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Effect Can Rahul Gandhi Rival Him?

Shamed Abroad Yasin in Rapes deface country’s image

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IN THIS ISSUE

Shamed Abroad Rapes deface country’s image

The verdict on Delhi gang rape case is out; four of the six accused have been sentenced to death. One has already committed suicide and the other juvenile offender has escaped with minor punishment. But the question is, will the punishment alone stop such crimes?

A state on the boil UP Govt. surviving on communal divide

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Yasin in the net

The terrorist stopped from plotting further attacks

No Easy solutions Why the Indian Economy is in a Mess?

Tackling inflation New RBI Governor acts tough Yasin Bhatkal, the brain behind a series of bomb blasts that killed a number of innocent people, is now in police custody and is being interrogated for his links with other foreign terrorist organisations.

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Hiroshima Then, Fukushima Now‌

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Eco disaster looming Let us move away from coal power

16 19

Coal is an essential component of power generation. But it has its own drawbacks, the main one being the environmental pollution that it causes on a large scale. The more we depend on coal, the more will be the damage it causes to environment.

Game of cover-up No end to the mystery of IPL

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IN THIS ISSUE

26 Transcending Boundaries Volume: 15 Issue: 03 October 2013 Bhaadrapada - Aashwayuja

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Feminism Murdered

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Tragic end of Sushmita Banarjee

Technological breakthrough At Last, Mosquitoes Find Their Nemesis

Distorted focus?

Indian Institutes Fail on Foreign Shores

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32 35

Pleasing the Enemy Should the Indian and Pak PMs meet in New York?

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Shamed Abroad Rapes deface country’s image

The verdict on Delhi gang rape case is out; four of the six accused have been sentenced to death. One has already committed suicide and the other juvenile offender has escaped with minor punishment. But the question is, will the punishment alone stop such crimes? Unless there is a total change in people’s mind set, crimes against women are bound to happen and no law enforcing agencies can stop it.

I

t’s a shameful incongruity in a nation where women are worshipped as goddesses. In a country that has given birth to phrases like Yatra Naryastu Pujyante, Ramante Tatra Devata (Where Women Are Honored, Divinity Blossoms There), there is an increasingly disturbing trend of objectifying women and treating them as second rate citizens, a burden on the family.

In many ways, the brutal gang rape of a physiotherapy intern in Delhi in 2012 served as the final spark of ignition to the collective psyche of a nation. A woman was brutalised in the capital of our country, and a nation erupted in rage. Since then, India has been carrying the shameful tag of

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being the rape capital of India, especially in the eyes of foreign media and governments.

Needless to say, rape is a heinous crime. But what reflects badly on any society is its steady increase and laxity of punishment for such crimes.

Owing to a lethargic justice system and a society lenient towards men, Indian society has seen an alarming increase in the number of rapes.

When the Delhi gang rape occurred in December, 2012, China was among the first countries to react, and irrespective its own bloody history of human rights violations, it spared no words in defaming India.

In a strongly worded report, staterun news agency Xinhua said that In-

dia is known for “rampant rapes” and “Delhi is called the rape capital of the world.”

The Chinese Embassy asked its citizens living in the country, especially women, to be aware of their personal safety. It also asked them to avoid going out alone. They were also advised to avoid sensitive places and report to police and the Chinese Embassy if they come across any unusual situation.

Governments of other countries routinely warn women travellers about the looming dangers for females in India. The British Government has released detailed instructions to its women tourists travelling in India. It says, “Women should

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use caution when travelling in India.

Reported cases of sexual assault against women and young girls are increasing; recent sexual attacks against female visitors in tourist areas and cities show that foreign women are also at risk. British women have been the victims of sexual assault in Goa, Delhi, Bangalore and Rajasthan and women travellers often receive unwanted attention in the form of verbal and physical harassment by individuals or groups of men. A Swiss national suffered a serious sexual attack in Madhya Pradesh on March 16. Women travellers should exercise caution when travelling in India even if they are travelling in a group.”

“If you are a woman travelling in India, you should respect local dress codes and customs and avoid isolated areas, including beaches, when alone at any time of day. Avoid travelling alone on public transport or in taxis or auto-rickshaws, especially at night. If you have to use a taxi, get them from hotel taxi ranks and use pre-paid taxis at airports. Try to avoid hailing taxis on the street. If you’re being collected at the airport by a hotel driver, make sure they have properly identified themselves before you set off. If you are the victim of abuse, call “100” for police assistance (“112”

from mobile phones).”

Other countries like Australia, New Zealand and the US also have issued similar warnings to the female tourists travelling to India.

However, India is not the only country in the world where women are victimised. But it is the Delhi gang rape case that has painted the country in bad light. While this certainly dents the country’s image as a progressive nation, it has also hurt the booming travel industry of the country.

For example, visits to India by female tourists decreased by 35 percent in the first three months of 2013 compared to the same period last year. While the Delhi case raised awareness about the atrocities committed on women in India, foreign tourists have been victims as well.

India cannot afford to lose the foreign currency that tourists bring into the nation. Economic growth has dipped to 5 percent in 2012 from more than 9 percent annually in 2010.

Like any other developing country, India requires foreign currency to offset huge payments for imported oil and coal, which cannot be paid in rupees.

We can talk endlessly about the need for increased policing, stricter anti-rape laws and enhanced safety for women in India but the problem lies elsewhere. It lies in our minds and it stems from the root of our society. Maybe because we think a girl is a burden, to be disposed of (read married off) at all costs.

The damage is already done in the foreign media. In the days where every country depends upon another country for its economy to run, these types of incidents can deliver a frontal blow on our economy.

World’s R Worst Offender Against Women

ape and violence against women are a massive problem in India. According to India’s National Crime Record Bureau, crimes against women have increased by 7.1 percent since 2010. The number of rapes reported has also increased.

About one in three rape victims in India is a teenager. One in 10 is under 14. Every 20 minutes in India, a woman is raped.

And yet India ranks only third in the number of rapes reported each year. The first rank goes to the United States.

In India, a country of over 1.2 billion people, 24,206 rapes were reported in 2011 whereas in the United States, a nation of 300 million, 83,425 rapes were reported in the same year.

A woman is raped every 6.2 minutes in the United States.

Even if such crimes in India are considerably under reported, the statistical difference is still a major point. Violence against women is a global phenomenon and the United States may be leading the pack.

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7

Yasin Bhatkal, the brain behind a series of bomb blasts that killed a number of innocent people, is now in police custody and is being interrogated for his links with other foreign terrorist organisations. This hard core terrorist has been practising as a Unani doctor when he was captured by the Indian security agencies. It was Abdul Karim Tunda, a key Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, who revealed his whereabouts. However, whether the arrest of Yasin is the end of Indian Mujahedeen is anyone’s guess, but it has certainly weakened the terrorist outfit.

Yasin in the net

The terrorist stopped from plotting further attacks • Rajesh Vaidya

T

he arrest of Yasin Bhatkal has certainly dealt a big blow to India’s homegrown terrorists. His detention may not end the Islamic terrorism but will certainly help the security officials explore and destroy some of the major links in the terrorist network that has been stalking the country for more than decade now.

Yasin had taken all the precaution to evade arrest: he cut off all his connections with parents as well as relatives in his homeland and befriended everyone who hated India, including the Pakistan’s ISI and other Islamic terrorist outfits.

Yasin, who lived incognito for years, never really realised that his perceived enemy, that is, the Indian intelligent agency, has been watching his every move and waiting for a chance to pounce upon him. Sure enough, Yasin would never have been caught had he not left his safe shelter in Pakistan, because India never attacked its enemy in a foreign Country the way America did to kill Osama Bin Laden.

What is interesting to note is that

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by arresting Yasin the intelligence bureau has proved that it is working to its utmost capacity to nab the terrorists. The events that led to his arrest make it clear the intelligence bureau had long been monitoring his movement (The Bureau had tipped off the authorities well in advance about a possible terrorist strike on the Buddhist temple in Gaya).

As they do most often, the intel-

ligence officials tap phone calls of several terrorist suspects as well as their family members inside the country. Some reports suggest the intelligence agency deliberately left several suspects walk freely so that it can watch their movements and learn about their future terror plots as well as the movement of their leaders in Dubai and Pakistan. But it is still a mystery as to why Yasin decided to

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come to India instead of carrying out the attacks through men at the lower rung of the ladder.

Yasin’s terrorist outfit had planned several deadly attacks but it hardly had a team that was bold enough to carry out the task. Yasin has reportedly revealed the Mujahedeen’s plot to kill Narendra Modi and LK Advani.

Such high-profile killings need dozens of suicide bombers, but there were hardly anyone in the outfit willing to sacrifice for the sake of the ideology they believed in.

Most of those in the rank and file of Indian Mujahedeen are illiterates and have little knowledge of the wider world.

In most cases, the bombs they planted failed to explode, which showed that the outfit severely lacked the men and expertise to carry out such deadly attacks. In addition, Yasin found it extremely tough to operate out of Pakistan, where terrorists have turned against their own countrymen, having been divided on sectarian lines such as Sunnis and Shias.

To strengthen the organisation he founded, Yasin had to move his base from Pakistan to India. Barely a week before Yasin’s capture, the police arrested Abdul Karim Tunda, a key Lashkar-e-Taiba operative and an expert bomb maker. There are reports that Yasin was instrumental in sending him to India for making bombs. But further details about his interrogation are yet to be disclosed.

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Profile of a Terrorist Y

asin was born as Ahmed Siddibapa on January 15, 1983, in Bhatkal, a prosperous but sleepy town on costal Karnataka. Bhatkal, though a small fishing town on the bank of the Arabian Sea, became a smugglers’ paradise in early ’80s. Yasin grew up watching his Muslim relatives travelling to Dubai and coming back stacked with gold and cash.

After the Narasimha Rao Government opened up the market for foreign investors, gold smuggling decreased and a large number of Muslim youths travelled to Dubai looking for jobs in the desert city’s booming real estate business.

Some time in 2005, Yasin married a woman named Zahida but two years later he disappeared. Reports say he lied to his wife that he was Imran from Lucknow. Since 2010, he had been living as Dr. Shahrukh, a Unani doctor.

When the media broke the news of his arrest, his parents issued a

statement saying that the detainee might not be their son. But they acknowledged that Yasin disappeared in Dubai some time in 2005. Interestingly, they did not dispel the confusion over his marriage with Zahida. “I don’t even know if it is my son. Today we got a notice from the police that they have arrested him. I have to see him to believe it is him” stated Yasin’s father Zarar Siddibapa in a press release.

IM Running Out of Steam J

ust as the Naxals do, Indian Mujahedeen has also planned to feed on the poverty of the country. The terrorist outfit was reportedly recruiting poor Muslim youths in impoverished Bihar provinces including Mithilanchal, Darbhanga, Madhubani and Samastipur.

There is no information as to how many youths were signed up for the organisation so far. Over the past two years, police say they have arrested as many as 18 Mujahedeen operatives in Darbhanga alone.

Indian Mujahedeen was certainly weakening by the day. Though it

recruited a significant number of youths, it could not provide training to anyone.

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Hiroshima Then,

Fukushima Now‌ Japan is in the throes of a deep crisis because of its leaking nuclear power plants that refuse to cool down and are spilling radioactive water all over the place. The company that is in charge of the plants is storing this highly toxic water in tanks, but so long as the chain reaction that was set in motion due to the devastating tsunami in November 2011 does not stop, the situation will continue to be grim.

