India’s most acclaimed scholars of comparative religion and philosophy. During his lifetime, he served his country in various capacities as the first Vice President of independent India between 1952 and 1962, and the second President of India between 1962 and 1967. Dr. Radhakrishnan represented India at UNESCO and served as the Ambassador of India to the Soviet Union between 1949 and 1952.

Academically, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan held various positions including King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta in 1921 and Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University between 1936 and 1952. He had also served as the Vice Chancellor of the Andhra University, and of the Hindu Banaras University. Besides, he was elected a fellow of the All Souls College.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was a prolific writer. During his lifetime, he had written many articles for journals of repute like The Quest, Journal of Philosophy and the International Journal of Ethics and also completed his first book “The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore.” His second book titled “The Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy” was published in 1920.

The British government honoured Dr. S. Radhakrishnan with the British ‘knighthood’ in 1931 for his services rendered in the field of education. However, for obvious reasons Dr. S. Radhakrishnan did not use the title in his personal life. In 1954, the Indian government honoured him with the Bharat Ratna and the Order of Merit in 1963. In 1938, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

A multi-faceted personality, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan’s love for teaching and education was evident from his illustrious career and the yeomen service he rendered in the field of education. He was a man who possessed a rare blend of deep love for Hindu religion and philosophy and an open mind towards other religions and philosophies as well. This rarity in him was by itself responsible for bringing out the uniqueness of Hindu religion and Indian philosophy in the best way understandable to the western audiences. And his love and dedication towards his profession reflected in the utmost respect and love his students had for him. Truly, India couldn’t have any better day to celebrate Teachers Day than on the birthday of one of India’s most respected men of all times.

Education, teachers and teaching in India: the challenges
One of the primary challenges that the country faces today is providing education for all. This is no easy task considering the whopping figures of illiteracy rates in India. According to UN figures, 42 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 are not in school in India. And the national literacy rate of girls over seven years is 54%, compared to 75% for boys.

Besides infrastructure problems, gender discrimination, poverty, the teacher training facilities for not only the general stream of teachers catering to the normal students but also training for special teachers who cares for and teaches the ‘challenged’ category children is inadequate in the country. Even while at schools the services of teachers are not best utilised! The services of government teachers in India are being misused for census, elections and disaster relief duties during which time their services to their respective schools are denied and children deprived of valuable hours and education. These issues should be effectively addressed. Equally important is the need to devise quality education and teaching standards in all schools.

The recent government’s promise to enact the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, which seeks to make education a fundamental right of every child in the age group of six to 14 years, needs to be amended to also include children between 0-6 years of age. It is a globally accepted fact, based on research, that the early years are the most critical years for lifelong development, both from neurological and biological standpoints. And experts feel that the neglect in providing basic education during the early years can often result in irreversible reduction in the full development of the brain’s potential. The bill in its present avatar overlooks this vital point and hence needs to be amended before it is enacted into law.

Teachers, spare the rod!
While India celebrates Teachers Day on the birth anniversary of a man who spent his entire lifetime lifting the education system to new higher levels of grade and reputation, today the indifferent and ‘un-teacher’ like attitude of a few teachers in some of the country’s schools has not only sullied the hard earned reputation of teachers in India but also the spirit of celebrating the Teachers Day. Take for instance the widespread corporal punishment in the country! According to a 2007 joint study by UNICEF, Save the Children and the Government of India, 65% of school-going children have faced corporal punishment. And the National Report on child abuse by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2007 says that two out of three school children are physically abused in Indian schools.

It is disheartening to learn that there are a few sections in the Indian Penal Code that does not hold a teacher/guardian responsible for a moderate and reasonable corporal punishment done in good faith for benefit of child under 12 years, unless it causes death or grievous injury. The Working Group of National Commission of Protection of Child Rights representing the best sections involved in education and teachers in the country has voiced their support to amend these sections. And it is high time the government wakes up to introduce the amendments, and clean up the system!

Parents and students should share the responsibility
Perhaps the best way to say thank you to the teachers on Teachers Day is to share their responsibility and dreams of making the education and teaching in India on par with the best international standards! And for this to happen, the onus is not only on teachers and an effective educational policy and system but equally on parents and students as well. It is the duty of the parents to keep a close look on the students’ progress and issues at school and studies, and extend their cooperation and support to the school authorities and teachers. The students, on their part, should adopt a sense of responsibility and respect towards their teachers. Often there is a history of provocation from the student community that irks the teachers to resort to unfair practices! Hence, constant and healthy interaction with teachers will only help the students to become more responsible and better citizens and help clean up the system and uphold the spirit of Teachers Day celebrations.

Ten Ways to Improve Employee Awareness Initiatives

By M H Ahssan

1. Find out what interests your audience. Recognize that the reason awareness programs are required is that typically while the information you are providing is important, it falls beyond the interest level of the intended audience.

2. Make your material relevant. The people you do reach often are unable to immediately see how to apply it to their situation.

3. Use attention grabbing headlines and be brief. People have too much to do and ever shortening attention spans.

4. Use compelling content. Policy documents are not compelling.

5. Improve your measures of success. Reading an information item or attending a session on its own does not constitute a successful program.

6. Identify the steps to success. Getting people to read a well crafted invitation is just as much of a success towards a the overall program as any other security awareness activity they might participate in.

7. Make awareness on-going. Maintaining employee awareness is like maintaining good health. One meal or one week at the gym does not make you healthy for very long. You need constant maintenance and so does your awareness program

8. Ensure that you have support from the top. Managers need to see the relevance themselves. If they don’t “get it”, they won’t be supportive of your initiatives as evidenced by not allowing staff the time to participate, or not funding activities.

9. Keep an eye out for changes in the way things are done. Changes to business processes often represent an opportunity to insert awareness activities.

10. Keep up the momentum. Falling behind is a sure way to lose the interest of employees who begin to look forward to your offerings.

Successful Budgeting For Your Medical Tourism Marketing Campaigns

By M H Ahssan

If marketing can be called the vehicle that brings dreams to reality, a marketing budget can certainly be referred to as the fuel that drives the vehicle. A marketing budget has long since outlived the traditional moniker of being a financial tool that helps an organization assign enough resources to achieve its marketing objectives.

Today, a marketing budget is a proud badge of recognition that demonstrates that an organization has purpose in its marketing. It says that an organization knows EXACTLY what marketing it intends to perform and how that marketing is going to help its bottom line.

In order to design a marketing budget, on organization first needs two things; an executive in charge of marketing and a manager in charge of executing the marketing plan. The former petitions the keeper of the funds for enough budget dollars to successfully help the organization, while the latter determines exactly how much resources the former should ask for.

The most successful budget style that I have encountered is the Cost Center Budget approach. With this approach, Medical Tourism is assigned what we call a cost center. This puts it on par with all the organization’s important strategic and operational departments such as Finance, Accounting, and Sales. More importantly, it means that your organization can now capture ALL the medical tourism costs in one place. This is a very important management tool that will enable senior management to assess the performance of the organization’s medical tourism operations.

Within this Cost Center, Medical Tourism Marketing is assigned a Cost Center Group. This means that all the marketing activities associated with medical tourism can be tracked from a financial perspective. Also, it isolates the marketing expenses from the other medical tourism efforts, such as Customer Service, Information Technology (IT), Sales, Public Relations (PR), Education and Training, and Business Processing (paperwork).

What are your marketing budget elements? In other words, what goes into your marketing budget? There’s the obvious; Salary and Fringe Benefits, IT Expense, Advertising, Event Marketing, and Promotional Merchandise. In addition however, your organization should budget for Professional Services, New Business Promotion, Purchased Services and Travel.

Professional Services will include any expenses that the organization incurs to solicit the services of professionals. Included in this line item are creative design, graphic design and website design. Website design, in my opinion, should always merit its own line item due to its importance and the need to isolate and, therefore, manage its expenses. Website marketing is rapidly becoming the most effective (and cost effective) way to attract customers. However, the costs associated with its design and maintenance can become very complex and easily lost with the other design costs that an organization may incur.

New Business Promotion costs are those costs incurred for new products, new markets or new customers. It’s very important for an organization to capture these costs separately from ongoing promotion. Most marketing professionals operate under a timeless adage that it costs seven times as much to capture a new customer as it costs to retain an already existing customer. In my opinion, anything that’s costing my organization seven times the cost of anything warrants its own specific attention. Plus, proper capture of these costs enables proper management of them and can provide guidance to actually reducing them, thereby becoming more efficient. ALL costs associated with new products, new markets or new customers should be captured in this bucket.

Purchased Services are those services that an organization elects to “buy” versus “build”. These costs can include printing, service measurement (customer surveys), project expenses, mail management, and special promotions not associated with any current product or service, nor with any new product or service, such as an organization’s community activities. The key to identifying which costs belong in this bucket is that they are for services (usually professional services) other than those included in the Professional Services bucket.

Travel costs might appear to be obvious and one might wonder why they warrant special attention. In one of my previous organizations, I have direct experience that suggests that excluding travel costs that are incurred because of marketing, from a marketing budget can skew the results of a marketing campaign. Imagine a campaign that involves travel to a particular conference where your organization is a sponsor and has a booth or other display space. The costs for travel, lodging, meals and other related expenses can be appreciable and should be included in the budget in order to determine how successful that event was for your organization. ALL expenses that are incurred to get people somewhere for a special reason, should be included in the marketing travel costs bucket.

While this article attempts to simplify the budgeting process somewhat, it should be clear that capturing all your marketing efforts is important for your organization. For a particular campaign like marketing to a specific U.S. state, or a particular U.S. ethnic sector, or for a specific purpose in the U.S., the campaign should be set up to capture all the aforementioned costs.

You can never have too many campaigns; each unique in its cost collection efforts so that the success of each can be uniquely and separately assessed. In order to accomplish this goal successfully, the marketing manager and marketing department should know EXACTLY what each campaign involves. This can be achieved by creating a communications plan for your campaign.

The Marketing Manager should be responsible to ensure that all the costs are properly captured and reported up to the executive responsible for marketing. Also, the marketing manager should be responsible for determining what results are expected. How many new customers? How many referrals? How much sales? What incremental sales are expected? By balancing the expected results against the cost, an organization can establish an expected Return on Investment (ROI). And, by balancing the actual results against the cost, an organization can establish an actual ROI. Does your actual medical tourism marketing campaign ROI meet or exceed your expected ROI?

When I was in charge of marketing at a previous employer, I created a campaign for every promotion. We tracked every campaign. We were able to identify and continue successful campaigns and actually improve them. We were also able to discontinue unsuccessful campaigns so they didn’t drain much needed resources. That particular product achieved $40 million in revenues in the first year and a retention ratio of almost 80% in the second year. Both achievements are considered excellent for the competitive market of the product. We are so committed to the concept of using marketing budgets, that we have created a presentation that demonstrates how to create a medical tourism marketing budget.

Make sure your organization has a budget method that enables it to capture all medical tourism marketing costs. Make sure that you establish expected results, against which actual results can be compared. Using a marketing budget for each campaign will help you achieve this. It will help you demonstrate the success of your Medical Tourism Marketing Program.

India: Untapped potential in the medical tourism market

By M H Ahssan

The Indian healthcare market is Rs 15 billion and growing at over 30 per cent every year. Indian private hospitals are increasingly finding a mention in the travel itineraries of foreigners, with the trend of medical tourism catching up in the country. If industry estimates are to be believed, the size of the medical tourism industry stands at Rs 1,200 – Rs 1,500 crore (Rs 12-15 billion).

A recent CII-McKinsey study on healthcare says medical tourism alone can contribute Rs 5,000- Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 50-100 billion) additional revenue for upmarket tertiary hospitals by 2012, and will account for 3-5 per cent of the total healthcare delivery market. Compared to countries like the UK or the US, procedures like heart bypass surgery or angioplasty come at a fraction of the cost in India, even though the quality of doctors and medical equipment is comparable to the best in the world.

A heart bypass surgery in India costs USD 3,000-6,000, while in the US it costs between USD 15,000 and USD 40,000. The Indian Health Care Federation (IHCF), an association of the healthcare delivery sector that includes the Escorts Heart Institute, Apollo Hospitals Group, Fortis Healthcare among others and CII, under the leadership of Dr Naresh Trehan, executive director, Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre (EHIRC), New Delhi have also decided to project India as a major healthcare destination. Even travel agents are aggressively promoting India as a destination for medical tourism. This is a huge, untapped market, not just for therapeutic medical tourism like ayurveda, but also for curative treatment.

The benefit to tourism industry could be of the order of Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion). Indian NRIs, Asians and tourists from around the world are beginning to realise the potential of modern and traditional Indian medicine. Health and medical tourism is perceived to be one of the fastest growing segments in marketing ‘Destination Incredible India’ today. While this area has so far been relatively unexplored, we now find that not only the ministry of tourism, Government of India, but also the various state tourism boards are all promoting health and medical tourism as a segment with tremendous potential for future growth.

Indian hospitals have also realised the potential of this niche market and have begun to tailor their services for foreign visitors. Visitors, especially from the west and the middle-east, find Indian hospitals as an affordable and a viable option rather than grappling with health insurance and national medical systems in their native lands.

* Areas where Indian healthcare excels
* Clinical outcomes being on par with the world’s best centres.
* Internationally qualified and experienced doctors.
* Technology edge.
* Competitive costs – 1/5th to 1/10th of costs in the west.
* Quality of service.
* No waiting time.
* Patient-centric care.
* Exotic experience, increasing popularity as a tourist destination.
* Eastern healthcare wisdom along with the expertise of western medicine.
* Areas where Indian healthcare has to focus
* Accreditation norms to be adopted by all major hospitals.
* Hospitals must conform to a code of ethics.
* Provision of a uniform price band for major specialities especially for health insurance majors.
* Handling of medico-legal issues.

Working with Indian tourism ministry and tour operators to promote medical tourism overseas. Cross-border travel for healthcare reasons is still a highly disorganised movement, but countries are slowly waking up to its potential. In some places, the governments have taken a lead. In others, travel agents specialising in medical tourism are driving the trend.

In India, private hospitals are trying to attract patients on their own and by showcasing Indian healthcare overseas through CII-IHCF led overseas missions. Developed nations will benefit majorly as costs and waiting time come down for a significant chunk of their population. Developing countries benefit through medical tourism as it brings in revenues and provides the right spur to improve their overall healthcare sector, apart from reducing brain drain in their medical fraternities. Least developed countries, too, benefit as they lack facilities for cutting-edge treatment.

The situation was so dismal that in 2002, the National Health Services(NHS) in UK started a pilot scheme for ‘overseas treatment’ to see if surgery services abroad could be bought to shorten the waiting lists. The project focused mainly on facilities available in the European Union.

Meanwhile, many British patients take the initiative to seek their own treatment abroad without waiting for the NHS to sort out its problems.

A Rs 15-billion-plus market growing at over 30 per cent per year throws up huge opportunities for anyone smart enough to tap it. Thus, India not only offers world class cardiac bypass surgery, hip replacements, organ transplants, but also cosmetic, dental surgery and vision correction etc and alternative healthcare which is a significant niche opportunity.

Healthcare insurers in the developed countries are aware of the fact that the option of medical treatment in countries like India could help them reduce premiums and offer options to people who are currently uninsured. Over the next few years, insurance firms are expected to provide a fillip to the medical tourism business in India.

Google’s Chrome shines with hope

By M H Ahssan

It was only a matter of time before Google’s campaign for global domination and data control ventured into the realms of software operating systems. Its latest announcement takes aim squarely at its largest rival, Microsoft, which has been churning out the world’s most popular computing platform for years. Love it or hate it, Windows runs on about 95% of the planet’s PCs and sells over 400 million copies per year. Those are going to be hard targets to hit.

Google Chrome OS was introduced on the company blog this week along with a few paragraphs about the new vision the company has about people working on the web as opposed to their desktops. The new no-cost operating system will be aimed at netbooks, a rapidly growing market of lower specification, lightweight and smaller laptops. The system aims to be fast, simple, secure and available to consumers by the second half of 2010. The Linux-based kernel will be open source and will run on x86 and ARM chips, making it compatible with the majority of today’s hardware.

Little other technical information is currently available; at the moment it is just a message from Google that people want their computers to be better. They want to get online quickly and access their e-mail and data instantly without having to wait for boot-up times, virus scans and browser loading. Hours spent installing and configuring software and hardware and worrying about updates and patches would also not be missed, according to the search company.

That message rings true for many, but there is also the huge problem of learning a completely new way of computing; people are used to what they have and they don’t like change. The challenges for Google in this arena are huge. For years, corporations such as Sun Microsystems and IBM have been trying to vie for a slice of Microsoft’s OS market. Free alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu, a version of Linux, have gained traction among the tech-savvy minority, but have yet to make an impact on the market as they are perceived as too geeky and a chore to learn.

Then there is the gargantuan issue of hardware compatibility, Microsoft has entire divisions devoted to working with hardware vendors to ensure that their products run smoothly on Windows (most of the time). Almost every software company offers a Windows version as its primary product. How many will Google convince to create a new product just for its new venture? Gaming is another huge industry that relies on computers running Windows; its market dominance casts a long shadow over those trying to compete. Additionally, a solid support base is another factor currently in favor of Microsoft, as anyone who has ever tried to call Google will agree.

Although the chips seem to be stacked against Google this time, nobody can dispute its dominance online. It practically owns Internet search and gains 97% of its revenue from online advertising. Its bid to extend this dominance into operating systems could prove successful providing it can convince the public that its new baby is worth the learning curve.

Google is also targeting Microsoft’s Office suite with its own platform, which will extend from current web offerings including Google Docs and Gmail. Working in the “cloud”, or the web, will take off without a doubt, but the issue of online security and data protection still looms large – few people will feel totally at ease with Google having complete control over all of their personal documents. So the desktop is likely to remain diehard.

Android, Google’s mobile operating system, is gaining momentum although the company states that Chrome OS will be a completely separate project, as stated on its blog:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.

Initial observations indicate that Chrome OS will be more of a Google-powered version of Linux that functions as an extension of Google’s web browser. Every time you go online with it you will be giving Google your location, browsing habits, search patterns, ad revenue, and even your e-mail and data. This is exactly what the American company is after after, regardless of whether it at present has the authority to do anything with this information. You’ll be using a Google-powered Internet, and that could be a dangerous thing.

The Google model of offering free software may ultimately prove decisive; the company could even afford to pay computer manufacturers to preload its operating system. This would subsidize the cost of the hardware, which is good news for the budget-conscious consumer and emerging markets.

Free software has not always been the best though – the appearance of Linux-loaded netbooks into the mainstream a couple of years ago is a good example. According to market research firm NPD, over 90% of US-based netbooks now run Windows XP. Apple on the other hand has completely missed out on the netbook growth market as the company’s entry-level MacBook is just under a US$1,000. A Google-powered one would cost less than a third of that.

With Windows 7 just around the corner, Google’s Android gaining ground and the recent Chrome OS announcement, the only thing we can be sure of is that things are about to heat up and the way that we compute is likely to undergo some major changes. Whether we welcome them or not is another matter.

Innovative Marcom: Digitizing Brochures Leads to Customer Action and Measurable Results

By M H Ahssan

The purpose of communication technology is to allow humans to interact more efficiently and effectively. At it’s best, technology will extend human communication models; for example, creating the means for an on-going dialogue, which allows businesses to communicate with a greater level of intimacy with customers in order to serve them better.

Consumers prefer that businesses use the mail to communicate with them over the telephone, email and other channels. As mail finds a new niche as a communication channel, technology will be developed to help make it more efficient and effective. This column is about emerging technologies in the mail industry.

Karen is the marketing manager for the communications vertical with Pitney Bowes Business Insight, and she has for years now created well-written, concise marketing brochures that explain how products work both separately and in concert to deliver enterprise value.

I have known Karen since we both were hired by docSense to form a formidable marketing team under the direction of Sheila Eletto (Women of Distinction class ‘07) and Lenore O’Connor. docSense was an innovative software company founded by Karl Schumacher that had a big impact on the parent company in its brief life.

For example, to sell some of our more big ticket items, such as enterprise e-billing software, docSense had to devise a way to gain mindshare in the C-suite, where decisions to purchase such items are made. We initiated several programs, including a very exclusive Customer Conference at the PGA National Golf Resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. To reach CIOs, we started an Analyst Relations program, which garnered us excellent reviews in reports by Giga, Doculabs, Gartner, Aberdeen and Killen and Associates. We began a customer-focused newsletter and invited customer participation. Last, we began a Thought Leadership program that positioned our team as experts in our many fields of interest, including CRM, ERP and marketing—which would later take on a life of its own when adopted by corporate marketing.

