SPAN: September/October, 2007

NASA Award

By BHAVYA GUPTA

have a dream, a dream that one day, my four children will be able to go into outer space and live a free life without the shackles of the earth. " These words by Emmanuel Ratnaraj, mentor for our group of Apeejay School space architects in Jalandhar, Punjab, paraphrase the famous "I have a Dream" speech by American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. These words inspired us to create a winning design in the International Space Settlement Design Contest organized by the NASA-Ames Research Center in California and the US National Space Society.

Our team-comprising Abhisaar Sharma, Karan Jain, Sanyam Mehra, Aaina Dhingra and me-developed a research-based proposal for a space settlement where humans could dwell permanently in orbit around the earth.

Our model was titled "Babel" after the biblical story about people trying to build a tower in an attempt to stay united, make a name for themselves and reach the heavens. After eight months of laborious work, guided by our teachers Ranjana Sud and Mr. Ratnaraj, we submitted an 80-page proposal, one of 109 submitted by 11- to 18-year-olds from around the world. We won in the junior, small group category.

Besides increasing our knowledge and giving us the ability to harness the resources of space, our vision is that a space station like Babel, designed to sustain 10,500 people, could also ensure the survival of the human race, in case life on earth is destroyed in a catastrophe. In our design, gravity would be generated through centrifugal force, which is generated by rotating the settlement. We planned for Babel to be constructed by robots, in space. Our proposal contained an estimated construction time, 22 years; cost, $85-125 billion; and funding, from governments of different countries, private investors and the stock market.

To win the prize, we had to think of everything. So we designed Babel's water, air, waste, electricity and distribution systems to provide an earth-like environment and even protection against radiation, asteroids and meteors.

We and five other winning teams-from Romania, Uruguay and California-visited the Ames Research Center on June 19. We were shown models of aircraft, a space module, the world's largest vertical motion simulator, the world's largest wind tunnels and pressure chambers.

We also had some leisure time, to visit San Francisco, Disneyland and Universal Studios in Los Angeles.

We not only got an opportunity to expand our intellectual horizons, but came to know about American culture. There was an exchange of different innovative and intellectual ideas about space settlement design among the winning teams. The students got to know about each other's countries and had a great time together. ~

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Bhavya Gupta is now a class X student at Apeejay School, Jalandhar, Punjab.

Back, from left: Sanyam Mehra, Abhisaar Sharma and Karan Jain.

Front, from left: Bhavya Gupta and Aaina Dhingra.

September/October 2007

Front cover: Chaitra (left) and Rajeshwari at a group teaching and learning multimedia hybrid program at the Government Higher Secondary School in Bangalore, Karnataka. Photograph

by Anita Khemka.

SPAN Publisher: Editor-in-Chief: Editor: Associate Editor: Urdu Editor' Hindi Editor.

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*U.S.-India Higher Education

By Sebastian John

7

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*Predeparlure Planning * Beware of Education and Visa Scams!

By Jane E. Schukoske and Peter G. Kaestner

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*Is Harvard Ready to Take on South Asia?

11 *My College Experience Shaped Who I Am Today By Brittanie K Anderson

13

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* Finding Housing

14 *True Education 15 *Using Technology

By BhamyV Shenoy

By Dilip D'Souza

to Train Teachers and Inspire Chi Idren By Richa Varma t.\"

*Human Trafficking

36 Food: HaiI Caesar By

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Law and Art: Portrait of Injustice

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On the Lighter Side

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Corrections:

In the anicle "Creating

Music" in me July/August

Cross-Cultural

2007 issue, SPAN incorrectly

stated that the capital of Maryland

is Baltimore.

The

capital is Annapolis.

In the article "National May/June

Family Health Survey" in the

2007 issue, SPAN incorrectly

stated that 80

percent of health services in India are provided by the public sector. However, the private sector provides the majority of health care in the country.

A LETTER FROM

THE

PUBLISHER ducators and scholars in India and the United States are scrambling to keep up with the demands of students and employers to prepare for, and be effective in, our globalizing economies.

University campuses that we often imagine as placid oases for contemplation and scholarly discourse are seriously reviewing their strategies for competitiveness in the global market of ideas.

The libraries, colloquia and coffee shops will not disappear. Rather, intellectual centers are finding new ways to collaborate across time and distance and creating new partnerships that are revolutionizing the face of contemporary education. The consequences will be enormous for ur global engagements, with vast opportunities for people to improve heir lives, as well as the welfare of their families, communities and nations.

India's young people are well placed to benefit from the new global knowledge marketplace. India is ahead of all other nations in sending its tudents abroad for higher studies. More than 60 percent of the 123,000 Indian students abroad are in the United States. America welcomes more tudents from India than from any other country in the world.

We have devoted almost half of SPAN's annual "education issue" to information for these prospective students and their parents, including insights from recent U.S. graduates, choosing an appropriate instituion, tips on visas, what to pack, housing and using research tools.

In India, where 54 percent of the population is under 25, young people have aspirations that cannot be met without higher education. Not everyone can afford to study abroad, but Americans are eagerly joining ith Indian educators to bring the best educational opportunities here-to build campuses, exchange faculty and students, and conduct 'oint research on subjects as varied as agriculture, fighting disease and exploring space.

In our main story, "U.S.-India Higher Education," Sebastian John outlines some of the collaborative efforts underway between Indian and merican institutions and individual scholars and researchers, and describes others that as yet are only dreams.

Our cover captures a moment of joy in learning and intellectual chievement that we can all remember from our experiences as young people. It shows two schoolgirls from Bangalore learning to use a chool computer. The girls are experiencing a new world of education beyond their families' dreams because of a collaboration between Indians and Americans trying to make the very best in education availble to all. Their story, by Richa Varma, on the use of radio, TV and computers to train teachers and inspire children in rural India reflects he vision of another dreamer, Mohandas K. Gandhi: "Money invested in the promotion of learning gives a 10-fold return to the people, even s a seed sown in good soil returns a good crop."

We agree, and hope you do, too.

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"The student understands that the global knowledge society knows no boundaries. Now, it remains for government and higher education institutions, working in partnership with the private sector, to match their students' ambitions."

-U.S

Under Secretary of State Karen P.Hughes Mumbai, March 2007

eorgia, in the southern United States, is known for its sweet peaches and busy airport. Aviation, cell phone equipment and paper pulp are key export industries.

However, as the state eyes increasing trade with India in the coming years, it is not simply investing in business delegations or marketing offices. It's looking for faculty and hoping to build a state-of-the-art research campus in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh.

In fact, The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) aims to become the fIrst American university in India to offer u.S.-recognized graduate degrees identical to those received by students at its American campus in Atlanta. Dr. Gary B. Schuster, provost of Georgia Tech, says the Hyderabad campus would "focus on new research areas that are critical to the growth ofIndia's economy, but will also provide unique market opportunities for U.S. economic interests." The planners are already talking with corporations to set up research facilities and other collaborations. Students in courses such as power distribution, solar energy and infrastructure engineering would be taught by permanent Georgia Tech faculty and have opportunities to fInish their degrees in the United States, according to a memorandum of understanding between the university and the Andhra Pradesh government signed on June 5, 2007.

A new initiative from President George W. Bush and the U.S. State Department to increase cooperation with foreign universities has further encouraged American higher education institutions to consider unique ways to establish themselves in India and elsewhere.

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Above: Indian students read brochures from among 32 American universities at the Linden U.S. University Fair in Bangalore, Karnataka, in 2006.

Left: Gary B. Schuster, provost of Georgia Tech, exchanges a memorandum of understanding in June 2007 with Andhra Pradesh government officials: (left to right) Chief Minister YS. Rajasekhara Reddy, Technical Education Minister R. Chenga Reddy and C.B.5.

Venkataramana, principal secretary for higher education.

In the fields of study Georgia Tech would offer in Hyderabad, Schuster points out India produces fewer than 500 doctoral graduates a year. "Our courses will be aimed at creating a set of alumni who will be successful entrepreneurs, thus producing new jobs and new industries in India, as opposed to graduates seeking jobs elsewhere," he says.

Georgia Tech wants to be a pioneer in a new kind of U.S.-India collaboration on education, but it's not alone. In March, India's Union Cabinet approved the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill for introduction in Parliament, though that has not yet occurred.

The Indian legislation that is being considered would clarify regulations for setting up campuses in India, a process which many U.S. universities have found to be an obstacle. One proposed provision of the bill is that foreign educational institutions would invest 51 percent of the capital for a project, and all profits would be reinvested in the Indian partner institution in most cases, encouraging only serious educators. The foreign universities and colleges would also have to ensure that the quality of the programs they offer in India is comparable to those on the home campus. Exemption from Indian reservation, admissions and tuitions

Two-Way Education Exchanges America wants to open its doors even wider to students from India, and we want more American young people to travel to India to study and learn. More two-way exchanges of students with India will: • Help address the demand for education in India, where there are many more students who want higher education than there are spaces for them; • Continue a welcome infusion of Indian talent and creativity into U.S. campuses; • Give American students

important skills to work effectively in a global environment and enrich Indian institutions with their intellectual contributions; • Meet the growing demands of American and Indian businesses for skilled, knowledgeable workers; • Help future generations forge stronger bonds between our countries.

-U.S. Under Secretary of State Karen P. Hughes, Mumbai, March 26, 2007

rules could be given by the government, after consultation with an advisory board.

With only 7 percent of India's I8-to 24-year-olds entering universities, according to India's National Knowledge Commission, increasing education opportunities takes on new importance for India's growth in the 21st century. Education in India is also an increasing priority for the American government and American students.

The lure of the East "Studying abroad is becoming an essential component for success in the competitive global environment," US. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen P. Hughes said during her trip to India in March. "The student understands that the global knowledge society knows no boundaties. Now, it remains for government and higher education institutions, working in partnership with the private sector, to match their students' ambitions."

Her accompanying delegation included presidents of a type of institution Indians have usually been unaware of: twoyear community colleges whose degrees can be used for credit at four-year institutions.

Columbia University in New York City, George Washington University in Washington D.C. Akhilesh Pandey in his laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, works with researchers in Bangalore, Kamataka.

Hiba Aleem of the U.S. Institute for South Asian Undergraduate Leaders Program, with Nishi Pandey, alumna of the Study of the U.S. Institute on Contemporary American Literature, greets U.S. Under Secretary of State Karen P. Hughes, in New Delhi in March 2007. and the University of North Dakota are among those tying up with Indian schools to send American students over for an international experience.

The US. govemment is also fostering educational collaborations like the US.-IndiaAgricultural Knowledge Initiative, which allows students from both countries to do joint degree programs.

The American Society of Engineering Education is working with Indian engineering educators on an action plan to strengthen engineering programs, and recently had a high level meeting at the Infosys campus in Bangalore.

Darryl Calkins of Linden Tours organizes education fairs where US. university officials can meet prospective Indian students. He

says the new push toward India comes from increasing international awareness and also the concerns that U.S. universities have about meeting the demand from potential students in America. By opening up joint programs and campuses abroad, they can provide the same quality education to students who would have otherwise come to the U.S. campus, he says. Yet, they still have an opportunity to grow their school and their alumni. Calkins also says U.S. universities have realized that in a fast globalizing world, they have not sent enough American students overseas to study and gain perspective. Programs in India give students a somewhat familiar environment to step into. It "makes it easier for U. S. students who have never thought of it before" and might have been afraid of all the unknowns in going abroad, he says.

And it is not only traditional universities that are responsible for growing ties. The Simmons School of Management in Boston, Massachusetts, is creating a student exchange program with the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata so that students from both schools can gain global experience, and women MBA candidates, in particular, can be encouraged to take on leadership roles and become entrepreneurs. "My fundamental belief is that to be a successful manager in organizations today, you need cross-cultural competencies and global experience," says Simmons' dean, Deborah Merrill-Sands.

Johns Hopkins University Professor Akhilesh Pandey set up the Institute of Bioinformatics in Bangalore in 2002 to help him evaluate huge amounts of data generated by his experiments in isolating and studying proteins to help fight cancer. Even though many people doubted his idea, Pandey put up his own money to get the institute running and later received grants to step it up.

Now, it operates the Human Protein Reference Database, which contains information on more than 24,000 human proteins. It gets thousands of hits a month from laboratories around the world, and Pandey has helped many of the institute's Bangalore-based researchers complete their PhDs in India and study at Johns Hopkins in Maryland. He hopes to set up more collaborative projects with American institutions that want to expand their research by taking advantage of lower costs in India.

Private corporations also playa role in helping universities set up these collaborations. The University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, Cornell and other U.S. universities have started a science and engineering electronic-learning program with Amrita University in Tamil Nadu, thanks to funding for travel and salary supplements from Qua1comm, Microsoft and Cadence Design Systems.

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Seeking International Scholars ultinational corporations are helping to fund the McDonnell International Scholars Academy, established at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in partnership with leading Asian universities including the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. The first group of international scholars, including three from India, arrived for the fall 2006 semester Their travel, tuition and living expenses are paid for while they conduct research. The Academy also appoints a liaison, or ambassador, to nurture the relationship. Kolkata-born Himadri B. Pakrasi, who moved to the United States in 1984, is the academy's ambassador for liT Mumbai. He is also director of the university's new International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustai nabi Iity.

Washington University's chancellor, Mark S. Wrighton, met with Indian political, educational and business leaders in February 2007 to identify more areas for cooperation in education and research. "The initial areas are Top: Washington going to be energy and environment," University Wrighton said. "We found no resistance. It's Chancellor Mark S. up to us to identify areas where we feel colWrighton chats with laboration would be meaningful for our facul2006 graduates ty and students and the liT faculty and stuHarsh and Nupur dents. We feel a big opportunity exists, for Agarwal while in both our countries, in the area of bio-energy.

India to promote In the US, education and research go hand collaboration in hand. What we're trying to do is prepare a through the group of people to be leaders, all around the McDonnell International world. We see this as a two-way partnership."

-L.K.L. Scholars Academy.

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The draw of the West Though there are growing opportunities to get an American education in India, it hasn't dampened the desire to study in the United States. India's Knowledge Commission estimates 160,000 Indians are studying abroad, spending an estimated $4 billion a year. More than 76,500 of them went to the United States in 2006. Most of these Indian students pursue masters and doctoral programs, though about 20 percent now go into undergraduate studies, says Vijaya Khandavilli, who recently retired as country coordinator for Educational Advising Services of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India. USEFI is on hand to help Indian students, scholars and

Left: Himadri B. Pakrasi, the McDonnell International Scholars Academy liaison for IIT Mumbai, in his energy lab.

A Community Choice I f you're short on funds, or worried about a bad grade in the past, there is a second chance in life. And he's coming to a college fair near you.

George Beers, dean of International Education at Foothill College in the Silicon Valley area of California, has been corning to India for more than five years, to help explain a unique American educational option: community colleges.

"We're an alternative way to do the first two years," he says.

How do community colleges differ from regular ones? They are mostly publicly funded, have two-year degree courses, are located allover the country in small towns and big cities, and are committed to accessibility through open admissions (almost anyone can join) and low tuition fees.

Consequently, community college enrollments reflect the rich diversity of the United States, and campuses are populated with people of all ages, ethnic and cultural heritages and socioeconomic backgrounds. There are 1,202 community colleges in the United States, serving 11.6 million students.

In March 2007, presidents of 16 U.S. community colleges visited India to discuss the potential for mutual exchange as part of a U.S. initiative to encourage foreign students to attend community colleges. Visas for students seeking to study at these col-

George Beers, dean of International Education at Foothill College, California, speaks to students at the Linden U.S. University Fair in Bangalore, Karnataka.

leges were difficult to get in the past, but the State Department is now trying to raise awareness and encourage more students to consider the option.

"I feel community college education is good for Indian students to cut down costs," says Vijaya Khandavilli, just-retired counselor at the U.S. Educational Foundation in India. "The first two years can be spent at a community college and then the student can move on to a four-year college."

Tuition and other fees at public community colleges average less than half of those at publ ic four-year colleges and about a 10th of those at independent four-year colleges.

Khandavilli says the smaller class sizes of community colleges often help Indian students adjust, and she also points out that studying at the community colleges helps students "understand the American society and the people better than studying at a large, publicly funded university" Beers also notes that at his college, teaching is done by professors, not assistants. And he's proud to say he sends international students on to big name schools like the University of California, Yale and Stanford every year Once you've attended a community college, universities no longer look at high school grades or test scores.

The only academic work evaluated is from the community college. "It's like a second chance to be able to get a good academic record to get into top universities," he says.

For more information, see the American Association of Community Colleges Web site. http://www. aacc.nche.edu/ -S.J.

researchers navigate the visa process and figure out which is the best university or college for their needs, how to pay, find housing, fill out applications and transfer academic work for credit toward a degree.

Aspiring scholars tend to gloss over the more personal trials of cultural adjustment and homesickness. USEFI helps with that, too, inviting prospective students to seminars, workshops and interactions with returned Indian students and Americans.

Deepak Goyal, a PhD student in Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been studying in the United States since 2001. At first he was just excited, like nearly all Indian students arriving for the first time. "I came out of my shell and it opened up my mind to new things," he says of his first year in the States. But after that, he felt tired and confused by the American system, and even saw some of his Indian friends leave the country, depressed. "Everyone feels these things to some extent," he says. Often, Indian students come with a very specific idea of what America will be like, and it doesn't often turn out exactly as planned. Goyal says it was hard getting used to cooking for himself and not having the support of family and friends around him. To beat the blues, Goyal advises taking new kinds of classes, fmding supportive professors and giving oneself time to settle in. Goyal took advantage of the flexibilities in American higher education, and took courses outside of his field: economics and ballroom dancing. And he enjoyed the freedom he was given to debate what is taught. "If you don't agree with a professor, you can openly talk about it.. .and your entire life does not depend on one professor's opinion," Goyal says.

Even with scholarships, the average cost of studying in the United States is $20,000 per year for an Indian student, cautions Khandavilli. This is another reason why earning a U.S. degree in India may be a solution for many. With this in mind, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS. Rajasekhara Reddy, during a visit to the United States in May 2007, signed a memorandum of understanding with Stanford University and Satyam Computers Emergency Management and Research Institute in California. It would provide for a Stanford University branch campus to be set up in Hyderabad to educate Indian emergency medical professionals, or paramedics.

