Reality... on the Fringes!!

"You must look at Shenzhen in China! Look at the prosperity it created!" - a friend wrote to me.

He clearly did not agree with my two ealier posts on SEZs in India - and all the controversies around them, viz.,

Beware! SEZs Ahead

Dispencible People...

So I did!... And here is what I found.

According to Wikipedia:

"The one-time fishing village of Shenzhen, singled out by late Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, is the first of the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in China. It was originally established in 1979....

In 2001, the working population reached 3.3 million. Though the secondary sector of industry had the largest share (1.85 million in 2001, increased by 5.5%), the tertiary sector of industry is growing fast (1.44 million in 2001, increased by 11.6%). Shenzhen's GDP totaled CNY 492.69 billion in 2005, up by 15 percent over the previous year. Its economy grew by 16.3 percent yearly from 2001 to 2005 on average...

It ranked the 4th in GDP among mainland Chinese cities in 2001, while it ranked the top in capitation GDP during the same period. Its import and export volumes have been 1st for the last 9 consecutive years. It is the 2nd in terms of industrial output. For 5 consecutive years, its internal revenue within local budget ranks 3rd. It also comes the 3rd in the actual use of foreign capital.

Shenzhen is also a major manufacturing centre in China. One highrise a day and one boulevard every three days is one famous line referring to Shenzhen in the 1990s. With 13 buildings at over 200 metres tall, including the Shun Hing Square (the 8th tallest building in the world), Shenzhen is a marvel of lights after sunset."

(see the picture of the building below)


...which, obviously, is an impressive record of economic achievement!!!

Here is another view of the same building


According to a US Labor Dept Report:

"Much of the evidence of child labor in China is derived from data from the large special economic zone of Shenzhen in southern China. Children between the ages of 10 to 16 are reportedly working up to 14 hours a day in factories in Shenzhen."

Another site quotes a New York Time (Sept 14, 2005) news item:

"Workers making clothing for Wal-Mart in Shenzhen, China filed a class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart in September 2005 claiming that they were not paid the legal minimum wage, not permitted to take holidays off and were forced to work overtime. They said their employer had withheld the first three months of all workers' pay, almost making them indentured servants because the company refused to pay the money if they quit."

A Study by SACOM (Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour) investigated 13 Shenzhen electronics factories producing components for many well-known brand names. It found widespread labour abuses including issues such as:

- child labour,
- excessive overtime and overtime pay below legal minimum,
- maximum working hours,
- marital and sick leave,
- maternity leave, pregnancy,
- marital status and disability discrimination,
- minimum wage and
- social insurance.

These factories produce components for the following 47 global brands:

Acer, Apple, Asrock, Asus, BYD, Canon, Compaq, Datang Telecom, Dell, Delta, Dongju, Elecom, Epson, Evoc, Founder, Foxconn, Fujitsu, Gateway, Greatwall, Hancheng, Hanhua, HP, Huawei, IBM, Kinpo Electronics, Konka, Lenovo, LG, Maxim Integrated Products, Microsoft, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Nortel, Panasonic, Philips, Ruijie (formerly Start), Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony, TCL, Toshiba, Trigem, Tsinghua Tongfang, ZSSoft and ZTE.

...and a travelogue by a visiting student narrates this journey from Shenzhen to Dongguan (which passes though its fringes):

"I’m living in a bubble. I know it, living on a campus in an English-speaking college. Even when we leave the campus we are pointed at certain parts of town, and see the glitz and gloss of downtown Shenzhen and the bright lights which are shining when I invariably get there after dark. Today I’m heading to Dongguan, and downtown Dongguan is exactly the same: new buildings, shining towers, and spotless public areas. That is what we Wai Guo Ren (foreigners) are meant to see.

Going from Shenzhen to Dongguan you travel on the concrete flyovers of the expressway. Today, with time to spare, I take the slow, cheap bus. I know that it will take 3.5 hours, but this is a chance to see the real Guangdong experienced by the majority of its inhabitants. It proves a stark reminder of the poverty in which many live! It’s not all glitz and gloss here... They are the faces of immigrant workers, invariably tired, and all seeking their fortune on streets they believed paved with gold."