With regard to strategic marketing, many of our key messages are still being used by the big company; it’s also fair to say that the acquisitions and strategic partnerships made by docSense strongly influenced the kind of acquisitions the company has made over the past six or seven years, which includes, among others, Group 1 Software and MapInfo.

Which brings us back to Karen Hansell. As each acquisition was successfully merged into the body politic, Karen has been called upon to create new marketing collateral that placed the new company in the larger context, and which offered clear insight into the kind of value these mergers and their new product lines promised customers. Over the years, Karen has supported high-speed inserters, e-billing software, the data quality suite of products, customer communication management solutions and now the Pitney Bowes Business Insight portfolio. She knows more about these products than many of the so-called subject matter experts. While others on the Marcom team have stayed with one set of products for years, Karen has restlessly moved forward to support the companies’ most innovative offerings.

So, as I continue to muse in this space about new ways to deploy technology in order to better communicate with customers, it occurred to me that Karen would be a good person to interview about new technologies that help her MarCom efforts. In this tough economy, the group needs to justify its own existence by monetizing MarCom projects and needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is more teeth than tail.

“It’s all about your value add,” she said. “If you aren’t generating leads and proactively answering objections–before they are voiced—you aren’t doing your job. Return on investment is top of mind; every process and result is scrutinized.”

I asked Karen to name a technology for MarCom that she thought had real promise and her answer surprised me: digitized brochures. When I think of brochures, I mainly think about handouts at trade shows and conferences, or collateral to be left behind by sales reps after a call. However, according to Karen, the Internet continues to alter the way we conduct business, and customer collateral is no different from any other communication vehicle. The market for digital brochures will likely catch up with her.

“Human beings have a need for interaction that can best be satisfied online,” she said. “Hyperlinks that lead us to more customer insight; rich media that can graphically underscore major features and benefits; metrics that enable us measure usage patterns, customer reach and that facilitates viral marketing…these tools are newly available to us now and marketing operations need to embrace them.”

As an example, Karen went with me to www.zmags.com and digitized a brochure she had designed. Using this site, she could now add rich media, including video of the product developer walking though a list of features and benefits. She could include links to more information than she could fit on a printed page for prospects that desired a deep dive. The site provided metrics for tracking end user behavior related to the piece. And the entire process took three fairly simple steps.

“Research tells us that a multi-channel approach to communication is the most effective if you can reinforce the message in different modalities and media,” she said. “Web-enabled tools can enhance the customer experience and make each communication more fun to explore—and it can compel a reader to forward the piece to colleagues in a kind of viral marketing. And when you can measure customer reactions to the piece—how long they spend reading it, what links they click through for more information, whether or not it drives some kind of action—these are tremendous tools that strengthen Marcom’s position in the marketing mix.”

Karen wants to leverage the power of web analytics in the same way that the company webmaster does to prove that her collateral gets results. “To increase our understanding of what works and what is or is not effective is the most important benefit, in my opinion, since the digital piece is always live and can always be altered. Like direct marketers, we are always testing. After all, delivering a poor customer experience can lead to the loss of a customer, so it’s not an option.” She also said that the delivery options available for digital brochures could extend her reach and readership and therefore generate more revenue for her business unit. Posting the brochure on a targeted Social Networking site, for example, increases the readership dramatically.

Perhaps most importantly, given the current and future economic climate, there is a cost savings component to creating digital brochures. “Communicate ineffectively and you waste business cycles, waste increasingly scarce resources and squander new revenue opportunities,” Karen said. “I compete for budget with other members of the marketing team. I have to understand how my messages are resonating with readers, how much of my audience I’m able to reach and how customers respond—including using tools like click-path tracking, instant notification and reporting to know which ones require follow-up from sales or additional marketing material.”

Karen’s main theme in our conversation was marketing optimization—how she can make each marketing brochure more effective by embedding rich media–video, audio, hyperlinks, and more—directly into the collateral, always testing it for effectiveness. “With digitized brochures marketers can go beyond traditional, two-dimensional printing into a virtually limitless multi-media world in a single document,” she said. “This technology is very exciting. Every piece can serve as a doorway into every customer-focused service and all the information our company can provide on the web.”

“Technology has moved way beyond PURLs. There are no limits to the customer experience that marketers can now provide. Customers can access all the information they need to make informed decisions; in addition, they can access customer service, sales, case studies, news releases—and if the piece is interesting enough—it tends to be viral, which extends our reach.”

This has opened my eyes to a new initiative in the optimization of customer communications: with all my emphasis on Transpromo and Dynamic Enveloping and VDP, I had overlooked the importance of customer collateral. Nevertheless, even I can see the value of interactive digital brochures.

And Karen Hansell continues to strive for strong returns on her marketing investments. HVTO—take notice.

India Independence Day – Revive the fighting spirit

By Jaya Shankar VS

India is a nation with a very rich historic background. The Independence Day, India (Swatantrata Divas) is celebrated on the 15th August to commemorate its independence from the 150 years British rule and its birth as a sovereign nation on that day in 1947. It is one of the 3 national holidays in the country. Flag hoisting and distribution of sweets is done all over the country. This is a proud day for the Indians. The prime minister raises the national flag at the Red Fort in New Delhi, and delivers a nationally televised speech from its ramparts, which is viewed by millions of nationals. He highlights achievements of the government, important issues and gives a call for further development through his speech.

Every Indian out there knows that the country achieved independence from the British rule on August 15, 1947 and this year marks the 62nd year of independence! Many of us also know from the history books in our schools the recorded sacrifices that were made to regain the sovereignty of our motherland! Equally familiar is the fact that on this day the country celebrates this landmark achievement in its usual customary and colourful ways! The National flag is hoisted in the national capital of New Delhi, and at the various state capitals and union territories. The Prime Minister lists the achievements of the country since the last Independence Day, raises the current and important domestic and sometimes international issues, and urges fellowmen to come together to solve it! Various cultural events are held, and special shows to honour the martyrs and the surviving freedom fighters are staged.

And so another Independence Day quietly comes to an end, the very day our forefathers and great leaders of pre-independent India dreamt of. But for us it is just another national holiday, a mere show of pomp, special shows on television, everything but an occasion to celebrate the spirit of independence, and relive and revive the spirit of fighting!

Why should we fight today? And against whom? Or what is there to fight for? Well, in my opinion we should ask ourselves why we have stopped the fight! After all, we have so many nagging problems, big and small, around us! Isn’t? Unfortunately, today we have ‘learnt to live’ with these problems and as long as they don’t ‘severely’ make a dent on our personal lives, we just don’t care! But have we ever wondered where we went wrong! I know this will kick start the blame game! There is corruption, red tapism that slows down development, and there are no good politicians, no leaders, no vision, no resources, and so on! But do we also realise that we too are responsible for this dismal state of affairs? Everyone knows that there cannot be a change overnight but I hope we will agree that there has to be some beginning somewhere!

Independence vs freedom
What is independence and what is freedom? For most of us political independence is freedom enough! The term ‘independence’ and the sense of ‘being independent’ has outshined the freedom struggle fought by our leaders and countrymen. What they sought was an independent India and more than that the ‘freedom’ to govern ourselves and to be dictated by some foreign force! Sadly, we have achieved the political independence but only some degree of real freedom. Real freedom is what will turn our country into a strong and united India! And every one of us should be fighting for it now!

Take for instance the personal freedom, a freedom that can be exercised by one individual without violating the other person’s freedom. In a nutshell, the freedom to express my views, do my own things without hurting others’ sentiments, and feelings and sentiments. It is a part of the civil liberties that protect an individual from the government of the residing nation setting limits for it so that it cannot abuse its power and interfere unduly with the lives of its citizens. Now how many of us can proudly say that we enjoy complete personal freedom in our ‘independent’ country?! I am not questioning here the rights of the government in upholding the law of the land or punishing the guilty and extending protection to its citizens.

Every government has the right to do that! But this is more about the apathy, of the government and a few individuals and groups, in the name of caste, religion, tradition, and gender that directly or indirectly violates my personal freedom to express my views or do my own things! It is an irony that only a select few have personal freedom which is only misused in restricting the freedom of others. There are more unwritten and unspoken laws being followed here than the customary written ones on bound books, which are almost never followed! Many of our laws are only ‘said’ in the right spirit but not ‘done’ in the right way.

Rights are not allowed to be fully exercised
Similarly we do not fully enjoy the civil rights, social rights, cultural rights and the rights to quality health, quality education, and defence to name a few. Even the right to vote has often been not allowed to exercise in the way we want it to, and needless to say the right to education is dictated by castes and money! Quality health services are denied to many. Everything comes with a heavy price tag! There can be several reasons for this but unfortunately our ‘muted mumbles’ is only making things get worse!

How many of us can proudly say that we enjoy all these rights to the fullest! Right from getting a birth certificate for our babies, to admissions in schools and colleges, and to get the jobs that we deserve, we compromise on everything. This compromise is not ‘ahimsa’ that Mahatma Gandhi stood for; this is typical ‘meek’ surrendering to the apathy of the few bad elements in the society! Of course, there will be a very few out there who would have not experienced the apathy of the officials at some point in time! But that’s only a handful of the population! A majority of us are still in the dark about our rights even on everyday issues! Even after 62 years of self-governing independent India we cannot get to exercise our rights and get things done in the way it ought to be done! Superficially, India has improved leaps and bounds in many fields. The quality of life has improved but sadly the quality of ‘living’ has not! Many of us do not even realise that in some parts of the country, far from our busy cities and our so-called social consciousness, some people are still fighting for some basic things, not with the British Empire but with the Indian government.

Wake up, India!
It is startling that we have failed to realise the gravity of the situation we are in. Or is it like we have meekly surrendered to the official apathy and gone numb to issues around us? Or is it simply because we have lost the spirit of fighting that our leaders and millions of citizens in pre-independent India displayed against the British? May be, it is a bit of all of them. The freedom struggle for independent India was not scripted by Gandhi and Nehru and other leaders alone, there were millions of people who stood up at that time to fight. The only reason was they wanted to be the masters of their own destiny, to help themselves and the country, the single most important persona that each one of us is missing today! What we need today is freedom, freedom across all spectrums and at all levels and the political independence is only just a beginning. If this happens, India will be a real force to reckon with!

Sunny at 60: ‘There are two things I would have definitely changed’

By M H Ahssan

On the eve of his sixtieth birthday, Sunil Manohar Gavaskar is not contemplating regressing into past life. But he admits, nonetheless, that if he had to live life all over again, there are two things he would most certainly do differently. “I would throw my wicket away, not bat 60 overs for 36 runs like I did in the 1975 World Cup, and I would not get into a situation where a Test match could be conceded [as happened at Melbourne, Australia, in 1980-81], whatever the provocation,” he said.

After a bout of badminton at the Bombay Gymkhana, Sunny, as he is popularly known, settled down for an extensive interview with HNN over bhelpuri and a cup of tea:

How differently do you see this game at 60 from the time when you saw it at 20?
It is different in the sense that there is a much wider following than, say, in the 1960s, when I was a kid growing up. Then it was a majority male following, but now I think it’s fairly mixed. You have got women of all ages interested in the game thanks to T20, mainly.

Would you have been happier playing today than when you played? With far more money, and fame…
Maybe not, for the simple reason that there was innocence about the game when I was a kid, which is perhaps not quite there now. So I think yes, I would prefer the innocence of the game that was there when I was a teenager.

Earlier, cricket was not just a sport. It was also about the great qualities of life it represented. Has there has been a fundamental shift in the way people approach the game today?
Not to a great extent. But, for instance, when people didn’t do the right thing, the saying used was “that’s not cricket”. Now that does not hold as much water as it did then. Mainly because I think the game has become commercial and therefore some of the old values have gone out of it. But it’s still a fantastic game. I think it is a far more attractive game to watch from a spectator’s point of view.

Has the romance of cricket fallen victim to money?
Well, I guess it’s now a win-at-all-costs system. The unpleasant things that happen in the game have come to the fore, so, therefore, I think in a sense the romance is gone. The appreciation of the game, whether it was by your own team or by the opposition, is not quite so much. You rarely see fielders go up to applaud somebody getting a half-century anymore. Players are aware that the TV cameras are on them. So they might have just one clap and that’s it — almost as if, if you have more than two or three claps for the opposition, then it’s a kind of weakness. I don’t think that’s a correct thing.

A problem arising out of the mega bucks is that there are a lot of young cricketers, 19 or 20, who are exposed to success that would usually come much later. How do you manage this?
That is why mentoring is so important. At the National Cricket Academy we must regularly invite seniors, not just from cricket but from all sports, to talk to youngsters about the perils of fame. Particularly how to handle the minuses of fame — people who have experienced the ups and downs in life can provide some guidance. Some guys might go over the top — after all, if you are young, you tend to live life in the fast lane and you will make mistakes and there is nothing wrong with that. You know you have the time to come back because age is on your side. But mentoring is essential.

India probably has the largest talent base because of our size and our obsession with cricket. Why do you think we have not been able to be the best team for any sustained period? Internal divisions, short on strength and stamina, not enough focus?
I think it’s a combination — of practice, the quality of pitches, and of infrastructure. Not just Ranji Trophy players, but even at the junior level, the facilities must be top class. I sense there is a realisation that yes, we have the financial clout now, let’s use it in a better way. And there is no point of being financially big if your on-field performance is not good. This realisation has emerged, which is why I think in the future India will be a lot more consistent than it has been in the past.

What makes excellence — is it talent, determination, ambition, passion, or a combination of all this?
Don’t forget luck is an important factor as well, plus all that you have mentioned. You have also got to have discipline, and I don’t just mean regular hours or practice. Discipline of a particular area of expertise is important. It doesn’t come easily and that is why there are very few great players who have been able to discipline their game to the requirements of the situation. Those are the players who are recognised all over the world as matchwinners.

You have always protested against maverick or natural players getting greater recognition vis-à-vis the more steady ones. How do you rate Shane Warne, who might appear a maverick but is actually a very sound bowler?
Absolutely. That is the point. I think Warne is a maverick perhaps because of the way he has been perceived off the field. On the field, he is very disciplined. He has always observed the basics of bowling a good line. He hasn’t taken 700 wickets in Test cricket and 300 wickets in ODIs just like that. Make no mistake: there is a lot of study and analysis that has gone into his becoming one of the greatest cricketers in history.

Has technique become redundant or superfluous? Look at Virender Sehwag and Adam Gilchrist and the kind of success they have enjoyed. Do you think this is the modern approach to cricket?
I have always believed that technique has never been a huge part of a sport. Temperament is your No 1 thing. You could have the best technique in the world, but if your temperament is bad, you will be nowhere. While if the temperament is good and you don’t have great technique, you will be able to do well. You have the ability inside you which makes you hang in there, makes you go on. That’s what separates the men from the boys. So does approach, attitude, and the upbringing towards the game. The difference in the style that you see from the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s is the upbringing in those days was not to hit the ball in the air, not to take risks. Coaches today encourage youngsters to play aerial shots or unorthodox shots, try different things. That is what has made the game so attractive.

What is the biggest issue confronting the game today?
The gap that is developing between some of the Test-playing countries and the others — a few Test-playing countries have developed fantastic cricket while others have stagnated or gone down. Now that is the biggest challenge: to be able to make all the 10 Test-playing countries into pretty much equal cricketing powers. That is never going to happen. But even if you have six countries, that will be a big step forward.

In recent times you have become a vehement critic of on-field sledging.
I have never been against banter. But sledging is nothing really but abuse of the opposition. Sometimes players get away saying to the opposition something on the field that they would never get away off the field had they said it to anybody. One day this might lead to a physical confrontation on the field. Why do you want to get to that stage? Are you trying to tell me the Bradmans, Benauds, Cowdreys, Soberses did that?

They didn’t. There might be a joke or two where even the butt of the joke laughs. A little gamesmanship did not affect us either. Today it is not that. I don’t mind the four-letter word thrown into a sentence. That’s not a problem at all. It’s when the ‘you so-and-so’ gets in there that it becomes personal. That is what I feel is an absolutely unnecessary part of the game. We never heard the Merchants, Hazares, Amarnaths ever saying anything abusive to their fellow mates, so why should it happen here?

You were like a one-man spearhead, especially against England and Australia in several matters, as player and even later.Was this part of some deep-seated anti-colonialism in you?
Not at all. I have been vocal about it because I have seen it happening. It was happening increasingly, so I’ve spoken about it. Those who say that this is a part of the game are talking nonsense. Banter yes, abuse no.

Do you sense some kind of resentment of India’s sudden rise to power, at least financial power?
No, I don’t think so. That’s not a factor at all. You just want the game to be a good sport at the end of it without people abusing each other. Let me explain. The Roger Federer versus Andy Roddick 2009 Wimbledon final was an epic game. If Roddick serves at 120 miles per hour, Federer trying to hit a backhand gets the top edge of the racket and the ball lands on the baseline of Roddick allowing Federer to get an absolutely flukey lucky point, would Roddick abuse Federer because of the luck he has? Then why should a bowler stand at his end and abuse a batsman who got an inside edge which went to the boundary, or who played and missed half-a-dozen times?

Federer and Roddick are playing for a major title and for millions of pounds, for rankings and stuff like that. Why should it be different in cricket? Why to go for wild abuse in a match? That’s wrong. The game will be better off without all this. It’s also a bad influence on young, upcoming players watching on television.

A lot of people see sports as a substitute for war. Does that subconsciously provoke sledging?
You throw yourself, die, do everything you know, to field a ball. You run three runs even when your legs are weary and tired, because that is where you have to give it your everything. By swearing at somebody you are just wasting your energy.

Did something early in your career provoke this sentiment against sledging?
It happened to me only once. I was staggered that a player who was making his debut in Tests, and I was well past 100 Tests, stood at the end of his follow through after I had cut him over slips for a boundary and swore at me. I couldn’t believe it. That’s probably the only occasion.

What do you think about the Twenty20-versus-Tests debate? Is Test cricket under threat?
I don’t think Test cricket is under threat. It has been there for more than 100 years. Test cricket will become far more attractive, as it became after the advent of one-day cricket. We saw more results, less dot balls, and it became far more result oriented. The same thing will happen with the influence of T20s. There will be a lot more runs scored in a day than earlier, which means plenty of results and more excitement for viewers at the ground and on television.

You don’t see the demise of bowlers like some players predict?
Look at the way the bowlers have come back in the Twenty20 game. They have learnt how to bowl, what fields to set, and, suddenly, they have got clobbered less. They will get occasionally clobbered by good batsmen, but they are also striking back. In the ICC Twenty20 World Cup, bowlers probably got as many ‘players of the match’ awards as batsmen or all-rounders.

You first played Tests for India 40 years ago. Is there anything you would have wanted to do differently now?
There are a couple of things I would obviously want to do [differently] if given another chance. Like our first World Cup match, where I got 36 not out. I would throw my wicket away now, which I wasn’t brought up to do. Earlier on, the mindset was different. I think today I might feel a little more flexible as far as throwing-a-wicket-type situation is concerned.

Even in the Melbourne incident, where I was provoked into asking Chetan [Chauhan]to leave the field, let me clarify that this decision was not taken at first, but when I was making my way back to the pavilion and was almost 10 yards down, I was abused by the Australians. That’s when I came back and took Chetan away. I wouldn’t come back to do this today, because as a captain, whatever the provocation, I should have kept my cool. Yes, these are the two things I would have definitely changed.

People feel that SMG is mellowing and then some new controversy comes up. So, has Gavaskar mellowed?
[Laughs] I don’t know… If I feel strongly about something, I say it. The problem is, I haven’t learnt to use my head when I speak or write, despite doing it for all these years. I still feel with my heart and say something and then a storm is created. Using words which cause little or no offence is a creative activity. But I write or speak from the heart and not the head.

But you can deal with criticism better now?
Because I no longer feel the pressures of performing.

From your huge experience and wisdom, what do you have to say to budding cricketers, the whole generation growing up to play for India?
Dream big and then go all out, focus all out to achieve the dream. It could be that you want to go for the moon, it could be that you want to develop a medical marvel. To achieve something, dream big, be focused and be determined.

When is the definitive autobiography coming?
Maybe I am writing too much. I have got columns and match reports, so maybe that has dulled my need to write any more. Besides, my first autobiography [Sunny Days] created a storm! Again I used my heart and not my head, perhaps the usage of words could have conveyed the same meaning without causing offence. So, if I have to write a definitive book, it would have to be honest. Some big reputations might get a bit of a dent once again. So why…

You have never pushed your son Rohan, but do you have any sense of disappointment that he could not go the distance with the India cap?
Look, I wanted him to be a good human being. For me, that was the most important thing. Being a cricketer or a doctor, engineer, journalist was his choice. I just wanted him to be content with what he was. All the feedback that I get from all those who have interacted with him is nothing but positive, which pleases me to no end. As far as his cricket is concerned, I keep teasing him all the time that his father used up all the luck, that’s why he didn’t have much left for him.