Sreenath Sreenivasan, dean of students and associate professor at Columbia University's School of Journalism, says U.S. schools need to step up their marketing in India, and emphasize their diverse student bodies and Indian student leaders. "On a recent trip to southern India, I met lots of savvy potential students," Sreenivasan says. 'They seem to have done a lot of research and spent tin1e connecting with Indian alumni groups."

"Another issue is simply one of structure: India tends to o..~ ÂŤ operate on a year-based calendar, while American schools use @ the system of fall and spring semesters, with winter, spring o:~ an d summer breaks. "With disparity in the two systems, cred~ it transfers are a challenge," Khandavilli says.

Some schools solve this through something called "twinning." Manipal Academy in Karnataka initiated the idea in the 1990s with the University of Ohio. In such a program, a student studies for a certain numbers of years in India, then completes the rest of the degree program in the United States. The

•• t.!ijii"MMI Plan to take with

you to the United States any important documents that relate to your legal, medical and academic history. Do not put them in a suitcase. Do not loan or give them to anyone unless that person can show some form of identification stating that he or she is authorized to receive them.

As a foreign national entering the United States, you must have certain documents as evidence of your legal status. These include: • a passport with at least six months validity beyond your entry date, • a nonimmigrant visa stamped inside your passport by a consular officer of a U.S. Embassy or Consulate, • a Certificate of Eligibility (1-20 A-B, 1-20 M-N, or DS-2019 form) for students and scholars, • an Arrival-Departure Record (1-94 form), which will be issued to you, usually on the airplane before landi~.

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Ask at the U.S. Embassy or Consulate whether you must have a medical examination and/or immunization(s) before entering the United States. Regulations are different for each country of origin. For more information, go to http://www.who. inVith/ If you use prescription medicine on a regular basis, take a sufficient supply and a copy of the prescription, in English. If you depend on eyeglasses, it is a good idea to take an extra pair, if possible, and a copy of your eyeglass prescription, in English

nltin.llfjlQ Take your official transcripts from secondary schools, colleges or universities. Additionally, bring any syllabi, catalogs, bulletins, course descriptions or other relevant materials issued by the secondary school or university you have attended most recently.

These can be helpful to the Admissions Office and academic departments if questions arise concerning academic credit or your placement in courses a40ur U.S. college or university Ii1ilillffijlm elii.M1tM Include with your documents the name, address and telephone number of the individual at your U.S. university to contact in case of a travel delay or an emergency Also include the contact details of a person at home and the name, address and telephone number of your country's consulate in the United States.

,·'Ji!fi·tildl • a good bilingual dictionary, since it might not be possible to obtain one for your language in the United States; • books, manuals or journals that you think may be useful for reference in your field of study and that definitely will not be available in the United States; • traditional dress and accessories for festive occasions. This would be a great way to show and tell Americans more about your culture and traditions; • a camera so you will have souvenirs of your time in the United States after you return home.

• things you can easily buy in the United States, such as notebooks, pens, paper; • food, seeds or plants. The United States has very strict restrictions on importing foods, perishables and agricultural goods.

• books that can be easily obtained in US. libraries. Some universities have their library catalog on the Internet, where you can check the availability of books. You can also contact the university library staff to verify the availability of any essential books.

• animals; • medications, unless you have written prescriptions from a doctor; • expensive jewelry, treasured possessions, family heirlooms or delicate things, since there is always a chance that these items can get lost, stolen or damaged; • firearms, knives, weapons or articles that could be perceived as weapons; • narcotics or drugs; • any article of clothing, artifact or medicine made from endangered animals; • electrical appliances. Appliances in the United States work on a 115-volt and 50-cycle system. It is usually best to purchase electrical items in the United States.

Also note that video systems, including televisions, VCRs and DVD players (including those in laptop computers), use different systems in different parts of the world, and those you bring from home are unlikely to be compatible with the U.S media~ Source: http://www.educationusa.state.govl

Education Scams I

Visa Scams!

By PETER G. KAESTNER U.S. Consul-General

do not need a visa agent and you should not pay one paisa to anyone who tells you that they can guarantee you a visa.

Every day at the visa window we see eligible applicants who are refused visas because they presented fake documents to a vice consul on the advice of their "visa consultant" or "friends." Touts abuse the visa system and harm their "customers" by taking, and then selling appointments.

One reason that such "consultants" thrive in India is because the US. Government has not been as effective as it could be in getting useful information out to the Indian public.

Consultants have entered the information vacuum and have thrived. The U.S. Embassy has reinvigorated its efforts to better inform Indians about our visa rules, regulations and procedures It is important that Indian applicants get good information-for free-from a trusted source like USEFI and the U.S. Embassy.

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http://newde Ihi. usem bassy. gov I visa services.html

By JANE E. SCHUKOSKE Executive Director of USEFI

he u.s. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) warns Indian students to be wary of advertisements and claims about U.S. higher education that sound too good to be true. Scams can harm your reputation as well as your pocketbook. Common educational scams include: Unaccredited schools: A school's degree may be worthless if the school is not accredited by an official agency.

Students can check a U.S. institution's accreditation on the Web site of the Council for Higher Education accreditation. http://www .chea. org/search/d efau It.asp.

To ascertain the legitimacy of an online or distance-education institution, students may contact the Better Business Bureau or state attorney general's office to make sure the school is operating legally in a specific state and to see if anyone has filed a complaint. The bureau has listed red flags about questionable on-line programs. www.bbb.org/alerts/article.asp?ID=185 Quick degrees: Institutions which offer quick degrees are often called "diploma mills." A fake degree can ruin your reputation. In case you encounter questionable providers of higher education, check out the questions on the Council for Higher Education Accreditation Web site.

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schools synchronize their schedules and mutually recognize course work. However, Khandavilli suggests that students should have a backup plan, in case they are unable to go to the United States, and should make sure there is real parity between the two systems so that their academic work can be transferred.

Despite the obstacles, any student with dreams of succeeding in U.S. schools should know it can be done. Mel RossoLlopart, associate director of the Masters of Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says the Indian students who study with

www.chea.org/pdflfact_sheet6_diploma_ mills.pdt Fakeadvertisements:Some of thesearealso listed on the University Grants Commission's Web site. http://www.ugc.ac.in/inside/ malprac.html "On the spot" admission: At quality institutions in the United States, the admissions process involves a committee of faculty who review the applicant's academic record, test scores, references and personal statement. By contrast, "on the spot" admission suggests that almost anyone will be accepted, so quality is in question. This may cast doubt on whether you are a serious student when you apply for a U.S. visa.

Promise of a U.S. visa: No institution or agent can guarantee you will receive a U.S. visa. This determination is made only by a U.S. Consular Officer.

Costly scholarships: Beware of sending an advance fee to a scholarship service that guarantees a scholarship. No one can. Lists of scholarships are readily available for free on the Internet. Visit www.educationusa. state.govlfinaid.htm for details.

It it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Treasure your reputation and your education. Spend your funds wisely. Stay alert to avoid education scams.

him through an exchange program with SSN College of Engineering in Tamil Nadu are always well qualified and provide hot competition for their American classmates. In addition, he says that American students should take note: Indians' respect for knowledge and drive to succeed sets them apart from the rest. ~ Sebastian John is an Indian writer and photographer who lives in Washington, D.C. Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@state.gov

Is Harvard Read to Take on SouthAsia? he expanding presence and growing influence of South Asian students and professionals in American society is presenting American higher education institutions with both challenges and opportunities. Over the past five years, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has taken a leading role in calling for greater engagement between American universities and the South Asian region.

Meanwhile, Indian American students and visiting students from South Asia have flourished at Harvard, establishing perhaps the most visible and influential presence on campus of any cultural or international group. For example, the South Asian Association's "Ghungroo," an annual, springtime, cultural show nearing its 20th anniversary, is one of the most highly anticipated artistic events at the university. Yet, Harvard's administration is struggling to keep up with soaring demand among students for greater resources devoted to South Asia related activities.

In a speech at the Harvard South Asia Conference in September 2003, the university's then-president, Lawrence Summers, pronounced a bold call to action, not only for Harvard but for universities nationwide. "There is an enormous opportunity to fill a gap," he observed. "There is an enormous need for us as a nation to enhance our understanding of contemporary South Asia."

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A region on the rise, he said, "commands the attention of a great university." For Summers, Harvard's role would be to lead the way toward filling that gap: "The development and enhancement of our capacity to study South Asia," he proclaimed, will be "our major international affairs and regional priority in the years ahead." While calling for improvements, Summers also paid special tribute to two South Asian scholars already established on Harvard's campus: Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History, and Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate in Economics.

An ambitious proposal Summers followed up on his speech a few years later with a visit to India in 2006.

Inspired by the experience, upon returning he made the ambitious proposal that "every American should visit the country that may be our most important ally two decades from now." Since Summers' resignation from the presidency last year, leadership of the university has been handed over to Drew G. Faust, a professor of American history. She will encounter increasing demand from a vociferous contingent among the undergraduate student body to revamp and reorganize the school's resources in order to fulfill Summers' South Asian mission.

Harvard, America's oldest university, has a long history of South Asian scholar~ ship, though it has been devoted chiefly to ~ philology, the study of language. Sanskrit ~ was first taught at Harvard in 1872 by James Bradstreet Greenough, a Latin grammarian. A Sanskrit Reader, published in 1888, by Charles Lanman, head of the department of Indo-Iranian languages, continues to serve as Harvard's standard introductory text for the language. By 1902, interest among students had grown to the extent that a Department ofIndic Philology was formed. Its modem incarnation, the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, has held strongly to its linguistic center. Today, a Harvard student can choose from courses offered in

Sanskrit, Vedic, Tibetan, Bengali, Gujarati.

Pali, Urdu-Hindi, epali, Sindhi and

Historic roots and modern shortcomings Today's undergraduates, though, are no longer satisfied with Harvard's historic tradition of scholarship in South Asian

• The Committee on South Asian Studies, Harvard University, Massachusetts http://www .fas. harvard. edu/ - sanskrit/sastudies.html • Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Massachusetts http://wwwfas.harvard.edu/-sanskril/index.html • South Asia Program, Cornell University, New York http://www .einaudi.cornell.edu/SouthAsia/ • Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University, New York http://www .sipa.col umbia. edu/REGIONAL/SAI/ • India Studies Program, Indiana University, Bloomington http://www.indiana.edu/ - isp/ • Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing http://asianstud ies.msu.edu/ • South Asia Center, Syracuse University, New York http://www .maxwe II. syr.edu/moyn ihan/programs/sac/ • Center for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley http://www. ias.berkeley.edu/southasia/ • South Asia at Chicago, University of Chicago http://southasia. uchi cago.edu/ • Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor http://www.umich-cseas. org/ • Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia http://www .southasia.upenn.edu/ • Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania http://casi.ssc. upenn.edu// • Asian Studies, University of Texasat Austin http://asnic.utexas.edu/asnic/index.html • Center for South Asia, University of WisconsinMadison http://www.southasia. wise. edu/ • Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, Connecticut http://www. yale.edu/seas/

USEFI CALENDAR Northern Region September 11, 18, 25, October 9, 16, 23, 30, November 6,13, 20, 27 "United States: Explore the Possibilities of Higher Education," basic orientation program, 230 p.m., USEFI, New Delhi.

September 13,20,27, October 11,18,25, November 1,8,15, 29 "United States Explore the Possibilities of Higher Education," basic orientation program, 4:00 p.m., American Center, New Delhi.

September 17 Linden US. University Fair Admission officials from U.S. institutions interact with prospective students and provide information on U.S higher education, 500-6:00 p.m. for undergraduate stUdents, 6:00-9:00 p.m. for all students, Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi.

September 20 Information session on "Higher Education in the U.S" with Susan Whipple, admissions official from Marquette University, Wisconsin, 2:30 p.m., USEFI, New Delhi.

September 25 Information session on "Higher Education in the U.S." with Guilherme Albieri, admissions official from Hawai'i Pacific University, 2:30 p.m., USEFI,New Delhi.

September 29 The MBA Tour: Admission officials from U.S. universities interact with prospective MBA students and provide informafion on pursuing an MBA program in the United States, 12:30 p.m.- 500 pm., Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi.

October 4 USEFI-Institute of International Education Fair: Admission officials from U.S. institutions will interact with prospective students and provide information on U.S. higher education, 200-6:00 pm. at USEFI, New Delhi. Open to all students.

Western Region September 5, 13, 27, October 25 "United States: Explore the Possibilities of Higher Education," basic orientation program, 11 :00 a.m., American Center, Mumbai.

September 6, 17 Question and answer session on U.S. admissions procedures for USEFI annual members, 1100 am, USEFI, Mumbai.

September 19 Linden US. University Fair: Representatives from U.S. universities and colleges interact with prospective students on admissions and financial aid, Hilton Towers Hotel, Mumbai. Also on September 20 at Aurora Towers Hotel, Pune.

October 2 USEFI-Institute of International Education Fair: Representatives from U.S. universities and colleges interact with prospective students on admissions and financial aid, Hilton Towers Hotel, Mumbai.

STATES

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\EDUCATIONAl FOUNDATION ININD~

October 4 "Higher Education in the U.S." information session by Ohio Wesleyan University, 11:00 a.m., American Center, Mumbai.

October 4, 11, 25 Question and answer session on U.S. admissions procedures for USEFIannual members, 2:30 p.m., USEFI,Mumbai.

October 5 Outreach at Thadomal Shahani Engineering College, Mumbai.

October 6 The MBA Tour: Educational fair with representatives of U.S. business schools. Hilton Towers Hotel, Mumbai.

October 11 Information session on opportunities offered by Montana State University, 11:00 am., American Center, Mumbai.

Southern Region September 5, 12, 19, 26, October 3, 10, 17,24,31, November 7,14,21,28 "United States Explore the Possibilities of Higher Education," basic orientation program, USEFI, Chennai.

September 7 "Resources at U.S. Campuses," informal discussion with U.S. consular officers, USEFI, Chennai.

September 22-23 USEFI, Chennai to make two presentations at the "Astro Exhibition" and serve at the USEFI stall at Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore.

September 24-26 Presentations at four colleges in Coimbatore.

September 27 Linden US University Fair, Taj Coromandel, Chennai.

October 1 MBA Fair, Le Royal Meridien Hotel, Chennai.

October 5 Presentations on "Choosing and Short-listing US. Universities," USEFI, Chennai.

October 12 Informal discussion with consular officers on higher education in the United States, USEFI, Chennai.

October 19 Session on "Statement of Purpose and Letters of Recommendation" for the university admission process, USEFI, Chennai.

Eastern RegioD September 14 Linden US. University Fair: For the first time in eastern India. Representatives from U.S. universities and colleges interact with prospective students on admission and financial aid, Oberoi Grand Hotel, Kolkata.

October 11 "Higher Education in the USA," a presentation by the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USEFI, Kolkata.

http://www .fulbright-india.org/

philology. In recent years the demand for broader regional studies has come especially from Indian American students and scholars from South Asia, who have formed a South Asia Studies Initiative.

In March of this year, two leaders ofthe movement raised the profile of the issue with an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson daily newspaper. Vinita Andrapalliyal and Shreya Vora insisted that South Asian studies must break out of the constraints oftradition and be elevated above the status of a mere "special interest issue." Writing at a time of simmering inter-faculty battles over the undergraduate curriculum, they argued that the study of South Asia has become "absolutely essential to any curriculum that seeks to make global citizens of its students."

Academic interest rising Andrapalliyal and Vora contended that Harvard has not adequately met growing demand for South Asia related study opportunities. Supporting their case was the Initiative's 2005 survey that found academic interest in the region among undergraduates on the rise, and found present resources inadequate in comparison to peer universities. Lack of resources and opportunities may be a deterrent to devoting one's studies to the region, they argued, noting that fewer than 12 percent of students who were initially interested in concentrating on South Asia studies actually followed through. Moreover, of 59 students who said they were interested in going to the region to study, only three eventually signed up.

Students said they are seeking greater breadth and depth in course offerings, especially in contemporary South Asian politics, culture and society.

The recently formed South Asia Initiative is a serious attempt by faculty across disciplines to compensate for the narrow focus of the Sanskrit department. The Initiative, housed at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, supports faculty and student exchanges and research in South Asia, and conducts a broad range of seminars, lectures and conferences across academic disciplines. In 2005 and 2006, a group from the Initiative, led by Assistant Director Rena Fonseca, traveled to Tamil Nadu to assist with tsunami reconstruction projects. Despite these steps toward Summers' vision, though, the Initiative has yet to become a heavyweight among Harvard's legions of institutions and faculties. It has not been granted the power to appoint faculty or grant degrees, and has limited resources.

Looking ahead, Harvard has much work to do to satisfy the demands of the students and turn the opportunities envisioned by her predecessor into realities on campus. In order for South Asian studies to enjoy enhanced comparative prestige among other regional studies programs and institutes at Harvard, the South Asia Initiative will need to attract greater funding and build its capabilities. Faust could persuade the Sanskrit department to modernize its curriculum to match undergraduate interests, and could lead a university-wide effort to recruit leading professors to Harvard departments lacking in South Asian specialists. Given Harvard's stature and influence in the United States, if the university can succeed in meeting those challenges, South Asian students and enthusiasts can expect to find the coming years among the most exciting in the history of American higher education. ~ Robert Nelson, a 2007 graduate of Harvard University, wrote this article while working as a Public Affairs intern at the American Center, New Delhi.

MV College Experience Shaped Who I Am Todav

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n a hot, 41-degree day at the end of May, I arrived in New Delhi for a 10-week internship at the US. Embassy with little 1Tlore than some multi-vitamins and a degree from Howard University, one of America's most prestigious HBCUs. That means Historically Black College or University, a concept that is very specific to the history of the United States. Many HBCUs are among America's oldest universities, having grown from the academic deprivation that slavery imposed upon African Americans.