Japan Stares at Looming Nuclear Disaster • Ganapati Shetty

T

he United States dropped two nuclear bombs on two cities of Japan at a time when the Second World War was raging. The result was instant death of thousands of people and slow and painful death of thousands of others due to radiation. Today, the same country is bracing for another nuclear disaster, albeit of a different kind.

When the earth below the Japanese coast shook in November 2011, a giant tsunami rose up and submerged

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vast areas in the western parts of the country. Among those hit hard by the devastating tsunami was the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, a small industrial town 120 miles west of Tokyo. Here, the giant waves caused by the tsunami swamped the nuclear power reactor and destroyed the generators. Also destroyed were a dozen emergency generators installed to cool the reactors in the event of a disaster. Today, though the reactor has been shut down, the water at the reactors continues to be heated. Over the past months, Tokyo

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Economic Implications

Power and Electric Company (TEPCO), the company in charge of operating the plant, has been constructing tank after tank to store the radioactive water. A recent investigation shows that the radioactive water is leaking to the ground and into the Pacific Ocean – an alarming situation. The radioactive water is the creation of the reactor which refuses to stop generating heat despite a number of measures to cool it down. At one point of time, the authorities even used helicopters to dump water into the reactor. Despite all these efforts, the atoms in the reactor have not stopped exploding.

Of course that’s how a nuclear reactor generates power. (Atoms inside the reactor explode in chain reaction heating the water into steam which in turn activates the turbines generating electricity).

In the meantime, the system that subdues the radioactive content in the water no longer appears to be working. That’s why the authorities are building tank after tank to store this contaminated water. According to Japanese media, more than a thousand tanks have been built over the past two years.

The plant slips deeper into trouble every time it rains. There are steep hills behind the Fukushima plant.

Rainwater runs down from those hills through the ground on which the plant is built and flows into the ocean.

Radioactivity readings offshore have not fallen in the way many experts say they should have, indicating that this

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Health disorders Analysts say the radioactive caesium does not last long in the body - most has gone within a year. However, it lingers in the environment and can continue to present a problem for many years.

The nuclear radiation is believed to be harmful to young people living near the plant.

After the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Russia, a few cases of thyroid cancer were reported.

The same is feared in Fukushima too. The government recently handed out iodine tablets to prevent the radioactive rays from harming the body.

groundwater is picking up radioactive elements while flowing.

There have been at least five leak events from the tanks, with the most recent, in August, being the largest. This saw contaminated water flood a walled concrete pad under the faulty tank and then pass through a rainwater valve to soak the surrounding soil.

There are fears that the radioactive contents could be hiding in the air near the plant. But no investigation has proved it. Anyway, Japan is once again staring at a nuclear catastrophe that had already destroyed two of its cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Seeing the nuclear plant sliding deeper into trouble, the Japanese government has evacuated 159,128 people from the exclusion zones. Those people have lost their homes and virtually all their possessions.

Estimates of the total economic loss range from $250 billion to $500 billion.

Many countries have now stopped importing seafood from Japan. Worse still, some countries are asking their citizens to return, predicting a real nuclear disaster in the days ahead.

Tokyo, Japan’s capital, is just a hundred miles from the nuclear plant and is home to more than 13 million people.

If they were to be evacuated because of a radiation cloud heading its way, the economic costs of such an event would be astronomical.

Following the disaster, Japan has shut down a dozen of its nuclear power plants. As a result, today the country is facing electricity shortage. Power shortage is a severe threat to Japan’s export-based economy. Some analysts fear that Fukushima’s looming disaster is forcing many manufacturing plants to shift to nearby China.

Remember, China has recently overtaken Japan to become the second biggest economy in the world after the United States.

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A state on the boil

UP Govt. surviving on communal divide • Shalini Hegde

R

iots in Muzaffarnagar have killed dozens of people. But that is not something the nation is worried about. Uttar Pradesh is increasingly becoming prone to religious violence. Here, teasing women and refusing to collect garbage also pit communities against one another and the resultant violence leads to deaths of dozens of people. The Samajwadi Party, whose victory was largely attributed to Muslims’ overwhelming support, is today facing the biggest challenge: How to balance its policies in such a way that both Hindus and Muslims can feel comfortable and start living in harmony.

This is naturally a difficult task for the government which has long been churning out different policies for different communities. This vote-bank

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politics in the name of secularism has led the majority of Hindus to suspect the Akhilesh Yadav Government.

A couple of months ago a junior IAS officer Durga Sakthi Nagpal was transferred for ordering demolition of an illegally built wall around a mosque. Instead of going by the rule of the land, Akhilesh chose to suspend her accusing her of inflaming

communal hatred. Today, every Muslim leader in Uttar Pradesh is accusing the officials of being anti-Muslim if they don’t obey their orders.

Cabinet Minister Nadeem Khan has recently accused Principal Secretary Praveer Kumar of being anti-Muslim.

“Parveer is not taking an interest in improving the Rampur District Hospital, because he is anti-Muslim,” writes Khan in his letter. Rampur is an important district for Muslims where they make up almost 50 percent of the population. The same minister criticised Mulayam Singh when he met Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Ashok Singhal.

Akhilesh should have acted against the minister to hammer home the message that his government treats everyone as equal. But he trusted such comments and acted against

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Hindu officials in a desperate attempt to restore Muslims’ support to the party.

Today, there is hardly any official in UP who dare to admit complaints against Muslims. As a result, Hindus are feeling helpless. When a Muslim boy teases a girl from their community, Hindus believe that the boy is encouraged to do so because of the backing his community has from the government.

Muslims account for more than 20 percent of the population in Uttar Pradesh, and they are the largest religious minority here. More than anything else, they are decisive voters who can change the course of electoral politics. This has made them the most powerful community politically.

In the meanwhile, the Union Government hived off 4.5 percent jobs quota from OBC share of 27 percent and handed it to Muslims. Job reservation is a politically sensitive subject in Uttar Pradesh where political parties have staked their fortunes on poverty and the economically backward community.

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Vote bank politics has landed the Akhilesh Yadav Government in Uttar Pradesh in a piquant situation. It has to please the minority community at any cost for its survival. This has led to various complications such as the recent communal flare-up in Muzaffarnagar where more than 50 people have been killed. So long as this political scenario lasts, UP can expect still worse communal tensions in future.

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• Dr M N Buch

I

ndian economy is in the media limelight. The rupee has been fluctuating violently at historically low levels, inflation is out of control, industrial growth has fallen, the markets are in a free dive and investment is declining, global confidence is shaken and our foreign exchange reserves are under pressure as foreign funds are flowing out of India.

All that government spokespersons can say is, “The fundamentals of our economy are sound.” An analysis of this situation is provided here. The article reviews fundamentals of our economy, identifies flawed economic policies, suggests way forward along with a glimpse at theoretical underpinnings.

It is not true that we are unaware of the fundamental of economics. From time to time we have even addressed some or all of them. But never wholly, holistically, harmoniously, or consistently and with persistence. Apparently, we either tire very quickly or else are soon bored by consistency and want to move on to something new. A couple of examples in important economic sectors would bring the insight to the fore.

The agriculture and mining sectors are most labour intensive providing the bulk of employment. We have constant focus on agriculture but still are unable to break free of our almost total dependence on the monsoon.

India, even today does not have a national land use policy which identifies and allocates land according to the use to which it is best suited, of which agriculture would be the most predominant.

After the land reforms, Madhya Pradesh abolished Malguzari in 1951 which was not quite Zamindari but had the responsibility to manage the village commons, including the village forests. In the next ten years, Madhya Pradesh lost four million hectares of village forests to indiscriminate felling, of which 2.8 million hectares were encroached upon.

In the early fifties, S.K. Dey’s Com-

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No Easy solutions Why the Indian Economy is in a Mess?

munity Development Programme was launched dividing the country into Community Development (CD) Blocks. The block concept encouraged participative implementation.

Because the people had a stake in the work, they saw to it that it was done honestly and the infrastructure built 60 years ago is still intact. In 1963, however, we abolished the CDB, gave up participative development and replaced it by hundred per cent government grants works.

Discontinuing of the watershed development and management pro-

gramme is another example. The whole country is divided into ‘mili’ (about 5000 hectares covering about ten villages) and micro (about 500 hectares covering a village) watersheds. The programme has succeeded in converting sizeable tracts of drought-prone areas into productive areas, reduced seasonal distress migration and substantially raised the water table.

Mining is extractive and impacts the environment. Exploitative mining, which destroys whole ecological systems, is not desirable. But many of those who are vocal against mining -- environmental and social activists -- are anti-establishment. Such activism has affected healthy mining. Thermal power plants are denied coal, steel plants are denied iron ore.

Sand mines are closed. Anti-mining has adversely affected industry and decreased jobs, estimated at over 50,000 in Bellary and over 20,000 in Hoshangabad. One has to evolve a balance between environment protection, curbing corruption and economic development. Excessive restrictions in mining have created a scenario reminiscent of a lunatic asylum in the power sector.

The backbone of a modern industrial state is the secondary or manufacturing sector. When India had few industrialists, governmental participation was a requirement. But even today the economy is enveloped by the tentacles of the State. Opening up of Indian economy heralded rapid

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About 70 years ago, the German State of Rheinland Westphalia had a policy whereby before mining began, the company had to submit a detailed plan of the mining operations, site for dumping overburden, restoring the site through backfill and layering with fresh soil, carrying out a vegetation plan and generally ensuring a return of the site to its old biodiversity. The policy has paid rich dividends, especially because it is vigorously enforced. industrial growth. But, unfortunately, the government continued as a major player in many of the sectors related to industry, mainly dealing with infrastructure.

In the tertiary sector, we emphasised IT and ICT as the core areas.

Focus on IT led to a massive upsurge in employment. We are proud of our IT industry and we also claim to have the fastest growing mobile telephony sector in the world. But due to excessive reliance on service and software, our manufacturing capability is neglected. The growth in the IT sector is cited to prove that India is amongst the fastest growing economies in the world and also as a stable economy cable of withstanding global economic vicissitudes. If our fundamentals are sound, why is rupee falling and crisis looming?

It would be instructive in this context to understand the theoretical underpinnings of our economy. The various apologists for government claim helplessness, because they say that it is global trends which are affecting the Indian economy and these forces are beyond our control. Do we believe in globalisation as good for the country?

Another area in which we are on the wrong track is in our capacity to take sound decisions. The world can live with a harsh tax regime, provided it is practicable and consistent. In India, however, the tax regime is to-

D

o we believe in capitalist free enterprise? Mercantilism? Monetarism?

Keynesian policies? Are we Marxists? Fabian socialist? Neo-liberals?

What exactly are our economic moorings and how does it affect our progress? Lord Keynes advocated judicious public spending during depression creating permanent assets. He approved deficit financing by government in controlled conditions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, used public funding to build magnificent works in the Tennessee Valley, which harnessed the Tennessee River and its tributaries, generated hydel power and made available water for irrigation and countered economic recession. President Eisenhower’s post-war programme of building 40,000 miles of interstate highways in the United States put money into the economy and created the infrastructure which today supports trade, commerce and industry in the whole of the United States. These are all Keynesian measures and are perfectly justified.

tally inconsistent, and is completely political in character. Holistic view is absent in Indian policy formulation mechanism. Inflation is attributed to excessive money supply and the government is resorting to monetary measures. In an economy where a strong parallel economy exists, attempts to restrict supply of money are debatable. Questions are also raised in implementing monetary policies in a professional manner.