Now that you are a grandfather, too, that must be filling up your time quite a lot?
I travel a lot, but I try and spend whatever time I get with him. That’s another part of life which you have to experience to realise how wonderful it is. I know somebody had said that if he had known grandchildren were so good, he would have had them before his own children. I can’t say that because Rohan has been absolutely terrific, so it’s a double whammy, a great kid as well as a great grandkid.

You batted perfectly in your career, you believe in structures and systems and temperament and in the hard logic of batting technique — everything to suggest that you are a very rational person. How do you explain your strong faith and trust in Sai Baba?
If I tried to go deep into that, I don’t think people would understand. For me he is everything. He is the ultimate. Just thinking of him gives such a sense of completeness, such a sense of well-being. And the knowledge that he is looking after me is such a great sense of comfort, not just for me, but also for my whole family. It is hard to really describe it.

You have been pretty much identified as a loner, a man who lived in his own world as a player, even though cricket is a team game. But you do have a lot of friends…
If you meet my buddies or friends whom I hang out with, they’ll give you a different picture. Even during my playing days. It is an image… if you play serious and risk-free cricket, the image you get is different. Even when I played, guys knew how I was off the field. But due to my prankster habits, I really got into trouble with some of my seniors. That’s a part which wasn’t seen by anybody. There was no media explosion like it is now. I thank god for it.

But you have mentioned in your book that the Indian dressing room wasn’t the best place to be in.
Yes, maybe on an occasion or in an odd Test match or a series. But 99.9% of the time it was an absolute honour to share the room with my teammates and play for the country. For all those guys who went out and gave it their best, it was a great honour to play with them. The happiest moments have been off the field when I went to Hyderabad in the 1980s and saw Shivlal Yadav’s house. To see Roger [Binny] or Gundappa’s [GR Vishwanath] house gave me a lot of pleasure. They gave it everything just like everyone else in the team, but they didn’t get the endorsements or rewards that Kapil or I got, or to an extent Ravi [Shastri] and Dilip [Vengsarkar] got. But believe you me, their contribution is no less than ours. If they hadn’t been in the Indian dressing room and on the field, then we wouldn’t have been able to do half of what we have actually done.

So, when you look back at the 1970s and 1980s, some of the pangas, the old enmities, have been sand-papered and smoothened out?
Yes, they are. But to a great extent this was perception or speculation, not anything serious. People weren’t that close to the scene and just got bits and pieces and jumped to their own conclusions. This doesn’t happen in cricket only. We are all always waiting for a good story about something bad about others. I would look at it like that.

At one point of time you were considered to be mercenary, yet you had the great ability to completely compartmentalise your mental processes when you went out to bat. Was this difficult?
I don’t accept to being a mercenary. I didn’t play for people simply because they paid me money. Yes, I spoke on behalf of the players, for what the players’ body or the fraternity felt. For a better deal. I expressed myself maybe because they made me the spokesperson and then when I became the captain I was automatically the spokesperson of the team. I did take up their issues. Even today you speak to cricket officials and explain to them, you will be surprised how much they will do it for you. You have to be completely articulate. The administrators were happy to listen to us. We also learnt that having told them to do something, we had to be patient about it, so I don’t think there was too much of a problem.

Who would you pick as the all-time greats after your retirement whom you would have loved to play against?
Tendulkar and Lara are the first who come to mind. Then, of course, Shane Warne, Muthiah Muralitharan, and Wasim Akram are some who would also be right up there. Another one would be Anil Kumble. He is such an unassuming player, with 600-plus wickets and the records that he has. He is a fantastic cricketer.

Once you were seen as anti-establishment. Now you are on the governing council of the IPL and close to the BCCI, though out of the ICC…
Cricket is my life. It is heaven, therefore, to be a part of it or do something for the game. For the ICC, it was a huge honour and privilege. Despite all that, if I do feel something strongly, I still say it. See, here I go again with my heart leading my head.

International Youth Day – Our challenge. Our future

By Jaya Shankar VS

International Youth Day (IYD) celebrated on August 12 every year since 2000, is an awareness day designated by the United Nations. The Day is an opportunity for governments across the countries to draw attention to youth issues including cultural, political, humanitarian, societal and legal issues. The Day is filled with concerts, workshops, cultural events, and meetings with active participation from national and local government officials and youth organisations across the world.

History of the Day
In 1965, the Member States of the United Nations endorsed the Declaration on the Promotion among Youth of the Ideals of Peace, Mutual Respect and Understanding between Peoples. Two decades later, in 1985, the UN General Assembly called for the International Youth Year: Participation, Development, Peace, to emphasise the important and the effective role young people play in the world and their potential contribution to development and the ideals of the United Nations Charter. That same year, the Assembly also endorsed the guidelines for further planning and suitable follow-up in the field of youth, which are significant for their focus on young people as a broad category comprising various subgroups, rather than a single demographic entity.

In 1995, on the tenth anniversary of International Youth Year, the United Nations strengthened its commitment to young people by directing the international community’s response to the challenges to youth into the next millennium. It did this by adopting an international strategy — the World Programme of Action for Youth to the Year 2000 and Beyond — to address more effectively the problems of young people and to increase opportunities for their participation in society. The Programme provides a policy framework and practical guidelines for national action and international support to improve the situation of youth. The Programme identifies ten priority areas for action aimed at improving the situation and well-being of youth. These are: education, employment, hunger and poverty, health, environment, drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, leisure time activities, girls and young women, and the full and effective participation of youth in the life of society and in decision-making.

Following this, on 17 December 1999, in its resolution, the General Assembly endorsed the recommendation made by the World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth held in Lisbon, Portugal in August 1998 that 12 August be declared International Youth Day. The first International Youth Day was observed on August 12, 2000.

Theme for 2009 IYD
The theme for this year’s International Youth Day is Sustainability: Our challenge, our future. Apart from its popular significance of maintaining environmental balance and renewal, sustainability also includes the environment, society and the economy. It is true that our actions and attitudes help shape these three facets of life and their changing shapes in turn affect the way we are able to live our lives. There has to be a global sense of responsibility to help mitigate the negative effects of unsustainable behaviour as has been proven by the global crises in food, the economy and the environment. Today, the concept of the global village has gone beyond being a useful analogy to being a hard reality.

How the IYD is celebrated?
The General Assembly, while declaring 12 August as International Youth Day, had recommended that public information activities be organised to support the Day as a way to promote better awareness of the World Programme of Action for Youth to the Year 2000 and Beyond, adopted by it in 1995.

Youth across the world team up on this Day to rally support and urge their governments, non-governmental organisations, academic institutions, businesses, and young people involved with youth development to focus on what has been done to further the World Programme of Action for Youth. Forums, public discussions, information campaigns highlighting the rights and issues the young people face today and how they can be addressed are distributed. Public awareness campaigns on youth issues and the role of media in promulgating the info are conducted. The United Nations Programme on Youth encourages youth organisations around the world to host community barter fairs for International Youth Day, where there is no money involved, only pure exchange of goods and services.

Youth issues and possible solutions
The development of any society depends heavily on the imaginations, ideals, visions, aspirations and energies of young men and women living there. And hence identifying the problems of this group and working towards solving them is very important.

The global youth population, ranging in age from 15 to 24 years, is an estimated 1.03 billion, or 18 percent of the total global population. And the majority of these young men and women live in developing countries. Projections say that these numbers are expected to increase well into the next century. And at a time when the world countries are reeling under heavy financial and economic constraints due to recession, the situation is simply not conducive for the effective development of youth welfare and related activities. Among them are: limited physical and financial resources for funding youth programmes and activities; inequities in social, economic and political conditions, including racism and xenophobia; gender discrimination; high levels of youth unemployment; armed conflict and confrontation; continuing deterioration of the global environment; increasing incidence of disease, hunger and malnutrition; changes in the role of the family; and inadequate opportunity for education and training.

As said, since this group is extremely important in the development of societies and communities and across all spectrums of governance in the countries, it has become doubly crucial to set forth goals and action plans towards the sustenance of this group. It is also equally important that the youth who are the energizers of today and the holders of tomorrow should prepare themselves to embrace the challenge of sustainability in its fullness as they help pave the way forward through the 21st century and beyond.

The solutions lie in the hands of the governments, international organisations and voluntary associations in the respective countries. Equally important is the receptive response from the youth which alone will guarantee that the governments’ efforts are fruitful. To begin with, the governments have to ensure education, access to employment opportunities, adequate food and nutrition, a physical and social environment that promotes good health and protection from disease, enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, participation in decision-making processes, and access to cultural, recreational and sports activities.

The world has been witnessing changes at all levels, environmental, political, economic and socio-cultural changes. And young people are both beneficiaries and victims of such changes which will inevitably affect us into the next century. The key is to ensure that the positive policy changes and development activities of the governments, international organisations and voluntary associations touch youth. The International Youth Day is a Day for the governments, international organisations and voluntary associations to remind themselves of the commitments they made to provide the youth with a conducive social, political, cultural, economic and financial environment. Together, we can make a positive change!

Asia’s growth hopes crumble

By M H Ahssan

As the global economic slowdown deepens, poverty in Asia is set to become further entrenched. The number of people living in absolute poverty is increasing as a result of sagging incomes and loss of jobs amid a collapse in export-led growth, which has been the region’s road to prosperity.

A slew of reports makes it clear that the global financial and economic crisis will have a significant impact on the vulnerable section of the population in Asia. A year ago there was still discussion about the possibility of Asia “decoupling” from the recession in the rich countries; it is now clear that the region is not immune.

Growth in developing Asia as a whole will fall three percentage points this year to 3.4%, the slowest rate since the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Its recovery will depend on the depth and length of the recession in the United States, Europe and Japan, the destinations for about 60% of Asia’s exports.

The global economic crisis will keep in poverty more than 60 million people in developing Asia – including 14 million in China – and 24 million more in 2010 who would otherwise have been freed from that shackle had economic growth continued at pre-crisis levels.

A just-released United Nations assessment says that both the number of poor and the poverty rate are expected to increase further in some low-income southern Asian economies. It has been widely accepted that the global crisis is likely to wipe out gains made over the past decade in reducing poverty.

Across Asia, poor communities are feeling the consequences of the global downturn particularly hard. Prices of food and fuel have declined from their peaks, but not enough for people to return to 2007 living standards.

Research in poor rural and urban communities in five countries, including Bangladesh and Indonesia, carried out by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Britain, found that people in poor communities are eating less frequently, and less diverse and nutrient-rich foods. In some cases, people are resorting to self-medication while children’s education is suffering, with them being withdrawn from school or in Islamic countries moving to (cheaper) madrassa schools.

Export-dependant businesses are closing factories, laying off workers and are being hit by supply chain disruptions. Declining prices in commodities such as rubber mean reduced production, resulting in less income and job migration.

In the urban area around Jakarta, migrant export-sector workers started to return home late in 2008 when their contracts were not renewed; others have had their working hours reduced. Garment factory workers in Dhaka report that new jobs are available, but these are in poor-quality, unsafe sub-contractor sweatshops, rather than in factories that comply with labor standards.

More workers are having to resort to low-yield or dangerous jobs. People from Kalimantan, Indonesia, are traveling to other islands to mine gold, while cross-border smuggling is reportedly rising in rural Bangladesh – both illegal and dangerous but potentially lucrative activities.

In China, tens of thousands of export-oriented firms in cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou have closed in recent months while 20 million domestic migrant workers are said to have lost their jobs as a result of the collapse in export orders.

As recession deepens in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, migrant earnings sent home to developing countries may fall to about US$290 billion in 2009 from US$305 billion in 2008, according to the World Bank. For some countries such as the Philippines, remittances from expatriate workers are the single-largest source of export revenue.

The IBON Foundation in the Philippines reported that in the first three months of this year, overseas remittances fell from 11 out of the 20 countries that account for 96% of such remittances. Remittance growth in another four countries is slowing and could soon turn negative.

In India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, remittance flows are forecast to slow sharply to zero growth this year from over 16% growth in 2008. The rising pressures on international labor markets are also being felt in Indonesia. Up to 200,000 Indonesian workers, out of more than 4 million expatriate Indonesian workers worldwide, might need to return home if the international economic crisis remains severe, according to a report by the Lowy Institute in Australia.

As for people who are employed but who do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the poverty line, the International Labor Organization forecasts that their number in Asia will increase by 50-120 million for the period between 2007 and 2009.

The adverse impact of the crisis has been particularly harsh on women in the region. An Asian Development Bank (ADB) official related how most workers in the lower segment of the global supply chain of exported goods are women, and they are being heavily affected by recent job losses – particularly in the garments, textiles and electronics industries. These industries, heavily hit by the current crisis, employ five female workers for every two males.

The impact of developments in international capital markets also presents serious risks for Asian countries. In recent months, all major global financial institutions have become much more risk-averse and financial agencies are much more cautious about providing funds.

The ADB notes that “the region is … experiencing a precipitous drop in foreign direct investment” and “funding for infrastructure projects is fast drying up”. The result, says the Lowy Institute, is that many developing countries are finding that their access to international capital is being squeezed at a time when they are critically needed for development and to overcome poverty.

Proposed reforms to financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and development banks might provide some extra funding for developing countries, the overall impact of the proposals currently under consideration seems likely to be small.

There are also signs of increasing protectionism in capital markets. In recent months, many rich countries have introduced various forms of assistance for their domestic financial sectors. While some of these have been emergency measures needed to head off systemic collapse, the Lowy Institute said some other measures have the effect of tilting access to the playing field for international capital markets in favor of rich countries at the expense of developing countries. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown described these kinds of measures as “mercantilism in a new form” and “a form of financial protectionism”.

Open economies in Asia will also need to contend with increased trade protectionism in the industrialized countries. For example, since last November’s Group of 20 (G-20) summit in Washington, a pledge by leaders not to raise new barriers to trade or investment has been widely flouted. The World Bank recently estimated that 17 of the G-20 countries had instigated 47 policies that had restricted trade since the summit.

Difficulties faced during economically challenging times are usually compounded by social problems. As the IDS research found, there are signs of rising domestic violence growing inter-group tensions. Minority groups have been criticized for taking advantage of the crisis, but are typically disadvantaged compared with the majority in terms of access to official resources. Petty crime, drug and alcohol abuse were reportedly on the rise. So were the abandonment of children and the elderly; micro-credit default; and criminalization of youth.

Help from governments is severely limited in many countries. Public safety nets for the poor in Bangladesh, for example, were criticized for the small amounts disbursed. In Jakarta, migrant workers who had lost their jobs were not able to access government rice for the poor, which typically goes to longer-term residents.

Asia’s growth hopes crumble

By M H Ahssan

As the global economic slowdown deepens, poverty in Asia is set to become further entrenched. The number of people living in absolute poverty is increasing as a result of sagging incomes and loss of jobs amid a collapse in export-led growth, which has been the region’s road to prosperity.

A slew of reports makes it clear that the global financial and economic crisis will have a significant impact on the vulnerable section of the population in Asia. A year ago there was still discussion about the possibility of Asia “decoupling” from the recession in the rich countries; it is now clear that the region is not immune.

Growth in developing Asia as a whole will fall three percentage points this year to 3.4%, the slowest rate since the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Its recovery will depend on the depth and length of the recession in the United States, Europe and Japan, the destinations for about 60% of Asia’s exports.

The global economic crisis will keep in poverty more than 60 million people in developing Asia – including 14 million in China – and 24 million more in 2010 who would otherwise have been freed from that shackle had economic growth continued at pre-crisis levels.

A just-released United Nations assessment says that both the number of poor and the poverty rate are expected to increase further in some low-income southern Asian economies. It has been widely accepted that the global crisis is likely to wipe out gains made over the past decade in reducing poverty.

Across Asia, poor communities are feeling the consequences of the global downturn particularly hard. Prices of food and fuel have declined from their peaks, but not enough for people to return to 2007 living standards.

Research in poor rural and urban communities in five countries, including Bangladesh and Indonesia, carried out by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Britain, found that people in poor communities are eating less frequently, and less diverse and nutrient-rich foods. In some cases, people are resorting to self-medication while children’s education is suffering, with them being withdrawn from school or in Islamic countries moving to (cheaper) madrassa schools.

Export-dependant businesses are closing factories, laying off workers and are being hit by supply chain disruptions. Declining prices in commodities such as rubber mean reduced production, resulting in less income and job migration.

In the urban area around Jakarta, migrant export-sector workers started to return home late in 2008 when their contracts were not renewed; others have had their working hours reduced. Garment factory workers in Dhaka report that new jobs are available, but these are in poor-quality, unsafe sub-contractor sweatshops, rather than in factories that comply with labor standards.

More workers are having to resort to low-yield or dangerous jobs. People from Kalimantan, Indonesia, are traveling to other islands to mine gold, while cross-border smuggling is reportedly rising in rural Bangladesh – both illegal and dangerous but potentially lucrative activities.

In China, tens of thousands of export-oriented firms in cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou have closed in recent months while 20 million domestic migrant workers are said to have lost their jobs as a result of the collapse in export orders.

As recession deepens in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, migrant earnings sent home to developing countries may fall to about US$290 billion in 2009 from US$305 billion in 2008, according to the World Bank. For some countries such as the Philippines, remittances from expatriate workers are the single-largest source of export revenue.

The IBON Foundation in the Philippines reported that in the first three months of this year, overseas remittances fell from 11 out of the 20 countries that account for 96% of such remittances. Remittance growth in another four countries is slowing and could soon turn negative.

In India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, remittance flows are forecast to slow sharply to zero growth this year from over 16% growth in 2008. The rising pressures on international labor markets are also being felt in Indonesia. Up to 200,000 Indonesian workers, out of more than 4 million expatriate Indonesian workers worldwide, might need to return home if the international economic crisis remains severe, according to a report by the Lowy Institute in Australia.

As for people who are employed but who do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the poverty line, the International Labor Organization forecasts that their number in Asia will increase by 50-120 million for the period between 2007 and 2009.

The adverse impact of the crisis has been particularly harsh on women in the region. An Asian Development Bank (ADB) official related how most workers in the lower segment of the global supply chain of exported goods are women, and they are being heavily affected by recent job losses – particularly in the garments, textiles and electronics industries. These industries, heavily hit by the current crisis, employ five female workers for every two males.

The impact of developments in international capital markets also presents serious risks for Asian countries. In recent months, all major global financial institutions have become much more risk-averse and financial agencies are much more cautious about providing funds.

The ADB notes that “the region is … experiencing a precipitous drop in foreign direct investment” and “funding for infrastructure projects is fast drying up”. The result, says the Lowy Institute, is that many developing countries are finding that their access to international capital is being squeezed at a time when they are critically needed for development and to overcome poverty.

Proposed reforms to financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and development banks might provide some extra funding for developing countries, the overall impact of the proposals currently under consideration seems likely to be small.

There are also signs of increasing protectionism in capital markets. In recent months, many rich countries have introduced various forms of assistance for their domestic financial sectors. While some of these have been emergency measures needed to head off systemic collapse, the Lowy Institute said some other measures have the effect of tilting access to the playing field for international capital markets in favor of rich countries at the expense of developing countries. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown described these kinds of measures as “mercantilism in a new form” and “a form of financial protectionism”.

Open economies in Asia will also need to contend with increased trade protectionism in the industrialized countries. For example, since last November’s Group of 20 (G-20) summit in Washington, a pledge by leaders not to raise new barriers to trade or investment has been widely flouted. The World Bank recently estimated that 17 of the G-20 countries had instigated 47 policies that had restricted trade since the summit.

Difficulties faced during economically challenging times are usually compounded by social problems. As the IDS research found, there are signs of rising domestic violence growing inter-group tensions. Minority groups have been criticized for taking advantage of the crisis, but are typically disadvantaged compared with the majority in terms of access to official resources. Petty crime, drug and alcohol abuse were reportedly on the rise. So were the abandonment of children and the elderly; micro-credit default; and criminalization of youth.

Help from governments is severely limited in many countries. Public safety nets for the poor in Bangladesh, for example, were criticized for the small amounts disbursed. In Jakarta, migrant workers who had lost their jobs were not able to access government rice for the poor, which typically goes to longer-term residents.

Sex meets society, in court

By M H Ahssan

The Centre, mulling over the Delhi High Court verdict on Section 377 of the IPC, should recognise a basic principle of democratic freedoms – we are free when others are free.

