So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,blue skies from pain.Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?A smile from a veil?Do you think you can tell?And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees?Hot air for a cool breeze?Cold comfort for change?And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?How I wish, how I wish you were here.We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,Running over the same old ground. What have you found? The same old fears.Wish you were here.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
God listens to you, Mr. Bush
50000 dead in china and counting, 90000 dead in myanmar and still counting. Mr. Bush there should be some relief to percieved food crisis that the world faces. Though there will as many lesser mouths to feed, but there will be twice the number of hands not available to produce the surpuls, that would have fed the world.
India, has to wait for its own share of calamity, some wil die in the scorching heat, and then the floods will arrive and finaly the landslides. This is guaranteed. If God would listen to you further, He Would bestow on us an earthquake or a cyclone, and more millions would be lost. Then Terrorist are doing their bit. So, as far as your immediate botheration is concerned. He is looking after it.
But then, We can produce in no time, by the time you wink we will have another army ready. who will eat healthy and produce more so that America can eat their double Mac burgers with extra cheese, and yes, diet coke.
India, has to wait for its own share of calamity, some wil die in the scorching heat, and then the floods will arrive and finaly the landslides. This is guaranteed. If God would listen to you further, He Would bestow on us an earthquake or a cyclone, and more millions would be lost. Then Terrorist are doing their bit. So, as far as your immediate botheration is concerned. He is looking after it.
But then, We can produce in no time, by the time you wink we will have another army ready. who will eat healthy and produce more so that America can eat their double Mac burgers with extra cheese, and yes, diet coke.
Doing business the hard way in
By Simon Denyer
HAJIPUR, India (Reuters) - The white envelope filled with ten 500 rupee notes was dispatched to the electricity board official as a "goodwill gesture".
Soon it came back, with a message from a subordinate. The official was not playing ball -- at least not at that price.
"He refused to accept it, and now he is cooking up a problem," the factory manager said as the envelope was handed back. "I will have to pay the bugger 20,000 in the evening."
The manager had wanted a second power line for an extension for his small factory in the Hajipur Industrial Area in Bihar. A simple request, the official had threatened to tie it up in endless red tape, unless he was paid.
The routine way the bribe was offered, and the way the episode unfolded in front of a Reuters correspondent, offers a tiny insight into the problems of doing business in a state which has become a byword for poverty, lawlessness and corruption.
India's boom has not reached Bihar, a state of 90 million people almost completely disconnected from the global economy.
It is the country's poorest and one of its slowest growing states, with "exceptionally low" levels of private investment, according to the World Bank. There is no sign of any foreign investment at all.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took over two years ago promising to turn things around. Since then he has been wooing rich Indians at home and abroad, trying to attract the investment his state so desperately needs.
Last December, the World Bank said he was moving in the right direction. His government had initiated comprehensive reforms, it said, improved the investment climate, stepped up public investment and improved the delivery of health and education services -- albeit from an extremely low base.
The Bank loaned Kumar's government $225 million, but private investors have not been so enthusiastic. India's biggest industrialists have been visiting the state capital Patna, but so far they have kept their money firmly in their pockets.
The sad fact of Bihar is that it has little or no raw materials, intermittent power, terrible roads, a reputation for kidnapping businessmen and some of the least business-friendly bureaucrats in the capitalist world.
"People say things have changed, but we have yet to see that change," said the manager. "The red tape is the same, the bureaucracy is the same."
Law and order may be improving but Kumar's reforms are still only scratching the surface of the problem, says Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna.
"Why would anyone invest in Bihar?," he asked. "In a place like Bihar you have to build everything from scratch. Where is the rate of return?"
A HOPELESS PLACE
Hajipur is Bihar's premier industrial park.
Its factories get power when the rest of the state is in darkness, but only because they pay bribes. There is no drainage -- factories just dump tens of thousands of litres of effluent every day in nearby ditches or ponds.
Squatters camp on the grass verges beside the factory walls, cows munch grass and wander across the pot-holed roads. Armed guards man security gates to ward off kidnappers.
"This so-called industrial area is really in a pathetic condition," the manager said. "Bihar really is a hopeless place to do business."