In India, consistency is seen in implementing populist measures. The government’s decision to subsidise whole sections of users is discouraging private enterprise defeating the liberalisation of the economy. Economic decisions cannot be influenced by electoral calculations. The National Advisory Council (NAC), headed by

Sonia Gandhi, persuaded the government to launch the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the purpose of which is to give a hundred days’ employment per capita per year. This is an employment programme, muster based, whose prime objective is not asset creation. All such programmes can trace their origin to the scarcity relief programme of British days. NREGS is creating a massive web of corruption which has engulfed the entire Panchayat Raj system.

We need to move away from subsidies and towards consistency implementation policies.

Source: Vivekananda International Foundation, Vivekananda Kendra

About the Author The author is a former Secretary to Government of India. Born on 5th October 1934. He is a trained economist and a doctor of Science. Joined Indian Administrative Service in 1957. He took voluntary retirement in 1984. He received Padma Bhushan for his contributions to civil service from Government of India in 2011. The main areas of his concern are housing, forestation, town planning and environmental protection.

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Tackling inflation New RBI Governor acts tough

• CP Nambiar

I

t was too much to expect that the new RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan would set right the economy in a jiffy with the swish of a brush like a magician and it was a wonder as to how the hard-nosed dealers on Dalal Street expected such a thing to happen. So when finally Mr. Rajan announced the mid-term monetary policy – his first on becoming the RBI chief – down went the market and the rupee too. He didn’t cut the interest rates, nor did he announce any sops for the banking sector. As it is, the economy is in a rickety condition with almost all the key parameters

16

RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has his eyes set on inflation which refuses to show any sign of decline. Food inflation hit a three-year high of 18.18 per cent in August, and with onion prices still on the upswing, it is likely to cross this mark in coming months. Therefore, it was but natural that he addressed this burning problem in his maiden policy announcement as RBI chief on Friday, September 20. It showed that he is stark realist who doesn’t want to play to the gallery.

on the negative side. It is as if the powers that be do not know what to do at this juncture. Fortunately, two things happened to cheer them and the investors: One, there won’t be an immediate rollback of the stimulus package by the US Federal Reserve (the US central bank) and second, the US and its allies won’t attack Syria as it has agreed to surrender its chemical weapons stockpile for UN inspection. However, these events could at best be a palliative, because there remain certain structural imbalances in the Indian economy which have to be addressed in all its seriousness if the country has to sustain a healthy growth.

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The growth slumped to a four-yearlow of 4.4% in April-June from 4.8% in the previous quarter, though there was a rebound in July. The April-June figures have raised fears of a slowdown on a wider scale with factories producing less, companies offering fewer jobs and inflation on the high side. CSO’s latest estimates of GDP showed economy hit by free-falling rupee, shrinking investment and high interest rates.

All this will certainly exert pressure on growth-reviving measures in the coming months. The solution offered

by Finance Minister P Chidambaram is more reforms. Addressing the Lok Sabha he listed ten steps including promoting of the manufacturing sector and boosting. He has also announced a string of austerity steps to be taken by the different government departments.

According to one analyst, “from being a foreign investors’ darling to an economy characterised by policy flip-flops, the Indian economy’s turnabout has been as rapid as the heady 9%-plus growth it had once clocked during 2004-2008.” And then there is the prospect of a credit rating agencies downgrading to “junk” status casting a dark shadow over the market.

A series of steps have been an-

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nounced by both the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank making loans costlier for banks, controls on foreign exchange transactions for individuals and firms and easing of foreign investment caps on several sectors such as telecommunications and de-

fence.

“There are no visible signs of investment pick up as investor sentiments continue to be very low. A weak rupee, tight liquidity, high cost of funds, procedural delays are all coming in the way of an investment revival,” industry body Confederation of Indian Industry said in a statement. News that investments worth more than Rs. 1.83 lakh crore had been approved did nothing to boost sentiment.

Inflation continues to be a great source of worry. The RBI Governor made it clear that this is his main area of concern. A sharp spike in prices of onions and other vegetables sent headline inflation soaring to a sixmonth high of 6.10 per cent in August.

Driven mainly by a 245 per cent jump in onion prices, the Wholesale Price Index for August was higher than the 5.79 % inflation recorded in July, though lower than 8.01 % in August 2012. With cereals up 14%, rice surging 20 per cent and vegetable prices rising 78 % year-on-year, food inflation hit a three-year high of 18.18 per cent in August. Engineering, meat and fish prices were up 18 %.

The WPI figure is a worrying factor.

The weaker rupee and the food price spike can lead to supply shocks. Last week, hopes of a rate-cut were fu-

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Bottling T the

devil

he new RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan sprang a surprise on Friday, September 20, by raising the repo rate (the rate at which RBI lends to banks) for the first time since October 2011 from 7.25% to 7.5%, which sent the rupee and the Sensex spinning down, ending the remarkable run they had earlier following the good news of Fed decision not to roll back the stimulus package and the US decision not to attack Syria. Rajan had in mind the dark shadow of inflation which is at a six-month high and is expected to head north because of costlier imports and oil

elled by a lower consumer price index of 9.5 per cent.

The monetary policy stance is expected to remain stable and shortterm rates could remain elevated (in the near term), said Shubhada Rao, Senior President & Chief Economist, YES Bank.

Though food prices may start to moderate post October on a good harvest after the bounteous monsoon, price pressure could come from the government plan to hike retail fuel prices by nearly 10 per cent to ease its oil subsidy burden, which has risen with the falling rupee and rising crude prices.

Devendra Pant, Chief Economist, India Ratings & Research, said that overall food inflation is unlikely to decline sharply anytime soon despite

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price hike. Food prices have spiralled and so have onion prices. Latest data shows food prices rose by 18% on a year-on-year basis, while retail inflation has hovered around double digit for the past one year.

“Although better prospects of a robust kharif harvest willl add to some moderation in CPI inflation, there is no room for complacency…

What I would like to see is that we achieve, certainly, the RBI’s target of trying to bring WPI inflation below 5%. We want to fight inflation and we’ll bring it down,” the policy statement by RBI said.

the good monsoon. This is due to structural factors driving food inflation.

There is however a silver lining in the cloud. The industrial output posted a surprise rebound in July, rising by 2.6% year-on-year after two consecutive months of contraction; retail inflation eased marginally, net foreign direct investment rose 58% in April-July and deposits from expatriate Indians rose for the first time this fiscal years, pointing to a turnaround in the economy’s mood.

The numbers released bon Thursday, September 12, helped partially to lift the gloom over the economy, hit by a slowdown in growth and battling a sharp fluctuation in the currency.

The string of positive data adds to the recovery staged by the rupee and the

share market. But there remain several sectors that require urgent attention to fast-track growth.

Credit rating agency Crisil said the industrial output data reflected a temporary rise, not a sustained turnaround. “A sustained revival of the manufacturing sector will be contingent on a pick-up in corporate investments,” the rating agency cautioned.

Data released by the Central Statistics Office showed factory output growth rose by 2.6% year-on-year in July, up from he previous month’s decline of 1.8 percent and a 0.1% contraction in July 2012.

The manufacturing and electricity sectors led the rebound while the mining sector, which has been hit by policy and regulatory delays, remained in negative territory.

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Eco disaster looming

Let us move away from coal power Coal is an essential component of power generation. But it has its own drawbacks, the main one being the environmental pollution that it causes on a large scale. The more we depend on coal, the more will be the damage it causes to environment. Again, if we were to go in for extra mining, vast tracts of forest lands will have to be destroyed to extract coal. The effect of such large-scale destruction can only be imagined. A conveniently hidden fact about coal power is the inherent gross inefficiency associated with it. The losses involved in coal burning, steam making, generating, transmitting and distributing electricity are estimated to be very high.

• Shankar Sharma

T

he government and many people in position of influence have been associated with an oft- repeated statement that continued reliance on coal power is essential to lift the poor people in India from the clutches of poverty. One such recent statement has been attributed to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is reported to have said: “If you look at Indian policy, the most important element of it is to get rid of poverty,” and “Why would we not be entitled to finance that’s available for generating power, as long as you are continuing to burn large

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quantities of coal?” This statement, if true, is highly unfortunate at a time when the international scientific community, including the IPCC body itself, is strongly advocating a low carbon global economy.

The expert group on low carbon strategies for inclusive growth, set up under the Planning Commission, has in its interim report assumed coal power to be the least cost option and that coal power capacity needs to be increased vastly to address the issue of energy access to all. It states: “… This will require an annual coal supply of at least 1,000 million tons, two and a half times the present level. Domestic mining will have to increase considerably; otherwise

imports will have to meet a large fraction of coal demand.” The embedded green house gas (GHG) emissions in increasing the installed power capacity by about 120,000 MW have not been discussed in the report.

A survey report by Prayas Energy Group released in 2011 has estimated that more than 580,000 MW capacity coal power plants are waiting to be built in the coming years. This is more than 4.7 times the present coal power capacity of 121,600 MW. In this context, it should be clear as to how coal power will continue to be the predominant source of GHG emissions in the country’s share to the global warming. With about 75% of electricity generated in the country

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coming from coal power in 2012-13, it should not be hard to imagine the potential for a vast increase in total GHG emissions in the country if this humongous amount of coal power capacity is to be added.

With so much of additional coal power capacity in the pipeline, one shudders to think the consequences of mining, transporting and burning, and ash disposal of such vast quantities of coal in addition to the huge increase in total GHG emissions. In the Indian context, which is already a water stressed country, the additional demand for water, people’s displacement and potential destruction of thick forests, below which about 30% of the country’s coal reserve are known to be located, are all matters for serious concern.

A report of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has opined that if we want a 50-50 chance of staying below 2° of global warming increase, we have to leave two-thirds of the known reserves of coal, oil and gas underground; if we want an 80% chance, we have to leave 80% of those reserves untouched. In this context the hypocrisy of making tall claims on measures to mitigate global warming on the one hand and patronising the coal power sector on the other hand becomes clear.

IPCC’s ‘Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources’ has projected a very critical need to move away from overreliance on coal. This report has projected that the renewable energy could account for almost 80% of the world’s energy supply within four decades. It has said that if the full range of renewable technologies were deployed, the world could keep greenhouse gas concentrations to less than 450 parts per million, the level scientists have predicted will be the limit of safety, beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible. The latest findings have shown that the average daily concentration of atmospheric concentration of CO2 is already 400 parts per million.

In the context of these facts, it is

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Is coal power sustainable?

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he state agencies keep saying that coal is abundant in India.

The Integrated Energy Policy of the Planning Commission in 2006 has said that if the domestic coal production continues to grow at 5% per year, the economically extractable coal reserves will run out in about 45 years.

During 2005-12, the government cleared more than 160 coal blocks for mining at breakneck speed. In the context of the Supreme Court’s investigation into ‘Coalgate Scam’, even if we assume that 50% of these coal blocks may get cancelled, the increase in coal extraction rate is likely to exhaust the reserve to less than 25 years. India’s domestic coal supply infrastructure has been consistently failing to meet even a week’s demand for coal in most of the power plants.