The Delhi High Court ruling overturning the ban on consensual homosexual behaviour has been met with a flurry of political opposition. Pretty much every party – predictably the right-of-centre BJP, but also surprisingly a ‘rational’ party like Lok Satta – has expressed reservations agains the ruling, saying that it runs counter to Indian society and culture. The UPA Government is mulling its response, amidst calls for overturning the ruling by legal or political means. All of this is plain wrong, and not to forget, stupid.

A different kind of moral policing
First, let us get the facts straight. Consensual gay sex cannot be a crime, without gay orientation itself being a crime. The Indian Penal Code’s Section 377 has always illogically ignored this disconnect, whereby we’re outlawing a behaviour which is really the outcome of an orientation which is itself not illegal.

Coming to orientation and ‘Indian-ness’: Those who engage in homosexual conduct are ‘Indian’ too, so there is no question of arguing that their conduct is not Indian. If we begin to apply percentage yardsticks for what constitutes Indian-ness, there will be no end to it. If 80% of India is Hindu, does that make the other 20% ‘not Indian’? Why is it that even those who would reject that view outright if applied to religion are callous in applying it to sexual minorities?

The ‘tyranny of the majority’ is why we need constitutional protections. If everyone engaged only in popular conduct (or speech) there would be no need for a constitution guaranteeing any of their rights. Ultimately, we want a society in which the imposition of the views of the majority on the minority is opposed as ‘not Indian’.

This fundamental understanding of protection for unpopular things is totally absent in Indian culture, steeped as we still are in traditional identities of community, hierarchy and ’social order’. Not surprisingly, this reflects in our governance too, and hence we repeatedly witness politicians and even judges referring to cultural mores of the majority in under-pinning their arguments for or against unpopular things.

An affordable democracy
The second thing to remember is that eventually, the ghosts of our battles will come home, and then the walls will really crumble. It is much easier to tell strangers how their rights should be curtailed, than to repeat that view to friends and family. If there is one reason why the gay rights movement has continued to gain ground in every free society, it is this. Here is the former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, mastermind of the right-wing takeover of America during the Bush years, speaking about marriage rights for gays: “Freedom means freedom for everyone. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”

The secret of this strange mix is simple: his daughter is gay, and he loves her very much. All the other arguments can go to hell.

Too often, we pretend that we ourselves will never be put in situations that others protest. We smugly think that the activist shouting in the street, “2-4-6-8, how do you know your children are straight?” is carrying things a bit too far, because we imagine that our own social and personal lives will never be like that. We pretend that no one we know or love will make such choices, and that no one we care about will be subject to the kind of name-calling that flows easily in conversations among homogeneous groups.

But this is a limited freedom; it makes us feel free without giving others the same luxury. And it always breaks down. When those who are very close to us – sons and daughters, siblings, even friends – become the butt of such characterisation, we can’t afford that kind of separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ anymore.

Law, culture and silence
There is a third point that is often lost in the noise about sexuality. Namely, that those who demand equality are usually more vocal than the rest. This is understandable; they have a lot to lose from the status quo, and are therefore naturally loud in protesting it. What is more intriguing is the other half of this asymmetry – why are so many others silent?

The usual answer is that they are indifferent. I.e. they keep quiet because it does not matter to them which way the debate turns. They don’t know anyone who is gay, and they don’t expect to encounter any such person either, so they simply keep away from ‘all this nonsense’. But that is only half the answer; it hides a more important truth.

There is at least one other reason for the silence of the majority. Because they too have been subjugated by the same expectation of conformity, and many of them are simply afraid to discuss it, much less articulate in the public realm. Keep in mind, we have a society in which heterosexual conduct itself cannot be discussed without embarrasment. How can we even think of joining the debate with gay activists? So the silence is consensual. People agree its best not to talk.

This is also the reason the Section 377 of the IPC was overturned in a court of law and not amended by popular will in Parliament, as it ought to have been. But then we would be getting ahead of ourselves — our politicians have long considered themselves guardians of our culture. Ironical as it may seem, an IPC drafted by our colonial rulers has lived through relatively untouched in India even as its sections contradicted a Constitution framed by the native leaders of our own freedom movement. Luckily, our courts are the guardians of our Constitution, not culture.

It was natural then that our homegrown liberal demons would eventually knock the doors of the judiciary. And so it came to pass that a court ended up striking down the violative sections and not Parliament.

A lose-lose calculus
Fourth, this ‘asymmetry of noise’, in the long run, has a profound impact. No group, however large its majority, can be unaffected if the only loud noises are all from the opposing view. The only way to counter this is for the majority too to make some loud noises. This is what we’re seeing now – politicians who normally do not talk much about sexual issues suddenly taking up the cause of the moral majority. Now the battle is more even, it appears – ‘majority noise’ versus ‘minority noise’.

But there is an important difference. The majority’s noise-making threatens its own self-policing. When Sushma Swaraj or Lalu Yadav speak out against the Delhi High Court judgment, they have to be careful what they say. They are quite candid and loud in telling you what ‘bad sex’ is, but they dare not talk much about ‘good sex’, because one of the rules of this ‘good sex’ is that you cannot talk about it, especially in public. So, for a few days they will make some noises here and there, but eventually the asymmetry of silence will take over. It’s a lose-lose equation: if you talk about sex, then the old rules of silence will break down, but if you don’t talk about sex, then only those demanding sexual rights will be heard.

What next?
Politics being what it is, we cannot rule out an appeal of the current verdict by the Centre in the Supreme Court. That may buy the Centre’s politicians some breathing room, to contend that they too are trustees of Indian culture. But if the SC were to uphold the Delhi High Court’s view, then that would be curtains for this debate all over India. Even without that, the Delhi court’s ruling will give a fillip to demands for more rights to gays, and our hierarchical culture is simply not prepared for challenges to the ‘order. No wonder the Centre is ‘mulling’ over the matter.

There is nothing to think about. The only consistent repsonse, the only affordable response, the only one that will overcome the lose-lose calculus, is to recognise the basic truth. A free and unthreatened minority is the truest measure of the safety of the majority too. We are free when others are free.

Let Gays Rejoice – Not Exult!

By Rajinder Puri

The Delhi High Court judgment which decriminalized private sex between gay adults is welcome. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will endorse the judgment to make it applicable throughout India . That should end harassment and insecurity among gays. But there is need for caution and restraint while welcoming this measure. The first reaction by media and the gays who participated in a parade and hailed the judgment later was far from encouraging. They went overboard. French kisses in the street between gays for the benefit of media cameramen were not only offensive – these violated the anti-obscenity law. Our law and order machinery may be too lax to take note. In the days to come the public may be less forgiving.

If gays view reform as a license for exhibitionism and the right to indirectly propagate their culture through an overactive gay community they may invite big trouble. Gay rights are fine as far as constitutional rights of individuals to pursue in private their sexual orientation are concerned. But any perceived intended or unintended attempt by them to alter the moral norms of society could provoke a public backlash of tragic dimensions. The court has decided the constitutional issue. It is not equipped to judge the moral issue. In that sense Dr Murli Manohar Joshi was right to assert that only society as a whole and Parliament representing it will have the last word in determining the limits of gay rights.
Attitude to homosexuality raises questions of morality. Morality changes from time to time and from place to place. It is not rational. But it does reflect the will of society. It can change only by the will of society.

Commentators who describe public disapproval of homosexuality in India as a legacy of Victorian England and alien to Indian culture are spreading dangerous nonsense. Whatever the reality might have been during the Kama Sutra era and during the era preceding British colonial rule, the Indian public by and large frowns upon homosexuality. It would be dangerous to ignore this truth. That is why gays had best consider their sexual preference to be a private affair and refrain from overt exhibitionism that could provoke a reaction.

Arguments for or against the moral codes of existing societies are futile. These are a reality. They can change only by the willing consent of societies. Thus President Sarkozi of France considers the burqa immoral because it demeans women. A Muslim critic considered Sarkozi’s wife immoral for flaunting her nudity for the world to see. In the wide gap between the veil and exposure there lies a glut of moral codes that differ from each other. Who is to decide which moral code is right and which is not? Society is quite arbitrary in deciding its moral code. Change should be attempted only through delicate moves and by consent. The impression is unavoidable that mainstream media’s over-reaction to the Delhi High Court judgment reflects a pathetic attempt to appear politically correct in western eyes. The tendency to approximate to prevailing cultural mores in America and Europe is derived perhaps from the belief that it signifies progress. But societal change is not necessarily progressive. It can equally signify decline.

Empirical studies by historians of numerous civilizations have established that the decline and demise of each civilization was preceded by excessive promiscuity and permissiveness in its culture. J.D. Unwin who authored Sex & Culture wrote: “Every civilization is established and consolidated by observing a strict sexual moral code, is maintained while this strict code is kept … and decays when sexual license is allowed…” Aldous Huxley fully endorsed Unwin’s book and said: “The evidence for these conclusions is so full, that it is difficult to see how they can be rejected.”

Along with political and economic reform India needs social reform. But it should be introduced with restraint and on India ’s own terms. The priests of all the major religions in India decry homosexuality. They are by no means infallible. Some of them are indicating acceptance of the judgment decriminalizing homosexuality. Their support should be welcomed but their concerns should be addressed. We should not be so reckless as to ignore the large section of our public that heeds the priests. Gays are attempting to integrate with mainstream society. That calls for restraint and decorum. Otherwise it could result in traumatic alienation.

India budget 2009 bows to politics

By M H Ahssan

The plunge in Indian stock prices that greeted Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s budget on Monday says as much about the inability of market participants to recognize reality before it is thrust in their faces as it does about the dismal content of Mukherjee’s budget statement.

The benchmark Sensex slumped 5.8%, the most since early January, as if shocked at the scale of the budget deficit proposed by Mukherjee and at the lack of a coherent reform agenda.

Yet only three days earlier, the budget for Indian Railways, whose finances are kept separate from the federal government accounts, showed clearly which way the wind was blowing. Railway Minister Mamata Bannerjee kept fares unchanged, announced new subsidies and earmarked a mere 3% of total revenue to develop the 156-year-old network. As I stated at the time, “Going by this, it is quite likely that the union budget might not be much different and the supporters of reform might be disappointed.” [1]

The day after the election result was announced in mid-May, sweeping a Congress-led coalition into power while banishing to opposition the parties of the left, a 17% surge in stock prices epitomized the bullish hopes for the new government, hopes not borne out by reality. The market continued to ignore global realities thereafter. Not surprisingly it tanked on Monday’s budget day.

Like the railway budget, the Mukherjee budget was a give-away affair largely devoid of imagination and notably empty of any indication of real moves towards fiscal prudence. As admitted by Mukherjee, it was a pro-poor, pro-rural area budget – and surely nobody’s going to begrudge that.

The target for agriculture credit flow for the financial year to next June 30 was set at 3,250 billion rupees (US$66 billion), up from 2,870 billion rupees. Allocation for the National Agricultural Development Plan, or Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojna, was increased by 30%, while that for the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Program was raised 75%. The budget also provided for a 1% interest rate subvention to farmers who repay short-term crop loans on schedule, thereby bringing down the effective rate to 6%; towards this end, 4,110 million rupees was allocated for the year. The deadline for the debt waiver scheme was extended by six months to December 31, 2009.

The budget also provides 20 billion rupees for rural housing and substantially increases outlays in various other programs. Funds to the flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme will go up as much as 144% and, under a proposed Food Security Act, rice and wheat will be provided to the poor at 3 rupees per kilogram.

Spending on physical infrastructure will also increase, by about 1,000 billion rupees, an amount that can be supported by the government-owned India Infrastructure Finance Co Ltd and banks.

From the reform point of view, the most important positive statement was an assurance that plans for a Goods and Services Tax are on target and it will be introduced by 2010. This will go a long way towards simplifying the highly complicated indirect tax structure.

The good news on the budget ends about there, as reforms took a back seat and politics won out over economics.

Certainly, at this stage in the financial crisis that is hitting India just as it is the rest of the world, the government had to choose growth over fiscal restraint to bring the economy back on track and prevent the growth rate from plummeting. During the last quarter of the just-concluded fiscal year, government final consumption expenditure grew 21.5% year-on-year, just above the full-year increase of 20.25%. As a result, although private demand was anemic, gross domestic product (GDP) growth was higher than initially expected.

However, government expenditure is not a panacea and it is important that the government start to reduce the deficit to prevent inflation creeping up and to avoid higher interest rates that can prevent the nascent recovery from blooming. This budget provides no clarity as to how the government will withdraw from the market.
The biggest disappointment has to be a clear lack of a roadmap with regard to fiscal prudence. The government’s fiscal deficit for the current financial year is pegged at a higher-than-expected 6.8%. Add the deficits of the various state governments along with the various below-the-line items such as oil bonds and fertilizer bonds, and the deficit would be tantalizingly close to 13%. Even this estimate seems optimistic, as the budget makes no provision for the proposed Food Security Act and assumes that current global prices of oil and fertilizers will not rise. It optimistically projects a 15% rise in corporate tax receipts, even as income-tax revenue declines 9%.

With the deficit having more downside to it, nerves were further jangled as the budget failed to give any indication as to how the government will go about the fiscal consolidation process (after having increased the fiscal deficit target), unlike earlier when the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act was introduced in 2003. While the Finance secretary did mention after the budget that he intended to bring the deficit down to 4% by 2012, there was nothing to inspire confidence that the target could be achieved.

The easiest way to cap the fiscal deficit would be to move aggressively on the disinvestment front – selling of state-held assets – but that was not to be, clearly because of a lack of political consensus among even the so-called strong coalition partners and despite the absence of the obstructionist, not to say destructive, parties of the left following the May election results.

Whatever its perceived mandate, the government obviously does not have enough political consensus to bring the desired reforms to the table. Despite the strong thrust on disinvestment in the Economic Survey released last week, the government is not going to do the needful, fearful of the political consequences. Banks and insurance companies have been kept out of the disinvestment proposals and the amount of funds to be derived from selling off state holdings will be small as sales focus on undertakings of lesser importance and value.

The budget proposals have the appearance of back-seat driving by the left. I certainly cannot recall another budget that was not criticized by the left despite it being in opposition. The Congress party’s coalition partners have made enough noise to ensure that the government has no stomach for reforms. The market’s failure to read those signals earlier resulted in the post-budget disappointment and stock plunge.

Nor was there mention of even the intent of bureaucratic or spending reforms that could have helped the government curb a host of wasteful expenditure and plug the enormous amount of leakage in delivering funds – a maximum of only 10% to 15% of resources spent by the government on various developmental projects goes to the intended beneficiaries, as has been well documented.

The government’s revenue deficit now accounts for close to 71% of the budget deficit. While a part of the revenue expenditure does add to growth, a greater part goes on housekeeping expenses. Given that the government needs to borrow to bridge the deficit gap, we have a situation where only about 30% of the borrowing will be used for productive purposes, yet this is expected to earn a return that meets the financing cost of the entire borrowed amount. That’s a pipe dream.

With inadequate disinvestment proceeds and a government unable to temper its profligate ways, investment in infrastructure, among other sectors, continues to be inadequate.

Hence, while the Economic Survey stressed the need to spend about 9% of GDP on infrastructure during the 11th five-year plan (2007-2012), the envisaged investment in infrastructure during the current financial year is still less than 5% of expected GDP. As a result, India’s inability to set is fiscal situation to rights will continue to result in perennial under-investment in areas that could spur economic growth.

Budget documents show that the government’s gross market borrowing in the current fiscal year will be about 4.51 trillion rupees, a 23% increase on the borrowing target cited in an interim budget in February. The government must somehow manage its humungous borrowing needs without triggering inflation and while retaining a soft interest rate regime that can spur domestic demand and investment.

The government has missed a golden opportunity to stamp its authority and to show a real concern for reform. It should have given direction to ensure structural improvement in the economy, creating a sound foundation that could have led to higher growth. Instead, it preferred to choose an easier path.

Indian defense spices things up

By Sudha Ramachandran

Red-hot chili peppers could soon come to India’s defense. The country’s defense scientists are working on using the world’s hottest chilies in hand grenades for use in counter-insurgency operations and riot control.

An important ingredient in Indian cooking, hitherto chilies have been confined to kitchens. They seem poised now to storm another bastion. If ongoing field trials are successful, chilies will soon make a grand entry into India’s defense armory.

The plan is “to harness the pungency value of chilies to make hand grenades that can be used in riot control and counter-insurgency situations”, R B Srivastava, director of life sciences in the government-run Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), told Asia Times Online.

Unlike its explosive-filled counterpart, the chili grenade is non-lethal. It works quite like tear gas. While it will not kill, it triggers tears and could put the victim in a semi-conscious state. “It will be useful in forcing militants out of their hideouts,” he said.

Even ordinary chilies cause severe itching and burning of the eyes. The chili that the DRDO is thinking of using – the bhut jolokia – is no ordinary chili.

Grown in India’s northeastern region, it is a thousand times more pungent than the hot chilies used in Indian cooking. The word bhut means ghost and those who have eaten it say that the chili was aptly named. It would scare even a spirit away. When you bite into a bhut jolokia, it bites back at you. Eating a bhut jolokia is an all-out assault on the senses.

The hotness or pungency of a chili is measured in Scoville Heat Units (SHUs), that is, the amount of capsaicin (a chemical compound that stimulates nerve endings in the skin) present. Thus a bell pepper, which contains no capsaicin, would have a SHU rating of zero, while commonly used varieties like jalapeno or Italian peperoncino would log in less at than 5,000 SHUs. Until recently, it was the fiery hot Red Savina Habaneros developed in the United States with a rating of 350,000–580,000 SHUs that was regarded the king of the chili world.

Then in 2000, the DRDO’s Defense Research Laboratory (DRL) at Tezpur in the northeastern state of Assam claimed they had discovered a chili with a pungency of 850,000 SHUs. That claim was met with much skepticism abroad.

In 2005, Paul Bosland, a professor at the New Mexico State University in the US, decided to test the claim. He found that the DRL was wrong. It had underestimated the pungency of the bhut jolokia. Its pungency, he found, measured a scorching 1,001,304 SHUs. Bhut jolokia had toppled the Red Savinia to emerge as the hottest chili in the world.

It is this heat that India’s defense scientists are looking to harness for a variety of purposes.

Besides using chili grenades to deal with rioters and terrorists, India’s scientists are exploring the chili’s pungency for use on other enemies, some of them more formidable than terrorists.

Elephants have for long posed a huge threat to the Indian army’s camps in the northeast. Many of the camps are situated near reserve forests and wildlife sanctuaries and elephants routinely storm the camps.

Army officers say they have tried every trick in the book to keep elephants away. But every one of them has failed. They even put up electrified fences around army camps hoping a mild shock would keep the elephants away. The elephants simply knocked down the poles, bringing down the fences. But recently, scientists discovered that the mammoths are scared of the smell of chili.

Preliminary investigations by the DRDO’s DRL at Tezpur indicate that “elephants are scared of the bhut jolokia and they stay away from it”, said Srivastava. “We are thinking of applying a coat of bhut jolokia paste on nylon ropes along the boundary walls of army camps.”

This little chili is expected to help the army keep the mighty elephant away. If the experiment in Assam succeeds, the army is planning to deploy the bhut jolokia to fight elephants at bases situated near elephant habitats in other parts of the country.

The bhut jolokia is also expected to help soldiers combat extreme cold in high altitude terrain. It raises body temperature and is likely to become a part of their diet to help them keep warm. For soldiers deployed in the icy heights of the Siachen Glacier, the world’s highest battlefield, where temperatures drop to minus-40 degrees Celsius and blizzards touch speeds of about 300 kilometers per hour, the bhut jolokia will provide some respite.

World Population Day 2009 – Fight Poverty, Educate Girls

By M H Ahssan

On 11 July 2009, people around the world will be observing the 20th World Population Day in different ways. This year’s theme is chance to build awareness of the importance of educating girls to a wide range of development issues, including poverty, human rights and gender equality.

There are many ways to promote this theme:

- Consider inviting local celebrities to help spread the message.
- Organize events to generate widespread attention about the importance of girls’ education.
- Spark discussion with seminars, conferences and debates. Host essay and poster contests.
- Work with community groups to create plays and soap operas.

Encourage women and girls to speak or write about the impact of education in their own life. The messages can come to life when different people from different circumstances share their own experiences and knowledge.

Investing in Women is a Smart Choice
No one knows yet what the full scale of this global economic crisis will look like. We do know that women and children in developing countries will bear the brunt of the impact. What started as a financial crisis in rich countries is now deepening into a global economic crisis that is hitting developing countries hard. It is already affecting progress toward reducing poverty.

