Bangalore's health crisis

 Earlier this month, I had written about Bangalore's garbage crisis, among other things, and about Bangalore's civic authority(the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Pallike, or BBMP) and it's much ballyhooed drive to segregate wet, dry, recyclable and toxic trash which it claimed was the solution to the crisis. I had opined that the net result, given the fundamental incompetence of the BBMP, would be the accumulation of uncollected piles of segregated trash all over the city. Three weeks into the BBMP's segregation drive, that is in fact what has happened, with upward of 20,000 tons of rotting trash piling up all over the city and further clogging the inadequate drains.

This remains as common a sight as ever, post-segregation

 The inevitable consequence of refuse lying about the streets is a deterioration in the health environment. That has manifested itself already with a significant rise in mosquito, rat and fly-borne diseases in and around the city. An avian flu epidemic has broken out on a government-run turkey farm on the outskirts of the city, with a ban on all poultry products from farms within a 1 kilometer radius, possibly being escalated to a 10 km. radius. With segregated trash laying around, dogs, cats, birds and rats are feeding better than ever, not having to burrow through mixed trash to find food. This carries with it the probability of bird and flea-borne epidemics, such as the plague that hit Surat, being imminent. Heavy rain could further aggravate the health situation by polluting the water supply and spreading out the disease vectors. With no urgency on the part of the BBMP, this is turning into a rapidly escalating health crisis of epidemic proportions, and if serious steps are not taken in the next few weeks, Bangalore very well could see itself being quarantined. This is a serious, serious crisis.

 I am amazed that there is no action on the part of either the state government or the central(federal) government to contain this incipient crisis. One would be hard-pressed to find another part of the world with such apathy on the part of government or the people when faced with a major developing health crisis. Is this lassitude an Indian cultural trait? Indians come out in militant multitudes at the least hint of religious insult, but when faced with lethal crises far more important and urgent, they seem to lapse into torpor. This is a crisis that demands that political differences be set aside, and the state and federal governments attack this situation on an emergency basis. Not merely because millions of people are at risk, but also because Bangalore is the center of India's IT industry, contributing a third of India's substantial IT/ITES exports. The outcome of this crisis could very well determine if it deals a crippling blow to this industry and, longer-term, to the country's competitiveness and desirability as an outsourcing destination. Hundreds of billions of dollars hinge on how this developing crisis is handled. If nothing else, that alone should have moved government to action.

 Finally, I believe the BBMP has to be thoroughly cleansed of its thoroughly incompetent, inefficient and corrupt offices, and capable replacements brought in. This is an organization which has proven its unworthiness since inception. I am inclined to use much harsher language, such is my exasperation at the way I see this incredible joke of a civic authority function. Even over the past year alone, Bangalore has become a markedly filthier city. Have we come to the point of indifference where only a plague can spur decisive action?

Updates:
 Bangalore is doing its bit to celebrate the upcoming Year of the Snake: Snakes feast on garbage rats

The BBMP is now imposing fines on businesses and homes with standing water which potentially provide breeding spots for dengue-carrying mosquitos. Apparently, the BBMP believes that its own rivers of raw, stinking sewage are unattractive to egg-laying mosquitos. Like an armed robber denouncing pickpockets.

Half a million idols, many with toxic paint, dumped in Bangalore's lakes.

All of India remains apathetic toward the filth which surrounds human habitation. And yet I encounter people who insist that it is well on the way to becoming a "superpower"!

Bangalore Civic Services: Cash and Carry? Part One

 There is an anonymous civic group(leastwise, I think it's a group!) in Bangalore called The Ugly Indian, which has transformed many "Ugly Spots" into clean areas with an emphasis on sustainability through the involvement of local stakeholders like businesses, homes and city workers. Their motto is "Kaam Chalu Mooh Bandh", which roughly translates as "Close your mouth and work", referring to their preference for anonymity. The core proposition is that when government is not up to the job, the citizens should step up.

  Of course, all such activity is certain to bring up the issue of whether private citizens should be doing the work that city government collects taxes to provide as a service. That debate on Facebook turned a bit lively, and TUI brought up the question of whether the house/property taxes, modest in relation to property values, were sufficient to warrant the services which people expect from the city. I wrote back, if I recall correctly, that while the taxes were admittedly low in relative terms, one needed to be sure that submitting to a higher tax rate would not simply result in the city administration siphoning away the added money, without providing promised services, and also take into consideration that many property owners were "house rich, cash poor", as it were. TUI then asked me to expand on my remarks, which I promised to do in a blog post, as I had too much to say to put into an FB conversation. So here- better late than never!- is my take!