This scenario will undoubtedly lead to a massive increase in coal import, not only bringing uncertainty to the energy security, but also adding to the already worrisome import bill.

Can this scenario be called as sustainable? If not, why our communities should be burdened with such a policy?

The economic, social and environmental concerns associated with other conventional sources such as natural/shale gas, dambased hydro and nuclear are equally serious, if not more, when we look at them from the perspective of overall human welfare. Hence a very diligent and transparent approach in all such technologies and a paradigm shift in the way we look at electricity/energy demand are urgently needed.

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difficult to reconcile Dr. Pachauri’s various statements on global warming as Chairman of IPCC and his latest statement of support to the massive addition of coal power capacity in the country against the sane advice of IPCC itself.

Whereas the successive governments continue to say that vast coal capacity additions are necessary to provide electricity to all and through it to eliminate poverty in our country, the reality as seen since Independence is vastly different. Whereas the total installed power capacity in the country has increased from about 1,000 MW in 1947 to about 212,000 MW in 2013, and the national per capita electricity has increased from less than 100 kWh in 1947 to about 900 kWh in 2013, about 300 million people in the country have no access

to electricity even in 2013 as against the Planning Commission’s target of 30 kWh of electricity per family per month as life line energy by 2012.

The reason given by the official agencies for not being able to supply electricity to all households is that it is not economical to extend the grid power to all villages. Since coal power is economical only in large-size grid connected mode, the hollowness of the claim that coal power is needed to electrify all houses becomes clear. It is a sad reflection of the lack of due diligence in our planning that many families are living without electricity even in the close vicinity of large power plants including coal power plants.

A conveniently hidden fact about coal power is the inherent gross inefficiency associated with it. The loss-

es involved in coal burning, steam making, generating, transmitting and distributing electricity are so high that only about 20% of the coal energy reaches the end consumer in the form of electricity even with the best technologies.

Communities across the globe are getting increasingly concerned about the health effects of coal pollution in the form of toxic mercury, arsenic, smog, soot and other emissions. According to a recent report from Greenpeace India and Conservation Action Trust, the coal industry causes roughly 100,000 premature deaths annually in India.

So it is anybody’s guess how coal capacity addition can provide electricity to the poor, and through it how it can lead to overall welfare.

About the Author Shankar Sharma is a renowned power policy analyst. He has an Electrical Engineering degree from Mysore University (1979) and a PG diploma in Technology Management from Deakin University, Australia (2001). He has 28 years of professional experience in electricity industry in the areas of generation, transmission and distribution. He has worked for Central Electricity Authority, Karnataka Electricity Board, Electricity Corporation of New Zealand, Queensland Electricity Transmission Corporation of Australia.

Presently he is engaged in energy policy issues and consultancy.

His e-mail id is shankar.sharma2005@gmail.com

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Game of cover-up No end to the mystery of IPL

• Raju Shanbhag

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BCCI has chosen to ban two lowranking players for life, but left those on top untouched in spite of some serious allegations against them.

Claiming autonomous status, it has sought immunity from the RTI Act. The conclusion is, therefore, inescapable that BCCI does not want to reveal some ugly truths, and by banning unimportant players it is only trying to divert the attention of the public from its own mismanagement.

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he punishments in IPL scandal are out. BCCI, in its effort to appear stern, has banned Shreeshanth and his Rajasthan Royals teammate and Mumbai spinner Ankeet Chavan for life.

For those who have been witnessing the IPL tamasha for more than half a decade, these punishments look like a cover up. The enquiry committee set up BCCI picked up two of the least undistinguished players, one at the far end of his sinking international career and another with no hope of playing above the IPL level, to hand out its punishment. The committee conveniently didn’t find any proof against other officials, team owners and top ranking bosses of IPL whose names figured prominently in the controversy.

Obviously, there is more to this whole story.

BCCI is the richest sports body in the country and, by its own admission, is not answerable to anyone, including the government. Time and again, BCCI’s financial transactions have come under public scrutiny, but it has always kept its dealings under wrap. Since it is an autonomous body, claims BCCI, its dealings do not even come under the RTI Act. More than any other format of the game, IPL has been a money spinning machine for BCCI. Cricket is secondary in

a format where scantily clad cheer-girls and ignorant glamour dolls have replaced serious commentary. The duration of the game is short, and the inflow of cash is instant; a perfect breeding ground for corruption and scandals.

Although the enquiry committee has found only two players guilty, there are reasons to believe that there’s more to it than meets the eye. Given the extent of betting rackets and the kind of money involved, it is impossible to believe that only a handful of players were involved in betting. It’s common logic that if matches need to be thrown for money, one has to approach the best players and possibly the captain; not the low-ranking, insignificant players as we are made to believe in this instance.

The conduct of team owners and IPL bosses has been mired in controversies right from the beginning. There have been reports that funds from tax havens like Mauritius have been forced into the league by different franchises in violation of FEMA provision. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has

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already registered a case against the Indian Premier League (IPL) under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) to inquire into unauthorised transfer of foreign funds. The case registered is the first by ED against IPL after it received preliminary information that funds from abroad, without the permission of RBI, might have trickled in.

There have also been reports of benami shares involving politicians and their kith and kin in the IPL. In relation to this, the Finance Ministry has set up eight enforcement teams.

Their investigations will be spread across the country with I-T offices in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kochi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune. These teams will source out information about financial transactions, money flows and team owner-

ship across all franchises. The Research team of ICWAI will help the Enforcement Wing of the Finance Ministry to uncover the background about the formation of certain “shell companies’’ at Mauritius suspected of routing unaccounted money into IPL franchises.

Apart from the financial irregularities, the way IPL is conducted also gives rise to many suspicions. While the top ranking international players are always under the scrutiny of ICC and BCCI, the lower ranked players, those have not played any international games, are hardly monitored.

This gives bookies and other unscru-

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Efforts to cleanse the game I

t’s not that BCCI is not doing anything to cleanse the game of corruption, but unfortunately its efforts are directed only at the players and not at the administrators, where major problems lie.

Recently, BCCI roped in Ravi Sawani, the former head of ICC’s anti-corruption and security unit (ACSU), to lead its new domestic anti-corruption bureau. India will be the fourth country after Pakistan, Australia and England to have an independent ACSU unit. It has been directed to keep a close eye on the exhaustive domestic set-up, which was also in the eye-line of the illegal betting industry and made

pulous elements plenty of time to contact these players and lure them into their net. Many of the international uncapped players land at IPL venues only days before the tournament starts and nobody has any records on what they do before they come for this tournament.

And many corporate experts believe that BCCI is shying away, or worse, covering up its important personalities by coming in the way of a transparent investigation of IPL’s affairs. In an ideal world, Srinivasan should have willingly resigned first as BCCI president and then allowed the three-member commission set up

players “vulnerable”.

Apart from the domestic and IPL management, Sawani and his team will educate young players at the various BCCI state academies about the anti-corruption code and extend the work done by the ACSU for the international players.

But even here, BCCI is not very eager to put security mechanisms in place. In the past it has not encouraged security practices, which was evident from its response to security in the first two editions of the IPL. In its inaugural year, 2008, the IPL gave the ACSU a very short notice - just about a week - to come on board.

by the Indian board to take its decision against his son-in-law. But he refused to step down and it was only after intense media pressure that he finally resigned. But in all likelihood, he will be elected BCCI’s chairman once again.

It’s clear that behind all that glamour glitz, IPL hides some ugly truths.

BCCI does not seem too interested in revealing them either. By categorically banning unimportant players, BCCI is only trying to divert the attention from its own mismanagement.

Looks like it’s succeeding in this game.

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Protecting the Criminals Cong Bid to Scuttle SC’s Landmark Verdict Following the conviction of its MP Rashid Masood by a CBI Court, the Congress Government is doing everything it can scuttle the Supreme Court verdict against criminal politicians. The Apex Court has set aside its appeal to review the judgment. Then the party tried to amend the laws relating to the elected representatives. Neither of them has worked. Now, as a last-ditch attempt, it has issued an ordinance to overturn the judgment. The ordinance will bring to an end the Supreme Court’s historic attempt to rid the country’s politics of criminals and corrupt leaders.

• Ravi Shukla

C

ongress leader Rashid Masood will be the first parliamentarian to be disqualified after the Supreme Court’s historic judgment in July that calls for disqualification of elected representatives once they are convicted.

The court has also ruled that the convicted politicians cannot contest elections while they are behind bars. Now the grand old party appears to be doing everything it can to prevent Masood from being disqualified. To protect him, the Union Cabinet has issued an ordinance to overturn the Supreme Court verdict.

That would be a risky step for the party which has to face the election in the near future. But analysts say that such an action was inevitable given the current political climate in Delhi. Lalu Prasad Yadav, who has long been charged in fodder scam, is also likely to be convicted this time. And if convicted, his political career too would have come to an end. So would have been the future of his Rashtriya Janata Dal. The Congress believes that Yadav will join hands with the party in Bihar in the coming Lok Sabha election if it manages to save him now.

Some observers say that he had mounted pressure on the government to do whatever it could to overcome the Supreme Court judgment. Sonia Gandhi had in fact

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planned to bring an amendment to the Representation of the People’s Act as part of an attempt to circumvent the verdict but could not do so in the just ended monsoon session.

An ordinance will certainly anger the opposition parties because they have been arguing that such an important issue requires in-depth discussion through the introduction of a Bill to this effect in Parliament.

As per the judgment, any elected representative convicted and sentenced to more than two years’ imprisonment shall stand disqualified. Masood has been convicted of corruption charges by a CBI court, but it has not yet handed down the sentence, which it is expected to do sometime next month. And in case the verdict is for two years imprisonment, he will stand disqualified.

Like Masood and Lalu Prasad Yadav, several other politicians across the country were facing the prospect of being disqualified and losing abruptly their political career.

Earlier, the politicians could save themselves from disqualification by appealing against the court verdict. But the apex court has struck down that provision, making it clear that MPs, MLAs and MLCs would stand disqualified from the date of conviction.

Following the judgment, the Congress government tried

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to ask the Supreme Court to review its verdict. But the apex court has set aside the appeal. It was in fact a major step to clean up politics beset with corruption scandals.

But unfortunately, the Congress government is trying to overturn the judgment.

A recent report from an NGO, generated after processing the data available with the Election Commission, shows that more than 150 MPs in the 543-seat lower House of Parliament are facing criminal charges. We have in our country more than 1,400 such lawmakers. Worse still, the same report says that as many as 15 MPs are facing at least one murder charge each.

The judgment is simple: if the convicted person has no right to vote, he has no right to contest the election. Now, how can you expect a convicted guy to rule us?

What is worrying the Congress is several of its leaders

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are facing corruption charges. Given the NGO’s report, a total of 80 candidates facing corruption charges were given tickets by political parties in elections to state assemblies in the last five years. Twenty-nine of them have won the elections and are currently serving as lawmakers.

The majority (eight) belongs to the Congress and most of the winners (seven) are from Tamil Nadu whose DMK is supporting the Congress in New Delhi.

