India turns off Nepal's Oil

Byoliveridley

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indian oil supplies to Nepal cut

The Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) supplies all land-locked Nepal’s oil. Many petrol stations in the kingdom are now reported to have run out of fuel.

The state-run Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) said it had been unable to pay the IOC $90m that it owes.

A spokesman said it would soon run out of reserves and the IOC move was causing widespread fuel shortages.

Well, not the greatest PR move. When you’re the superpower in the neighborhood, why piss people off over $90 million? Anyway, the related links on the bbc page will tell you all you ever needed to know about the country that hosts the world’s tallest mountain.

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    India, The Emerging (polio stricken?) Tiger

    Byoliveridley

    States on alert against polio – NDTV.com – News on States on alert against polio

    India appears to be in a grip of a polio outbreak with 352 cases reported so far this year, many of them from areas that were free of the virus, and officials fear the number may increase further. Uttar Pradesh alone has reported 312 cases, the highest of all the states, and World Health Organisation officials have described it as an “exporter” of the disease.

    In Uttar Pradesh, officials said 90 percent of the cases were due to ignorance in the minority Muslim community, who believed the polio vaccine could make children impotent.

    From wikipedia

    Only four countries in the world (Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan) are reported to have endemic polio.

    I remember reading about a Nigerian Province issue with Clerics claiming “that vaccines supplied by Western donors were adulterated to reduce fertility and spread AIDS as part of a general war on Islam”, which the Wikipedia Polio article verifies. But we have never seen this in India before, and I find it hard to believe. I will remain sceptical about the Muslim clerical influence on India’s polio debacle unless I hear better. News from India sometimes builds its own “truth momentum”, with speculation and hearsay morphing into bulletproof truth in a matter of hours. It is also easy in India to start rumors to deflect blame.Here’s a contrarian take from a Reuter’s Article

    “Tens of thousands of children were missed by state health workers over the past year during rounds of immunization, leading to a resurgence of the virus, they said.

    “We are very concerned. It raises the threat to India and is also threatening other countries,” said Jay Wenger, head of the National Polio Surveillance Project, a collaboration between the WHO and the Indian government.

    One federal official said around 10 percent of children in several western districts of Uttar Pradesh, known for its ramshackle state health care and sluggish bureaucracy, could have missed immunization between late 2005 and early 2006.

    “These (vaccination) rounds were of poor quality,” said the official, who did not want to be named.”

    Well, sounds more logical, does it not? But why let the depressing truth of inadequacy get in the way of a juicy and self-perpetuating tale of Muslim backwardness.

    India, the emerging tiger.

  • Musharraf and the Pakistani Army's Many Problems

    Byoliveridley

    Why has Musharraf failed so dramatically to stop the insurgency? One reason is that most of the public is hostile to government action against the extremists (and the rest offer tepid support at best). Most Pakistanis see the militants as America’s enemy, not their own. The Taliban is perceived as the only group standing up against the unwelcome American presence in the region. Some forgive the Taliban’s excesses because it is cloaked in the garb of religion. Pakistan, they reason, was created for Islam, and the Taliban is merely asking for Pakistan to be more Islamic. Even normally vocal, urban, educated Pakistanis — those whose values and lifestyles would make them eligible for decapitation if the Taliban were to succeed in taking the cities — are strangely silent. Why? Because they see Musharraf and the Pakistan army as unworthy of support, both for blocking the path to democracy and for secretly supporting the Taliban as a means of countering Indian influence in Afghanistan.

    Pakistan’s problems start at the top – Los Angeles Times

    This is an excellent article on how the Pakistanis military’s long hold on power has created a situation where the Talibanization of Pakistan is tolerated even by the people who have a lot to lose from it. He has to step away and let Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto fight it out, but I don’t see it happening unless he loses control of the army.

    While on the subject of Pakistan, this blog post by Samia Altaf summarizes the hollowness of Pakistan’s “democracy”. Bhutto and Sharif have, in their past incarnations, been about as corrupt and reliant on the army as Musharraf is. So, are they good alternatives to Musharraf? Not really.

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  • Harry Potter and the idiocy of Copyrights

    Byoliveridley

    No, that is not the title of the next Harri Puttar. It’s how a slavishly devotional fan base that has spent millions of rupees buying your books, watching your movies, purchasing all your assorted paraphrenalia gets repaid. By getting sued when they pay homage to you.

    BBC NEWS | South Asia | Harry Potter and the Hindu gods

    A community group in the Indian city of Calcutta says it has been sued by JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, for breach of copyright.