Apparently, there is another reality that lies on the fringes of great economic achievements...

World Bank criticises World Bank Research!!

World Bank (or more specifically DEC, its Development Economics Group) publishes countless research studies, reports and papers, which influence development thinking and developmental policies of countries.

A couple of months back, in December 2006, it released one more of its research reports. Titled "Evaluation of World Bank Research: 1998-2005", this report has not received as much publicity as it deserved (though The Financial Times did characterize the 165 page report as “a scathing critique” of the Bank’s selective use of unscientific data to advocate policies and projects that are ideologically in vogue, such as pension reform, aid effectiveness, and poverty mapping).

This study, commissioned by World Bank, was conducted by a team of consisting of a panel of 24 established researchers (from places like London School of Ecnomics, MIT, Oxford, Universities of Columbia, Yale, Harvard, MIT, etc.), and was led by Profs Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Angus Deaton (Princeton University), Nora Lustig (UNDP) and Ken Rogoff (Harvard University).

While the report is not all negative - in fact, it also lauds some of WB's reports and also empathises the constraints of doing research on complex topics - here are some excerpts which are quite revealing:

About the Quality of Research:

"...the panel had substantial criticisms of the way that this research was used to proselytize on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view of the evidence, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that was favorable to Bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. There were similar criticisms of the Bank’s work on pensions, which produced a great deal that was useful, but where balance was lost in favor of advocacy. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of the checks and balances that should separate advocacy and research."

"...evaluators generally found that Bank research was well-targeted towards important topics, but was often weak on execution and technique. While it is desirable for Bank technique to be behind the frontier, there has often been too large a gap. Some technically-flawed projects have run for years, and have been incorporated into country work without appropriate certification and review."

"Evaluators also noted that a high proportion of the citations in this group of papers are to other Bank papers, many of them unpublished. In some cases, where groups are almost entirely inward looking, the degree of self-reference rises almost to the level of parody."

"There is much selection of evidence, with obscure, sometimes unpublished, studies with the "right" message given prominence over better and often better-known studies that come to the "wrong" conclusion."

About Conditions under which Research is done:

"They (the WB resarchers) tend to be more academic than policy oriented, the technical execution tends to be weak, and although they nearly always contain policy conclusions, the conclusions are rarely well based on the preceding analysis. We suspect that the relentless pressure to give every paper a policy conclusion, whether or not it actually has one, is largely responsible, though it was not always clear that researchers understood the limitations of their work, let alone communicated it to their readers."

The report quotes from a 1997 paper - "The World Bank as "Intellectual Actor"" - by Nicholas Stern (before he became the Vice President for Research at WB) and Francisco Ferreira about the difficulties of doing research in World Bank:

"Researchers are not free to follow intellectual inspiration. They are under constraints of designated priorities and of an apparent need to be immediately useful to operations. Further there is the strong hierarchy and an atmosphere much more deferential then would be found in universities. Among researchers there is considerable concern with what superiors will think of conclusions reached, to the occasional detriment of whether an analysis is sound."

...and then goes on to say: "To this we would add that the superiors themselves are sometimes under pressure from the Bank Presidency and elsewhere not to say things that go directly against the broad policy line that the Bank is espousing."

About WB's annual World Development Reports:

"We are also concerned with quality control over the Bank’s large number of "flagship" publications, here taken to be the World Development Reports and the DEC and non-DEC major topic studies to which the term is applied. These reports are sometimes enormously influential (though we suspect that many just gather dust) and they are the vehicles where the line between the Banks’ advocacy role and its role in producing new research ideas becomes particularly blurred."

