Two Worlds, Just Across The Street

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer saga continues... What
better place to see this today, than in the booming techno towns of
India. "India has always had its upper classes, as well as legions of
the world's very poor. But today a landscape dotted with Hamilton
Courts, pressed up against the slums that serve them, has underscored
more than ever the stark gulf between those worlds, raising
uncomfortable questions for a democratically elected government about
whether India can enable all its citizens to scale the golden ladders
of the new economy, says an article in the New York Times.

According to this article, "In India, poverty has also dropped
appreciably in the last 17 years of economic change, even as the gulf
between the rich and poor has grown. More than a quarter of all
Indians still live below the official poverty line (subsisting on
roughly $1 a day); one in four city dwellers live on less than 50
cents a day; and nearly half of all Indian children are clinically
malnourished.
At the same time, the ranks of dollar millionaires have swelled to
100,000, and the Indian middle class, though notoriously hard to
define and still small, has by all indications expanded.
For those with the right skills, the good times have been very good.
Mr. Chand, 34, a business school graduate who runs the regional
operations for an American manufacturing firm, has seen his salary
grow eightfold in the last five years, which is not unusual for upper
class Indians like him."

This widening gap became very obvious to me when I visited Bangalore,
a little over a year ago. Rising sky scrapers, huge wallets,
increasing poverty and lack of infrastructure to keep with the
phenomenal growth. Similarly according to the article, "Gurgaon, a
largely privately developed city and a metonym for Indian ambition,
has seen a building frenzy to satisfy people like the Chands. The
city's population has nearly doubled in the last six years, to 1.5
million. The skyline is dotted with scaffolds. Glass towers house
companies like American Express and Accenture. Not far from Hamilton
Court, Burberry and BMW have set up shop. State services, meanwhile,
have barely kept pace. The city has neither enough water nor
electricity for the population. There is no sewage treatment plant
yet; construction is scheduled to begin this year."

"India has long lived with such inequities, and though a Maoist
rebellion is building in the countryside, the nation has for the most
part skirted social upheaval through a critical safety valve: giving
the poor their chance to vent at the ballot box. Indeed, four years
ago, voters threw out the incumbent government, with its "India
Shining" slogan, because it was perceived to have neglected the poor.
It is little wonder then that the current administration has seized on
"inclusive growth" as its mantra, and as elections approach in less
than a year, it is spending heavily on education, widely acknowledged
as a key barrier to upward mobility for the poor," says this article.

Read the full article at --
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world/asia/09gated.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Where Wealth is Health!

While India's economic growth is on the media radar, and articles
about how Americans and other westerners are going to India for it's
high quality, yet relatively cheap healthcare get written, the truth
is that there are many millions of Indians who are getting poorer and
are unable to receive proper healthcare. Capitalism is on the rise.

From a New York Times article, titled, "Royal Care for Some of India's
Patients, Neglect for Others" -- "Mr. Steeles, 60, a car dealer from
Daphne, Ala., had flown halfway around the world last month to save
his heart, at a price he could pay. He had a mitral valve repaired at
a state-of-the-art private hospital here, called Wockhardt, and for 10
days, he was recuperating in a carpeted, wood-paneled room, with a
view of a leafy green courtyard.

A dietician helped select his meals. A dermatologist came as soon as
he complained of an itch. His Royal Suite had cable TV, a computer, a
minirefrigerator, where an attendant that afternoon stashed some ice
cream, for when he felt hungry later. Three days after surgery, he was
sitting in a chair, smiling, chattering, thrilled to be alive.

On his bed lay the morning's paper. Dominating its front page was the
story of other men, many of them day laborers who laid bricks and
mixed cement for Bangalore's construction boom, who had fallen gravely
ill after drinking illegally brewed liquor. All told, more than 150
died that week, here and in neighboring Tamil Nadu State.

Not for them the care of India's best private hospitals. They had been
wheeled in by wives and brothers to the overstretched government-run
Bowring Hospital, on the other side of town. Bowring had no intensive
care unit, no ventilators, no dialysis machine. Dinner was a stack of
white bread, on which a healthy cockroach crawled while a patient,
named Yelappa, slept.

Wockhardt has 30 ventilators, including some that are noninvasive, so
the patient does not have to have a tube rammed down his throat. At
any one time, a half-dozen are in use. An elderly woman had been in
its intensive care unit for a week, on dialysis; her family wanted to
do whatever possible to keep her alive, no matter the cost.

At Bowring, one of the young doctors, named Harish, said a ventilator
and a dialysis machine would have allowed him to keep half of his
patients alive. The most severe case, Mohammed Amin, was breathing
with the aid of a hand pump that his wife squeezed silently. Dr.
Harish sent the relative of one man to get blood tests done at the
nearest private hospital; there was no equipment to do the test here.
Then the doctor rushed to the triage section in Bowring's lobby, where
the newest patient, writhing, resisting, disoriented from the poison
in his gut, had to be tied down with bedsheets."

