from The Human Impact:
Does marriage stop prostitution? Indian village thinks so
Is marriage a guarantee that a woman won't be prostituted?
It's a question that played heavily on my mind recently when I went to the remote village of Wadia in India's western region of Gujarat to cover a mass wedding and engagement ceremony of 21 girls, which was aimed at breaking a centuries-old tradition of prostitution.
I arrived in the small, neglected hamlet on the eve of the big ceremony. Preparations were well underway.
Soon-to-be-brides sat inside the mud-walled compounds of their homes surrounded by singing female relatives, with "haldi" or turmeric paste smeared on the faces and arms - a South Asian pre-wedding ritual believed to make the skin "glow".
Sporting long, curled moustaches, large turbans and gold studs in their ears, old men idled on charpoys outside, smoking beedis under the shade of trees.
They told me they were from the Saraniya community - a once nomadic group who inhabited the arid landscape of Gujarat and the neighbouring Rajasthan.
Human waste corroding Indian railway network
Human faeces is scattered across India’s 64,400 kilometres of rail lines.
One of the world’s largest surface transport networks, carrying 30 million people and 2.8 tonnes of goods daily, is being downed by those using it.
A government panel report this month said that human waste from open-discharge toilets used by passengers is damaging tracks and associated infrastructure.
The report recommended that toilets with nil or harmless discharge be installed within the next five years in all 43,000 carriages used by the railways.
“Apart from the issue of hygiene, this has several serious safety implications arising out of corrosion of rails and related hardware,” the report said.
Waste is dumped directly on to the tracks through small holes from western-style and squat toilets inside trains.
Only a handful of luxury tourist trains like the “Palace on Wheels”, running between New Delhi and Rajasthan, have bathrooms with well-built toilets.
Politicians like Mamta do not want common people and Industries to see growing. These guys know if they let them educate, give better facilities, give them opportunity to grow, then who will care for illiterate / poorly educated politicians.
We must dump these politicians like our railway is dumping human faeces.
from Photographers Blog:
License to kill
By Danish Siddiqui
Mumbai provides everyone living in it with an opportunity to earn and survive. Be it a white-collared job in a multinational company located in one of the city’s plush high rise buildings or killing rats by night in the filthiest and dirtiest parts of India's financial capital. This time, my tryst was with the latter.
I decided I wanted to meet Mumbai's rat-killer army employed by the city's civic body. Very little is known about this tireless force that works the bylanes of the metropolis every night. Mumbai's municipal corporation employs 44 rat killers and also has a freelance contingent, who aspire to be on the payrolls one day. Employees of the pest control department receive a salary of 15,000 to 17,000 Indian Rupees ($294 to 333) while contract laborers are paid 5 Indian rupees ($0.10) per rat they kill. The rat killers are expected to kill at least 30 rodents per night and hand over the carcasses to civic officials in the morning. If they fall short by even one rodent, they are expected to make it up the next night or else they stand to lose a day’s pay.
Importing Ukraine stray dogs above the existing Indian stray dogs is a great idea of the economist of India. I am sure Ukraine would be too happy to export its stray dogs.
Why not send a proposal to the Indian government for a quick action on this brilliant break through idea of importing Ukraine dogs to kill Indian rats?
from Photographers Blog:
City of joy
By Rupak de Chowdhuri
It’s festive time in Kolkata, with the Durga festival celebrated across the city, before Diwali celebrations fill the city with light. Kolkata has been called the "City of Joy," a title which was immortalized in a book by Dominique Lapierre. It tells the story of the poorest of the poor who still somehow find hope and joy in life. Little did I know I was about to come face-to-face with such a story.
I hunt for pictures every day. One day, I was looking for pictures when an old friend told me to go to a place where I was guaranteed to find a good story. Because of my curious nature, I started to walk in search of the story I’d been told about in the middle of Kolkata. I started searching among the food stalls because I wouldn’t believe it until I saw them myself.
At last I found them. And I stood stunned, like other customers in front of the food stall. I watched for half an hour.
The next day I came back and started talking to other people at the food stall. The other workers said they were a happy family once. They lived nearby for forty years. A few years ago, they moved to a village about 45 minutes away by train. I went home but I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I didn’t sleep at all that night.
Tears dont help but did not realise that they flow sometimes unknowingly !
Why should the government control inflation?
The ‘reform agenda’ understood as ‘market-oriented reform’ or giving more space to market mechanism in food and fuel economy seems to have been held up.
The government can not be seen to be doing away with subsidies just as prices are up. Its hand is stayed for now.
But is that enough for say the gross national happiness?
Food and fuel inflation has been in the news for a while.
