Indian Architecture: Colonial India

By Sonam Gupta

India has been invaded ever since the times of Aryans repeatedly, the invaders almost always attracted by richness of its resources and natural bounties or by the heritage and glory of an already flourishing reign. The Europeans also were no exception to this fact; European interest in India persisted since the classical times and for very cogent reasons. India had much to give Europe in the practical form of spices, textiles and other oriental products.

That probably was the reason of all the expeditions from Vasco da Gamma in 1498, the Dutch in 1590, to the east India Company in 1600.

The Europeans extended their sovereignty over the Indian continent, post industrial revolution, to seek profits by exploring new markets for their products, which now had a lesser market in the area where ‘industrial revolution originated’. Besides, obtain the required resources be it the raw material or absolutely inexpensive labor.

Amongst the many countries setting up colonies in India, ‘the British’, though not the first but definitely, in the long run were the most powerful one. Following a trajectory similar to the Dutch, and used the Dutch techniques, later in time, with more spectacular results. The ascendancy falls into five phases that begin roughly in 1600, 1740, 1792, 1820 and 1848, the shape and substance of ‘British India’ changed dramatically. The British formed ‘East India Company’ on “31st December 1600”, of the knights and merchants of the city of London and Queen Elizabeth I granted its royal monopoly charter. It flourished in the same up–and–down manner as other commercial operations, like those of the French, Dutch, and older merchant communities who worked under the authority of the Mughals and their contemporaries.

But the British fought against the Dutch, progressed gaining territorial powers by military control to increase their control over assets in the interiors to the extent that by around 1784 William Pitt’s India act made the company an autonomous body. This act decried territorial expansion which accelerated imperial expansion and with the British military aristocracy taking charge of the company armies, a lot of regions were conquered, Delhi (1803) being one of those. Along with these achievements treaties were signed with the ‘princely states’ and Ajmer and Mewar became directly administered British territory. By 1813, the parliament opened British India to private merchants and missionaries. As the power increased Indian affairs were controlled directly by crown and parliament and now British citizens could operate in India under the crown protection in company territories called ‘presidencies’, with their capitals at Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras.

The Indian families’ were pushed out of the market, the British silver rupee became the imperial currency and thus the value of Indian goods kept decreasing by folds for the next thirty years. By 1833, the company’s trading rights ended completely making it strictly an arm of British administration and as consequence India became part of the larger “British Order”. With India becoming part of the order many a changes were made for instance – English becoming the official language, commercial networks entailing deeper controls of Indian resources, and the drive which began in 1830 materialized by almost 1848 to bring the hills also under the British conquest.

The British India – The Multiplicity of Motives Become Visible: Britain viewed the people of India as second-class citizens in their own country, working to build an infrastructure that fed India’s natural resources to England while depriving the indigenous population opportunities to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The Hindustan, under the sway of the British Empire, was despotism – complete deprivation of freedom.

Though, the 1850s witnessed the introduction of the three “engines of social improvement” that heightened the British illusion of permanence in India. They were the railroads, the telegraph, and the Uniform postal service, but it was primarily to serve the British and not for the development of the natives.

The Colonial Culture Reflecting In the Architecture: The infrastructure in India without the giving of the industrial revolution was negligible for the British, as mentioned above; the developments were for the colonizers and not for the ruled, the architectural manifestations also had a colonial aim of representation. Representation of power, supremacy and yet somewhere, even in their own dilemma, a way to connect to the masses of the colonized Indians and symbolize their blatancy of rule.

The architectural undertakings in the colonial empire also just like in their own nation, politically driven, had different needs to subside to. For instance, the colonial and India office buildings in white hall, in fact, themselves indicated something of the distinctive character of empire. Both structures, designed by Scott and aligned with the Foreign Office, were classical in their architectural form. Most revealing, however, was their sculptural ornamentation. The topmost story of the Foreign Office was decorated with a series of sculpted figures emblematic of different countries, such as France and Italy. Similar figures set on the India Office, however, represented not the nations but “Indian tribes”, an afghan, a goorkha, a Malay, a Maharatt, and so on”, social categories identified by the British as significant for their rule of the sub continent. While the inner court of the foreign office was plain, that of Indian Office was decorated with busts and statues of” celebrated worthies, both civil and military, connected with the Indian empire.”

British architects who worked in the empire, regardless of their choice, shared a set of attitudes very different from their colleagues’ home. Their views together formed the colonial style, which more or less were inflicted with a concern of making visible Britain’s imperial position as ruler. Since, the British thought process was based on the allegory that, “to know was, in some measure, already to rule”, hence the imperial architecture was – “architecture both of knowledge and of power.”

It is probably for the thought that, T. Roger Smith stated, “The great peculiarity of a tropical climate is that it is very hot…and that is one point an architect must never forget.”

Innovation did not stop here.

The Thought Materializing Together with the Imperial Apparition of Pre-Eminence: The Indians had of course over the centuries developed ways to accommodate the country’s climate in their building and the English men even with full realization of the fact did not adopt the same means but set their work different from that of the Indians. To satisfy those imperial whims were adopted the bungalow form, which ideally combined the climate and political fantasies – ‘of social distinction’.

- It had thick walls and high ceilings – to provide ample ventilation.
- Encircling veranda – shaded the main structure; also
- It provided an arena for a carefully regulated intercourse with that world.
- The placement of the bungalow in a large compound – emphasized a social distance and of superiority.
- The superiority further emphasized by an impressive drive way and with access regulated by walls, gates and watchmen.

Though this expression and culture of colonialism did not confine only to the architectural manifestations like the bungalow or other public buildings but it was prominently visible at the urban level in the form of many settlements.

The Demarcations And The Results
These settlements probably borne out of some kind of a racist fear, as the British created separately demarcated spaces for themselves. In cities these areas were labeled ‘civil lines’, with associated ‘cantonments’ for the military, in mountains they established ‘hill stations’ that served as summer refuges not only for individuals but for the colonial governments. The building of these areas went hand in hand with a increased number both of settled families, their presence made easier by improved communications of the day, and of British military personnel. These spaces communicated racial difference as well as the threatening disorder and ‘putrid air’ understood to characterize the old cities. They represented, moreover, as part od lived experience, an association of British culture with ‘modern’ in contrast to the older sections of the city seen as ‘medieval ‘ or ‘traditional’ – always the necessary foil to modernity. The ‘colonial city’ was predicated on such duality.

Though at the urban level there was a concern about the break down in sanitation, and alarming diseases and epidemics. Drainage, removal of refuse, safe water supply, were the remedies thought but whatever measures were taken at the urban development level were in to the English privilege. In fact, one of the earliest, “sanitary concerns focused on the military, whose poor health was evident from the fact that more soldiers died from diseases than from the battle.

The city of Allahabad, capital of the United Province, is a classic example of the way health and safety drove urban design. One of the most celebrate pilgrimage places, its population varied tremendously along the course of the year. The British feared itinerancy in all forms so that Allahabad seemed a particularly dangerous site for health and safety. The old city had two or three main streets, but from these a labyrinth – as the British saw it – of narrow streets led off to distinct neighborhoods, some still with gates fastened at night. The houses mixed together with shops and warehouses, looked inwards and were densely built. With the establishments of sanitary commissions and municipal councils, efforts were made to improve sanitation in the old city, but resources were disproportionately directed towards the European areas.

Here, to just like in the case of delhi, rail line was strategically used as the defence for European population, and so it ran through the city forming a barrier between the civil lines and the areas inhabited by the native population.

Apart The Records…
All of these facts have been penned down over a certain period of time but what is left for direct observation, also though matches many of those writings, are the great works of architecture, the existent pattern of education, and much of the planning aspects in almost every part of our free nation. Along with probably, their thought process which we have banked upon or were adapted to and have not been able to grow out of. The thought process, of ultimate grandeur and one worth a flaunt, is eminent in the buildings left by the English on the land, which was alien to them but are well suited to the context of our nation. The context -be it of the climate, the psychology of the masses or the understanding and appreciation of the already existent wonders for creations of our history, owing to which was given birth to the “indo-saracenic” style of architecture, by far outstands the way we incorporate these elements integral to the constructional legacy of any realm and its populace.

Even after decades of freeing ourselves of a foreign rule, we have not been able to surpass the magnificence and opulence reflective in the undertakings of the ‘foreigners’. The splendor of those accomplishments still speaks of the by-gone era where we were each day made to realize that, we even with huge resources and bounties, “are inferior”. If that is not “incorrect”, What was it that we wanted to free ourselves of and Have we actually been able to liberate ourselves form that rule? Are we actually “now” an independent nation and not a “colony”?

Islam at Crossroads: Who’s to Blame?

By Rajaque Rahman

It has become almost fashionable for a Muslim to say ‘Islam is in danger’. The religion whose literal meaning is peace is today seen as the root cause of terror and violence. The Muslim world cannot merely dismiss this as a fallout of a grand conspiracy against Islam by people of other faiths. It has failed to present the real essence of Islam and remained a mute spectator to many atrocities against humanity committed in the name cleansing the world of infidels.

This diffidence to stand up for Islam is mainly due to lack of clarity among Muslims about what their religion truly stands for. The Muslim world is heavily weighed down by its own blinkered interpretation of what’s permitted and forbidden in Islam. The most glaring misinterpretation that has led to a distortion of the very essence of Islam is its understanding of the expression ‘La Ilaaha Illallaah’, which is the first principle of Islam. Literally translated, it means ‘there is no god but God’.

However, generations of Muslims have been taught to interpret it as ‘there is no god but Allah’. Thanks to this limiting interpretation, Muslims are made to believe that there are many gods, but only Allah is the right one. This understanding totally distorts Islam’s real message of tauhid (oneness of God).

A case in point is the recent statement of chairman of National Fatwa Council of Malaysia Abdul Shukor Husin while passing a fatwa against yoga. “Many Muslims fail to understand that yoga’s ultimate aim is to be one with a God of a different religion.” When one has affirmed to ‘La Ilaaha Illallaah’, how can a Muslim think of another “God of a different religion”.

If a Muslim thinks there are different Gods for different religions, he is negating the essence of Islam and unwittingly subscribing to polytheist beliefs. ‘La Ilaaha Illallaah’ establishes beyond argument that there is only one God. However differently we may pray and by whatever name we may call, it goes to that one source. Further, the Quran clearly states that God can be invoked in different names. “Glory be to God, beyond any associations. He is Allah, the Creator, the Evolver, the Bestower of Form. To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names.” [Al Hashr 59:22].

Despite the clear pointers in the Quran, orthodox mullahs still hold that calling God by any other name than Allah amounts to associating a partner with Him. The biggest casualty of this exclusivity of Allah has been the concept of jihad, prompting innocent Muslims to believe that fighting against ‘infidels’ who don’t call God by Allah is an act worthy for the Quranic promise of heaven for jihad. This amounts to challenging Quran’s command to invoke God by any names with a sense of reverence and beauty.

This myopic interpretation of the concept of tauhid has had a domino effect on other spheres of life. Take the case of recent fatwas forbidding yoga for Muslims on the ground that yoga will erode their faith in the religion.

As the Quran and Hadith have nothing specific that will make practice of yoga haram, the ulemas based the ruling on their own fear of supposedly ‘Hindu’ elements of yoga destroying the faith of a Muslim. The best way to allay their fear is to look at the Hindu philosophy on yoga and see how and where it contradicts the tenets of Islam.

Yoga simply means uniting with the Self. Maharishi Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras starts by calling itself an enunciation in union. The asanas, the practice of which is the focal point of these fatwas, are just one way of attaining that union. Is striving for such a union with the Self against Islam? It cannot be. For, Prophet Mohammed has said, “He who knows his own Self knows his Lord.” Anything done in pursuit of knowing the Lord will count as a meritorious act of following the Prophet.

The best explanation of why yoga is not just permissible, but also desirable for Muslims is to be found in the second sutra of the Yoga Sutras. “Yogas Chitta Vritti Nirodhah.” It means yoga is stopping all the modulations of the mind. Ceasing all the outward activities of the mind and reposing in Allah is the ultimate goal of Islam. So doing yoga asanas as a means of attaining a thoughtless state will qualify as the highest form of ibadat (prayer). Hence contrary to the fatwas, yoga as a spiritual pursuit is very much permissible in Islam.

It’s universally proven that yoga brings peace of mind, and on that count yoga is almost obligatory for Muslims. As Islam means peace, peace of mind is a prerequisite for one to be truly following Allah’s only religion.

This leaves only one ground for orthodox mullahs to frown at yoga: that yoga stems from polytheist beliefs of Hinduism. But when yoga means union, how can it be linked to polytheist beliefs? In fact, yoga takes one away from polytheism and leads to Advaita, which is in perfect agreement with the doctrine of tauhid.

The time has come for ulemas to dispel this mistaken understanding of the real essence of Islam. Else history will accuse them of doing a great disservice to Islam and unwittingly leading innocent Muslims towards polytheism.

Medical Ailments – The Market For Sickness

By M H Ahssan

Healing people is considered one of the noblest professions; doctors can do so much good to people without any cost to their own interests. But while competition goes to serve consumers as a rule, it does not always do so in this industry. That, together with the potential good it can do, has led to much government intervention in it in various countries, all the way to nationalization in some.

Competition has given India about the cheapest medicines in the world. The competition once served to evade the law. For like all industries, drug production was subject to industrial licensing. That led to the mushrooming of a few thousand small firms, all claiming to be below the ceiling beyond which licensing applied; competition amongst them kept cost of drugs down. It also led to rampant patent breaking. A long conflict between patent-breaking India and patent-devout industrial countries finally led to a compromise. But history has left us a questionable legacy. For one thing, it is impossible to know how genuine or effective drugs produced in India are. For another, collusion between doctors and drug companies can bias treatment.

Competition is strongest in the home of free enterprise, the US. Competition is supposed to minimize the cost to the consumer; but amongst Americans, the proportion of income spent on medical treatment is the highest in the world. And the results, as measured by longevity and healthiness of population, are unimpressive. Somehow, competition in the US has become a race to the bottom.

Why has it worked that way? A study by Atul Gawande, a surgeon, gives one answer. He went to the community which had the highest medical costs in the US — and by implication in the world — and tried to find out why. Surprisingly, the answer is not that medical stores or doctors there charge more than elsewhere; it is that doctors recommend more tests on patients than elsewhere. And the reason why they do so is that they get kickbacks from the firms or specialists who do those tests. This is similar to the collusion that can often be suspected between doctors and drug companies in India. A tour of pharmacists close to doctors’ practices will reveal that many doctors prescribe medicines produced by particular drug companies. Such biased prescribing could be due to kickbacks. But tests cost more than drugs, so American doctors overprescribe tests. It is the Indian ailment on an American scale.

It is not just tests that they overdo in America. They also refer patients more often to specialists, who are, of course, amongst the costlier of medical practitioners. Many of these referrals are unnecessary; specialists only confirm the referring doctors’ diagnoses. A physician is trained to diagnose all common elements and many uncommon ones. In their case, a referral does not add to what is known about the patient’s condition. Doctors would say that no diagnosis is a hundred per cent certain, and that referral reduces uncertainty. But it is one thing to reduce uncertainty from 50 per cent to 25 per cent, and another thing to reduce it from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. At one time, this obsession with certainty could have been attributed to Americans’ penchant for malpractice litigation. But most states have legislated it out of existence; today, the risk doctors run is negligible. But lucrative habits die hard; US doctors continue to make patients pay dearly for certainty.

But not all of America is dysfunctional. Medical costs per insured person vary by a factor of three to one between the worst and the best districts; how do some areas offer equally good service at much lower cost?

That question, too, does not have an economic answer; it all depends on the community of doctors. In the overmedicated communities, doctors get rich. The doctors who arrive want to belong, and to belong they too have to get rich. So they fall in line and overprescribe. No one has done a study of Indian doctors to my knowledge, but I suspect we will find the same thing. Doctors in rich cities like Delhi overprescribe and medical establishments overcharge; a village doctor charges much less.

Good and cheap medical treatment calls for dedicated communities of doctors. Doctors themselves must put together groups of specialists and resolve to serve their patients at affordable cost. They must use their informed judgment to make diagnoses, and spend no more on them than their trained common sense requires. They must aim to achieve comfortable lives, not to become Ambanis. They must want to be doctors, not businessmen.

And how can that be achieved? I must admit I do not know. Let me ask a doctor.

Quick Impact: I have received much response from the medical profession to my above article on doctors. One of the doctors said essentially that a corrupt society deserved corrupt doctors (he did not add, like himself) and that I, who belonged to the corrupt media, was unfit to call doctors names. Actually, I did not call them names. I was only reporting on what Atul Gawande had found when he travelled around the US and talked to doctors. I do not know about corruption in the media, but I have certainly not written anything favourable about anyone who was kind or generous to me. I guess Manmohan Singh was kind to me when he took me into the finance ministry; but I have repaid his kindness with criticism. I would like to think that it has been fair and objective, but I am sure the opposite view is supportable.

Let me go back to the state of healthcare in America. The Americans are themselves increasingly conscious of its poor state, and are investigating its reasons. One of the relentless investigators of medical fraud is Senator Charles Grassley. He has uncovered the enormous consulting fees pharmaceutical companies give to professors in prestigious medical schools. In America, drug companies are prohibited from trying out new drugs on human beings. So they pay doctors who hold dual positions as professors in universities and doctors in attached hospitals. In return, the professors try out the companies’ drugs on their own patients, and write scholarly articles claiming that the drugs are effective. Drugs have to jump a number of difficult hoops in America before they can be put in the market; apart from having to be ringfenced by patents, they have to be approved by Federal Drugs Administration.

The authority of well placed professors helps in this process. There is nothing wrong in the accumulation of knowledge by or through professors. What raises questions is what they are paid to publish. The payments are not always made directly to doctors. In one case, Glaxo-SmithKline gave a grant of $3.95 million to National Institute of Mental Health, which went to a research project whose principal investigator was Charles B. Nemeroff, professor of psychiatry in Emory University; he personally got $1.35 million for overheads (Marcia Angell’s piece in The New York Book Review of 15 January 2009 is full of such information).

The result is not simply that new drugs are coming on to the market based on investigations that are supposed to be objective but have in fact been bought. The cooperation of doctors and drug companies has led to the invention of new illnesses to fit expensive drugs. There is some ailment called bipolar disorder which I had never heard of. Now, apparently, children as young as of two years are being diagnosed of bipolar disorder and being treated with drugs whose side-effects are unknown and could extend over their lifetime.

While new ailments are being invented, old ones are being given new names. One disorder I know from past experience is acidity or hyperacidity; the common name for it is heartburn. The latest name for it in America is gastro-esophageal reflux disease. Another common, and even more dreaded, disorder is impotence; it is now called erectile dysfunction. And the billion Indians who suffer from shyness had better beware: they have got social anxiety disorder. Its treatment is a growth industry in the US.

These things are exposed in the US for a number of reasons. They have more honest and courageous legislators — not all, but some. They have less oppressive libel laws, and it is possible to write about people’s wrongdoings without going bankrupt. And they have public-spirited intellectuals. We do not; but it is not true that everyone in India is a corrupt scoundrel. I have come across many honest doctors; in fact, amongst the many medical institutions I have been to, only one was a racket.

So it is not on the basis of my experience, but of responses to my column, that I am inclined to think that there is malpractice in the Indian healthcare industry. I am not talking of doctors alone; the drug and test industries are intimately involved. But I am convinced that if ever this industry is to be reformed, it is doctors who will have to do it. They are a powerful force in our country; unlike in the US, politicians will never take them on. It is doctors who should look within themselves, and find solutions that would give patients treatment that the doctors would be proud of. Change, if it comes, will come from doctors’ professional pride.

Interview with Kapil Sibal – ‘We Need To Liberalise The Education Sector’

By M H Ahssan

Kapil Sibal, 60, has a lot on his plate. a law graduate from Harvard and science and technology minister in the previous UPA regime, he has been entrusted the task of removing the ills plaguing the country’s education sector. There are problems of access as well as of quality. In higher education, there are unreasonably high entry barriers for private sector players and multiple regulatory agencies for authorisation. Sibal has already outlined the 100-day agenda of his ministry. He also plans to make Class X board examinations optional to reduce stress on students and replace the various school boards across the country with a single board. He has formulated a ‘brain gain’ policy to attract talent from across the world in existing and new institutions, launching a new scheme of interest subsidy on educational loans for economically weak students and a law to regulate the entry and operation of foreign education providers. The minister spoke to HNN’s Editor in Chief M H Ahssan on the critical issues facing the sector. Excerpts:

Will there be big ticket reforms in education?
What Manmohan Singh did in 1991 to the economy should be done in the field of education in 2009. He opened up the system, brought it out of government control, through the liberalisation process attracted investment, allowed private players to come into the system which brought about a revolutionary change in the way our economy functions. In essence, that’s what we intend to do (in education).

