Over the next five years, military analysts expect the country to spend as much as $40 billion on weapons procurement alone, more than its entire annual armaments budget today — upgrading systems as diverse as jet fighters, artillery, submarines and tanks in its largely Soviet-era arsenal. As a result, India will become one of the largest military markets in the world.
In terms of “potential for growth, India is our top market, ” said Richard G. Kirkland, Lockheed Martin’s president for South Asia.
Great, now we only need to start another war and American military contractors are set for life. After all, now they’ll be arming both sides. Meanwhile, the average South Asian is sitting in her hut somewhere wondering how to feed her family, send her kids to school, protect them from flooding and disease, all on less than a dollar a day.
The fire in this bustling but entirely provincial city, roughly 50 miles northeast of the capital, New Delhi, is now seen as an example of the painful paradox of India’s economic miracle. The hunger for brand-name goods — a Toshiba television, a Whirlpool washing machine, an LG air-conditioning unit — has spread to middle India. But that hunger has only exposed the raw and yawning gaps that remain: a disregard for health and safety measures in many places, combined with a deep public suspicion that corrupt officials turn a blind eye to the need to enforce standards in these areas.
Please, I know that this is the standard article frame, the “painful paradox of (insert country’s name here)’s Economic Miracle”. One has seen a million stories about “developing countries” like these with the word “paradox” thrown in. Of course, the writer makes no attempt to find even one person or reference that calls this a “paradox”. But why is this a paradox? Is this not the rule, the true paradox is when economic development, government efficiency, population attitudes, literacy, and all those other indicators of a country’s state of being go hand in hand. As in, a GDP increase of 10% brings a 10% increase in government efficiency, what a terrible media frame.
Fires, stampedes, bus accidents, plagues, you name it, easily avoidable deaths happen all the time all over India. They have nothing to do with anything other than the combination of poor enforcement, poor crowd control, over population and systems that don’t work. These things were happening when I was growing up in the 1970s and they will happen for the forseeable future. How surprising is it that it is easier to manufacture a few million washing machines than to change a country’s attitudes and performance.
Governance is more difficult than making money, and requires the money to have been in the system for a few years. Good governance also requires higher expectations, and higher expectations come with the higher standard of living that the injection of money brings. So, no paradox, just the natural order of things: Money – Expectations – Governance.
I grew up in Chennai and worked with the Students’ Sea Turtle Conservation Network in the mid ’90s. It’s nice to see an article on them in the city’s biggest newspaper.
CHENNAI: Scores of newborn Olive Ridley turtles entered their natural habitat — the sea — under the watchful eyes of conservationists at Elliots Beach, Besant Nagar, here early on Sunday. Conservationists said nearly 75 eggs hatched on Sunday alone and most of the young ones were safely released into the waters. But about 25 eggs reportedly did not hatch and some were stillborn. Volunteers of the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network (SSTCN) annually collect Olive Ridley turtle eggs from the Besant Nagar coastline upto Neelankarai, a fishing village beyond Tiruvanmiyur. The eggs are then taken to a hatchery at Oorurkuppam, a fishing village located behind the Theosophical Society premises. It takes 45 days for the young ones to hatch.
In Chennai, and most of South India, the adult sea turtles are not poached, only the eggs. Also, it is not possible to just secure the nest with “do not poach” notice! So the eggs need to be relocated to a hatchery where they’re re-buried. For more on sea turtle “management” in India, I would suggest visiting Kartik Shanker’s excellent website.
I grew up in Chennai in the 80s and got to witness the Sri Lankan civil war from just across the border. I read about it mostly from the Indian English news media (The Hindu, Indian Express) and remember many parts of the conflict: The initial profusion of Tamil groups, the LTTE takeover, the quick suppression of peaceful/non-violent voices by the LTTE, the Indian “peace” mission, and then much of the mayhem that followed, including the killing of Rajiv Gandhi. My opinions were filtered through my pro-Sanskrit anti-Tamil Brahmin upbringing and I don’t remember being especially sympathetic to the cause back then.
This book really took me back and filled in the blanks. I learn history best when told through the experiences of those affected the most, the women, children, “civilians”. It’s a beautiful, extremely challenging history lesson on the Sri Lankan war told from the viewpoint of a young woman growing up in Jaffna. VV’s writing makes you read through the horror of war, the clear and repeated threads of who suffers and how no one involved in violence is “noble” or “heroic”. Read it if you are able, trigger warnings all the way with violence, sexual violence, family violence 🙁 It is however a story primarily of resistance, survival and how important it is to catalogue the horrors of war as they are happening, and not let that story get buried in traditional war jingoism.