162 (30%) out of the 543 Lok Sabha MPs have declared criminal cases against themselves and 14% of the current Lok Sabha MPs have declared serious criminal cases.

In Jharkhand 2009 Assembly, 55 out of 74 MLAs have declared criminal cases against themselves. This means that 74% of the so-called law makers are law breakers!

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Effect Can Rahul Gandhi Rival Him? • Narayan Ammachchi

P

arliamentary elections are still months away, yet the social media is already buzzing with talks about Narendra Modi, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. Here, people are debating why Modi should become the next prime minister and why he should not. But a vast majority of this group appears to favour Modi. How this one time chai-wala grew up to become the prime ministerial candidate of an important political party like the BJP is an interesting story.

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In post-Independence India, no chief minister of a state was painted as a perfect person to be the prime minister, let alone being declared as a prime ministerial candidate. If any of them became the prime minister, it was all because of his luck or because of ‘God’s grace’ as Deve Gowda put it. But Narendra Modi is different, because the Gujarat he ruled -- and still ruling -- for more than decade is today a different state: An engine of growth and prosperity. To know about Modi, you need to know the economic miracle he has brought about in Gujarat.

Until a year ago, a large majority of the Indian mainstream media wasted tons of newsprint painting Modi as a Hindu “terrorist” who supervised the mass killing of Muslims in the communal riots that broke out in Gujarat following the barbaric killing of nearly 50 “karsevaks” in Godra. Today, the same media are devoting reams of newsprint praising him, mainly due to the fact that their pre-election surveys are all showing Modi as the right person to hold the top post.

For example, the latest survey conducted by the India Today Group, based on responses from over 5,000 youth in the age group of 18 to 22 years, has concluded that Modi as the most popular figure for the country’s highest political post. Given this survey, almost half of around 15 crore youth across the country, who would be eligible to vote for the first time in general elections next year, want to see Modi as prime minister. If they vote overwhelmingly, Modi will be the sure winner.

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The driving force behind the Modi effect is Gujarat’s phenomenal economic success under his stewardship. It is precisely this that has made him a household name. Under Modi, Gujarat is recording scorching double-digit growth, prompting even London’s ‘Economist’ magazine to call it India’s Guangdong. If Guangdong is the growth engine of China, Gujar at is India’s growth engine, says the magazine.

This out-

standing success has forced economists to advise the Union government to adopt the Gujarat model. While

Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram, who had both studied in prestigious Western business schools, have pushed the country deeper and deeper into an economic mess, this one-time tea vendor has led his state on to an astounding growth path.

Today, Gujarat produces 35% of India’s pharmaceuticals, 60% of salt, 90% of soda ash, a sixth of cement and a third of the country’s cotton.

Gujarat’s milk production as well as its distribution has become a model for the whole country.

Unbelievable yet true, Gujarat’s seaports handle a quarter of the national cargo.

Gujarat has achieved 100 percent rural electrification, and here there are no power shutdowns.

It is the only state in the country where farmers have continued to grow rich, with the farm output growing at seven times the national average.

Though he has been in power for more than a decade, Modi has never been accused of corruption. Given reports published by foreign papers and magazines like the ‘Economist’, even the officials in Gujarat are relatively less corrupt. Modi has successfully torn off the bureaucratic red tape, which is scuttling investments elsewhere in India.

In addition, his governing style has no comparison. In Gujarat, the draft note of the government policies is

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their land, farmers got a share in the industrial growth. As the industries profited, so did the farmers. Politicians elsewhere in the country also dream to do what Modi did for Gujarat. But they cannot achieve it unless they become as sincere as Modi.

Gujarat is building a tech city for the financial service industry. Once built, it will be the financial capital of the country. Legatum Institute’s Global Prosperity Index 2012 has recognised Gujarat as the highest-scoring among all states of India on matters of social capital. The state ranks 15th in a list of 142 nations worldwide and actually ranks higher than several developed nations. posted on the Internet so that the common man can read it and suggest changes. The policy will be enforced only after receiving a clear consent from the people. Is such a thing happening anywhere else in India?

His policies have yielded high dividends. Over the past years, the state’s per capita income has more than doubled. “If all Indians enjoyed the same income as those in Gujarat,

the country’s economy would be 50% bigger—easily outstripping France’s,” says the ‘Economist’.

Gujarat has given huge tracts of land to industries. Even Tata Motors finally got settled here after being booted out of West Bengal. No farmer opposed when his land was handed over for an industrial plant, because Modi had tied the industrial success to farmers’ success. In exchange for

A Pracharak and a Skilled Orator B

orn into a lower middle class family in Gujarat’s Mehsana district, Narendra Modi is the third of the four children of Damodardas who owned a mobile teashop near the Vadnagar Railway station.

The children, including Modi, would carry tea in a kettle and dispense it to customers at the station.

At school he was an average student, but even there he had proved himself a skilled orator. But there was also another

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side of him: He would often disappear and move to a secluded place to pray. Once, it is said, he stayed at a temple in Gir forest for a long time.

After the 1971 war with Pakistan, Modi joined the RSS and it was here his fortunes changed.

(Reports say Modi worked at his father’s teashop in the railway station until he formally joined the RSS). The Sangh sent him to Delhi, where his daily chores included clean-

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ing the office and cooking food for senior colleagues. It is said that this is something routine in RSS offices where the cadres do everything themselves rather than depending on hired employees. In the evening, Modi was required to reply to the mails at the office.

When the Emergency was declared by the Indira Gandhi regime in the ’70s, Modi went underground. He dressed up like a Sikh employee and moved around in a scooter.

Seeing his oratorial and other skills, the Sangh decided to depute him as BJP’s organising secretary in Gujarat. There, Modi’s future changed. He developed a good rapport with the party workers and gained the confidence of the well-wishers of the party. When L

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K Advani launched the Rath Yatra in Somanath, Modi was the key organiser.

With that Rath Yatra, Advani catapulted the BJP onto the national stage. The party grew up to become a national political party. In 2001, BJP chose Modi to become the chief minister of Gujarat. It was for the first time an RSS Pracharak had become the chief minister of a state.

Some former pracharaks marry

after they retire from the RSS. But Modi has remained a bachelor.

That’s why he is often compared to Vajpayee.

Many in the media are still saying that Modi ditched the leaders who groomed him. Advani is an example, they say. But 85-yearold Advani had never said that he would contest for the prime ministerial post, nor had he said that he was displeased with the BJP leadership for promoting Modi as its prime ministerial candidate.

Advani is treated as a father figure in the party and his suggestions are never set aside, because it is he who raised the party to the national level.

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It was a horrible death for a woman who dared the fanatical Taliban in their own homeland. Sushmita Banerjee, who had married an Afghan businessman, and settled down in a village in that lawless country, was dragged out of the house and riddled with bullets, a “brave” act by the “courageous” brigade of Taliban. She was punished for various reasons by these men – for having written a book on Taliban, for being a social activist and for not wearing a burqa!

Feminism Murdered

Tragic end of Sushmita Banarjee

• By Raju Shanbhag

I

t may not be a big issue in Afghanistan. A woman of Indian origin was dragged out of her house and killed. In a country where stepping out of the house can be a reason for death punishment for women, this came as no surprise. But the death of Sushmita Banarjee, an Indian woman and author, married to a businessman from Afghanistan, sent shock waves in India.

There were many reasons for the killing of Sushmita; one major reason being the fact that she was a woman who dared step out of her house to run her clinic. Sushmita had been subjected to such extremely regressive tyranny right from the time she landed in Afghanistan with her husband.

Regression and deceit had started right at home for her. She first met her

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future husband Janbaz Khan at a theatre in Kolkata. She married him on July 2, 1988. The marriage took place secretly as she was afraid that her parents would not accept this interreligious marriage.

When her parents tried to get them divorced, she escaped to Afghanistan with her husband, only to find out that he already had a first wife, Gulguti, in Afghanistan. Although shocked, she continued to live in Khan’s ancestral home in Patiya village, with her three brothers-in-law, their wives, and with Gulguti and Gulguti’s children. Later, Khan returned to Kolkata for his business, but she could not return.

Life under Taliban was hellish, especially for women who were banned from talking with men other than family members. They were not allowed outside home. Schools, colleges, and hospitals were shut down. She was severely beaten up in May 1995

by some Taliban members near her clinic.

Sushmita made two abortive attempts to escape from Afghanistan but she was caught and kept under house arrest in the village. A fatwa was issued against her, which stated that she was scheduled to die on July 22, 1995. With the help of the village headman, she finally escaped from the village, killing in the process three members of the Taliban with an AK-47 rifle. She reached Kabul and took a flight back to Kolkata on August 12, 1995.

A few years later she was back in Afghanistan only to meet with a gory end. Suspected Taliban terrorists forced their entry into Sushmita house on the night of September 4, 2013. They tied up her husband, dragged her out of the house and pumped her with bullets. Her body, which was found early next morning

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beside a madrasa on the outskirts of the provincial capital Sharana, had 20 bullet marks.

According to police, she might have been targeted for murder for various reasons, including her book, her social work in the region, or merely because she was an Indian woman. Or she may have been killed, according to others, for not wearing a burqa.

She was sentenced to death for this ‘crime’ almost two decades ago, under the Taliban regime.

Women’s rights in Afghanistan have a depressing and bloody history.

From the 19th to the 20th century the rulers of Afghanistan had attempted to restrict women’s rights. Modern social changes for Afghan women began when Queen Soraya made rapid reforms to improve women’s lives and their position in the family. She was the only woman to appear on the list of rulers in Afghanistan and is credited with having been one of the first and most powerful female Muslim activists in Afghanistan. Her advocacy of social reforms for women led to a protest and contributed to the ultimate demise of King Amanullah’s reign.

Throughout the 20th century, Afghanistan continued to be a country mainly dominated by tribes, and men continued to have unquestioned control over women. In 1973, the state was declared a republic and throughout the 1970s and 1980s a communist group called the People’s Democratic

A Film on B Sushmita Banarjee

Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was in power. It tried once again to reform marriage laws and women’s health laws and encouraged women’s education.

During this time it made rapid advances towards modernisation. Women were able to hold jobs as scientists, teachers, doctors and civil servants and had a considerable amount of freedom with significant educational opportunities. But the majority of women still lived in poverty and were denied these opportunities. In 1977, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) was

ollywood, quick to latch on to anything that promises some action, made a movie in 2003 on the life of Sushmita Banarjee. It was titled “Escape From Taliban” and starred Manisha Koirala in the lead role. Sushmita Banarjee wanted Rekha or Dimple to play her role.

She wrote that the makers opted for Mani-

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founded by Meena Keshwar Kamal in Kabul, but her office was shifted to Quetta in neighboring Pakistan where she was assassinated in 1987.

RAWA still operates in the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In spite of some half-hearted attempts by the Afghan Government to provide rights for women, their plight even now remains pathetic. Repeated attempts by the international community to improve the conditions of society in general and women in particular do not seem to have had any effect.

sha as they wanted glamour.

Throughout the shooting of the movie, Sushmita kept saying that she was not happy with Manisha. She even complained that Manisha did not take any of her suggestions. While Sushmita wanted the actress to feel deep down what she went through and portray it well with dignity, she complained that it did not happen with Manisha.

Before her untimely death, she was planning to direct a Bengali film based on her experiences. The film was to be titled ‘Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife.’

