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Half of India's children are malnourished – Yahoo! News

Byoliveridley

Half of India’s children are malnourished – Yahoo! News

With about 46 percent of children underweight — a negligible improvement over the last survey, conducted in 1998-99 — India is in the same league as nations like Burkina Faso and Cambodia. In China, Asia’s other rising economic power and the country India so often compares itself with, only 8 percent of children are underweight.

The improved infant mortality rate — down to 57 per 100,000 births from 68 in 1998-99 — remains dramatically higher than that seen in Western nations, such the Netherlands, where it is 4.

In every category where a comparison between the health of people in the countryside and cities was offered, those in rural areas lagged far behind. The rural infant mortality rate, for example, was 62 per 100,000, compared to 42 the in urban areas.

Such statistics show India “should be worried,” said Werner Schultink of UNICEF. “It’s going to be difficult for India if wants to use its human resources to develop the nation but does not make improvements.”

I don’t really know what to say, it is depressing, and points to the enormous amount of basic nuts and bolts infrastructure work that needs to be done in India. Back to themes from yesterday’s sewer post, it is basic government work, not sexy, not exciting, not flashy, just plodding mundane get it right kind of infrastructure building. It HAS to be done, there’s no sense in pointing to fancy malls in Bangalore or a super wonderful space program. One day, when I have time, I will convert all these percentages to numbers, percentages are good for comparing data, but to get a true sense of the magnitude, I think numbers are necessary. Quick calculation,the 2001 Indian Census says there were 350 million children (15 years old or less) in 2001, well, that makes 170 million starving (okay, “underweight”) children, it’s a happy place, ain’t it?

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    The Blue Marble: Indian Crocodiles Guard Dwindling Forests

    Byoliveridley

    This is an interesting and good side effect of releasing captive bred crocodiles back into the wild.

    The Blue Marble: Indian Crocodiles Guard Dwindling Forests

    Dozens of crocodiles bred in captivity in eastern India are protecting their endangered counterparts. Newly released into the wild, these giants are scaring away poachers bent on illegal fishing and timber harvesting in mangrove forests in the states of Orissa and West Bengal, reports Reuters. The disappearing mangroves have led to a steep decline in wild croc numbers, from several thousand a century ago to less than 100 in the early 1970s. But the same species has bred well in captivity and is now being used to solve its own problem. “The swelling number of released crocodiles in the wild is working as a deterrent and keeping people away from the mangrove as villagers are more cautious before venturing into the forests,” said Rathin Banerjee, a senior wildlife official. “Unlike guard dogs, crocodiles cannot be tamed and are ferocious and can attack anyone in the swamps.” .

  • Infrastructure, Not Guns

    Byoliveridley

    Things that make me want to bang my head against the wall at 6:30 in the morning.

    Building a Modern Arsenal in India – New York Times

    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.

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    Pollution vs. Development? Hardly!

    Byoliveridley

    It’s clean air vs. TV in poor India village – International Herald Tribune

    Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China and elsewhere have become a favorite way to make electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world.

    The headline sucks, clean air vs. TV is not really the choice here. Is the implication that third worlders somehow need to make this a “choice”? It’s not as if the rest of the world has to make this “choice”! They do seem to have both. This is a situation where poor choices are made because of poor infrastructure. Other than the headline, it is a good article because it makes all the right points:

    1. Lack of infrastructure – No centralized power to remote areas
    2. Well meaning, but poorly executed subsidies – Cheap Diesel and Kerosene
    3. Subsidy induced corruption – Diesel/Kerosene pilfering
    4. Top down approaches to development – Throw the money, pay no attention to local experts, don’t follow up, then blame the lazy villagers!
    5. Competition for scarce resources with developed countries – Germany will outpay India for photovoltaics every time.

    Biomass burning as an alternative to diesel?

    Given the popularity of generators, perhaps the most promising alternative is a new type like the one at the edge of the village that contributes much less to air pollution and global warming. It burns a common local weed instead of diesel, costs half as much to operate, emits less pollution and contributes less to global warming.

    The main material is dhaincha, a weed commonly grown in India to restore nitrogen to depleted soils. The dhaincha grows 10 feet tall in just four months, with a three-inch-thick green stalk. Wood from shrubs and trees is used when there is not enough dhaincha.

    I am not a big fan of biomass burning, but using a weed that can be replanted repeatedly seems fairly harmless, especially compared to burning diesel.

    The project has succeeded partly because it has the active backing of one landlord family, the Sharans. Family members have gone on to successful business careers in big Indian cities and in Europe, and have dedicated themselves to helping their home village.

    Local involvement, especially by authority figures goes a long way in rural India.
    China does suggests another way forward.

    China has tried another approach: supplementing an expansion of electricity from coal-fired power plants with cheap rooftop solar water heaters that channel water through thin pipes crisscrossing a shiny surface.

    Close to 5,000 small Chinese companies sell these simple water heaters, and together they have made China the world’s largest market for solar water heaters, with 60 percent of the global market and more than 30 million households using the systems, said Eric Martinot, a renewable energy expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

    Not so hot during the monsoon, I guess! I remember a friend of mine having a solar heater in their home in the 1980’s. Their company used to make them, so it is old technology, with price being the prime barrier. It will work as a supplemental source, not as the prime source.