On the wall behind his head he displays nearly two dozen licences he needs to keep his business open, standards for health, safety, labour laws and pollution. Each costs a few hundred rupees a year to renew, plus a 10,000 rupee bribe.
"Twenty-three departments have the power to shut down this unit," he said. "They create problems, make money, go back."
"So much for a liberal economy."
Rajesh Singh took a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) at Bombay University, before returning to Bihar to set up a tiny factory on his family's farmland to manufacture jams, juices, sauces, pickles and canned fruits.
"I realised things in Bihar were not very good, so I decided to start an agri-venture," he said. "It was a mix of good potential and good intentions."
But Singh has found the odds stacked up heavily against A1 Farm Solutions. His friends and even his father tried to convince him out of the idea, before his bank manager took over.
"The banker was telling me I was a fool to leave my job and start a business here," he said. "That is the attitude to coming back, to dissuade you."
It took Singh five years to get a bank loan, of just 500,000 rupees. To get it, he needed to offer 3 million rupees as security and have 250,000 parked in fixed-term deposits.
Today, his loan has been extended to 4 million rupees -- still, in his terms, "a meagre amount", equivalent to just 10 days of raw material and labour costs.
"I had a lot of orders from the UK, from Sainsbury's for lychees, but I couldn't complete them because bankers are not ready to back us," he said. "I am educated and I have assets. If I can't get finance, how can ordinary Biharis get finance?"
If bankers were not hard enough to cope with, Singh has also found himself sucked into the divisive caste-based politics and society of Bihar.
His high-caste parents feared they would be made outcastes because he employs Dalits or "untouchables" in a food processing factory, since upper-caste Indians are barred from eating anything which has touched a Dalit hand.
Then a lower-caste boy was killed on his farm when he fell under a tractor trailer. A local politician tried to exploit the issue to get Dalit votes, filing a police complaint in which he claimed the boy had been shot in the head.
Although everyone knew this was untrue, the accident cost him a year, he said.
"No one was willing to work for us, we couldn't get financing," Singh said, adding that all the time the police had been demanding money to drop the charges.
As we travelled down the pot-holed road to Singh's factory, a 35-km, three hour trip on a "state highway", he looked around at the congestion, the poverty, the crumbling infrastructure.
"Look at this," Singh said. "Someone has to come back... but at times you feel like asking 'what am I doing with my life'."
Is anywhere in the world more challenging to do business? "Maybe Somalia," he said. "They are shooting at you there."
HAJIPUR, India (Reuters) - The white envelope filled with ten 500 rupee notes was dispatched to the electricity board official as a "goodwill gesture".
Soon it came back, with a message from a subordinate. The official was not playing ball -- at least not at that price.
"He refused to accept it, and now he is cooking up a problem," the factory manager said as the envelope was handed back. "I will have to pay the bugger 20,000 in the evening."
The manager had wanted a second power line for an extension for his small factory in the Hajipur Industrial Area in Bihar. A simple request, the official had threatened to tie it up in endless red tape, unless he was paid.
The routine way the bribe was offered, and the way the episode unfolded in front of a Reuters correspondent, offers a tiny insight into the problems of doing business in a state which has become a byword for poverty, lawlessness and corruption.
India's boom has not reached Bihar, a state of 90 million people almost completely disconnected from the global economy.
It is the country's poorest and one of its slowest growing states, with "exceptionally low" levels of private investment, according to the World Bank. There is no sign of any foreign investment at all.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took over two years ago promising to turn things around. Since then he has been wooing rich Indians at home and abroad, trying to attract the investment his state so desperately needs.
Last December, the World Bank said he was moving in the right direction. His government had initiated comprehensive reforms, it said, improved the investment climate, stepped up public investment and improved the delivery of health and education services -- albeit from an extremely low base.
The Bank loaned Kumar's government $225 million, but private investors have not been so enthusiastic. India's biggest industrialists have been visiting the state capital Patna, but so far they have kept their money firmly in their pockets.
The sad fact of Bihar is that it has little or no raw materials, intermittent power, terrible roads, a reputation for kidnapping businessmen and some of the least business-friendly bureaucrats in the capitalist world.
"People say things have changed, but we have yet to see that change," said the manager. "The red tape is the same, the bureaucracy is the same."