"Trade-offs tend to be eschewed in favor of ubiquitous "win-win" scenarios, so that, for example, growth and environmental improvement are never seen as in conflict, because poverty and pollution are social problems that each mark institutional failure, so that institutional repair can somehow lead to both being dealt with simultaneously. A more equal income distribution is seen as a generally good thing, but there is no discussion of the optimal tax literature that formalizes the necessary trade offs between equity and incentives. More generally, trade-offs between competing goals are downplayed relative to sometimes far-fetched complementarities. While there is something to be said for such an approach in forging the compromises that are required to make progress in policy formation, it hardly leads to intellectual clarity. The World Development Reports suffer from always trying to make everyone happy."

"The Equity and Development WDR is perhaps the leading example. It contains no stable concept of what it means by inequality; again, we suspect that is a response to the need to try to make everyone happy, even when they have mutually incompatible views. For example, the report never resolves the tension between "equality of outcomes" and "equality of opportunity"."

Sources:

Evaluation of World Bank Research: 1998-2005

Knowledge Bank-rupted: Evaluation says key World Bank research ‘not remotely reliable’

...Being Poor

For most of us, poverty is just numbers... Some numbers that describe people with income less than such-and-such, people with access to so-many calories of nutrition/day, approximate number of people who live and sleep on the footpaths, who do not have land or any assets.... etc.

Numbers are perhaps also our way of dis-infecting the emotions we would need to deal with (within ourselves) from the experiential reality poverty. They shield one from the experience of what it means to be poor, to understand poverty from the poors' point-of view.

Partly, learning from some conversations I have been having with people like these in the pictures (all except one are mine, which I had downloaded from another site/blog; I would like to give credits, but have no references with me), partly trying to consolidate the overall meaning of some postings that I had made on this blog (have linked the URLs in the text), partly by observing how they are treated by others, and partly because I am reading a book called Voices of the Poor, here are a few things I have come to understand:

Being poor, of course, means not having adequate and regular income, often having to sleep empty stomach, shivering during winters, and often not having a home to call one's own... But these are only the visible tip of the iceberg. The day-to-day living experience is far more daunting and demeaning. For instance:

being poor means living a life with a sense of powerlessness and anonymity - as if it of no consequence to anyone.... Slum demolitions and 'relocations' rarely make a headline, even though they displace many times more people than Tsunami did!!

being poor means having to live with - maybe perhaps get resigned to - a perpetual (24/7/365 in the modern terminology) sense of precariousness of one's livelihood and existence... A single rainy day, a one-day bandh, a new city-beautification scheme, or just a bout of week-long illness is enough to send one's existence ove the edge to the other side...

being poor means accepting public humiliation as a part of one's life... Ever seen a person refusing a beggar? Or observed the nature of one's own reaction (internal and/or external) when refusing a beggar?

being poor means being denied the basic rights as a citizen - errata: as a human being... Do street vendors or rickshaw-pullers have a right? - or the right to voice their rights?

being poor means being denied access to resources, information, credit, technology, markets and opportunities... I can get a car-loan or house-loan for around 8-10-12% on easy installments up to 84-150 months. I can also get a "gold" credit-card from some banks, simply because I travelled by air by producing my boading pass (no credit-rating checks!!)... But if I am a urban or rural poor, trying to incease my livelihood options by buying a rickshaw or seeds for my farmland, I will need to either produce an impossible plethora of documents, or pay higher interest (and EMIs up to max 36 months)...

And lastly....

being poor means being blamed for being poor

Indian History Trivia (7): The "Non-Legend" of Cyril Radcliffe

For most of us - the pre- and post-independence generation of India and Pakistan - the reaction would be ...

...Cyril Radcliffe, who?.......

... Which, perhaps, is a lesson about how history unfolds - and gets (or doesn't get) documented.... Like a river or wind, it has its own logic and direction (though as humans, we may call it amoral)

Not many books or commentries on the formation of India and Pakistan mention his name... even though, he was literally the true "achitect" of the two nation-states.

