Arundhati Roy Romanticises Maoist Violence Again

Arundhati Roy's article in Outlook : Walking With the Comrades

Rebuttals :
Moonwalking With The Comrades by Anirban Gupta Nigam in Outlook / Kafila
Maostan of Arundhati Roy by Salil Tripathi in Mint
9 is not 11, 10 is not 13 and We are not stupid, Ms.Roy by Aditya Kuvalekar  (The Backbencher's Blog)

My take : She should have kept to writing fiction. May be she has.

[Forbes India] The Expat Diary

Going through the acculturation experiences of foreign nationals who have taken up residence in India is always amusing and refreshing. In some ways its like seeing oneself through the looking glass, but this time the other way round.
The Expat Diary on Forbes India records such several short personal anecdotes of expats who have made India their workplace and consequently their home. In one such piece titled 'India is Not a Country Made for Everyone', SAP Labs’ Clas Neumann writes on what he has learned here and about how different it is from the country which he came from :

"...I learned more about how to conduct meetings, expectations, and I learned not to take things personally. I found this out well in my first meeting I did here with my own little management team at that time. I said let’s start at 9 a.m. I was in the room at 9 a.m. and nobody else was there. Then at 9:05 a.m. the first guy walks in and says, “Hi Clas, nice to meet you,” with no apologies for being late. By 9:20 a.m. we were complete and still chatting. In Germany the meeting would have been over by then and my boss actually would have left the room if no one appeared on time. But this is not meant as a sign of disrespect. People from my culture would easily see this as disrespect — if you’re not on time you’re not respecting my time, and it would be taken as an insult to the person you are meeting. "

Spot on! That's exactly how we are. And then he testifies to our unflinching commitment to the Great Indian 'Nick of Time' Finish.

"As recently as a month ago, I saw my incoming German colleagues who were very worried looking at how preparations were going for our TechEd conference. One day before the conference, my colleagues said, “They will never finish. Look at what state this is in, and they haven’t even put up the backdrop!” And I was thinking, “They still have one night to work.” So I said: “Relax guys, it’s just the way things go, and I can tell you it’s going to be okay by the end of the day. Tomorrow 9 a.m. it will be finished.” The next day at 8:59 a.m., it was all done and so you have to be very trustful, but usually it works."

By now you are positively giggling. But hang on, there's more. How can our tendency to mix all aspects of life effortlessly, work or personal, and to involve everyone around us in them, sometimes even before they know it, not  have manifested itself amply to him. And then how could he have resisted such temptations that we Indians dole out by giving a say to almost everyone whom we see often, in the most significant of our decisions.

"For example, there was this one incident where two colleagues fell in love, and their families did not agree and it was very tense. We sent them to Germany on assignment to get them out of the tension zone, so they could rethink things and communicate with their families from a different perspective. In Germany, people would not even approach the company with things like this."

And finally a sort-of-compliment. Yes, we are competitive and fond of degrees.

"A couple of years ago I saw so many of my engineers do their MBA and they came back knowing more than me, so I became a little competitive. I did an executive MBA from INSEAD; in Germany I would have never done this. Ten years after you start working, you would never take time during your career to pursue any sort of studies, as it puts a lot of stress on your family, and your job."

[WSJ] Rajeev Mantri : Job Creation and Income Growth

Rajeev Mantri, executive director of Navam Capital writes in WSJ: 

The distinction between job creation and income growth is not as well understood as it should be. Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman once visited China at the height of Communism, and was taken to a construction site. He asked why the contractors were not using machinery and modern equipment, and was told that the project was part of a government job creation program. Friedman replied that the spades used by the labor force should be replaced with spoons, and that would increase employment even more! The lesson is that it is easy to "create" jobs, but harder to grow incomes because incomes rise only when productivity increases. Productivity increases when companies compete and innovate.
If we are serious about creating jobs, we should focus on creating an environment where people like Jobs prosper. Bharat will become more like India.
In the current regime, India is being turned into Bharat. Well-intentioned policies that claim to employ the poor are distorting the labor market by incentivizing people to migrate back to villages from cities. The country must urbanize if it has to develop economically, it cannot continue to live in villages.
Much has been made of India's demographic dividend. An average of nearly 1 million people will be entering the work force every single month for the next 20 years, a scale unprecedented in human history. The only comparable event is the post-World War II Baby Boom in the US. This is an opportunity, and can be a huge challenge, because all those people will want to be well-fed, educated and productively employed. It would be futile for the government to even try employing so many people.

Read the full article: The Genesis of Jobs on WSJ.

[HT] The Hunger Project

Emerging India either does not know or ignores the statistics: Half its children are malnourished, a record worse than the world’s symbol for deprivation, sub-Saharan Africa. India is ranked 66th out of 88 countries in the Global Hunger Index drawn up by the International Food Policy Research Institute. India is home to a quarter of the world’s hungry – about 230 million people – according to a World Food Programme report released on March 2009. More than 455 million Indians survive on US$ 1.25 ((Rs 56) approximately) a day or less, compared with 420 million in 1981. As the government prepares to launch India’s grandest attempt yet to tackle hunger and malnutrition, the Hindustan Times announces a nationwide effort to track, investigate and report every aspect of the struggle to rid the nation of hunger.