What about the Foreign Education Providers’ Bill?
Foreign investment in education and FDI is a natural corollary of liberalising the whole process. But we first need to liberalise it from within — restructure our present-day institutions in a manner that gives the government only the power to regulate and not a decision-making (role) for setting up institutions. The system should allow institutions to be set up — whether they are universities, colleges or schools — either privately or through public-private partnerships, charitable trusts or government institutions, whether they are state-run or set up by the government, either through executive act or through statute. But all this should be free and open, transparent and accountable, and must be under a uniform regulatory framework. It must not be in government hands, but should be away from its control.

Are you planning to make any changes in the Foreign Universities Bill before introducing it in Parliament?
That is something we have to apply our minds to. My first concern is primary and secondary education. We should free the school education system, have regulatory procedures, allow a variety of participants to enter the school system through various kinds of partnerships — public-private, only private, charitable trusts, societies, etc. and have a uniform system of standards. Allowing state governments to have their own variety is also essential for cultural diversity.

This freedom already exists, but the stipulations on a charitable trust to set up an institute leads to opaqueness in the system.
Those are exactly the things we are looking at — why should it be limited only to charitable institutions? Anybody who passes certain entry barriers should be allowed to set up an institute.

One need not necessarily set up a trust to run an institute.
No. But there is a Supreme Court judgement to that effect, and we need to get over that.

Since education is on the concurrent list, states do anything they want. For instance set up private universities without even informing the UGC. This leads to ambiguities.
Because it (education) is on the concurrent list, we can actually have a law and set standards. We have not done it, but this is something which should be done.

What action is going to be taken against deemed universities found to be flouting rules?
Before the report (on the inquiry against deemed universities instituted in the past five years) comes to me, I can’t say what action is going to be taken.

You are reported to have said “the future of students (studying in deemed universities found to be flouting norms) will remain secure”. That means the future of these universities will also remain secure and there can be no action against them.
That’s not necessarily true. That’s your assumption. First, it is not fair for me to comment on it before I get the report, but I want to make this clear and put it on record for the sake of students that whatever punitive action, if at all, will be taken, will not harm the interests of the student community and parents. We will make sure that whatever studies they have undertaken do not go waste and that they get a university degree. How we will do that is not very difficult.

That again implies that the institutes themselves will not be harmed.
I am not saying that. Theoretically we have the power to withdraw the deemed university status of an institute, affiliate the students to some other university and give them a degree from that university.

What about private universities?
That’s another issue we have to deal with. Because education is on the concurrent list we can actually have standards and regulations.

You talked about the need to change the curriculum in IITs and IIMs.
Everywhere else in the world, institutes of technology are at the center of expansion that takes place around them. Why should IITs be silos? Why can’t they be at the heart of a whole range of expansion? Take, for example, Triple IITs or Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) in San Diego. It (Calit2) has around it a whole university. Why can’t the IITs be within the midst of a university system where university students interact with these centers of excellence and these centers in turn develop within the university system? Instead of doing it in project mode and have money come within the IITs, why can’t a whole university develop around them? These are some examples which we have seen across the world and we need to learn from them.

Do you plan to hold a public debate on the issue of reforms in education?
Nothing is going to be done without setting up advisory boards.

The Fundamental Rights Of Business

By M H Ahssan

Do businesses have any fundamental rights? Should businesses have any fundamental rights? Strange as these questions may seem, it is important to pose them at this point of our economic development.

Fundamental rights are important because they guarantee certain basics that are needed for realising the full potential of the individual. Though India became an independent nation on 15 August 1947, it was not until 26 January 1950 that its citizens — at least the educated ones — came to know about the exact fundamental rights that were being guaranteed to them by the Constitution.

Of course, the Constitution gave the Indian citizens many other rights as well. But the fundamental rights were written as a special category simply because they were so crucial for the growth and development of the Indian citizens.

Of course, when the Constitution was written, there were no fundamental rights provided for the corporate or business entity per se. Indeed, it would have been quite extraordinary if such provisions had been made at all. There is no constitution anywhere in the world that has anything called fundamental rights for businesses. Not even in the US, the country in which the business entity has overarching importance.

And even if there were precedents anywhere around the world, why would India need to create any fundamental rights for business in its Constitution? The fundamental rights for the citizens already guaranteed by the Constitution, when read along with the directive principles of state policy, pretty well cover anything that the country’s businesses could want.

The right to freedom, for example, explicitly states that all citizens are free to choose any trade, set up any business or follow any occupation. The right against exploitation and the right to equality are not just important for the individual, they are equally important for business entities. And the right to constitutional remedies is the final protection. These rights were designed for the individual — but they fit nicely for business entities as well.

So in this 62nd year of India’s independence, why is there any need to debate on the necessity of certain fundamental rights of business? Aren’t there a plethora of laws — both corporate as well as pertaining to specific industries and sectors — that lay down and clarify the rights (and duties) of business entities? And aren’t these laws enforceable in courts of law — the corporate equivalent of the right to constitutional remedies? And shouldn’t the fundamental rights for citizens also help businesses in the natural course of things?

Actually, there is a need to debate the necessity of fundamental rights for businesses for a few good reasons. First, since 1991, the country has moved towards a path of giving increasing economic freedom and independence to its businesses. But those freedoms have not been backed by the kind of fundamental guarantees that businesses in the developed world can take for granted. These might be unwritten guarantees, but they are an important part of doing business properly.

Then again, the Indian government is hoping for many years of 9 per cent plus growth rates — and it is depending largely on the corporate entities, both in the manufacturing and services sector, to achieve that ambition. But that growth rate is unlikely to be achieved year after year unless businesses count on certain very basic conditions and rights. And finally, none of the rights that are being focused on in the following pages are unusual or extraordinary or require any special effort. They are all essentially provisions that are already provided for the Indian citizen that now need to be interpreted keeping the business entity in mind.

What are these fundamental rights of business that we are talking about? The first one is right to infrastructure — to good roads, ports, airports and uninterrupted power supply. The second one is right against corruption. The third, right to rational taxation. The fourth, right to fair labour laws. The fifth, right to speedy clearances. And finally, the sixth — the right to an educated and skilled workforce, something that should naturally flow from the recently passed Right to Education Act.

These are the very basics that every business in every developed country can bank on. These are the basics that all developed nations guarantee to their corporate entities. In no other country is a corporate entity asked to create its own infrastructure, educate its own workforce even in the basics, or deal with complicated structures to open businesses.

This is our basic case: it is high time the government thought in terms of guaranteeing certain basic fundamental rights to our corporate citizens, much like it does for individuals. This is necessary to help India take its place among the economic superpowers around the globe.

Implement the fundamental rights for business — and you will have created a more conducive ground for business to flourish as well. You would have created the environment for 9 per cent plus growth for years to come.

His name is Khan

By M H Ahssan

When it happened to APJ Abdul Kalam, affectionately called India’s “people’s president”, it could have been seen as overzealousness by a private airline. Kalam was frisked by Continental Airlines at Delhi airport because they said their policy did not recognise VIPs. Apologies followed later.

But when India’s most popular and recognisable movie star, Shah Rukh Khan, is detained at the Newark airport in the US for two hours on Saturday for questioning, allegedly for his Muslim surname, then this is not security protocol but appears to have a tinge of racial profiling to it.

Khan was released only after Indian diplomats intervened. The incident has sparked off widespread condemnation from legions of fans in India and abroad. Khan was on his way to Chicago to attend an event related to India’s Independence Day.

According to Khan, he appeared to be detained primarily because he was an Asian. The statement from the US ambassador to India Timothy J Roemer about the incident is characteristically tame.

Roemer was obviously trying to play safe when he said, “We are trying to ascertain the facts of the case — to understand what took place. Shah Rukh Khan, the actor and global icon, is a very welcome guest in the United States. Many Americans love his films.”

Post September 11, the US concerns for security are understandable but do appear to have reached oppressive levels. Racial profiling based on an individual’s country or religion must be denounced in no uncertain terms and not because Khan is a celebrity or an icon.

The stories of detainees at prisons like Guantanamo Bay show the extent of the paranoia after the outrageous attacks on the twin towers in New York. It seems that the same fear and suspicion works behind detentions of people like Khan.

Having said that, Indian information and broadcasting minister Ambika Soni’s call for a tit-for-tat solution is immature and ill-thought-out. It may be better if the India uses diplomatic channels — as it has done — to make the Indian government’s disapproval of this kind of racial profiling clear.

Khan himself has also had a fairly muted reaction to the events, although he has made his discomfiture known. It is ironical however that he should be targeted for being a Muslim in the US at the same time that the US Commission on International Religious Freedom has placed India on a watch list for its treatments of religious minorities, particularly Christians and Muslims.

Team Manmohan flounders in 100 day test

By M H Ahssan

The first 100 days of any government are considered the honeymoon period, when the media is generally charitable about its first few faltering steps. This UPA government was more or less an extension of the previous one, but its election was greeted with an audible sigh of relief. For weeks before the elections, all kinds of permutations and combinations were being worked out and several names doing the rounds as putative prime ministers, from Sharad Pawar to Mayawati to even Ram Vilas Paswan. All of them came a cropper; the Congress surprised pundits and prophets with its victory margin.

The UPA saw this victory as a vindication of its policies, from rural schemes to the nuclear deal. The new Cabinet came in all fired up and one after another the ministers announced ambitious plans for the next 100 days. Each was batting as if it was a One-dayer or even a Twenty20 game rather than a five-year Test match; the 100-day programme became a mantra.

Well, the 100 days will be reached at the end of this month and going by what we have seen so far, after all those early rhetorical flourishes, the governmenthas mostly floundered. The general mood is hardly optimistic. Not all the problems are of the government’s making of course — no one could have predicted such a poor monsoon — but it is worth looking at the manner in which various key ministries have dealt with issues and problems in their domain. Here goes:

External Affairs: A huge disappointment. By bringing in SM Krishna, the prime minister was making it clear that foreign policy would be run from the PMO. Krishna was an amiable enough chief minister and governor but had no experience at the Centre; was giving him such a high-profile post a good idea? His first real test came when reports of Indian students being attacked in Australia began pouring in. There was a general air of cluelessness in the ministry on how to handle this. By the time the Sharm el-Shaikh fiasco happened, it had become clear that Krishna was out of his depth and perhaps out of the loop; it was Singh’s show all the way (and he has been severely pilloried for it.) Krishna’s deputies, the tweeter Shashi Tharoor, darling of the social circuit and the largely invisible Preneet Kaur don’t inspire much confidence either. How soon before some changes happen here?

Petroleum: Apart from the unpopular job of raising petrol prices, this is not a ministry that normally gets sucked into too many public controversies. But it got singed by the fratricidal war between the brothers Ambani when Anil Ambani openly attacked the minister Murli Deora for partisanship and the matter got debated in Parliament. Now Deora, a veteran politician but not an experienced minister, is caught in the cross-fire between two powerful business rivals. But he has also to ensure that the public sector NTPC is protected and national interest is not compromised. An unenviable position and his every decision will be watched closely.

Civil Aviation: A big mess. The national airline is facing humungous losses and the private airlines are in a downward spiral. Praful Patel has blamed everyone — the managements, the workers, fuel hikes, the recession — but that does not absolve him. He was one of the few to get the same ministry as he had in the last government, so it is he who must take responsibility for the crisis in the sector. When was the last time one heard of an entire industry’s owners threatening to go on strike? For some unknown reason he is a favourite of the prime minister and therefore protected, but for how long?

Agriculture: Sharad Pawar is a pale shadow of his former self. At one time, he was known for his administrative acumen. No longer. A few months ago he had dreams of becoming the next prime minister, but the poor performance of his party has meant he has to now make sure the NCP’s alliance with the Congress in the forthcoming Maharashtra elections does not break up. Besides this, his cricketing affairs keep him busy. Meanwhile, agriculture is in a crisis and there is a drought in parts of the country. This is going to be a challenging year.

Health: Ghulam Nabi Azad is an old warhorse at the Centre, but he appears to have been taken by surprise at the intensity of the swine flu pandemic. It looked innocent enough in the beginning and the few measures at the airport were seen as adequate. But with the death of a young girl in Pune, it has blown into a full-scale panic and Azad, instead of being seen as leading from the front, is fobbing off allegations of making some bizarre statements. The ministry failed to rise to the occasion even as it was becoming obvious that swine flu was a potential problem. Though it is dawning on everyone that the hysteria over the flu may be unwarranted, it is no thanks to the ministry or the minister.

It’s not as if governance has collapsed nor it is a story of all-round incompetence. Ministers like Kapil Sibal, Salman Khursheed and Veerappa Moily have gone about their jobs in a business-like manner. But the overall impression is that of a government which is spluttering and as the leader Manmohan Singh must take some of the flack. Rarely has a government been buffeted by so many controversies in the first few months. It has been a poor start and many more problems are yet to come. Is this government, in its present avatar, capable of handling them?

Pandemic or media pandemonium?

By M H Ahssan

We have a new type of cold in town, that’s all.”These aren’t the words of an ignorant layman. The person describing swine flu as “a mild disease” is Jayaprakash Muliyil, professor and head of the department of community health, Christian Medical College, Vellore. And as anyone in the medical world will tell you, Christian Medical College is one of the best institutions of its type in India and Muliyil is one of India’s leading epidemiologists.

So what is the fuss all about? With the H1N1 virus floating all around the media, it is impossible not to be affected. Very few, luckily, will get swine flu but everyone will get a terrible attack of panic. Who is to blame?

Switch to the news on any TV channel and you think that all that is happening in the country is swine flu, swine flu and more swine flu. There are pictures of bodies being taken away, weeping families in masks, scores of agitated people standing in line to
be tested, doctors pleading with folded hands for restraint… The same kind of visuals have been on the front pages of our newspapers too, where stories of swine flu have driven away every other report to the inside pages for almost two weeks.

Yet look at the statistics. As of August 12, all across India the total number of confirmed cases is 1193. The death toll from these is 17, which works out to just 1.4 per cent. Here’s another revealing figure: according to the World Health Organisation, the number of deaths worldwide since the outbreak of swine flu is 1462. That’s it. Under 1500 deaths in months of the outbreak across many countries.

How many people died of traffic accidents in that time? How many from the usual
flu? How many died due to malaria, pneumonia, TB, cancer, heart failure? Far far more. But the world isn’t going into a frenzy because of those deaths, is it?In fact, doctors say that malaria is a far bigger threat than H1N1 but it’s been around so long no one’s paying it any attention.

As it happens, the 31-year-old man who died in Mumbai, reportedly from swine flu, had tested negative for the disease. What he died of was malaria,complicated by pneumonia. Yet as far as I know, no one has reported this. How did I find out? I spoke to his doctor.

What we are dealing with is a pandemic alright. H1N1 is highly infectious and it’s likely that a lot of us will catch this new kind of flu but — and this is the important point — a large majority of us will suffer only mild symptoms.

If the current figures are representative, as many as 98 per cent of people who get swine flu will only have the usual flu symptoms like fever, body ache, and so on. So why are we in such a state of panic?

Is it any surprise that doctors, particularly, epidemiologists, have been stressing that shutting down schools, malls and cinemas is an over-reaction likely to aggravate the
frenzied rumours about swine flu.

On the other hand, did the government have any choice given the current mood everywhere? People like their governments to act, even if the action has no intrinsic value and is action purely for action’s sake.

Why was the government forced into this corner? Would I be overstating the case that this was because of the frenzied reporting of the media, both electronic and print? An epidemic is a compelling story and brings with it dramatic pictures and heart-rending human interest stories, yet somewhere a sense of perspective was lost and the media failed in its primary duty of reporting the facts in the correct context.

The context and perspective are just beginning to come out now. But the damage, sadly, has already been done.

Will panic combat swine flu?

By M H Ahssan

The current panic over swine flu took me back to an incident from my early days in school. One day, a boy in my class developed high fever and was sent to the infirmary to rest. He overslept, was a little late in catching the school bus and was reprimanded by the teacher on duty with a (uncalled for) slap on the face.

The following day, the boy’s mother was in school complaining that her son had developed “105 degrees fever” because he had been slapped. The principal, believing that this was an indulgent parent, was furious. In pique, she called a boarder from the same class to her room, gave him a tight slap across the face and thundered, “Tell me, do you have 105 degrees fever?”

The stunned boarder shook his head in the negative, the indignant principal went back to her work and the parent went home stupefied. Soon after, the boarder went back to his class and narrated the recent experience to some of his friends, a few of whom complained of high fever by the end of the day and skipped school for the next few days.

So, after two eventful days, there was a clutch of boys with high psychosomatic fever instead of only one who was genuinely ill. The poor boarder, I suspect, must be still wondering why he had been slapped by his principal in the first place.

I don’t intend to make light of the threat from swine flu, but overreaction is certainly not a solution. Several people have died in India, several hundred across the world, and every life is precious. But a crisis demands a rational approach, not needless panic. The number of deaths as a percentage is minuscule compared to those infected as yet. We all have major insecurities about health, but in such situations we must yield to the scientific method rather than conjecture and abject fear.

Should we then be flummoxed that the country’s death tally from H1N1 went down by two between Thursday and Friday? Many people saw this as bizarre but to me it is symptomatic of the ineptitude with which the problem has been handled yet by the government — at the health ministry and public relations levels.

The extent of under-preparedness when the flu had already hit half the world six months earlier is shocking. In a globalised world inundated by frequent travel between countries, it is foolish to believe any part of this planet would be exempt from such a rapidly spreading virus.

The health minister then compounded the problem with his foot-in-the-mouth disease after the tragic death of Reeda Shaikh. His lack of knowledge was camouflaged in ill-conceived nonchalance and triggered off panic rather than the rapid awareness that was needed.

The media has not been blameless in the spread of fear either. The nature of competitive media is to hunt down a good story, and this is often shaped by the way it is received from sources considered reliable — in such cases, largely the government and medical authorities — though there should be no compromise on due diligence. Perhaps when the current pandemonium dies down, everybody will be chastened.

A pandemic refers to the geographical spread of an epidemic, not its intensity. Most of the reaction — across the world and not just in India — has been as though if millions are affected, half of them will die. All evidence so far points to the contrary; indeed there is enough evidence to suggest that this flu can either be evaded, or easily tided over with basic hygiene care and rest.

There are more people dying every day even now of malaria, say, and as John McConnell editor of the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal says pithily in an answer to a question, “What swine flu, and the media reaction to it, does highlight is our willingness to accept the “routine” toll of infectious diseases with little apparent concern.”

That is not just a paradox, but also perhaps the tragedy.

NC – Logos

NC – Testing Logos

Google offers more of the same

By M H Ahssan

The hype this week in tech circles has been Google’s caffeine addiction or, for the more technically minded, its next-generation search technology. The “caffeine” code-name refers to a new version of the world-dominating search engine that the company claims will be faster and more accurate.

Most users will not notice the difference, as the results page, format and layout will be unchanged. The only major difference with the new system is that it will scour more of the web for the search terms entered.

Statements on the company blog have elaborated a little but have left most of the juicy bits out: “For the past several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Despite Google’s claim, this probably won’t help the majority of websites, which will remain buried on page 57 while the likes of Wikipedia and huge conglomerate travel or merchandise affiliates remain in that elusive top 10 on the first page – and that’s without the ones that pay Google to be there. Google’s Page Rank system, named after co-founder Larry Page, naturally favors larger websites with more inbound links – they are seen by Google as more relevant and important. Actual content is less of a ranking factor.

Over the years wily webmasters and spammers have developed countless tricks to deceive Google into listing their websites as more relevant and gain higher placements; this in turn deceives readers into clicking on the link and visiting the site.

The latest upgrade may be an effort to prevent this link spamming and underhanded search engine optimization. However, favoring huge corporate sites is hardly delivering more relevant results – it’s a tough balance.

In reality, it doesn’t really matter if Google indexes 3.1 million pages for the term “Spengler” on the new system (which can be tested at http://www2.sandbox.google.com) compared with 2.1 million on the old, if most people never go further than page one of the results anyway.