His was the un-envious role in the partitioning of the Indian sub-continent. A day before the Indian independence - on the last day of his first and only 5-week visit to the sub-continent - he wrote to his nephew:

"I am going to see Mountbatten sworn as the first Governor General of the Indian Union at the Viceroy's house in the morning and then I station myself firmly on the Delhi airport until an aeroplane from England comes along. Nobody in India will love me... and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me. I have worked and traveled and sweated - oh I have sweated all the time."

So who was Cyril Radcliffe? What was his role in "The Partition"?

The idea of partitioning of the subcontinent and the "two nation theory" was in the air since early 1930s (when it was voiced by poet Md Iqbal - the lyricist of "Sare Jahan Se Accha, Hindostan Hamara"), but the actual decision to divide India came much late. It was only on June 3rd, 1947 - less than 2 months before the independence - that the British Parliament passed the Bill, approving the partitioning of the territory into India and Pakistan.

But how do you divide the land, people, their lives and their sanjhi virasat?

Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a distinguished barrister, was appointed to draw the boundaries between the two nations. It was only on June 30, 1947, the Governer General of India constituted the two Boundary Commissions for the partition of Punjab and Bengal - each consisting of two Hindu members and two Muslim members.

Radcliffe's task was an unenviable one, given that:

he had never ever been to the subcontinent in his life earlier; he did not know its people, and had no first hand knowledge of its culture, economics, or perhaps even history...

he had to work with Census statistics, which were outdated and unreliable - the previous major census was done in 1931. In 1941, the British were too preoccupied with WW-II and though the Census was conducted, it supplied meager information to rely on (in fact, there were also reasons to believe that the demographic statistics were falsfied in Punjab and Bengal by the communal elements on both sides). In any case, he had to rely on data and statistics that were clearly obsolete.... and

he hardly had any time to do a proper job of the assignment, even if wanted to. He arrived in India on July 8th, 1947 for the first time, and the Award was announced on August 16th... He had to submit his recommendations before the two nations became independent (Pakistan on August 14th and India on August 15th). Within these five weeks, he was given the momentous task of deciding on a boundary that, as one chronicle noted, will divide "more than 35 million people, thousands of villages, towns and cities, a unified system of canals and communication networks, and 16 million Muslims, 15 million Hindus and 5 million Sikhs, who despite their religious differences, shared a common culure, language and history."

One will never know his thought processes, judgements, and discretions which determined the destiny of two nations, and which created a continental schism that still haunts many. He had insurmountable challenge of creating two homogenous countries - one Hindu and another Muslim - which perhaps was beyond human capabilities. Just a few examples:

Religious contiguity, unfortunately, does not follow geography. One of the most sacred Sikh Shrine, Nankana Sahib, was located in Western Punjab - which was surrounded by an overwhelming Muslim population

Gurdaspur had a slight Muslim majority, but it was the Sikhs who dominated their economically.

There were many shrines of Sufi saints who were equally revered by the Muslims, as well as by Hindus and Sikhs.

Lahore had a Muslim majority, but it was Hindus and Sikhs who owned the bulk of banking, insurance and manufacturing.

Etc....

Needless to say - and if one puts oneself in Radcliffe's shoes - his was a no-win situation. And not surprisingly, neither the "owners" of India or Pakistan were satisfied by his Award.

And though he architected the historyof the subcontinent (and its repercussions), and literally created two nations, he remains an unknown figure for most in these two countries...

The only "homage"(?) he ever got was from the poet W.H. Auden in his lesser-known poem The Partition:

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
"Time," they had briefed him in London, "is short. It's too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you."

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

...Yes, we may sit here today and judge the history in terms of right and wrongs... But what Cyril Radcliffe, inadvertently, did prove - to go back to where we started - History, like a river or wind, it has its own logic and direction (though as humans, we may call it amoral)....

Earlier Posts in the Series:
1. The Story of Junagadh
2. The Foundations of "Nehruvian Socialism"
3. A "Nation-in-Making"
4. Legacy of "The Raj"
5. India's 1st 5-Star Hotel

Sources:
The Third Side of the Partition Coin
"The Partition" by W.H. Auden
The Other Side of Silence
Splitting the Difference
Sanjhi Virasat

On Merit & Discrimination: Pygmalion in the Classroom

In 1960s, Robert Rosenthal, currently a Professor of Psychology at Univ of California, along with and Lenore Jacobson had conducted a series interesting experiments about what a teacher - and his/her beliefs, hopes, biases and prejudices - can do to a student.