There were no higher education institutions for blacks until African American leaders, white abolitionists and religious societies began creating distinguished colleges for them. The first was Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, established in 1837. In 1964, segregated higher education institutions were banned nationwide, although the HBCUs had always been open to all races. There are 107 recognized

Historically Black Colleges and Universities that serve about 228,000 students.

I chose to attend Howard University after visiting two other schools that I had been accepted to-the enormous state university in Illinois with a good sociology program, and Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, an allwomen's HBCU. I was already wearing the colors of the University of Illinois, and telling everyone that I was going there, and I only decided to visit Spelman as an afterthought. When I arrived on Spelman's sunny campus, I could feel the legacy of accompl ished black women alumni like Alice Walker, one of the foremost contemporary American writers; Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund; and Marcelite J. Harris, the first woman U.S. Air Force brigadier general.

I could envision a bright, successful future unfolding in front of me, a first-generation university student from a low-income family. I

For More Information Howard University's Web site http!/www.howardedu Historically Black Colleges and Universities http!/www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq9511

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knew that an HBCU was the only choice for me. In the end, Spelman did not offer much financial aid, whereas Howard University offered me a full scholarship Without ever having visited Howard, or the East Coast, I packed up my things and drove to Washington, D.C. Grateful

Body, Dress & Culture; Black Women in Visual Culture and Intro to African Diaspora In addition, Africana Studies is tied into every subject, from history to physics to fashion merchandising Professors emphasize the often disregarded roles that blacks have played in

HBCUs are not simply universities or colleges with a majority of black students. Those are Predominantly Black Institutions, or PBls, which, over the years, because of their location and other factors, have attracted predominantly African American student populations. There are 75 colleges, universities and trade schools recognized as PBls. More than half of the estimated 265,000 students who attend them are from low-income families or are among the first generation in their families to attend college.

So, an HBCU is always a PBI, but a PBI is not always an HBCU. simply for the opportunity to study, I didn't realize that I had made quite possibly the best decision of my life.

In addition to classes in one's major field of study, Howard requires students to take at least one course in an Africana cluster, which is a series of courses on issues, theories and developments of black people throughout the United States, Africa and elsewhere. I chose from such life-changing classes as Black

these fields, and constantly relate the subjects to the lives of people of color. Howard students are required to develop a strong historical consciousness, which produces strong leaders of the future.

My professors weren't expected to teach about important historical moments with passive subjectivity, but with passion and pride. They frequently used the word we when speaking of issues concerning people of color. This does not create an

.~ Howard students majoring in ~ dance perform the bhangra ~ during the university's first ~ celebration of Diwali, on ! November 3, 2005.

exclusive environment, because a Howard education aims to instill in students a sense of humanity and a desire to fight all forms of oppression. Ironically, one of the common criticisms of Howard is that it, allegedly, is not diverse, when it actually has one of the highest international student populations of any university in the United States. There

are no quotas, and discrimination based on race, ethnicity or nationality is strictly prohibited in the admissions process. Though the vast majority of Howard's applicants are African American students, I am proud to have befriended students from India, Brazil, Japan, Cameroon, France and other countries during my time at Howard.

Books available at the American Libraries The Howard Guide to African-American History (New Delhi) Howard University: An Architectural Tour (Kolkata) Martin Luther King, Jr.. The Making of a Mind (New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai)

~ There is also a long-running hisÂŤ ~ tory between Howard University and ~ India. Howard Thurman, the dean of z ~ Howard University's Rankin Chapel, o along with his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, visited India in the mid1930s. They met with Mohandas K. Gandhi, discussing India's colonial struggle and black Americans' struggle for civil rights. In 1947, Howard University President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson led an African American delegation to India, along with Benjamin Mays, president of another prominent HBCU, Morehouse College of Atlanta, Georgia. When Johnson returned home, he gave a speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, spreading what he had learned to other intellectuals and activists. A young man named Martin Luther King, Jr. was in attendance. King, a recent graduate of Morehouse College, was fascinated by the crossreligious, non-violence strategies of Gandhi. King began researching

Gandhi, and a decade later, made his own visit to India. He used Gandhi's tactics of non-violent civil disobedience and religious tolerance to develop strategies for the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and '60s.

Today, Howard University can be distinguished by its renowned Indian faculty, including Dr. Anita Nahal, whose work promotes bonds between African American and Indian women. The university has also developed programs to enhance mutual understanding, such as the Howard University-Jadavpur University Research Initiative, and the U.S.-India Studies Initiative. Combined with an ever-increasing Indian and Indian diaspora student population, Howard University and other HBCUs are cementing their role in today's global S_o_ci_ety_.

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Brittanie K. Anderson wrote this article while working as a Public Affairs intern at the American Center, New Delhi.

Please share your views on this article.

Write to editorspan@ state.gov

Test Scores vs. Reflective Essays: The U.S. University Application What do you want to do with your life? Why do you want to do it?

These questions, or some variation of them, must be answered to gain admission to most universities in the United States. It's called an admissions essay, and the people who read them look for students with passion, focus and purpose to their studies. And yes, simply saying, "I enjoy studying biology" doesn't cut it.

Yet, Indian students with dreams of studying in the United States manage to write admissions-winning essays every year, with a little help from counselors. "In India the admission is based on the marks the students scored, whereas US. universities look at several criteria. :5 :::J Indian students are often unable to understand that, and this is where ~ Z USEFI advising services come into play," says Vijaya Khandavilli, a ~ '> just-retired counselor at USEFI. USEFI adviser Amita Sharma gives students and parents Students should also consider, not just a university's academic information on studying in the United States at a U.S. reputation, but its other attributes. For instance, would you like to live University Fair in New Delhi. in a city or a small town? Are small classes a priority, or are you more interested in participating in sports teams?

USEFI offers weekly basic orientation programs on U.S. higher For Deepak Goyal, studying at Texas A&M University, it was weather. education, which are free to the public. USEFI also replies to queries He had heard about the snowy winters in some parts of America, and in person, by phone, e-mail and post from six certified advising cenknew he did not want to go to school in a cold climate. He zeroed in on ters in Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Texas as having the right climate, and applied to three schools there.

Hyderabad.

-S.J.

A typical dorm room at Howard University, Washington, D.C.

ne of the most important things you will have to take care of before you start your studies in the United States is finding a place to live.

This is an important decision since it will be one of your biggest expenses and will affect your personal and academic adjustment.

dence halls and rented rooms in private homes.

To find off-campus housing, ask the university's Housing Office or consult the classified advertising section of the local newspaper.

Gas, electricity and telephone services, known as "utilities," are not usually included in the rent and must be paid by you, the tenant, each month.

These can add from $75 to $200, or more, to the rent each month, depending on how much you use them. Sharing an apartment with a roommate can keep costs down.

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Temporary accomodations You may arrive at your school before the date when you can move into your permanent housing.

The most expensive options are hotels and motels, but some "budget" motel chains can be quite reasonable. Other options include the local YMCA or YWCA, youth hostels and international houses.

Off-campus dormitories Sometimes there are privately owned dormitory complexes near the campus. These are designated for students and are run like university dormitories.

Usually, the costs are comparable to living in an oncampus dormitory

Campus housing Almost all U.S. colleges and universities provide students with the option to live in residence halls or dormitories (also called "dorms"). These are usually for single students, not married couples or families, and are situated on or close to the campus Dormitory rooms are equipped with basic furniture, and the buildings usually have a cafeteria. In some dorms, there may be a kitchen for those who would rather cook for themselves.

Usually, there is a great demand for residence hall space. As soon as you receive your acceptance letter from your chosen school, return the housing application. An advance deposit may be required.

At some colleges and universities, dormitory rooms are so much in demand that a lottery is held to determine who will be granted space.

Cooperative residence halls A co-op is usually a large house in which a group of students lives together, sharing the Danielle Stiles, 20, in the dorm room she shared with her roommate in 2001 at Gwynedd-Mercy College in Pennsylvania.

Off-campus housing While university-subsidized housing is often less expensive than housing off-campus in large U.S. cities, that is not always the case in smaller cities and towns. Types of accommodation include furnished and unfurnished apartments and houses, privately operated dormitories, cooperative resi-

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costs and chores. Residents take turns cooking meals, cleaning the house and maintaining the yard and driveway. Because they are generally less expensive, rooms in co-ops may be difficult to find.

Rooming houses These are dwellings in which rooms are rented usually to individuals, but occasionally to two roommates. Cooking facilities are often provided. It is probably cheapest to live in such a room, but sometimes there are problems with human relations (sharing the bathroom, kitchen and so on). If you consider rooming in a house, be selective and ask many questions.

Living with a U.S. family Sometimes international student advisers have listings of families in the community who would like to have an international student live in their homes. Sometimes the family expects the student to perform certain services, like baby-sitting or household chores, in exchange for free or r_ed_u_c_ed_r_en_t_.

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Guest Essa\A

True Education A simple and practical way to ignite the thinking of students

fter 45 years, I returned to my ancestral village of Bantwal, near Mangalore in Karnataka, for a stay of more than two months. It is a typical rural town, surrounded by small villages dependent upon farming and beedi rolling.

In this town is a five-year degree college with 1,000 students. Most of them are first generation literates. A large percentage (99 percent) is not accustomed to reading books other than textbooks, despite the college having a good collection. These students, for several reasons, are also not accustomed or allowed to ask questions, as in many other colleges. Because of the well-critiqued education system of ours, they are also not encouraged to think and develop their own solutions to any problems. They are not encouraged to offer their comments. To bring about some change in this rigid and learning-unfriendly environment, I experimented with a seminar series called "True Education" during my stay.

The seminars, held between June and July at S.v.S. College, were a great success.

I had 19 sessions with a group of 20 students. Nineteen of the participants were young women. We limited the participation so that everyone could be given personal attention. All of them turned up regularly even though none of the topics would help them score more marks. None of the students could relax or daydream since everyone had to either ask a question or comment on topics of wide-ranging interest. I noticed a remarkable improvement during a short span. Students who were hesitant to speak up before the beginning of the seminar series were completely transformed, and by the end of the sessions there was not enough time to

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respond to all their questions.

The topics covered were: philosophy of writer Jiddu Krishnamurthy; the NGO movement in India; world and Indian history; India's energy crisis; communism, socialism and capitalism; holding a mirror up to Indian society; politics and corruption; major world conflicts; citizen responsibility; reservation; the status of education; management principles; the world's religions; science, superstition and modern gurus; energy and environment; reasons for India remaining poor even after 60 years of independence; liberalization, privatization and globalization; and critical factors for India's development. I spent just 15 minutes at the beginning of each session introducing the topic. The remaining 75 minutes were spent on questions and answers.

During the valedictory, every student made a short presentation on what they got out of this seminar series. Everyone wanted this experiment repeated for the benefit of other students who missed the opportunity. One said that he learnt more during these 19 sessions than he had during his entire 15 years of education. Many young women mentioned that they had started reading newspapers critically. Many talked about the courage they had acquired as a result of their participation to ask questions not only in the classroom but also in government offices. All had determined to take up some civic cause to fight against, like untouchability, casteism, the dowry system, gender bias, child labor, plastic menace, water harvesting, tree planting, improving the local hospital.

Some teachers who observed the program in action wondered how they would complete the syllabus if students started asking questions as a result of this program. On the other

hand, others were happy that some of the students had already started asking questions and were taking a greater part in classroom discussions. Two of the women participants spoke at the valedictory about how they objected when they saw an underage boy serving coffee at a meeting. But for these seminars, they said, they would never have observed such things and also would never have had the courage to point out such unlawful acts.

Five more colleges from the towns of Mulki, Udupi, Kundapur, Moodabidri and Karkal have already come forward to implement this program. There is hardly any cost involved, nor is prior permission required from the government. Through this program, we can encourage students to develop independent thinking and critical questioning abilities, without having to wait for our political class to take the necessary steps to change the education system. What we need are a few-just one or two per college-committed teachers to get involved. Every well-informed and concerned educationist can join this effort either as a facilitator of the seminar series or by sponsoring someone to conduct them if they themselves are unable to do so. ~ Bhamy V. Shenoy (bhamysuman@hotmail. com), a retired manager of the Houston, Texas-based oil company ConocoPhillips, is a trustee of Pratham, an NGD for slum education, and editor of Catalyst, a newsletter that promotes the NGD movement.

He travels between Houston and Mysore, Karnataka.

Please share your views on this article.

Write to editorspan@state.gov

Students of a government primary school near Bangalore learning about the food chain through new group teaching software.

Using Technology 10

Train Teachers and Inspire

Children W

earing multicolored flip-flops, her hair tied up in neat braids, eight-year-old B. Shruthi hates being late for school-a far cry from the days when her teacher, H.S. Paramesh, had to coax and cajole her to study, at times even ferrying her to school on his rickety Bajaj scooter.

But things have changed at Shruthi's Government Primary School in Banjarapalaya village, 30 kilometers southwest of India's Silicon City, Bangalore.

Students are now learning English, math, science and social studies through radio, video and computer programs. Launched in 2002, Technology Tools for Teaching and Training, or T4, as the $7 million initiative is called, uses interactive lessons to

enhance the children's learning experience.

This program of the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) is being implemented in schools in Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Madhya Pradesh came forward on its own, and Bihar is to be next.

"Shruthi keeps telling me she wants to ride the mystical flying horse that enthralls students in the radio broadcasts every day. The horse comes in the dreams of a radio character, Putti, an inquisitive fourth grader, and takes her on a journey across continents, learning about new lands and new cultures," says Paramesh. The characters of Putti, Babu, Appu, Thimma (a pet monkey) and Akka have forged a bond with 5.7 million students in nearly 50,000 schools in the towns and villages of Karnataka, making learning exciting.

"A slow revolution is underway, changing the face of education," says S.N. Shylajamma, state coordinator of the Education Development Center, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that is implementing the program for USAID. Working with the Department of State Educational Research and Training and several other agencies, the program has introduced innovative applications of technology while lending support to the government's mammoth Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan or "Education for All" initiative. It is also courtesy the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan that daily lessons are broadcast on All India Radio, which reaches even rural and remote areas.

"The aim was to exploit technology, building upon the state governments' investments in basic education, to improve the quality of education in India-and to do so on a large scale," says George Deikun, USAID mission director. "T4 has been very successful in improving the quality of education, as reflected by the substantial learning gains among students resulting

from the intervention. This is shown by pre- and post-testing of students."

Through uniquely designed programs within the school curricula, the system uses radio, television, computers and other digital media to revolutionize the way children are taught.

"Unlike traditional classrooms, where rote is used and children are just passive listeners, the interactive programs prod students to participate through a variety of games, activities and even song and dance," says Shylajamma, who was a primary school teacher for more than two decades before she took on the task of helping to implement the initiative.

Besides improving the overall learning experience, the programs have added an element of fun to the staid classroom routine. So while tiny tots boogie to the catchy beats of "Chinnara Chukki," a half-hour educational broadcast that teaches firstand second-graders the basics of math, English and Kannada, the older ones try to make sense of concepts like decimals and fractions with a little help from the friendly radio teacher, Akka ("sister" in Kannada).

But students are only one half of the program. The other half-and there are more than 200,000 of them-are teachers.

"The software works like a step-by-step guide. Before they started, I had doubts about amphibians. But after seeing the life-like animations, I have cleared all my doubts. Sometimes, I feel I am more enthusiastic than the children," says Kantha Raju, a social studies teacher at a primary school in Agara village near Bangalore. Raju utilizes the Group Teaching Learning software, forming groups of 10 to 12 students around one computer to explain concepts, living up to the program motto of "learning by seeing and doing."

Nearly 200 kilometers southwest of Bangalore, in Karnataka's

Right: Children engrossed in a video lesson relayed via satellite in Karnataka's rural Chamrajnagar district.

Below: After singing the hugely popular warm-up song broadcast at the beginning of each lesson, students settle down for some serious work with" Akka," the friendly radio teacher.

Chamrajnagar district, a potholed dirt track leads to the Government School at Alahally village. Under a heavily overcast monsoon sky, the stone and brick structure is abuzz with the sounds of animated dialogue. A government-made televised documentary on the 1942 Quit India Movement is being broadcast through EDUSAT, the "education satellite" project, and the students are talking about interviewing a fellow classmate's grandfather who bore the brunt of a lathi or two.

Films on science, social studies and mathematics are an intrinsic part of this other side of the technology initiative. To make lessons more engaging, the Department of State Educational Research and Training has persuaded television stars to anchor the 30-minute lessons that are broadcast to 1,700 schools in Chamrajnagar and Gulbarga districts.

"These are familiar faces, favorite actors, who offer quick

recall. Some are role models and kids instantly pay more attention. It's a kind of stimulation, an encouragement to come and learn," says CN. Raju, coordinator at the Block Research Center at Kollegal, who implements projects at the ground level and monitors quality.

Since 2004, the Technology Tools for Teaching and Training initiative has moved from its pilot stage, which covered some 900 schools and reached approximately 85,000 children, to an expanded phase reaching more than 200,000 schools and 13 million children in four states.

That it should spread its wings further is not in doubt, for _sc_h_o_o_l_w_a_s_n_e_v_e_r_s_o_m_u_c_h_f_u_n_.

~

American Museums Offer

Online Educational Resources Finding the best and most innovative educational offerings on the Web.

merican museums offer a wealth of online exhibitions, podcasts and other educational material that represent learning opportunities for teachers and students around the world.

There are approximately 17,000 museums in the United States, and "most museums of any size now have a Web presence," according to Jason Hall, the director of government and media relations at the American Association of Museums in Washington. In addition, many libraries and other institutions have made some of the collections they hold partially or entirely available online. The Internet has become the "principal way of reaching those who can't physically come," says Hall.

The result is a bonanza for teachers looking for interesting new lesson plans or for students searching for material on a specific topic. Search pages specifically designed for teachers improve access to the materials, as do thematically arranged teaching resources from the Smithsonian Institution, the world's largest museum complex (www.si.edu).

The Smithsonian Global Sound (www.smithsonianglobalsound.org) provides Internet access to more than 40,000 recordings available for downloading, most for 99 cents. Selections include blues, bluegrass, cowboy songs, the Afghan Rubab, French chansons, Jamaican calypsos, Sicilian tarantellas, Chinese opera and Tajik and Uzbek music.