Universal healthcare is not just needed for the US, it is required for
other capitalistic societies like India as well.

Read the full NYT article at--
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/weekinreview/01sengupta.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Don't throw It Out...

One of my pet peeves has been food wastage. I am appalled at the
portions served in restaurants and the amount of food wasted,
considering how many people and children are going hungry each day.

A really concise commentary in the Hartford Courant today emphasizes
this, "We obviously have no way of getting that softening head of
lettuce in the back of the fridge to a Third-World country, and if we
could we still wouldn't halt global warming. But we can be more
careful about what we buy and eat. In most major cities, food rescue
organizations save and refrigerate food from participating cafeterias
and restaurants. Cities such as San Francisco compost organic wastes.
Some restaurants are offering smaller portions.

These are relatively easy steps, useful in themselves and helpful in
informing larger decisions on food. Is the subsidy of corn ethanol
substantially hurting the production of food? Do U.S. agricultural
policies hurt local farming around the world? Can we continue to spend
hundreds of billions on wasteful farm bills?

If we remember that food is precious and not to be wasted, perhaps we
can make better decisions across the board."

Read the full commentary at --
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-compost.artjun02,0,3258854.story

Food Crisis -- Argument versus Action!

I was wondering why it took so long for the he said and she said to
begin after Bush made his statement, saying that the food crisis was
started by India's middle class.

Yesterday, yoga guru, Baba Ramdev, voiced his frustration at Bush's
statements and today the New York Times reports that, "Instead of
blaming India and other developing nations for the rise in food
prices, Americans should rethink their energy policy — and go on a
diet. That has been the response, basically, of a growing number of
politicians, economists and academics in this country, who are angry
at statements by top United States officials that India's rising
prosperity is to blame for food inflation. The debate has sometimes
devolved into what sounded like petty playground taunts over who are
the real gluttons devouring the world's resources."

As someone who lived and grew up in India it amazes me to see wastage
of food and other natural resources, not just by non-Indians but by
visiting Indians as well. The same folks who struggle without water in
Chennai, waste water in the US as though it was an eternal resource.
The same folks who watch people starve in Delhi, throw away food like
there was plenty of it to go around, the same folks who go without
power in Kolkatta, leave fans and lights on all over the place without
conserving any energy.

Instead of arguing, it is high time each individual stepped back and
assessed what they are each doing to make the problem better or worse.
Time to stop the bickering and get to some real action, don't you
think?

See the Times Of India video, with Baba Ramdev's statements here--
http://broadband.indiatimes.com/showvideo/3034648.cms

See the New York Times article here --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/05/14/business/worldbusiness/14food.html&tntemail0=y

Another recent New York Times article on this subject-

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/weekinreview/18martin.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

A Time Magazine article on this-

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1806579,00.html

Read about Bush's statements here--
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/07/AR2008050703405.html

See what President Bush said about India being responsible for the
food crisis here--
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/may/03food.htm

Empty Bellies In India Add to Global Hunger

Effects of the global food crisis are rippling across the world. Each
time I see wasted food at restaurants and homes, I think of how many
mouths this food, that just got thrown into garbage, might have fed.

The New York Times has been publishing several articles and editorials
on the subject of hunger and the food crisis. Todays paper carries an
article titled, "Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger." The
article features examples from several poverty stricken nations, real
life people who are struggling to eat, and do not know where their
next meal will come from. The photograph itself is an eye opener.

An excerpt --
"The rising prices are altering menus, and not for the better. In
India, people are scrimping on milk for their children. Daily bowls of
dal are getting thinner, as a bag of lentils is stretched across a few
more meals.
Maninder Chand, an auto-rickshaw driver in New Delhi, said his family
had given up eating meat altogether for the last several weeks.
Another rickshaw driver, Ravinder Kumar Gupta, said his wife had
stopped seasoning their daily lentils, their chief source of protein,
with the usual onion and spices because the price of cooking oil was
now out of reach. These days, they eat bowls of watery, tasteless dal,
seasoned only with salt."

We only hear about India and China being the economic boom towns. Very
few speak about the majority in these fast growing economies who are
struggling to put food on the table everyday. The more we become aware
of issues such as these, the more obvious are the misplaced priorities
of many governments and policy makers.

Read the full article at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html&tntemail0=y

Hair Color Kills

We all know that coloring your hair is not good for health, because
our skin absorbs some of the harsh chemicals in hair color. But this
news item below, takes it to a new level. Hair color can kill you!!!

The New York Times reports that, "The authorities in Uttar Pradesh
State have banned the sale of a locally made hair dye after
debt-ridden farmers were found to be drinking it to end their lives, a
state official said. At least 11 farmers have died from swallowing the
cheap dye in a drought-hit part of the state in the last three months,
he said. In parts of western and southern India, the dire economic
state of farmers has been blamed for thousands of suicides in recent
years."