    The group has been building a huge model based on Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as part of celebrations for a Hindu festival.

    If you want to know all the ways in which copyrights have gone amok in this society of ours, just go read Dean Baker.

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    More depressing water news from India

    Byoliveridley

    Climate change is a factor that will exacerbate water shortages. But the main culprits are over-exploitation, unplanned development, pollution and crazy dam building.

    The Sunday Tribune – Spectrum

    In the years to come the northern plains, heavily dependent on the Ganga, are likely to face severe water scarcity. Together with the onslaught of industrial and sewage pollutants, the river’s fate stands more or less sealed. “Among the categories dead, dying and threatened, I would put the Ganga in the dying category,” says WWF Programme Director Sejal Worah. The other heavyweight to join in the list from the Indian subcontinent is the mighty Indus. The Indus, too, has been the victim of climate change, water extraction and infrastructure development. “In all, poor planning and inadequate protection of natural means have ensured that the world population can no longer assume that water is going to flow forever,” WWF says, adding that the world’s water suppliers—rivers-on-every-continent are dying, threatening severe water shortage in the future.

    I think I will go out and enjoy the rest of this beautiful day, enough bad news!

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    Green Building in India: NOT

    Byoliveridley

    There is a buzz about green buildings. But the question is: what does one mean by building green? And how does one design policies to make the green homes of our dreams?Green is not about first building structures using lots of material and energy, and then fixing them so that they become a little more efficient. Building green is about optimizing on the local ecology, using local material as far as possible and, most importantly, building to cut the power, water and material requirements.

    via Green buildings: how to redesign | Centre for Science and Environment.

    Sunita Narain makes some excellent points about building in India, and how western architecture influenced glass facades, closed buildings, etc. make little sense in India, and how traditional building concepts, optimised for local conditions would make more sense.

    Two points:

    1. Traditional buildings are not necessarily optimised for density. To fit a lot of people in a little space, you need to build up. No, not 100s of stories, but fives and tens? It would be interesting to figure out that contradiction. But I’m no architect and I don’t know the answer
    2. The glass facade concrete skyscraper jungle look is associated with aspirational prosperity, ask any affluent Indian what they like about Hong Kong, or New York, or Singapore, and the shiny buildings will figure pretty high on the list after cleanliness and shopping. This is the kind of building associated with modernity and “class”. Making a sealed glass and concrete hell hole work in regions of high heat and humidity without large amounts of energy use for air conditioning is difficult.

    It appears, though, that at least some people are thinking about this, as this book, helpfully titled Tropical Sustainable Architecture, would attest to.

    BTW,
    Sunita Narain’s editorials for the Down to Earth magazine are always thoughtful, and required reading for anyone interested in India’s development and environmental issues.

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    Church State Separation in India

    Byoliveridley

    Meant to blog about this on Wednesday, but it’s been that kind of week!

    Debate in India: Is Rule on Yoga Constitutional? – New York Times

    At issue is a measure by the Hindu nationalist-led government of the state of Madhya Pradesh, in central India, that required public school students to practice the sun salutation and recite certain chants in Sanskrit during a statewide function on Thursday. The state government, controlled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., said that it complied with a central government policy to encourage yoga in schools and that it was inspired by a recent visit from a popular Hindu spiritual leader. Muslim and Christian groups in the state took issue not so much with the yoga exercise, but with the chants, which they said were essentially Hindu and in worship of the sun. They argued in court on Wednesday that it violated the Indian constitutional provision to separate religion and state.

    The courts did the right thing. Yoga in India is definitely associated with being Hindu, and Sanskrit as well. There has been a growing tendency among right wing Hindu organizations to conflate Hindu and Indian (they do mean the same thing, after all). I would recommend any number of essays from Amartya Sen, especially those from the Argumentative Indian for a definitive takedown of this pernicious movement. The one-line answer is that India over the last 2000+ years has been influenced by so many religions and regions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, China, Arabia, Persia, Europe) that it is a foolish to ascribe any one identity to this country.

    Whether yoga is religious practice is, like everything in this country, a matter of debate. Some people note that its recitations sometimes invoke Hindu gods, but others argue that its physical exercises have nothing to do with Hindu ritual. It is hardly uncommon for non-Hindus to practice yoga

    And a lot of Hindus celebrate Christmas by going to the temple, funny how that works, and funny how nobody’s making them do it. The issue here was always imposition by the state and choice.

    Yoga is wonderful and very good for you, and with a little care, can easily be delinked from its religious affiliations. Maybe this program can be done right, if the government is actually interested in getting it right.