The catalyst for this redoubling of effort by Google, which already has more than 60% of the global search market, is Microsoft’s latest baby, Bing, and the software company’s recent partnership with Yahoo, which has lost out in the search race since the birth of the Google Goliath 10 years ago. Bing has been good news all round as it has provided an alternative, so those looking for real search relevance should try more than just one search engine.

Blindsearch (http://blindsearch.fejus.com) is a good way to test search relevance when comparing the three major engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo. It provides results from the three in randomly ordered columns when search terms are entered. The user then selects which one they feel has provided the most relevant results. It wasn’t surprising that Wikipedia and those huge conglomerates featured in nearly all of the searches we tested on it, so the pattern is there with all three major players. Countless websites and resources are still hidden from searchers, and the results we see on the front pages of search engines these days are still the same tired handful of websites that represent less than 1% of the web.

Internet
Chinese government officials stated this week that they will not force the mass installation of Internet filtering software but will be recommending and using “Green Dam-Youth Escort” in schools, Internet cafes and public places. The decision followed global condemnation and fierce resistance from foreign computer manufacturers and the burgeoning population of Internet users in China.

A number of Asian computer companies, including Taiwan-based Asustek and Acer and China-based Lenovo, have been offering the software to consumers but not forcing them to install it. The software, designed by a Chinese company, has been designed to block pornography as a parental control. However, it has always been known that the government have been using it to stifle any politically sensitive websites.

Science
The boffins at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, have announced the restart of the biggest machine ever made. The Large Hadron Collider, a US$10 billion atom smasher that was destined to probe the origins of the universe last year (see Building a backyard black hole, Asia Times Online August 30, 2008), is set to be fired up again for tests in November following a breakdown that delayed experiments for over a year.

The malfunction was caused by the failure of an electrical connection resulting in a short circuit that caused a helium leak and damaged some of the massive magnets in the tunnel. Engineers have been testing the 10,000 superconducting connections and repairing those with abnormally high resistance.

The 27-kilometer proton race track will run an initial two beams at low power so the scientists can experience running the machine safely while minimizing the risk of a failure similar to that which rendered the beast inoperable last year. Once they are confident, the power will be cranked up a little, but no particle colliding is scheduled until the latter half of 2010. So we can put off “black hole swallowing the Earth” conspiracies until then.

Life has new meaning in the Himalayas

By Raja Murthy

An intrepid tribe of scientific Indiana Joneses has unearthed a remarkable treasure trove of unknown species in the eastern Himalayas, marking one of the biggest-ever series of discoveries of new life forms on Earth.

In a search from 1998 to 2008 that covered the eastern Himalayan regions of India, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet, scientists found 353 new species – including 242 plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, two birds, two mammals and 61 invertebrates.

The high number of new species found in one sub-region suggests a call for increased investment to learn and care more about terrestrial life forms – before spending billions looking for extra-terrestrial versions in Mars and beyond.

With the major success of the biological brand of Indiana Jones in the eastern Himalayas, the region ranks among the top of famous biological hotspots among 200 globally designated areas rich with animal and plant life, such as Borneo in Asia and the California Floristic Province in North America.

A World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report released on August 10, titled “Collision of Worlds – New Species Discoveries, Eastern Himalayas”, gave more details of the fascinating finds over the past decade.

Star discoveries included the leaf deer (Muntiacus putaoensis) which is now the world’s smallest deer, standing 60 centimeters to 80 centimeters tall and weighing about 11 kilograms.

Other significant recent finds included the primate Arunachal macaque (Macaca munzala) that is the first new monkey species found in over a century, and a brightly colored bird named the Bugun Liocichla (Liocichla bugunorum) that an Indian astronomer and bird-watcher Ramana Athreya first spotted in 2006.

The discovery of the Arunachal macaque, for instance, was most significant, say scientists. The macaque, a type of monkey, was named after India’s Arunachal Pradesh state where it was found. Finding new mammal species, especially primates – the order of beings that include lemurs, apes, monkeys and, allegedly, us humans – is ranked high in the “very rare” list among scientists worldwide.

“The Arunchal macaque is also one of the highest-dwelling primates in the world, and certainly of all macaques, occurring between 1,600 meters and 3,500 meters about sea level,” said the WWF report.

The biological exploring of the the eastern Himalayas included the Chinese botanist duo of Yuan Yong-ming and Ge Xue-jun, who discovered the blue diamond impatiens flower in Medog, Tibet, a remote region nearly 1,000 meters above sea level and 100 kilometers from any roads.

The blue diamond impatiens (Impatiens Namchabarwensis) was named after the remote Namcha Barwa canyon where the Chinese duo first spotted it. Growing to 60 centimeters in height, it can blossom all year and its petals dramatically change color according to season. It sometimes appears beautifully blue during cool weather and then turns purple, as if angry in hotter temperatures.

Biologists Yuan and Ge found this highly endemic (meaning region-specific) marine-blue flower in 2005. They had determinedly plunged into the bowels of the Namcha Barwa canyon, a gorge nearly 250km long and with some of its areas nearly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the US.

More such fascinating floral life forms could be waiting to be discovered in the Himalayas, for instance in the Valley of Flowers in India’s Uttaranchal state.

The Himalayas, the world’s largest range of mountains, is already designated home to an estimated 10,000 plant species, 300 mammal species, 977 bird species, 176 reptiles, 105 amphibians and 269 freshwater fish.

More famously, the eastern Himalayas also hosts the highest population of the Bengal tiger and the one-horned rhino in the world, two majestic beasts facing extinction thanks to human greed and foolishness.

The near-mystical snow leopard, too, prowls this region. Myth has it that the Yeti, the un-abominable snowman, resides somewhere in a penthouse cave in the Himalayas.

Much life already teems in the Himalayas. “The world’s northern-most tropical rainforests can be found in the eastern Himalayas and nearly half of the flowering plant and bird species known from India,” confirms the WWF report “Collision of Worlds”. “The plant life of Arunachal Pradesh is considered among the most diverse in the world, ranking second only to Sumatra in Indonesia and greater than Borneo, Brazil and Papua New Guinea.”

The title “Collision of Worlds” refers to the creation of the 3,000-km “Himalayas”, the word meaning “abode of snow” in the ancient Indian Sanskrit language. The Himalayas arose from a mighty collision of two continental plates – the chunk of earth containing India crashing into the rest of Eurasia – some 50 million years ago.

The collision of the two “worlds” was so emphatic that the pressure is still being felt 50 millions years later. Geologists say the Himalayas continues to grow taller into the skies.

Inevitably, the 30-page “Collision of the Worlds” report listing discovery of so many life forms – in so brief a period in just one region of the Himalayas – makes one wonder how many more life forms await discovery in the rest of the land and water of planet Earth.

Oceans, for instance, from where the mighty Himalayas arose, cover about 70.8%, or 361 million square kilometers, of the Earth’s surface. What strange and wonderful creatures do the oceans of the world hide?

“There are more species of animal in the deep sea than beetles in the rainforest,” according to Dr John Copley, a deep-sea biologist in the National Oceanography Center, Southampton, quoted in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper in its May 11, 2009, edition.

An intriguing hint of what incredible and mysterious life forms lurk in watery depths comes up in deep-sea exploration projects such as HADEEP, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo.

Funded by the Nippon Foundation in Japan since 2006, and by the British Natural Environment Research Council since 2007, HADEEP is the Indiana Jones of the vast ocean depths. The project uses deep-sea machines, or “landers”, carrying high-definition video cameras that can operate at ocean depths where no human can survive.

At depths where the mountain of water above is equivalent to the pressure of 1,600 elephants standing on the roof of a small car, HADEEP machines – with their roof made not of glass, but a sheet of sapphire – produced footage that stunned scientists.

They expected to find little or no life at ocean depths of 11,000 meters, a depth vertically more downwards than Mount Everest in height, where there is little oxygen and light for life forms to survive. Yet they found this ocean depth awash with life.

“We got some absolutely amazing footage from 7,700 meters,” project leader Alan Jamieson, aboard the Japanese research ship Hakuho-Maru, said in a media release dated October 7, 2008. “More fish than we or anyone in the world would ever have thought possible at these depths.”

The incredible life forms included the black dragon fish that emits infra-red light. Another strange creature of the deep, the spookfish, also called barreleye – because its eyes can turn through 90 degrees – has a transparent skull through which its glowing green brain can be seen throbbing.

How many life-filled Himalayas lie in ocean depths? The 353 new species found in the past decade in the eastern Himalayas finds awesome perspective in the “Census for Marine Life”, a decade-old global network of researchers in over 80 countries that is studying life in oceans.

The census, a first-of-its kind project undertaken by the Washington-based Consortium for Ocean Leadership, plans to release “the world’s first comprehensive census of marine life – past, present and future” in 2010.

Involving an astonishing number of over 400 governmental and private organizations worldwide, the Census for Marine Life is one of the most significant and least-known projects in the world.

Its participants include the New York-based Alfred P Sloan Foundation, Google, the Cousteau Society, the National Institute of Oceanography of India, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the European Commission, the National Geographic Society, Stanford University, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the World Wildlife Fund, Canada.

Biologists have already identified 1.5 million terrestrial plants and animals in the 23% of land that forms the Earth. But if an average of 30 new life forms is being discovered in one sub-region of the Himalayas, how many more unknown millions of remarkable creatures share our land space?

The remaining 73% of watery Earth hosts a confirmed list of 230,000 species of marine animals, the number a mere fraction of what scientists expect to find in the deep. They estimate a mind-boggling 10 million undiscovered species living in the oceans, undetected perhaps for millions of years. The number might as well be 100 million, given the vast ocean depth terrain.

Vast underwater oceanic mountain ranges, also called sea-mounts, number in the tens of thousands and offer secluded places were it may take centuries of evolved high-technology scientific equipment to detect life forms.

For instance, the deepest place on the surface of Earth is under ocean waters. It’s called the Mariana Trench, near Guam in the Pacific Ocean, east of the 14 Mariana Islands, at 11″21′ north latitude and 142″ 12′ east longitude, and near Japan. Scientists say that if Mount Everest were placed in the deepest part of the trench, there would be 1.6 kilometers of water above it.

The “Collision of the Worlds” report and the Census for Marine Life project strongly indicate how many more millions of life forms exist. Sadly, if the endangered Asiatic elephant, the Bengal tiger and the one-horned rhinoceros could hire public relations agencies, they might warn these undiscovered, exotic species to stay hidden from humans.

India’s election machine under fire

By Santwana Bhattacharya

Complaints about the rigging of elections are nothing new in India. The phenomenon has a checkered life of its own. For instance, it is said that the Indian side of Kashmir would have had a different history had Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference not rigged the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir assembly polls.

Had the so-called pro-Pakistan political formation, the Muslim United Front, been allowed to win whatever seats it could, it may have been at some cost to the nationalist party, but hundreds of disenchanted Kashmiri youth would not have been impelled to seek redress through arms training across the border. The Kashmir problem might not have had to go through the phase of militancy that began in 1989 and continues until now at huge human cost on all sides. And the most hawkish of the separatist leaders, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, would still be contesting elections instead of boycotting what he calls “India-sponsored polls”.

The second-highest profile allegation came from former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Upset when he failed to defeat the left front in the eastern state of West Bengal, he coined a rather colorful term, “scientific rigging”, to describe what he felt was the left’s methodical approach to ensure electoral victories for itself – indeed, it has been in power in the state since 1978 and it is a common insinuation that political popularity alone could not have guaranteed such blanket success.

This prompted the Election Commission (EC) to order an inquiry of sorts. As an election observer, civil servant Afzal Amanullah (now principal secretary, Home, in the state of Bihar and currently in the running for the vice-chancellor’s position at a prominent Indian university) gave a report detailing what he felt were innovative ways of rigging followed by the left.

For reasons best known to the EC, the Afzal Amanullah report was kept under wraps for many years. This correspondent brought the findings out in the open through an exclusive news report published in The Indian Express daily.

But, rigging’s been a story mostly of the paper ballot days. There is no dearth of anecdotes: one has heard of ballot boxes disappearing and then reappearing with a completely new set of ballot papers; voters turning up at polling booths only to find that their votes have already been cast; trucks carrying sealed ballot boxes being hijacked on highways and supplied with a fresh mandate.

All this was routine until the early 1990s, when electoral reforms were initiated. For this much-needed clean-up, then chief election commissioner, T N Seshan, overhauled the functioning of the EC by taking out the dusty rule book from a forgotten shelf.

Ever since the EC started implementing the rules that always existed on paper, it started winning kudos internationally. Its top officials have been appointed special observers by the United Nations in tricky elections around the world. Its technological prowess, the quality of its indelible ink, its skilled manpower – all this received due appreciation.

The centerpiece of this revolution was the electronic voting machine (EVM) – it holds a special place in the technology-savvy EC’s inventory. As its application spread progressively across India’s political map in a heuristic experiment that went remarkably well, the country registered a concomitant qualitative change in the conduct of its elections.

The 2009 parliamentary election was the first one where millions of voters across the length and breadth of the country cast their votes by pressing buttons on the EVM. No one doubted the efficacy of the instrument – its arrival was taken to herald an efficient and error-proof future.

Among the comic moments of the past few election campaigns was when Laloo Prasad Yadav – a former Railway minister and chief of a regional party in north India who cultivates a deliberately rustic image – initiated not-so-literate rural voters into the technique of voting on the EVMs with an exaggerated “pinggg” sound.

But the EVM’s dream run and the EC’s perceived infallibility on this front have been challenged in the recent past. Most recently, by the prima donna of Tamil politics, J Jayalalitha of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, who decided to boycott assembly by-elections to five constituencies on the ground that the EVM – the technological foundation on which rests the claim of fair elections – is not tamper-proof.

It is often said that the first sign that a political combination or party is not doing well in an election comes when they leave the campaign trail and take a delegation to the Election Commission’s headquarters in New Delhi – invariably to complain about the malpractices of the ruling side. But, on a serious note, the EC does admit that a strong opposition is important for even the conduct of free and fair elections.

Half the time the EC comes to know about the wrongdoings of a candidate by the opposing political camp and not from voters or even poll personnel. But this time, the complaint was not about a candidate or a political party, but the Election Commission itself. Jayalalitha has alleged that the EC has neither been able to provide tamper-proof EVMs, nor has it been able to rein in the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party (DMK) from indulging in electoral malpractices.

Citing a live demonstration given by a software engineer named Hari Prasad in Hyderabad, capital of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, she has decided to not put up candidates in five assembly segments – Cumbum in Theni district, Ilayankudi in Sivaganga, Bargur in Krishnagiri, Srivaikuntam in Tuticorin and Thondamuthur in Coimbatore – where by-elections are scheduled for August 18.

It is the common understanding that she is whipping up a controversy over the EVM only to cover up a political decision. She has been on a losing streak for a few years now. Having been decisively whipped in the recent parliamentary elections by the DMK, it would be suicidal for her to lose any more ground to her bete noire M Karunanidhi.

But the grumblings about the EVMs do not stop here. A parallel plot started with a few people wondering how the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Y S R Reddy, could predict the exact number of votes his party, the Congress, would win in an election that everybody else was sure it was losing. This is snowballing into a crisis of credibility for the Election Commission.

Now, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani, has joined hands with Jayalalitha to express doubts about the EVM. He has said the EC should consider reverting to ballot papers in the elections in Maharashtra, Bihar and other states. The left parties, too, sang in the chorus – let the EVM be re-evaluated.

It is no coincidence that all of them are parties which have tasted defeat in the recent past. To give the issue some veneer of authenticity in the public eye, it needed someone who had no evident vested interest in the process. This was duly provided by a retired civil servant, former Delhi chief secretary Omesh Saigal, who stunned the incumbent chief election commissioner Navin Chawla by demanding an inquiry into the possibility of the rigging of an EVM through pre-programming.

Saigal and Chawla are from the same cadre of bureaucrats; the former is senior to him. Chawla naturally could not wriggle out of the situation without taking some action.

Saigal has claimed that EVMs can be pre-programmed in a manner that every fifth vote cast in a particular polling booth goes in favor of a certain candidate by just keying in a code number. In a letter written to the EC, he alleges that it has never checked the software run on the EVMs. Two public-sector units – Bharat Electronics Ltd and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd – manufacture the EVMs.

To strengthen his case, he looked at some international developments: the Supreme Court of Germany, after a two-year trial, declared e-voting unconstitutional since the average citizen was found to be ignorant of the steps involved in the recording and tallying of votes; and Ireland, too, gave up on e-voting for virtually the same reason.

As for the US, in 2005 its Federal Election Commission came up with a report detailing its electronic voting system for the public. It took 400 pages of explanation – but at least voters there have this in the public domain, whereas no guidelines exist in India. Even so, the situation in the US is complex, with individual states arriving at their own set of rules for voting – some have scrupulously kept e-voting out, some have resorted to a dual system.

Asserting that huge gaps existed in the safeguards, Saigal pointed out that the program code, once written and fused in the OTPROM (one-time programmable read-only memory), cannot be read back and altered by anyone, including the manufacturer. Therefore, the EC is merely dependent on the certification provided by the manufacturer – trust, and no verify.

K J Rao, a former EC official and one of India’s best-known independent election experts, has pooh-poohed the claims made by Saigal. “The randomization procedure followed by the EC makes it impossible to tamper with the EVMs. No one knows which batch of EVMs will land where and be used in which election. How can anyone possibly tamper with a machine? Besides, it is impossible to introduce a chip inside the system without breaking it.”

After being pilloried over its prized possession, the EC finally brought out its EVMs for a demonstration. Fortunately for the EC, neither Hari Prasad, Saigal or an independent Hyderabad-based election watch body that joined the queue of complainants turned up to make their point. That is, demonstrate the said faults on the machine used by the EC – rather than on their own look-a-like EVMs.

Madan Lal Dhingra: A Forgotten Martyr

By M H Ahssan

Madan Lal Dhingra was perhaps the first Indian freedom fighter to be executed on British soil. He died in London on Aug 17, 1909. It is strange that no one in the Indian government has paid any attention to the need to commemorate the event.

Dhingra was born Feb 18, 1883 in Amritsar into a very rich family. His father, Ditta Mal, retired as a government civil surgeon and had 21 houses in Katra Sher Singh and six bungalows on G.T. Road. Ditta Mal shifted from his village Sahiwal in Sargodha district, now in Pakistan, in 1850 and he held 10 bigha land and a haveli in his ancestral village. He held the title of Rai Saheb, given by the British government.

Dhingra’s father also had six buggies and his car ran on Amritsar’s roads, the first Indian to have this privilege in the city. He had seven sons and a daughter. Three of his sons were trained medical doctors and three were barristers-bar at law. One of his brothers, Bihari Lal Dhingra, was a notorious prime minister of Jind state.

It was into such a family that the rebellious son was born. He did physical labor while studying science in Lahore, where he got influenced by the “Pagdi Sambhal Jatta” movement of Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh, uncle of Bhagat Singh. He later went to England for higher studies, reaching London after two months by ship.

Dhingra took admission in an engineering course but quickly became involved in India’s freedom struggle. He was influenced by Shyamji Krishan Verma and Veer Savarkar.

Veer Savarkar, who was on a scholarship established by Shyamji Krishan Verma, also reached England in 1906, the same year as Dhingra. Both were of the same age group, but Savarkar was inclined to Hindutva ideology. Shyamji Krishan Verma was more liberal and rational in his views, but he had to leave for Paris as the British government harassed him a lot.

Dhingra was now under the spell of Savarkar and it was he who inspired him to shoot Curzon Wyle, who was notorious for using Indians to serve as spies in England. The pistol for this purpose was provided by Savarkar to Dhingra, who shot Wyle dead in June 1909. After a trial lasting one-and-a-half months, Dhingra was executed Aug 17, 1909 at the age of 26 years.

Bhagat Singh wrote about Dhingra in his sketches about revolutionary freedom fighters. It is the duty of the nation at both the government and people’s level to commemorate the event in a befitting manner.

Thirty-one years after Dhingra died, another Indian revolutionary, Udham Singh, followed his path in England. He too was executed July 31, 1940, under almost similar circumstances.

The life and legend of Tendulkar

By M H Ahssan

For a reluctant public speaker, Sachin Tendulkar’s measure of words and timing of delivery today would be only a whit lower in impact than when he plays one of his exquisite straight drives.

I remember him as a man with monosyllabic responses to queries, but today he is a seasoned raconteur, with a sharp memory and more importantly a sense of humour.