The catalogue of selections can be searched by genre, instrument, artist name or song title, as well as by continent, coun-

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The entry hall of the National Museum of Natural History, one of the most popular Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C.

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try or region of origin.

Although there is no simple way to look comprehensively at available educational resources, there are some easy ways to find the best.

Fifty U.S. organizations and agencies ranging from the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to the White House have tried to make educational materials easier to find by participating in the Federal Resources for Educational Excellence Web site (www.free.ed.gov).It includes teaching ideas, learning activities, photographs, maps, primary documents, statistics, paintings, sound recordings and podcasts on thousands of topics.

It is particularly useful because it includes a great deal of educational material from agencies of the federal government and museums and has an archive dating back to 1998.

Science.gov is a gateway to reliable information about science from across the federal government, including museums.

Created by a partnership of 10 major U.S. government science agencies, it offers resources for teachers and students in scientific or technical fields.

Finding the most useful online educational materials offered by the thousands of private museums and libraries is more difficult, but special subject pages can streamline the process. The U.S. Embassy in Berlin (http://germany.usembassy.gov), for example, has a comprehensive page of resources on the American Indian.

American museums are trying to help teachers and students by providing special pages that organize online exhibitions or make their collections more accessible to educators. Many also are providing free lesson plans or teaching modules that use materials in their collections.

New York's Guggenheim Museum (www.guggenheim.org), for example, provides a variety of curriculum materials for teachers based on such recent exhibitions as Russia and The Aztec Empire. It aims to develop a comprehensive range of lessons for educators on art and artists in the museum's collection.

The U.S. Library of Congress has a special page offering a "teacher's eye view" to more than seven million historical documents, photographs, maps, films and audio recordings, with lesson plans and activities designed for use with

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the collections for various grade levels (http://memory.loc.gov/learn/).

For example, "Interviews with Today's Immigrants" offers immigration stories illustrating the American immigration experience during the second half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century.

The Smithsonian Institution's "In Your Classroom" program recently released a three-lesson teaching module, The Music in Poetry, the latest in a series.

The module introduces students to the rhythms of poetry by focusing on the ballad stanza and the blues stanzas of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. A sound track for the module available on the Smithsonian Web site includes early recordings by singers Bob Dylan and Suzanne Vega.

Hall says that the most rapid growth in the museum field is in children's museums and science and technology museums. "These museums typically do not collect unique objects but instead focus on

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education," he said, and they try to educate by presenting processes.

An excellent example is the Brooklyn Children's Museum (www.brooklynkids. org). It won a silver medal in the American Association of Museums' 2005 MUSE Awards for its Collection Central Online, which eventually will include access to virtually all of the museum's 30,000 cultural artifacts and science specimens.

"What fun it is, and how easy it is, to find an object, maybe even hear the sound it makes, zoom in and around it, and even make your own inspired drawing for submission to a public online collection," the MUSE judges said. "The ease with which relationships among objects can be explored will really get kids discovering, _th_i_nki_' n_g_a_n_d_le_a_rn_l_' n_g_.'_' ~

Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@state.gov

Jimmy Wales wanted to build a free encyclopedia on the Internet. So he raised an army of amateurs and created the selforganizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future called Wikipedia .

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ixon, New Mexico, is a rural town with a few hundred residents and no traffic lights. At the end of a dirt road, in the shadow of a small mountain sits a gray trailer. It is the home of Einar Kvaran. To understand the most audacious experiment of the postboom Internet, this is a good place to begin.

Kvaran is a tall, hale, 50-ish man with a ruddy face, blue eyes and blond hair that's turning whjte. He calls mmself an "art illstorian without portfolio" but has no formal credentials in ills area of proclaimed expertise.

He's never published a scholarly article or taught a college course. Over three decades, he's been a Peace Corps volunteer, an autoworker, a union steward, a homeschooling mentor and the drummer in a Michjgan band. Right now, he's unemployed. Which isn't to say he doesn't work. For about six

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hours each day, Kvaran reads and writes about American sculpture and public art and publishes ills articles for an audience of millions around the world.

Hundreds of books on sculptors, regional arcilltecture and art illstory are stacked floor to ceiling inside ills trailer-along with 68 truck albums containing 20 years of photos he's taken on the American road. The outlet for ills knowledge is at the other end of ills dialup Internet connection: the daring but controversial Web site known as Wilipedia (http://www. wilipedia.org!).

Six years ago, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia ambitious in purpose and unique in design. This encyclopedia would be freely available to anyone. And it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but by whoever wanted to contribute.

An unemployed "art historian without portfolio," Kvaran shepherds entries on American art from his trailer in Dixon, New Mexico.

'The ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe.'

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'Citizen editors don't need to make an entry flawless. They just need to make it better.'

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Bryan Derksen User name: Bryan_Derksen A medical equipment reseller in Edmonton, Canada, Derksen has edited more than 40,000 articles on everything from Kryptonite to Greek mythology.

With software called Woo-which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete or add to what's there-Wales and his volunteer crew would construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria.

In 2001, the idea seemed preposterous. In 2007, the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. WOOpediaoffers about 2 million articles in English-compared with Britannica's 100,000 and Encarta's 4,500fashioned by more than 75,000 active contributors. Tack on the editions in more than 253 other languages, and the total WOOpediaarticle count tops 8.2 million.

Wikipedia's explosive growth is due to the contributions of Kvaran and others like him. Self-taught and self-motivated, Kvaran wrote his first article in 2004-a short piece on American sculptor Corrado Parducci. Since then, Kvaran has written or contributed to two dozen other entries on American art, using his library and photographs as sources. He's added words and images to 30 other topics, too-the Lincoln Memorial, baseball player Carl Yastrzemski, photographer Tina Modotti and Iceland's first prime minister, Hannes Hafstein, who happens to be Kvaran's great-grandfather. "I think of myself as a teacher," Kvaran says over tea at his kitchen table.

To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral-librarians, lexicographers, academics-that's precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock's place in postmodernism? What's more, the software that made Wikipedia so easy to build also makes it easy to manipulate and deface. A former editor at the venerable Encyclopa:dia Britannica (www.britannica.com) recently likened the site to a public rest room: You never know who used it last.

So the modest trailer at the end of a dirt road in this pinprick of a town holds some cosmic questions. Is WOOpedia a heartening effort in digital humanitarianism-Dr a notso-smart mob unleashing misinformation on the masses? Are well-intentioned amateurs any replacement for professionals? And is charging nothing for knowledge too high a price?

ecovery may take 12 steps, but becoming a junkie requires only four. First comes chance-an unexpected encounter.

Chance stirs curiosity. Curiosity leads to experimentation. And experimentation cascades into addiction.

For Danny Wool, chance arrived on a winter afternoon in 2002, after an argument about-Df all things-Kryptonite, [a fictional element from the Superman comic book series]. Googling the term from his Brooklyn, New York City, home to settle the debate, he came upon the WOOpedia entry.

He looked up a few more subjects and noticed that each one contained a mysterious hyperlink that said, "Edit." Curious but too nervous to do anything, he returned to WOOpedia a few more times. Then one night he corrected an error in an article about Jewish holidays. You can do that?! It was his first inhalation of Woo crack. He became one of WOOpedia's earliest registered users and wrote his first article-Dn Muckleshoot, a Washington state Indian tribe. Since then, he has made more than 16,000 contributions.

Bryan Derksen wrote the original Kryptonite article that Wool discovered. While surfmg from his home in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada. Derksen also stumbled upon Wlkipedia and quickly traveled the path to addiction. He read a few entries on Greek mythology and found them inadequate. The Edit link beckoned him like a street pusher. He clicked it and typed in a few changes. You can do that?! "I just got hooked," he tells me. He is one of the most proficient Wikipedians, with tens of thousands of additions and revisions.

Another top contributor is Derek Ramsey, who has automated his addiction. A software engineer in Pennsylvania, Ramsey wrote a Java program called rambot that automatically updates Wikipedia articles on cities and counties. So far, the man and machine combination has contributed more than 100,000 edits.

String enough of these addicts together, add a few thousand casual users, and pretty soon you have a new way to do an old thing. Humankind has long sought to tame the jungle of knowledge and display it in a zoo of friendly facts. But while the urge to create encyclopedias has endured, the production model has evolved. Wikipedia is the latest stage.

In the beginning, encyclopedias relied on the One Smart Guy model. In ancient Greece, Aristotle put pen to papyrus and single-handedly tried to record all the know 1-

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Derek Ramsey User name: Ram-Man With more than 45,000 edits performed from his home in Ashton, Pennsylvania, software engineer Ramsey is one of the most prolific Wikipedia contributors.

Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock's place in postmodernism?

edge of his time. Four hundred years later, the Roman nobleman Pliny the Elder cranked out a 37-volume set of the day's knowledge. The Chinese scholar Tu Yu wrote an encyclopedia in the ninth century.

And in the 1700s, Diderot and a few pals (including Voltaire and Rousseau) took 29 years to create the Encyclopedia, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers.

With the Industrial Revolution, the One Smart Guy approach gradually gave way to the One Best Way model, which borrowed the principles of scientific management and the lessons of assembly lines. Encyclopa:dia Britannica pioneered this approach in Scotland and honed it to perfection. Large groups of experts, each performing a task on a detailed work chart under the direction of a manager, produced encyclopedias of enormous breadth. Late in the 20th century, computers changed encyclopedias-and the Internet changed them more. Today, Britannica and World Book still sell some 60-kilogram, $1,100, multivolume sets, but they earn most of their money from Internet subscriptions. Yet, while the medium has shifted from atoms to bits, the production model-and therefore the product itselfhas remained the same.

Now, Wales has brought forth a third model---call it One for All. Instead of one really smart guy, WOOpedia draws on thousands of fairly smart guys and gals-because in the metamathematics of encyclopedias, 500 Kvarans equals one Pliny the Elder.

Instead of clearly delineated lines of authority, Wikipedia depends on radical decentralization and self-organization---open source in its purest form. Most encyclopedias start to fossilize the moment they're printed on a page. But add Woo software and some helping hands and you get something self-repairing and almost alive. A different production model creates a product that's fluid, fast, fixable and free.

The One for All model has delivered solid results in a remarkably short time. Look up any topic you know something about-from the Battle of Fredericksburg to Madame Bovary to Planck's law of black body radiation-and you'll probably find that the WOOpedia entry is, if not perfect, not bad.

Sure, the [entry on actor Leonard Nimoy, famous from the Star Trek TV series] is longer than the one on [Nobel Prize winner] Toni Morrison. But the Morrison article cov-

ers the basics of her life and literary works about as well as the World Book entry. And among the nearly two million articles are tens of thousands whose quality easily rivals that of Britannica or Encarta.

What makes the model work is not only the collective knowledge and effort of a farflung labor force, but also the willingness to abide by two core principles. The first: neutrality. All articles should be written without bias. WOOpedians are directed not to take a stand on controversial subjects like abortion or global warming but to fairly represent all sides. The second principle is good faith. All work should be approached with the assumption that the author is trying to help the project, not harm it.

Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and the goodness of others. In the Wikipedia ideal, people of goodwill sometimes disagree. But from the respectful clash of opposing viewpoints and the combined wisdom of the many, something resembling the truth will emerge. Most of the time.

If you looked up Jimmy Carter on Wikipedia one morning in 2004, you would have discovered something you couldn't learn from Britannica. According to the photo that accompanied Carter's entry, America's 39th President was a scruffy, unshaven man with his left index finger shoved fmnly up his nose.

Lurking in the underbrush of Wikipedia's idyllic forest of reason and good intentions are contributors less noble in purpose, whose numbers are multiplying. Wiki devotees have names for many of them. First, there are the trolls, minor troublemakers who breach the principle of good faith with inane edits designed to rile serious users. More insidious are vandals, who try to wreck the site-inserting profanity and ethnic slurs, unleashing bots [web robots] that put ads into entries, and pasting obscene pictures and other junior-high laugh-getters.

Considering how easy it is to make changes on WOOpedia, you'd imagine these ne' er-dowells could potentially overwhelm the site.

But they haven't-at least not yet-because defenses against them are built into the structure.

Anybody who is logged in can place an article on a "watch list." Whenever somebody amends the entry, the watch list records the change. So when that anonymous vandal replaced a Carter photo with a nose-picker,

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Don't Believe Evervthing You Read any educators and ed itors are leery of Wikipedia because students and less experienced writers use it as a primary source, rather than as a compendium of background information that needs to be checked and confirmed before being included in an article or essay.

It also seems to be a temptation to plagiarists. Some journalists have been found to include large blocks of Wikipedia text, verbatim, in work under their bylines, raising doubts about their commitment to fact-checking, reporting and writing, as well as honesty.

Even if a writer is clever enough to rewrite the Wikipedia text into her own words, the "facts" have not been checked.

The articles on Wikipedia are in most cases not written by experts in those fields (in fact, real experts are forbidden from quoting their own work on Wikipedia), and it is impossible to know for sure which bits in the lifted material are correct and which are not This undermines the purpose of writing academic or journalistic articles: to convey accurate information to the reader.

In the United States, some high schools have blocked their students from accessing Wikipedia, others are trying to teach pupils how to use it as a general resource along with more reliable, primary material. At universities, professors are warning their students about relying upon Wikipedia. These educators are concerned because they want their students to learn correct information and concepts, not incor-

M

WIK FACTS • • • • •

"Wiki" is used in Hawaii to mean "quick."

Wikipedia contains nearly 2 million entries.

In more than 253 languages.

Owned by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Biggest expense is Internet hosting, at $189,631, according to its 2006 financial statement.

• Total expenses were $791,907 in 2006.

• Received $1.3 million in contributions last year.

rect ones. They also want them to learn to be discerning, to ask, when they read: "Who says so? And does the person who is saying so have enough knowledge or experience that I should rely on it?"

Wikipedia does not supply this information.

"I think what is more important than banning resources that a student might or might not use is helping students to understand how to make critical judgments about the resources they uncover," Sandra Jordan, associate provost of Murray State University in Kentucky, was quoted as saying in an article in the school newspaper about professors' concerns with Wikipedia. The April 6, 2007 Murray State News article, by Emily Wuchner, also quoted student Tyler Moore as saying he sti II uses the site for background information. But he has learned from his teachers to search out research-based articles that have "actual sources and references and citations in them." When he first started using Wikipedia,

he said, "I thought I could trust all of the information that was on the site. I didn't really know that anyone could go in and just modify or change it, so I took all of the information as being correct."

There is a problem with inaccurate postings like the hoax article about the "Upper Peninsula War" between Canadians and Americans, complete with maps and "historical photos." This war never happened, yet the article remained on Wikipedia for two weeks. Articles on obscure topics receive less monitoring from Wikipedia checkers.

Other problems have arisen when companies, organizations, governments, groups and individuals write their own Wikipedia entries (which the site says it does not allow), when they "edit" articles written by others to make themselves look better, or "correct" articles on their opponents to make them look worse.

"Young and old alike often go to Wikipedia and see that its name ends in '-pedia'," says Andy Carvin (http://www andycarvincom/archives) in his blog on Internet culture.

"They assume it's just like any other encyclopedia and they should take its content as vetted, accurate information, which ain't always the case."

all the Wikipedians with Carter on their watch list knew about it. One of them merely reverted to the original portrait. At the same time, the user who rescued the former President from Boogerville noticed that the vandal had also posted the nose-pick photo on the "Rapping" entry-and he got rid of that image just four minutes after the photo appeared.

On controversial topics, the response can be especially swift. Wikipedia's article on Islam has been a persistent target of vandalism, but Wikipedia's defenders of Islam have always proved nimbler than the vandals. Take one fairly typical instance. At 11:20 one morning, an anonymous user replaced the entire Islam entry with a single scatological word. At 11:22, a user named Solitude reverted the entry. At 11:25, the anonymous user struck again, this time replacing the article with the phrase "u stink!" By 11:26, another user reverted that change-and the vandal disappeared. When Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Femanda Viegas and IBM's Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave studied Wikipedia, they found that cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes. When an obscenity accompanied the mass deletion, the median time dropped to 1.7 minutes.

It turns out that Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself.As a result, woefully outnumbered vandals often give up and leave.

What's more, making changes is so simple that who prevails often comes down to who cares more. And hardcore Wikipedians care. A lot.

Danny Wool logs on to Wikipedia at 6 each morning and works two hours before leaving for his day job developing education programs for a museum. When he gets back home around 6:30 p.m., he hops back on Wikipedia for a few more hours. Bryan Derksen checks his watch list each morning before leaving for work at a small company that sells medical equipment on eBay. When he returns home, he'll spend a few hours just clicking on the Random Page link to see what needs to get done. It's tempting to urge people like Wool and Derksen to get a life.

But imagine if they instead spent their free time walking through public parks, picking up garbage. We'd call them good citizens.

Still, even committed citizens sometimes aren't muscular enough to fend off determined bad guys. As Wikipedia has grown, Wales has been forced to impose some more guard centralized, police-like measures-to

Mark Pellegrini User name: Rau1654

A PhD candidate in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, Pellegrini chooses which articles appear on Wikipedia's front page.

Regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia, librarians, teachers and academics don't perceive it as credible, because it has no formal review process.

against "edit warriors," "point-of-view warriors," "revert warriors," and all those who have difficulty playing well with others. "We try to be as open as we can," Wales says, "but some of these people are just impossible." During the 2004 presidential election, Wikipedia had to lock both the George W. Bush and the John Kerry pages because of incessant vandalism and bickering. The Wikipedia front page, another target of attacks, is also protected.

If that suggests an emerging hierarchy in this bastion of egalitarian knowledge-gathering, so be it. The Wikipedia power pyramid looks like this: At the bottom are anonymous contributors, people who make a few edits and are identified only by their IF [Internet Protocol] addresses. On the next level stand Wikipedia's myriad registered users around the globe, people such as Kvaran in New Mexico, who have chosen a screen name (he's Carptrash) and make edits under that byline. Some of the most dedicated users try to reach the next level-administrator.