Policy responses that build on women’s roles as economic agents can do a lot to mitigate the effects of the crisis on development, especially because women, more than men, invest their earnings in the health and education of their children. Investments in public health, education, child care and other social services help mitigate the impact of the crisis on the entire family and raise productivity for a healthier economy.

Protect the gains achieved
Investments in education and health for women and girls have been linked to increases in productivity, agricultural yields, and national income — all of which contribute to the achievement of the MDGs. Investments by governments worldwide have raised school enrolment rates, narrowed the gender gap in education, brought life-saving drugs to people living with AIDS, expanded HIV prevention, delivered bed nets to prevent malaria, and improved child health through immunization.

Today, as we commemorate World Population Day, the global financial and economic crisis threatens to reverse hard-won gains in education and health in developing countries. Among those hardest hit are women and girls. This is why the theme of this year’s World Population Day focuses on investing in women. Even before the crisis, women and girls represented the majority of the world’s poor. Now they are falling deeper into poverty and face increased health risks, especially if they are pregnant.

Today, complications of pregnancy and childbirth are leading killers of women in the developing world. And maternal mortality represents the largest health inequity in the world. This health gap will only deepen unless we increase social investments, maintain health gains and expand efforts to save more women’s lives.

In countries and communities where women have access to reproductive health services—such as family planning, skilled attendance at birth and emergency obstetric and neonatal care—survival rates are high and maternal and newborn deaths are rare.

Access to reproductive health, in particular family planning and maternal health services, helps women and girls avoid unwanted or early pregnancy, unsafe abortions, as well as pregnancy‐related disabilities. This means that women stay healthier, are more productive, and have more opportunities for education, training and employment, which, in turn, benefits entire families, communities and nations.

And investments in reproductive health are cost-effective. An investment in contraceptive services can be recouped four times over—and sometimes dramatically more over the long-term—by reducing the need for public spending on health, education and other social services.
It is estimated that family planning alone could reduce the number of maternal deaths by as much as 40 per cent.

Our world today is too complex and interconnected to see problems in isolation of each other. When a mother dies, when an orphan child does not get the food or education he needs, when a young girl grows into a life without opportunities, the consequences extend beyond the existence of these individuals. They diminish the society as a whole and lessen chances for peace, prosperity and stability.

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, remains committed to supporting countries to advance women’s empowerment, gender equality and sexual and reproductive health.

Today, on World Population Day, I call on all leaders to make the health and rights of women a political and development priority. Investing in women and girls will set the stage not only for economic recovery, but also for long-term economic growth that reduces inequity and poverty. There is no smarter investment in troubled times.

The Future of Medicine

By M H Ahssan

Medical science is entering a golden age, but the keys to longer, better lives are not all hidden in the lab. The biggest challenge we face is to translate knowledge into action.

Scientific medicine has a special pull on our imaginations. Like religion, it embraces our pain and our fears, and assures us that things can be better. And for all its missteps, it often fulfills its promise. You need only look back 20 years to see a world in which HIV/AIDS was essentially untreatable, depression went largely untreated and the U.S. death rate from heart disease was a third higher than it is today. Science has sparked transformations in each of those realms and now stands on the verge of even greater ones. As the stories in HNN make clear, the prospects for improving human health have rarely been so bright. Yet even as we hurtle toward personalized prescriptions, stem-cell therapies and silver-bullet cancer drugs, the bedrock challenges of making medicine safe, affordable and accessible loom as large as ever.

What breakthroughs could the new century bring? For cancer patients, the excitement centers on a new generation of treatments designed not for massive conquest but for narrowly targeted strikes against tumor cells. Targeted therapy is an emerging ideal in psychiatry as well.

Researchers are working to devise different treatments for different subtypes of depression—a trend that could help millions who get no relief from Prozac and its cousins—and applying the same principle to other afflictions as well. As science reveals more about the chemistry of mental function, diseases ranging from addiction to Alzheimer’s could become as manageable as high blood pressure. With luck, several drugs that target the underlying mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease could reach the clinic before the first baby boomer turns 70.

That’s just the beginning. The mapping of the human genome has set the stage for an era in which doctors use gene tests to determine which patients are most likely to benefit from a particular treatment or lifestyle regimen. And researchers are now working their way —from the genome to the proteome—the vast array of biologically active protein molecules encoded by our DNA.

Proteins are the microscopic workhorses behind everything from respiration to cogitation. By cataloging the 100,000 or so proteins that human genes produce, and pinpointing their functions, researchers will gain a surfeit of targets for drug molecules. And if the new art of therapeutic cloning fulfills its early promise, embryonic stem cells may someday help our ailing bodies produce whatever proteins they lack. The approach is still years from clinical use, but the tools are evolving fast. In an experiment reported this spring, South Korean researchers used DNA from ordinary skin cells to produce 11 lines of embryonic stem cells—each one genetically matched to its donor and theoretically capable of producing anything from insulin to dopamine.

The possibilities are endlessly seductive. But technological progress is not a complete recipe for better health, and there is real danger in equating newer with better. America has built the world’s highest-tech medical system, yet the nation ranks 46th in life expectancy (behind Japan, Singapore, Canada and virtually all of Europe and Scandinavia). And 41 countries, including Cuba, have achieved lower rates of infant mortality. “Without systemwide health-care reform,” says Dr. Henry E. Simmons of the non-partisan National Coalition on Health Care, “we’re missing massive opportunities to create a healthier population.”

New treatments can advance that cause, but they’re only as good as our ability to manage them. Amid all the public debate over the ethics of stem-cell research, for example, there are safety issues to think about, too. Materials that originate in people or animals can spread everything from infections to malignancy, even when handled with some care. And as the British Medical Journal cautioned recently, stem-cell companies are now “springing up around the world with all the fervor of a new dotcom era.” Costs are exploding, meanwhile, as technology expands and the population ages. Some 15 percent of the U.S. economy is now devoted to medical care, up from 10 percent in 1987. And America’s uninsured population (45 million at last count) is growing in lock step with total expenditures. It doesn’t take an expert to see where that trend leads. The Institute of Medicine estimates that 18,000 Americans now die every year for lack of health coverage.

What is a person to do? The forces shaping the health system are far beyond our reach as individuals, but those shaping our own well-being are not. Even as scientists explore the frontiers of biomedicine, they keep confirming the truism that health is easier to preserve than it is to repair. Wonder drugs aside, most of us can still achieve longer, better lives by exercising, eating well and managing our weight. In other words, medical science can light the path to optimal health. Walking it is still up to us.

His Brain, Her Brain

By M H Ahssan

It turns out that male and female brains differ quite a bit in architecture and activity. Research into these variations could lead to sex-specific treatments for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

On a gray day in mid-January, Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, suggested that innate differences in the build of the male and female brain might be one factor underlying the relative scarcity of women in science. His remarks reignited a debate that has been smoldering for a century, ever since some scientists sizing up the brains of both sexes began using their main finding–that female brains tend to be smaller–to bolster the view that women are intellectually inferior to men.

To date, no one has uncovered any evidence that anatomical disparities might render women incapable of achieving academic distinction in math, physics or engineering. And the brains of men and women have been shown to be quite clearly similar in many ways. Nevertheless, over the past decade investigators have documented an astonishing array of structural, chemical and functional variations in the brains of males and females.

These inequities are not just interesting idiosyncrasies that might explain why more men than women enjoy the Three Stooges. They raise the possibility that we might need to develop sex-specific treatments for a host of conditions, including depression, addiction, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, the differences imply that researchers exploring the structure and function of the brain must take into account the sex of their subjects when analyzing their data–and include both women and men in future studies or risk obtaining misleading results.

Sculpting the Brain
Not so long ago neuroscientists believed that sex differences in the brain were limited mainly to those regions responsible for mating behavior. In a 1966 Scientific American article entitled “Sex Differences in the Brain,” Seymour Levine of Stanford University described how sex hormones help to direct divergent reproductive behaviors in rats–with males engaging in mounting and females arching their backs and raising their rumps to attract suitors. Levine mentioned only one brain region in his review: the hypothalamus, a small structure at the base of the brain that is involved in regulating hormone production and controlling basic behaviors such as eating, drinking and sex. A generation of neuroscientists came to maturity believing that “sex differences in the brain” referred primarily to mating behaviors, sex hormones and the hypothalamus.

That view, however, has now been knocked aside by a surge of findings that highlight the influence of sex on many areas of cognition and behavior, including memory, emotion, vision, hearing, the processing of faces and the brain’s response to stress hormones. This progress has been accelerated in the past five to 10 years by the growing use of sophisticated noninvasive imaging techniques such as positron-emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can peer into the brains of living subjects.

These imaging experiments reveal that anatomical variations occur in an assortment of regions throughout the brain. Jill M. Goldstein of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues, for example, used MRI to measure the sizes of many cortical and subcortical areas. Among other things, these investigators found that parts of the frontal cortex, the seat of many higher cognitive functions, are bulkier in women than in men, as are parts of the limbic cortex, which is involved in emotional responses. In men, on the other hand, parts of the parietal cortex, which is involved in space perception, are bigger than in women, as is the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that responds to emotionally arousing information–to anything that gets the heart pumping and the adrenaline flowing. These size differences, as well as others mentioned throughout the article, are relative: they refer to the overall volume of the structure relative to the overall volume of the brain.

Differences in the size of brain structures are generally thought to reflect their relative importance to the animal. For example, primates rely more on vision than olfaction; for rats, the opposite is true. As a result, primate brains maintain proportionately larger regions devoted to vision, and rats devote more space to olfaction. So the existence of widespread anatomical disparities between men and women suggests that sex does influence the way the brain works.

Other investigations are finding anatomical sex differences at the cellular level. For example, Sandra Witelson and her colleagues at McMaster University discovered that women possess a greater density of neurons in parts of the temporal lobe cortex associated with language processing and comprehension. On counting the neurons in postmortem samples, the researchers found that of the six layers present in the cortex, two show more neurons per unit volume in females than in males. Similar findings were subsequently reported for the frontal lobe. With such information in hand, neuroscientists can now explore whether sex differences in neuron number correlate with differences in cognitive abilities–examining, for example, whether the boost in density in the female auditory cortex relates to women’s enhanced performance on tests of verbal fluency.

Such anatomical diversity may be caused in large part by the activity of the sex hormones that bathe the fetal brain. These steroids help to direct the organization and wiring of the brain during development and influence the structure and neuronal density of various regions. Interestingly, the brain areas that Goldstein found to differ between men and women are ones that in animals contain the highest number of sex hormone receptors during development. This correlation between brain region size in adults and sex steroid action in utero suggests that at least some sex differences in cognitive function do not result from cultural influences or the hormonal changes associated with puberty–they are there from birth.

Inborn Inclinations
Several intriguing behavioral studies add to the evidence that some sex differences in the brain arise before a baby draws its first breath. Through the years, many researchers have demonstrated that when selecting toys, young boys and girls part ways. Boys tend to gravitate toward balls or toy cars, whereas girls more typically reach for a doll. But no one could really say whether those preferences are dictated by culture or by innate brain biology.

To address this question, Melissa Hines of City University London and Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University turned to monkeys, one of our closest animal cousins. The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the “masculine” toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

Because vervet monkeys are unlikely to be swayed by the social pressures of human culture, the results imply that toy preferences in children result at least in part from innate biological differences. This divergence, and indeed all the anatomical sex differences in the brain, presumably arose as a result of selective pressures during evolution. In the case of the toy study, males–both human and primate–prefer toys that can be propelled through space and that promote rough-and-tumble play. These qualities, it seems reasonable to speculate, might relate to the behaviors useful for hunting and for securing a mate. Similarly, one might also hypothesize that females, on the other hand, select toys that allow them to hone the skills they will one day need to nurture their young.

Simon Baron-Cohen and his associates at the University of Cambridge took a different but equally creative approach to addressing the influence of nature versus nurture regarding sex differences. Many researchers have described disparities in how “people-centered” male and female infants are. For example, Baron-Cohen and his student Svetlana Lutchmaya found that one-year-old girls spend more time looking at their mothers than boys of the same age do. And when these babies are presented with a choice of films to watch, the girls look longer at a film of a face, whereas boys lean toward a film featuring cars.

Of course, these preferences might be attributable to differences in the way adults handle or play with boys and girls. To eliminate this possibility, Baron-Cohen and his students went a step further. They took their video camera to a maternity ward to examine the preferences of babies that were only one day old. The infants saw either the friendly face of a live female student or a mobile that matched the color, size and shape of the student’s face and included a scrambled mix of her facial features. To avoid any bias, the experimenters were unaware of each baby’s sex during testing. When they watched the tapes, they found that the girls spent more time looking at the student, whereas the boys spent more time looking at the mechanical object. This difference in social interest was evident on day one of life–implying again that we come out of the womb with some cognitive sex differences built in.

Under Stress
In many cases, sex differences in the brain’s chemistry and construction influence how males and females respond to the environment or react to, and remember, stressful events. Take, for example, the amygdala. Goldstein and others have reported that the amygdala is larger in men than in women. And in rats, the neurons in this region make more numerous interconnections in males than in females. These anatomical variations would be expected to produce differences in the way that males and females react to stress.

To assess whether male and female amygdalae in fact respond differently to stress, Katharina Braun and her co-workers at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, briefly removed a litter of Degu pups from their mother. For these social South American rodents, which live in large colonies like prairie dogs do, even temporary separation can be quite upsetting. The researchers then measured the concentration of serotonin receptors in various brain regions. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, or signal-carrying molecule, that is key for mediating emotional behavior. (Prozac, for example, acts by increasing serotonin function.)

The workers allowed the pups to hear their mother’s call during the period of separation and found that this auditory input increased the serotonin receptor concentration in the males’ amygdala, yet decreased the concentration of these same receptors in females. Although it is difficult to extrapolate from this study to human behavior, the results hint that if something similar occurs in children, separation anxiety might differentially affect the emotional well-being of male and female infants. Experiments such as these are necessary if we are to understand why, for instance, anxiety disorders are far more prevalent in girls than in boys.
Another brain region now known to diverge in the sexes anatomically and in its response to stress is the hippocampus, a structure crucial for memory storage and for spatial mapping of the physical environment. Imaging consistently demonstrates that the hippocampus is larger in women than in men. These anatomical differences might well relate somehow to differences in the way males and females navigate. Many studies suggest that men are more likely to navigate by estimating distance in space and orientation (“dead reckoning”), whereas women are more likely to navigate by monitoring landmarks. Interestingly, a similar sex difference exists in rats. Male rats are more likely to navigate mazes using directional and positional information, whereas female rats are more likely to navigate the same mazes using available landmarks. (Investigators have yet to demonstrate, however, that male rats are less likely to ask for directions.)

Even the neurons in the hippocampus behave differently in males and females, at least in how they react to learning experiences. For example, Janice M. Juraska and her associates at the University of Illinois have shown that placing rats in an “enriched environment”–cages filled with toys and with fellow rodents to promote social interactions–produced dissimilar effects on the structure of hippocampal neurons in male and female rats. In females, the experience enhanced the “bushiness” of the branches in the cells’ dendritic trees–the many-armed structures that receive signals from other nerve cells. This change presumably reflects an increase in neuronal connections, which in turn is thought to be involved with the laying down of memories. In males, however, the complex environment either had no effect on the dendritic trees or pruned them slightly.

But male rats sometimes learn better in the face of stress. Tracey J. Shors of Rutgers University and her collaborators have found that a brief exposure to a series of one-second tail shocks enhanced performance of a learned task and increased the density of dendritic connections to other neurons in male rats yet impaired performance and decreased connection density in female rats. Findings such as these have interesting social implications. The more we discover about how brain mechanisms of learning differ between the sexes, the more we may need to consider how optimal learning environments potentially differ for boys and girls.

Although the hippocampus of the female rat can show a decrement in response to acute stress, it appears to be more resilient than its male counterpart in the face of chronic stress. Cheryl D. Conrad and her co-workers at Arizona State University restrained rats in a mesh cage for six hours–a situation that the rodents find disturbing. The researchers then assessed how vulnerable their hippocampal neurons were to killing by a neurotoxin–a standard measure of the effect of stress on these cells. They noted that chronic restraint rendered the males’ hippocampal cells more susceptible to the toxin but had no effect on the females’ vulnerability. These findings, and others like them, suggest that in terms of brain damage, females may be better equipped to tolerate chronic stress than males are. Still unclear is what protects female hippocampal cells from the damaging effects of chronic stress, but sex hormones very likely play a role.

The Big Picture
Extending the work on how the brain handles and remembers stressful events, my colleagues and I have found contrasts in the way men and women lay down memories of emotionally arousing incidents–a process known from animal research to involve activation of the amygdala. In one of our first experiments with human subjects, we showed volunteers a series of graphically violent films while we measured their brain activity using PET. A few weeks later we gave them a quiz to see what they remembered.

We discovered that the number of disturbing films they could recall correlated with how active their amygdala had been during the viewing. Subsequent work from our laboratory and others confirmed this general finding. But then I noticed something strange. The amygdala activation in some studies involved only the right hemisphere, and in others it involved only the left hemisphere. It was then I realized that the experiments in which the right amygdala lit up involved only men; those in which the left amygdala was fired up involved women. Since then, three subsequent studies–two from our group and one from John Gabrieli and Turhan Canli and their collaborators at Stanford–have confirmed this difference in how the brains of men and women handle emotional memories.

The realization that male and female brains were processing the same emotionally arousing material into memory differently led us to wonder what this disparity might mean. To address this question, we turned to a century-old theory stating that the right hemisphere is biased toward processing the central aspects of a situation, whereas the left hemisphere tends to process the finer details. If that conception is true, we reasoned, a drug that dampens the activity of the amygdala should impair a man’s ability to recall the gist of an emotional story (by hampering the right amygdala) but should hinder a woman’s ability to come up with the precise details (by hampering the left amygdala).

Propranolol is such a drug. This so-called beta blocker quiets the activity of adrenaline and its cousin noradrenaline and, in so doing, dampens the activation of the amygdala and weakens recall of emotionally arousing memories. We gave this drug to men and women before they viewed a short slide show about a young boy caught in a terrible accident while walking with his mother. One week later we tested their memory. The results showed that propranolol made it harder for men to remember the more holistic aspects, or gist, of the story–that the boy had been run over by a car, for example. In women, propranolol did the converse, impairing their memory for peripheral details–that the boy had been carrying a soccer ball.

In more recent investigations, we found that we can detect a hemispheric difference between the sexes in response to emotional material almost immediately. Volunteers shown emotionally unpleasant photographs react within 300 milliseconds–a response that shows up as a spike on a recording of the brain’s electrical activity. With Antonella Gasbarri and others at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, we have found that in men, this quick spike, termed a P300 response, is more exaggerated when recorded over the right hemisphere; in women, it is larger when recorded over the left. Hence, sex-related hemispheric disparities in how the brain processes emotional images begin within 300 milliseconds–long before people have had much, if any, chance to consciously interpret what they have seen.

These discoveries might have ramifications for the treatment of PTSD. Previous research by Gustav Schelling and his associates at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany had established that drugs such as propranolol diminish memory for traumatic situations when administered as part of the usual therapies in an intensive care unit. Prompted by our findings, they found that, at least in such units, beta blockers reduce memory for traumatic events in women but not in men. Even in intensive care, then, physicians may need to consider the sex of their patients when meting out their medications.

Sex and Mental Disorders
ptsd is not the only psychological disturbance that appears to play out differently in women and men. A PET study by Mirko Diksic and his colleagues at McGill University showed that serotonin production was a remarkable 52 percent higher on average in men than in women, which might help clarify why women are more prone to depression–a disorder commonly treated with drugs that boost the concentration of serotonin.

A similar situation might prevail in addiction. In this case, the neurotransmitter in question is dopamine–a chemical involved in the feelings of pleasure associated with drugs of abuse. Studying rats, Jill B. Becker and her fellow investigators at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor discovered that in females, estrogen boosted the release of dopamine in brain regions important for regulating drug-seeking behavior.

Furthermore, the hormone had long-lasting effects, making the female rats more likely to pursue cocaine weeks after last receiving the drug. Such differences in susceptibility–particularly to stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamine–could explain why women might be more vulnerable to the effects of these drugs and why they tend to progress more rapidly from initial use to dependence than men do.
Certain brain abnormalities underlying schizophrenia appear to differ in men and women as well. Ruben Gur, Raquel Gur and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have spent years investigating sex-related differences in brain anatomy and function. In one project, they measured the size of the orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in regulating emotions, and compared it with the size of the amygdala, implicated more in producing emotional reactions.