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At Last, Mosquitoes Find Their Nemesis

Mosquitoes, those pesky creatures that have been biting and irritating human beings and animals for eons, may soon find themselves “trapped” in a web of technological invention. Mosquitoes reach out to their prey through their acute sense of smell, but the technological breakthrough will help humans to protect themselves with an “invisibility cloak” that will leave these creatures virtually groping in the dark. If the technology becomes viable, then India, which has millions of people suffering from mosquitoborne diseases, should be the first to adopt it.

Technological breakthrough • Rahul Sharma

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he end of mosquito menace may be near. Those tiny, irritating creatures that gleefully stick their teeth into the human skin to suck blood might have finally found their nemesis. According to a report, US scientists have been successful in producing an ‘invisibility cloak’ for mosquito-plagued people, pets and livestock.

The scientists have conducted research on substances that occur

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naturally on human body and have been successful in blocking mosquitoes’ ability to smell and target their victims. Although it looks like a piece of not so important information, this discovery could go a long way in preventing deadly diseases such as malaria which kills approximately one million people around the world every year.

Even developed countries like the US are plagued by the mosquito menace. There the mosquitoes spread rare types of encephalitis, an inflam-

mation of the brain, and transmit heart worms to pet dogs and cats.

Although proven mosquito repellents are available all over the world, they sometimes repel even humans and that’s where the problem lies.

Female mosquitoes, which suck blood to obtain a protein needed to produce fertile eggs, can smell people from a distance as far away as 100 feet. A person’s scent comes from hundreds of chemical compounds on his skin. Of these, many are emitted through sweat and others

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Delhi is also the Mosquito Capital E are produced by bacteria. Lactic acid, found in human sweat, is particularly appealing to mosquitoes. However, other chemical compounds confuse the insects. In this study a group of chemical compounds, including 1-methylpiperzine, were found to block mosquitoes’ sense of smell.

Mosquito-borne diseases are prevalent in more than 100 countries where 300-500 million people are infected. These diseases also cause about one million deaths every year.

In India, more than 40 million people suffer from mosquito-spread diseases every year. There are numerous diseases borne by mosquitoes, malaria and dengue being the most prevalent diseases in our country where more than two million cases of malaria are reported. India spends about 100 million dollars on controlling malaria every year. In spite of such massive spending, the diseases continue to grow from time to time.

The reason is that the mosquitoes can develop resistance to medicines and chemicals. Hence fighting mosquitoes and the diseases spread by them is a continuous process.

The mosquito-borne diseases are no more restricted to the lower strata of society. One can find them in boardrooms, lifts, cars, theatres and in golf clubs. Also, mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases are the result of poor hygiene and sanitation in the down market areas and poor insect control in the upmarket areas.

For years, India has been considered as the dengue capital of the world. Many suspect that the Indian Government is considerably underplaying the number of dengue cases reported in the country. Dengue has been spreading in the country due to various factors such as lack of hygiene and adequate disease control

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ven the capital of the country, Delhi, is not immune to mosquito-borne diseases. Most high-profile residential colonies in Delhi-NCR region are not prepared for the battle of mosquito menace. On the other hand, civic bodies claim they are spreading awareness programmes among residents to fight mosquitoborne diseases such as malaria and dengue.

A survey conducted in 321 colonies to test the preparedness of RWAs to fight mosquito menace recently gathered details of the measures taken to prevent mosquito breeding and fight vector-borne diseases. The survey was conducted in areas such as Rohini, IP Extension, Kalkaji, Vasant Kunj, Alaknanda, Hauz Khas, RK Puram, Dwarka, Noida, Faridabad, Gurgaon, and others.

measures.

A series of such outbreaks of the viral diseases in India are being blamed on the collapse of mosquito control programmes and inadequately planned urbanisation. An estimated three billion people -- almost half the world’s population -- live in malaria endemic areas. In India, more than

According to the survey, 57% of the colonies are yet to ascertain their readiness to fight mosquito menace. Of the remaining that have got their self-assessment and colony inspection done, 66 RWAs have submitted information that is far removed from the ground realities found during the site inspection and verification.

The survey stated that the RWAs were ill-prepared. They were not clear about where they stood in terms of their preparedness to fight mosquito menace.

Only 70 RWAs were found to be aware of the menace and have worked towards the betterment of the condition in their colonies. But even within these RWAs, 69% have open dustbins, 25% don’t maintain gardens in their areas on a weekly basis and 19% colonies have open sewers and drains.

two million cases are reported every year.

In such a scenario, controlling mosquitoes becomes an essential part of any government’s health care plans.

The government needs to seriously consider this new technology to keep mosquitoes at bay and introduce it in the country.

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Distorted focus?

Indian Institutes Fail on Foreign Shores • Ravindra Shaw

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here was a time in ancient India when people from all over the world flocked to Indian universities for higher education. The Nalanda, Takshashila, Ujjain and other universities were known all over the world and were sought after by the aspirants of higher education. But it appears that we have rested on our oars for too long. The current day higher educational universities do not command the same respect internationally as they did in the bygone era.

In fact, QS World University Rankings states that not a single Indian university is among the world’s top 200, let alone top 10. About 11 Indian institutes feature in the top 800 of

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the worldwide list. The highest ranking goes to IIT Delhi which is placed 222 in the list. Although most of the IITs made it to the top 800 ranking, none secured a place in the top 100.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) tops the list for the second year in a row, followed by Harvard and Cambridge. In fact, MIT has become the ultimate centre of technical education all over the world.

Advanced, high-impact research and an unparalleled focus on science and technology are often cited as the reasons for MIT to top the list every year.

MIT has some 77 Nobel laureates and 38 MacArthur Fellows affiliated at the faculty level. MIT’s most famous current faculty member, the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, has been named among the top 10 most cited scholars of all time.

No Indian university finds a pride of place in a survey conducted recently by a prestigious organisation that ranked 200 universities across the world as the best.

We have IITS and IIMs but they are churning out mainly job-seekers, whereas other universities concentrate more on research and allied fields.

Not that there is dearth of talent, but that the focus of teaching in our educational institutions has become somewhat aberrant and foggy.

As a result, they have failed to upgrade the curriculum and keep abreast of the latest trends in education.

Other factors that differentiate top ranking universities like MIT, Harvard and Cambridge are their comparatively better performance for research citations and lower student-to-staff ratio. The students at these universities benefit from intensive teaching and small class sizes. The postgraduate level at MIT is rigorously selective, with less than 10 per cent of applicants admitted.

So, what ails the Indian universities in comparison with their better placed international counterparts?

Many believe that the country’s premier higher education centres like IITs and IIMs suffer from the same problems of red-tapism that engulfing other sectors of our society. Also, while the MIT and Harvard Universities are purely research oriented, the mandate of IITs and IIMs for the first

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Jobs – the focus of higher education W

50 years was to ready the managers and leaders for developing India’s corporate sector.

In spite of having some of the best minds in the world, the Indian higher education universities often suffer from lack of funds. As recently as 2000, IIT Madras had a budget of about Rs 350 crore. Today, it has only Rs 200 crore. It also faced significant constraints on hiring. For example, Ramanujam could never have been hired even though he was a genius as he had failed in BA exams. Compare this with the endowment of, say, a Caltech or Harvard or MIT. That runs to millions of dollars and has a 100year research focus and legacy!

The QS World University Rankings are based on four key pillars—research, teaching, employability and internationalisation. The methodology consists of six indicators: academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), faculty-student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), international students (5%) and international faculty (5%).

It’s not that these top Indian management universities have a dearth of talent either in their student or faculty groups. The professors of IIT Madras have published in world-class journals such as the “Journal of American Chemistry Society”, “Journal of Physical Chemistry”, “Annals of Mathematics” and American civil and mechanical engineering society journals. In

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the last few years, these universities have managed to attract some bright minds from Wharton, INSEAD, MIT, etc. Obviously, there is potential; but it’s not being used properly.

Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees something needs to be done. He said in an interview given to an English daily, “Too many of our higher education institutions are simply not up to the mark. Too many of them have simply not kept abreast of changes that have taken place in the world around us ... (and are) still producing graduates in subjects that the job market no longer requires. It is a sobering thought for us that not one Indian university figures in the top 200 universities of the world today.”

Maybe, the parameters used for the selection of the best universities did the Indian universities in. According to our own admission, a large number of students coming out of the premier Indian institutes lack employable skills. This is either because the universities have failed to invest in the latest teaching methodologies or they simply have failed to keep up with the latest trends.

Either way, the QS World University Rankings are a wakeup call for our educational experts. There is no dearth of talent in our country. But we need to keep abreast of international trends in education and invest in upgrading the curriculum of our universities.

ell, the answer seems to be too obvious. For a majority of Indians, seeking higher education is to get a fat salary in a reputed company and possibly ‘settle’ abroad. While the higher education universities in the West stress more on learning and research, our universities tend to focus on ‘jobs’ a bit too much.

There may be one more reason for the complacency of Indian higher education institutions: lack of competition. In India, there is simply no competition for IITs and IIMs and every year a large number of students clamour for seats in these prestigious organisations. They have near 100% placement, their students get instant placements in esteemed organisations and the salary to a graduate from these universities is way above what anyone else gets in the country.

So when these universities are fulfilling the great Indian dreams, why should they bother if they are ranked low by some foreign agencies?

And the story goes on.

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Transcending Boundaries

Pleasing the Enemy Should the Indian and Pak PMs meet in New York?

• Kanwal Sibal, Dean, Centre for International Relations and Diplomacy, VIF

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hether the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, should meet his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, in New York has become a politically controversial issue. The government is being cautious in not ruling in or out such a meeting at this stage, hoping that the surrounding circumstances may change for the better, making the meeting politically less risky in the background of the public agitation over the killing of five Indian soldiers on the Line of Control, and the government’s shaky handling of the Defence Minister’s statement on the incident in the Lok Sabha.

Clearly, the minister’s first statement, casting doubts on whether the regular troops from Pakistan were involved in the killing, was intended to keep open the doors not only for the New York meeting but also the resumption of the composite dialogue prior to that, for which suitable dates were being considered. The second statement accusing Pakistan’s military of direct involvement, followed by giving the Indian military a free hand in responding to Pakistan’s cease-fire violations, has naturally, complicated the political choreography of dialogue resumption, with the postponement of some envisaged secretary level-meetings as the first casualty.

It is apparent that Nawaz Sharif’s election raised hopes of better rela-

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tions with Pakistan, especially as improvement of ties with India figured in his party’s election manifesto and his post-election statements on expanding economic cooperation and expediting the trial of those involved in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks struck the right chords. These positive perspectives evidently prompted our Prime Minister to send his special envoy to meet Nawaz Sharif even before he formally took office, a gesture reciprocated by the latter through sending his special envoy to Delhi with the message that all stake-holders in Pakistan — meaning the military — were on board on improving

ties with India.

The positive momentum of these early moves has, however, been reversed by subsequent developments.