  A maxim of city planning is to plan for the future, rather than just for the present. The thrust of Indian city “planning” has been to address yesterday's problems. Bangalore has been no exception to that rule. My experience of Bangalore has been that each passing year brought declining levels of service from the city administration, from trash disposal to street maintenance to animal control. Likewise, BWSSB, the autonomous water utility, has also deteriorated with each year. The hallmark, if you will, of the failure of these services has been the lack of foresight and, more importantly, the corruption and lack of will on the part of these agencies.  I wrote about this in another post.

 The crux of TUI's question was this: do you think that the current taxes justify your current expectation of services and are you willing to pay more in taxes in order to receive a better level of service? Both points require a more nuanced response than a simple yes or no. To the first, there is no doubt that the total revenues generated by the city are insufficient to adequately provide services on a level commensurate with the ambitions of a "world class city" or, indeed, of a second-world city. But, more importantly, are they getting the level of service now that the taxes warrant? Those of us who live in better neighborhoods need to be more cognizant of the services provided in less-affluent areas, and not assume that the same level of service, however unsatisfactory it is, obtains citywide. As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the more affluent generally have a greater ability to get their squeaks heard.

 

  TUI noted, with a degree of optimism, that the average home in the Indiranagar neighborhood was worth close to a million dollars, while the average property tax was less than two hundred dollars a year. I would be inclined to value the average home in this area at closer to half a million dollars, which is still quite substantial. But the value is in the land, not the home, and rarely does the value of the house figure into an actual selling price. Moreover, many of the long-term residents are retired civil servants, ranging from police officers to civil service officials to military officers. These are people of modest means(current government salaries seem positively luxurious in comparison), and now survive on modest pensions of three or four hundred dollars a month. Not your typical million-dollar homeowner. Doubling or tripling their property tax might force them to seriously consider selling the homes they built with every intention of living out retirement here with their circle of friends and family.

 

These are homes on a street in Indiranagar, which sit on lots currently worth in the neighborhood of $500,000. Do they look like half-million dollar homes?

 

 Typically, someone who lives in a million-dollar home in the US would have an income north of $250,000. On my street here in Indiranagar, perhaps three residents fit that bill. One is a businessman, another is a builder and the third is a politician/restaurateur, and each of them have multiple homes. Of the rest, I honestly don't think anyone makes more than $50,000 a year, and most make probably between $6,000 and $20,000. As I said, house rich and cash poor. That said, I think most of them would be able to withstand a doubling-or even tripling- of property tax without too much stress, but allowances must be made for pensioners and others on fixed incomes.

Please go on to Part Two.

 

Bangalore Civic Services: Cash and Carry? Part Two

 The largest portion of a typical property tax bill in the US typically are school taxes, which can be up to 80% of the total bill in some areas. There are some middle-class homes who pay $10-12,000 a year, with close to $8000 being billed as school taxes. Conversely, there are properties in Pennsylvania, for example, with property taxes of less than $2000 a year which include trash removal, street maintenance, snow removal, policing and school expenditures. A large part of the disparity can be explained by the relative cost of living and the quality of services provided. Even so, I would rate the basic sanitation and street maintenance services in the least expensive and most rundown American towns and cities far superior to that of Bangalore, which is a disgrace to this city. The administration, however, seems only to indulge its propensity for unwarranted bombast.

The recent garbage crisis in Bangalore stemmed from three events: a sanitation workers' strike, a protest by villagers that closed one landfill and a fire at another. That still left two landfills available after the strike, and thus no reason not to keep moving the garbage out of the city. The issue is not primarily of the amount of garbage or the lack of segregation. It is the consistent inability of the city administration to provide even the most basic service in an efficient and timely manner, as old-time residents will know. It isn't enough to merely collect trash door-to-door, and then dump it around the corner and set fire to it every now and then. The existing system, as Americans like to say, "does not work as advertised". Before we talk of segregating and reducing the quantity of trash, we need to have in place an effective system of collecting and transporting trash to proper disposal facilities. Otherwise, what we will end up with is piles of segregated but uncollected trash in the city.

 

This is a corner nearby which was cleaned up about a year ago. The stenciled bi-lingual exhortations and image of Ganesha notwithstanding, the pourakarmikas(sanitation workers) continue to dump and burn trash there. When I took this picture, part of the trash was still smouldering.