The investigators found that women possess a significantly larger orbitofrontal-to-amygdala ratio (OAR) than men do. One can speculate from these findings that women might on average prove more capable of controlling their emotional reactions.

In additional experiments, the researchers discovered that this balance appears to be altered in schizophrenia, though not identically for men and women. Women with schizophrenia have a decreased OAR relative to their healthy peers, as might be expected. But men, oddly, have an increased OAR relative to healthy men. These findings remain puzzling, but, at the least, they imply that schizophrenia is a somewhat different disease in men and women and that treatment of the disorder might need to be tailored to the sex of the patient.

Sex Matters
in a comprehensive 2001 report on sex differences in human health, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences asserted that “sex matters. Sex, that is, being male or female, is an important basic human variable that should be considered when designing and analyzing studies in all areas and at all levels of biomedical and health-related research.”

Neuroscientists are still far from putting all the pieces together–identifying all the sex-related variations in the brain and pinpointing their influences on cognition and propensity for brain-related disorders. Nevertheless, the research conducted to date certainly demonstrates that differences extend far beyond the hypothalamus and mating behavior. Researchers and clinicians are not always clear on the best way to go forward in deciphering the full influences of sex on the brain, behavior and responses to medications. But growing numbers now agree that going back to assuming we can evaluate one sex and learn equally about both is no longer an option.

Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic?

By Sarah Williams

A growing number of dissenting researchers accuse government and medical authorities–as well as the media–of misleading the public about the health consequences of rising body weights.

Could it be that excess fat is not, by itself, a serious health risk for the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese–categories that in the U.S. include about six of every 10 adults? Is it possible that urging the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight may actually do more harm than good?
Such notions defy conventional wisdom that excess adiposity kills more than 300,000 Americans a year and that the gradual fattening of nations since the 1980s presages coming epidemics of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and a host of other medical consequences.

Indeed, just this past March the New England Journal of Medicine presented a “Special Report,” by S. Jay Olshansky, David B. Allison and others that seemed to confirm such fears. The authors asserted that because of the obesity epidemic, “the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end.” Articles about the special report by the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other news outlets emphasized its forecast that obesity may shave up to five years off average life spans in coming decades.

And yet an increasing number of scholars have begun accusing obesity experts, public health officials and the media of exaggerating the health effects of the epidemic of overweight and obesity. The charges appear in a recent flurry of scholarly books, including The Obesity Myth, by Paul F. Campos (Gotham Books, 2004); The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, by Michael Gard and Jan Wright (Routledge, 2005); Obesity: The Making of an American Epidemic , by J. Eric Oliver (Oxford University Press, August 2005); and a book on popular misconceptions about diet and weight gain by Barry Glassner (to be published in 2006 by HarperCollins).

These critics, all academic researchers outside the medical community, do not dispute surveys that find the obese fraction of the population to have roughly doubled in the U.S. and many parts of Europe since 1980. And they acknowledge that obesity, especially in its extreme forms, does seem to be a factor in some illnesses and premature deaths.

They allege, however, that experts are blowing hot air when they warn that overweight and obesity are causing a massive, and worsening, health crisis. They scoff, for example, at the 2003 assertion by Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that “if you looked at any epidemic–whether it’s influenza or plague from the Middle Ages–they are not as serious as the epidemic of obesity in terms of the health impact on our country and our society.” (An epidemic of influenza killed 40 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919, including 675,000 in the U.S.)

What is really going on, asserts Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is that “a relatively small group of scientists and doctors, many directly funded by the weight-loss industry, have created an arbitrary and unscientific definition of overweight and obesity. They have inflated claims and distorted statistics on the consequences of our growing weights, and they have largely ignored the complicated health realities associated with being fat.”

One of those complicated realities, concurs Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the widely accepted evidence that genetic differences account for 50 to 80 percent of the variation in fatness within a population. Because no safe and widely practical methods have been shown to induce long-term loss of more than about 5 percent of body weight, Campos says, “health authorities are giving people advice–maintain a body mass index in the ‘healthy weight’ range–that is literally impossible for many of them to follow.” Body mass index, or BMI, is a weight-to-height ratio.

By exaggerating the risks of fat and the feasibility of weight loss, Campos and Oliver claim, the CDC, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization inadvertently perpetuate stigma, encourage unbalanced diets and, perhaps, even exacerbate weight gain. “The most perverse irony is that we may be creating a disease simply by labeling it as such,” Campos states.

A Body to Die For
On first hearing, these dissenting arguments may sound like nonsense. “If you really look at the medical literature and think obesity isn’t bad, I don’t know what planet you are on,” says James O. Hill, an obesity researcher at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. New dietary guidelines issued by the DHHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in January state confidently that “a high prevalence of overweight and obesity is of great public health concern because excess body fat leads to a higher risk for premature death, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia [high cholesterol], cardiovascular disease, stroke, gall bladder disease, respiratory dysfunction, gout, osteoarthritis, and certain kinds of cancers.” The clear implication is that any degree of overweight is dangerous and that a high BMI is not merely a marker of high risk but a cause.

“These supposed adverse health consequences of being ‘overweight’ are not only exaggerated but for the most part are simply fabricated,” Campos alleges. Surprisingly, a careful look at recent epidemiological studies and clinical trials suggests that the critics, though perhaps overstating some of their accusations, may be onto something.

Oliver points to a new and unusually thorough analysis of three large, nationally representative surveys, for example, that found only a very slight–and statistically insignificant–increase in mortality among mildly obese people, as compared with those in the “healthy weight” category, after subtracting the effects of age, race, sex, smoking and alcohol consumption. The three surveys–medical measurements collected in the early 1970s, late 1970s and early 1990s, with subjects matched against death registries nine to 19 years later–indicate that it is much more likely that U.S. adults who fall in the overweight category have a lower risk of premature death than do those of so-called healthy weight. The overweight segment of the “epidemic of overweight and obesity” is more likely reducing death rates than boosting them. “The majority of Americans who weigh too much are in this category,” Campos notes.

Counterintuitively, “underweight, even though it occurs in only a tiny fraction of the population, is actually associated with more excess deaths than class I obesity,” says Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the CDC. Flegal led the study, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 20 after undergoing four months of scrutiny by internal reviewers at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute and additional peer review by the journal.
These new results contradict two previous estimates that were the basis of the oft-repeated claim that obesity cuts short 300,000 or more lives a year in the U.S.

There are good reasons to suspect, however, that both these earlier estimates were compromised by dubious assumptions, statistical errors and outdated measurements.
When Flegal and her co-workers analyzed just the most recent survey, which measured heights and weights from 1988 to 1994 and deaths up to 2000, even severe obesity failed to show up as a statistically significant mortality risk. It seems probable, Flegal speculates, that in recent decades improvements in medical care have reduced the mortality level associated with obesity. That would square, she observes, with both the unbroken rise in life expectancies and the uninterrupted fall in death rates attributed to heart disease and stroke throughout the entire 25-year spike in obesity in the U.S.

But what about the warning by Olshansky and Allison that the toll from obesity is yet to be paid, in the form of two to five years of life lost? “These are just back-of-the-envelope, plausible scenarios,” Allison hedges, when pressed. “We never meant for them to be portrayed as precise.” Although most media reports jumped on the “two to five years” quote, very few mentioned that the paper offered no statistical analysis to back it up.

The life expectancy costs of obesity that Olshansky and his colleagues actually calculated were based on a handful of convenient, but false, presuppositions. First, they assumed that every obese American adult currently has a BMI of 30, or alternatively of 35–the upper and lower limits of the “mild obesity” range. They then compared that simplified picture of the U.S. with an imagined nation in which no adult has a BMI of more than 24–the upper limit of “healthy weight”–and in which underweight causes zero excess deaths.

To project death rates resulting from obesity, the study used risk data that are more than a decade old rather than the newer ratios Flegal included, which better reflect dramatically improved treatments for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The authors further assumed not only that the old mortality risks have remained constant but also that future advances in medicine will have no effect whatsoever on the health risks of obesity.

If all these simplifications are reasonable, the March paper concluded, then the estimated hit to the average life expectancy of the U.S. population from its world-leading levels of obesity is four to nine months. (“Two to five years” was simply a gloomy guess of what could happen in “coming decades” if an increase in overweight children were to fuel additional spikes in adult obesity.) The study did not attempt to determine whether, given its many uncertainties, the number of months lost was reliably different from zero. Yet in multiple television and newspaper interviews about the study, co-author David S. Ludwig evinced full confidence as he compared the effect of rising obesity rates to “a massive tsunami headed toward the United States.”

Critics decry episodes such as this one as egregious examples of a general bias in the obesity research community. Medical researchers tend to cast the expansion of waistlines as an impending disaster “because it inflates their stature and allows them to get more research grants. Government health agencies wield it as a rationale for their budget allocations,” Oliver writes. (The National Institutes of Health increased its funding for obesity research by 10 percent in 2005, to $440 million.) “Weight-loss companies and surgeons employ it to get their services covered by insurance,” he continues. “And the pharmaceutical industry uses it to justify new drugs.”

“The war on fat,” Campos concurs, “is really about making some of us rich.” He points to the financial support that many influential obesity researchers receive from the drug and diet industries. Allison, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, discloses payments from 148 such companies, and Hill says he has consulted with some of them as well. (Federal policies prohibit Flegal and other CDC scientists from accepting nongovernmental wages.) None of the dissenting authors cites evidence of anything more than a potential conflict of interest, however.
Those Confounded Diseases

Even the best mortality studies provide only a flawed and incomplete picture of the health consequences of the obesity epidemic, for three reasons. First, by counting all lives lost to obesity, the studies so far have ignored the fact that some diversity in human body size is normal and that every well-nourished population thus contains some obese people. The “epidemic” refers to a sudden increase in obesity, not its mere existence. A proper accounting of the epidemic’s mortal cost would estimate only the number of lives cut short by whatever amount of obesity exceeds the norm.

Second, the analyses use body mass index as a convenient proxy for body fat. But BMI is not an especially reliable stand-in. And third, although everyone cares about mortality, it is not the only thing that we care about. Illness and quality of life matter a great deal, too.

All can agree that severe obesity greatly increases the risk of numerous diseases, but that form of obesity, in which BMI exceeds 40, affects only about one in 12 of the roughly 130 million American adults who set scales spinning above the “healthy” range. At issue is whether rising levels of overweight, or of mild to moderate obesity, are pulling up the national burden of heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
In the case of heart disease, the answer appears to be no–or at least not yet. U.S. health agencies do not collect annual figures on the incidence of cardiovascular disease, so researchers look instead for trends in mortality and risk factors, as measured in periodic surveys. Both have been falling.

Alongside Flegal’s April paper in JAMA was another by Edward W. Gregg and his colleagues from the CDC that found that in the U.S. the prevalence of high blood pressure dropped by half between 1960 and 2000. High cholesterol followed the same trend–and both declined more steeply among the overweight and obese than among those of healthy weight. So although high blood pressure is still twice as common among the obese as it is among the lean, the paper notes that “obese persons now have better [cardiovascular disease] risk profiles than their leaner counterparts did 20 to 30 years ago.”

The new findings reinforce those published in 2001 by a 10-year WHO study that examined 140,000 people in 38 cities on four continents. The investigators, led by Alun Evans of the Queen’s University of Belfast, saw broad increases in BMI and equally broad declines in high blood pressure and high cholesterol. “These facts are hard to reconcile,” they wrote.

It may be, Gregg suggests, that better diagnosis and treatment of high cholesterol and blood pressure have more than compensated for any increases from rising obesity. It could also be, he adds, that obese people are getting more exercise than they used to; regular physical activity is thought to be a powerful preventative against heart disease.

Oliver and Campos explore another possibility: that fatness is partially–or even merely–a visible marker of other factors that are more important but harder to perceive.

Diet composition, physical fitness, stress levels, income, family history and the location of fat within the body are just a few of 100-odd “independent” risk factors for cardiovascular disease identified in the medical literature. The observational studies that link obesity to heart disease ignore nearly all of them and in doing so effectively assign their causal roles to obesity. “By the same criteria we are blaming obesity for heart disease,” Oliver writes, “we could accuse smelly clothes, yellow teeth or bad breath for lung cancer instead of cigarettes.”
As for cancer, a 2003 report on a 16-year study of 900,000 American adults found significantly increased death rates for several kinds of tumors among overweight or mildly obese people. Most of these apparently obesity-related cancers are very rare, however, killing at most a few dozen people a year for every 100,000 study participants.

Among women with a high BMI, both colon cancer and postmenopausal breast cancer risks were slightly elevated; for overweight and obese men, colon and prostate cancer presented the most common increased risks. For both women and men, though, being overweight or obese seemed to confer significant protection against lung cancer, which is by far the most commonly lethal malignancy. That relation held even after the effects of smoking were subtracted.

Obesity’s Catch-22
It is through type 2 diabetes that obesity seems to pose the biggest threat to public health. Doctors have found biological connections between fat, insulin, and the high blood sugar levels that define the disease. The CDC estimates that 55 percent of adult diabetics are obese, significantly more than the 31 percent prevalence of obesity in the general population. And as obesity has become more common, so, too, has diabetes, suggesting that one may cause the other.
Yet the critics dispute claims that diabetes is soaring (even among children), that obesity is the cause, and that weight loss is the solution. A 2003 analysis by the CDC found that “the prevalence of diabetes, either diagnosed or undiagnosed, and of impaired fasting glucose did not appear to increase substantially during the 1990s,” despite the sharp rise in obesity.

“Undiagnosed diabetes” refers to people who have a single positive test for high blood sugar in the CDC surveys. (Two or more positive results are required for a diagnosis of diabetes.) Gregg’s paper in April reiterates the oft-repeated “fact” that for every five adults diagnosed with diabetes, there are three more diabetics who are undiagnosed. “Suspected diabetes” would be a better term, however, because the single test used by the CDC may be wildly unreliable.

In 2001 a French study of 5,400 men reported that 42 percent of the men who tested positive for diabetes using the CDC method turned out to be nondiabetic when checked by a “gold standard” test 30 months later. The false negative rate–true diabetics missed by the single blood test–was just 2 percent.

But consider the growing weights of children, Hill urges. “You’re getting kids at 10 to 12 years of age developing type 2 diabetes. Two generations ago you never saw a kid with it.”

Anecdotal evidence often misleads, Campos responds. He notes that when CDC researchers examined 2,867 adolescents in the NHANES survey of 1988 to 1994, they identified just four that had type 2 diabetes. A more focused study in 2003 looked at 710 “grossly obese” boys and girls ages six to 18 in Italy. These kids were the heaviest of the heavy, and more than half had a family history (and thus an inherited risk) of diabetes. Yet only one of the 710 had type 2 diabetes.

Nevertheless, as many as 4 percent of U.S. adults might have diabetes because of their obesity–if fat is in fact the most important cause of the disease. “But it may be that type 2 diabetes causes fatness,” Campos argues. (Weight gain is a common side effect of many diabetes drugs.) “A third factor could cause both type 2 diabetes and fatness.” Or it could be some complex combination of all these, he speculates.

Large, long-term experiments are the best way to test causality, because they can alter just one variable (such as weight) while holding constant other factors that could confound the results. Obesity researchers have conducted few of these socalled randomized, controlled trials. “We don’t know what happens when you turn fat people into thin people,” Campos says. “That is not some oversight; there is no known way to do it”–except surgeries that carry serious risks and side effects.

“About 75 percent of American adults are trying to lose or maintain weight at any given time,” reports Ali H. Mokdad, chief of the CDC’s behavioral surveillance branch. A report in February by Marketdata Enterprises estimated that in 2004, 71 million Americans were actively dieting and that the nation spent about $46 billion on weight-loss products and services.

Dieting has been rampant for many years, and bariatric surgeries have soared in number from 36,700 in 2000 to roughly 140,000 in 2004, according to Marketdata. Yet when Flegal and others examined the CDC’s most recent follow-up survey in search of obese senior citizens who had dropped into a lower weight category, they found that just 6 percent of nonobese, older adults had been obese a decade earlier.

Campos argues that for many people, dieting is not merely ineffective but downright counterproductive. A large study of nurses by Harvard Medical School doctors reported last year that 39 percent of the women had dropped weight only to regain it; those women later grew to be 10 pounds heavier on average than women who did not lose weight.

Weight-loss advocates point to two trials that in 2001 showed a 58 percent reduction in the incidence of type 2 diabetes among people at high risk who ate better and exercised more. Participants lost little weight: an average of 2.7 kilograms after two years in one trial, 5.6 kilograms after three years in the other.

“People often say that these trials proved that weight loss prevents diabetes. They did no such thing,” comments Steven N. Blair, an obesity researcher who heads the Cooper Institute in Dallas. Because the trials had no comparison group that simply ate a balanced diet and exercised without losing weight, they cannot rule out the possibility that the small drop in subjects’ weights was simply a side effect. Indeed, one of the trial groups published a follow-up study in January that concluded that “at least 2.5 hours per week of walking for exercise during follow-up seemed to decrease the risk of diabetes by 63 to 69 percent, largely independent of dietary factors and BMI.”

“H. L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is a simple solution–and it’s wrong,” Blair muses. “We have got to stop shouting from the rooftops that obesity is bad for you and that fat people are evil and weak-willed and that the world would be lovely if we all lost weight. We need to take a much more comprehensive view. But I don’t see much evidence that that is happening.”

Children’s Day – Living the dreams of Nehru

By Jayashakar VS

Globally, countries celebrate Children’s Day on different days. On 14 December, 1954, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to recommend that all countries institute a Universal Children’s Day, to be observed as a day of worldwide fraternity and understanding between children. It recommended that the Day was to be observed also as a day of activity devoted to promoting the ideals and objectives of the Charter and the welfare of the children of the world.

The Assembly suggested to governments that the Day be observed on the date and in the way which each considers appropriate. The UN Universal Children’s Day is celebrated every year on the 20 November. The date 20 November marks the day on which the General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, in 1959, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.

Children’s Day in India
India celebrates Children’s Day on November 14 to commemorate the birth anniversary of its first Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Most of us have only a superficial understanding of the significance of the day: Nehru loved children and hence this day was chosen to commemorate his love for children ever since his death in 1963. But for chacha Nehru (Uncle Nehru), as he was fondly called by the children, his passion for them and their welfare spanned his entire lifetime. As the first Prime Minister of India, he has done extraordinary things and introduced many successful schemes for the welfare, education and development of children and young people. A peek into his exceptional dedication and love towards children on this day will go a long way in not only appreciating the rationale behind having the children’s day on his birthday, but also inspiring enough to imbibe his dedication to child welfare.

Education and nutrition for all children
An avid advocate of education in India particularly to children and youth, Jawaharlal Nehru firmly believed that India’s future relied entirely on providing basic education to children and higher education for the youth. He set forth on his mission. In his early five year plans, he outlined a commitment to ensure free and compulsory primary education to all children in the country. To achieve this, Nehru visualised mass village enrolment programmes, implemented them and administered the construction of thousands of schools. For the youth, Nehru set up adult education centres, vocational and technical schools, especially in the rural areas to equip them to face the future. And to cater to the demands of quality higher education, Nehru established many institutions of higher learning, including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The Prime Minister also gave equal importance to child nutrition and health and launched many initiatives like providing of free milk and meals to the children in the schools.

Special focus on the girl child
At a time when caste and gender discrimination was rampant and which actually proved to be a hindrance in educating the girl children, Nehru introduced many changes to the existing Hindu Law to criminalise the caste discrimination and give more legal rights and social freedom to the girl child and women. And to provide social equality across the nation, the reservation system for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes was introduced that opened up reserved seats in government services and educational institutions. In his own government, Nehru gave opportunities to minorities.

How the Day is celebrated?
November 14 is marked with fun and innovative celebrations across all schools and educational institutions in the country. Debates, painting and essay competitions, tours and excursions to places of national interests, cultural shows by children of all ages are conducted in the respective school premises. Many activities that could inculcate the sense of togetherness among children are organised. Mass rallies for and by the children are also arranged. Children hold placards, and messages that highlight the difficulties of the underprivileged children and the urgent need to address child welfare issues that continue to affect them despite laws and restrictions in place.

Apart from big celebrations in schools and among children during the Children’s Day on November 14 every year, the UN Universal Children’s Day on November 20 is also celebrated with equal fervour. On this day, under the auspices of the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) and UNICEF, all schools in the country conduct informative classes for their children about the UN Convention on Child Rights, and hold debates and essay writing and drawing competitions on the subject.