Law and order may be improving but Kumar's reforms are still only scratching the surface of the problem, says Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna.
"Why would anyone invest in Bihar?," he asked. "In a place like Bihar you have to build everything from scratch. Where is the rate of return?"
A HOPELESS PLACE
Hajipur is Bihar's premier industrial park.
Its factories get power when the rest of the state is in darkness, but only because they pay bribes. There is no drainage -- factories just dump tens of thousands of litres of effluent every day in nearby ditches or ponds.
Squatters camp on the grass verges beside the factory walls, cows munch grass and wander across the pot-holed roads. Armed guards man security gates to ward off kidnappers.
"This so-called industrial area is really in a pathetic condition," the manager said. "Bihar really is a hopeless place to do business."
On the wall behind his head he displays nearly two dozen licences he needs to keep his business open, standards for health, safety, labour laws and pollution. Each costs a few hundred rupees a year to renew, plus a 10,000 rupee bribe.
"Twenty-three departments have the power to shut down this unit," he said. "They create problems, make money, go back."
"So much for a liberal economy."
Rajesh Singh took a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) at Bombay University, before returning to Bihar to set up a tiny factory on his family's farmland to manufacture jams, juices, sauces, pickles and canned fruits.
"I realised things in Bihar were not very good, so I decided to start an agri-venture," he said. "It was a mix of good potential and good intentions."
But Singh has found the odds stacked up heavily against A1 Farm Solutions. His friends and even his father tried to convince him out of the idea, before his bank manager took over.
"The banker was telling me I was a fool to leave my job and start a business here," he said. "That is the attitude to coming back, to dissuade you."
It took Singh five years to get a bank loan, of just 500,000 rupees. To get it, he needed to offer 3 million rupees as security and have 250,000 parked in fixed-term deposits.
Today, his loan has been extended to 4 million rupees -- still, in his terms, "a meagre amount", equivalent to just 10 days of raw material and labour costs.
"I had a lot of orders from the UK, from Sainsbury's for lychees, but I couldn't complete them because bankers are not ready to back us," he said. "I am educated and I have assets. If I can't get finance, how can ordinary Biharis get finance?"
If bankers were not hard enough to cope with, Singh has also found himself sucked into the divisive caste-based politics and society of Bihar.
His high-caste parents feared they would be made outcastes because he employs Dalits or "untouchables" in a food processing factory, since upper-caste Indians are barred from eating anything which has touched a Dalit hand.
Then a lower-caste boy was killed on his farm when he fell under a tractor trailer. A local politician tried to exploit the issue to get Dalit votes, filing a police complaint in which he claimed the boy had been shot in the head.
Although everyone knew this was untrue, the accident cost him a year, he said.
"No one was willing to work for us, we couldn't get financing," Singh said, adding that all the time the police had been demanding money to drop the charges.
As we travelled down the pot-holed road to Singh's factory, a 35-km, three hour trip on a "state highway", he looked around at the congestion, the poverty, the crumbling infrastructure.
"Look at this," Singh said. "Someone has to come back... but at times you feel like asking 'what am I doing with my life'."
Is anywhere in the world more challenging to do business? "Maybe Somalia," he said. "They are shooting at you there."
India struggles to tame its heart of darkness
( ofcourse this is a copyright violation, reuters would sue me....)
By Simon Denyer
PATNA, India, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Young girls and their mothers huddle under shawls in the central reservation of one of the city's main streets, picking through trash for grimy metal scraps that might earn them 20 rupees (half a dollar) a day.
Buses and autorickshaws belt out black fumes beside them on the congested, muddy street, dogs pick through huge piles of garbage by the roadside, men urinate at their side. This is Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India's poorest and one of its slowest growing states economically. On a rainy day, Patna can seem like some post-apocalyptic nightmare, with poverty, misery and ugliness around every corner.
So far, India has failed to trickle the benefits of its economic boom down to Bihar, a failure which could have serious political and economic repercussions. People here feel the rest of the country is simply not paying attention.
"Everyone has discarded Bihar, they think of it as a nightmare," said businessman Rajesh Singh.
"They only talk about the good things in India, they don't even look at Bihar. But this is 10 percent of India's population, you can't just chuck it away."