Tendulkar’s formal education was truncated just after finishing school, but he appears to have learnt well from the ‘university of life’. At the release of Shadows Across the Playing Fields (a book on 60 years of India-Pakistan cricket co-authored by Shashi Tharoor andShaharyar Khan) the other night, he had the audience in thrall with memories of his introduction to international cricket. Hesent me 20hurtling years back in time.

I was on that eventful tour of Pakistan in 1989, and remember the callow 16-year-old being the focus of attention of everybody — not the least Pakistan’s dreaded pace attack led by Imran Khan and including Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. Though a raw youngster, for psychological reasons, he was the obvious target for the Pakistan team.

Ten months earlier Tendulkar had not been chosen for the tour of the West Indies despite scoring centuries in his first Ranji, Duleep and Irani Trophy matches because the selectors feared he might be hit by pace bowlers and lose confidence permanently. But in many ways — some of which have been examined by Tharoor and Shaharyar in the book — a tour of Pakistan was even more daunting.

Tendulkar recalled how jittery he was before his first innings, but I can vouch his teammates were perhaps even more nervous. Concern over Tendulkar reached a crescendo on the eve of the final Test at Sialkot when it was discovered that the young player would not just talk, but often also walk in his sleep.

Manager Borde, whose room would often become the hub for hacks in the evenings to sniff out stories, was most distraught. “Ab kya hoga?” he asked the clueless press corps. As a precaution, I suspect he moved into the room adjoining Tendulkar’s and kept vigil.

Tendulkar had enjoyed a modest tour till then, and then faced a trial by fire in the last Test when he was felled by a vicious bouncer from Waqar Younis. There was blood on the pitch as he swooned briefly from the blow, but got only muted commiserations from Imran Khan who saw this as a decisive psychological moment to win the series.

But Tendulkar was unfazed, and after some quick-fix remedy by the physio, was back into his stance. The next delivery from Waqar was sent scorching through the covers for a boundary. Imran’s moment to put India on the mat had come and gone in a flash. Tendulkar had sealed his brilliant script with destiny forever.

It’s almost 20 years since that day, and the marvel about Tendulkar is now not so much about his record-breaking feats as his longevity. Heck, twenty years transcends a couple of generations at least. There have been 15 cricketers who have played 20 years or more and in the early 20th century, England’s Wilfred Rhodes’s career stretched to a whopping 30 years and 315 days, but nobody has had the workload as Tendulkar who has played 159 Tests and 425 one day internationals.

This makes for arguably the most extraordinary story in Indian sport, and while every fact is well known, is still only half told. The other half should come from the man himself. For the sake of posterity, I insist, Tendulkar must start living his life again, as it were.

A metropolis for the dead and buried

By M H Ahssan

I am afraid it’s going to be a rather grave column this time. Literally. It all started merrily enough at a dinner in London in a charming flat nudging Hampstead Heath. And then the conversation, fuelled by the wonderful wine from the Dordogne region of France, unexpectedly took a strange turn.

From nostalgic midsummer reveries about holidays together talk turned to the ashes of maharajas having been buried in the pastoral environs of Surrey. Apparently, ashes weren’t quite welcome in regular burial grounds in Great Britain in the 19th century. It was perhaps because of the Indians that ashes were first given a home here.

At which point I sat up, all ears — which maharajas and why were they being cremated there I wondered. Were there any chhatris? Margaret Miles, our friend from Dordogne, volunteered to take us to this city of the dead, inhabited by nearly 300,000 of those who had passed on. The Brookwood Cemetery, spanning over 400 acres, was built in the mid-19th century to take the overflow from London.

My friends thought it a bit macabre that I wasplanning to visit a cemetery in rural England. It wasn’t as if I had to pay my respects to anybody from amongst the dearly departed. But, dear reader, I was actually thinking of you. Rather, of the surreal facts that I could write about.

Imagine: this was the largest burial ground in the world when it was opened in 1854 by the London Necropolis Company. (What a name, metropolis for the dead? The company had its own private railway, with “funeral trains” that brought the coffins from its private station just outside Waterloo to its cemetery near Woking.

There was even a class system at work in the afterlife, with first, second or third class coffin tickets available. The two cemetery stations even had bars with notices stating (no doubt without a hint of irony): “Spirits served here”. Not surprisingly, the place has inspired a couple of novels. I can imagine the late Evelyn Waugh going to town on this.

Alas, I did not find any of our late Royals here. I seriously doubt their “presence” here.But the densely populated necropolis with imposing avenues of redwoods, Chilean pines and wild flowers here and there is the final resting ground for innumerable desis and subcontinentals. It is said to house the oldest Muslim cemetery in this country.

Death mirrors life here. Especially in its distinctions and divisions: there are separate grounds for Sunnis, Ahmadiyyas, Ismailis, and Bohra Muslims. Brookwood Cemetery’s ocean of graves is certainly eclectic, including as it does pauper burial areas, the WWI American Cemetery, the grave of the master of the household of Queen Victoria, King Edward, the martyr and the painter John Singer Sargent, not to speak of Turkish Air Force pilots who died in alien skies during the Second World War.

However, one of the most moving and aesthetically eloquent enclosures — amongst the best kept — is the Zoroastrian Burial Grounds. It contains the graves and memorials of Zoroastrians, a large number of them Parsis from Bombay. The mausoleums of the Tata family, the Wadias and the Jehangirs are beautiful and moving, as is the statuary, particularly of Parsi women.

You have to tread softly in this vast city of the silent. However, the words inscribed on some of the mausoleums cry out loud — to be remembered by the living passing by. Particularly heart-tugging are the words of Nowrosjee Nashir Wadia who asks posterity sitting “beside winter fires to reverently remember his name”… while he lies there alone in the dark. He also asks posterity to “offer to our disembodied spirit the fragrance of flowers and fruit…” during summer. And, of course, reverently remember his name.

There is a lot of loneliness out there, in this city of the dead.

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Ancient Sands Modern Stories

By M H Ahssan

The endless sheet of rippled white sand of a desert with dunes dotted here and there makes one feel as if it was a sea minus water! The deserts have always fascinated the explorers. One gets glimpses of past civilizations buried in sands of time. Were deserts always like this? Or were they green lands, home of mankind and home to a variety of fauna and flora? Well if the latest researches are to be believed the deserts were not that bad as they are today.

They became deserts over a period of time because of the climate change. Even today world’s 37% population resides in deserts only. Human population means a stress on the deprived land. The dragon of global warming or climate change has been threatening the world society. Will our future be like present day deserts? Is a question that haunts the mind of the environmentalists. That is why a study of past climates of deserts has assumed significance today. Did these areas turn in to a desert because of human pressures in the past along with rapid climate change is also another question whose answer is being sought by the experts.

A.K. Singhvi of Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad and Naomi Porat of Geological Survey Of Israel, currently working at PRL are two renowned authorities on desert studies. Using Luminescence techniques on desert sands they have been able to work out the ages and climates of those ancient periods of the deserts of both northern and southern hemispheres. They published their researches in the famous journal of Quaternary Research-BOREAS in July 2008. Here is a report.

While reconstructing the past climates one needs clues to proceed further. Because of paucity of plant or animal life in the deserts very often enough organic matter is not available to the researchers to establish dates of past events. Thus in case of desert sands, they realized that if somehow they could be dated the problem could be solved. Luminescence techniques tell the scientists how long ago the sample of sediment was exposed to day light. With the state of art instruments now available, this technique has gained lots of significance amongst the researchers looking for the clues on past climates.

The semi-arid and hyper-arid regions of northern and southern hemispheres where evapo-transpiration is more than twice precipitation drew special attention of Singhvi and Porat. Moreover deserts are least disturbed by living beings, specially the human beings. Therefore deserts are ideal locales to study the interplay between climate and geology. Desert regions are not only affected by climate but can influence climate in a significant manner. The albedo (reflectance) of desert sands is only next to that of ice. The expansion and contraction of deserts leads to large scale albedo changes, which in turn affects the climate of a much wider region, say Singhvi and Porat. Desert dust carried by winds to far away place plays an important role in modulating climate. Dust can cut off the sun light for months together. Similarly records of past climates from regions covered by wind born sand and or silt (loess) provide useful information about various parameters of climatic changes of the past.

Quoting K. Munyikwa and M. Smith and P. Hesse, Singhvi and Porat say that Aeolian mobilization (that is sand blown by wind) in the Deserts of Southern Hemisphere at its peak between and 65000 and 45000 years before present. However, in Australia this mobilization took place between 35000 to 9000 years before present. These phases were synchronous of similar event between 60000 and 57000 years and between 36000 and 8000 years in southern Africa. Munyikwa et al had collected an additional phase of mass movement of sand from 46000 to 41000 years in South Africa. Sands of Australia on the other hand showed more moisture content in the period 45000 to 35000 years. South American deserts perhaps did not yield much information, but these workers could establish an unstable landscape between 30000 to 8000 years ago.

Quoting Bubenzer and other researchers, Singhvi and Porat have given a detailed analysis of the deserts of the Northern Hemisphere. The sands of Sahara were subjected to luminescence dating and it was found that accumulation of sand dunes began some 20000 years ago and till 13000 years it continued unabated. While the Sahara faced active dune building in the period cited, in Sahel region, immediately south of Sahara dune building was low. Perhaps due to limited sediment supply!

The period between nine to five thousand years before present was a period of reduced dune building and during this period soil was formed over the dune. It is yet to be established if feature was uniform all over the Sahara. But it is known that even during this period there were several dry spells. Wind regimes changed several times in Western Sahara during the past 25,000 years.

Luminescence dating of sand grains attached with the stone implements indicated that the stone-age man was busy making his tools in this region between 130000 to 70000 years and 50000 to 40000 years ago.

Wahiba dunes in Arabian Desert at Rub Al Khali have sand which are approximately 75000 years old. These sands are found within the layers of rocks and with the help of Optical Luminescence dating and direction of the layers of rocks, Singhvi and his colleague were able to establish that southwestern monsoon and the northwestern winds (Shamal system) were at play.

Part of the Wahiba information matches with that of the Dune record of Thar Desert in India. The oldest dune construction took place between 165000 and 143000 years. After a lull dune construction activity started again 77000 to 63000 years ago. And again during 50000 years to present there have been several episodes of dune accretion. Southeastern Arabia got more moisture between 35000 years and 250000 years and between 10000 to 6000 years. Aridity prevailed between 25000 to 10000 years and since 6000 years.

Thar Desert of India is on the edge of mid-latitude tropical belt records of past sands are better preserved here. Evidence of deserts being there 165000 years ago removes doubts regarding enhancements of desertification process due to anthropogenic activities. Dune building activity in Thar has been of episodic nature. Major phases took place 115 to 100000 years, around 75000, 55000, 30000 years and 11000 to 13000 years before present.

Singhvi and his colleagues quoting others (Wasson) say that dune building activity in Thar is associated with winds preceding the SW monsoon. During last glacial maxima That is around 18000 years ago, winds became weak, consequently there was less of dune building activity. About four thousand years later winds picked up speed as the monsoon began picking up. But an increased monsoon again reduced the sediment supply for dune building. Therefore in the core of the desert a peak in accumulation of wind born sand at around 12000 to 13000 years ago is deciphered from luminescence dates of sediments and again around 10000 years ago. Both times it was the re-establishment of monsoon winds that enhanced sand dune building.

Based on the data available Singhvi and Porat infer that the sand dune building activity was not due to human related factors, but yes the dune migrated rates changed tenfold due to human interference. About 2000 years ago dune migration rate was 0.9 cm/yr. This was reduced to 0.25 cm/year between 500 and 200 years ago. But since past 200 years it has been about 1.5 to 9cm/year.

Luminescence dating of sediments from Luni River in Thar showed a complete fluvial regime with high floods occurring one thousand years ago. In other words the desert of today was a greenery of the yore.

Nature changes and no one can stop that. But yes we should be able to check our misdeeds. Fiddling with vegetation cover can lead to increased rate of dune movement and it can enhance desertification of areas which are still green. For better future we have to restrain hacking of trees.

Should a Woman with the Mental Age of Nine Bear a Child?

By M H Ahssan

In India, a disabled girl-child is usually at the receiving end of a lot of contempt and neglect. Women with disabilities have been consistently denied their rights. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court (SC) of India recently allowed a 19-year-old mentally challenged orphan girl to carry on with a pregnancy resulting from a sexual assault. The Punjab and Haryana High Court ruling had earlier ordered medical termination of pregnancy (MTP).

Giving the facts of the case, Advocate Colin Gonsalves who had argued for abortion in this case, said that the girl, who was kept at Nari Niketan, Chandigarh, a government institution for destitute women, was raped some time in March 2009 on the premises by the security guards. In May 2009, the pregnancy was detected. The media widely reported the rape but no institution or individual came forward in the woman’s support. In the same month the Director of the Government Medical College and Hospital constituted a three-member board comprising a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist and a special educator to evaluate the woman’s mental status. Their report did not suggest anything out of the ordinary except that “she also cries almost daily”. The board found her mental age to be nine years and placed her in the category of mild mental retardation.

A few days later, a four-doctor Multi Disciplinary Medical Board was constituted, which included a psychiatrist. It recommended an MTP. The Punjab and Haryana High Court ultimately went on the basis of these reports. The second one concluded that “the continuation of pregnancy in this case can be associated with certain complications considering her age, mental status and previous surgery. There are increased chances of abortion… pre-maturity… fetal distress and more chances of operative delivery including anesthetic complications.” The committees concluded that the woman “has adequate physical capacity to bear and raise the child but that her mental health can be further affected by the stress of bearing and raising her child.”

This case thus raised fundamental issues relating to consent and to the support required while assessing consent. Eventually most mentally challenged women will, if properly supported, be able to indicate whether they wish to abort the pregnancy or proceed with it, concludes Gonsalves.

Shampa Sengupta, Director of the Sruti Disability Centre in Kolkata, says that if the woman wants to keep the baby she should be allowed to do so. “We as civil society must take the responsibility of supporting her. How can we forget the UN Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention?” she asks.

Sengupta, who has worked on disability for the last 10 years, adds, “How can we say her choice is not valid? Because the doctors say so? If you or I do not consider the doctor’s word as final, why should this young girl? Also, why is it that no one is talking about the rapists and how Nirmala Niketan came to have male employees?”

“The SC judgment has focused more on pro-life arguments and the rights of the child,” states Bhargavi Davar, who heads the Bapu Trust in Pune, an organization devoted to challenging the mindset and practices of the Indian mental health establishment. She points out that several women’s organizations have responded to this judgment by focusing on women’s rights and the right to abortion.

But nowhere in this dialogue between the state and civil society has the issue of reproductive rights and sexuality in the context of psychosocial and mental disability been discussed.

Many state institutions for women living with a mental disabilities, with the co-operation of families, routinely sterilize, abort or give the child away for adoption without the consent of the mother. Many women’s organizations and NGOs that provide care have an equally problematic custodial outlook towards such persons. Argues Davar, “In this case, we have not heard the woman’s voice anywhere, while we have several third party arbitrations and advocacy. We do not know what the woman wants. Whether the mentally challenged woman has the ‘capacity’ to take care of the child is another question riddled with prejudices and stereotypes.”

In the 1990s at Sirur, Maharashtra, 17 mentally challenged girls below 18 years were peremptorily hysterectomised. The state chose to control the girls’ reproductive rights by deploying extreme measures. The professionals involved in that decision neither denied that hysterectomies were done, nor did they perceive them as a violation. They justified them as having been done in the best interests of the girls.

Dr Anant Phadke from Pune who filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) on the issue, says that case is still on. In January 2009, the state filed an affidavit stating “Mentally retarded adolescent girls or adult women have no sense of hygiene during menstruation.” Shockingly, this is the prime reason given by the government for backing the controversial decision. Justifying its move, the government stated that, unlike stools or urine, menstrual flow is continuous and lasts up to at least 100 hours a month.

It added that caregivers find it difficult to deal with inmates who are uncooperative; and that poor hygiene can lead to infection and laceration on thighs and genitals and that increased flow can cause anemia. Behavioral problems and psychotic symptoms also cause difficulties for care-givers.

All that is needed to perform the operation is the consent of the parent/guardian and certification from a psychiatrist and gynecologist that hysterectomy is needed.

“We are challenging these guidelines,” says advocate Anand Grover adding that the hysterectomies were performed for the convenience of the institute, to prevent pregnancy in case of sexual abuse and not for the woman’s welfare. The Government had no authority to conduct a hysterectomy on mentally disabled women and such a move violates the fundamental rights of such women and the provisions of the Mental Health Act.

Shruti Pandey, a human rights lawyer from Delhi, admits that this is a case that is “so grey”. Says Pandey, “To my mind, this case was not about abortion per se, it was about whether the law of this country recognizes and protects the agency of a woman to take decisions for her life and body, especially all its nuances when the woman is a person with mental retardation (MR) or any other disability.”

Legally, this case showed – which the HC also noted in detail in its first order – that the Medical Termination Of Pregnancy (MTP) Act does not deal with access to abortion of women with MR, and that it wrongly distinguishes between women with mental retardation and mental illness, leaving the former out totally. Also that the Act does not understand that both these kinds of women are more likely than not to be destitute, in which case guardianship is not that simple.

Clarifies Pandey, “If the SC has said this woman wants to go ahead with the pregnancy, in principle I would support the decision. Every woman has a right to bear children, including women with mental disabilities. But if the court says it is the right of child to be born/not to be killed, and so the pregnancy must go on, that is hugely problematic. In any case, if the SC says no MTP, I would like to see what support mechanism it relies upon, institutionally, and not merely on the assurances and hyperbole of individuals and NGOs. I would also like this decision then to lead to the state’s accountability for creating and sustaining comprehensive and reliable support systems for all persons with disabilities, within a rights framework. This is definitely an obligation under Article 12 of the UN Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention, which India is totally ill-equipped to deliver on, as this case shows.”

This case indicates eloquently that the Indian legal framework has to be strengthened a great deal to bring it in line with international legislation.

Swine Influenza and Ayurvedic Management

By M H Ahssan

Swine influenza (also called H1N1 flu, swine flu, hog flu, and pig flu) is an infection by any one of several types of swine influenza virus. Swine influenza virus (SIV) is any strain of the influenza family of viruses that is endemic in pigs.[1] As of 2009, the known SIV strains include influenza C and the subtypes of influenza A known as H1N1, H1N2, H3N1, H3N2, and H2N3.

Swine influenza virus is common throughout pig populations worldwide. Transmission of the virus from pigs to humans is not common and does not always lead to human influenza, often resulting only in the production of antibodies in the blood. People with regular exposure to pigs are at increased risk of swine flu infection. The meat of an infected animal poses no risk of infection when properly cooked.

The Swine flu has been compared to other similar types of influenza virus in terms of mortality: “in the US it appears that for every 1000 people who get infected, about 40 people need admission to hospital and about one person dies”.[2]. There are fears that swine flu will become a major global pandemic in the winter months, with many countries planning major vaccination campaigns. [3]

Influenza is quite common in pigs; the main route of transmission is through direct contact between infected and uninfected animals. [4]

People who work with poultry and swine, especially people with intense exposures, are at increased risk of zoonotic infection with influenza virus endemic in these animals, and constitute a population of human hosts in which zoonosis and re-assortment can co-occur.[5] Other professions at particular risk of infection are veterinarians and meat processing workers, although the risk of infection for both of these groups is lower than that of farm workers.[6]

Main Signs and Symptoms of Swine Flu

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in humans the symptoms of the 2009 “swine flu” H1N1 virus are similar to those of influenza and of influenza-like illness in general.

Symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. The 2009 outbreak has shown an increased percentage of patients reporting diarrhea and vomiting.[7] The 2009 H1N1 virus is not zoonotic swine flu, as it is not transmitted from pigs to humans, but from person to person.

The most common cause of death is respiratory failure, other causes of death are pneumonia (leading to sepsis)[8], high fever (leading to neurological problems), dehydration (from excessive vomiting and diarrhea) and electrolyte imbalance. Fatalities are more likely in young children and the elderly.

Prevention

According to Ayurveda, prevention is always better than cure, and the primary aim goal of Ayurveda is to maintain the health of a healthy person. As stated: “Swasthasya Swasthya Rakshanam…” here are the few preventive measures according to modern science and Ayurveda.

Prevention of swine influenza has three components:
1. prevention in swine,
2. prevention of transmission to humans,
3. and prevention of its spread among humans.