Wikipedia's 400 administrators, Derksen and Wool among them, can delete articles, protect pages and block IP addresses. Above this group are bureaucrats, who can crown administrators. The most privileged bureaucrats are stewards. And above stewards are developers, 57 super elites who can make direct changes to the Wikipedia software and database. There's also an arbitration committee that hears disputes and can ban bad users.

At the very top, with powers that range far beyond those of any mere Wikipedian mortal, is Wales, known to everyone in Wikiworld as Jimbo. He can do pretty much anything he wants-from locking pages to banning people to getting rid of developers. So vast are his powers that some began calling him "the benevolent dictator." But Wales bristled at that tag. So his minions assigned him a different, though no less imposing, label. "Jimbo," says Wikipedia administrator Mark Pellegrini, "is the God-King." he God-King drives a Hyundai. On a sunny Florida Monday, Wales is piloting his red Accent from his St. Petersburg home across the bay to downtown Tampa, where on the 11th floor of a shabby office building, a company called Neutelligent manages a vast server farm. In one of the back rows, stacked on two racks, are the guts of Wikipedia--42 servers connected by a hair ball of orange and blue cables. For the

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next two hours, Wales scoots to and fro, plugging and unplugging cables while trading messages with a Wikipedia developer on Internet Relay Chat via a nearby keyboard.

Back in St. Petersburg, Wales oversees his empire from a pair of monitors in Wikipedia's headquarters-two cramped, windowless rooms that look like the offices of a failed tech startup. Computer equipment is strewn everywhere. An open copy of Teach Yourself PHp, MySQL and Apache is splayed on the floor. It may be good to be God-King, but it's not glamorous.

Wales began his journey in Huntsville, Alabama. His father worked in a grocery store.

His mother and grandmother operated a tiny private school called the House of Learning, which Wales and his three siblings attended.

He graduated from Aubum University in 1989 with a degree in finance and ended up studying options pricing in an economics PhD program at Indiana University. Bored with academic life, he left school in 1994 and went to Chicago, where he took to betting on interest rate and foreign-currency fluctuations. In six years, he eamed enough to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives.

They moved to San Diego in 1998. The times being what they were, Wales started an Internet company called Bomis, a search engine and Web directory. He began hearing about the fledgling open source movement and wondered whether volunteers could create something besides software. So he recruited Larry Sanger, then an Ohio State University doctoral student in philosophy, whom he'd encountered on some listservs.

He put Sanger on the Bomis payroll, and together they launched a free online encyclopedia called Nupedia. Why an encyclopedia? Wales says he simply wanted to see if it could be done.

With Sanger as editor-in-chief, Nupedia essentially replicated the One Best Way model. He assembled a roster of academics to write articles. (Participants even had to fax in their degrees as proof of their expertise.)

And he established a seven-stage process of editing, fact-checking and peer review.

"After 18 months and $250,000," Wales says, "we had 12 articles."

Then, an employee told Wales about Wiki software. On January 15, 2001, they launched a Wiki-fied version and within a month, they had 200 articles. In a year, they had 18,000. And on September 20, 2004, when the Hebrew edition added an article on

Making changes is so simple that who prevails often comes down to who cares more.

Angela Beesley User name: Angela Directing a "deletion bot" from Essex, England, Beesley wages war on vandals and helps develop the WikiCities project with Jimmy Wales.

Kazakhstan's flag, Wikipedia had its one millionth article. Total investment: about $500,000, most of it from Wales himself.

Sanger left the project in 2002. "In the Nupedia model, there was room for an editorin-chief," Wales says. 'The Wiki model is too distributed for that." Sanger, a scholar at heart, returned to academic life. His cofounder, meanwhile, became a minor geek rock star. Wales has been asked to advise the BBC, Nokia and other large enterprises curious about Wikis. Technology conferences in the United States and Europe clamor for him.

And while he's committed to keeping his creation a "charitable project," as he constantly calls it (wikipedia.com became wikipedia.org almost five years ago), the temptations are mounting.

In 2004, Wales and Angela Beesley, an astonishingly dedicated Wikipedian, launched a for-profit venture called WikiCities. The company will provide free hosting for "communjty-based" sitesRvers [recreational vehicle owners], poodle owners, genealogy buffs, and so on. The sites will operate on the same software that powers Wikipedia, and the content will be available under a free license. But WikiCities intends to make money by selling advertising. After all, if several thousand people can create an encyclopedia, a few hundred Usher devotees should be able to put together the ultimate fan site. And if legions of Usher fans are hanging out in one place, some advertiser will pay to try to sell them concert tickets or music downloads.

It may feel like we've been down this road before-remember GeoCities (http://geocities.yahoo.com) and theglobe.com? But Wales says this is different because those earlier sites lacked any mechanism for true community. "It was just free home pages," he says. WikiCities, he believes, will let people who share a passion also share a project.

They'll be able to design and build projects together. So the founder of the Web's grand experiment in the democratic dissemination of information is also trying to resurrect GeoCities. While some may find the notion silly, many others just want a piece of Jimbo magic.

During our conversation over lunch, Wales' cell phone rings. It's a partner at Accel, the venture capital firm, calling to talk about WikiCities and any other Wiki-related investment ideas Wales might have. Wales says he's busy and asks the caller to phone

back later. Then he smiles at me. "I'll let mm cool his heels awhile." ikipedia's articles on the British peerage system-clearheaded explanations of dukes, viscounts and other titles of nobility-are largely the work of a user known as Lord Emsworth. A few of Emsworth's pieces on kings and queens of England have been honored as Wikipedia's Featured Article of the Day. It turns out that Lord Emsworth claims to be a 16-year-old living in South Brunswick, New Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody has to know you're a sophomore.

And that has some mstressed. Sanger gave voice to these criticisms in an essay posted on kur05hin.org titled "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism." Although he acknowledges that "Wikipedia is very cool," he argues that the site's production model suffers from two big problems.

The first is that "regardless of whether Wikipema actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia," librarians, teachers and academics don't perceive it as credible, because it has no formal review process. The second problem, according to Sanger, is that the site in general and Wales in particular are too "anti-elitist." Established scholars might be willing to contribute to Wikipema-but not if they have to deal with trolls and especially not if they're considered no different from any schmo with an iMac. Speaking from his home in Columbus, Omo, where he teaches at Omo State University, Sanger stresses that Wikipedia is a fine and worthy endeavor. But he says that academics don't take it seriously. "A lot of the articles look like they're written by undergraduates." He believes that "people who make knowing things their life's work should be accorded a special place in the project." But since Wlkipema's resolute anti-elitism makes that unlikely,Sanger argues, something else will happen: Wlkipedia will fork-that is, a group of academics will take Wlkipedia's content, which is available under a free license, and produce their own peer-reviewed reference work. "I wanted to send a wake-up call to the Wlkipedia community to tell them that this fork is probably going to happen."

Wales' response is a dare: "You want to organize that? Here are the servers." Yet Wales acknowledges that partly in response to these concerns, Wikipedia will likely offer a stable-that is, unchangeable-version

Helping Indian Cities Move into the

Future

Indore finds new ways to deliver better service to its citizens.

ore than half of the Indian economy depends on cities, which are home to about 300 million people. It is estimated that half of India will be living in cities by 2030, putting even more pressure on civic infrastructure.

To help find solutions to these problems, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is offering to help Indian cities learn new methods of civic services management. USAID's urban management project has provided training and technical support to local bodies to increase revenues through better management and provide better civic facilities for citizens.

USAID's Financial Institutions Reform and Expansion-Debt initiative in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, is an example of how such efforts can improve a city. A decade ago, the Indore Municipal Corporation, the agency responsible for maintaining and expanding the city's civic facilities, had meager resources. "Roads were deteriorating and there was no money available to augment the existing water supply and sanitation services. The situation was hopeless," says Chetan Vaidya, principal urban adviser for the USAID project.

Then, in 2000, the leaders of the corporation took the initiative to improve the city and prepared a vision document.

"The officials thought about ways to increase revenue and how citizens could be made partners in the development schemes. They also thought about ways to improve the corporation's image to help it raise money from the market for the development projects," says Vaidya. This

M

commitment to transformation helped the corporation find a partner in USAID for the urban management project, which started in 2003.

In 1997, the Indore Municipal Corporation had been collecting only about Rs. 160 million in annual revenue. But in the most recent fiscal year, this figure has risen to Rs. 920 million. "Better management was the key to multiplying resources. The training under the USAID project. .. changed the mindset of urban managers. They became interested in ... better management formulas, which helped the corporation increase its resources," says Aashish Agarwal, coordinator of the Madhya Pradesh City Managers Association, which was established with the help of the urban management project.

The people of Indore have benefited because of the corporation's improved financial health. Senior citizens aged 60 to 80 have been provided medical insurance of Rs. 20,000. Under another program, the city's residents have been given accident disability insurance of Rs. 10,000. All girls studying in government schools are covered under an insurance plan which will give them about Rs. 87,000 to complete their studies and get a start in life, if one of their parents dies accidentally.

The corporation has also been able to build new infrastructure. Mayor Uma Shashi Sharma says, "We are implementing a water supply project at a cost of Rs. 6.4 billion that will provide more water to the city by March 2009." The city has purchased buses that are easier for the

disabled to board, and can be tracked by satellite in case of accidents. Roads along the city bus routes are being improved as part of a Rs. 8.64 billion project. The corporation is also building houses for slum dwellers.

All these projects are backed by 50 percent grants from the central government's Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, which seeks to encourage reforms and development of cities. The Madhya Pradesh government provides 20 percent of the money, while the remaining 30 percent is generated by the corporation itself.

"If the USAID project had not improved the financial health of the corporation, it could not have gone for such big projects," says Vaidya.

The Indore corporation also introduced better accounting methods to block corruption, while computerizing and decentralizing tax-paying and water bill systems. "With the help of new software it became easier for the public to deposit their taxes and water bill payments," says J.C. Galar, secretary of the Indore Municipal Corporation. The software helps people check details of their current and past bills with just a few clicks and also get answers to most of their queries immediately. Citizens can check their records from anyone of 11 zonal offices, obtain various licenses, birth and death certificates without going to the head offfice. To promote transparency, the corporation also put its revenue and expenditure details on the Internet. ''The success of any urban reform initiative ... depends on the willingness of, and

ÂŤ

Top: Young trees donated by residents flourish at the Mountain of the Departed in Indore, Madhya Pradesh.

Center left: Indore saved 39 percent on electricity by switching to energy-efficient street lights.

Center right: Citizens paying their water bills and property taxes at a computerized zonal office of the Indore Municipal Corporation.

Above: One of Indore's new, technologically advanced buses. cordial relationship between the elected representatives and the executive. Indore represents an excellent case in this regard,"

says N. Bhattacharjee, urban team leader and USAID program manager.

Under the USAID program, the Indore Municipal Corporation has also involved citizens in the development process.

Around 150 kilometers of concrete roads have been built in the city and part of the expenditure was provided by the citizens through voluntary contributions.

The corporation developed more than 150 gardens and asked resident welfare associations to maintain them. "A barren hill was converted into a green forest with the help of citizens," says Mayor Sharma. Under another program, citizens

donated Rs. 251 each to plant a sapling in memory of a family member or friend on that hill, now called Pitm Parvat, or "Mountain of the Departed."

"More than 15,000 plants have been planted there and almost all of them have survived. The corporation could do this without spending much from its pocket," says the mayor.

USAID also helped Indore by linking it to Garland, Texas, as part of the Resource City and City links Project, which paid for teams from the two cities to visit each other between 2002 and 2004.

"Indore experts learnt about the effective techniques of budgeting and (implementing a) tax system, whereas the Garland team took keen interest in the decentralization process, as well as in the strategy to tackle inadequate infrastructure in Indore," says Vaidya, who visited Garland in March 2003.

US AID also helped Indore with an energy audit of its street lights. The study found that the city could save 39 percent on electricity if it switched to energyefficient tubelights. A private company, Asian Electronics Limited, took the responsibility of changing the high-energy consuming lights. "The company did not ask for any direct money from the corporation. Instead it received 80 percent of the amount saved on street lights continuously for 27 months," explains corporation secretary Galar.

The main objective of the urban management project, which will end in 2008, is to strengthen local urban bodies to tackle the challenge of rapid urbanization. "Key indicato':s of this program have been included in the Indian government's Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission agenda," says Lee E. Baker who heads the institutional reform project.

Over the next seven years, Rs. 500 billion will be allocated by the Indian government for ambitious urban projects under the Renewal Mission program.

Only those Indian urban local bodies which have already adopted reforms and are financially healthy will benefit from this opportunity and Indore has already shown the way. ~ Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@state.gov

Far left: Lava shoots 150 meters in the air, feeding a fourkilometer flow in a 1983 eruption.

Center: In this 2004 eruption, lava flows around a tree as it moves down the slopes of Kilauea.

Left: Lava has been pouring out of Kilauea for more than 20 years, creating new black sand beaches and extending Volcanoes National Park by several hectares each week.

At Kilauea's 1,200-meter summit, we stop at the massive caldera, the depression at a volcano's center, which held a lake of lava for most of the 19th century until it dried up. "This is where Pele lives," says Meyerson, gazing into the crater. And Pele has been a very busy goddess. The plateau we're standing on is composed of new rocks (they're silvery) and older ones (they turn dark black, then brown, over time). Some are smooth and billowy, like coils of ropes spread across the ground.

Called pahoehoe in the Hawaiian language, they were gaseous flows that moved smoothly across the ground. Other flows, called aa, are marked by jagged edges and rough pebbles. Flip-flops are not the footwear of choice.

The highlight is the active lava erupting several miles away. It flows from a rift zone-a series of cracks and faults--down to the ocean. The road cuts off several kilometers short of the lava. A few kilometers away, the hillside is spotted with red-hot lava. Three glowing clouds shoot into the sky where it meets the Pacific.

Eager for additional volcano perspectives, I try an underwater tour-a 35minute ride in a battery-powered submarine. Since the Big Island is more than 10,000 meters tall (Mauna Kea's summit, measured from the seafloor), the bulk of Hawaii's volcanoes are submerged. The highlight: seeing hundreds of colorful tropical fish feeding off a coral reef that has grown out of an ancient lava flow.

Birds (and helicopters) get the best view of the eruption. Guess who came along for

our ride? "Pele was antICIpating your arrival," the pilot says. "A big lava flow broke out on the last flight." Below us, lava spits and froths out of a hole that seems to reach to the volcano's molten center.

Heading toward the ocean, we fmd an aa flow, a small stream of lava, bright red in the middle and edged with silvery and black chunks. Flying over with the pilot's door open, we can feel the heat 150 meters below.

After landing, my wife and I resolve to hike out to the lava. A local overhears us discuss our plan. "Respect Pele," she says. "Bring positive energy." We decide flashlights, food and a first-aid

Mauna Loa Rising gradually to more than four kilometers above sea level, Mauna Loa, meaning "Long Mountain" in Hawaiian, is the largest volcano on our planet. Its long submarine flanks descend to the sea floor an additional five kilometers, and the sea floor in turn is depressed by Mauna Loa's great mass another eight kilometers. This makes the volcano's summit about 17 kilometers above its base.

The volcano covers half of the island of Hawaii and by itself amounts to about 85 percent of all the other Hawaiian islands combined.

Mauna Loa is among Earth's most active volcanoes, having erupted 33 times since its well-documented historical eruption in 1843.

Its most recent eruption was in 1984. Mauna Loa is certain to erupt again, and the U.S. Geological Survey carefully monitors the volcano for signs of unrest. http://hvo .wr usg s.gov/maunal oal cu rrenV

kit might be more practical.

As the sun falls, we return to the park.

The rangers have posted warning signs and legal disclaimers-dangers on the unsupervised trek include toxic volcanic gases and unstable cliffs and steam vents that can collapse-but we just can't pass up the lure of lava.

The five-kilometer hike out is hazardous in itself, as we clamber over sharp rocks.

After 90 tiring minutes, we can see smoke plumes at the ocean's edge-and feel warm rocks beneath our feet. Since we see people up in front of us, we keep going.

They might know something we don't.

Suddenly, the ground becomes burning hot. Red lava glows through the cracks between rocks we're standing on.

Quickly retracing our steps, we perch on cool rocks a few hundred meters away and unpack our picnic dinner.

Around 9 p.m., a river of lava bursts from the ground nearby and rushes toward the ocean. The heat is tremendous, but we get close enough to see a molten waterfall coursing down the hill, lighting up the night sky-and building the earth in front of our eyes.

As we turn to leave, our sneakers stick to increasingly hot rocks. When we reach cooler ground, I trip, slicing my arm.

Luckily, the wound isn't too bad. Still, before we get back in our car, we make sure to knock all of Pele's rocks out of our _s_ho_e_s_.

Kevin Whitelaw

is a senior writer with News & World Report.

~

u.s.

Lava from Kilauea pours into the Pacific Ocean.

The lava has formed more than 200 hectares of new land along the Puna coastline.

t the heart of U.S. efforts to end human trafficking is a commitment to human dignity. Every day, all over the world, people are coerced into bonded labor, bought and sold in prostitution, exploited in domestic servitude, enslaved in agricultural work and in factories, and captured to serve unlawfully as child soldiers.

The structure of the (U.S. Government's Trafficking in Persons) report and the purpose are focused largely on drawing the world's attention on the existence of mod-

~

ern-day slavery and the desperate need to eliminate it in the same way that the world ended the African slave trade more than a century ago. Human trafficking plagues every country in one way or another, including the United States. The report covers 164 countries and territories, comprising some 85 percent of the world. It ranks 151 countries and territories where there have been some 100 cases of human trafficking that were documented. It spells out what countries are doing on prosecution, prevention and protection and what more can be done together between the United States and other countries on all three fronts.

The U.S. Government is committed to taking action in cooperation with other nations .... Our sources of information for this report include U.S. Embassies, NGOs worldwide, brave activists fighting human trafficking, foreign law enforcement officers and staff visits. Extensive analysis based on criteria laid out by Congress in the law goes into the assignment of countries into Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List and Tier 3.