The government has no short-term control over supply side issues causing price rise like a bad monsoon leading to a low harvest or floods, but it can control the rising demand by reining in liquidity.
It is guarded on doing so for fear of stifling growth.
Is that fair to the poor?
The economic paradox of north-east India
India’s seven northeastern states, known as the seven sisters, have been “on the map, but off the mind”, if one goes by the title of a Tehelka-organised seminar on the Northeast.
The region, connected to India by a narrow stretch of land called the “chicken’s neck”, has been through a string of conflicts, seen the rise of many rebel groups, lack of infrastructure and poverty.
The World Bank describes conditions in the region as a low-level equilibrium of poverty, non-development, civil conflict and lack of faith in political leadership.
According to the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region, more than 426 billion rupees were kept for the northeast between 1998 and 2006.
Also, central government ministries have been earmarking 10 percent of their annual budgets for northeastern states since 1998.
The Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India has said that funds to the northeastern states add up to more than what India gets from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
Even with the constant and heavy flow of funds, why is development still distant from the seven sisters?
i would love to know the answer to your question. Born and living in Assam, I wonder how can politicians keep lying to us. Are we blind?
Is ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ poverty porn?
“As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too…Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn,” wrote London Times’ columnist Alice Miles.
The phrase “poverty porn” spread across the Indian media as commentators nodded in agreement or shook their heads even before the film premiered in its native Mumbai and India could (legally) watch it.
A group of the city’s slum dwellers, including children, protested against the word “dog”. A social activist filed a defamation case in Patna. And this week, hundreds of slum dwellers in Bihar’s capital ransacked a movie theatre demanding the title be changed.
So, is it really “poverty porn” for the Westerner’s delectation? Are beatings, torture, and the maiming of street beggars a sick form of adult exotica?
Perhaps the question can be rephrased: does a morbid fascination with the suffering of others find a place in art and is “Slumdog” are a striking example of this?
Be it a film on the Nazi holocaust, or based on crime, or a painful examination of the horrors of drug abuse (Trainspotting?), viewers can gawk at the world’s dirty underbelly whether or not they would describe themselves as pain perverts.
But the film has caused real offense in some parts.
I really dont find the movie offending in any way. The only things that i agree with is that its a bit odd that Jamal speaks perfect english, but that happens in many many other movies too.
Whose poor is poor?
“To define is to limit,” wrote T.S. Eliot.
Indeed sometimes, to limit things, they just may have been defined in a particular manner.
This struck home when I saw a communication by the World Bank on poverty estimates.
The World Bank produced an update of poverty numbers for the developing world based on an international price survey conducted in 2005.
The latest figures put the percentage of India’s people living below $1.25-a-day poverty line at 42 percent in 2005. This was an improvement on the 60 percent figure in 1981.
On the other hand, the government’s Economic Survey 2007-08 claims a poverty ratio of 22 percent for the country.
There is a huge difference between the two figures. According to the World Bank figure nearly half of India is defined as poor.
All the new so called progress is just because the CEO wants to have cheap Indian service labor. Slavery is back but it is by the Internet. As the backlash against outsourcing and CEOs increases in the West in the global crisis, India will be the main looser. Nehru and its founder wants socialist India for the poors but the Brahman caste want the capitalism so only few gets the benefits while rest loose. With this much population and caste system and a downturn economy based on service sectors. It is a real challenge to the shining India.
India’s Advani needs help on “money matters”
India’s 80-year-old opposition leader says he needs help on “money matters”.
Not only does his wife pay all the bills at home, but he asked business leaders on Tuesday for help in drawing up a new economic model which does not ape the West.
He also had some strong words for the Congress-led government, accusing it of failing to control inflation and failing to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor.
When Advani’s own coalition government was in power, it followed pretty similar policies, except with more emphasis on privatisation of state-run companies. But it lost power partly for claiming that India was shining, when poverty was still rampant.
So it’s fair enough to look for economically sustainable ideas to help India’s poor, in fact it is probably essential to address widespread poverty more aggressively.
But is Advani being realistic to suggest there is an alternative to a “Western” development model in the modern world?
And is it right that a man who could be India’s next prime minister so blithely admits to not really understanding economics or money matters?
till now mr advani has seem to be very selfish as his main concern seems to be only prime minister post..in his own regime as deputy prime minister he is focussing on privatisation and the policies followed that time has resulted increased inflation at this hour.When people are dying from poverty he is having his india shining program,and till now he didnt even given a single thought that at this inflation rate how much mid term elections can burden the country but he is only intrested in his PM post and saying that i dont understand money matters…while most of the corrouption cases were filed for nda govt members