The findings of their unsettling study finally got published as a book: The Pygmalion in the Classroom
...and have been replicated more than 350 times since then....

The experimental design was simple:

Randomly select a groups of students, and group of teachers. Tell the teachers that they are going to teach some of the brightest of the brains in the school.

The Result: The students out-performed their batch, even though they had no "real" differentiating "merit".

Rosenthal's studies were about the schools, so one issue that begged the questions:
does this apply to higher education?

Apparently, it does, as he shared the example of the juniors he teaches:

"I ask them to define a research problem, search the literature, design an experiment and come in with results all in one semester. Now nobody can do all that in one semester. I can't do that in one semester, but these are juniors: they don't know it can't be done; so they all do it. They do amazing things."

The reverse of this self-fulfilling prophesy was also true - i.e., if the teachers perceived students as below average, their perfomance was also below average...

Some other later studies also identified the reasons for such perceptions (which are quite relevant to contemporary Indian acadmic environment) for such perceptions - and therefore, lower performance among students:

Sex. Lower expectations are often held for older girls--particularly in scientific and technical areas-- because of sex role stereotyping.

Sociao-Economic Status. Teachers sometimes hold lower expectations of students from lower SES backgrounds.

Race/Ethnicity. Students from minority races or ethnic groups are sometimes viewed as less capable than Anglo students.

Type of School. Students from either inner city schools or rural schools are sometimes presumed to be less capable than students from suburban schools.

Appearance.The expense or style of students' clothes and students' grooming habits can influence teachers' expectations.

Oral Language Patterns. The presence of any nonstandard English speaking pattern can sometimes lead teachers to hold lower expectations.

Messiness/ Disorganisation. Students whose work areas or assignments are messy are sometimes perceived as having lower ability.

Readiness. Immaturity or lack of experience may be confused with learning ability, leading to inappropriately low expectations.

Halo Effect. Some teachers generalize from one characteristic a student may have, thereby making unfounded assumptions about the student's overall ability or behavior.

Seating Position. If students seat themselves at the sides or back of the classroom, some teachers perceive this as a sign of lower learning motivation and/or ability and treat students accordingly.

Negative Comments about Students. Teachers' expectations are sometimes influenced by the negative comments of other staff members.

Outdated Theories. Educational theories which stress the limitations of learners can lead to lowered expectations.

Tracking or Long-Term Ability Groups. Placement in "low" tracks or groups can cause students to be viewed as having less learning potential than they actually have.

Rosenthal's book ends with a quote from GB Shaw's play "Pygmalion":

..."You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."

...perhaps - as the so-called "issues" of reservations, quota and merit, etc. become increasingly a reality in India - Rosenthal's studies put the issue/choice in a nutshell:

It all depends on....
How do you treat Eliza Doolittle?
... As a "lady" or as a "flower girl"?!!!

Sources:
Rosenthal Lecture
Expectations & Student Outcomes
Pygmalion In The Classroom
"Proper" English & Reservations-of-a-Different-Kind
Quota/Reservations: More ""Reserved" than Others

The Number Game... India's IT/ITES Exports

India's IT-ITES/BPO exports, as everyone "knows" is booming.

According to the statistics cited at the India Brand Equity Foundation (which quotes data from Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India's central bank, and IDC):

"India's sunshine sector - IT-ITeS - continues to chart double-digit growth and is expected to grow to US$ 53 billion by the end of calendar year 2008, says an IDC study. It will witness a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.1 per cent till 2008..."
&

"The Indian IT-ITeS industry has recorded revenues of US$ 23.6 billion in FY 2005-06, as compared with export revenues of US$ 17.7 billion in FY 2004-05, a remarkable 33 per cent growth in exports."