Roads in Bangalore are another example of how not to run a city. I have noted before that there is not a single pothole-free road in Bangalore, and many resemble rural dirt tracks. A perfect example is this stretch of Richmond Road coming off Trinity Church Road, which has been in a state of abysmal disrepair for more than five years, despite being a central artery for people travelling from the east and northeast parts of Bangalore to Electronics City and Hosur. It's more fun if you watch the video in fullscreen!
 

 

With its unusual width, fixing the road without major traffic disruption should have been a piece of cake, but the disconnect between the BWSSB and the BBMP combined with the natural inertia of both entities ensures that the ordeal continues.

 So now we come to the second part of TUI's question. I think it is worth paying more in taxes if we get better service, but we need to ensure that the extra money will be properly utilized, and that residents on pensions and fixed incomes are spared undue stress. It's not only a matter of efficiently utilizing additional taxes, but also of efficiently utilizing existing taxes. For example, in many middle-class areas, trash collection can be segregated and done on a weekly basis, since they usually have the space to locate trash cans and recycling bins within the premises. Such collection routes can utilize small compactor trucks. Street sweeping can be mechanized using small electric sweepers, perhaps every other day, and residents should be made responsible for the cleanliness of their own sidewalks. As an aside, residents should also be required to remove gardens, fountains, statues, parking slots, and any other obstructions from the sidewalk in front of their properties.

  Businesses also need to be educated on taking ownership of the sidewalk in front of their stores/offices in a different way than they are accustomed to now: i.e., not as parking space, work space, display space or trash space. They also could pay more in a sort of categorized business tax, depending on how the business would impact local infrastructure and services. A restaurant, for example, would pay more than a book store of similar square footage. Taxing businesses a bit more and actually providing them service would discourage them from dumping as they do now. Additional revenues can be raised, for example, by licensing private enterprises to construct utility conduits(cables, gas, water, electric) alongside storm drains that they could lease to operators, which would also rid the city of those unsightly tangles of cables hanging between homes and running through the trees, or drooping from the trees threatening to strangle taller pedestrians. That needs to be addressed very soon, and it is better to build a solution before it gets out of hand.

 City officials need to demonstrate that they can responsibly utilize their current revenues and efficiently perform the jobs they are tasked with, before people will consent to paying higher taxes. Right now, there is not a single neighborhood in Bangalore which can be considered clean and well-maintained. That is the standing record of the BBMP. An independent audit of BBMP revenues and expenditures, preferably by accountants with certification in International Standards of Auditing, needs to be done prior to any tax hikes to make sure that the taxpayer is getting the best bang for the buck. A thorough analysis of the processes the Pallike uses should suggest ways of streamlining and making them more efficient users of the available resources, and thus also reducing the toll in time and expense for citizens who visit various city agencies. When citizens see wastage of their taxes, it is difficult to convince them that they need to pay more. The BBMP may need to have an outside team brought in to do a ground-up overhaul before more money flows into their coffers from a charged-up citizenry. Certainly we need to pay more to get the sort of services a world-class city deserves, but we also need to ensure that the city is ready, willing and able to put the added revenues to efficient use.
 
UPDATE: To buttress my point that the BBMP currently does not efficiently use tax monies:

" N R Ramesh, BJP corporator from Yediyur, claims that Bangalore is the only City in India that spends about Rs 430 crore(about $80 million) a year on garbage disposal. Mumbai, that has twice the population of Bangalore, spent Rs 191 crore in the last fiscal, Delhi spent Rs 177 crore and Chennai, which too is larger than Bangalore, Rs 135 crore."
Source: The Deccan Herald



 

India: Health amarjhansi

 The title of this post is a play on words that might need a little explanation. "Amarjhansi" is a phonetic expression of the way people from the Hindi belt pronounce the word "emergency", as in "Indira Gandhi wonly declared it amarjhansi!". But my synthetic compound word amar-jhansi also has meaning. Amar means ever, always, eternal, immortal. Jhansi is the name of a town in Uttar Pradesh which has roots in a word which translates to "vague", ethereal, indistinct or tenuous. Put together, the title provides a delightful double-entendre for the content of this post.