The current trivalent influenza vaccine is unlikely to provide protection against the new 2009 H1N1 strain,[9] so the control of swine influenza by vaccination has become more difficult in recent decades. But you don’t worry even if you are not vaccinated. Start practicing Pranayama, especially “hot Pranayama like Bhastrika and Kapalbhanti”! This will improve your lungs capacity and immunity to combat any infections from the viruses.

Swine flu cannot be spread by pork products, since the virus is not transmitted through food but it spreads between humans through coughing or sneezing and people touching something with the virus on it and then touching their own nose or mouth.[10]

The swine flu in humans is most contagious during the first five days of the illness although some people, most commonly children, can remain contagious for up to ten days. Diagnosis can be made by sending a specimen, collected during the first five days for analysis.[11] so as soon as you feel discomfort with symptoms like sneezing, coughing and any other respiratory symptoms, start to have herbal tea, which is very common practice in India. The recipe of such herbal tea knows almost every mother or grandmother knows in India! well, if you don’t know: let me explain:
Boil approximately 200ml of potable water, till it remains half and mix the following herbs in it.
Juice of 10 to 15 fresh leaves of Tulasi, (Basil),
5 ml of fresh ginger root juice,
half spoon powder of cloves,
half spoon powder of cinnamon bark,
half spoon powder of peppermint leaves,
half spoon powder of cardamom,
half spoon of turmeric powder,
half spoon of rock salt
Mix all these properly, add one spoon of honey when the tea is lukewarm and have it twice or thrice a day.

These all-around wonder spices are said to help detoxify the liver, fight allergies, stimulate digestion, and boost immunity. All these drugs have anti viral, cleansing and antioxidant properties. It helps the free flow of oxygen to the brain, helps enhance digestion and circulation and stimulates the appetite. They are excellent for balancing Vaata and Kapha, which are the prominent Dosha in Swine influenza or any other respiratory track infections.

Recommendations to prevent spread of the virus among humans include using standard infection control against influenza. This includes frequent washing of hands with soap and water or with alcohol-based hand sanitizers, especially after being out in public.[12]

Chance of transmission is also reduced by disinfecting household surfaces, which can be done effectively with a diluted chlorine bleach solution.[13]

Experts agree that hand-washing can help prevent viral infections, including ordinary influenza and the swine flu virus.

Influenza can spread in coughs or sneezes, but an increasing body of evidence shows small droplets containing the virus can linger on tabletops, telephones and other surfaces and be transferred via the fingers to the mouth, nose or eyes.

Alcohol-based gel or foam hand sanitizers work well to destroy viruses and bacteria.

The Puja being done in Hindus has the similar disinfecting properties. Studies have shown that lightning the lamp with cow’s Ghee has anti-viral property. The Dhupana being done with the help of natural sticks (Agarbattis) and Guggulu has very effective disinfectant properties.

Anyone with flu-like symptoms such as a sudden fever, cough or muscle aches should stay away from work or public transportation and should contact a doctor for advice.

Social distancing is another tactic. It means staying away from other people who might be infected and can include avoiding large gatherings, spreading out a little at work, or perhaps staying home and lying low if an infection is spreading in a community.

Public health and other responsible authorities have action plans which may request or require social distancing actions depending on the severity of the outbreak.
According to Ayurveda daily and dietary habits plays a major role in any disease. If your digestive fire is normal, your immunity will remain powerful and thus no infection can overrule you. So one should follow the ideal dietary regimen during seasons like monsoon and winter when the maximum chances are there for viral infections.

One should avoid sleeping during the day hours.
One should avoid traveling or being outdoors during the early hours of the day when there is dew and cold winds blow.
Oil massage with oil possessing warm quality is beneficial.
Clean and dry clothes should be worn.
Individuals should avoid direct and strong cold winds.
Avoid skipping meals.
Try to move around the place of work instead of sitting in one place or do some kind of physical work. This will help you to refresh yourself, especially when you feel dull & lethargic.
Try to avoid over exertion.
Not delay or skip your meals, you should take meals at regular timings & in fixed quantities.
Avoid damp, humid and cold weather, and environment.
Avoid use of air conditioners.
Drink a glass of water with two teaspoons of honey every day early in the morning.
Always have fresh meals, prepared using minimum quantity of oil, or prepared with the help of Cow’s ghee.
Dry chatni & dry vegetables are recommended.
Sprinkle your salads with dry ginger powder, and black pepper powder.
Chewing of a bite of ginger before meals with little bit of salt is helpful to improve.
Always choose warm food over cold food.
Pickles made of ‘Raw haldi’ are recommended.
Daily use of ‘Honey’ helps to control the excessive kapha.
Avoid regular use of sweets, butter, cheese, paneer etc.
Avoid dairy products especially curd and butter.
Avoid refrigerated, re-warmed, day old stale food, etc.
Avoid foods containing preservatives, artificial flavors, colors etc. Sauces, vinegar, pickles, chatani etc.
Avoid non-vegetarian food.
Avoid excessive use of Cheese, paneer, yogurt etc.
Ayurveda Treatment for Viral infections in Cold Seasons like Monsoon and Winter

If a person becomes sick with swine flu, antiviral drugs can make the illness milder and make the patient feel better faster. They may also prevent serious flu complications. For treatment, antiviral drugs work best if started soon after getting sick (within 2 days of symptoms).

Beside anti-virals, supportive care at home or in hospital, focuses on controlling fevers, relieving pain and maintaining fluid balance, as well as identifying and treating any secondary infections or other medical problems.

The virus isolates in the 2009 outbreak have been found resistant to amantadine and rimantadine.[14] In the U.S., on April 27, 2009, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued Emergency Use Authorizations to make available Relenza and Tamiflu antiviral drugs to treat the swine influenza virus in cases for which they are currently unapproved.

In such condition following Ayurveda drugs may be started as soon as possible. Few of these drugs have been found very effective in current research works and are being practiced in India since thousands of years for combating various seasonal and viral infections.

1. Sitopaladi Churna
2. Naradiya Laximivilas Ras
3. Classical Chyavanprash
4. Haridra Khanda
5. Talisadi Churna
6. Khadiradi Gutika
7. Lavangadi Gutika
8. Malla Sindura
9. Samirpannaga Rasa
10. Chandramrita Rasa
11. 64 Prahari Pippali
12. Suvarna Vasanta Malini Rasa
13. Shwasa Kuthara Rasa

It is advisable to remain under medical supervision of a qualified and experienced Vaidya. We have seen miraculous results of above said drugs in various viral infections in thousands of patients in our clinical experience.

Haleem – A Royal Regular dish of Hyderabad

Haleem (Persian: حلیم) is a thick Persian, Pakistani and North Indian high calorie dish. In Anatolia, Iran, the Caucasus region and northern Iraq, types of haleem are Keshkek and Harisa. Although the dish varies from region to region, it always includes wheat, lentils and meat. Haleem, and a variation called Khichra is very popular in Pakistan and India.

Haleem is made of wheat, meat (usually beef or mutton, but sometimes chicken or minced meat), lentils and spices. This dish is slow cooked for seven to eight hours which results in a pastelike consistency, with the taste of spices and meat blending with wheat.

Haleem is sold as snack food in Bazaars all year around. It is also a special dish prepared throughout the world during Ramadan and Moharram months of Muslim Hijri calendar, particularly amongst Pakistani and Indian Muslims. In India, Haleem prepared in Hyderabad, during the Ramadan month, is very famous and is distributed all over the country.

In Bangladesh, Haleem has attained a significant level of popularity in the urban centres. It is now a very popular food item in capital Dhaka during Ramadan. The preparation of haleem is complicated.

Hyderabadi Haleem The city of Hyderabad is known for its delectable haleem, which is available only during Ramadan. It is a mainstay during the Holy month of Ramadan. This traditional wheat porridge has its roots in Iran (Persia).

Even today mitthi (sweet) and khari (salted) haleem variants are served for breakfast in the homes of people living in the Barkas area of Hyderabad.

The salted variety is popular during the month of Moharram and Ramadan. The high-calorie haleem is the perfect way to break the Ramadan fast. The ingredients are wheat, lentils, lamb, spices and ghee and sprinkled with lemon juice and/or spicy masala to adjust flavor to the taste of the eater.

A derivative of haleem, dry fruits and vegetables are used, is also prepared during Ramadan.

Haleem is also a traditional starter at muslim weddings in Hyderabad, and also at muslim functions or parties.

The ingredients include mutton, cracked wheat, lentils, ginger & garlic paste, turmeric and spices. It is served hot topped with ghee based gravy and lime pieces, coriander and fried onions as garnish.

The chicken variety of haleem is less popular, but is cheaper than the beef/lamb version. There is also a fish variant now.

A vegetarian derivative of haleem, in which dry fruits and vegetables are substituted for the meat, is also prepared during Ramzan, and can be found at some eateries in Hyderabad.

It is slow cooked for at least 10 hours in the bhatti (a cauldron covered with brick & mud kiln) and two men, usually, hit with large wooden sticks all through out the preparation, until it gets to a sticky-smooth consistency, similar to mashed mince.

The cooking of haleem in Hyderabad is mastered to an art form.

Even today meethi (sweet) and khari (salted) haleem variants are served for breakfast in the homes of the Arabs living in the Barkas area of Hyderabad. The salted variety is popularly seen during the month of Moharram and Ramzan. The high-calorie haleem is the perfect way to break the Ramzan fast.

This traditional wheat porridge has its roots in Arabia, similar to harees. But this derivative of haleem is different from the rest, with a nice smooth paste of all ingredients well mixed.

In Hyderabad, haleem is the traditional starter at Muslim weddings, and is also commonly eaten at celebrations and other special occasions.

Criminals Make 600mn Telephone Calls from Behind Bars

Did you know that the 2.2 million incarcerated criminals behind bars in our nation’s jails have acces to inmate telephones? Did you know that they make several billions telephone call attempts and complete about 600 millions calls every year?

This industry is a growing $2.5 billion a year business with about 50% of the money kicked back to the institutions as commissions. Sure it’s expensive for the inmate’s friends and families to receive the collect calls or pay for the prepaid calls, but they do it so they can talk to their loved ones.

The inmates like it because they can continue their criminal activities from behind bars. Did you know that almost 70% of the criminals return to jail (recidivism) because they get caught committing new crimes or violating their parole conditions? That should tell you that when behind bars, they get their PHD on how to improve their criminal abilities. This is not make believe but a repeat of documented evidence.

And the vast majority of citizens don’t know this practice and industry exists until they get a crank call from an inmate who tells them some cock and bull story about illegal incarceration and having problem dialing a number, and could the unsuspecting citizen help them complete the call to their loved one. This happens thousands of times a day. Inmates have nothing to do but try to bend and break the rules of the prison. And they work at it 24 hours a day.

Sure there are restrictive features that help prevent or stop some of the pranks inmates attempt, but because prisons officials are in short supply, extremely low paid with many being bribed or blackmailed by the wealthy inmates, they pay little attention to managing the inmate telephone system. But the wardens and sheriffs like to high commissions they receive, and freely admit that there are crimes committed by the inmates. They don’t necessarily try to improve the management because they are always under staffed and over budget.

Therefore, this nation suffers from a little known dichotomy called “greed marketing” which because of “free found money” coming into these institutions, authorities turn a blind eye to the problem. Who suffers? Joe and Jane citizen, that’s who.

If we truly punished criminals rather than trying to rehabilitate them, (remember 70% return to jail anyway), we would have a lot less crime in this country?
The public should contact their local, state and federal representatives and ask them if they know of this problem and insist that something be done to drastically reduce or eliminate this oversight.

Turmeric Can Prevent Diabetes-induced Blindness

By K.S. Jayaraman

Indian scientists have found yet another reason why turmeric should be part of our daily diet.

Lab experiments in the past have shown that curcumin – the yellowish component of the Indian curry spice turmeric – is able to fight skin, breast and other tumor cells. It is also known to lower the chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease and hemorrhagic stroke.

Now a team at the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (MDRF) in Chennai reports that curcumin also blocks a key biological pathway needed for development of diabetic retinopathy, an eye complication among diabetics that leads to blindness if untreated.

“This is the first scientifically documented evidence of the molecular action of curcumin against diabetic retinopathy,” the researchers claim in a report published in a recent issue of Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science.

The study was prompted by an interesting observation made by the MDRF team while analyzing the data from an epidemiology study it had completed in urban Chennai earlier.

The study showed that the prevalence of diabetic retinopathy in Indians is lower than that reported among Europeans suggesting there could be something in the diet that gave protection to Indians. What was that something?

“We suspected it was turmeric,” says Mohan Rema, chief ophthalmologist and vice-president at MDRF. The hunch turned out to be correct.

In diabetic retinopathy, abnormal new blood vessels grow in the retina – the light sensitive layer lining the back of the eye – due to a process called “angiogenesis”. These new vessels are thin and fragile and tend to bleed resulting in sudden and total loss of vision.

Angiogenesis that involves the growth of new blood vessels from pre-existing vessels is a normal process as in wound healing. But this is also a key step that helps tumors to grow. Angiogenesis inhibitors (or anti-antigenic drugs) prevent the formation of new blood vessels so that the tumor cannot grow.

“Our guess was that curcumin which shows anti-angiogenic effects against various cancers may also inhibit the growth of new blood vessels in the retina and thereby prevent diabetic retinopathy,” said Muthuswamy Balasubramanyam, cell biologist and assistant director of MDRF who is one of the authors of the paper describing the study. “Our laboratory experiments have confirmed this.”

Diabetic retinopathy results when the so called “endothelial cells” that line the inside of retinal blood vessels proliferate and migrate away from the parent vessels to form a network of new fragile micro capillaries which bleed.

“We have demonstrated that curcumin inhibits the migration of cells thereby blocking a key step that leads to retinopathy,” Balasubramanyam said. Other authors of this work include research scholars Zaheer Sameermahmood and Thangavel Saravanan.

Turmeric which is a major ingredient of curry has been consumed for thousands of years and has been used in traditional Indian, Chinese, and Western herbal medicine.

While much of the world literature dealt with the anti-cancer actions of curcumin, the work at MDRF for the first time emphasizes its use against diabetic retinopathy, the scientists said.

Headed by Viswanathan Mohan, a renowned diabetologist, MDRF is exclusively devoted to research on diabetes and its vascular complication.

Kashmir: The Political Circus

By M H Ahssan

Caught between warring politicians who are hell bent upon pulling down each other in the race for power, the people in Jammu and Kashmir have been caught in an unending political circus. Unhappy to stay out of power even sensible, experienced and “educated” leaders are raising charges which they well know cannot be proved even in a kangaroo court, yet their persistence with the ridiculous will baffle many. The common man in Kashmir perhaps sees this political theatre as a welcome relief from the bandhs, strikes and cross fire that he was used to earlier. How long he will have patience remains to be seen, but the Abdullahs, Begs and Sayyeds in the Valley need to search for issues which are closer to the people’s welfare than charging each other and then retracting these at the drop of a hat.

The order-disorder paradox was thus once again evident in Jammu and Kashmir, with political stability threatened over allegations of involvement of the Chief Minister in an infamous sex scam of 2006, continuous bandhs and strikes over killings alleged at the hands of security forces and militant activities. The main political crisis in Kashmir seems to have blown over at least for now, with the Governor rejecting the resignation of the Chief Minister Mr. Omar Abdullah.

Given the highly complex political contest involved, it was evident that aim of the Opposition to embarrass the National Conference-Congress led government has not succeeded. The rather emotional outburst by Mr. Abdullah after he was accused of being involved in the sex scandal worked in his favor and the PDP the main opposition has been placed on the back foot. But such incidents are likely to occur in the days ahead for the extremely murky politics in Kashmir has been witnessing such charges and allegations from time to time.

The first fortnight of the month saw a series of bandhs and protests with the cycle finally broken with revelations that the death of a youth in Srinagar was caused by his own friends. The body of Asrar Ahmed Dar, 20, a student who was reported missing from uptown Maisuma area, was found in Rainawari, leading to a follow up of the protests but this came to be attributed to rivalry. Other alleged murders also came to be attributed to crime rather than atrocities or action by the security forces.

The Muzaffar Jan Commission appointed to probe the Shopian murders found four personnel of the Jammu and Kashmir police guilty which to an extent assuaged the local sentiment but separatists continued to harp on the issue over the month. There are also concerns that this may fester into serializing such incidents which has been happening in the past when law and order issues have been converted into attacks on security forces particularly when involving women or young men,. The larger implication of resentment in the youth also needs to be addressed so that in the long term this does not snow ball into deep rooted affliction in the people.

It is however clear that all these incidents are not spontaneous and have been largely engineered with allegations that most of the bandhs have been monetarily sponsored. Thus there is no grass roots support for such activities. The government would also have to ultimately seek a way out by exposing the nexus thereby gaining credibility as the cycle of bandhs related to the killings was exposed only when it was seen that the Srinagar boy killed allegedly by the security forces later turned out to be a victim of rivalry with friends. The Chief Minister is getting a hang on the situation as he has issued instructions that, “No law and order situation or protests should be dealt without the presence of a magistrate.” At the political level the role of grass roots workers is important. The authorities will also do well to shift the debate to larger issues as development and tourism.

The central design of the separatists and the terrorist groups at present appears to be to get the CRPF troops out of the Valley. However after supporting this demand for some time, Mr Abdullah the Chief Minister recognized that this was not practical. “We have over 70 battalions of the CRPF and the state police’s strength is not even one-third of it. Five battalions of the state police which includes India Reserve Police are undergoing training. So any rash decision in this aspect can be detrimental to state’s security,” he said. “A lot is required to be done in terms of augmenting the numbers of J&K police, upgrading their equipment and improving their levels of training,” he added.

Omar faces the challenge as a young chief minister in many spheres, so far the young man has not distinguished himself in the high office, he has very less time to prove his credibility, for the political wolves in Kashmir are waiting to pounce on his next gaffe.

Guiding AIDS Victims on How to Face Death

By Byomakesh Biswal

Ajay Patra is a unique guru. He teaches AIDS victims how to face death.

Patra, 39, plunged into the exercise after he was diagnosed with AIDS and told that he had an uncertain future.

The pain of impending death propelled him to look at life afresh, leading to the birth of a network of men and women in Orissa who help fellow HIV positive and AIDS patients to prepare for their final years.

“Only an affected person can understand another affected person better. Approaching a person with AIDS is easier than approaching a doctor or NGO volunteer. They know the same fate awaits us,” said Patra, head of the Kalinga Network of Positive People.

An engineering graduate, Patra contracted the disease through infected syringe because he was a drug addict in his student days in Chennai. When he learnt he was HIV positive in 2002, he lost hope.

He then read about a Kolkata hospital that provides one year free treatment. After returning from Kolkata, he decided to help other affected people overcome the trauma.

“I know I will have to live with this disease. I decided to help others,” said Patra, who says his family members help him financially now that he does not have a job.

He prompted other victims to go to Kolkata. When some said they did not have money to travel, he arranged monetary help. As word spread, many more people flocked to him.

“Disclosing one’s status is a Herculean task, but only after doing that can one go for treatment,” Patra said. “When people came to know that I am HIV positive and helping affected people, my acceptability as a friend increased. Soon many came forward disclosing they had AIDS.”

Thus was born a network of similar thinking people guiding AIDS victims how to spend their final months and years.

Initially he tied up with voluntary agencies but felt they were driven more by monetary interests. Later he began the Kalinga Network, which now boasts of about 1,000 HIV positive members.

Patra is not alone.

Bhaskar Behera, Dillip Rao and Amarendra Behera head different groups in different Orissa districts. The Beheras command 600 supporters each.

Rao, who is active in Ganjam district, the worst hit in Orissa, raises awareness among the vulnerable people.

“In Ganjam there is a substantial number of migrant people. They often contract the disease through sexual contacts with affected people outside the state and carry the disease back home,” he said.

“Apart from helping in the treatment of those who have been affected, we focus on raising awareness among the migrants,” said Rao, who heads the Ganjam Network of Positive People.

The various networks also provide asylum for HIV women who get ostracized once it becomes known that they suffer from AIDS.

“I lost my husband to AIDS. I was blamed for his death. I was shunted out of the house. I left with my kid and now help other infected people,” said Prabhasini Pradhan, a coordinator with Kalinga Network of Positive People.

The networks run by Patra and others are proving to be very effective.

Patra said: “Many international agencies are trying to woo us. But we are not here to earn money. What will we do with money when our days are numbered?