This is one industry that has been adding to India's exports by leaps-and-bounds - depending on the source, the figures range between 25%-to-50%/annum!!!

Which is an eminently (feel-)good news... till one does a reality check :-((

According to NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), a significant %age of these exports are to USA - accounting for almost 2/3rd of the export revenues.

So do US statistics reflect this surge of Indian IT-ITES exports?

... Which is when one hits another reality!!!

According to a report by US Govt Accountabiity Office, entitled "US and India Data on Offshoring show Significant Differences" in BPT (Business, Professional and Technical" trade services, which - to the best of my knowledge - is the US term for the Indian IT-ITES exports):

"...data show that for 2003, the United States reported $420 million in unaffiliated imports of BPT services from India, while India reported approximately $8.7 billion in exports of affiliated and unaffiliated BPT services to the United States."

Obviously, $420mn-US imports is too a huge difference from $8.7bn-Indian exports to be a typographical error.



So what accounts for this this discrepancy?

Apparently, Indian way of counting the chicken is pretty different than their counterparts in US, e.g.,:

About 40-50% of the discrepancy can be accounted by the fact that India counts the earnings of temporary Indian workers residing in the United States as exports to the United States. However, the US only includes temporary foreign workers who have been in the United States less than 1 year and who are not on the payrolls of firms in the United States.

Another 10-15% difference in the numbers is due to the fact that India defines services more broadly than does the United States. For example, Indian data on trade in services include packaged software and software embedded on computer hardware, which the United States classifies as trade in goods. In addition, India includes in its data certain information technology-enabled services, such as some financial services, that are not included in US's definition of BPT services.

India also treats sales to US-owned firms located outside of the United States as exports to the United States, but the United States does not count these as imports.

US calculates import data on BPT services from India as those from the unaffiliated parties only, while Indian data include both affiliated and unaffiliated trade but do not separate them. That is, Indian calculations of IT-ITES exports includes intra-company trade, which is not considered as 'export' by the US.

Just in case, one wonders why RBI does not put its foot down on this spurious "number game", here is an explanation - RBI's data is actually the NASSCOM data:

"RBI, which is India’s central bank, is responsible for reporting official Indian data on trade in services. However, RBI data on trade in services incorporate the data collected by India’s primary information technology association — the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM)... Thus, the data cited above for India come from NASSCOM."

To find similar examples of the Number Game, please see:

A World Deceived By "Numbers/ Facts"

FDI: China and India - Just a Difference in Definition!!!

How to Increase GDP: Learning from Indian Budget

The Collapse of U$D Economy?? - Part II

More than 2 years back, I had written about The Collapse of Dollar Economy?

The reasons for such a blasphemous statement were as follows:

The U$D is/was valued not because it represents strong fundamentals, but because it is/was the monopoly currency in the global oil-trade (and since every country need oil, they need to buy and keep U$D as forex)

Betting on that, the US economic policies have allowed its debt to grow to an almost insolvent levels, which is not sustainable in the long run,

However, Euro as an alternative petro-currency poses a major threat to petro-dollar.

Finally, I have found a taker of this argument in none other than David Walker, the Comptroller of the US. In an accompanying note to the Financial Report of the United States Government, realeased on December 15th, 2006, he cautions:

Despite improvement in both the fiscal year 2006 reported net operating cost and the cash-based budget deficit, the U.S. government’s total reported liabilities, net social insurance commitments, and other fiscal exposures continue to grow and now total approximately $50 trillion, representing approximately four times the Nation’s total output (GDP) in fiscal year 2006, up from about $20 trillion, or two times GDP in fiscal year 2000.

As this long-term fiscal imbalance continues to grow, the retirement of the “baby boom” generation is closer to becoming a reality with the first wave of boomers eligible for early retirement under Social Security in 2008.

Given these and other factors, it seems clear that the nation’s current fiscal path is unsustainable and that tough choices by the President and the Congress are necessary in order to address the nation’s large and growing long-term fiscal imbalance.