 It's no secret that India is witnessing an unfolding of lifestyle diseases of epidemic and historically unprecedented dimensions. While most lifestyle diseases are placed in the context of affluence and leisure, in India they can affect- and are affecting- people who don't exactly fit the picture of affluence and leisure. Instead, these diseases, primarily diabetes and heart disease(and of course the associated side effects of kidney, liver and eye disease), are being boosted not by conventional lifestyle changes that come with what would be considered affluence, but by culturally-nurtured dietary preferences indulged to excess by increased income not actually amounting to wealth or affluence. Increasingly, these diseases will disproportionately impact the poorer sections, because the wealthy will be able to diagnose, treat or prevent them better, just as in the west. It is truly a paradox of our modern world that it is the poor who increasingly suffer from the diseases which historically primarily afflicted the indolent wealthy. As an aside, during Elizabethan times(circa 16th century AD), the wealthy suffered from blackened and rotting teeth because sugar was an expensive luxury only they could afford. No doubt they also suffered from undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes and related issues.

 Every Indian meal, whether breakfast, lunch, teatime snacks or dinner, has excessive amounts of any or all of the following: sugar, salt, fat, starch. Coffee and tea are usually consumed sickly-sweet and often with more milk than water. In those parts of the country which are predominantly vegetarian, the potential advantage of avoiding animal fat and cholesterol is negated by the liberal use of vegetable oils(some of them hydrogenated or rich in saturated fats) and frequently ghee, which brings all the ill-effects of meat consumption to the vegetarian in a delicious, aromatic, convenient and religiously-sanctioned form. Even steamed foods are frequently accompanied by unhealthy condiments. A staple Kerala breakfast is rice(sometimes brown rice or whole wheat) flour steamed in a cylinder, with grated coconut steamed along with it on either end of the cylinder. But it is typically eaten with mashed bananas, ghee and sugar. Another staple was steamed plantain eaten with- you guessed it- ghee and sugar. Rice, I found out recently, is cooked in salted water here, something I have never done in all the years I have cooked rice. The saving grace for the poor who lived on this cuisine was the fact that they could not afford as much sugar or oil as they would have liked. Indeed, they frequently could not afford as much food as they required- paradoxically shielding them from "lifestyle diseases"- and that is only gradually changing for some. But they are discovering, with the proliferation of cheap Indian fast food on the streets, that scanty doesn't have to mean tasteless, and are dousing their food with as much salt, sugar and fat as they can afford, although- mercifully for them- ghee is still out of reach.

 On a previous visit to India, I employed a cook, a young woman in her early 20s. While she had an acceptable repertoire of culinary abilities, her preparations had too much salt, sugar and fat for my tastes. So I asked her to dial it way back for me, if not for the rest of the household. I lectured her on the drawbacks of such a diet. She countered that the methods I preferred were tasteless and inedible. One day, she had to go to the doctor, and had her blood pressure taken. It turned out that it was way high(I remember it as being something like 200/100), especially considering her age. Of course, I tried to reinforce the health benefits of the food angle, and urged her to at least tone it down. Recently, through the grapevine of the domestics, I heard that she had gotten married, had a couple of miscarriages, then developed kidney and heart issues. Now, according to the grapevine, she has renal failure. And she's not yet 30 years old.

 wherever you walk in an Indian city, you are likely to encounter sweet shops around every corner. And if that isn't enough for your sweet tooth, most restaurants("hotels") and even ordinary hole-in-the-wall convenience stores will provide you with goodies made nearly of pure sugar. It seems to me that Indian sweets are essentially varieties of flavored sugar. So you will find sweetmeats that are basically almond-flavored sugar, milk-flavored sugar, ghee-flavored sugar, cardamom-flavored sugar and so on. Sometimes, they are topped or stuffed with something like nuts or shredded coconut flavored perhaps with cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, or soaked(of course!) in sugar syrup. One of my favorite Indian sweets is the rasagolla, a cottage-cheese ball soaked in sugar syrup. Another is the gulab jamoon, which is essentially a dough ball deep-fried and served(surprise!) with rosewater-flavored("gulab" means rose) sugar syrup. In the US, we get them with barely a teaspoon of syrup. In India, they are served with so much syrup that you need to put your goggles on and dive in to find the cheeseballs and, before you are done, colonies of ecstatic ants and bees are bucket-brigading the syrup away like the Little Rascals after Alfalfa accidentally set the clubhouse on fire.