They have raised the question of whether the early optimism on our side was justified in the light of our frustrating experience of decades in dealing with Pakistan, the structural impediments that exist there in normalizing ties, and the long-standing links of Nawaz Sharif and his party with jihadi organisations. To this must be added the region’s changing geo-political scenario with American overtures to the Taliban and its renewed recognition of the Pakistan

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military’s crucial role in facilitating an orderly American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Already, under Nawaz Sharif’s very brief watch, many negative events have occurred, raising questions of whether we can count on him to control sufficiently the various elements in the body-politic of Pakistan in disagreement with his perceived positive agenda towards India: his political support base, extremist religious organisations, the military and the bureaucracy. For over a decade, Pakistan has been accusing our consulate in Jalalabad of supporting the insurgency in Balochistan. The Pakistani foreign office’s reaction to the Ramban incident in Kashmir was deliberately couched in religiously provocative terms in demanding an Indian inquiry into reports of desecration of the Quran.

Nawaz Sharif has been saying repeatedly that he intends to focus on resolving the Kashmir problem, describing Kashmir as Pakistan’s “jugular vein” in his first address to the nation and equating it with the economy as the two priority issues. Such rhetoric cannot but fire up popular antiIndian sentiments and demands of “progress” on Kashmir to Pakistan’s satisfaction. In June, the numbers for infiltration across the LoC and of terrorists killed went up considerably.

The political atmosphere has been worsened by Pakistan’s parliament passing two anti-Indian resolutions in the last few days on cease-fire violations, countered by an Indian parliamentary resolution declaring that the whole of the state of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, with Pakistan illegally occupying a part of it.

On top of it, Pakistan’s finance minister has announced that the grant of ‘Most Favoured Nation’ (MFN) status to India is not under consideration.

Pakistan was supposed to grant it last December, but decided to delay formalizing the decision till after the elections. Nawaz Sharif’s declared commitment to expand economic ties with India would have gained cred-

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‘Already, under Nawaz Sharif’s very brief watch, many negative events have occurred, raising questions of whether we can count on him to control sufficiently the various elements in the body-politic of Pakistan in disagreement with his perceived positive agenda towards India: his political support base, extremist religious organisations, the military and the bureaucracy.

For over a decade, Pakistan has been accusing our consulate in Jalalabad of supporting the insurgency in Balochistan…’

ibility if he had quickly closed the MFN chapter. That the Urdu translation of MFN makes the issue politically sensitive is a dishonest excuse.

The latest Pakistani strategem to gain time is to leave business bodies on both sides to discuss the issue and allay the concerns of sectors in Pakistan that fear competition from India, following which the way would have been paved for the grant of MFN status. The issue could well get tagged to the resumption of the dialogue

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process, which means that it will get further complicated politically.

To cap it all, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa has received sizable funding from the Punjab government headed by Nawaz Sharif’s brother for charitable works, even though it and its leader, Hafiz Saeed, are on the United Nations list of terrorist organizations. Showing disdain for Indian sensitivities about his persona, his anti-India tirades and his involvement in the Mumbai attacks, Hafiz Saeed was allowed to lead the Eid prayers in Lahore in the Gaddafi stadium. Nawaz Sharif has also failed to initiate any new step to bring to justice those responsible for the Mumbai attacks.

When these facts are mentioned by a group of experts to advise the government not to show undue anxiety for a meeting at the prime-ministerial level in New York and for resuming the composite dialogue, as we would be playing into Nawaz Sharif’s hands and giving him in advance what he wants without any positive action on his part to set the stage for a renewed engagement, a former media adviser to the Prime Minister, representing the most puerile position of profes-

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sional peaceniks in India, descends to a new low in making personal attacks against what he calls the “Punish Pakistan” school, questioning their professional integrity instead of refuting their arguments.

The fact is that Nawaz Sharif has presided over several negative developments, which, if overlooked, would signal that India is once again willing to tolerate Pakistan’s provocations without any dissuasive diplomatic or other response. If such indulgence has not produced any significant result so far, why persist in failed policies? When this is said, the ideological peaceniks distort the debate with imaginary accusations that those

advocating a tougher approach to Pakistan are advocating war and that the call for thrashing Pakistan as an errant schoolboy will make India just like Pakistan — home to jingoism, xenophobia and rough patriotism.

This kind of intellectual chicanery is deplorable, as postponing the proposed meeting of the prime ministers at New York, delaying the resumption of the composite dialogue, seeking an end to state-sponsored terrorism and legal action against the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks, restoring the link between dialogue and terrorism, pressing for curbs on Hafiz Saeed, insisting on MFN status as a gauge of Pakistan’s readiness to normalize trade ties, retaliating locally against Pakistan’s ceasefire violations are the many steps in our panoply that can be taken. These are not acts of war against Pakistan, and only those with no grounding in diplomacy can be so obtuse to think that they are.

Source: Vivekananda International Foundation, Vivekananda Kendra

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A Tiger Reserve Planned in Uttarakhand

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ttarakhand might not lose its tourism luster even after the flood that damaged several historical Hindu shrines, because the Union Forest Ministry is mulling converting its Rajaji Forest range into a tiger reserve. Currently there are just 13 tigers roaming this forest area spread around 820 sq km in the Himalayan foothills, but the ministry will add the nearby forests to tiger reserve.

Tigers have long been a major source of attraction for foreign tourists, with over two million tourists visiting the country every year with the sole aim of getting a glimpse of this beautiful big cat. The Rajaji Park, where the tigers are roaming free, covers three districts of the state, including Dehra Dun and Haridwar. It has already been merged with Chilla and

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Motichur Parks and two more nearby parks -- Laldhang and Kotdwar -- will be added to it.

Over 315 species of birds are found in the park, whereas the wider region has over 500 species, including both residents and migrants. The most prominent avian species include pea fowl and kingfisher, supplemented by a number of migratory species during the winter.

This area is the first staging ground after the migratory birds cross over the Himalayas into the Indian subcontinent.

Analysts say the plan for a tiger reserve is not new; it has long been pending with the Union Forest Ministry for a long time. What is latest is that the Environmental Department has approved the plan to turn the park into a tiger reserve.

Also in offing is setting up of a task force to monitor the forest and prevent wildlife poaching at the park.

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Rajasthan’s Congress Minister Accused of Rape

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rosecutors in Rajasthan are likely to demand the arrest of Dairy Minister Babu Lal Nagar as they have now charged him with raping a woman at his official residence. Court papers accuse the minister of raping the woman after luring her into the house with the promise of a job in the government. He is alleged to have not only raped her, but also threatened to harm her if she complained to the police.

Recently, a local BJP leader has also complained to the police that he was receiving death threats from the minister. The Minister, on his part, alleges that the woman has links with land mafia and they are using her to remove him from power. Nagar says he would welcome the probe as that would help reveal the truth.

The German ex-pontiff’s comments were reported by the Catholic news agency Zenit, which did not name the person Benedict had spoken to. Many officials in the Vatican consider the report credible explaining that a spiritual process guided him to resign.

His mystic experience, according to media, lasted for months, asking him to develop a closer and exclusive relationship with God. When retiring, Benedict had said that his advanced age was no longer supporting him to continue as the Pope.

A report in the ‘Guardian’ newspaper said that a German journalist, who had recently met the former Pope, reported he was going deaf, appeared to be blind in one eye, and was emaciated and “exhausted-looking”.

The paper said that he was depressed after his trusted butler, Paolo Gabriele, was caught leaking his personal correspondence. Italian press reports have recently claimed he was frustrated by a network of influence built up at the Vatican by a pro-gay lobby of prelates.

In the run-up to his retirement, he had nearly stopped meeting visitors and was increasingly liking privacy and quietude.

The Catholic Church has long been suspected of having been caught in the crossfire of different lobbies which were trying to influence on the Pope.

“The last time there were two or three popes. They didn’t talk among themselves and they fought over who was the true Pope,” ‘Guardian’ reported the current Pope Francis as saying.

Pope says he quit because God told him to do so

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he former Pope, Benedict, who resigned in February this year, has told a close associate that he was told by God to do so, according to Vatican media. When he became feeble, God inspired him to leave his position and focus on prayer.

Eighty-six-year-old Benedict, who is the first Pope to step down half way through his tenure in 600 years, has stated that he had a mysterious experience during which he heard a godly voice telling him to quit.

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Now, file RTI applications online

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he Central Information Commission has allowed people to submit RTI applications online. The service has just been launched by Minister of State for Public Grievance Narayan Swamy.

Though you can file applications online, the government might continue to reply offline, by post. Applicants can pay the fee using their credit or debit cards or through their online accounts in State Bank of India or its subsidiaries.

The service will, however, be used by the government officials for the time being but will shortly be extended to everyone. The minister has asked all states to allow citizens to file RTI applications online.

the performance of the site.

The engineer, according to ‘The Hindu’, graduated from Hindustan Institute of Technology in Coimbatore in June.

The youth is unemployed and is looking for a job in Chennai. Arul Kumar stated that he often examines the features of these sites to educate himself. When Facebook found problem with removing the pictures posted by its users, he hit upon an idea.

As of now, images once posted on Facebook can be removed either by the person who posted them or by the Facebook team. That means if you dislike the image of yourself that someone has posted on the site, you can remove all on your own.

When Arul claimed that he had found out a solution for this bug, the Facebook team did not realise its significance. They insisted that there was no bug in the first place. Later he sent a video displaying the bug and the method to neutraliee it.

Soon the Facebook team replied and informed him

Facebook rewards a Tamil Nadu Engineer

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opular social media site Facebook has announced Rs. 8 lakh reward for an engineering graduate in Salem, Tamil Nadu, for helping it to deal with a technical snag in its site. The 21-year-old graduate, Arul Kumar, has reportedly helped the social media giant to remove images from account holders without their knowledge.

The money was paid under the company’s ‘bug bounty programme’ which offers hefty sum of rewards for technology wizards who help it improve

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that they had sent him $12,500 as reward for helping the company find the bug.

Indian technical experts have long impressed the Western tech companies, which have grown global.

Thousands of Indian technological wizards are working for these giants like Google and Facebook.

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When Americans mistake the Sikh for a Muslim…

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gang of young men has beaten up a Sikh professor in Colombia University after mistaking him for a Muslim. 31-year-old Prabjot Singh was attacked just blocks away from his home by 20 young men on bikes. The attackers called him Osama Bin Laden.

They beat him up and left him on the street with a broken jaw. The wounded professor was later taken to a hospital for treatment.

The incident has shocked the Sikh community in the United States, where a large number of people fail to distinguish between Sikhs and Muslims. There are Sikhs in large number in New York as well as in some parts of the United Kingdom.

The professor was on his evening stroll after he dropped off his wife and children at home. It is sur-

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prising because the professor has long been living in the area and was involved in several community programmes there.

He told ‘New York Daily’ that his attackers were outsiders and he had never seen them before. The turbans and long beards of Sikh men have often marked them out as targets for discrimination, writes one of his cousins in ‘New York Times.’

Many Sikhs have contributed to the American economy, military and lifestyle. In 2007, there were approximately 250,000 Sikhs living in the United States, with the largest number living in the Eastern and Western coasts. The US also has a number of non-Punjabi converts to Sikhism.

Most Sikhs started life in America working in lumber mills, mines, and as farm labourers, with many eventually becoming landowners. Many early Sikh immigrants were restaurant owners.

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Rationalist’s Murder Sparks Protests

tests have continued in Pune where Dabholkar was shot dead. In a march which included students, public anger against politicians was overflowing. Local politicians who joined the march were prevented from making speeches. The protestors felt that they would not allow politicians score points through their fake solidarity, they said.