Meanwhile, a month old news-item in Financial Times reports that Oil Producers are gradually moving away from U$D... replacing it with Euros

Welcoming 2007.... changing the "daily average"

The "good news", as the 2006 comes to an end, was:

... according to a news item by Steven Herst of Associated Press on yahoo news, the hanging of Saddam Hussein did not have any impact on daily lives of people in Baghdad:

"..There was no sign of a feared Sunni uprising in retaliation for the execution, and the bloodshed from civil warfare on Saturday was not far off the daily average — 92 from bombings and death squads."

I guess this stability of "daily average" is a metaphor for many other things too - ranging from farmers' suicide in India to melting of ice caps in the arctics...

...the "daily average" remains stable - and, so apparently, it seems that we are doing well in this world

With this note, let's welcome 2007 in our lives... with the hope that we may be able to change the base point of this "daily average" in some small ways.

Have a great and meaningful year!!!

Saddam Executed for Criminal Complicity with US

Saddam Hussain was executed this morning for a crime that he had committed back in 1980s, in complicity with, what has now become, the United States of Amnesia.

In December 1983, during the 8-year Iraq-Iran war, US President Ronald Reagan dispatched his special Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad with a hand-written letter to Hussein. Rumsfeld had served in various positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including as President Ford's defense secretary, and at this time headed the multinational pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co.

On January 1, 1984, Washington Post reported that the US “in a shift in policy, has informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the 3-year-old war with Iran would be ’contrary to US interests’ and has made several moves to prevent that result”.

Three months later, Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad for meetings with then-Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. United Press International reported on March 24, 1984, that “mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq, a team of UN experts has concluded... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign minister Tariq Aziz on the Gulf war before leaving for an unspecified destination”.

In fact, even prior to Rumsfeld's visit, in May 1983, in a letter to the Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, US Secretary of State George Shultz had mentioned about the "very important common interests" between the two countries, and had noted that:

"...Clearly, international terrorism is not only a parallel menace to our two contries, it also appears that at least the inspiration for certain terrorist acts against Iraq and again's the US emanates at times from the same sources.By working together to combat terrorism, our efforts should be more effective"

In November 1984, US resumed normal diplomatic ties with Iraq.

As I had posted long time back:

During the eighties, the UN was concerned with Saddam Hussein's use of chemcal weapons. On March 21st, 1986, the Security Council President, "speaking on behalf of the Security Council," stated that the Council members were

"profoundly concerned by the unanimous conclusion of the specialists that chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian troops...[and] the members of the Council strongly condemn this continued use of chemical weapons in clear violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 which prohibits the use in war of chemical weapons"

The United States was the only country to vote AGAINST the issuance of this statement!!!.

In any case, Saddam is now dead and gone, killed by a form of "justice" which is paradoxical. A few months back, an article in New York Times (May 21, 2006), noted about the court proceedings in Iraq:

"The American influence has been undeniably pervasive, with about 90 percent of the $145 million in annual costs for the court and associated investigations paid for by the United States Justice Department, and lawyers sent by Washington acting as advisers."

Commenting on the execution of Saddam, Robert Scheer observed:

"It is a very frightening precedent that the United States can invade a country on false pretenses, depose its leader and summarily execute him without an international trial or appeals process. This is about vengeance, not justice, for if it were the latter the existing international norms would have been observed. The trial should have been overseen by the World Court, in a country that could have guaranteed the safety of defense lawyers, who, in this case, were killed or otherwise intimidated.... This rush to execute him had the feel of a gangster silencing the key witness to a crime."

So today, besides all his cruel deeds, Saddam finally paid for two of his costliest mistakes:

1. He did not choose his friends wisely, and
2. He did not learn from his past experiences with his "Best of Enemies"

Other Sources:
National Security Archives
(this contains links to some of the de-classified documents from State Dept)
The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s Closet
Who should pay for Saddam's Crimes?

An "Invisible" Revolution... 400 Poor Women/ Hour!!!