A country falls into Tier 3 if its govemment is not making a significant effort to combat human trafficking. A Tier 3 country can be sanctioned if it doesn't take seriousIy antislavery action in the next 90 days.

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~ It's especially disappointing that so many :'2 wealthy countries in the Near East that aren't lacking adequate resources to make significant progress are on Tier 3. For instance, Saudi Arabia is on Tier 3 for the third year. These are countries in that region that rely extensively on foreign migrant laborers. Practices such as sponsorship laws create conditions that make guest workers especially vulnerable to trafficking in the region.

Sponsorship laws give employers extensive personal authority over workers, allowing them to control movement and legal status. The power given to sponsors over foreign workers should be limited and counter-

Public Awareness 01 Human Trafficking Increasing

By ERIC GREEN

U

.S efforts to raise awareness of trafficking in persons are paying off, and now millions more know about the global problem, says US. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

In introducing the State Department's seventh annual Trafficking in Persons Report (http://wwwstate.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/20071) in June, Rice said human trafficking until recently was "akin to a global family secret. It was known but not often discussed publicly."

Rice said that in her travels, she has noticed "a greater desire by our partners to fight this crime and protect its victims." The United balanced with rights for workers to seek legal redress, and governments in destination countries should be more active in protecting workers.

Now 32 countries are on the Tier 2 Watch List, the same number as last year.... India, Mexico and Russia are on the Tier 2 Watch List for the fourth consecutive year. Tier 2 Watch List is not supposed to become a parking lot for governments lacking the will or interest to stop exploitation and enslavement on their soil. We stand ready to cooperate with these nations and support any efforts they make to end this travesty within their borders.

The link between prostitution and sex trafficking is indisputable. That's why we must move with more creativity and commitment to deal with the demand for victims. Prostitution is not a victimless crime.

Sexual servitude is particularly grotesque in human trafficking. The report is interspersed with stories of survivors who have been aided by U.S. programs that demonstrate our commitment to rescue and rehabilitate innocent victims.

Let me tell you briefly about some trends that we see highlighted in the 2007 report.

States, she said, is helping to lead a global movement "not just to confront this crime, but to abolish it. More and more countries are coming to see human trafficking for what it is-a modem-day form of slavery that devastates families and communities around the world" Mark Lagon, the new director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking in Persons, said India stayed on the Tier 2 Watch List for the fourth straight year and was not downgraded to Tier 3, despite the fact that the world's largest democracy has the "world's largest problem of human trafficking" The United States, he said, needs to "engage in a very serious dialogue with India" on its trafficking problem, since the countries are "two serious democracies" with a "developing alliance."

The U.S.-India relationship is such, said Lagon, that the "Ievel of communication Use of debt, first of all, as a tool of coercion and secondly, stalled progress in strengthening rule of law. First, in both labor and sexual exploitation, illegal or illegitimate debt is increasingly used to keep people in servitude .... People are enticed into fraudulent offers of work abroad that require a steep payment up front for the services of a labor agency arranging the job or a payment that goes straight to the future employer.

To pay the fee, workers often borrow money from relatives and friends or they mortgage property. Sometimes, additional debt is added at the place of employment: inflated fees for supposed costs of room and board or equipment. Sometimes, new, unexpected transportation fees are added. The debt becomes exorbitant on purpose, yet workers are trapped into trying to pay it off for years.

Democracy and rule of law are crucial to fighting human trafficking. And fighting trafficking conversely is crucial to the future of democracy worldwide, since trafficking is one of the most brutal ways to silence women, half of humankind worldwide. This lack of progress on rule of law can be traced to official corruption and complicity on the

one hand and indifference on the other.

One of the heroes highlighted in this year's report, Kailash Satyarthi of the Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, prompted the rescue of 92 Bengali children enslaved in goldsmith and jewelry factories in New Delhi. The children were forced to eat, sleep and labor in workshops, 10 to a room.

Dangerous chemicals were used for making gold ornaments in the same rooms where they were kept 24 hours a day. Most of the children were under the age of 14.

According to the children, many were physically and sexually abused.

Just days after this rescue, which didn't result in any arrests in India, the factory owners, managers and their thugs showed up at Bachpan Bachao Andolan's shelter with iron rods, sticks and bricks. They tried to recapture the children. Shelter staff were injured. When police finally responded, no one was arrested. The connections and clout of these traffickers were enough, apparently, to thwart justice. India has the world's largest labor trafficking problem with hundreds of thousands of sex trafficking victims and millions of bonded laborers including forced child laborers. In India, there is no national anti-trafficking effort, no recogni-

Excerpts from comments on the U.S. Government's seventh annual Trafficking in Persons Report, released in June in Washington, D.C.

between our two govemments" can "stand some serious, frank talk about a problem like bonded labor or sex trafficking" The report does not exempt the United States from a cataloguing of its own trafficking problem, including women and girls who migrate to America and become prostitutes or victims of forced labor or sexual servitude.

In fiscal year 2006, the United States contributed more than $74 million abroad to fund 154 intemational anti-trafficking projects in 70 countries. Since 2001, Lagon said, the US govemment has funded more than $448 million to fight a problem in which an estimated 800,000 people are trafficked across intemational borders each year Some 80 percent of these people are female, and up to half are children. ~ Eric Green is a USINFO staff writer.

tion of bonded labor on an official level, and poor efforts against sex trafficking. The world's largest democracy has the world's largest problem of human trafficking.

The goal of this report is...to stimulate government action in concert with the United States to end modem-day slavery and to celebrate the heroism of those who are working to help spare victims from pain....

4i

To read the Trafficking in Persons Report go to http://www.state.govlg/tip/ Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan速State.gov

The Salad that Conquered the United States

merica cannot get enough of the Caesar salad. In the last two decades, the simple combination of romaine lettuce, creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese has: â&#x20AC;˘ Become America's most popular main-dish salad, showing up virtually everywhere from fast-food chains to whitetablecloth restaurants to the takeout counter in the supermarket; â&#x20AC;˘ Dramatically altered the lettuce industry as the demand for romaine has skyrocketed; â&#x20AC;˘ Turned the chicken-topped Caesar into the chicken item most frequently found on restaurant menus-more often than wings or even that perennial kid favorite, chicken fingers.

And still Americans want more.

Three-fourths of all full-service restaurants now offer a Caesar salad, compared with 57 percent just a year ago, according to a survey of the United States' top 500 restaurants by market research firm Technomic in 2006.

Dole Foods, which introduced the Qagged Caesar salad kit 12 years ago, says sales of its classic Caesar kit continue to grow each year, despite competition from other companies and Dole's own 11 other bagged salad kits [sold in supermarkets]. "Americans just don't get tired of that flavor," says Eric Schwartz, president of Dole's fresh vegetable division.

Although the Caesar may seem like the all-American salad, it was actually invented in 1924 by an Italian immigrant in Mexico.

Caesar Cardini, owner of a popular Tijuana restaurant, concocted the salad one night for some late-partying Hollywood guests, most food historians agree. He used romaine, then considered an uncommon delicacy, and just six ingredients to make a creamy dressing: garlic, olive oil, lemon, egg, Worcestershire sauce and Parmesan cheese.

A

A Caesar salad, with an individual touch of tomatoes, toast and chicken added by Vinod K. Bhatti, executive chef for the American Community Support Association in New Delhi.

The salad was prepared tableside, and posh restaurants in Los Angeles soon began offering it as well.

"The ingredients today don't impress us, but back then they were much more expensive and difficult to fmd. The Caesar, when it was first introduced, was considered exotic," says Vogue magazine food critic and author Jeffrey Steingarten.

As ingredients like olive oil and Parmesan cheese became more common, however, the Caesar made the jump from upper-class rarity to mass-culture staple.

Demand for the salad grew and the effect began to be felt in the lettuce industry. Over the past 15 years, romaine has gone from a tiny portion of America's lettuce crop to one of the fastest-growing vegetables to be produced, consumed and exported, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service (USDA).

Romaine production has soared so dramatically that in 2002, for the first time, the USDA's agricultural census gave romaine its own category. According to the government's figures, California, America's largest lettuce producing state, grew romaine on more than 6,000 hectares in 1992. By 2004, that had quadrupled to nearly 26,000 hectares.

The Caesar also has proved a boon to the poultry industry, thanks to the idea of topping the salad with strips of chicken to turn it into an entree.

A 2003 survey of about 1,400 restaurants conducted for the National Chicken Council found that the chicken Caesar

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was on 66 percent of restaurant menus; chicken fingers showed up on 50 percent. "We were surprised. We thought wings or tenders would be higher [than the Caesar]. But I guess it's the universal chicken dish," says council spokesman Richard Lobb.

The popularity of the Caesar, particularly as an entree salad topped with chicken, beef or fish, is expected to keep on growmg.

The National Restaurant Association's 2005 restaurant industry forecast showed entree-salad orders registering the largest increase of all menu items at both full-service and quick-service restaurants. Nearly 80 percent of quickservice places reported that customers are ordering entree salads, such as the Caesar, more often.

And it's not only popular in the United States. When Didier Armand, chef at the Paris La Defense Hotel, was named Renaissance Hotels' chef of the year in 2005, he noted at a luncheon that no matter what he put on the hotel's lunch menu, "the chicken Caesar always outsells everything."

Candy Sagan is a former reporter for The Washington Post's Food section.

Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan @state.gov

Consumption of all lettuce varieties has been increasing since 1960. Iceberg remains the most popular, but Americans are eating less of it and more of romaine. In 1985, per capita consumption of romaine was less than 450 grams By 2004, that had increased to 3.7 kilograms, nearly doubling between 2001 and 2004, due in part to the increased popularity of the Caesar salad, (Source: US, Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service)

Get dressed Although ranch dressing is the most popular for eating at home, Caesar is the dressing most likely to appear on restaurant menus.

(Source Mintet menu monitor base, 2005)

BVcalories and weight It may be a salad, but it's not necessarily low-calorie. Some examples, with dressing A 250-gram chicken Caesar from the Au Bon Pain bakery chain is 920 calories (60 grams of fat); a 400-gram salad from the Panera Restaurant chain is 560 calories (34 grams of fat); and a 300-gram salad from McDonald's is 470 calories (25 grams of fat).

For its 861 hotels in North America that serve Caesar salads, Marriott International bought nearly 900,000 kilograms of romaine lettuce in 2005, (Source: Restaurant Web sites, Marriott tnternational)

Why it's so hard for companies to raise prices.

he price of the fIrst serving of Coca-Cola was 5 cents in 1886, about a dollar in today's money. Coke no longer sells for a nickel, and that is not terribly surprising. What is surprising is that it took more than 70 years for the price of Coke to change.

Economists call this "nominal price rigidity." My salary is not tweaked each month to reflect the latest inflation fIgures, and neither is yours. Restaurants do not reprint their menus, nor wholesale fIrms their catalogs, if the cost of their inputs changes by a penny.

That might be a problem. Of course, if inflation is low, money has a predictable value from month to month, and that predictability is worth a lot. But while it is handy to know what your pay packet will buy, prices need to be able to change relative to one another to reflect demand and the underlying costs of production. If prices don't adjust smoothly for any reason, then the economic consequences could be serious. If wages can't fall in a recession, then people will lose their jobs instead. If the price of a car or a restaurant meal can't fall when demand does, sales will collapse with much the same effect.

Coke was clearly an exceptional example of rigid prices. Daniel Levy and Andrew Young, the American economists who analyzed the case, report that Coke's price stayed at 5 cents a serving while the price of other products bounced all over the place.

The price of sugar tripled after World War I before falling back somewhat; over the past seven decades, the price of coffee has gone up eightfold. Coke itself was taxed fIrst as a medicine, then as a soft drink, and survived sugar rationing. All the while, the price stayed at a nickel.

Part of Coke's problem was the cost of replacing vending machines that accepted g, only nickels-and the fact that the alter- ~ ~ nati ve, dimes, represented a 100 percent " price hike. (The boss of Coca-Cola wrote ~ to his friend President Dwight D. 1S Eisenhower in 1953 to suggest, in all seriousness, a 7-and-a-half-cent coin.) ~ Most companies don't wait so long to ~ change prices if they need to. Researchers ? have tended to conclude that many prices â&#x201A;Ź. change every year or so, often sooner. ~ Levy and some colleagues looked at :;, supermarket pricing in the mid-1990s and ~ E found, based on detailed accounting data, 11 that to change the price of a single type of 25

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product in a typical supermarket cost 52 cents in printing, labor and errors. The total of all such changes was about $100,000 per store, per year-still less than I percent of revenue.

Technology makes it even easier to change prices using bar codes, Web sites and laser-printed menus. Amazon.com always seems to be changing book prices. Coke vending machines now take very little effort to reprogram. So, should we conclude that "menu costs" no longer matter?

That would be too optimistic. Economists have long argued that even small "menu costs" could cause large economic distortions, because when firms are pondering whether to pay those costs, they don't consider the social benefIts of a more accurate price, only their own profIts. A prize-winning paper from Carlos Carvalho of Princeton University, New Jersey, recently showed that it does not even help if many prices adjust quickly, because those that change slowly will distort the rest. Amazon may be able to adjust its prices easily to reflect its costs, but that is of little use if those costs are distorted by slow adjustments from the bookbinders or the freight handlers.

Coca-Cola's experience reflected exactly that: Long before the introduction of vending machines, they had signed a perpetual fIxed-price contract to supply their bottlers. Without a long-term contract, potential bottlers would have been nervous that CocaCola would have taken advantage of them on the price of Coke syrup after the bottling plant had been built. But these long-term contracts were signed at a time of very low inflation, and nobody appears to have considered the possibility that Coca-Cola's costs might start to take off. The contracts were eventually renegotiated in 1921 to allow them to move up and down with the price of sugar.

I drank a half-liter bottle of Coke while writing this article, and it cost me 85 pence ($1.70) at the corner shop in England. I'd rather have paid a nickel, but price changes are important. Perhaps I shouldn't be too ungrateful. ~ Tim

Harford

is a columnist

for

the

Financial Times. His latest book is The Undercover Economist.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE :JI Copyright © The ew Yorker Collection 2006 Lee Lorenz from canoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

"Encouraging dissent is a good way offinding out who the traitors are. " Copyright © The New Yorker Collection 2005 Leo Cullum

from cartoonbank.com.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © The New Yorker Collection 1997 MOrl Gerberg from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

Minnesota Trade Mission Governor Tim Pawlenty will lead a three-city trade mission to India in October. delegation of Minnesota business execu- Bangalore, and the offices of the Tata Group in tives, led by state Governor Tim Pawlenty, Mumbai. will visit New Delhi, Bangalore and MumMinnesota's manufactured exports to India bai in October to explore investment and trade grew 208 percent between 2000 and 2005. Out of opportunities. the state's total exports of $15.2 billion in 2006, "Strong economic growth is unleashing a wave India received $129.5 million in goods It is these of demand in India. From consumer goods to pro- figures that the delegation will seek to boost. fessional services, hi-tech to health care, machinThere is also strong potential for Indian ery to processed foods-the prospects are abun- investment in Minnesota. In 2005, Indian dant," says Governor Pawlenty. "It's important that investors owned assets worth $1.36 billion in we make these connections firsthand." the United States, up from $277 million in 2002.

Among the many reasons for Minnesota to Indian-owned companies in Minnesota include expand trade with India, he says, are the coun- Suzlon Wind Energy Corporation and Wipro try's fast-growing markets, a middle class popu- Technologies. lation with growing purchasing power and a huge Also part of the visiting group is an 11-memyouth consumer base that has an increasing ber governor's delegation which includes State desire for hi-tech products and services.

Senator Satveer Chaudhary, US. Congressman During the October 20-27 visit, about 30 Erik Paulsen and Gopal Khanna, Minnesota's business leaders will get a chance to promote chief information officer. increased exports to India, gather firsthand mar"This is an amazing opportunity, not only for ket information and contacts, and develop rela- Minnesota businesses to find new markets, but tionships with Indian business organizations like for the people of our state and the people of India the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce to foster a more productive friendship," says and Industry (FICCI) and the Confederation of Chaudhary, who helped set up the sister-state Indian Industry (CII). Major participants include agreement between Minnesota and Haryana, technology conglomerates 3M and IBM Corp- where his family is from. "People have raised oration, speciality retailer Best Buy Inc., the concerns about trade imbalances and things like fluid-handling and components firm Graco Inc. outsourcing, which are all the more reason for and Datacard Group, which this delegation to kick the doors open for Minnesota makes 10 badges and cards. State Senator Satveer Chaudhary On the itinerary are seviยง businesses to compete in the eral networking events; pre~global marketplace." sentations on India's IT ~ Chaudhary adds that India's industry, the energy sector ~ middle class is larger than the and the health care industry; ~entire U.S. population, which and discussions and meetmakes those Indian consumers ings with potential Indian one of the world's largest customers and partners. untapped markets. "By taking The delegation also plans to this kind of initiative to estabvisit the Fortis Hospital in lish better business relationNew Delhi, the IBM Center ships, I know Minnesota is and the Wipro campus in going to do well," he says.

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Its wheat-covered plains were once known as "the breadbasket of the world."

It is home to family-owned farms, small town main streets, middle-class suburbs, world class medical and agricultural research, and boasts one of the highest education levels in the United States.

Winters are freezing, with most of the state covered in snow from mid-December to mid-March. Record-breaking blizzards and forest fires are regular occurrences.

Relief is provided, however, by the many lakes-about 12,000 of them-and the rushing rivers that enabled Minnesotans to ship all that wheat, and later corn, iron ore and lumber, to the rest of America and the world.

The Dakota Indians who named the region chose aptly. Minnesota means "Land of Sky-Blue Waters." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem about a heroic Indian, The Song of Hiawatha, was inspired by Minnesota's natural beauty. Many places in the state are named in the poem.

Minnesota, and particularly its major metropolitan area, the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St. Paul, will be in the news a year from now. The Republican Party, headed by President George W. Bush, will hold its quadrennial convention to formally select candidates to run for President and Vice President in the November 2008 general elections. The opposition Democratic Party will convene in Denver, Colorado, to choose its Right above: A scene from St. Paul-based Ali Selim's movie, Sweet Land, about immigrant struggles in the 1920s. Filmed in southwestern Minnesota in 2004, it won "Best First Feature" in the 2007 Spirit Awards for independent productions.