“We are here to help others so that they can face life valiantly without going through the trauma we underwent,” he said.

India is home to 2.5 million HIV positive people including over 70,000 children below the age of 15 years. Though Orissa is not one of the high risk states, Ganjam is one of the high risk districts in the country.

Rakhi: The Thread of Love & Bondage

By M H Ahssan

In India, festivals are the celebration of togetherness the celebrations of being one of the family. Raksha Bandhan is one such festival that is all about affection, fraternity and sublime sentiments. It is also known as Raksha Bandhan which means a ‘bond of protection. This is an occasion to flourish love, care, affection and sacred feeling of brotherhood.

Not a single festival in India is complete without the typical Indian festivities, the gatherings, celebrations, exchange of sweets and gifts, lots of noise, singing and dancing. Raksha Bandhan is a regional celebration to celebrate the sacred relation between brothers and sisters. Primarily, this festival belongs to north and western region of India but soon the world has started celebrating this festival with the same verse and spirit. Rakhi has become an integral part of those customs.

An insight of Rakhi Rituals
On the day of Rakhi, sisters prepares the pooja thali with diya, roli, chawal, rakhi thread and sweets. The ritual begins with a prayer in front of God, then the sister ties Rakhi to her brother and wishes for his happiness and well-being. In turn, the brother acknowledge the love with a promise to stand by his sister through all the good and bad times.

Sisters tie Rakhi on the wrist of their brothers amid chanting of mantras, put roli and rice on his forehead and pray for his well-being. She bestows him with gifts and blessings. In turn, brothers also wish her a good life and pledges to take care of her. He gives her a return gift. The gift symbolizes the physical acceptance of her love, reminder of their togetherness and his pledge. The legends and the reference in history repeated, the significance of the festival is emphasized.

Unconditional Bond of Love
Raksha bandhan has been celebrated in the same way with the same traditions for many years. Only the means have changed with the changing lifestyle to make the celebration more elaborate and lively. This day has an inherent power that pulls the siblings together. The increasing distances evoke the desire to be together even more. All brothers and sisters try to reach out to each other on this auspicious day. The joyous meeting, the rare family get-together, that erstwhile feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood calls for a massive celebration.

For everyone, it is an opportunity to reunion and celebrate. People also share tasty dishes, wonderful sweets and exchange gifts. It is a time to share their past experiences also. For those who are not able to meet each other, rakhi cards and e-rakhis and rakhis through mails perform the part of communicating the rakhi messages. Hand made rakhis and self-made rakhi cards are just representation of the personal feelings of the siblings.

The Meaning of Raksha Bandhan
Relationships are the essence of celebration and it holds true for any Indian festival. Each festival brings the family together which calls for a total festive environment. Raksha Bandhan is a celebration of one such relation – the relation of a brother and a sister. The relation is no where so celebrated as in India. Raksha Bandhan is a festival which celebrates the bond of affection between brothers and sisters. It is a day when the siblings pray for each others’ well being and wish for each others’ happiness and goodwill.

The name ‘Raksha Bandhan’ suggests ‘a bond of protection’. On this auspicious day, brothers make a promise to their sisters to protect them from all harms and troubles and the sisters pray to God to protect their brother from all evil. The festival falls on the Shravan Purnima which comes generally in the month of August. Sisters tie the silk thread called Rakhi on their brother’s wrist and pray for their well being and brothers promise to take care of their sisters.

The Significance
Raksha Bandhan is now considered as a day to celebrate the sacred relation of a brother and a sister. Yet there have been examples in history where in rakhi has just been a raksha or protection. It could be tied by wife, a daughter or mother. The Rishis tied rakhi to the people who came seeking their blessings. The sages tied the sacred thread to themselves to safe guard them from the evil. It is by all means the ‘Papa Todak, Punya Pradayak Parva’ or the day that bestows boons and end all sins as it is mentioned in the scriptures.

Previously, Rakhi festival encompasses the warmth shared between the siblings but now it goes way beyond it. Some people tie Rakhi to neighbours and close friends signifying a peaceful co-existence of every individual. Rakhi Utsav was first popularized by Rabindranath Tagore to promote the feeling of unity and a commitment to all members of society to protect each other and encourage a harmonious Social life.

In today’s scenario, the day has a different perspective. The occasion involves a pledge of life-time practice of moral, cultural and spiritual values. The values and the sentiments attached to the rituals of this festival are worth inculcating by the whole human race, the sentiments of harmony and peaceful coexistence. The festival of Raksha Bandhan assumes all forms of Raksha or protection, of righteousness and destroyer of all sin. The ritual of Rakhi tying has become so important that come what may, brothers and sisters try to visit each other place on this particular day tin order to bring back the oneness of the family, binding the family together in an emotional bond of love.

Importance of Raksha Bandhan
Around mid-August, Hindus all over the world celebrate Raksha bandhan. “Raksha” means protection, and “bandhan” means bound or binding.

In North India, the occasion is popularly called Rakhi, Raksha Bandhan or Rakshaa Bandhan- the tying of an amulet.

In ancient times a woman tied a ‘rakshaa’ on her husband’s wrist to protect him from evil. Gradually this changed; she tied a ‘rakshaa’ on her brother’s right wrist, to protect him from evil influence and those factors which may taint his character, and to strengthen the bond of sibling love between them. On the occasion of Rakshaa Bandhan she visits her brother’s home and performs his ‘pujan’ by applying kumkum and rice grains on his forehead. In return the brother gives her a gift and vows to protect her too. The ‘rakhadi’ for rakshaa bandhan itself ranges from a coloured cotton string to exquisitely decorated balls of various sizes and materials such as fluffy cotton, ‘zari’ paper, tinsel, beads and so on.

On Rakshaa Bandhan a second imortance relates to ‘Baleva’ and our devotion to the Lord. Just as Bali Raja offered devotion to Lord Narayan by sacrificing his kingdom and himself, devotees should endeavor to emulate him. That is the true spirit of Baleva.

Rakshaa bandhan day is important for the priests too, as they tie rakhis on their patrons wrist and in return receive offerings from them. In some parts of the country it is customary to draw figures on the walls of their home and worship them with offerings of vermilion and kheer. The imprints of palms are also put on either side of the entrance and rakhis are stuck on them as part of rakshaa bandhan rituals.

Some parts of India also reserve Rakshaa Bandhan day importance for the sacred thread changing ceremony when the young brahmin boys discard the old one and don a new one ritualistically. However, on rakshaa bandhan it is the emotions which are important. The rakshaa bandhan ceremony performed is the symbolic everlasting bond between brothers and sisters that reinforces ties between them even across continents, and it is the one which has the most importance on this auspicious day.

Raksha Bandhan in History
The traditional Hindu festival ‘Raksha Bandhan’ (knot of protection) was came into origin about 6000 years back when Aryans created first civilization – The Indus Valley Civilization. With many languages and cultures, the traditional method to Rakhi festival celebration differs from place to place across India. Following are some historical evidences of Raksha Bandhan celebration from the Indian history.

Rani Karnawati and Emperor Humayun
The story of Rani Karnavati and Emperor Humayun is the most significant evidence in the history. During the medieval era, Rajputs were fighting Muslim invasions. Rakhi at that time meant a spiritual binding and protection of sisters was foremost. When Rani Karnawati the widowed queen of the king of Chittor realised that she could in no way defend the invasion of the Sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shah, she sent a rakhi to Emperor Humayun. The Emperor touched by the gesture started off with his troops without wasting any time.

Alexander The Great and King Puru
The oldest reference to the festival of rakhi goes back to 300 B.C. at the time when Alexander invaded India. It is said that the great conqueror, King Alexander of Macedonia was shaken by the fury of the Indian king Puru in his first attempt. Upset by this, Alexander’s wife, who had heard of the Rakhi festival, approached King Puru. King Puru accepted her as his sister and when the opportunity came during the war, he refrained from Alexander.

Lord Krishna and Draupathi
In order to protect the good people, Lord Krishna killed the evil King Shishupal. Krishna was hurt during the war and left with bleeding finger. Seeing this, Draupathi had torn a strip of cloth from her sari and tied around his wrist to stop the bleeding. Lord Krishna, realizing her affections and concern about him, declared himself bounded by her sisterly love. He promised her to repay this debt whenever she need in future. Many years later, when the pandavas lost Draupathi in the game of dice and Kauravas were removing her saari, Krishna helped her divinely elongating the saari so that they could not remove it.

King Bali and Goddess Lakshmi
The demon king Mahabali was a great devotee of lord Vishnu. Because of his immense devotion, Vishnu has taken the task of protecting bali’s Kingdom leaving his normal place in Vikundam. Goddess lakshmi – the wife of lord Vishnu – has became sad because of this as she wanted lord Vishnu along with her. So she went to Bali and discussed as a Brahmin woman and taken refuge in his palace. On Shravana purnima, she tied Rakhi on King Bali’s wrist. Goddess Lakshmi revealed who she is and why she is there.

The king was touched by Her and Lord Vishnu’s good will and affection towards him and his family, Bali requested Lord Vishnu to accompany her to vaikuntam. Due to this festival is also called Baleva as Bali Raja’s devotion to the Lord vishnu. It is said that since that day it has become a tradition to invite sisters on sravan pournima to tie sacred thread of Rakhi or Raksha bandan.

The Legends of Rakhi

Origin
The Shravana or the monsoon month carries all hues and shades of nature and emotions. Religiously speaking Shravan is a pious month and full moon of this all-important month is considered to be a very holy day. It is celebrated in different ways for different reasons almost throughout the country.

For the siblings it is the eternal tie of love, for Brahmins the day to take the pledge of Brahmanik rites and for those who depend sea and monsoon, it is the beginning of the new season.

Indian festivals are based on the weather changes and their significance in the lives of people but they do have a story to support the celebrations. The rich Indian Mythology provides a religious reason to celebrate the day in a specific way. Many epics are related to the day and the origin of Raksha Bandhan. The festival finds a mention in most of the epics and its origin can be traced back to the mythological Pouranik times.

The legend in the Bhavishya Puran
The legend refers to a war between the Gods and the Demons. The demon King Brutra was advancing and the Gods lead by lord Indra, were on verge of defeat. The king of Gods, Indra approached Guru Brihaspati to find a solution to the situation. Brihaspati asked Indra to tie a sacred thread on his wrist, powered by the sacred mantras on the Shravan Purnima. Lord Indra’s Queen Sachi also called Indrani, empowered the thread and tied it on to his hand on the decided day. The power of the sacred thread called Raksha helped the Gods to victory.

The tradition of thread tying still continues. It is a gesture of goodwill.

The legend of King Bali and Goddess Laxmi
According to another legend Demon King Bali was a great devotee of Lord Vishnu. Lord Vishnu had taken up the task to guard his kingdom leaving his own abode in Vaikunth. Goddess Laxmi wished to be with her lord back in her abode. She went to Bali disguised as a Brahmin woman to seek refuge till her husband came back.

During the Shravan Purnima celebrations, Laxmiji tied the sacred thread to the King. Upon being asked she revealed who she was and why she was there. The king was touched by her goodwill for his family and her purpose and requested the Lord to accompany her. He sacrificed all he had for the Lord and his devoted wife.

Thus the festival is also called Baleva that is Bali Raja’s devotion to the Lord.It is said that since then it has been a tradition to invite sisters in Shravan Purnima for the thread tying ceremony or the Raksha Bandhan

Yama and the Yamuna
It is said that the Raksha Bandhan was a ritual followed by Lord Yama (the Lord of Death) and his sister Yamuna. Yamuna tied rakhi to Yama and bestowed immortality. Yama was so moved by the serenity of the occasion that he declared thar whoever gets a rakhi tied from his sister and promised her protection will become immortal.

In the Epics
Raksha Bandhan finds a mention in Mahabharata when Lord Krishna advised Yudhishthir to perform the ceremony to protect himself and the army from the dangers of the war. It is said that Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas tied rakhi to her grandson Abhimanyu and Draupadi to lord Krishna.

Traditions & Customs
Raksha Bandhan is an occasion to celebrate the sacred bond of love and affection between siblings with lots of verve. Also known as Raksha Bandhan across the world, this festival is primarily a north Indian festival that is celebrated all brothers and sisters to express their deep emotions, love and affection.

On the day of Rakhi festival, the sister ties Rakhi on the wrist of her brother and both make prayer to God for the well being of each other. Sisters perform ‘aarti’ and put tilak on the forehead of her brother. In return, brothers make promise to take care of his sister under all circumstances. Usually, brothers gift something to the sister to mark the occasion. The mirth that surrounds the festival is unsurpassed. Amidst the merriment the rituals are also followed with great devotion.

Preparation of Rakhi Festival
Generally, the fancy Rakhis and delicious sweets are prepared long before the Shravana Purnima. According to the Indian tradition, the family members get ready for the rituals early in the morning. They take a bath to purify mind and body before starting any preparations. Sisters prepare the puja thali which consists of roli, tilak, Rakhi threads, rice grains, aggarbattis (incense sticks), diyas and sweets. After offering the rituals to the deities of the family, the sister perform aarti of their brothers and ties Rakhi on their wrist. Then, they put kumkum powder on the forehead of their brother and offer sweets. All these rituals take place amid the chanting of the following mantras :

“Suraj shakhan chhodian, Mooli chhodia beej
Behen ne rakhi bandhi / Bhai tu chir jug jee”,

Which means “The sun radiates its sunlight, the radish spreads its seeds,
I tie the rakhi to you O brother and wish that may you live long.”

After her prayer for a long life for her brother, she says that she is tie the ever-protective Raksha to her brother’s wrist and chants:

“Yena baddho Balee raajaa daanavendro mahaabalah
tena twaam anubadhnaami rakshe maa chala maa chala”

This means,” I tie you the rakhi that was tied to king Bali, the king of Demons,
O Rakhi I pray that you never falter in protecting your devotee.

In return, brothers pampers and blesses the sisters and promises to protect her from all the evils of this world. He also present a token of his love and affection as a Rakhi gift. The rituals performed on Raksha Bandhan may differ from place to place but they carry the same aura throughout the globe.

Editorial : The Seeds Of Wrath

By NEWSCOP

Our hysteria for ready answers has become a dangerous trap. A bomb blast conspirator’s explosive confession poses a challenge to us all.

In the clever calculations men make about security and State, they underestimate the power of human despair. But despair can be a deadly weapon. When you lose faith that a system will protect and play fair by you, it breeds fatal recklessness. It makes you abdicate from the rules that cement human relations. Despair can turn you from citizen to perpetrator. From the hunted to the hunter.

From 2006 to 2008, there was an escalating climate of terror in the country. With terrifying regularity, bomb blasts went off in Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad. And finally, most brazenly, in Mumbai. But Mumbai 26/11 was different: here the killers outed themselves: like a giant game show gone horribly wrong, groups of young men in clear view of millions went about with impunity shooting people down. The enemy was visible. Tangible. They could be dealt with. With the other blasts, there was no one to pin the crime on. And as bombs kept exploding and people kept dying, fuelled by a media hungry for immediate answers and genuine citizens’ distress, a paranoia gripped the country.

Hundreds of young Muslims were arrested. And within a few days — often within a few hours — police and agencies, who had had insufficient knowledge to preempt the blasts, began to hold press conferences on how they had cracked the case. A triumphant line of deadly “masterminds” were trotted out: Safdar Nagori, Maulana Haleem, Mufti Abu Bashar, Atif Ameen. Under pressure to perform, the police hid behind short attention spans and a confusing cocktail of Islamic proper nouns. They knew that neither the media (rushing off to its latest story) nor ordinary citizens were interested in the details. No one wanted veracity. Everyone only wanted the illusion of security and ‘action taken’. The few human rights groups and media outfits who raised flags about false arrests and gaps in police logic were scorned as ‘anti-national’. Or doctrinaire liberals.

The larger point was missed. It is no one’s case that those who plant bombs should go unpunished. Those of us raising flags had only two simple arguments to make. One, take the long route, catch the genuine culprits, remain constitutional: that is the only way to be really secure. Two: do not make false arrests and breed fresh despair, triggering new cycles of hate and revenge. If you corrupt a system entirely, people will abdicate from it. And black despair can be a deadly weapon.

This week, HNN cover story braids all these themes together and teases out their giant implications. The story is about a young man, Muslim, no more than 22, caught in a terrible dilemma. He is a star witness in the Gujarat police’s case. Based on his statement, dozens of men are locked in jail. Except, this young man’s statement is a lie. He was coerced by the police into becoming their witness in exchange for his own freedom. He has remained silent for a year, sick with himself, but free. Tracked to his house by HNN’s Editor in Chief M H Ahssan, he breaks down. Ahssan is accompanied by a young woman. The woman’s husband — an innocent man — is in jail because of this witness. Confronted by her and the child, rocked by remorse and a sudden desire for atonement — in an almost cinematic moment — the man tells his real story.

One could dismiss his account as another false turnaround, except in telling the story — like some protagonist in a classic Greek play — the young man implicates himself. He is no ordinary witness. He is self-confessedly a member of the July 2008 bomb blast conspiracy. Conscience-struck, he stopped short of planting the bombs when he realized the targets would not be Hindu zealots like the RSS and VHP but ordinary bystanders. But he knows and names who his real co-conspirators were. To free the innocent men in jail, he must now bear the cross himself. It is not enough that he shrank back from the abyss and backed out of the conspiracy. As he says to Rana, by speaking out, he is consciously setting himself up for reprisal from the police.

So how is the police and State going to react to this man’s confession?

At a specific level, his story blows big holes in the police’s case in Gujarat, exposing a damning lie and injustice. At a profounder level, it is a parable for what is happening beneath the skin of our democracy in countless other places. It raises questions about media, prejudice, policing and the due process of law. Most of all, it raises the question: in a just democracy, how should we deal with those who assault us?

Of the many strands in this story, there is first the one about nailing true culpability. It is obvious from this witness’ account that all the wrong men are in jail and the police know it. Take Abu Bashar, for example. The media and police jointly touted him as one of their deadly ‘masterminds’. But the witness says he is far from that. The Abu Bashar he paints is a gentle and religious man, so opposed to violence, the mentors of the conspiracy specifically advised the witness and his friends to keep him in the dark. The police know this, yet Bashar continues to languish in jail.

There are other troubling details. The witness speaks of torture and the police’s double-crossing tactics to extract false statements. Set aside polite questions about human rights. What about the holy grail: national security? According to the witness, the real conspirators — Subhan Qureishi, Alamzeb and Qayamuddin — are still on the run. What is one to make of this willful official charade? Lock innocent men in jail, let the guilty roam free. What is this society we are creating, where we are in such a hurry to get answers to difficult questions, we’d rather get false answers than none, even if it means innocent men must pay?

Another profound issue this story raises is one of causality. The witness cites all the big faultlines — Gujarat 2002, false arrests, tortures — as reasons why he and his friends were drawn into the conspiracy. And, indeed, it would be myopic to treat these bitter young men as merely hard criminals. Yet, the argument of causality is a tricky rope. Gujarat 2002 cannot justify bomb blasts of 2006 – 2008. By that logic, extremist Hindus would also be right in marshalling their own epic justifications: Hindu pilgrims burnt alive in a train, Kashmiri Pandits chased out of a valley, organised Christian conversions, a Hindu swami murdered in his ashram. Be they real or imagined wounds, causality can never be a justification for violence. But in a society overtaken by greater and greater hysteria, all causalities must be recognised and addressed. No military might can break the lethal chain of action and reaction. Redressal for grievances stands a better chance.

Finally, this is an intimation of our easy and extreme prejudices. Until a few months ago, whipped on by an unthinking media, India was being lured into demonising 250 million of its citizens. For many years, SIMI — a politically strident Islamic student organization — was a convenient scapegoat for the police. By a sleight of hand, the bad aura around SIMI was projected onto Indian Muslims at large. Last year, HNN published an exhaustive investigative story that proved many SIMI members or ex-members jailed by the police were actually innocent men, wielding nothing more dangerous than strong political views. At no point did HNN vouch for SIMI as an organisation, but by flagging individual miscarriages of justice it broke the easy consensus on SIMI. But by then, another pet poltergeist had been conjured by the police and media: the Indian Mujahideen. (At a press conference in Gujarat, with almost laughable cynicism, DG Police, PC Pande told waiting media, “If you remove S and I from SIMI, you have IM: Indian Mujahideen.” For him, that clinched the truth.)