Uphold the real spirit of Children’s Day
Children’s Day celebration is not only for the children of this country. As a parent, each one of us has a responsibility in shaping the future of our children and other children around us. The key is to make your child understand the importance and significance of the Children’s Day, to encourage them to participate in the celebrations and nurture the concept of love, kindness and sharing.

On Children’s Day, you could take your child to the nearby orphanage or to a nearby slum and if possible sponsor for a child’s education. Donate liberally to the cause of children’s education and nutrition. Take active part in spreading the awareness about child’s rights and their education. You could make your children help the cause of providing nutrition for those deprived children working and living in deplorable conditions. Make your own child understand and appreciate the joy of giving and sharing. By doing this, you will make a little contribution to the dreams of a man whose love for children and their welfare surpassed boundaries and brought joy to millions of children.

Basically, Children’s Day is to celebrate ‘childhood.’ And childhood is not those few years after birth or till one attain adulthood. Childhood is a kind of healthy revelation, a way of life! And it should be kept alive till one’s lifetime. Do not let the ‘child’ in you to die! The spirit of childhood is marked by the zeal to learn, to keep oneself open to new concepts and ideas and more importantly the sense of unconditional and universal love, sans race, colour, gender, societal status, and ego. Let us celebrate Children’s Day to let the future generation have its say. On this day and every day, let us take an oath and work towards keeping alive the dreams and actions of a man, a leader, who did everything during his lifetime to see the children of India healthier, educated and smart enough to lead this country into the future.

World Human Rights Day – More than mere celebrations!

By Jayashankar VS

The horrors of the Second World War shook the entire world! Besides thousands of precious lives lost, the world witnessed perhaps the most gruesome violation of human rights during the time. In a way the war was a wake up call for the entire world. In 1945, the founding member nations of the then newly formed United Nations came together to draft many radical laws to protect and promote the basic human rights of its citizens.

In three years time, in 1948, the combined efforts of these nations paid off when the United Nations General Assembly adopted and proclaimed the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” declaring that respect for human rights and human dignity “is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Soon in 1950, the U.N invited all member States and interested organisations across the globe to observe 10th of December every year as World Human Rights Day.

Last year, 2008, marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The theme of the campaign was “Dignity and justice for all of us.” In commemoration of this eventful year, the UN launched a year long campaign during which all parts of its family reinforced the vision of the Declaration as a commitment to universal dignity and justice and not something that should be viewed as a luxury or a wish-list.

The World Human Rights Day is celebrated with gusto in New York City, the headquarters of the UN and across the world. The day is marked by high-level political conferences and meetings and cultural events and exhibitions with focus on human rights issues. More importantly, it is on this Day that the five-yearly UN Prize in the Field of Human Rights and the coveted Noble Peace Prize are awarded.

What are human rights?
According to the UN, human rights are interrelated, interdependent and indivisible rights inherent to all human beings without discrimination and irrespective of our nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination.

The concept of human rights has many faces. Civil and political human rights is the right to life, and equality before the law and freedom of expression; economic, social and cultural rights are rights such as the right to work, social security and education, and collective rights are the rights to development and self-determination.

Treaties and laws to enforce human rights
All governments across the world countries are obliged to express, guarantee and uphold the basic human rights in all its faces by means of laws in the forms of treaties, customary international laws, general principles and other sources of international laws.

While the core of the Universal Declaration has continued to remain the same that of protecting human rights wherever their violations occur, the social, political, economic and cultural changes over the years has created the need to have a flexible whole new network of human rights instruments and mechanisms in place which is now being recognised and developed to enforce the objective. For instance, in the wake of the economic downturn faced by many of the world countries today, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has been holding conventions and meetings to explore the human rights violations on already marginalised populations in many member countries. It has urged the countries to do everything possible to ensure that the current recession does not affect the rights to work, housing, food, health, education and social security.

Similar conventions are on to assess the human rights scenario due to climatic changes, political coups, water and sanitation issues, conventions to protect the rights of the racism victims, of the disabled, of the victims of torture, of people suffering from poverty and many other such issues.

Human Rights in India
Though the human rights issue in India has improved a lot since independence in 1947, a lot remains to be done. India is one of the founder members of the United Nations and given this status India should have scored better in human rights issues, civil and political, economic, social and cultural and rights against discrimination, but the fact is it has not.

In its annual report on “The State of Human Rights in India – 2008” the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has pointed out, debated, and discussed how India has fared in some aspects of the civil and political rights such as right to fair trial without delay, rights concerning torture, bonded labour, and freedom of religion; economic, social and cultural rights like land rights, right to food, and rights against discrimination mostly the caste based discrimination, the internal security of the country, and equal status to women. The report points out that the apathy and ineptitude of the law enforcement agencies at district, state, and national levels has been one of the main reasons for some of these human rights violations still being prevalent in India.

Custodial torture
On the widespread use of torture in India, the report has pulled up the bad policing in the country and also the lack of interest on the part of the government in protecting, promoting and fulfilling human rights. The use of torture as the easiest way of investigation has created a distance between the law enforcement agencies and the ordinary people.

Bonded Labour
India is one of the founding members of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Despite this and the country introducing the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 and legislating many other domestic laws concerning wages and working conditions, it is a fact that bonded labour is still practised in India.

With 70 percent of the population living in rural areas and 35 percent of them in appalling circumstances, the poor people borrow money from the rich in order to meet their everyday basic requirements of food, clothing and shelter. Unable to pay off the debt and coupled with the widespread caste based discrimination in practice these poor people end up as bonded labourers. Here again the various law enforcement agencies have turned a blind eye to the problem.

Freedom of religion
Being a fundamental right in the country, religious freedom is an individual choice. Sadly, it is not so! Today, the scenario is such that the religion determines the security and liberty of a person. Religious violence unleashed in the name of politics, and moral policing is widespread in India. Religion has been misused to jeopardise the right to education, to health, to sanitation and even the right to vote. And the recent terrorist attacks in the country have also spelt danger for some minority communities. The government through its law enforcement agencies has to secure the liberty and rights of individuals. The media too has an effective role to play and not just confine to filming these atrocities on print and electronic media.

The right to fair trial without delay
It is the constitutional obligation of the law enforcement machinery in India including the judiciary system to ensure that lethargy on the part of the police, the state or the centre or administrative inability or financial constraints does not delay the justice. We have been witnessing quite a lot of cases pending at the court due to one or several of these reasons and the time to time observation and condemnation of the Supreme Court of India on the need for the speedy disposal of pending cases. After all, justice delayed is justice denied! The State and the Centre should look into the drawbacks of this kind and fix it at the earliest.

Right to food, education and health
In a country that is self-sufficient in food production and with substantial food reserves, the basic right to food has not been met. The rights to education and health face similar fate in India. Almost 22 percent of the population still live in deplorable conditions due to acute poverty and hence cannot afford to enjoy the basic rights to nutritious food, quality education and health services. Despite the Ministry of Food’s initiatives like the public distribution system, midday meals scheme, government sponsored hospitals, and various other methods in place, a section of the society still do not benefit from it.

The reasons are visible and many: Corruption, caste based discrimination, gender inequality, the indifferent attitude of the various law enforcement agencies including police, courts and administrative neglect, trade barriers and the bottlenecks in internal security and the lack of will on the part of those in responsible positions continue to play havoc on the human rights scenario in the country!

Till all these problems are effectively addressed at the earliest, celebrating the World Human Rights Day will mean nothing! Educating the children and youth on the human rights issue is important. It is a welcome gesture as the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will launch Human Rights Education as a separate subject at the 10+2 level from 2010-11 academic sessions. This will give the children an opportunity to understand, analyse the existing human rights scenario in the country and work towards its betterment.

What you could do!
The UN has outlined the many ways through which the World Human Rights Day could be used an opportunity to create and raise an awareness of the human rights and help protect your community and beyond. Simple campaigns like distribution of hand notes on human rights or as SMS messages to mobiles, or organising a meeting about human rights issues in your neighbourhood or publicising the efforts of real-life stories of people vying to get their basic human rights, or submitting petitions to support the rights of a group in your area, all these could go a long way in making the World Human Rights Day celebrations a meaningful one. However, the big change has to come from the government! And we, as responsible citizens have a right to demand this change! It is time for each one of us to speak up for those whose basic human rights are violated. The change has to start today and now.

Do You Have A Real Estate Strategy?

By Sarah Williams

The importance of a strategic real estate plan to a successful business plan is no Mickey Mouse affair. Walt Disney needed to learn that lesson only once when he set out to create what have since become the world’s most successful theme parks. Just before World War II, Disney envisioned an eight-acre amusement park. When his plans were delayed by the war, he used the time to expand his dream, ultimately purchasing a 160-acre tract of orange groves in Anaheim, Calif. There, he built Disneyland.

By any standard, the park has been a success. At the time, Disney’s decision to acquire a larger tract of land than he thought he would need was seen as extravagant. And yet even that seeming extravagance proved inadequate. Shortly after the park’s opening day, Disney predicted, “We’re gonna kick ourselves for not buying everything within a radius of 10 miles around here.”

Decades later, while planning for Disney World in Orlando, he was determined not to make the mistake he’d made in California. In Florida, he developed a long-term master plan for future growth, acquiring a land holding that rivals many midsize cities. The result has been decades of continual expansion of Disney World – driven by a sound, strategic real estate plan with flexibility that is still in sync with the company’s overall business vision.

Few of us will ever be challenged to develop a master plan of this scale. But all businesses rely on some form of real estate to execute their business plans, whether it’s a one-person consultancy in a shared office space, a multimillion-dollar manufacturer, or behemoths like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. As Disney learned in Anaheim, the lack of a fully developed strategic real estate plan can limit a company’s ability to respond to future opportunities and challenges.

Today, executives who have the responsibility of aligning their corporate real estate strategies with overall business plans see the need for more real estate assets on the balance sheet. Yet, current business trends often dictate that real estate assets consume less of the company’s capital.

However, some firms do plan larger real estate investments. Today, 30 percent or more of the value of American corporate holdings currently is allocated to real estate. A new study by Ernst & Young LLP shows that 42 percent of the businesses surveyed plan to increase the amount of real estate they occupy in the next 12 months. Further, 65 percent plan to increase their investment in real estate. Whether a firm is planning to increase or decrease its real estate investment, all firms share the same fundamental mandate: real estate investments must be tied strategically to the business plan.

Who Will Take the Lead?
Though it may represent a substantial part of the balance sheet – and often one third of a corporation’s assets – real estate planning receives a disproportionately lower amount of staffing, budgeting, and other resources when compared with other corporate functions. Most manufacturing companies, for example, have in-house expertise in engineering, financial management, communications, and human resources. Some larger companies have substantial in-house real estate planning and management expertise. But it’s rare for small to midsize companies to have any in-house real estate capability.

Perhaps this state of affairs occurs at many firms because real estate is not a discipline through which decisions are passed routinely. Because of that, real estate planning frequently has no in-house champion, making it all the more difficult to assemble the necessary resources when real estate decision-making is critical. With a global market and ever-more sophisticated and complex business environments, it’s apparent to most that the days have passed when key corporate real estate decisions could be made on an ad-hoc basis by people who are skilled in other areas but unprepared to develop strategic approaches to real estate.

The low priority that strategic real estate planning too often receives is especially troublesome given some recent events. For example, prior to September 11, major corporations generally considered it sound practice to concentrate corporate offices in a central location. After all, this tends to maximize efficiency. In the wake of that day’s devastation, however, prevailing wisdom has challenged this monolithic, all-in-one-place approach.

Dispersal to multiple locations that are linked by technology dominates the current debate on how best to locate corporate operations. To illustrate the point, in the week following September 11, AT&T reported a 20-percent increase in its teleconferencing business. Similarly, a Prudential videoconferencing facility that rents to the public doubled business that week.

Manufacturers once distributed their inventories to small warehouse facilities in many locations. Now, so-called super-regional distribution centers and just-in-time through-docking facilities – which take products in the front door and push them almost immediately out the back – are best serving changing business needs. Add to that the weaker economy and it is clear that companies need more flexibility than ever to shrink or grow their real estate assets in lock-step with the demands of the marketplace.

Implementation
At this point, some readers of Area Development might think, “Tell me something I don’t know!” Every corporate real estate executive, CFO, or CEO at least gives lip service to the idea that strategic real estate planning is critical to business success. In much the same way, every football coach knows that a team must run and block well, that quarterbacks need good arms, and that receivers need good hands. Just about everyone knows what it takes to be successful. Yet some teams win consistently and some almost never do. The winners are able to move from knowledge to execution.

Typically, thinking about real estate is limited to factors such as how a facility contributes to creating a product, how it affects the supply chain, whether or not it contributes to client intimacy, and how it contributes to employee morale and satisfaction. But real estate can affect many more factors that directly impact the bottom line. Good or bad real estate choices invariably have an impact on recruitment, training, client relations, corporate image, efficiency of workflow, the ability to deploy new technologies, and the return on public or private equity investments in a company.

Because real estate decisions can affect so many things, truly strategic real estate planning is linked closely to the business plan in realistic and practical ways. Assembling a complex real estate plan is precisely that – a complex undertaking with many parts that must be integrated seamlessly to form a coherent picture. Yet far too many real estate plans fail to account for all of the pieces of the puzzle.

For example, if your company were to consider buying the “perfect” building today, how perfect will it be when the size of your business doubles in accordance with your business plan? Would it be smarter to lease space in a corporate-center environment where the landlord has ample motivation to accommodate your expansion requirements? Would a stand-alone building be the only way to project the high-end image that’s also demanded by your business plan? Or would a stand-alone facility belie your market position as the value provider of your product or service?

The following questions deserve consideration in any such analysis:

- Should you be deploying any capital to bricks and mortar when your business plan calls for capital investments in other areas of your company?

- Would that capital provide a higher return if it were used to support the purchase of new capital equipment, increase marketing, or fund other capital requirements?

- Are your facilities geographically aligned with your targeted growth markets?

- Are you considering the locations, technologies, and amenities that are required to attract and keep the kind of workers you need?

- Conversely, how will your real estate plan accommodate an unexpected downturn in sales?

Real Life Real Estate
These and other questions were among the challenges considered recently by executives at Philips Communication, Security & Imaging, Inc., which is now pending acquisition by German-based Bosch GmbH. The Communications, Security & Imaging unit – currently a division of Philips North America Corp. – designs, manufactures, and supports communications and security products and systems, including closed-circuit video surveillance, paging, and public-address systems. The company’s U.S. headquarters were housed in an antiquated facility that was inherited when the current parent company purchased the firm. The executive team agreed that the facility did not support the business strategy in many ways.

The building had been retrofitted so many times that materials no longer flowed through the facility efficiently and departments that needed to relate physically could not do so. The building was not attractive, a factor that had real consequences for a firm known in its industry as a technology leader. Also, the building didn’t offer a pleasant working environment, which had a profound effect on employee morale and productivity. Further, the facility was leased from a landlord who didn’t share the firm’s desire to make the infrastructure improvements that were sorely needed, such as sophisticated telecommunications systems, high-speed Internet access, and HVAC improvements. This was a straightforward case of a company’s real estate being out of sync with its business planning.

Philips executives reached a number of conclusions. First, they did not have the in-house expertise to assemble their complex real estate puzzle, and, second, they did not want to take on the overhead of a full-time, in-house real estate planning and development team.

So Philips hired the expertise it needed. The company’s requirements included locating the new facility within close proximity to the existing facility and avoiding any disruption to the commuting patterns of the current work force – which would reduce the need for a large recruitment and training effort. Philips wanted its manufacturing and distribution facilities to be connected to its office facilities, yet also saw the advantage of having some separation between them. Company executives also wanted a large amount of office space outfitted with the high-end look and sensibility they needed to support their position in the marketplace. Finally, despite the highly customized requirements they had, they did not want to invest their assets in owning a facility.

The firm that Philips chose was a full-service real estate company that was able to locate and purchase the real estate; design, specify, and handle permits; build the facility; and create a lease structure that was attractive both to Philips and to the real estate company, which would also serve as Philips’ lessor. And, because the real estate firm specialized in development projects within the same geographic areas in which it operated, it also helped Philips take advantage of special state-level funding programs that provided incentives for companies to expand or retain jobs in the state.

Honest Evaluation
It’s useful to look behind the scenes at decisions that were made in the Philips deal. The facility that Philips needed was unique. For the real estate company, it would not have been economically sound to build so much office space in a manufacturing facility – if the tenant were to leave, finding a replacement company with similar requirements would be nearly impossible.

In order to serve Philips’ needs and also make it economically feasible for the developer and facility owner, two buildings were designed – one for offices and one for manufacturing and distribution. The two were connected by an umbilical structure that could be removed if later required. This met Philips’ needs and protected the investment of the real estate company.

How can you develop a sound real estate strategy for your business? The truth is, you probably can’t do it alone. The first step is to honestly, rigorously, and objectively evaluate whether you have the in-house expertise required to tackle such a mission-critical task. If the answer is no, your first step must be to determine how to fill that need, either by building the capability in-house or engaging the necessary outside help.

Just as lawyers, accountants, and other consultants help in crafting a business’s strategy, qualified real estate professionals who contribute their knowledge and guidance can yield huge dividends for an organization.

Developing any important strategy that will influence the future of your business is tough and complicated work. Sometimes, it can seem overwhelmingly complex. But as Disney was fond of saying, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

Human resource issues need constant attention

By M H Ahssan

Human resource management is directly related to the overall performance of the organisation. Identifying and planning for training can be linked to many corporate processes.

The level of intense activity continues in most organisations. Many managers and team leaders find themselves working hard on a myriad of activities. However, effort can be wasted if it is expended in a vacuum. If each activity is treated as a separate action, its intended impact on the organisation may be lost.

Many important initiatives are undertaken by organisations. These can include technology upgrades, quality processes, industrial issues and the like.

These initiatives are important, but they must be related to an underlying theme that ties them together.

Performance is the underlying basis of many organisational and human resource (HR) programs and initiatives.

Total quality management, benchmarking, re-engineering and the move to self-managing teams, are all concerned with performance. In human resources management, training, performance management (including performance appraisal and salary administration), recruitment and selection, and employee relations’ activities are all concerned with performance. Each makes an important contribution. Often these initiatives are regarded as separate programs. Often, when they are, they fail.

If organisations lose sight of the basic goal of performance improvement, if they treat these or other programs as the ends rather than the means, then they are doomed to difficult times, if not outright failure. All activities need to be regarded as complementary rather than separate, with the underlying principles and vision clearly established.

The first step to a sound organisation is to keep all programs and initiatives aligned to a framework of increased performance. This ensures that each activity complements the others occurring at the same time. The relationship between internal and external factors is also important.

Within the performance framework, the second step is to achieve the best outcome from each activity. Improvements and achievements can be made in all areas, even the traditional ones such as training:

The sources of training need provide a diversity and complexity of training requirements.

To be at best practice level, you should be managing and coordinating the training necessary to satisfy, in priority order, all of the needs shown. All personnel involved in training should be skilled and effective. All the training should dovetail into your performance improvement efforts.

The training effort is at an optimum level when every area is addressed. The importance of training in performance management is clearly shown by the similarity of the two diagrams. Training is an important foundation of success.

Recruitment/selection is another traditional HR area. The best possible recruitment/selection processes should be in place.

High quality candidates should be attracted to your positions. The person and position requirements/competencies, including the appropriate balance, should be clearly established. A variety of selection methods appropriate to the situation should be used. Selection decisions should be free of bias and discrimination. These are just some of the benchmarks to be considered. The processes used need to reflect the latest thinking. The staff involved need to have, and more importantly practice, high-level recruitment/selection skills.

After training and recruitment/selection, the third and final traditional area to highlight is salary administration.

In some organisations, a whole variety of different salary and pay arrangements have resulted. Opportunities exist to bring these different systems into a new framework that may overcome the difficulties of the past. Staff need to have confidence in the salary administration system. They want the rewards to be shared fairly and equitably. Dissatisfaction can cause severe morale and performance problems. Some enlightened Councils may establish an improved salary administration structure which is developed specifically to meet local requirements. It is possible to develop a simple structure that overcomes the difficulties of the past, yet is simple enough for everyone in the organisation to understand. This can be tied to a completely new performance management approach, including better performance appraisal mechanisms.

Organisations have many change programs in place at any one time. All should be related.

A co-ordinated approach understood by staff leads to confidence. Confidence leads to trust. Trust provides the foundation for a positive cultural environment, which in turn provides the driving force necessary to achieve performance improvements.