Link --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntget=2008/04/12/world/asia/12briefs-HAIRDYEBANNE_BRF.html&tntemail0=y&oref=slogin

Giving Home

From the New York Times --

"An important man from the World Bank recently arrived in this
isolated village, where monkeys prowl rutted roads, rain pours through
the school roof and the native son who achieved the most did so by
going away.

On a visit to his home last month, Dilip Ratha walked through fields
toward his father's farmland near Sindhekela.
Lessons about global poverty were waiting, but so were his sisters'
chapattis. Migrant and migration scholar, Dilip Ratha was home.

No one has done more than Mr. Ratha to make migration and its
potential rewards a top-of-the-agenda concern in the world's
development ministries. And no place has done more to shape his views
than this forgotten hamlet, where he studied under the lone
streetlight and began a poor boy's improbable journey to the front
ranks of an elite field.

"When I think about the effects of migration, I think about
Sindhekela," he said.

Working from his office in Washington five years ago, Mr. Ratha
produced the first global tally of remittances, the money that
migrants send home, and stunned experts from himself on down with the
discovery of their size. Gathered from a trickle of hard-earned cash,
the sums now exceed $300 billion a year.

In subsequent work, Mr. Ratha, 45, has pushed to reduce money-transfer
fees and increase the productivity of the money that is sent. Allies
say his work has prompted projects in governments and beyond that
could benefit millions of people. Skeptics argue that if migration
brought development, Mexico would be Switzerland."

Read the full article at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/03/17/world/asia/17remit.html&tntemail0=y

Depression and Anxiety Affects All

A very revealing article from the New York Times about Depression in India.

An excerpt--
"Depression and anxiety have long been seen as Western afflictions,
diseases of the affluent. But new studies find that they are just as
common in poor countries, with rates up to 20 percent in a given year.

Researchers say that even in places with very poor people, the
ailments require urgent attention. Severe depression can be as
disabling as physical diseases like malaria, the researchers say, and
can have serious economic effects. If a subsistence farmer is so
depressed that he cannot get out of bed, neither he nor his children
are likely to eat.

In India, as in much of the developing world, depression and anxiety
are rarely diagnosed or treated. With a population of more than one
billion, India has fewer than 4,000 psychiatrists, one-tenth the
United States total. Because most psychiatrists are clustered in a few
urban areas, the problem is much worse elsewhere.

As a result, most Indians with mental illness go untreated, especially
in poor and rural areas. "There is a huge treatment gap for people
with depression," said Dr. Vikram Patel of the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the psychiatrist who began the Siolim
project. "In most places in the developing world, 80 percent to 90
percent of people with severe depression don't receive adequate
treatment."

Read the full article at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntget=2008/03/11/health/11psych.html&tntemail0=y&oref=slogin

Slum Tourism - Can we stoop so low?

An excerpt from an article in the Travel section of the Sunday New York Times --
"Slum tourism, or "poorism," as some call it, is catching on. From the
favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the
garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while,
beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising —
slums. When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and
Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough
customers for one tour a day. Now, he's running two or three a day and
recently expanded to rural areas.

Slum tourism isn't for everyone. Critics charge that ogling the
poorest of the poor isn't tourism at all. It's voyeurism. The tours
are exploitative, these critics say, and have no place on an ethical
traveler's itinerary.

"Would you want people stopping outside of your front door every day,
or maybe twice a day, snapping a few pictures of you and making some
observations about your lifestyle?" asked David Fennell, a professor
of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario. Slum
tourism, he says, is just another example of tourism's finding a new
niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners
feel better about their station in life. "It affirms in my mind how
lucky I am — or how unlucky they are," he said.

Not so fast, proponents of slum tourism say. Ignoring poverty won't
make it go away. "Tourism is one of the few ways that you or I are
ever going to understand what poverty means," said Harold Goodwin,
director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism in Leeds,
England. "To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty
doesn't exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity."

Read the full article at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/03/09/travel/09heads.html&tntemail0=y

Now They Call It Reproductive Outsourcing!!!!

Talk about taking advantage of the poor, the surrogate mom saga
continues, and is in full swing it sounds like.

Read this excerpt from a New York Times feature article --
" An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly
expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers
for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests
from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India's mix of
skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European
countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about
$25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States.
That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother,
which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air
tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization
and a second to collect the baby)."

Read the full article at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/03/10/world/asia/10surrogate.html&tntemail0=y

Another attempt at Reducing Female Foeticide

As young college girls, my friends and I were doing what we could to
help disseminate information about Female Foeticide in India. In fact
one of the most terrible moments of my teenaged years was when I was
researching this subject and I found out about the how infant girls
are killed in some of the interior regions of the state of Tamilnadu.
Piping hot chicken broth being oured down their throats till they die,
poisonous sap given to female infants and what not.