Now, in an eerie corroboration of HNN earlier story, the witness strongly asserts that no SIMI members were involved in the conspiracy. In fact, their mentors – “outsiders” he calls them, “shadowy men, clean shaven who spoke English and smoked a lot” told him and his mates to stay away from SIMI members because they would scuttle the plan to plant the bombs. Who were these “outsiders” — calm, anonymous, out of frame — and why is the police not working overtime to track them down? How many veils of prejudice and illusion do we as Indians voluntarily live behind?

This man’s story is a challenge to us all. How is he to be dealt with? One route — the familiar one — would be for the police to kill him extra-judicially because he has exposed them. But here is a man, bewildered, wounded, tempted into violence. He was brought to the brink but had the courage to pull back. Now, he has the courage to undo another wrong and expose mighty forces at grave danger to himself. Clearly, like hundreds of others, he has both wronged and been wronged. How should a mature society react to such a conundrum?

Critical Expose – Chilling Confession

By M H Ahssan

The Gujarat Police took quick credit for arresting the masterminds behind the July 2008 blasts in Ahmedabad. HNN tracks the police’s star witness to find he has been tortured into falsely implicating the ‘masterminds’. An exclusive report.

He has a name, but lets just call him ‘Witness’. He had a life too — like yours and mine — till 26 July 2008, when serial blasts shook Ahmedabad. Between 6.45 and 7.55 that evening, 16 bombs exploded in various parts of the city, including in a hospital where the injured were being rushed to. As the death toll reached 56, Witness had only one thought – he could have been responsible for the bloodletting, the mayhem, the death of innocents.

He almost was. Witness was in on the plot. He knew bicycles were being bought. He knew low-intensity explosive devices were being assembled. He knew they would be concealed in tiffin boxes and the boxes placed in the bicycles. But Witness withdrew at the last minute — barely 24 hours before 6.45 in the evening — when he learnt that the target areas had changed. As the plot was being hatched in meetings Witness attended before July 26, he was given to believe that RSS and Bajrang Dal offices would be targeted. But the script changed. Witness withdrew when he realised that innocent people in crowded places would be slaughtered.

The Gujarat Police was quick to blame the blasts on the Indian Mujahideen (IM), the same group held responsible for the blasts in Jaipur on 13 May 2008. But when different states paraded different faces, all proclaiming their catches as the IM’s mastermind, HNN started an investigation that led it to Witness.

The testimony of Witness is important — and credible — for several reasons. First and foremost, because he indicts himself, openly admitting he was part of the plot till the last moment. This gives his words credence. His words gain even more credence because he has given more or less the same narrative to the Gujarat Police. The narrative changes at one crucial place – when he reels off the names of the men behind the Gujarat blasts. But wait. Witness has told HNN that he was physically tortured by the police into naming innocents, that he could not bear the physical and mental torture he was subjected to. They were not responsible for the serial bombings, he swears.

HNN special correspondent, landed up at his house in Juhapura, accompanied by the wife and daughter of an accused in the case. Witness’ sister opens the door. Her brother is not home, she says. As I speak to her, a male voice asks from inside, “Who’s there?” When she does not answer, a man comes to the door. He is around 22, dressed in kurta and jeans, just like any college student. The lady with me says, “He is the one.” Yes, this is the Gujarat police’s star witness. The police arrested people on the basis of Witness’ statements. The police said its claim that the Gujarat blasts was the work of the Indian Mujahideen, a reincarnation of the Student’s Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was proven by Witness’ statements. It is on the basis of Witness’ statement that the police have named the masterminds in the case – Mufti Abu Bashar and Sajid Mansuri.

At first, Witness is unwilling to talk. He is preparing for exams, he says. He sees the lady accompanying me and asks her what she is doing with me. I have smuggled myself in, wearing a head scarf, trying to pass off as one of them. He lifts up the lady’s child in his arms and allows us in, looking around to see if we have been spotted. After keeping in him detention for twelve days and beating the confession out of him, the police now keep an eye on their ‘approver’

Witness bursts into tears when I ask him questions. “Don’t make me narrate everything again. My family and I have gone through hell all because of me. It was all a big mistake,” he says between sobs.

His mother, an ailing lady in her late 50s enters. She wants to know if we too are from the police. “How many questions do you want to ask him? He has told you everything he knows. Now leave him alone!” she says. Witness ushers her out and bolts the door.

“I wouldn’t be talking had it not been for this girl,” he says, gesturing at the girl now sleeping snugly in her mother’s arms. “Her father is innocent”. They are all innocent. If what I say to you can do anything, then please get them freed. They are in jail for no fault of theirs.”

Witness was detained days after the blasts in Ahmedabad took place in July last year. He was part of the plot until he learnt the targets included hospitals and not those responsible for the 2002 Gujarat riots. Until he learnt that they were not going to kill the ‘Bajrangis’ or those who had admitted to having slit open the stomachs of pregnant women during the riots.

They (THE conspirators) had told us that they wanted to avenge the atrocities committed against Muslims but what they were doing would also kill Muslims,” says Witness. Although he was never told who the top bosses were, he carried out the orders of his fellow plotters.

Witness also reveals troubling truths – he denies ever being a part of SIMI. He denies the involvement of SIMI in the plot and says he knows the Indian Mujahideen only as a phrase seen in newspapers. Witness says he was tortured into implicating the men he met during Friday prayers. “The police forced me to name those they had arrested.” Our long conversation was occasionally interrupted by his mother’s knocks on the door. She was both scared and curious but Witness wanted to talk. He wanted to unburden himself and reveal everything; all in the hope that it would help free those innocent people languishing in jail.

The words came in a torrent and he spoke, initially without much prodding. “My friend Alamzeb Afridi [absconding, involved along with Witness in the blasts] introduced me to Yakub bhai [earlier detained, now a witness], Arif Kagzi, Yunus Mansuri and Sajid Mansuri [all accused in the July 2008 Ahmedabad blasts and all ex-SIMI members who spoke to HNN in Sabarmati jail]. They told me that they used to be SIMI members. I knew Alamzeb from college. We used to meet in the evenings for religious discourses. We would discuss the Quran and often attended various programs at Yaqub bhai’s place. These guys would only teach us about the hadees [the Prophet’s statements and actions] and would tell us about the life of the Prophet. I was told that after SIMI was banned, they would hold educational programmes to explain the true meaning of Islam to youngsters who were disillusioned. People like Abdul Subhan Qureishi [one of the masterminds of the plot, now absconding] and Safdar Nagori [General Secretary, SIMI] used to come there. I was told that Subhan worked with Wipro and that he had been absconding ever since his name came up connection with the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts. He said that he was not involved in the blasts. He said that the group hated the hardliners and wanted to work against the propaganda put out by the VHP and the RSS. This was in 2007.

In the meetings we were told how Muslims were being tortured in Afghanistan, America and Palestine. Subhan Qureishi used to tell us that these were the real people who were against Islam. Of all the people who attended, Abu Bashar Siddiqui was perhaps the most reserved of all. He had tremendous knowledge about the Quran and the hadees and used to speak about the true essence of Islam. Those meetings were not conspiracy sessions. In them, no one ever spoke about the plot. Subhan used to bring Abu Bashar Siddiqui for the religious gatherings and it was very clear that he did not discuss anything else with him.

There was an annual meeting of SIMI every year. In 2007, it took place in Indore. They just wanted the ban on SIMI to be lifted. It was there that Safdar Nagori and others were arrested. Subhan and Qayamuddin Kapadia [recently arrested, named by Witness as being involved in the blasts] were also to reach there but they said they had missed their train. They returned to Ahmedabad two weeks later. Alamzeb, Mujeeb [another ex-SIMI member, now in jail], Tauseef [a localite accused in the case, now in jail] and I had continued to meet after namaz.

After the Indore arrests of SIMI cadres, Subhan Qureishi met Mujeeb, Alamzeb, and me and told us that we had to do something to avenge the Gujarat riots. Subhan first approached the SIMI guys. They told him outright that they did not wish to be a part of anything and that they were struggling to lead a normal life as had been tortured enough by the Gujarat police for being SIMI members. These people could not even carry on their normal jobs. Qayamuddin was also absconding then as the police was after him. The first time Subhan and Qayamuddin met us was at a shop at the Dani Limda area in Ahmedabad. We were told not to involve the SIMI people and also to take in new people with no records. Arif and the others told Subhan not to do anything destructive.

Subhan then gave us Rs 3,000 to enrol in some physical fitness courses like swimming. We did that for a month. Only the three of us — Mujeeb, Alamzeb and me — knew about it. Qayamuddin was our leader. We were asked to stay away from SIMI members, as they would have stopped us. We did not meet any SIMI member. Subhan and Qayamuddin had tried to gauge who could do the task and had told just the three of us.

Qayamuddin got a CD just a month before the blasts. The CD was shown to Mufti Abu Bashar as he was the only one who could understand Arabic. A few days afterwards, Qayamuddin came to us and told us that some boys had come from outside who were well trained and who wanted to do something. None of us knew them. Nobody knew them. We were only given orders. When Qayamuddin mentioned bombs, I said that the original plan was to attack the VHP headquarters and not kill common people. He retorted that even if we didn’t help them, the boys from outside would set off the bombs. He said they wouldn’t wait for us and told us that if we helped them, they would be able to place the explosives at the right places and would be able to take revenge against the right people.

We then agreed to the plan. Qayamuddin then gave us Rs 5,000 and asked us to buy 10 cycles. At that time my exams were on. Alamzeb bought six bicycles and gave me three. I parked them at places where no one would touch them and Alamzeb parked his cycles too. Later, Qayamuddin called us. We asked him about the bombs and how many casualties they would cause. Initially, they said the bombs would be kept in buses and we were asked to identify the right buses. We then confronted them, saying that people in buses were not our targets. We said we should set off the bombs in places were Hindus dominate and where it is difficult for Muslims even to enter. The places they had chosen were areas like Paldi, which also had a large number of Muslims.

The targets were then changed to areas like Maninagar and Satellite. Qayamuddin later took me with him and showed me places like Naroda [one of the worst hit during the Gujarat 2002 riots] and told me that these were the places were we needed to plant the bombs. I was told to just look at the areas. After we came back from Naroda, we met Mujeeb who was waiting for us near the Vadodara express highway. Qayamuddin then told me that I did not appreciate what we were doing and that I was too busy with college. I retorted that that was because they were not keeping their promise to attack the VHP. I told them I did not want to be a part of the plan.

Did you know Sadiq Israr Ahmed? [in custody with the Mumbai police, named as one of the IM masterminds and accused in the Ahmedabad blasts. Recently cleared by a Mumbai court of involvement in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts] Was he ever a part of the plan?
No. I’ve never heard of him. If the SIMI members found out about our plan, they would never have let us go ahead with it.

Did any of you go to Pakistan or any other country?
No, never. The names I have read in the chargesheet are just names to us. We only heard about them on TV. SIMI was just a small organisation. Poor Abu Bashar had no idea what was going on. Whenever he was around, we never spoke about the plot. In fact we were told never to discuss anything with SIMI. The only reason Abu Bashar has been implicated in the case is because he used to attend tableeghi jamaats [religious conferences] across the country and was also very keen that the ban on SIMI be lifted. He was perhaps the only one who would speak to us about the true meaning of Islam.

After I said I wouldn’t be a part of the plot, I was removed from the group. It was only on the morning of the blasts when Alamzeb came in to get the cycles that I felt something was about to happen. I told him where the bicycles were parked and then went to college. It was only after I returned that I realised that the blasts had taken place. After the blasts, the group avoided me. Even when they met me they asked me not to discuss the plot.

The only fault of Zahid Sheikh [a friend of Witness arrested by the police and accused in the case. Also accused of attending terror camps in Ahmedabad] and others who have been arrested is that someone told him that the blasts were done by this group. I met Alamzeb five days after the blasts and asked him about the boys from outside. Were they like us – kurta-pyjama clad and bearded? Alamzeb replied that on the contrary, they didn’t look like us. They were welleducated, wore jeans and T-shirts and smoked a lot.

Did you know their identity?
No. They never divulged these things. Alamzeb only told me that they had rented a room and that they were extremely well-trained in making bombs. They were not like one of us. There was another person who kept the bombs. There is a stark difference between us and those people. They were like none of our group or any SIMI members we had seen.

You have been named a witness in the case. Your statement says that those named in the chargesheet including Arif, Tauseef, Zahid and the others played an active part in the blasts. Why did you say that? Did they torture you mentally or physically?
They first took me to Ashish Bhatia’s office [Joint Commissioner of Police heading the investigations]. They strip you completely. One person sits on one leg and another on the other. They kept me twisted over in a 180 degree position. Like they did to poor Zahid. They trick you. They told him that everyone had named him and that he should take responsibility for the blasts. They did the same to me. I could not stand the pain, so I did what they told me to.

Are those named in the chargesheet involved?
How could they be? We knew exactly what was happening from Day One. The people named had no inkling. Naved Kadri, one of them, is from Juhapura, like me. He would get frightened at the thought of blood. His only fault was that he was a friend from Juhapura. He has been chargesheeted as a conspirator. I have seen him being tortured in custody. He is still inside.

Do you see the role of a SIMI insider?
The third party with the bombs only came into the picture after the SIMI guys were all inside. How could they do it?

Did you know about the Indian Mujahideen?
No. SIMI was banned in 2001. All of them — Safdar Nagori and the rest — were still free. If they had actually received training they would have done the blasts way back. Why would they wait? The blasts happened only after they were arrested. In my lie detector test, they asked me about the IM but I’ve seen this term only in the newspapers.

But you were still a part of the plot. Why did you join it?
You know what happened in Gujarat. What happened in Godhra was wrong. The guilty should have been punished. But you know what they did to us. We saw the videos of Babu Bajrangi on TV and the VHP guys talking about slitting the stomachs of pregnant women. Politicians knew that what happened was wrong. The Hindus here knew exactly that it was wrong but they still support Narendra Modi. We just wanted to show them how it feels when your own people are killed.

You were a part of the plot till almost a day before the blasts and you have been let off. But others who don’t even know about the blasts are in jail. Why did this happen?
I only know how the plan was hatched and that the cycles were bought. The policemen told me that Yunus Mansuri said I had planted the bomb. I said that in that case, call him; I will face him because I know I have not done so. They told me this before they had even arrested him. Two days later, they arrested him, saying that I had named him. I told them whatever I knew. I know that uninvolved people were suffering, and I told the crime branch that those people were innocent. But they implicated them. There is no such thing as justice. Sub Inspector Bharvad took me out in a vehicle and said, as he took out his revolver, “You bastard, run! We don’t want to investigate you people. Run!” He later took me to the police station and I was tortured. They abused Muslims and kept on torturing me. I knew that I could not take it anymore and I gave in. I said whatever they told me to. They made me say that I had planted the bombs. When I met Police Inspector Tarun Barot, I told him I couldn’t take the pain. I said I would kill myself. Barot told me, “Don’t worry, I have spoken to Ashish Bhatia. We will make you a witness in the case.” I told them the truth so they would free the innocents, but they made a false statement from what I said. They warned me against speakingout and told me that they could implicate me and that there was scope for supplementary chargesheets. I am speaking out now because I am disgusted, because innocent God-fearing men are in jail.

How can you be so sure that the others were not involved?
It was all done secretly. We were told strictly to keep away from SIMI men like Arif, Sajid and the rest. If Mufti Abu Bashar and the others knew about it wouldn’t they have spoken to us about it? Only Subhan, Qayamuddin, Alamzeb and I knew about the plot.

What about Abu Bashar?
Subhan brought Abu Basher into the group in Ahmedabad only for his knowledge of Arabic and the hadees. They said Abu Bashar had asked us to wage jihad, which is absolutely false. Subhan categorically asked us to keep our mouths shut in front of Abu Bashar because he was quite educated and was a God-fearing man. Subhan and Qayamuddin were always on the run. They kept saying that they need people to help carry out attacks.

Did the Gujarat Police ever lure you?
They keep telling me, “Listen to us. You are a state witness. We will take care of you. Just don’t talk about this outside.”

When was the last time you met Subhan Qureishi?
Around 30 days before the blasts.

Unknown to the police, Witness has given us a full account in which he also damns himself. We also spoke to police officers without letting them know that we had had a long meeting with their star witness. The police maintain that they have a strong case. Says Joint Commissioner of Police Abhay Chudasama who is in charge of the case, “Even a child would know how important a witness would be in this case. And we do believe that whatever statements we have got from them and from the accused corroborate the evidence and will be enough to strengthen our case and nail the accused”.

When asked specifically why the alleged mastermind in the case would keep changing and asked about Abu Bashar Siddiqui, Sajid Mansuri and Yunus Mansuri [whose involvement in the case Witness has denied], Chudasama maintained that they were the key conspirators. While Chudasama was not as forthcoming when it came to the status of the witnesses, Ashish Bhatia, IG, Law and Order, who was the Joint Commissioner of Police in charge of the investigations maintained that some people who had backed out of committing the blasts were made witnesses and that their confessions would be crucial. When asked if the statements were voluntary, Bhatia said that all the statements were voluntary and in case the witnesses retracted their statements — even though they were recorded before a magistrate and therefore couldn’t be retracted —the Police would have the right to file a case against them. When asked if the witnesses had been tortured, both Chudasama and Bhatia replied that the matter was sub judice.

One year into the blasts, the trial is still to begin. Perhaps in the case of the Ahmedabad blasts there may not be no such thing called justice.

REAL ESTATE – Sold, Finally!

By M H Ahssan

Will the Finlay Mills prove to be a costly buy for the Lodha Group?

The repeated attempts to auction the 10.4-acre Finlay Mills in central Mumbai by the National Textile Corporation (NTC) in many ways mirror the roller-coaster ride the property market has seen in recent times.

The first round of bidding held in December last year was cancelled as there were no bids to match the reserve price of Rs 1,065 crore. The only bidder, DB Realty, offered just Rs 405 crore. The second round held in March 2009 was also a washout even after NTC reduced the reserve price to Rs 710 crore. In its third attempt in mid-July, NTC got some serious bidders. However, in this round too the highest bidders, the Lodha Group, bid below the reserve price at Rs 657 crore.

After negotiations with NTC, the Lodhas have agreed to up their offer to Rs 710 crore to meet the reserve price, and the sale is now set to go through. While this price is 20-30 per cent lower than the peak prices Mumbai mills have seen in the boom, the Finlay Mill sale still reflects a high price — nearly Rs 16,000 per sq. ft. It shows the builder is confident of the future. However, the risk is obvious. There is a huge glut in commercial property in central Mumbai. It can, of course, wait till demand picks up.

Gurbir SinghJapan seems to be manufacturing its way out of recession. Factory output rose for the fourth straight month in June. Production soared 8.3 per cent in April-June from the previous quarter, surpassing the 1953 record of 7.9 per cent. Japanese firms will keep raising production to meet the demand spurred by the trillion-dollar stimulus packages.

Ad-ing Up Losses

By M H Ahssan

As ads thin out, media firms look at other revenue sources

Dependent as it is on advertising revenues, the media and entertainment industry is among the worst hit in the slowdown. Advertisers have been trimming their budgets, and projections for ad revenue for the current financial year vary from no-growth to de-growth of 10 per cent. As the first quarter results trickle in, news organisations and entertainment channels are facing the thick end of the stick despite companies’ efforts to par down their costs.

The converse is also true. Those media companies that are not entirely dependent on advertising revenue, and have managed to diversify to garner other sources of revenue, have bucked the trend as Sun TV and, to some extent, Zee Entertainment (ZEEL) have shown. (Some of these media companies are competitors of ABP, which publishes Businessworld.)

Among the biggest disappointments in the first quarter results has been TV18. Performing below analyst projections, TV18 reported revenues of Rs 107 crore, an operating loss of Rs 4.2 crore and a net loss of Rs 40.6 crore as compared to last year’s Q1 loss of Rs 5.3 crore (see ‘Grim Situation’). Though the company’s flagship channel, cnbc, is the industry leader, this did translate into higher ad revenues, and income from the core news operations declined 35 per cent to just Rs 57 crore, while the net loss for this segment was Rs 28.3 crore. Unfortunately, its new media operations — Web 18 and Newswire18 — continued showing net losses of Rs 8.6 crore and Rs 1.4 crore, respectively, despite growth in revenues. Infomedia18, the print segment of the company that has always been something of an Achilles Heel, also dragged the company down with a net loss of Rs 2.4 crore. After a phase of robust growth, TV18 has had to face a losing streak with 2008-09 ending with a net loss of Rs 170 crore.

