BBC NEWS | Malnutrition getting worse in India

Every lunchtime the children of Chitori Khurda gather at the Anganwadi centre in the village. It is where nutrition and health services are provided at village level.

On the day we visited, each child was given two puris (small bread puffs fried in oil) along with some sweet porridge. The allocation is 80g of food a day per child.

The children ate it, then sat hoping for more, but there was none.

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In “Propaganda and the Public Mind” (David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky), Noam Chomsky is asked “Can you think of any positive examples of humanitarian intervention?” and offers this answer:

When you look at the historical record honestly, it’s extremely hard to find any examples of use of military force undertaken for genuine humanitarian aims. [...]

In the post-Second World War period, there were a few cases, two that I know of, that are genuine: the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which got rid of Pol Pot, and the Indian invasion of hat is now Bangladesh, which stopped a huge atrocity.

(Note: Chomsky does point out that “they were not undertaken with humanitarian intent”).

Today, India is an enabler of the repressive junta in power in Burma and is guilty of doing the least in the relief effort. Another example of India Shining.

Before India, there was Ireland. But as VH-1 might ask, where are they now?

Economic Slump in the Emerald Isle: Ireland’s Luck is Running Out — Spiegel

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At the same time, the cost of living and doing business is soaring. The headline inflation rate is hovering near 5 percent, vs. 3.3 percent for the euro zone as a whole. And the euro’s rise against the dollar and the pound sterling has made Ireland much less competitive in its two main export markets. That, in turn, has led many manufacturers, both Irish and foreign, to eliminate local positions. Over the last year, big multinationals such as Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Motorola, Vodafone, and Allergan have cut scores of Irish jobs. Irish unemployment topped 5.2 percent in February, up from 4.5 percent a year ago.

The upshot, says Jim Power, chief economist at the Dublin-based financial-services group Friends First, is that Ireland’s global competitiveness has markedly deteriorated. That’s a view also shared by the European Central Bank, which recently issued a report showing that for the second year in a row, Ireland suffered the biggest decline in competitiveness of the 15 countries in the euro zone.

Multinationals Pull Back

Now Power and others fear that Ireland’s decline, coupled with increased competition from lower-cost, emerging markets, is threatening the very foreign direct investment that made its economy so successful in the past two decades. The country hosts nearly 1,000 foreign multinational companies that employ more than 150,000 workers. Led by technology giants such as Intel and Microsoft and pharmaceutical firms such as Wyeth and Amgen, these companies were attracted by Ireland’s low, 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, skilled workforce, and business-friendly environment.

There are already signs that the pace of foreign investment is slowing. A recent report from consultancy OCO Global showed that the amount of direct foreign investment into Ireland fell by 5 percent last year, to $2 billion. At the same time, the number of Irish jobs created as a result of foreign direct investment fell by 40 percent. Case in point: Last October, Amgen, the world’s biggest biotech company, announced it was shelving plans to build a billion-dollar manufacturing plant in County Cork.

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The April 2007 issue of Business Week laments about the cautious Chinese consumer: In China private consumption is less than 40% of the GDP which BW compares to India at about 60% of the GDP. Leaving the worrying about China to BW, I wish to wonder instead what this says about Indian personal spending trends. Especially in light of private consumption in developed nations: India beats out both Japan and Germany and gets scarily close to the consumption king, the USA at about 70%.

If I am reading this right, and its probable I am not (a query to the masters on PEN-L should ascertain that; expect an update shortly), Indians are on a merry spending binge, cheered on by the “flattening” world which they consider themselves an inhabitant of, impervious to the existence of a security net for the residents of the welfare states whose league they are playing in. Let us hope they do not fall off the edge!

PBS’s [wide angle] covered the Indian farmer suicide issue in their episode today. The good news is that all that sad news and sorrow is alleviated towards the end by the wisdom of Jagdish Bhagwati, globalisation’s brown knight, who offered such gems as:

India specialises in poverty

The link to the interview transcript (PDF) is currently broken, but let that not prevent you from enjoying Bhagwati elsewhere.

I have whined elsewhere extensively about the whole India Shining thing, primarily motivated by my own personal education, through my father, of the Indian freedom struggle and the values it drew on and hoped to build the new nation upon. The New York Times today has an excellent op-ed piece by Pankaj Mishra which voices my fears in an elegant way:

Gaining Power, Losing Values - New York Times

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Upholding business interests above all in its foreign policy, as in its domestic policy, China at least appears to be internally consistent. The gap between image and reality is greater in the case of India, which claims to be the world’s largest democracy, with an educated middle class and a free news media.