Narendra Dabholkar was the founder-president of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS), an organisation set up to eradicate superstition. He was assassinated on August 20, 2013, while out on a morning walk.

Godman in Rape Case

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he angry protests ignited by the gruesome murder of well-known rationalist Narendra Dabholkar have forced the Maharashtra Government to clear an ordinance that enforces the anti-superstition laws he had championed for years.

Mr. Dabholkar had introduced an Anti-Superstition and Black Magic Bill 13 years ago but it failed to get through the Assembly on more than one occasion.

The Bill had proposed that those conducting black magic or using people’s superstitions be jailed for up to seven years.

It also sought to ban numerous practices that included animal sacrifice and magical remedies to cure diseases. Mr. Dabholkar’s family was highly critical of the delay. The Bill was introduced thrice in the Assembly and underwent 29 amendments. But in spite of that, it was not passed but ran into opposition from the Shiv Sena-BJP and from organisations that claimed that the Bill would target only the Hindus and suppress religious freedom. The State Government had said it would introduce the Bill once again in the Assembly session this July but failed to do so.

The Opposition is now putting the blame on the government. According to them, the government had failed to introduce the Bill in the last session, which showed that it had no will to get it passed.

Meanwhile, the investigation of the murder has not resulted in the police getting any firm lead. Pro-

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he 16-year-old girl, who unveiled the alleged horror story in front of the nation and filed a police complaint against self-styled godman Asaram Bapu, has faced the media. In her complaint, she explained how she was molested by the spiritual guru on Aug 15, 2013. According to her statement, the godman called the girl into his room in his ashram in Jodhpur, Rajasthan.

Then, Asaram Bapu allegedly assaulted her for more than an hour. When the girl started screaming, Asaram reportedly threatened her with dire consequences. The complainant, in the FIR filed with the Jodhpur police, explained how she was molested.

According to her, he switched off the light of his room first and then started molesting her. He also reportedly tried to strip her. She also told the police that she was warned by him to remain silent about the incident.

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The girl has said that she was taken to Asaram Bapu’s room at Manai ashram on August 15 night for a ritual for which he had wanted the two of them to be alone in the room, police said.

The girl was reportedly terrified by Asaram Bapu’s threats, and did not speak about the incident immediately, but disclosed the matter to her parents only after they reached home at Shahjahanpur (in Uttar Pradesh) two days later.

Thereafter, her parents came to meet Asaram Bapu on August 19 when he was in Delhi. But since Asaram Bapu refused to meet them, they immediately lodged an FIR with the Delhi police who then referred the matter to the Jodhpur police.

Having confirmed that both Asaram Bapu and the girl were present at the Manai ashram on the said night, police said that there was substance in the allegations against Asaram Bapu.

A Shooting ‘Championji’ at the Party

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n Uttarakhand minister in Dehra Dun hosted a dinner party and a Congress legislator named Pranav Champion took this occasion to show off his shooting skills. He reportedly opened fire, injuring two people.

The minister, senior Congressman Harak Singh Rawat, refused to comment. “I don’t have any information. I was busy inside the house,” he said. According to a guest at the party, Champion, who is the MLA from Khanpur, came out of his car as people were gathered for dinner and fired. Another person there who was shot in the leg stated that “Championji himself took him to the hospital.”

The police said two people were injured and both are in hospital. One of them, a local Congress leader, named Vivekanand Khanduri, said he was in no state to speak; doctors attending on him said he was brought bleeding and though X-rays showed no bullet lodged in his leg, there were what seemed to be entry and exit wounds. The state BJP has asked for a thorough investigation and immediate action against Champion. An FIR has been filed, though no one has been named in it yet, according to sources.

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‘Champion’ did not attend the Vidhan Sabha session which started recently. Sources stated that he was distributing cheques among flood-affected persons in his constituency. When media persons reached his Dehra Dun residence, they were told that the MLA was not at home.

Police have stated that they would record the statement of the injured persons. According to a source in the police department, Khanduri said in his recorded statement to the police that he became unconscious after hearing the shot at the party. “I do not know who fired the gun. I came to know about my leg injuries when I gained consciousness.”

Notice to Delhi Govt. on Dog Bite Menace

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he Delhi High Court has expressed concern over the increase in the number of stray dog bites.

The court has asked the Delhi government and civic agencies to inform it about the steps taken to tackle this menace within four weeks.

The order was issued on a plea filed by Advocate S K Singh, who said that the civic agencies were not taking any concrete steps to tackle the problem.

The bench of Acting Chief Justice Badar Durrez Ahmed and Justice Vibhu Bakhru issued notice to the government, the three municipal corporations and the New Delhi Municipal Council to submit their response with details of the sterilisation programmes

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undertaken since 2010.

Citing an MCD report and various news reports, Singh said there had been 30,608 cases of dog bites in 2012-13 in the city as compared to 17,000 in 20112012, an increase of more than 45 per cent.

The plea further stated that the corporation had issued a report stating that the number of stray dogs in the city had increased to 1.35 lakh. The lawyer also said anti-rabies vaccines were not easily available in hospitals run by civic agencies.

Counsel for NDMC told the court that the government agencies were carrying out sterilisation programmes but the personnel available were not sufficient to cope with the increase in the number of stray dogs.

Petitioner S.K. Singh alleged that the government and the local bodies had done little to control the menace. He also alleged that the street dogs were not sterilised in a routine manner, which had resulted in an increase in their population over the years as also cases of dog bites.

Google Glass Makes Its Debut

D

r. J.S. Rajkumar, a surgical gastroenterologist based in Chennai, has brought Google Glass for the first time into an operation theatre in India.

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Google Glass allows for immediate sharing of the photo/video of the operation. And in this case it transmitted a live video of his operation onto a remote location recently.

Google Glass has been within operating theatres twice before. The first surgery with the Glass was in June in Spain, and the second in August in Ohio.

When the Google Glass was switched on inside Lifeline Hospital’s operation theatre, it was a first in the country and only the third time in the world that it was used by surgeons.

Built essentially as a tool for social media, Google Glass operates on an android processor and can be hooked up to any android device -- a mobile phone or a tab. The video can be streamed on any chat site that allows multimedia content, say like Google Hangout.

Dr. Rajkumar, who is chairman of Lifeline Hospitals, got hold of the limited edition Google Glass at $1700 as he runs a Google Developers Group in the

US and had registered for the Glass a year ago. He was among the first to get it when Google started shipping them out. An old friendship with a surgeon and Dr. Rajkumar’s own interest in using the device in the theatre led to the debut of Google Glass in Chennai.

He says that they are working on connecting the Glass with hospital information systems, so that at a command, the patient’s history comes up on the visual layer. Broadband speeds being quite low in this country, the video from a second hernia surgery did not quite reach the viewing room. But if cost and connectivity are in favour, Google Glass can transform health care access in this country.

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Praise for Film on Kashmiri Pundits

A

short film that portrays the pain and suffering of displaced Kashmiri Pundits who had to run away from their homeland after terrorism raised its ugly head in Kashmir in the 1990s has been selected for the International Film Festival of Cinematic Arts, Los Angles.

Produced and directed by Siddhartha Gigoo, ‘The Last Day’ has already won viewers’ accolades and received three nominations in the forthcoming London International Film Festival to be held in October.

The film describes the plight of an entire community through the lives of four people living in the hope of a better tomorrow, the filmmakers say.

According to Gigoo, he has tried to bring to the fore the longing of a family for their homeland in an alien environment of migrant camps. He also stated that the film was shot at numerous locations in Jammu and Srinagar.

Set in 1994 in a camp for Kashmiri Pundits in exile, the film portrays the life of an old patriarch, who is

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on his deathbed and battling dementia, and his family’s daily fight for survival.

‘The Last Day’ explores themes of loss, shattered human relationships, fears and longing in the lives of the exiled families who left the Valley due to militancy. Around four lakh Pundits were forced to flee their homes. Several thousand homeless families sought shelter in puny canvas tents set up in migrant camps.

Several old men and women died in the hope that they will see their villages before their death. It’s the story of those people, who suffered the pain of migration and loss of identity. These exiled people are still waiting for favourable political conditions in Kashmir for their return.

The film has received adulation at the 6th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) and it was nominated in the “50 Best Films” category during the Indian Independent Film Festival (TIIFF) in Bangalore in August.

The film was a major showcase during the 7th Annual Film Aid Festival in Kenya and at Beskop Tshechu Documentary, Animation and Short Film festival, Bhutan.

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[ From the world of books ]

My Father, Our Fraternity: The story of Haafiz Ali Khan and My World

By Amjad Ali Khan 2012, Roli Books. Rs. 595

Musical journey of a different kind A

mjad Ali Khan undoubtedly represents the official Sarod lineage of Indian classical music heritage. It was his forefather Ghulam Ali Khan Bangash who turned the Afghanistani Rabab into Sarod. (Of course, there is another parallel historical argument that Sarod was invented by Niyamatullah Khan around the same time, that is., 1820 AD. Now Sarod has a distinctive presence in contemporary classical fora. In his book ` My Father, Our Fraternity: The Story of Haafiz Ali Khan and My World’, Amjad Ali Khan has captured the essence of being a musician.

This book is remarkable for its polite narration and some memorable photographs. Though the publication looks like a coffee table book, the content is straight, simple and honest to a great extent.

The 218-page book revolves around the life of legendary musician Haafiz Ali Khan, Amjad Ali Khan’s father. Amjad Ali Khan provides a first hand account of how his father preserved the purity of Hindustani classical music tradition. Haafiz Ali Khan’s request to the then President Babu Rajendra Prasad to protect Rag Darbari Kanada is an anecdote which indicates Haafiz Ali Khan’s innocent, yet firm beliefs. Amjad Ali Khan narrates the stories in a neutral voice to the extent, though at times we feel his natural obsession with his lineage.

The incident where Haafiz Ali Khan, referred as `Abba’ in the book, was challenged by one Darshan Singh on the Tabla and subsequently died due to a non-stop 35-minute playing on high speed Jhala is another shocking incident narrated in detail.

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But the whole book carries a firm tone of keeping the Sarod tradition intact by a strict regime of practice, a complete dedication to classical rendition and depicts several such anecdotes woven around the family members. Amjad Ali Khan is not hesitant in criticising one of his relatives; he even narrates what happened between him and Shehnai legend Ustad Bismillah Khan on a stage event.

The sepia toned image gallery is equally interesting. Amjad Ali Khan meeting the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is one of such many photographs.

The glossy art paper, which never goes well with such monochromatic design, is the only strange part of this otherwise beautifully produced book.

Amjad Ali Khan’s niceties are evident throughout the book. His respect for new talents is also commendable. But absence of Pandit Rajeev Taranath, the Sarod exponent and a senior disciple of Us tad Ali Akbar Khan, is a glaring lapse as he has quoted other contemporary artistes with zeal. He has showered praise on his sons, Aman and Ayan Ali Khans, which too is apt considering their hold on the Sarod.

This book -it may not teach you the music- inspires people with musical inclination. More importantly, it firmly supports the family tradition in preserving the art of music. This is the most important quality of this book, as India is witnessing a surge in nuclear families and broken traditions. Amjad Ali Khan, therefore, definitely deserves a standing ovation for this wonderful book.

- Beluru Sudarshana

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