    Clearly, the wider availability and ubiquity of consumer electronics, and electricity-dependent agriculture has outpaced India’s, and to a lesser extent, China’s power infrastructure. It is easy to make a billion television, it’s not quite so easy to keep them powered!

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    Obama interview in Indian magazine

    Byoliveridley

    In an exclusive interview, the US presidential hopeful speaks on a range of subjects: the nuclear deal, Mahatma Gandhi, his ability to reconcile Islam with modernity, and how he wouldn’t have put all eggs in the Musharraf basket

    ‘I Am Reluctant To Seek Changes In The N-Deal’ : outlookindia.com

    Interesting interview. Obama says the right things most of the time, so no surprises here. The interviewer also helpfully provides a summary at the top of the interview where he tells us what Obama said and what it means, a little bit of contextualization that goes a long way in helping the reader get perspective on the issues. Western journalists should try this sometime…

    On the nuclear deal

    “I continue to hope this process can be concluded before the end of the year…. I am reluctant to seek changes.”

    His remarks suggest he is opposed to renegotiating the deal, as the BJP has demanded. Should the deal not be sealed this year, Obama as president isn’t likely to impose new conditions, a fear the UPA has constantly stoked to compel its critics to fall in line.

    Now that’s an interesting observation because the proposed India-US nuclear deal will formalize India’s standing as a nuclear weapons power while providing the country with access to reactor fuel and technology. The deal will also mean that India will have to come under the purview of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure that certain nuclear safeguards can be agreed upon and met. The so called communist parties of India are protesting this as an affront to the sovreignity of the Indian State and have withdrawn support to the Indian government, who faces a very delicately balanced vote of confidence next week.

    Both the US and Indian governments are currently in agreement that the deal needs to be done before Bush leaves or else… Obama’s thrown a little bit of cold water over this idea, which will weaken the ruling party’s hand a little. The deal has been ratified by the US, so the only thing standing in the way is the continued stability of the current Indian government.

    What do I think? Nothing much other than it appears that India is getting most of what it wants from this deal, a formalization of its nuclear weapons status, access to more civilian technology and legitimization of its nuclear programme in return for some safeguards (which are good for safety and non-proliferation anyway). It’s just that the opposition BJP cannot possibly support the deal because they are the opposition and recent election results in various states have them reasonably confident of getting back in power in New Delhi if the government were to fall and elections were to be called. The left is trying to remain relevant and is usually reflexively anti-US. So dealing with the US government is like dealing with Satan for the “communist” parties (right, call yourselves communists, insult to the word).

    In other, more personal parts, we find out that Obama was in Pakistan for a few weeks when he was 19, which I did not know, but is apparently common news knowledge.

    Interesting times, he’s not even president yet and still has great influence on happenings far away.

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    India Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President

    Byoliveridley

    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 Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President – New York Times

    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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    Pakistan's Self Interest

    Byoliveridley

    Excellent article on the dynamics of Pakistan and the Taliban (H/T to 3QD)

    Scapegoating Pakistan (Harpers.org)

    Other countries, as former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer reminded me, do not look at the world from the same point of view as the United States. “The first duty of any intelligence agency,” he said, “is to protect the national interest. Pakistan is not going to destroy the Taliban because at some point they would like to see the Taliban back in power. They cannot tolerate a pro-Indian, pro-American, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian government in Afghanistan. They already have an unstable Western border and have to worry about a country of one million Hindus that has nuclear bombs.”

    That’s 1 billion Hindus, kind sir, not 1 million, there are one million Hindus in South Chennai alone, I would guess, your point is well taken, though. Self-interest ought to be the driving force of any country’s foreign policy. But this article oversimplifies the situation. Not all self-interest needs to be couched in, and carried out in purely adversarial terms. It has been in the self-interest of the military ruling class of Pakistan to carry out this hyper militarized foreign policy. It aids and abets the survival of this ruling class. But is it really in the long term self interest of the rest of Pakistan? Being Indian, I might tend to underestimate and undersell the threat that India is to Pakistan, but I don’t see the threat. Yes, India is a large country with hegemonical ambitions of being the local bully, but its threat to Pakistan is overrated. India has huge problems of its own anyway, and is probably not interested in territorial expansion at this point in time! I am guessing that a Pakistan that is a little more accommodating to its neighbors would find its neighbors a little more cooperative, no?

    How does this play out in the real world? Very simply, Pakistan cooperates with the United States when it serves its interests and doesn’t cooperate when it feels that its interests aren’t served.

    Well, I am completely and utterly on board with that. Pakistan should pay much more attention to its neighbors than to the “leader of the free world” thousands of miles away.

    The Pakistan-Afghan border, aka the Durand line, was drawn by some Brit administrator and in a region with thousands of years of history, artificial borders drawn by foreigners means little to the people who live there. Most identities are tribal, and these stupid colonial lines don’t mean that one person living one mile east of the border will think “Pakistani” and the other, one mile west of the border, “Afghani”.

    We’re unfortunately still suffering the consequences of colonial manipulations and divisions, and will continue to do so until regional borders reflect ethic identity more accurately, and are not a function of some ignorant British moron governor’s cartographic skills.

    Rant over, nothing like an ethnic conflict in my neck of the woods to bring out the stream of consciousness rambling. Back to more science based blogging later!