"Invisible" people create revolutions that too remain invisible from the sight of most - specially the MSM...

The following is a glimpse into one such revolution, which is happening in India.

Perhaps the best introduction to this phenomenon is this desciption from the preface of The Lights and Shades Study:

"I recall a time in Jharkhand, India in the forest town of Chandwa, sitting with a self-help group under a mahua tree. We ate the mahua’s large raisin-like berries, soon to be turned intocountry alcohol, while a few of the women recounted their story. A well-meaning organization (WMO) had come to empower this self-help group, which had formed on its own about a year earlier. The WMO advised the group that its members would have moremoney if they were to pickle and pack their garden harvests to sell to customers in Calcutta. The organization helped the group with recipes, with bottling and labeling. For several weeks the WMO and the women applied themselves day and night to the task. Somewhere along the way, the WMO lost the group’s savings and never did find a market for the chutney. The women pointed to a houseful of jars as evidence.

Invincible, the group forged ahead, without the benefit of the WMO. Group members met each week, deposited cash savings into a box, then lent the cash to one another for emergency needs. The group fund began to accumulate once again. Some members had helped other newgroups form in the village and they too began to increase their savings. A few groups had linked to a local bank for more credit. Women members were checking into benefits they might receive by connecting to a government programme.

I asked the women what activity might have been more lucrative than chutney production. Several said they preferred to work on their own, not in a group business. Working alone, except for harvesting activities, was less risky than putting all their eggs – their hours - into one basket. Yet they did cite one exception, an enterprise which they found to be most promising if undertaken as a collective. On occasion, together in the night after the children had fallen asleep, they would gather at the railway tracks to remove coal from the parked cars of the local freight train. Several women would stand guard while the others skimmed the goods. The next day they would sell the coal to nearby shops. There was no cash-outlay, justtheir time as a cost. They laughed as they confided their secrets.

Empowerment seemed less like a quaint watercolor of women pickling fruits and vegetables in the countryside, thanks to the benevolence of an empowering NGO, and more like guerrilla survival in a setting where self-help meant fending off assistance whenever possible. This group was pure inspiration – entrepreneurial, full of humor, immune to whatever good intentions might come its way...."

This Self-Help Group (SHG) is only one among the 2.6mn SHGs that spread across Indian villages.

What are SHGs?
Self Help Groups (SHGs) are informal associations of up to 20 women (their average size is 14) who meet regularly, usually once a month, to save small amounts (typically Rs 10 to 50) a month. While they are formed with the encouragement of NGOs and other self-help promoting agencies (SHPAs) such as government agencies and the banks, they are expected to select their own members, and are therefore sometimes called affinity groups. After saving regularly for a minimum of six months, and using the funds to lend small amounts to each other for interest, which is ploughed back into group funds, and satisfactorily maintaining prescribed records and accounts, they become eligible to be "linked" by the local bank branch under a NABARD-sponsored programme called the SHG-Bank Linkage Programme.... On-time loan repayment to the banks has been very high, above 90 percent, and there have been no defaults so far.

Some facts:

Started as a pilot project of 500 SHGs, by Nabard in 1992, they grew slowly. In last 5 years, they have grown 10-fold.

Now, they reach 31mn rural households (out of the 191mn total Indian households).

Of these, about 14mn households are linked to bank credit though SHGs

According to The Lights and Shade Study, overall, 51% of SHG members fall below the poverty line; another 32% are ‘borderline’ (above the poverty line but vulnerable to risk). Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), recognised as structurally poor, are 55% of members. Widows, also a vulnerable and under-privileged group, were found to be 10% of SHG members.

, 38% of SHG members work as casual labourers - 29% work in own agriculture, and 17% are engaged in a non-farm enterprise.

74% have no schooling, 11% have some adult education to become ‘neo-literate’, 15% have some schooling (mainly at primary level).

SHGs also represent an antidote to the "Access Denied!!!" phenomenon...

And perhaps also explain the fact that:

In India, there are 400 women, who join an SHG every hour!!!