In this world we’re in right now, dominated by war coverage and the daily unchallenged assertions by those committing war that they are “right”, “honourable”, “just”, etc., reading accounts of war from the perspective of those most affected are a reminder. They are a reminder that when you commit to continuous violence, even if it starts as self defense or resistance, there’s no nobility there, no heroism: you’re killing human beings, you’re destroying lives, homes, gardens, libraries, schools, music, love and everything that makes us human. I really wish all war coverage focused on what is lost, not on who gained a bridge or how the great leader sitting in his well-protected mansion is waging the war.
Two Indian doctors are facing an investigation into claims they let their 15-year-old son perform a caesarean section to get into the Guinness Book of Records.
The government of Tamil Nadu state in southern India today said it was launching an inquiry, according to Indian newspaper reports.
It is alleged the doctors screened a video of their son performing the caesarean at a meeting of the regional branch of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) last month in the hope their son, Dhileepan Raj, would get into the record book as the world’s youngest surgeon.
I feel like laughing at the parents, but the patient and her fetus were put at grave risk, what idiots!
Judges led by the chief justice closed a loophole that has kept some laws from their scrutiny in a part of the constitution called the Ninth Schedule. The Ninth Schedule was created in 1951 to help protect progressive laws on land reform and ending feudalism, but critics say it has since been misused.
Unfortunately, a shortsighted solution to a problem will be misused. Shielding laws from judicial review is good if you have a reform minded legislative, and an atavistic judiciary, which was presumably the case in 1950s India. Nehru and his parliament, fresh from the independence struggle, and eager to transfer power from the entrenched zamindari system to the proletariat enacted the ninth schedule as part of the first amendment to the constitution. The judiciary, and I am guessing here (this is a blog, isn’t it!), was probably filled with remnants of the British Raj civil service, and hence full of entrenched interests. The situation is reversed now, with the judiciary (the higher reaches, that is) coming up through the ranks as lawyers, and the politicians, well, being Indian politicians!
Bad law enacted for a good purpose is still bad law, and this judgment will bring some sanity into lawmaking.
BTW, the list of laws that will come under scrutiny is long, it is a bunch of land reform, industry nationalization and tribal rights acts that will not be challenged. Number 116:
116) The Tamil Nadu Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Reservation of Seats in Educational Institutions and of appointments or posts in the Services under the State) Act, 1993 (Tamil Nadu Act 45 of 1994).
This is the one that precipitated the review. This law called for a 69% of all college admissions in government institutions be based on a quota system to benefit “backward castes”. The supreme court had instituted a 50% cap. This law is sure to be challenged and since the protection under the 9th schedule is lost, will surely be overturned.
I remember her vaguely from being immersed in Indian politics a lot more in the past than I am now. She’s just another politician, member of the Congress Party, the corruption, nepotism, etc., well, par for the course. Just because she’s a woman does not make her immune. There’s a long history of corrupt politicians becoming president of India (See Singh, Zail!). Indira Gandhi started the rather convenient process of hiring pliant presidents, it was in general a good power consolidation move. It just so happened that the outgoing president, Dr. Abdul Kalam was a nuclear scientist and technocrat, not a career politician.
It looks like the Congress party’s just returning to its politician president ways!
India’s first female president is likely to be voted into office on Thursday, but this milestone event has been overshadowed in recent weeks by an unusually savage debate over whether she is fit to become head of state.
When the leader of the governing Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, announced in June that Pratibha Patil, 72, was her party’s official choice for the post, she added that to have a woman president would be a matter of “great pride” and a “historic moment in the 60th year of our republic.”
But Gandhi’s attempt to promote this as a triumph for gender equality has won Ms. Patil little support.
Instead, the pre-election campaigning has been dominated by a series of vitriolic attacks on Ms. Patil’s credentials.
The opposition has alleged, among other things, that she shielded her brother in a murder investigation, protected her husband in a suicide scandal, and was herself involved in numerous financial irregularities.
And then there are Ms. Patil’s own peculiar statements — most notably, her revelation that she had heard the voice of a dead guru predicting she would rise to power.
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