From the CS Monitor --
"Salem district, a mostly rural part of Tamil Nadu, has a longstanding
reputation as a deathtrap for baby girls. The Vellala Gounder
community, the dominant caste there, owns most of the land and is
intent on retaining property rights within the family. Sons represent
lineage; daughters marry and relocate to their husbands' homes. As a
result, local women, like Lakshmi, who gave birth to a girl early last
year, may refuse to nurse their newborns. They leave it to midwives or
mothers-in-law to administer the oleander sap, say anti-infanticide
activists.Nearly 60 percent of girls born in Salem District are killed
within three days of birth, according to the local social welfare
department. That doesn't count the growing number of abortions there
to ensure a girl baby won't be carried to term. Amid such stubborn
statistics, activists are at work to counter the forces of tradition.
A focus of their work: improving the standing and self-image of women
themselves."

Then a cradle scheme was introduced by the Tamilnadu government to
allow parents to anonymously drop off their girl babies, in an open
cradle outside orphanages. No one would question the parents dropping
off these babies, and they would be taken care of by the government as
orphanages.

From the Hindu -
"In 1992, the Tamil Nadu government started the Cradle Baby Scheme
primarily in response to reports of female infanticide in certain
pockets of the State. Studies showed that there were about 3,000 cases
of female infanticide every year in Tamil Nadu, adding up to a fifth
of all female infant deaths in the State. The government launched the
cradle scheme under which parents who did not wish to keep their girl
babies could leave them in cradles kept at government reception
centres. It was started with one reception centre each in Salem,
Madurai, Theni, and Dindigul, areas most notorious for female
infanticide. In April 2001, it was extended to the whole of Tamil Nadu
- reception centres, totalling 188, were set up at all PHCs and major
government hospitals."

Now Reuters reports that --
"India is offering to pay poor families nearly $3,000 to bring up
their girl children, and discourage the widespread practice of
aborting the female foetus which has led to a skewed gender balance in
parts of the country."

Scary isn't it, that with India fast becoming an economic superpower,
problems such as these continue to plague the country!

Read the full article from Reuters at --
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSP215468

Link to the article in the Christian Science Monitor --
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0209/p11s01-wosc.html

Link to the Hindu article -
http://www.hindu.com/fline/fl2211/stories/20050603006301600.htm

Will world hunger turn to mass starvation?

Everyone is talking about Economic Growth and how India and China are
becoming world economic leaders and how the middle and rich classes
are benefitting tremendously from this. The challenges faced by these
countries and those poor and downtrodden, who are getting poorer are
often ignored. This editorial in the New York Times talk about the
challenges faced by India and China, because of the Food Shortage
caused by population growth and the so called "economic progress". The
rich get richer the poor get poorer... This mantra is becoming common
in these countries as well..

An excerpt from this editorial in the New York Times --
"The world has faced periodic bouts when it looked as if population
growth would outstrip the food supply. Each time, food production has
grown to meet demand. This time it might not be so easy.

Population growth and economic progress are part of the problem.
Consumption of meat and other high-quality foods —mainly in China and
India— has boosted demand for grain for animal feed. Poor harvests due
to bad weather in this country and elsewhere have contributed. High
energy prices are adding to the pressures."

Read the full editorial at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntget=2008/03/03/opinion/03mon1.html&tntemail0=y&oref=slogin

The not-so-latent Energy Crisis in India

A question that most Indians are asking is about Energy. With planned
regular power cuts in large cities like Chennai, Bangalore and
Hyderabad, how if the country going to deal with the burgeoning
populations demand for energy?

An excerpt from an interesting article about energy in the New York Times --

"A beacon of India's red-hot economy, this new suburb on the edge of
the capital, New Delhi, is also a symbol of India's fast-growing
hunger for energy. By the government's own estimates, energy
consumption in this country of 1.1 billion is expected to quadruple
over the next 25 years, inevitably expanding India's emissions of
greenhouse gases.

At the moment, it is a mixed blessing that Gurgaon remains an island
of air-conditioned malls and roaring, round-the-clock office towers,
and that behind this brightly lighted boomtown lies a vast nation of
darkness and cow-dung-fueled stoves.

Almost half of India's population has no access to the electricity
grid, and many more people suffer hours without power. Nearly 700,000
Indians rely on animal waste and firewood as fuel for cooking. As a
result, India's per capita carbon footprint remains a small fraction
of that of the industrialized world — the average American produces 16
times the emissions of the average Indian — and in turn empowers the
central Indian argument for its right to consume more, not less,
energy in the future."

Read the full article at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/03/02/world/asia/02india.html&tntemail0=y

India's Poor Join the Jetset