With the launch of Times Group’s new business channel, ET Now competition will only increase for CNBC. There are other issues too. An IDFC-SSKI report, authored by analyst Nikhil Vora, sees problems ahead, with TV18 continuing to fund gestation losses of Web18 and Infomedia18, a high net debt of Rs 850 crore and limited options to unlock value, given the group’s complex structure.

The silver lining for Network18 is its group company IBN18 posting a 36 per cent growth in revenue of Rs 57 crore. This was mainly driven by Viacom18’s channels Colors and MTV, which garnered Rs 106 crore in revenues. As per the revenue sharing arrangement, these two channels contributed around 34 per cent to IBN18’s kitty this quarter, helping it to trim net losses to Rs 7.2 crore from Rs 21 crore last year.

Ad Revenues Stumble
NDTV’s results too are nothing to write home about, but analysts have noted that the company has trimmed costs successfully. Though its consolidated revenues rose in the first quarter by 9.6 per cent to Rs 131 crore compared to Q1 of the previous year, NDTV turned in a net loss of Rs 81 crore. Revenue from news operations dipped 5 per cent to Rs 80.1 crore from the Q1 of the previous year, despite additional ad revenue from coverage of the national elections and the budget. An area of concern for the company is its English news channel NDTV falling behind Times Now, currently the No. 1. For the whole year, the company made an operating loss of Rs 484 crore; but with a stake sale of 26 per cent to NBC Universal in its entertainment business, NDTV Imagine, bringing in Rs 624 crore, the company could show a net profit of Rs 119 crore.

The only saving grace has been the performance of the entertainment vertical NDTV Imagine. It accounted for Rs 51 crore in revenue, an impressive 30 per cent growth from the previous quarter. The channel is at a strong No.4 position among Hindi entertainment channels.

“I don’t expect ad revenues to improve before October this year,” says Raj Nayak, CEO of NDTV Media, who markets airtime for NDTV as well as several other channels. “With an increasing number of channels, audiences have got more fragmented, while the advertising pie has remained stagnant.”

Nayak, also the president of the International Advertising Association, says: “The economics of almost every Hindi entertainment channel is a cash burn of Rs 85 crore and a recovery of Rs 35 crore per quarter. The question is: How do we make up the Rs 50-crore-hole every quarter?”

Sounding a warning note for the future, Zee Entertainment chairman Subhash Chandra says: “We do not see early signs of recovery in advertising revenues.”

Bucking The Trend
In comparison, Sun TV Network with diverse operations — from broadcasting to cable distribution, DTH and radio — showed a healthy growth of 17 per cent in revenue for FY09 touching Rs 1,008 crore and a net profit growth of 19 per cent at Rs 437 crore. The company is in the red by over Rs 300 crore for its DTH operations (Sun Direct), and its radio business net losses increased from Rs 40 crore to Rs 69 crore. Yet, it made up these hits from strong revenues from broadcasting and distribution.

Interestingly, Sun TV, with a virtual monopoly over the Tamil news and entertainment market is not dependent on the vagaries of advertising by following a business model that sells airtime slots to TV content companies at fixed rates leaving these production houses to market advertising time.

Though Q1 results for FY2010 are unavailable, the company for the last quarter of 2009, showed a total income growth of over 10 per cent to Rs 292 crore and profit-after-tax by 25 per cent to Rs 114 crore.

Zee Entertainment Enterprises (ZEEL), similarly, would have faced a bigger hit with advertising revenues falling 29 per cent; but the company managed to stay in the black with a strong performance in subscription revenues. For the first time, the company garnered higher revenue from subscription — at Rs 241 crore accounting for 51 per cent of total revenue — than it did from advertising that contributed Rs 198 crore or just 41 per cent of the kitty. Interestingly, DTH subscription revenue showed the strongest growth — 88 per cent at Rs 46.7 crore.

In times when generating ad revenues becomes more and more challenging, subscription revenue and other revenue sources should be explored more vigorously by media companies.

CRUISES – River Rhapsody

By M H Ahssan

That a river can be a pleasure ground of activities was discovered as early as 19th century when Jerome K. Jerome and his two friends took a leisurely ride down river Thames, vividly depicted in his famous book Three Men In A Boat, giving an iconic status to the simple boating pastime. Boats have now been replaced by exotic cruises. In fact, river cruises score over ocean liners because they sail more into the heartland. Besides, river cruises are more affordable, and offer five-star comfort. Here’s an insight into some of the best international and domestic river cruises…

Global Waters
Exploring Egypt can be any traveller’s dream. How about living the dream by sailing across the Nile? Sounds mystical, doesn’t it? Well, one can explore the magnificence of the Egyptian civilisation and its architecture by cruising down River Nile. The cruise offers a stay of three, seven or eight nights and covers the cities of Cairo, Giza, Aswan, Kom Ombo, Edfu and Luxor. Tourists can explore the temple of ancient Thebes in Luxor, go for an excursion to the valley of the kings where king Tutankhamen rests ensconsed as a mummy, take a camel ride at Giza to visit the pyramids and see the sights around the High Dam at Aswan. One can also opt for the traditional wooden sailboat, Felucca, but it is a slower option than the luxurious motor cruise. Either way, sailing the Nile to unravel the mystery of Cleopatra, the pharaohs and pyramids is a breathtaking experience.

Similarly, there can’t be a better way to explore Germany than by sailing on the rhine. And it is not just the cruise itself but the picturesque cities that it touches that makes the journey an unforgettable experience. On an eight-day tour, tourists can float through Amsterdam and Kinderdijk (Holland), Cologne, Koblenz & Rüdesheim, Heidelberg, Speyer, Strasbourg and Breisach (Germany) and Basel (Switzerland). Some cruises take a detour and sail through Koblenz (Germany), at the convergence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers. The castles and the black forest in Germany, windmills and canals in Holland, the artworks of Pablo Picasso in Switzerland are the other attractions that this river cruise offers. Not to mention the local wines and cuisine enroute.

Some of south-east Asia’s most intriguing cities such as Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam can be explored on the Mekong river cruise. An eight-day Mekong river cruise takes travellers along Ho Chi Minh, Cai Be, Sa Dec, Tan Chau, Phnom Penh, Kampong Cham and Tonle river area. Like the other cruises, this one too offers the option of either a three, eight, 10 or a 13-day tour. One can visit floating markets, go ashore to visit the French Gothic Cathedral and colourful port area of Cai Be, resplendent with its colonial buildings, flower gardens and local rice paper manufacturers, explore the pre-Angkorian temple of Wat Hanchey dating back to the 8th century in Kampong Cham, or just laze around in the peaceful surroundings of the Asian waterway.

Home Calling
Exploring India through waterways can be really exciting — more so if the river is the mighty Brahmaputra.

Starting from Tibet through Arunachal Pradesh, Brahmaputra flows across the Assam Valley through Dibrugarh, Neamati, Tezpur, Guwahati, and finally enters Bangladesh to join the river Padma before reaching the Bay of Bengal. The river cruise on Brahmaputra, run by an Indo-British joint venture, is an excellent way to explore the stunning beauty of the north-east. The cruise offers a choice of four, eight or ten night tours.

An eight-night tour begins at Guwahati, and sails upstream to Kurua, Ganesh Pahar, Orang National Park, Tezpur and Kaziranga. A 10-night tour includes visits to Majuli Island (Asia’s largest river island), Sibsagar and Dhansiri Mukh.

For those interested in exploring the cultural riches of India, we recommend cruising along the Ganga. Beginning from Kolkata, the cruise travels upstream to Varanasi, covering 800 miles in 15 days. Travellers can visit the former British cantonment area of Barrackpore, the battlefield of Plassey, terracotta temples in Kalna, before entering the state of Bihar through the feeder canal of Farakka. A two-day trip to the ruins of Nalanda University and Bodh Gaya makes for a nice sojourn. Stoping over at Sarnath for a visit to the Buddhist sites, the cruise finally docks at the ghats of Varanasi.

Sailing through river Hooghly, is like journeying through the heart of Bengal. Exploring the essence of bengal in Belur, Chandannagore, Mayapur, Nabadwip, Murshidabad and Kalna can be an exhilarating experience. Apart from enjoying religious and heritage sites such as the Belur Math, Iskon temple at Mayapur and the fort of nawabs in Murshidabad, on-boat activities add to the thrill.

BPO – Making It Big At Home

By M H Ahssan

While global clients may still hold glamour, domestic BPO orders are proving more resilient.

Young and full of beans, the domestic business process outsourcing (BPO) market is disproving the existence of an economic slowdown. While the domestic IT services market grew at a dismal 20 per cent in FY09 compared to its 42.51 per cent rise in the previous year, the domestic BPO market grew at a much higher 40.6 per cent compared to last year’s 28.6 per cent.

A number of relatively recent deals and their value, which now runs into hundreds of millions of dollars, have strengthened the sector. Intelenet’s domestic BPO Sparsh employs 17,000 people, and has grown 35 per cent from its previous year’s head count of 12,600. Also, Sparsh closed one of the biggest domestic BPO deals for Aircel’s customer support this year, though the valuation is unknown. It will be based out of its Puducherry centre, which had an initial head count of 1,600.

Genpact, which hitherto only had international clients, set up a domestic division with a team of 1,000 employees nine months ago. Its main focus is the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) and telecom sectors. It is rumoured that Genpact has closed a deal with one of the largest private banks in the country to provide end-to-end solutions.

Tech Mahindra plans to scale up to 4,000 seats from the present 2,000 in the next two months. “We have a separate team handling domestic operations,” says Sriram Veeravalli Sevellimedu, head of BPO operations at Tech Mahindra. Nearly half of Hinduja Global Solutions’ (HGS) 14,205 employees cater only to the domestic market, and 17 per cent of its revenues come from it. “Initially, the margins were very low, but they are stabilising (at higher levels) slowly,” says Partha Sarkar, CEO of HGS. Seats at its domestic operations have grown from 6,500 to 7,000-plus last year.

Though the majority of the deals pertain to customer support, large deals for end-to-end processes (see ‘Homing In On Growth’) are also being sealed. The five biggest customers of domestic BPOs are Idea Cellular, Airtel, Indian Railways, ICICI Bank and Aircel. The domestic BPO sector has grown to a $1.94-billion (Rs 8,900 crore) industry from a $1.57 billion (Rs 6,330 crore then) in FY08.

While the telecom and BFSI segments have been generating maximum revenues for the sector, the HR, finance and accounting segments are also seeing credible growth. Operations out of tier II and III cities are becoming more commonplace. The decline in volumes in the international market has also aided the dramatic surge in the domestic BPO sector. As larger BPOs enter the domestic market, both the demands from clients and end-delivery modules are undergoing rapid changes.

“Several years ago, only a part of a project was outsourced by domestic enterprises,” says Anuj Kumar, vice-president, India domestic CoE at IBM Daksh. Today, Kumar finds Daksh looking at customer outcomes for large enterprises such as Bharti and Idea Cellular, too.

IT industry body Nasscom says that trends and verticals will become more diverse. “From customer care to back-office management, from banking to telecom, and from voice to non-voice, today, the domestic BPO is into everything and that too in a structured way,” says Raju Bhatnagar, vice-president of Nasscom.

The Next Level
In the early 1990s, BPOs catering to the domestic market were chiefly single-entrepreneur set-ups in an unorganised market. “Subsequently, they ran out of capital, and were forced to shut down or merge with larger enterprises,” says Sarkar. In 2004, IBM landed a landmark $275- million deal with Bharti Airtel, heralding the advent of large BPOs into the sector. While the market has come a long way since then, the past couple of years have been most significant. Today, the biggest players in the domestic BPO business are Sparsh Intelenet, Wipro, IBM Daksh, MphasiS and Bharat BPO.

While most of the work is still on the voice segment, there is a slow shift towards outsourcing back-end operations. Indian enterprises do not want to go to different BPO operators for handling different processes of their business. “The domestic market has proven to be better business for integrated processes,” says Kumar.

Susir Kumar, CEO of Sparsh Intelenet, also sees a significant shift from outbound calls to more inbound and end-to-end solutions. “Most of the work we do is inbound and back-office management, from entries to account set-ups,” he says. Market estimates value Sparsh’s deal with Aircel at Rs 70-80 crore, if the deal is for four-five years. “As we expand our business in south India, we needed a partner with core strengths in the domestic telecom industry,” explains Gurdeep Singh, COO of Aircel.

Earlier, pricing depended on several factors: the number of people working, time taken per call, total number of calls, and so on. Today, SLAs (service-level agreements) are changing to business outcome models and transaction-based pricing. “Buying patterns and heavier procurement processes are being formulated in the manner of international businesses,” says Tech Mahindra’s Sriram.

SMS has also become a revenue earner for BPOs. “Apart from 700,000 calls a day, we also handle 50,000 SMSs every day for the railways,” says Akashdeep Singh, COO of Bharat BPO, which takes care of Indian Railways’ BPO needs exclusively.

Transaction-based pricing has just taken off, and is expected to bring in more transparency. While Wipro continues to charge its customers on a time-per-call basis, irrespective of whether the call was resolved or not, it is looking at changing this. “We are looking at outcome-based pricing, and we are innovating to measure the business outcome per call,” says Ashutosh Vaidya, senior vice-president and head at Wipro BPO.

Telecom, BFSI And More
The ever-increasing customer base of telecom service providers, and the growing insurance and banking industry have supported the domestic BPO industry quite well till now. In 2008, telecom constituted $661 million of the $1.57-billion domestic BPO pie and, in 2009, it accounted for $865 million of the $1.94-billion domestic industry. While the telecom segment of the domestic BPO industry is growing at 56 per cent, the overall domestic BPO market is growing at 40.6 per cent. BFSI constitutes about 50 per cent of this market. The remaining verticals, though with a smaller share, continue to grow at a rapid pace.

Owing to the global slowdown, the BFSI sector in the West has seen a massive crunch in volumes. The travel sector, which does a lot of outsourcing, is not in good shape either.

Bharat BPO is the only company that caters to a single domestic client, the Indian Railways. Interestingly, it does not charge the railways. Instead, it shares revenue with telcos which route the customers’ calls to the BPO. “The railways used to spend as much as Rs 100 crore annually on callers and telephone bills till two years ago, which is a net saving for them now,” says Singh.

Still To Come
Impressive though its growth appears, the domestic BPO base is very small and is still at only 13.13 per cent of the total BPO industry in India. The size of domestic BPO orders is only about 40-50 per cent that of international orders, and the profit margins are lower. The difference in the profit margin between the domestic and international BPO sectors varies from 15 to 25 per cent, and is mainly due to the differences in labour costs. International services need a more skilled work force. “Domestic BPO margins are on an average 15 per cent lower than that of offshore, but are fairly comparable,” says Radhika Balasubramanian, COO of Sparsh.

India remains a price-sensitive market, and customers here have different demands from those of international clients. “Even if we can provide them a value proposition of 10 per cent, we can get a client,” says Susir Kumar.

Nasscom’s Bhatnagar feels both the export and domestic BPO markets will continue to grow as there is ample headroom. But in the days to come, a lot of consolidation is expected. “A lot of the larger BPOs do not have low-price models, so they might have to merge with the smaller BPOs to provide affordability to customers,” says HGS’s Sarkar.

As anticipated a few years ago, IT-BPO services have begun emanating from tier II and III cities. Several large BPOs are trying to operate out of cities such as Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Durgapur, which provide a large multi-lingual pool of labour that is needed (but not readily available in tier I cities) by telcos that offer multi-lingual services. But,“the trainability index of an employee is very high in these cities for high-end processes”, says Sriram.

Nevertheless, with a little extra effort to train personnel, it becomes far more cost-efficient to operate from a smaller city. “We have to pay low salaries and low rentals compared to large cities,” says Sarkar of HGS, which has a large facility in Durgapur. Similarly, Sparsh Intelenet has set up its BPOs in Mohali and Aurangabad, and IBM Daksh has a facility in Visakhapatnam.

Still, BPOs often cannot move operations because of strict SLAs on quality, which they are unable to meet from smaller cities that have deficient work culture, connectivity and infrastructure. Sparsh’s Kumar admits that moving to smaller cities is not always cheaper from the RoI (return on investment) point of view.

“To catch up with the growth of the export BPO segment, the domestic segment will have to grow phenomenally,” agrees Vaidya of Wipro. The slowdown has changed the needs of customers. New integrated processes, strict SLAs, pricing and consolidation will drive the industry. The domestic BPO industry will also have to move beyond the telecom and BFSI verticals by innovating faster. It is a time of considerable challenges, but also one of great opportunities.

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Tips for Writing an Op-ed Article

By M H Ahssan

If you have an opinion about current events-political, social, or otherwise-you have probably considered writing an op-ed article for local or national newspapers. Op-ed pieces allow writers, both amateur and professional alike, to participate in public discourse about the issues that are most important to them.

Writing an opposite editorial (op-ed) article is also a great way for an aspiring writer to break into the business and capture the eye of editors. Traditionally placed on the page opposite the editorial section, op-ed articles are written in the same tone as an editorial piece, but from the point of view of an individual writer. Often, this writer is not associated with the publication, or part of its regular staff of columnists and contributors.

The best op-ed writers are those who keep up with the news, and are able to write valid contributions to current topics. Newspapers focus on relevant journalism, and readers will not want to waste their time on articles that are based on outdated and tired arguments. If you have a fresh slant or new approach, go for it. Often, well-written op-ed pieces are the precursors to lively discussion in other media outlets, such as talk shows, news commentators, and news networks’ round-table talks.

Below is a list of some of the basics involved with writing or editing an effective op-ed article:

1. Keep current. The easiest way to get your op-ed article published is to write about something that is currently relevant in headline news. After a story has been written about numerous times, editors-as well as readers-will tire of it and consider it old news. Additionally, an op-ed piece about the condition of the city’s roads is hardly relevant when that same city is currently facing a crackdown on political corruption in the mayor’s office. Op-ed editors know what readers want to read, and will be more likely to publish your op-ed article if you take the time to consider your audience’s interests carefully.

2. Brevity is vital. Newspaper editors generally leave a space big enough for 700-750 words for an op-ed piece, and you have to be able to say a lot in that span to get their attention. A way to keep yourself on track is to remember to focus on one key point or argument, and save the multi-dimensional diatribe against all of society’s woes for another outlet (or multiple op-eds). In many cases, if you send in an op-ed article that is considerably longer, the editor will immediately refuse it due to not having the time to go back and forth with you in cutting the word count.

3. Hook your reader. Academics, who are accustomed to writing scholarly papers, tend to have an especially hard time with this one. The opening sentence needs to capture the reader’s attention, and this rarely happens in a roundabout way. The easiest hooks are the ones that begin a story, or make a blanket statement that someone might find humorous or intriguing. Think of Charles Dickens’ opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities-”It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Don’t take time to get the ball rolling or get your point across-do it from the opening lines of your article. You’ll find that this approach always works best in getting the readers (and editor’s) attention.

4. Stick to arguing one point. The op-ed article is not the place to take on the world’s problems. It’s not really even the place to offer your own five-point plan for fixing the city’s budget crises, or for bringing an end to corruption in government. Readers are drawn into op-ed articles because of the honesty of narrative, and simplicity of the argument, and the statements that will make them stop and think for a moment that maybe-just maybe-you have a valid point.

5. Avoid academic, stuffy, or jargon-filled writing. Newspapers around the world are generally written between and 8th and 12th grade reading level. Research has shown that when newspapers are distributed with articles written at higher reading levels, the circulation numbers tend to decline. Editors are aware of this, and will choose articles for publication that are clear and powerfully written without a lot of inside terminology and jargon that might elude much of their readership. If your chosen topic requires terminology that the average reader might not know, include a brief definition-either through context or one that is directly stated-to avoid confusion.

6. Use the inverted pyramid approach. Put the most important details-the “meat” of your article-in the beginning. This usually means to avoid meandering your way to what you are trying to say. As mentioned earlier, the editor will be concerned about space and word count. If the editor needs to cut your op-ed piece to fit and you’ve used the inverted pyramid approach, slicing off part of the end will not affect the overall intent of your article.

7. Publish locally. This is an often-overlooked method for aspiring writers to get their foot in the door. While national papers are often flooded with op-ed articles and requests for publication, local papers sometimes scramble to find new things to print. Think of it as the ‘big fish in a small pond’ phenomenon, and one that can work to your advantage as a writer. Later, you can query the larger publications with your previously published work as credentials, giving you a better opportunity to be noticed.