And yet fundamental rights to clean water, food and work remain empty abstractions to hundreds of millions of Indians, whose plight rarely impinges on the news media’s obsession with celebrity and consumption. The country’s culture of greed partly explains why a woman is killed by her husband or in-laws every 77 minutes for failing to bring sufficient dowry.

Pundits in India deplore, often gleefully, American excesses in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the inadequacies of the American news media in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But the Indian news media has yet to carry a single detailed report on the torture and extrajudicial killing of hundreds of civilians in Kashmir over the last decade.

Chinese nationalism is a tamed beast, occasionally unleashed by the Communist leadership to stir up mass protests against Japan and America. But in India, religious nationalists have run wild in the last 10 years, conducting nuclear tests, menacing minorities and threatening Pakistan with all-out war. In 2002, members of a Hindu nationalist government in the state of Gujarat, in western India, instigated and often organized the killing of as many as 1,600 Muslims.

Free markets and regular elections alone do not make a civil society. There remains the task of creating and strengthening institutions — universities, news media, human rights groups — that can focus public attention on the fate of the powerless and oppressed and spread ideas of human dignity, compassion and generosity.

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For Western nations to criticize Chinese investments in Africa or Indian overtures to Myanmar may seem hypocritical in light of the West’s history of ruthlessly exploiting Africa while appeasing its brutal dictators. But, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

However tainted in practice, the idea of virtue cannot be discarded in policymaking. By treating it with contempt, the ruling elites of India and China may soon make the world nostalgic for the days when America claimed, deeply hypocritically, its moral leadership.

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Forget non-alignment and socialism! It’s East India Co Shining baby!

Guardian | America’s dirty secret: India becomes the gasoline gusher

Sitting on the edge of the water in the Gulf of Kutch on India’s western shore is one of America’s dirty secrets. A mass of steel pipes and concrete boxes stretches across 13 square miles (33sq km) - a third of the area of Manhattan - which will eventually become the world’s largest petrochemical refinery.

The products from the Jamnagar complex are for foreign consumption. When complete, the facility will be able to refine 1.24m barrels of crude a day. Two-fifths of this gasoline will be sent 9,000 miles (15,000km) by sea to America.

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India is currently blocking access to certain blogging sites, such as Blogger, at Indian ISPs. For more: India - Censorship. Also, visit the Google group Bloggers Collective.

So the LTTE is in a bad spot now and wants the Indian govt to step back into the conflict in Sri Lanka. And just as in Kashmir, the people are stuck in the middle of this terrorism from all sides, and I doubt any new IPKF will do better than the previous one. A weakened LTTE, in the absence of all other Tamil representation which they so meticulously eliminated, will be only more encouragement for the Sri Lankan government.

I can remember the headier days of the LTTE, when Prabhakaran and his entourage lived in upscale houses in the street adjacent to my own, and the occasional bloody streetfights in Pandi Bazaar or elsewhere (not to forget the bomb threat we received by postcard, one fine day!)… and wondering how this would all end 20 years later. And it is now 20 years later, and it seems to be much the same.

FT.com - Sri Lanka rebels express regret over slaying of Rajiv Gandhi
By Jo Johnson in New Delhi

Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger guerrillas last night expressed "deep regret" over the assassination in 1991 of Rajiv Gandhi, then Indian prime min-ister, and called for a "new relationship" with India in which New Delhi would play an active role in resolving the island's ethnic conflict.

The unprecedented statement, made in a televised interview by Anton Balasingham, the Tamil Tigers' chief negotiator, reflects the separatist group's increasing isolation following the European Union's decision last month to follow India, the UK and the US in putting it on a list of banned organisations.

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[via RawStory] 

Guardian | Indian state bans Baa Baa Black Sheep
Maseeh Rahman in Delhi
Wednesday June 14, 2006

Tens of thousands of children at Indian schools have been told they can no longer sing popular English nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep.

In an attempt to rid schools of what is perceived as malign western influence, the school education minister in the state of Madhya Pradesh, Narottam Mishra, has commissioned a new set of rhymes written by Indians to "infuse a sense of patriotism" among five-year-olds.

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This is not the first time that the Hindu nationalist BJP has stirred a controversy by tinkering with the school curriculum. In neighbouring Gujarat state, school textbooks were rewritten to categorise religious minorities including Muslims, Christians and Parsis as "foreigners" and to extol aspects of Nazism and fascism. A social studies textbook in Gujarat said: "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time, establishing a strong administrative set-up."