 

One of Bangalore's ubiquitous sweetshops

 Of course, if your food cravings run to more than sweets, you can happily indulge in fatty and salty just as conveniently, virtually on every street in every city. We used to have a maxim back in the day that, in India, you could never go wrong with starting a restaurant. It seemed that restaurants never went out of business, they just sometimes went on to bigger and better. Nowadays, I do see some closures, but they are usually of the relatively more expensive or themed variety. Ordinary working-class joints do a roaring trade, serving hyper-fatted sodium-saturated foods that could transform a starving Somali child into the image of a supine bourgeoisie brat in fifteen minutes flat or your money back. Even the ubiquitous grilled kebabs contain enough fat to make your teeth feel like they are being coated with Teflon. I remember an Indian expression which said, to paraphrase, "He's so rich that if you squeeze his arm, ghee will ooze out of it!". The cultural association of a high-fat, high-sugar diet with affluence or an aspirational lifestyle is so strong that it permeates Indian cuisine across the board, making it that much more difficult to contain ill-effects with any rise in income.

 I believe that the Indian government could do a lot worse with their healthcare budget than launch a massive awareness and education program to fundamentally alter the way Indians look at and prepare their staple dishes. It wouldn't require changing the recipes so much as adjusting them, but it would mean altered judgement of what taste means. My sisters both cook Indian food low in salt, sugar and saturated fats, and turn out absolutely delicious meals. Indian proponents of the vegetarian lifestyle(who generally seem to have a one-point religious agenda: ban meat) trumpet the health advantages of vegetarianism, while blithely ignoring the reality of the health crisis sweeping through the vegetarian community. The current situation is like pressure building in a volcano, and when the volcano blows, the country will be ill-equipped to deal with the fallout. Two sayings come to mind: "A stitch in time saves nine" and "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". The ounce of preventive education applied immediately and intensively would also be the stitch in time, and this is one "amarjhansi" the government needs to declare right now.
 

Are airlines hijacking their passengers?

 I had to reschedule my ticket once already this year, and came within a whisker of having to do it again. So, for my next trip, I thought I would look at open-end return or one-way tickets. Open-end returns, I found, have gone the way of the dodo ever since fare deregulation. But what I found out about one-way ticket prices blew my mind!

 In a nutshell, booking a one-way ticket will cost you anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand more than the round-trip economy-class tickets on the exact same flights! I really could not find a reasonable and rational explanation for this anomaly. I would find it reasonable if one-way tickets were more expensive if you bought them each way than a single round-trip, but to charge you substantially more for a one-way ticket than the roundtrip? Pricing different airlines and flights, I found that a $1400 round-trip would change to a $2300 one way on the same flight that the roundtrip was based on, or $4600 if you bought one-way tickets in each direction. Similarly, a $2300 round trip would be a $3400 one-way! A $400 round trip becomes a $610 one-way. The logic completely escapes me. And I know I'm not the only one thinking about this!

 Some people postulate that this is a way to capture high-spending business travellers, who may not be able to pin down a precise travel schedule for one reason or another, or perhaps may be switching travel mode. I cleverly thought, "Then maybe they could buy the round-trip and not use the return leg!", but it turns out that the airlines already thought of this, and have instituted penalty clauses for failure to use a return leg or other activities such as "hidden city" bookings. They even threaten to blacklist you from ever flying with them again. Why, I wonder, would they be upset if you don't use something you've already paid them for? And think of the fuel savings from not having to carry that passenger and his/her baggage! Can you say "unexpected profits"? "Hidden city", I discovered, refers to the use of "legged" schedules, or flights with stopovers or layovers, where one of the intermediate airports is the actual destination of the traveler, using such indirect flights often being substantially cheaper than a direct flight. For example, I once flew from Miami to Newark via Houston, and people sitting next to me had paid more than my roundtrip fare just to travel one-way from Miami to Houston. From that perspective, my Houston-Newark flight was free for me. As the kids like to text, wtf?

 Airlines also have other pricing anomalies which make their arguments of the price of fuel and the weight of baggage appear to be just that much banana oil. For example, it is cheaper to fly from Miami to Anchorage, Alaska, than it is to fly from Miami to Chicago. You can go from La Guardia to Atlanta to Dallas to Jacksonville to Cincinnati to La Guardia(as I did once), cheaper than just going from Newark to Washington DC. And while you sit on that country-hopping flight, the people boarding and de-boarding on any one leg are paying more than you paid for the entire tour! I am baffled! And then they want to hit you with fees for baggage, for food, for pillows and, soon, for being overweight or for not having used the toilet at the airport. If you can fly 50 people 5000 miles for $340 apiece and make a profit, surely you can fly 100 people 2500 miles for $300 and make a profit without the song-and-dance about baggage surcharges? Or making passengers stand for the duration of the flight?

