from Photographers Blog:
Privileged witness to the start of life
By Vivek Prakash
It's an experience I will never forget. I have no children of my own, but when the day does come, maybe I'll be just a little bit more prepared for it.
I had come a long, long way from my usual cosmopolitan stomping ground of Mumbai, to a place just about as far interior as you can go in India. I was about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Rajasthan border in the state of Madhya Pradesh, in a village of about 700 people. This is very, very small by Indian standards. There were dusty roads that a car could barely fit down, mud houses, a scorching heat during the day which turned to a deep chill at night.
I had many ideas in my head and many questions too - what kind of emotions was I going to experience and witness? Should I be excited, or should I feel like an intruder, given the subject matter I was here to shoot? I had come a long way to shoot this, but now, standing in this little rural community health center with my camera, I felt conflicted.
from Photographers Blog:
A village of eternal bachelors
By Vivek Prakash
With the world's population set to hit 7 billion on October 31, photographers in India have been on the move to tell stories that talk about what those numbers really mean in a country as large as India - with 1.2 billion people and counting, this is supposed to be the world's largest democracy.
When you take a closer look at the statistics, you find some surprising and scary figures - the ratio of female children to males born actually declined here over the last 10 years - from 933 females for every thousand males in the 2001 census, to just 914 in 2011. The combination of cheap portable ultrasound technology and a decades-old preference for male babies -- who are seen as breadwinners -- has enabled sex-selective abortions and made worse female infanticide. In a place as wide and as vast as India, these are things that are hard to control, no matter how illegal.
We had been trying to find ways to illustrate this for some time without much success - getting access to tell this story had been taking some time. Late last month, a story about a small village in Gujarat was brought to my attention.
Journalists from the Thomson Reuters Foundation had visited Siyani, a small rural town of just 8,000 people (tiny by Indian standards) - where the social effect of such a low ratio of women meant that men were having a tough time finding brides. I set out to remote Gujarat to try and interpret this story with my camera.
Thanks MadonnaDevotta, It’s been corrected now.
Cheers,
Corinne Perkins
Gridlocked in the rush to grow
Newspapers have delighted in reporting a 100km traffic jam outside Beijing could last until mid-September. Road construction is the immediate cause for the gridlock, which stretches as far as Inner Mongolia, Chinese officials have said.
For Indian commuters battling a near-daily gridlock in all the big cities, this is an ominous sign of things to come.
India is adding vehicles at an unprecedented pace, with July clocking the highest car sales on record.
China has already overtaken the United States as the biggest auto market, and Indians are splashing out on cars across segments, from the humble Nano to the uber luxury Jaguar sedan.
But India, despite its stated goal of spending some $500 billion in the five years to March 2012 and double that sum over the next five-year period, has failed to build roads to keep up.
Transport Minister Kamal Nath’s promise to build 20 km of road a day is as full of holes as Mumbai’s roads in the monsoon, and plans for improving public transport have been slow off the ground.
Delhi’s Metro is a success story, but needs to cover a far greater distance before it can take the load off the congested roads.
Right to education: a leap that falls short?
Is the government short-changing the nation on right to education?
Not all is hunky-dory with the ‘right to education’ law that has come into force.
The law puts to work a constitutional amendment of 2002 that made education a fundamental right.
Fali Nariman, the famous jurist who argued the landmark ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution case, points out that the amendment took away more from the children than it gave to them.
Nariman says the Supreme Court in its various judgements clearly laid out the ‘right to education’ for every child till the age of 14.
However, the amendment and the Act enforcing it only covers children between 6 to 14 years of age.
Also the ‘right to education’ is further qualified as the government may decide the manner in which this education is provided.
I’m not so sure about 25% reservation in private schools for the deprived. This is again like bringing in caste reservation without evaluation and for Government’s shortcomings. If one looks at the higher education cess the govt has been collecting past 2-3 years, and yet haven’t made any significant improvement in the government schools, its again passing the buck to the private schools and bringing in the reservation there without stopping the collection of the cess money.
Bangalore: Teething troubles on path to globalisation
It has been a rather uneasy transition for Bangalore from “pensioner’s paradise” or “garden city” to the information technology capital of India.
Longtime residents often complain of immigrants from other parts of the country ruining their paradise. Such complaints have been common in Mumbai, which has witnessed waves of immigration since the 1950s, but Bangalore old-timers tend to blame the city’s problems on the “IT fellows”.
It’s fair to say the city’s infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the growing population. Traffic jams, as everywhere in the world, are incredibly annoying and travelling in Bangalore makes one wonder what exactly inspired Thomas Friedman to sing praises of this city in “The World is Flat”.
The much-maligned metro rail project is blamed for turning the city into an ugly mess. Gone are many of the broad tree-lined avenues and pretty neighbourhoods that gave the city a small town feel.
But isn’t the very existence of a metro system going to help people avoid the traffic in the future? Residents of Bangkok used to complain about the construction work on the sky rail and the elevated roads. Now, the toll roads and the sky rail are the pride and joy of Thailand’s capital.
In its zeal to become a global city, Bangalore should look eastwards. Kuala Lumpur, for example, has changed beyond recognition in the last ten years. This was a city which had a major problem with cockroaches before its makeover.
Nobody has benefited more from the arrival of immigrants than the locals. Local landlords are getting fatter and richer charging super-high rents.Local auto rickshaw drivers make a killing on those who don’t speak Kannada and local officials get lakhs from kickbacks.Local youth get more money working for IT companies than they ever would have for locally run businesses.The real problem is that locals don’t want to see others making money and living well. I see a bit of MNS in the locals that have posted comments here.Wake Up! India is ONE country.
from Global Investing:
Another nail in the Malthusian coffin?
All the talk of addressing the global imbalances throws a spotlight on contrasting demographic trends in the world's two most populous nations -- China and India.
Prior to the financial crisis, India's annual growth rate of about 9 percent seemed positively moribund next to China's double-digit economic expansion. But purely on demographics, the dimming power of the US consumer could give India an edge over its neighbour in the longer run.
That's what India's trade minister Anand Sharma seemed to suggest last week when he reminded the audience at a London conference that the country had "20 percent of the world's children":
We know that when we talk about emerging countries the consumption patterns are different. Most of China's production is meant for (markets) abroad. India consumes two-thirds of what India produces.
Indeed, Goldman Sachs projects that India's middle class will outstrip China's by 2045. This is some 15 years after half of China's population becomes either too old or too young to be part of the workforce.
Beijing's mandarins are taking note of this monumental shift in dependency ratios. After decades of enforcing a 'one-child' policy in the face of an human rights outcry, China appears to be relaxing its stance on population control. Family-planning officials in Shanghai have begun to urge eligible couples to have two children.
Well, did you get authorization from Anguri about using her picture? That should help your conscience’s conflict.
Lucas
http://www.pictobank.com/