Right: Fishing season opens on Lake Alexander, Minnesota, in May 2004. The morning temperature was below freezing, causing mist.

India Cenler allhe UniversilV of Minnesola he new India Center at the University of Minnesota, approved by the state government in May 2007, would promote exchanges and collaboration in areas ranging from education to business.

The main goals of the center, which the university planned to open this fall, are to foster understanding of India's history, culture and values; to promote economic, governmental and academic pursuits involving India; and facilitate partnerships in research, education and business.

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty signed a higher education bill on May 30 that includes a $150,000 appropriation for the university to create the center at its Minneapolis campus, in the Office of International Programs, which is also home to the China Center and the Learning Abroad Center.

The one-time appropriation requires a match from the university and will likely manifest itself in the form of staffing and physical space.

"We live in a global economy. Minnesota can compete and win in the world economy if we have the tools, training and relationships to succeed.

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candidates. The location of the Republican convention is no determiner, however, of how Minnesotans will vote in the election.

It is known as a "swing state," meaning the voters' choices are less predictable, they vote in large numbers, and in a tight race their decision could "swing" the election.

In general, Minnesotans are known for moderate-to-progressive politics and The Mall of America, with more than 600 stores, restaurants and entertainment outlets, is still America's largest 15 years after it opened in Bloomington, Minnesota.

social policies, and a high degree of civic involvement.

By several measures, Minnesota has been ranked as among the healthiest and most livable states, with a well educated population.

The convention delegates, and other visitors to the Twin Cities, can find plenty of bests and firsts and biggests. The Mayo Clinic is a destination for world leaders seeking treatment or just a checkup. Northwest Airlines has its headquarters in the metropolitan area. So does 3M company, where Scotch tape was invented. From the cities' docks, one can take a paddleboat ride down the historic and mighty Mississippi, the nation's second longest, but probably most sung about, river. Or go shopping in America's biggest mall, at 882,550 square meters.

"Even if you loathe shopping, you should see the Mall of America," writes Syd Kearney, travel writer for the Houston Chronicle in that other celebration of bigness, Texas. "It is a microcosm of what is best and worst about the United States, our obscene consumption, our brass, our epic vision, our attention deficit, our quest for the good life and our need to socialize."

The two cities, with their separate mayors and city councils, are working together to stage the political convention. But it was not always so. Starting out as a log church (St. Paul) and a British fort (Minneapolis) in the 1700s, the rival towns competed for the right to host the

! ~ ~ ~ ,

India and South Asia are an important and growing partner in our state's economic development. We need this center to better position Minnesota to forge a close economic relationship in the future," said State Representative Erik Paulsen, who introduced the legislation in February.

-D.K.

state capital (St. Paul won), slandered each other in their newspapers and inflated their population figures so much that both were investigated by the U.S Census Bureau.

From 1860 to 1880, however, there was little need to falsify such numbers.

Minnesota was one of the Midwestern destinations for millions of Northern Europeans who flocked to America seeking a chance to build a better life. So many Swedes and Norwegians found Minnesota, with its chilly clime, a comfortable place to settle that they gave the state a distinctive Nordic flavor. Hard work, hardiness, flower-painted furniture, folk dances, an exceptional focus on children and their education are some examples of the Nordic heritage. Another is a belief by many that the Vikings, ancestors of the 19th century immigrants, found America before Christopher Columbus and that they sailed right along those rivers and lakes to western Minnesota. The state's professional football team reflects that heritage in its name, the Vikings, and in the homed helmets and long blond hair that some fans wear at the games.

The tradition of welcoming immigrants continues and Minnesota has a more diverse population than one would imagine, including more than 30,000 Asian Indians. They are the state's secondlargest Asian population behind the Hmong refugees from Laos, and their number is growing much faster, The

Associated Press reports. It quotes University of Minnesota economist VV Chari as saying the Asian Indian growth comes from the attractions of the region's high-tech industry and major retail companies such as Best Buy and Target, which have big operations in the Twin Cities area. Minnesota is not densely populated. Just over 5 million people share its 225,365 square kilometers, with nearly 60 percent of them living in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area.

The Mississippi River is a major influence on Minnesotans, flowing down from its source at Lake Itasca. Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean, and one of Minnesota's many famous natives, entwined the river with the strands of his first memory of an airplane. "I can even connect the Mississippi, here, with aviation," the by-then elderly Lindbergh said in 1973, in a speech on the steps of his

childhood home in Little Falls, Minnesota. "One day, before the first World War began, when I was upstairs playing in our house, I heard an unusually loud engine noise. I ran to the window and

A Minnesota Vikings fan cheers the state's football team. climbed out onto the roof. There was an airplane flying upriver, below the treetops

on the banks .... Of course I wanted to fly in it, but my mother said that it would be much too expensive and dangerous."

Folk singer Bob Dylan is another whose early life was influenced by Minnesota's "Big Outdoors." "My youth was spent wildly among the snowy hills and sky-blue lakes, willow fields and abandoned open pit mines," Dylan wrote in a 1963 letter. "Contrary to rumors, I am very proud of where I'm from and also of the many bloodstreams that run in my roots." Dylan, born in Duluth, is also one of the Minnesotans who believes the Vikings were the first to reach America.

In his memoirs, he relates the advice he gave to Irish rock singer Bono, of the band U2: "I told him that if he wants to see the birthplace of America, he should go to Alexandria, Minnesota, where the Vikings came and settled in the BOOs." Just as Longfellow's Hiawatha can be traced in the mountains, lakes and rivers of Minnesota, fans of Dylan can find references in the state's manmade landmarksfactories, towns and working-class cafesthat resonate in the modem poet's songs.

Dylan, who grew up in the mining range town of Hibbing, about 240 kilometers north of Alexandria, mapped out a road trip for his friend, Bono. A traveler following the route can't help humming familiar refrains when passing towns with names such as Rollingstone. The road Dylan selected for Bono is ffighway 61, the theme of his 1965 song, andruos along the Minnesotans play hockey on the frozen rface of Lake Superior. On February 19, , the ice was about 14.5 centimeters thick near the shore, by the Lester River.

breakfast, I am proud of the fact that SPAM made my hometown famous." ~ Norman Borlaug is another famous ~ product of Minnesota, even though he waso I n't born there. Borlaug's work to develop ~ I hardier, healthier and more easily grown Z crops earned him the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and the honor, in India, of being known as the father of the Green Revolution. He earned his Bachelor's, Master's and PhD degrees at the University of Minnesota, where agriculture and weather remain important research fields. great, blue Mississippi River.

An old joke refers to a man who moved "As a child growing up in Minnesota, to the northern part of the state and asked older kids in my primary school used to a neighbor what Minnesota was like in the tease us younger students and would only summer.

"I don't know," he replied. "I've allow us into their club if we could spell only lived here 13 months." But ask a the word Mississippi," says Daniel Minnesotan what to do about the winter, Miller, a project development officer with and the answer will probably be: Go the U.S. Agency for International cross-country skiing, ice-skating, ice-fishDevelopment at the U.S. Embassy in New ing, and of course, play ice hockey.

Delhi. "For a kid in the first or second America's gold medal-winning Olympic grade, that was a long word to spell, but living in Minnesota we were familiar with hockey team, which beat the Soviet Union in a breathtaking match in Lake Placid, the word and quickly learned how to spell New York, in 1980, was coached by a it correctly. It became a game to see how Minnesotan, Herb Brooks, and half of the fast you could do it." amateur players were from the state.

Another memory for Miller is eating There is one more thing to do about the SPAM. No, it's not junk e-mail. And it's cold: stay in Minneapolis.

The city's skynot the name of this magazine, either. way system connects 52 blocks, making it Before the Internet arrived, to Americans, possible to live, eat, work, shop, be enterSPAM meant just one thing, processed, tained and travel between all these locapre-cooked, spiced ham in a can. "Hormel tions without ever going outside. invented SPAM in 1937 in Austin, But that would be a shame in the land Minnesota, where I grew up," says Miller.

"Our high school sports team was named _of_sk_y_-_b_Iu_e_w_at_e_rs_. ~ the Packers in recognition of the imporDaniel Miller, who contributed to this tant role that the Hormel meat packing article, is a native Minnesotan. plant played in the local economy.

Although some of my friends laugh when Please share your views on this article. Write I tell them I still have SPAM with eggs for to editorspan@state.gov a.

a.~ ÂŤ

''''

ith a few short words, Representative Keith Ellison had just stunned a joint session of the U.S Congress.

In March 2007, Jordan's King Abdullah II had concluded his address in the House of Representatives chambers with the traditional Arabic salutation, "as-salaam 'aleikum," which means, "Peace be unto you."

Ellison, a freshman Democrat from Minnesota and the first Muslim in Congress, instinctively replied, "wa 'aleikum as-salaam"-"And to you be peace." The assembled lawmakers were hushed.

"It was as quiet as a church," Ellison recalled. "I realized at that moment, wow, there is something about me that is a little different."

In an America post-September 11, Ellison is not just another freshman congressman. In just a few short months, he has become a congressional ambassador to the Islamic world. He has been recruited by the State Department to be a cultural envoy and traveled to Syria with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

When he served in the Minnesota state legislature, Ellison said, his religion had not been a major issue.

Now, his every move is scrutinized, sometimes unexpectedly. After his election last November, for instance, CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck asked him to "prove to me that

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you are not working with our enemies" And the question made waves throughout the Muslim world.

Ellison, though, is a reluctant spokesman, saying he is "not qualified to represent a world religion."

He would much rather talk about his first bill-an ambitious attempt to tackle predatory lending practices by credit card companiesthan detail the differences between the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam.

"I almost never bring it up," Ellison says of his religion. "Someone else always brings it up for me."

Ellison, 43, took his Minnesota seat from retiring Representative Martin Olav Sabo, easily winning the overwhelmingly Democratic district.

A self-proclaimed "bleedingheart liberal," Ellison says he wants to make a name for himself not just as a Muslim, but by pushing for better health care, reducing poverty, ending the war in Iraq-and tackling predatory lending practices.

"Barney Frank encouraged me to jump right into deep water," Ellison said of the House Financial Services Committee chairman. "This bill is at the heart of what it means to get to the middle class, to enjoy the great prosperity of this country" Much to Ellison's frustration, however, it is not the credit card bill that has drawn media attention.

His Muslim religion drew controversy, even before he took office.

In December, a Republican representative from Virginia, Virgil H. Goode, wrote a letter saying America's borders must be tightened or "many more" Muslims like Ellison would flood the country and run for office.

And when Ellison chose to be sworn in on a Quran once owned

by President Thomas Jefferson, his religion was again thrust into the spotlight, sometimes in disparaging ways on talk radio.

Still, the incidents helped Ellison quickly earn global recognition.

"Both in terms of symbolism and in terms of historical development, his election means a lot," said Akbar Ahmed, a former adviser on Islam to President George W Bush and the author of a new book, Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization.

Ahmed said that while traveling across the Muslim world researching the book, he found many people had heard of Ellison, viewing him as a symbol of increasing acceptance of Muslims in America.

And in the halls of Congress, Muslim staffers agree "He is someone who understands our faith and the things we can accomplish in the U.S.," said Jameel Aalim-Johnson, president of the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association and chief of staff for a Democratic Party representative from New York, Gregory W. Meeks.

For his part, Ellison is simply focused on learning the congressional ropes "He is a very studious, very serious guy," said Representative James L. Oberstar, a fellow Minnesota Democrat. "He is investing himself vigorously in the job." On the whole, Ellison said Congress has been a "hospitable place."

In fact, some of the harshest criticism he has faced has come from liberal activists back home, angry with him for not taking a tougher stance on ending the Iraq war; the critics even staged a sit-in in his congressional office.

"I have to be a practical idealist, not just an idealistic idealist," he said of his stance.

Still, the pressure from the antiwar faction is small compared with the weight others place on him to help the US burnish its tarnished image in the Muslim world.

Ellison insists that although he gets requests almost daily to travel to the Middle East and is constantly meeting with foreign journalists, he doesn't feel pressured.

"My focus is right here, right now, what's in front of me," he said.

"I don't ever take a moment to think if my (being Muslim) is a big deal or not. ...1 just do the best I can with what I got." ~ W. Reilly is a congressional reporter for The Politico.

Daniel

Acumen Fund

The

Business of Doing Good A growing tribe of social entrepreneurs are making investments in small businesses to lift millions out of poverty. Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund, is helping these businesses to expand.

ven though living standards in India have risen rapidly in the past few decades, there are still huge levels of income inequality.

Trying to address this problem is a growing tribe of philanthropists who believe that social entrepreneurs-people who develop social innovation through entrepreneurial solutions-can provide the key to lifting millions out of poverty.

"We strongly believe that business can play a role in poverty eradication. The high incidence of debt among lowerincome communities is largely due to lack of access to essential goods and services, such as health care," says Varun Sahni. He is the India country manager of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund started in the United States. The fund helps social entrepreneurs grow their businesses in India by providing strategic investments. "We nurture businesses that are developing high-quality goods and services that are affordable and accessible by that market," says Sahni.

Standing at the crossroads of the business and philanthropic worlds, Acumen Fund is striving to prove a point to both: "We seek to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor. Our investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services-like health, water

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and housing-through innovative, market-oriented approaches," says its Web site (www.acumenfund.org).

Acumen Fund was founded in New York in 2001 by Jacqueline Novogratz, a former Wall Street investment banker who wanted to use her skills to find solutions to challenges facing the world through new methods. She decided to start a not-for-profit venture fund that would invest in small businesses in the developing world using money donated by individuals.

Acumen Fund's strategy focuses on making small equity investments in businesses that provide affordable housing, water or health services. It has investments in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Tanzania and Kenya. Companies in which the fund has made equity investments are expected to return the capital and impact at least a million people within five years. "Because our capital is philanthropic in nature, our ability to take risks is higher. So we work with investee companies to build viable businesses. Our expectation is to have our capital returned and to ensure that there is social impact, innovation and market creation," says Sahni.

In India, Acumen Fund has invested in five social enterprises-Drishtee, IDE India, Medicine Shoppe India, WaterHealth International and Scojo. These investments are managed by Acumen Fund's office in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, which began operations this year.

A vision entrepreneur at Scojo, which sells low-cost eyewear with help from an Acumen Fund investment.

While IDE India distributes low-cost drip irrigation systems that can help double or triple a small farmer's income, Medicine Shoppe India is a Mumbaibased chain with a pharmacy/clinic format aimed at low-income urban customers.

WaterHealth International works to build community water systems, and has provided safe affordable water to more than 100,000 people in rural India.

Another Acumen Fund enterprise is Scojo, which conducts vision screenings and sells low-cost eyeglasses so poor workers, such as tailors or artisans, can

continue to earn their living.

"We see tremendous opportunity in India. It is a growing economy with millions of middle-class, rural and urban poor citizens whose aspirations and opportunities are rising," says Sahni.

"We are seeing a surge of entrepreneurs in India who are looking at businesses that will serve low-income communities. The challenge facing organizations such as Acumen Fund is to identify these entrepreneurs and nurture their businesses."

Drishtee, an enterprise in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, says it plans to transform the face of rural India, an endeavor that is being accelerated by an equity investment from Acumen Fund. "Drishtee aims to empower entrepreneurs to provide essential goods and services to villages through an information and communications technology based network of rural entrepreneurs," says Nitin Gachhayat, its co-founder. Using a franchise model, Drishtee has pioneered a network of kiosks that provide information on its diverse product offerings, such as eyeglasses, books, lighting, cell phones, health care, microfinance, e-government, education and insurance. Today, there are more than 1,600 Drishtee entrepreneurs in 12 Indian states, serving some 1.5 million customers.

In a market where companies interested in a "double-bottom line" of profit and social development are often dismissed by traditional lending institutions, it was not easy for Drishtee to find

investors, says Gachhayat. "As a social enterprise, it was hard to find traditional venture capitalists to back us when we first chose to start a for-profit company in 2002. We sought support from Acumen Fund because its mission matched our own and they could understand the space that we were coming from," he says. In addition to equity, however, he emphasizes that the managerial assistance and extensive network provided by Acumen Fund have been valuable. "Acumen Fund's partnerships with other like-minded organizations have also been extremely advantageous.

For instance, we are now distributing spectacles developed by Scojo through our franchising network," he adds.

Acumen Fund has provided to Drishtee an Acumen Fund Fellow, David Lehr, a former Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University in California. Acumen Fund has seven fellows globally, three in India. They are experienced global corporate professionals with an interest in social development who are placed by Acumen Fund to provide their expertise for nine months.

Lehr, originally from New York, is helping Drishtee streamline its decisionmaking. He is launching Drishtee's first health care program in rural India, for which he has spent five weeks in Saurath, Drishtee's project village in Bihar. "My work at Drishtee has completely changed my understanding of India, and especially the challenges

Above left: A delivery service near Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, that has sprung up in conjunction with the investment of WaterHealth International to provide safe, clean water to poor customers.

Above: Employees at the inauguration of a new Medicine Shoppe outlet near Mumbai for low-income customers.

It includes a clinic, optical services and a pharmacy.

faced by villagers," says Lehr. "Though I have traveled widely and visited villages similar to the ones Drishtee works in, I have never gotten to know the residents or had any real insight into their lives. Gaining this knowledge and being able to apply what I have learned has been the biggest takeaway for me."

Fellows are encouraged to document their experiences through video, online journals and photography, reflecting Acumen Fund's firm belief in the power of creativity in unleashing powerful change in the field of development.

"Acumen is a highly creative organization. We believe that because our work is cutting-edge, there are a tremendous number of insights which Acumen is gaining about what works and what doesn't work," says Sahni.

"In order to get these lessons out to the outside world, it's important to be creative in one's thought process." ~ Smita Jain is an American freelance writer based in Boston, Massachusetts.

here are few, if any, countries in the world in which sports-not a sport, but sports in general-permeate national life to the degree that they do in the United States. Sports are part of the very fabric of American life, discourse and lexicon, so much so that it is commonplace to hear prominent national leaders speak about matters of state with reference to such sports metaphors as "throwing up a Hail Mary," "scoring a slam dunk," "playing hardball," and "hitting below the belt." Indeed, the little black presidential briefcase that holds the codes necessary to launch U.S. nuclear forces is referred to as "the football."