 I've considered other angles, such as discouraging terrorists who don't want/don't need a return ticket, and it doesn't fit that theory either. I don't think they particularly care about being penalized for the unused return leg. It's kind of funny, then, that the TSA scrutinizes one-way tickets with extra care, apparently being blissfully unaware that terrorists are notoriously stingy with their group cash(remember the flophouse in Paterson, NJ that some of the 9/11 terrorists used?), and will not pay for a one-way ticket that is considerably more expensive than a round-trip. I've had one person try to explain that the passenger paying $186 for an indirect flight is subsidizing the passenger paying $375 to fly to the stopover which is half the distance. Huh?? I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I thought that you would have to pay more than the other guy in order to subsidize his cost. I mean, it's not like the airline is pushing the passenger out the door as they fly over the intermediate airport. They have to land the plane, pay landing and gate fees and possibly take on a fresh crew, food and fuel. So for all intents and purposes, the next leg of the flight must stand on its own economic merits.

 Can anyone possibly find the time to explain this to my satisfaction?

 

The Fear Factor

 Indians live in fear. Like most pervasive conditions, after a while it becomes part of you. You don't notice it, and are taken aback when someone points it out to you. You get defensive, especially if it is pointed out by an "outsider". But it's the truth. Having been here now for several months in a row, I find myself starting to succumb to it, and letting it color my thinking and actions. What are Indians afraid of? Most everything. They are afraid of the police, the bureaucrats, the judges, the errant drivers, people with "connections", the utility employees, the local goons, and even the discourteous people who stick their faces and hands in front of you at a service counter. I think this could also be a part of why Indians are so apathetic to the mess and incompetence around them. They- the not-rich and not-powerful- are too afraid to speak up and, instead, defend their inaction with illogical rationalizations.

 The first thing that the police do is arrest people. It really doesn't matter what the issue is. Somebody complains about something, and the police promptly arrest the subject of the complaint, even if the complainant was at fault. I will recount two particularly egregious examples of mindless police arrests. There was a young lady who applied to a bank for a student loan. Her mother had previously obtained a loan on her behalf, and defaulted. The bank's loan officer reviewed the application and turned it down on the basis of the previous default. The girl then hanged herself, leaving behind a note on the reason for her suicide, which is that without a student loan, her future was bleak. The police promptly arrested the loan officer on a charge of "abetment of suicide", claiming that the suicide note supported the charge. The second example is an incident when a group of goons invaded a farmhouse, and assaulted and molested people there, on the grounds that "immoral and illegal activities" were taking place. When the police arrived, they arrested not the thugs, but the victims, on the thugs' complaint that "immoral and illegal" activities may have taken place. So people are afraid of goons, because the police may not actually protect them, even if by some means they can be persuaded to come to the scene.

 There was an incident when a lawyer, on his way to court, got in a minor traffic incident involving his motorcycle and a judge's car. It so happened that the lawyer had to make an appearance in the same judge's court that day. When he appeared in the courtroom, the judge promptly had him arrested for "contempt of court" and jailed overnight. Apparently what constitutes "contempt of court" is subject to very broad interpretation, unlike freedom of speech. There was another instance in which an Indian litigant filed a complaint in an Indian court against US President George Bush, alleging various misdeeds. The local court issued a summons for the appearance of the US President, and threatened to hold him in contempt of court if he failed to respond or appear. No doubt that caused GWB to quake in his presidential shoes. A proper notion of jurisdiction seems to elude Indian courts.

 The propensity of Indian courts to charge "contempt of court" keeps a public discourse on the effectiveness and appropriateness of the judicial system from taking place in anything more than an indirect manner. Indians are afraid of the long arm of an offended judge. Indeed, this very post refrains from more pointed criticism, because I don't know what might be construed as "contempt". While, technically, Indians have the right to free speech, in practice it is rather limited because of the inappropriate and narrow interpretations of what is protected as free speech. [Update: Noted political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was arrested and charged with sedition] India has human rights activists, but they focus only on violations by the police, army and politicians which result in injury, and occasionally those involving loss of property, and not on judicial rulings or free speech protections. Moreover, they tend to see only violence as human rights violations, not arbitrary abuses of power or the infringement of rights and due process which also constitute human rights violations. To be fair, perhaps they are also trying to steer clear of that diaphanous line which separates free speech from "contempt of court".