The Art of Writing the Query Letter

By M H Ahssan

You’re finally there. You’ve finished your novel, or found the perfect non-fiction subject matter, or brushed the dust off the memoir that’s been sitting in your drawer. You’ve edited your book again and again, you’ve had someone else edit it for style and substance, you’ve done revision and polishing, and finally it’s in its best possible form. So now what?

Well, now it’s time to get serious. If you want your work to get published, you’ve got to start contacting editors and agents, and pitching your work to them in a way that’s exciting and professional. You’re going to need a query letter.

The query letter does several things-it introduces you, tells what genre you’re writing in, describes the book, shows that there is an audience for it, and outlines what you as an author can bring to the table. And here’s the kicker-you have to do it all in one page. No exceptions. Agents do read query letters, and they respond to the ones that spark their interest, but they are very busy. So your letter must be concise and to-the-point.

The good news is that there is a formula for writing a query letter. I can already hear some of you planning to ignore the formula. “I am not formulaic! I will figure out a unique and attention-grabbing way to write the letter!” Trust me, don’t. Agents and editors like the formula because it works, and you will not win brownie points by being creative or original in the letter’s format. I promise.

The first paragraph is your hook. You want to do two things with your hook-tell the agent which genre you’re writing in, and give an exciting one-sentence introduction to the book that makes them want to read it. Something like “I’ve written a dark sci-fi novel in which my hero Karl Ma’anta-a private detective from the planet Octupui-travels to the tropical planet Mouii to save a powerless sorceress.” You don’t have to sum up the whole book here-that comes later-but you do want to catch the reader’s attention. The hook for the first Harry Potter book might have simply been something like “I’m seeking representation for my young adult fantasy series, which stars an orphaned young boy who finds out that he is magic, and will soon be going to wizard school.”

Your second paragraph is the synopsis of the book. It must be one paragraph long. I can’t stress that enough. And no, having a full-page paragraph is not a good idea. Keep it very short! At the end of the paragraph, it’s good to mention two or three successful books or authors who have the same audience as your book will, to show the agent that there is a definite audience. “I see my memoir on the shelf next to Mary Karr and Rick Bragg.” Don’t use books that have sold over a million copies-you are probably not the next John Grisham, and the agent has heard that claim a lot. You should know your genre and the successful authors writing in it, so be realistic.

The third paragraph is your writer’s bio. Keep this very short unless you have good writing credentials or you do something that directly relates to your book’s subject matter. The agent doesn’t need to know that you were runner-up for the East Oakville County Real Estate Prize three years in a row. You should only put in the information that directly relates to the book. If the main character of your novel is a dental technician and that’s your line of work, definitely do say that. If you’re writing a book about autism and you have a doctorate in psychology, do say that. If you have publishing history-if you’ve been published in the local paper or a literary journal, etc-definitely put that in. And if you know published authors who would be willing to blurb your book, put that in too. If you have no writing experience and your education and work have nothing to do with the book you’re writing, this paragraph will be very short, and that’s fine.

In closing, let the agent know exactly what you have written. If you’re a novelist, it should look something like this: “The 89,000-word manuscript is available upon request.” If you’re writing non-fiction, it might be something like “I included an outline and table of contents, and I have a longer proposal and two sample chapters available upon request.” Then thank the agent for her time and consideration, and sign off.

Remember, always follow the agency rules for sending query letters. They will tell you if they accept email queries, and what exactly they want you to send. What I’ve given you here are just the basics; your letter should reflect who you are and the book you’re writing. But again-follow the formula! Below are a few more dos and don’ts for reference as you’re writing your letter. Good luck with your book, and keep writing!

Do:
…be professional and courteous, as if this were a letter to a prospective employer
…include a SASE or e-mail address
…provide all requested information
…put your contact information on the letter or email
…offer realistic comp titles and authors
…tell the agency why you are writing to them specifically
…have patience!

Don’t:
…send anything except the one-page letter (no photos, bookmarks, etc.)
…use scented paper
…mention that your friends or relatives loved your book
…ask a ludicrous hypothetical question in the first line of your query (“What would you do if someone asked you to kill your mother?”)
…be offensive as an attention-grabber
…use exclamation points, incorrect grammar, or misspelled words
…say that you are the next Dan Brown, Danielle Steel, or Charles Dickens
…include personal information unless it relates to the book
…give up

ADVERT

Superfat hits Asia with a Bang!

By M H Ahssan

A Big Pharma star player – Sanofi Aventis – has been battling a stock market tsunami these past few days. It was all caused by a negative rumor about one of its best-selling products, Lantus (or glargine) – an insulin-a-day wonder that is key in the fight against diabetes.

Tens of thousands of Lantus users panicked. Diabetes is a complex disease with multiple angles, touching tens of millions of people around the world. The stakes – strategic, financial and in terms of health – are enormous. Welcome to the New Health Great Game.

Asia is getting fat. Literally. And that spells trouble. The best specialists agree that obesity is largely responsible for a global diabetes epidemic. For instance, 25% of China’s 1.3 billion people are already overweight. 2.8% of Chinese males and 5% of females are obese; and no less than 16.1% of males and 37% of females suffer from what is graciously defined as “abdominal obesity”. In a nation of no less than 350 million smokers, 60% of them males, and with female smoking also rising, that spells a monster red alert.

By 2025, no less than 20 million people all over the world will be dying of cardiovascular diseases – mainly coronary diseases and strokes, linked to a cluster of risk factors that include obesity. And this will especially affect low and middle-income countries, as are most in Asia.

The medical diagnosis is implacable, as presented by Professor Rody Sy, of the University of the Philippines. “Carbohydrates in excess of energy needs” lead to “abdominal obesity”, and that causes “dyslipidemia [major alterations in cholesterol traffic], hypertension and diabetes”. This carbohydrate-rich diet may be better handled in rural areas, where people move about more often; but in increasingly urbanized – and sedentary – Asia it can be lethal. What to do about it?

In November 2008, in New Orleans, a group of global specialists from North America, Europe and Asia launched the Residual Risk Reduction initiative (known in the industry as R3i). That was packaged as a global program to reduce excess risk of myocardial strokes, kidney diseases, loss of vision and even non-traumatic limb amputation that afflict millions of people with diabetes – even those currently under available medication. R3i has just hit Bangkok, via a conference/workshop designed to spread the wake-up call to doctors from all over Asia.

Statin therapy is the current ABC in the treatment of cholesterol alterations. As specialists describe it, for the past few decades the treatment with statin of vascular risk associated with “lipid disorders” had only dealt with “bad cholesterol”. It’s time to take on “good cholesterol” as well.

Taxi to the cholesterol side
Cholesterol is an essential raw material for cells to work properly. As medical news analyst Dr Jean-Philippe Minart explains it, cholesterol is delivered by an army of “taxis” along a network of highways – the arteries.

Among these taxis, a major transportation company stands out: the LDL-cholesterol. They deliver their content to the artery walls. Then scores of trash-carrying trucks come to recover cholesterol from the artery walls, thus preventing their accumulation: these are the HDL-cholesterol transporters.

So we have on one side transporters that screw up and make a mess out of it sometimes, the LDL or “bad cholesterol”; and the cleaners, the HDL or “good cholesterol”. But this is not about good and evil; the point is that cholesterol should not pile up in the wrong place. It’s gotta move all the time.

Coming from our food intake, cholesterol is always in transit. As soon as it’s absorbed by our stomach and refined by a factory – our liver – it’s transported by the army of taxis along our vessels and to our cells, all of them voracious consumers. If we have too much cholesterol, the number of LDL taxis is higher, cholesterol shoots up and piles up in the artery walls: that’s atherosclerosis. Circulation is at risk, and we face a lethal traffic jam – a heart attack.

Statins reduce the circulation of the LDL taxis. In certain cases, more often than not, the trash-carrying trucks may also go on strike. The problem is compounded by the proliferation of an independent taxi enterprise – the TG and the VLDL. These circulation problems have a name: dyslipidemia.

Under these circumstances, the accumulation of cholesterol in the arteries goes on, while we’re under the impression the problem has been solved. That’s why doctors talk about residual risk, and that’s why they want to associate other drugs to statin to act against these disturbing elements. Thus, the task at hand is to lower the number of independent taxis (the TG and VLDL) and increase the number of trash-carrying trucks (HDL). It’s much more complicated than it sounds.

Professor Jean Davignon, of the University of Montreal, says the world is “facing a paradigm shift. This is the end of the statin era. We have to look beyond LDL [bad cholesterol]. The broader we are, the better. We must consider all aspects of atherosclerosis”. (Aatherosclerosis, as mentioned, is the accumulation of cholesterol fat in the arteries.) It was Davignon himself who coined the fabulous term “cholesterocentric world” – the world we all live in. Now he asks, “But what about other risk factors” causing heart diseases?

Studies show that even with statin treatment, “major coronary events” still happen at a staggering rate of 77%. Moreover, statin and other intensive therapies still cannot prevent the progression of what is called microvascular diseases (which include eye diseases, renal failure and amputation) in up to 50% of patients that already suffer from diabetes. Diabetes and obesity can become evil twins, and are commonly described in the medical industry as “diabesity”.

R3i to the rescue
That’s where R3i steps in. Its “mission” is to improve the lives of people suffering from heart disease and/or diabetes. The initiative is adamant: “The residual vascular risk issue has become a major public health challenge in all geographical regions.”

This is not philanthropy, of course: the project is run by a Swiss-based foundation, with initial seed funding by Belgian-based Solvay Pharmaceuticals, and led by a board of trustees and an international steering committee of 21 specialists in cardiology, diabetology, lipidology, endocrinology, epidemiology, nutrition, ophthalmology, nephrology and basic science. The foundation is now actively negotiating supplemental grants with other Big Pharma players and the food industry.

According to the American Journal of Cardiology, R3i is committed to research, educational programs and making sure that the core issue – technically described as “residual vascular risk associated with atherogenic dyslipidemia” – becomes a global priority. More than 40 countries are already involved in research and educational programs. Professor Sy of the University of Philippines defines R3i as “a neutral group. What we need to do most of all is to alert primary physicians”.

The ghost of “diabesity” is now haunting Asia. From 2000 to 2025, diabetes in Asia will increase by 85%. According to an alarming, recent study conducted in 3960 individuals aged 20-74 from urban and rural areas of Fujian, China, 29% were overweight (including 3.5% that were obese). Around 10% suffered from diabetes. And 14.5% had a condition called “impaired glucose tolerance”. In a 2002 report on hypertension in China, 24% of individuals were affected, 78% were treating it, but only 19% had it under control.

According to the International Diabetes Federation, in 1985 there were 35 million people with diabetes worldwide; in 2000, they were already 150 million. By 2007, they were more than 110 million in Asia alone. By 2025, they will be a staggering 380 million. In Southeast Asia alone, diabetes among 20 to 79-year-olds, in 2007, affected 46.5 million people. By 2025, it will affect 80.3 million people.

India has the highest number of people with diabetes in the world: 40.9 million. By 2025, also according to the International Diabetes Federation, that number will be 69.9 million. Not to mention an extra 35 million with impaired glucose tolerance.

On a global level, the rate of obesity and overweight children has increased from 0.2% in 1970 to 2% in 2007. This means a staggering 400,000 new cases of obese children every year. It’s important to remember that obesity can lead to diabetes.

The Chinese authorities won’t fail to notice that the economic burden of diabetes now represents around 17.6 billion yuan (roughly $2.4 billion) a year, and growing.

Welcome to the Lipid war
It goes without saying that R3i is an inevitable by-product of globalization. The directors of the initiative are the first to point out that the road to less residual vascular risk implies weight loss, a healthy diet, frequent exercise and no smoking – even in the case of people already being treated with statin.

But try convincing Asian masses especially in India and China they must abdicate from their Big Mac and fries. Or stop smoking – be it kretek cigarettes in Indonesia, bidis in India or non-filter torpedoes in China. If people won’t change, or the appeal of the fast food industry and the tobacco industry is too powerful, the answer has to come from educating the public plus, inevitably, pharmacotherapy.

R3i recommendations are fundamentally sound. They involve above all a change in lifestyle; normalization of blood pressure; and, as physicians stress, “earlier intervention in the natural history of the disease”.

Residual vascular risk is so crucial because research for the past 20 years has identified obesity, dyslipidemia, high blood pressure and raised blood sugar as the key risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Dyslipidemia alone is a major culprit: 54% as far as the risk of heart attack is concerned.

Microvascular complications, per se, do not kill. But their effects can be simply devastating. For instance, diabetic eye disease is the number one cause of blindness in working-age adults. Diabetic nephropathy is the number one cause of end-stage renal failure. And diabetic neuropathy may lead to amputation of the lower limbs.

For Big Pharma, the so-called Lipid Lowering Agent (LLA) market – the whole business of drugs that lower cholesterol – used to be a booming market ($26 billion in sales in 2008). Now this “gold rush” is over; welcome to the age of generics (mostly made in India).

The fact that the market will inevitably continue to grow in volume also means that the price of the available drugs keeps falling, squeezed by the increased availability of generic drugs. A branded LLA pill costs $3 to $4 a day for the rest of your life. A generic equivalent costs $0.7 to $1.9 a day. The social function of the spread of generics is essential – as they benefit more and more patients.

According to industry data, the LLA market in China in 2008, for instance, was worth almost 1.4 billion yuan (almost US$190 million), with 35 million pills sold. It has been in steady progress since 2004. This reflects a relentless, worldwide growing trend in emerging markets – the new frontier for Big Pharma.

New drugs are expected to be in the market within the next few years. But what kind of drugs? Professor Sy of the Philippines puts it as “a poli-pill. Or various poli-pills, especially helpful for low to middle-income countries. Single pills that take care of blood pressure, blood sugar, diabetes, will be helpful. But to tackle severe hypertension, several classes of drugs are needed”.

Yet there’s more to it. Once again, why is residual risk so important? Because as mentioned before, people treated with statin are still dying of cardiovascular diseases. Residual risk opens the way to the making of “poli-pills” – in this case, single pills that will tackle all aspects of cholesterol. This means the industry going the crucial step beyond statin. Once again, it’s high-stakes poker – a new source of huge profits for Big Pharma, on something that concerns us all, and not only stock market players.

And once again the perverse effects of Asia copying the Western globalization model come full circle. The global fast food industry turns people’s eating habits upside down and Big Pharma steps in with a cure. Everyone profits. But not necessarily those in the wake of their strokes and heart attacks.

World AIDS Day – STOP AIDS

By Jaya Shankar VS

AIDS is a global epidemic. According to the 2007 estimates, 33 million people were affected and living with HIV/AIDS around the world. And approximately 2.5 million people were affected with HIV in India in 2006 making it the third largest in the world and the largest in Asia. According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), AIDS is one of the biggest killers in recorded history killing more than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007. In 2007 alone, around 2 million lost their lives to this deadly disease, including approximately 270,000 children.

Today, it is a globally accepted fact that the keys to the prevention of HIV/AIDS not only depends on advanced treatment and care but equally on spreading improved awareness on the disease, dispel the myths surrounding it, stringent laws for the removal of discrimination and social stigmas that make some groups more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, and coordinated efforts and sharing of knowledge. And to reiterate this commitment, the World AIDS Day is observed every year on December 1. This Day is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS caused by the HIV infection. On this day, volunteers, welfare organisations and governments across the world hold rallies, meetings, and public awareness campaigns on HIV/AIDS, its treatment, care and dispel the myths associated with it and stress the need for a coordinated public support for HIV infected people, children in particular.

How it all began!
World AIDS Day was the brainchild of James W. Bunn and Thomas Netter, two public information officers for the Global Programme on AIDS (now UNAIDS) at the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva. The duo conceived the idea in 1987 to dedicate a day to spread the awareness of the disease, treatment, care and the ways to prevent it. Thus the first World AIDS Day was observed on December 1, 1988 and from then on, on the same day every year.

Soon in 1996, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) became operational and took over the World AIDS Day programme. In the following year, UNAIDS revamped the programme and created the round-the-year World AIDS campaign to focus on communications, prevention and education of HIV/AIDS. In 2004, the World AIDS campaign became an independent organisation.

Theme and sub-theme for World AIDS Day
Since its inception in 2004, the UNAIDS has chosen annual themes and yearly sub-themes for World AIDS Day ever year in consultation with other global health organisations. Earlier, the World AIDS Campaign and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) had announced that for the World AIDS Days from 2005 through 2010, the broad theme will be “Stop AIDS. Keep the Promise.” And the sub theme for this year’s World AIDS Day on December 1, 2009 is “Universal Access and Human Rights.”

The theme has been chosen to address and call to countries to uphold the basic human rights of providing access to prevention, treatment, care and support, and remove the discrimination and punitive laws against those living with HIV like women and marginalized groups. Countries are also urged to realise the many commitments they made to protect human rights in the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS (2001) and the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS (2006).

According to UNAIDS, some 84 countries across the world have laws and policies that actually hinder the effective prevention, treatment, care and support for HIV affected and vulnerable populations. And even today some 59 countries have laws that restrict the entry, stay and residence of people living with HIV, which is a clear case of discrimination against them in their freedom of movement and right to work.

AIDS in India – Statistics are alarming
According to National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), in India, the number of people affected with AIDS is the third largest in the world, and remains the largest in Asia. In 2006 approximately 2.5 million people in India were living with HIV. Out of this, 39 percent were women and 3.8 percent children. Sexual route is predominantly the transmission route for HIV in India with 87.4 percent of the HIV affected population affected through sex related activities. The other routes of HIV transmission includes peri-natal at 4.7 percent, unsafe blood and blood products at 1.7 percent, infected needles and syringes at 1.8 percent and unspecified and other routes of transmission at 4.1 percent.

AIDS affecting the cream of the society
The adult national HIV prevalence was 0.36% among the general population. And among high risk groups it is obviously higher. NACO statistics say that among Injecting Drug Users (IDUs), it is as high as 8.71 percent, while it is 5.69 percent and 5.38 percent among Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) and Female Sex Workers (FSWs), respectively.

More men are HIV positive than women. For every 100 people living with HIV and AIDS, 61 are men and 39 women. While a whopping 88.7 percent of all infections are prevalent in the 15-49 age group that is people in the prime of their working life, young people too are at greater risk, with the under-15 category accounting for 3.8 percent of all HIV infections.

Social stigmas, biological reasons make women more vulnerable to HIV
Women account for almost 1 million of the 2.5 million HIV affected people in India. Social stigmas like early marriage, sexual abuse and violence and the lack of equal rights to women in families, and the lack of information and knowledge about sexual related diseases is still widely prevalent in India. The choice to abstain from sex or safe sex is still far from reality. This is worse in the case of women sex workers who are stigmatised or marginalised. Poor access to quality health services have also added to the woes of women making them more prone to HIV infections.

Law is equal for all: Rights of the HIV affected

Whether a person is affected or infected by HIV, he/she has three important rights:

(1) Right to informed consent – testing for HIV requires specific and informed consent of the person being tested. A person can move the court if testing is conducted without the consent of the concerned person.

(2) Right to confidentiality – India’s law states that if the person with HIV is afraid to move the court to vindicate his/her rights for fear of his/her HIV status becoming public knowledge, he/she can take the help of Suppression of Identity under a pseudonym.

(3) Right against discrimination – the right to be treated equally is a fundamental right and issues like denial of housing for HIV affected can be settled in the court of law.

What should we know!
As a responsible citizen of this country it is important for each one of us to understand and spread the awareness about the HIV disease. This will largely help in reducing the social stigmas and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS. We should take measures to safeguard ourselves and others from getting infected with the HIV/AIDS by adopting preventive health habits and lifestyle. It is better not to have multiple sexual partners, or at least have safe sex!

Continue to donate blood. The National Blood Policy adopted in April 2002 ensures that the donor and the blood donated are safe as all materials used for blood collection are sterile and disposable. It also certifies that safe and quality blood is collected from voluntary non-remunerated regular blood donors. This resulted in a significant drop in transmission of HIV through blood transfusion. The percentage was reduced from 6.07percent in 1999 to 1.96 percent in 2006 and to 1.1percent in 2007.

Concerted global action is needed!
While this global epidemic is seen stabilizing largely due to the efforts at national and international levels, it is still at an unacceptably high levels. To help effectively pull back this level calls for concerted efforts at multi levels in countries across the globe.

Firstly, we need to act on the many political commitments made on HIV. This requires greater leadership, sincere efforts to learn the positives and keep building on the recent successes by taking account of lessons learnt, improve the financial resources required to fight the deadly virus, enhance coordination and cooperation between states in efforts and knowledge, and effectively draft new laws or spruce up existing laws for effective action to address societal determinants of HIV risk and vulnerability.

Let’s extend our whole hearted support to the HIV infected friends and help spread the awareness.