The centrality of sports in American life is amply reflected in contemporary American cinema. For decades, U.S. moviemakers have successfully mined sports to produce some of the most inspiring, poignant, exciting and memorable American movies.

This tradition started in the first half of the 20th century, but remains vibrant today. Just in the past few years, Hollywood has produced popular and critically acclaimed films featuring virtually every major sport, from football, basketball, baseball and hockey, to boxing, horse racing and even surfing.

Since the mid-1970s, four U.S. sports films have won Academy Awards, or Oscars; most recently, Million Dollar Baby (2004), the Clint Eastwood film about a woman boxer, won four Oscars, including for best picture (an honor the film shares with just two other sports movies). Though American sports movies make use of a common vehicle to explore the fullness of American life and the nuances of human psychology, they tell us many different things about the values that are important to Americans.

American football, always an ~ important subgenre of U.S. sports ~ cinema, has overtaken baseball in ~ ÂŤ recent years as the sport most fre- ~ quently featured in U.S. films. ~ o The last several years have seen 1â&#x201A;Ź the release of a plethora of seri- ~ ous, high-quality football movies '" that have explored such diverse themes as overcoming adversity (We Are Marshall, 2006); working hard to achieve your dreams (Invincible, 2006); the unrelenting pursuit of excellence (Friday Night Lights, 2004); the power of sports to heal racial and class divides and build communities (Remember the Titans, 2000); and the triumph of an athlete's innate competitive spirit and innocence over the crass commercialism and cynicism of the U.S. professional sports industry (Any Given Sunday, 1999).

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As diverse as these themes are, an overarching message about football emerges from these recent films: Football-in its epic scale, over-the-top pomp, gritty attitude, and, yes, hard hittingis the most complete and vivid sports metaphor for American life itself.

There has been a relative paucity of recent American films about basketball and baseball, the second and third most popular spectator sports in the United States. The two most successful American basketball films of recent years, both based on inspiring true stories, address themes of racial reconciliation (Glory Road, 2006) and teamwork and self-respect (Coach Carter, 2005). Another American basketball classic (Hoop Dreams, 1994), one of the relatively few documentaries in the sports film genre, painted a compelling portrait of inner-city American life and the power and real-world limitations of dreams. In their own ways, the two more recent basketball films make the same point: whatever the color of our skin, whatever our rung on the socioeconomic ladder, we can do great things when we commit ourselves to a larger team and a loftier goal.

Hoop Dreams tells us that, even so, it's probably not going to be easy. Meanwhile, the one major American baseball movie of

Left: Tobey Maguire, who played a jockey in Seabiscuit, at the movie's 2003 premiere in Los Angeles.

Above: A still photo from Seabiscuit.

Right: Hilary Swank with the 2005 best actress Oscar for her portrayal of a boxer in Million Dollar Baby.

Far right: Ken Carter in front of a promotional poster for Coach Carter, the basketball film he inspired. the last few years (The Rookie, 2002), also inspired by a true story, reminds us, in true American fashion, that you're never too old to reach for your dreams, whatever the odds against realizing them.

Hollywood has long demonstrated a fascination with boxing.

The three major boxing films produced in recent years (Rocky Balboa, 2006; Cinderella Man, 2005; and Million Dollar Baby, 2004) are all classic underdog stories (while Million Dollar

Baby explores other, more complex themes, as well). The underdog theme-a perennial favorite of U.S. producers of sports films-also extends to the Olympic hockey rink (Miracle, 2004) and the horse racing track (Seabiscuit, 2003), in which athletes (and, in Seabiscuit, a racehorse) achieve stunning victories in the face of overwhelming odds.

Collectively, these movies say a lot about American values,

but they strike a chord with foreign audiences, as well. That's because these films, at their core, are less about sports than they are about that part of each of us that yearns to take the field, give our all and live our dreams. ~ David J. Firestein works for the U.S. Department author of three books.

of State and is the

eanlng

and Memory Around Every Corner irst time in the City? A day trip, from which my abiding memories are: fIrst, yawning through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and second, shoehorning my rusting '72 Dodge Colt into a heaven-sent parking spot. You start off doing the "usual" New York thing, a visit to the Met, for us City novices.

But New York is such a gold mine of sight and experience that even the mundane, even parking, becomes a delight.

So that fIrst time, I drove around forever, searching for a spot to leave my light blue Colt. When I fInally found one on a lane near the Met, I actually got out and stepped it off. The car was shorter by half the length of my foot. Or wait, was it the other way around? Next 20 minutes, I nudged into that space, one hard-fought inch at a time.

Only in New York. Museums never did much for me. But parking? Ah, the thrill.

Next visit, two more New York things.

First, a frantic subway ride down to Coney Island, followed by more frantic rides there. I screamed and wept as we pelted up,

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down and every which way-and then we reached the amusement park. On one roller coaster, a sudden drop tore my glasses off my face and I grabbed for them as they fell through space. But so violent was my grab that the arms broke off, and being a poor grad student, I couldn't afford a new frame and so spent the next few months taping annless glasses to my nose every morning. (l even played cricket like that in Rhode Island.)

That frantic? Never again on a roller coaster, thank you very much.

Second, a leisurely cruise around Manhattan, the elegant way to appreciate the city's skyline. Glimpses of the graceful Chrysler and Empire State Buildings-do they make them like that any more?-then the sun-bathed glory of the World Trade Center towers. Hardly graceful, those two, but arresting and spectacular. Who knew then, or when we stood atop one a day later, that they would one day give tragic meaning to the phrase "nine-eleven"?

Years later, sitting on a bench overlooking the Hudson River, I remember that view and cruise. The Statue of Liberty is off in the distance to my left. Gorgeous orange and wispy clouds light up the wakening morning sky; helicopters mutter overhead; the waves go peacefully by, and across the water are the lights of the New Jersey shore. Two joggers glide synchronously past.

It's a quiet morning, yet a head-spinning feeling being in this humming city once more, this throbbing ode to humanity. And it's impossible not to think of the void only blocks behind me.

That vast pit, now cleaned and tidied up, but once fIlled and smoking with a terrifying, indescribable pile of rubble. Rubble that used to make up what was previously on that spot: those same two soaring silver towers that once stood solid under me.

How long will it be before a casual visitor can spend a day in this city without a thought of what happened that September morning?

Here and now, it's impossible not to be aware. Had I been here that 9/11 morning instead of this, I might have looked over at Liberty, then at the Jersey shore, then at the joggers, then heard some unusual sounds, turned my head to catch my own vision of apocalypse. The thought is inescapable: had I been here that morning, I may not have lived. Freedom symbolized by the Lady to my left; terrorism falling out of the sky behind me. What does it take to get used to that idea, as this city and country must?

New York is a sensory overload, and you've heard that before.

For years, I thought that phrase meant sights and smells, sounds and people, parking thrills and roller coaster grabs. That sort of thing.

Today, I know it's also memories of fear, thoughts of terror.

Nearby are more memories, in a marker of a history I would never have expected here.

From one angle, it's a nondescript if pleasant hillock that takes up half a city block. Not enough to stop the tourist in her tracks. If you do wonder what it's about, you might wander around the structure, ~ up the street on the side, up the gentle ~ slope heading toward the Hudson River, ~ => then turn the comer... ~ ...to come upon a yawning cave-like

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----------------" Above left: An aerial view of the World Trade Center site with the Hudson River on the left.

Above: A wall of photographs at the September 11 Tribute Center showing victims who perished in the terror attacks.

Right: A man stands within the rolls of grassland made to represent the Irish countryside, but set in downtown New York at the Irish Hunger Memorial.

entrance lit with tubelights, strips of backlit inscriptions along the walls. Two miles-no typo, they add up to two rniles-Df backlit inscriptions: quotes from letters, recipes, autobiographies and much more. Here in the built-up heart of Lower Manhattan at the comer of Vesey Street and North End Avenue, this strange little hill with its tubelights and words. What is this place anyway?

It's the Irish Hunger Memorial.

It remembers the victims of the Irish potato famine of the mid19th century. Takes its name from the Itish name for that calamity, "An Gorta Mor," or "The Great Hunger." An epic tragedy, and it left a mark on the psyche of the Irish that, over a century and a half later, they still bear. Ireland was a booming country when the Great Hunger struck, population and economy expanding in tandem. But the famine killed the Irish in droves, pushed many to emigrate, most to the United States, through New York City.

Dedicating the Memorial in July 2002, when 9/11 must still have been a raw wound, New York state's then-Governor George Pataki referred to this "great harbor and city that welcomed so many survivors of the famine to new life, new hope and a new day for themselves and our country."

That "our country" moved me greatly. In this city of immigrants, at a time when suspicion of the foreigner must have come easily, what a thing to say about immigrants-that they brought new life and hope to a country.

Yet, how true a thing to say.

It's no tourist attraction, the Hunger Memorial. Yet, how do I tell you how essentially ew York it is, thus deserving of a visit?

Especially because as you stroll through and read those quotes, you think once more of apocalypse. That pit still only a few blocks away, this little memorial: reminders of incomprehensible tragedy both. In its time, the potato famine must have seemed just as arbitrary and cruel as 9/11 did. It killed more slowly than the jets of 9/11 did, yes, but on a wider canvas, a vaster scale.

New York: thought at every turn, meaning wafting around every comer. g g y _I_S_th_a_t_th_e_l_a_st_in_ _l_e_ a_c_ _o_f_9_/l_l_?

------~ Dilip D'Souza, aformer computer scientist, is a writer based in Mumbai.

Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@state.gov

ortrail 01 Injustice

By ANNE BROACHE

A portrait of Clarence Norris (left) and Haywood Patterson by leading Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas.

Seldom seen for decades, a stark image of two of the wrongfully accused

he criminal case with the largest number of trials, retrials, convictions and reversals in American history started in Scottsboro, Alabama, during the throes of the Great Depression. Nine teenagers, who came to be known as the Scottsboro Boys, would spend a collective 130 years behind bars for crimes that never happened. Over the years, the case would outrage people worldwide, including artists such as Langston Hughes, who in 1932 published Scottsboro Limited, a book of four poems and a play, to raise money for the defense fund.

A previously unknown Scottsboro artwork surfaced three years ago. When the pastel drawing of two defendants, by Aaron Douglas, a leading Harlem Renaissance artist, was offered at an auction of African Americana in February 2004, in New York, National Portrait Gallery curators snapped it up. The cookie-sheet-size double portrait depicts Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson, whose cases eventually reached the Supreme Court. It is now on public view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The infamous case began with a tussle among a few dozen young hobos riding a freight train through rural Alabama on March 25, 1931. Two white women aboard the train accused nine black teens of rape. Within two weeks, white juries in Scottsboro found the defendants guilty.

Executions were set-for all but the youngest-for the month of July.

When the convictions were appealed, with the defense backed primarily by the Communist Party's legal arm, one of the accusers admitted that she'd made up the story; later, she even campaigned for the youths' freedom. Then, in 1935, the Supreme Court, hearing the appeals of the

Just after he asked the Governor of Alabama to pardon the nine youths held in the Scottsboro case, New York attorney Samuel Leibowitz conferred with seven of the defendants on May 1, 1935, at the Scottsboro jail. From left: Deputy Sheriff Charles McComb, Leibowitz, and the defendants; Roy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Robertson, Eugene Williams, Charlie Weems and Andy Wright.

Norris and Patterson cases, ruled in a later in Paris. He made a name for himself landmark decision that it was unconstituas an illustrator for magazines such as socialist W.E.B. tional for Alabama to keep blacks off its The Crisis-American juries. But new lower-court trials again Du Bois' journal about race-and Vanity brought convictions.

Fair. Inspired by ancient Egyptian sculpThe state set four of the men free in ture and Art Deco flair, Douglas frequent1937 and granted parole to four others ly rendered scenes with flat, geometric silhouettes. His four-panel mural for the over the next dozen years. Norris, released in 1946, died in 1989 in New New York Public Library's 135th Street York City. Patterson escaped from prison branch (now a cultural research center), in 1948 and fled to Michigan, whose gov- commissioned in 1934, portrays black ernor refused to extradite him. He died of history from its African origins to cancer four years later. enslavement in the South to the jazz Douglas, the artist, probably based his explosion in the cities. After nearly 30 drawing on pamphlets that criticized the years as a Fisk University art professor, verdicts and featured photographs of Douglas died in Nashville, Tennessee, in Norris and Patterson, says Wendy Wick 1979. His life's work, Reaves says, Reaves, the Portrait Gallery's curator of includes only a few realistic pastel porprints and drawings. She traces the style traits like the Scottsboro drawing. to German-born artist Winold Reiss, who The youths' stark faces, Reaves says, symbolize a "catalyzing moment for civil drew lifelike pastels of Harlem celebrities and became a mentor to Douglas when rights." ~ the young artist moved to New York City.

The Kansas native studied art at the Anne Broache is a Washington correspondent University of Nebraska in Lincoln and for CNET News.com

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Columbus believed he had found a new route to India, hence the use of the word Indians to describe the peoples he met.

olumbus Day is the annual U.S. commemoration of Christopher Columbus' landing in the New World (at San Salvador island, also known as Watling Island, today part of the British Bahamas) on October 12, 1492.

American schoolchildren use a rhyme to help them remember the date for their history tests

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In 14 hundred and 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Columbus was not the first European to successfully cross the Atlantic. Viking sailors are believed to have established a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland sometime in the 11 th century, and scholars have argued for a number of other possible pre-Columbian landings. Columbus, however, initiated the lasting encounter between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

A number of nations celebrate this encounter with annual holidays: Discovery Day in the Bahamas, Hispanic Day in Spain, and Ora de la Raza [Day of the Race] in much of Latin America. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed

Columbus Day a national holiday. In 1971, the U.S. Congress moved the holiday from October 12 to the second Monday in October, to afford workers a long holiday weekend. In the United States, Columbus Day is typically a celebration of Italian American cultural heritage, Columbus generally being considered a native of Genoa, a seaport in northern Italy.

In the late 15th century, Portuguese sailors dominated the effort to establish a sea route between Europe and India by circumnavigating Africa. It was with an eye toward outflanking the Portuguese that Queen Isabella I of Spain authorized an expedition in which Columbus would sail west from Spain, aiming for India. This, of course, presumed that the world was round. Contrary to later popular belief, many educated people already understood this; Columbus' achievement rests instead in his success in persuading Isabella to finance a dangerous and speculative expedition.

Columbus set sail with 90 men in August 1492 on three ships: the Niiia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.

After sailing west for five weeks, they reached land on October 12.

Columbus believed he had found a

new route to India, hence the use of the word Indians to describe the peoples he met.

Columbus would make three subsequent voyages and would die believing that he had found a new route to India and Asia, and not in fact the gateway to North and South America.

Because the United States evolved out of British colonization rather than the Spanish claims of Columbus and his successors, the United States for many years did not celebrate Columbus' "discovery," although ceremonies were held on the 300th and 400th anniversaries of his first landing.

Two early celebrations also occurred in New York in 1866 and San Francisco in 1869.

U.S. federal government offices close on Columbus Day, as do

Above left: A portrait of Christopher Columbus attributed to Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.

Above: Joseph Cervetto, Jr., holds up a sword, while dressed as Christopher Columbus, on a float during the Italian heritage parade in San Francisco to honor Columbus Day in 2003. most banks. Schools typically remain open, as do most American businesses. New York City continues to host a large and festive Columbus Day parade, over 500 years since the historic appearance of three ships off the coast of a small Caribbean island.

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From the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.

ason Fults, a Fulbright ~ . scholar in India since March, is working with the Centre for Science and Environment to produce its Green Communities Manual, which helps neighborhoods assess how their homes, shops, industries and entertainment activities are impacting their local ecology. He also participated in a workshop, "Towards Green Villages," sponsoredby the Center'sNaturalResourceManagementand Livelihoods unit, which monitors water harvesting, farming and forestry management http://www.fulbright-india.org/

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merican actors Reginald Woods and Jason Wilson, members of the Chicago-based Pegasus Players, conduct a workshop at the Academy Of Theatre Arts, University of Mumbai, on August 15. The drama group also brought audiences to their feet in Chennai, Kolkata and New Delhi with their performance of "My Soul is aWitness," highlighting seminal moments in the U.S. Civil Rights movement with music and song. The play highlighted India's and America's shared legacy of using non-violent resistance to overcome racism and oppression

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he Role of the Media in a Multicultural Society," a roundtable discussion with 50 senior Urdu journalists and academics, took place August 23 at the Nizam Club in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Participants included (from left) Urdu SPAN Editor Anjum Naim; Ragini Gupta, deputy public affairs officer of the U.S. Consulate in Chennai; and Syed Zafer Hasan, Urdu Editor for the U.S. Embassy public affairs section in New Delhi.

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ouglas G. Kelly, director of the American Center in Kolkata, buys a wallet from Nabakumar Hajra, a prisoner who lives with his wife at the Lalgola Correctional Home and makes leather wallets and purses, which he sells in the local market. Kelly traveled to Murshidabad district in West Bengal to view the experimental, open-air compound's 19th century main gate, two temples and a guesthouse, which are to be renovated with aid from the US. Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation.

Inmates who are masons will be trained in preservationwork.

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he Jazz All Stars, comprising four of the musicians/educators from Jazz at Lincoln Center's 2006-2007 Rhythm Road tours, performed in Kolkata, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and finally in Lucknow, where they were a highlight of the August 25-September 7 America Days programs. Eli Yamin on piano, Ari Roland on bass, Charlie Porter on trumpet and Alvin Atkinson, Jr. on drums are shown at the Taj Residency in Lucknow on September 6. America Days celebrated 60 years of U.S.-India relations, promoting people-to-people dialogue, showcasing positive aspects of U.S. society and highlighting U.S. programs in India such as cultural events, American Library services, student counseling by the U.S. Education Foundation in India, visa services and SPAN.