 When one goes to a government office for even routine matters, such as renewing a license, applying for a passport, getting the ubiquitous "clearance certificates", etc., the preferred and acceptable behavior by the applicant is obsequiousness. Because the bureaucrat can delay, deny or defer your application at whim. The preferred action is liberal bribery, to ease the passage of your supplication to the bureaucratic gods. Cross them at your peril, and face their wrath: slow or no response to service complaints, uncredited payments, arbitrary "inspections", demands for obscure documentation to support your application, missing files, and so on. So you routinely see members of the public incongruously grovelling in front of their own public servants, rather than demanding what is their due under the rules and the law. Fear of harassment, arrest, rejection and inconvenience compels them to supplicate the very people appointed to serve them.

 And then there is the ever-present threat of charges and complaints, by anyone who has ever entered your life. Almost every week, I read of at least one case where someone is arrested on a rape charge, because he failed to fulfill an alleged promise of marriage, or merely on the basis of some other non-sexual allegation. Recently, a minor Bollywood actress who had a years-long affair with a married cricket umpire more than twice her age filed rape charges against him when he finally categorically refused to marry her. Fortunately for him, he is not in India at the moment, but has bravely stated that he will be coming to India later this year, whereupon he will no doubt be promptly arrested. You read of people arrested on the complaint that money was borrowed and not repaid, even in the absence of documentary evidence. A model/actress was arrested recently because somebody(from the "Peoples' Power Party") complained that she had modeled a bikini in the colors of the Indian flag. Drivers are arrested when they hit someone who runs out into the middle of a highway(newspaper accounts, of course, always say "hit by a speeding vehicle", doubtless somewhat logical since the vehicle was in motion and therefore "speeding").

 Even cursory initial investigation is not undertaken by the police, who follow the unwritten rule of "arrest first, investigate later". That rule carries a potential benefit to the arresting officers, because often people will have to bribe their way out of their arbitrary arrest. So people walk in fear of someone making up charges, just because they know the police are too incompetent and too corrupt to handle it properly. They walk in fear of their neighbors, because perhaps the neighbors have official "connections" who can make life difficult for them. The saddest part is not that such things happen, but that these incidents elicit so little outrage from the people.

 A free people generally need to be able to voice and express their opinions freely and without fear of retribution. They need to be able to demand and receive from their government the services that their tax monies have paid for, without fear of reprisal. They should be entitled to due process in all situations, freedom from unconstitutional and arbitrary arrest, and fair and speedy justice. They need to be protected from harassment and arrest when they exercise their fundamental rights, and when they have not broken any law. Above all, they need to be free from fear of their own government officials. Are Indians a free people? I'm almost afraid to ask!

Update: Shaheen Dhada was arrested for criticizing on her Facebook status the shutdown("bandh") of Mumbai in the wake of the death of aged Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, a point of view I strongly support. Her friend Renu Srinivasan was also arrested, for "liking" her status. These "bandhs" are an arbitrary and deliberate violation of the fundamental rights "guaranteed" by the Indian Constitution, a point which seems to have noticeably eluded our esteemed judiciary(and the Indian press and public) over the past six decades.

What's wrong with America?

 It appears that most of my posts this year deal with Indian topics, not particularly surprising since I've spent the better part of a year here. But I do stay in touch with what's going on "back home", since I must return, and I don't want to be a stranger. What propels me to touch on this topic is, frankly, the disparity I see between perceptions and reality in both countries. Indian perceptions of the United States, or what I've gathered in my interactions here, are different from the American reality and, likewise, American perceptions of India are not altogether on target. In the main, Indian perception seems to be that the United States is in decline, and that China and India will relegate it to third place.

 That the US is currently in decline, I agree. That it will be pushed to third place in global economic and/or military power, I strongly disagree. I even more strongly disagree that India has even a remote shot at displacing the USA in this century, being not only dependent on exports and inward remittances, but perennially running a current account deficit. How America's economic strength plays out depends more on Americans and far less on the Chinese or Indians, and that is what this post is about: What is it about the United States, the most powerful and influential nation of the 20th century, that has changed that permits the perception of an irreversible decline?

 For most of the 20th century, the US was driven to superpower status by an empowerment of the middle-class, motivated by public policies which advocated for higher standards of living for all who were willing to work hard. Earlier, the very idea of a middle-class blue-collar family was almost laughable, but America showed that it was not only feasible, but actually baked the pudding that proved it. A vital part of this transformation was the policy of putting American interests first, economically, politically and militarily. Corporations(and their major financiers) were allowed to amass wealth, but it had to be done inclusively, with the American people sharing in the prosperity they helped to create. As America prospered, standards were set which were emulated by other developed nations, and were aspired to by developing nations: minimum wages, social safety nets, standards for clean air and water, health care, an educational system that was the envy of the world, and so on.