Bihar is home to around 90 million people and has one-seventh of India's poor, but accounts for just 1.6 percent of its gross domestic product. By any measure, literacy, infant mortality, malnourishment, it sits at or near the bottom in South Asia.
The World Bank put the challenge in its most tactful terms when lending Bihar's government $225 million last December.
"If large differences in growth rates between rich and poor states persist, these could eventually translate into vast differences in material well-being," it said. "Bihar lies at the heart of India's inclusive growth agenda."
Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) in Patna divides India into the sunrise states, those which are integrating into the global economy, and the sunset states, like Bihar and its larger neighbour Uttar Pradesh, which are rapidly being left behind. Bihar is metaphorically and sometimes literally India's heart of darkness -- there is so little power in Bihar, night-time satellite images show it as a massive black hole.
Crumbling roads, corrupt or inept governance and a reputation for unbridled lawlessness only add to the gloom.
"India will face problems if Bihar doesn't develop," Gupta said.
A SMALL STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
Bihar's economy failed to register any growth in the first half of the 1990s, and has grown at just under four percent since, less than half the current national growth rate and barely one percent in per capita terms.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took over two years ago promising a new era, and his reforms won some praise from the World Bank.
Criminal convictions were almost unheard of in the reign of Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi. A new system of speedy trials helped secure nearly 10,000 convictions in 2007.
Kidnapping for ransom, Bihar's biggest industry in Laloo's days, has fallen four-fold. In the past two years, more than 200 cases have been registered against corrupt government officials.
But private investment remains tiny, and a new era of fiscal responsibility in New Delhi means the kind of public investment required to transform Bihar is almost out of the question.
"Japan and Korea developed as industrial countries with the full support of the state," said the ADRI's Gupta. "In Bihar the state is very weak."
MIGRATION SPELLS TROUBLE
Rural migrants squat on the grass verges outside government ministers' houses in Patna, under plastic sheets, encampments that they say are "too horrible" when it rains.
Thousands of homes were damaged in last year's floods, and villagers tired of waiting for work under a new government rural employment guarantee scheme have left.
Bihar has a long history of migration dating back to the 19th century, when large numbers of people left as indentured labour to overseas British colonies or to find work on plantations in neighbouring Assam or in factories in West Bengal.
Today, as much of India booms, labourers from Bihar are migrating all over the country.
In the cities, the influx spells tension, and sometimes violence. Today nearly 11 percent of New Delhi's population hails from Bihar, another 40 percent from Uttar Pradesh.
Biharis are often looked down upon in Delhi, and blamed for rising crime -- the city's chief minister Sheila Dikshit publicly wonders how to turn back the tide.
In Mumbai, tensions between locals and migrants boiled over this month when a small right-wing Hindu-nationalist party stoked the flames with a campaign against "outsiders".
Taxi drivers, most of whom hail from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh were beaten up, a few vehicles damaged, and a bottle thrown over the wall of the house of Amitabh Bachchan, India's biggest film star, himself from Uttar Pradesh.
But the problem of Bihar -- and by extension the problem of India's widening inequality -- has even broader implications.
The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was kicked out of office in 2004 in a shock general election result, seen partly as an indictment of its failure to reach the rural poor.
The Congress-led coalition which has succeeded has made little headway with the type of economic reforms its prime minister and finance minister are associated with. Put simply, the political consensus for further economic reforms which India may need to sustain its boom, will simply not be there if those reforms do not benefit the poor.
Some companies are already suffering shortages of skilled labour that are pushing up wage costs. If India leaves millions of rural poor unskilled and illiterate, its economic upturn could find itself built on a shaky foundation, economists warn.
"If you think Bihar is not your problem, it will be your problem very soon," said businessman Singh. (Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Megan Goldin)
By Simon Denyer
PATNA, India, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Young girls and their mothers huddle under shawls in the central reservation of one of the city's main streets, picking through trash for grimy metal scraps that might earn them 20 rupees (half a dollar) a day.
Buses and autorickshaws belt out black fumes beside them on the congested, muddy street, dogs pick through huge piles of garbage by the roadside, men urinate at their side. This is Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India's poorest and one of its slowest growing states economically. On a rainy day, Patna can seem like some post-apocalyptic nightmare, with poverty, misery and ugliness around every corner.