Follow the Hunger Project on HT. 

Orissa, Jharkhand Cut Neonatal Mortality Rates

 Mothers in the tribal regions of Jharkand and Orissa are stopping their babies from dying by simply 'peer educating' and 'talking out' problems with the help of NGOs like Ekjut. TOI reports:

Prasanta Tripathy runs the NGO Ekjut, which facilitated the training. He says “there is a 45% reduction in neonatal mortality rate as well as a change in practices related to child-rearing. Besides, there is a 57% reduction in postnatal depression.”
Tripathy says they stress on “participation, learning and action — the ingredients in the making of an empowered mother and healthy baby.”
The NGO started with 20 women in three villages around Chakradharpur six years ago. By now, it has 20,000 trained women, spread across more than a thousand villages in nine districts of Jharkhand and Orissa.
Sumitra Gagrai, Ekjut group coordinator, says the core of the revolution was the community spirit unleashed, when trained female volunteers fanned out across remote villages “to encourage adolescent girls and married women to find practical solutions for good health during the pre and post pregnancy period.” 

Read the TOI reports here and here.
Just another example of how far even a handful of small basic steps can go in alleviating the seemingly intractable challenges facing us today.

D Subbarao : Why is Financial Literacy Important?

In a recently held RBI-OECD International Workshop on Financial Literacy in Bengaluru on March 22, 2010, Dr. D Subbarao, the RBI Governor, highlighted the imperative of Financial Inclusion and Financial Literacy for an economically empowered India :

5. Let me step back a bit and spend a few minutes on why financial literacy is so vital. There is virtually no country whose economy has developed and matured without a corresponding deepening of the financial sector. And such deepening is possible only when individuals and households are financially literate and are able to make informed choices about how they save, borrow and invest. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the sub prime problem would not have grown to the explosive proportions that it did if people had been financially more ‘literate’.
6. Beyond the individual level - and this is equally important - greater financial literacy can aid a better allocation of resources and thereby raise the longer-term growth potential of the economy. India clocked average growth of around nine percent in the period 2004-08 before the global financial crisis interrupted the growth trajectory. One of the key drivers of this growth has been the increased savings rate in the economy, which reached a high of 36 percent of GDP in 2007/08, the year before the crisis.
7. The increase in savings itself has been a consequence of the changing demographics and the welcome trend of rise in household savings. However, nearly half our population still lacks access to banking and other financial services. If we can redress that and provide this ‘left behind’ population access to the entire gamut of banking services, we could raise household and overall domestic savings even further, and that will fulfill one of the necessary conditions to achieve the double-digit growth that we aspire to.
8. To make that happen, we need to deepen the penetration and expand the coverage of financial services to all sections of society and to all regions of the country in a meaningful way, particularly to those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Lack of financial awareness and literacy is one of the main reasons behind lack of access to financial products or failure to use them even when they are available. An NCAER and Max New York Life study shows that in India, around 60 percent of laborers surveyed indicated that they store cash at home, while borrowing from moneylenders at high interest rates - a pattern which increases their financial vulnerability.
9. Financial literacy and awareness are thus integral to ensuring financial inclusion. This is not just about imparting financial knowledge and information; it is also about changing behaviour. For the ultimate goal is to empower people to take actions that are in their own self-interest. When consumers know of the financial products available, when they are able to evaluate the merits and demerits of each product, are able to negotiate what they want, they will feel empowered in a very meaningful way. They will know enough to demand accountability and seek redressal of grievances.  This, in turn, will enhance the integrity and quality of financial markets. One big lesson we have learnt in our outreach programmes is that financial literacy is not just a public good; it is a merit good. What this means is that by deepening financial literacy, not just individuals and households, even the society at large stands to benefit.

Read the complete text of his speech here.

[Forbes India] India's Second Tryst with Destiny

Dinesh Narayanan and Udit Misra write for Forbes India on the key issues they think India will do well to focus on in the coming times:

We’ve picked out four key challenges that the next ten years will throw up. One, the country needs a new, more remunerative approach to farming that replaces the current subsidy-ridden system. Sixty per cent of the population still survives on agriculture and figuring out a solution is now critical.

Two, India’s urban centres are bursting at the seams. So far, apart from a piecemeal approach, there’s been very little to suggest that the country is ready for the surge in urban population.

Three, the expanding society will fuel the demand for more energy. India is seriously short of stable sources of power. In the near future, the power produced will have to come from “clean” sources as the world seeks new ways to curb the damage to its environment. A sensible energy policy is, therefore, required urgently.

Finally, over the next few years, as incomes continue to climb, citizens will demand a more responsive government: New roads, better education and healthcare, to name just a few. Even though the budget has spelt out the government’s future role as an enabler rather than a provider, there is still a large swathe of services that require its supervision and execution. And for the most part, the government is invariably found wanting. How do we retool our bureaucratic machinery to be more responsive and capable so that the benefits of reform reach the people who need it the most?

 Read the full article here.