So far, India has failed to trickle the benefits of its economic boom down to Bihar, a failure which could have serious political and economic repercussions. People here feel the rest of the country is simply not paying attention.
"Everyone has discarded Bihar, they think of it as a nightmare," said businessman Rajesh Singh.
"They only talk about the good things in India, they don't even look at Bihar. But this is 10 percent of India's population, you can't just chuck it away."
Bihar is home to around 90 million people and has one-seventh of India's poor, but accounts for just 1.6 percent of its gross domestic product. By any measure, literacy, infant mortality, malnourishment, it sits at or near the bottom in South Asia.
The World Bank put the challenge in its most tactful terms when lending Bihar's government $225 million last December.
"If large differences in growth rates between rich and poor states persist, these could eventually translate into vast differences in material well-being," it said. "Bihar lies at the heart of India's inclusive growth agenda."
Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) in Patna divides India into the sunrise states, those which are integrating into the global economy, and the sunset states, like Bihar and its larger neighbour Uttar Pradesh, which are rapidly being left behind. Bihar is metaphorically and sometimes literally India's heart of darkness -- there is so little power in Bihar, night-time satellite images show it as a massive black hole.
Crumbling roads, corrupt or inept governance and a reputation for unbridled lawlessness only add to the gloom.
"India will face problems if Bihar doesn't develop," Gupta said.
A SMALL STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
Bihar's economy failed to register any growth in the first half of the 1990s, and has grown at just under four percent since, less than half the current national growth rate and barely one percent in per capita terms.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took over two years ago promising a new era, and his reforms won some praise from the World Bank.
Criminal convictions were almost unheard of in the reign of Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi. A new system of speedy trials helped secure nearly 10,000 convictions in 2007.
Kidnapping for ransom, Bihar's biggest industry in Laloo's days, has fallen four-fold. In the past two years, more than 200 cases have been registered against corrupt government officials.
But private investment remains tiny, and a new era of fiscal responsibility in New Delhi means the kind of public investment required to transform Bihar is almost out of the question.
"Japan and Korea developed as industrial countries with the full support of the state," said the ADRI's Gupta. "In Bihar the state is very weak."
MIGRATION SPELLS TROUBLE
Rural migrants squat on the grass verges outside government ministers' houses in Patna, under plastic sheets, encampments that they say are "too horrible" when it rains.
Thousands of homes were damaged in last year's floods, and villagers tired of waiting for work under a new government rural employment guarantee scheme have left.
Bihar has a long history of migration dating back to the 19th century, when large numbers of people left as indentured labour to overseas British colonies or to find work on plantations in neighbouring Assam or in factories in West Bengal.
Today, as much of India booms, labourers from Bihar are migrating all over the country.
In the cities, the influx spells tension, and sometimes violence. Today nearly 11 percent of New Delhi's population hails from Bihar, another 40 percent from Uttar Pradesh.
Biharis are often looked down upon in Delhi, and blamed for rising crime -- the city's chief minister Sheila Dikshit publicly wonders how to turn back the tide.
In Mumbai, tensions between locals and migrants boiled over this month when a small right-wing Hindu-nationalist party stoked the flames with a campaign against "outsiders".
Taxi drivers, most of whom hail from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh were beaten up, a few vehicles damaged, and a bottle thrown over the wall of the house of Amitabh Bachchan, India's biggest film star, himself from Uttar Pradesh.
But the problem of Bihar -- and by extension the problem of India's widening inequality -- has even broader implications.
The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was kicked out of office in 2004 in a shock general election result, seen partly as an indictment of its failure to reach the rural poor.
The Congress-led coalition which has succeeded has made little headway with the type of economic reforms its prime minister and finance minister are associated with. Put simply, the political consensus for further economic reforms which India may need to sustain its boom, will simply not be there if those reforms do not benefit the poor.
Some companies are already suffering shortages of skilled labour that are pushing up wage costs. If India leaves millions of rural poor unskilled and illiterate, its economic upturn could find itself built on a shaky foundation, economists warn.
"If you think Bihar is not your problem, it will be your problem very soon," said businessman Singh. (Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Megan Goldin)
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