 Somewhere, something began to go wrong. Minimum wages no longer kept up with inflation, social safety nets began to be eroded, clean air and water began to be perceived as an obstruction to "progress", health care and education began to be seen as a privilege, not a right. What changed, and when did it change? It's difficult to place a finger on the exact time, but one can see when substantial change began to occur. From my reading(I don't want to call it "study", because I did not formally study American economics), it began with the LBJ administration and its close links to the military-industrial complex. Yeah, yeah, I know, that's such a "liberal" thing to say! But realistically, that's when the talons really hooked into the American political system, and began implementing a series of changes which got us here.

 There is a school of thought- and there is some evidence to back it up- that the changes were at least conceived, if not actually set in motion, as far back as a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago. But limiting myself to my own experiential observations, I see it as having taken place over the past forty years or so. It began with the insertion into government of graduates of the Friedman school of economic thought. They quickly zeroed in on China as a major instrument for their objectives, and implemented the hitherto unthinkable action of replacing the capitalist pro-western Taiwanese government with the communist Chinese government in the UN Security Council. The next few years largely involved stabilizing the leadership of that government before getting on to the agenda at hand. From 1978 onwards, communist China was aided, advised and cosseted by the US and the TNCs as no other. There were three or four hugely appealing(to the TNCs) advantages to China- a huge low-wage working-class population, a large land mass, a willingness to transfer American smog and land and water pollution, and not least of all, a central government with absolute power.

 There was, of course, the dilemma of how to sell products to a people who you essentially were making jobless or reducing to lower income. The answer was to leverage income via consumer credit. Thus the period from the mid-1970s on saw the explosion of consumer credit in the US, paralleling Chinese development, along with the systematic dismantling of financial regulations and consumer protections. During this period, there were at least three major transfers of wealth out of the hands of ordinary people, one in each of the last three decades. The first was when Savings and Loans institutions were permitted to enter the more exotic waters of regular banking, and promptly incurred huge "losses" which had to be covered by the taxpayer. The second was when traditional pension plans were replaced by 401(k) accounts, which encouraged people to try out the casino-style operations of the stock market of the 1990s, ending with the bust of 2000. The third was with the deregulation of regular banking, which allowed banks to enter the even more exotic waters of "financial products" such as hedges, securitization and their own securities and commodities trading arms, after first testing the waters with interstate banking. And they, almost as promptly as the S&Ls before them, incurred even more gigantic "losses", pushing the world to the edge of a full-blown depression. A fourth transfer in this decade is probably being engineered right now, and we will be able to see it in the light of day in a few years. I suspect it will be a mandated social security "investment" account or a "health savings" account, which can be taken as easily as the 401k accounts were.

 So now we have this fait accompli of a huge, cheap and relatively modern Chinese manufacturing infrastructure made possible by enormous amounts of western debt(mostly American). In the process, the very, very wealthy have become unimaginably wealthy. But the game cannot end here, because this is no one-off special. It's part of a larger strategy, which we can just guess at. It is a strategy which has weakened the US, and has permitted the perception of an irreversible American decline. However, looking at it from the American point of view, what do you do to make sure that being an American and living in the United States does not become a hardship? I already see changes which I think will halt the erosion, and slowly rebuild the pre-eminence of the US. There is more discourse in the public space about what is really going on. There is finally an understanding that, blue-collar or white-collar, Americans need to stand together. A beginning has been made to penalize corporations for their sham globalization which is doing nothing but perpetuating an unsustainable American trade deficit, while allowing profits from that trade to enable their principals to acquire vast global personal assets while sheltering their money from taxes.

 Many people debating the China vs. US issue seem to be blissfully unaware of the essential unfairness of the trade between the two countries. While Chinese goods flow unimpeded into the US, American products are all but barred from China. While this works out very nicely for the Chinese, it's not so for Americans. Also, most goods manufactured in China today have been designed and engineered in the west, many in the USA. The iPhone, for example, could not have been designed and developed in China, but the common perception seems to be that it is a Chinese-engineered product. What the Chinese specialize in is cheap production, by any means. But that production needs to be sold somewhere, and the traditional buyers are suffering from debt stress, which is what has paid for the rise of the "global economy". That will be a sticking point for China, and India, should the United States continue in decline.

 But more needs to be done. "America-first" needs to become a principle, as other major economic powers do for themselves. When free trade is not free trade, it needs to be appropriately countered, with the same sort of tariff and non-tariff barriers which China employs to protect its own interests. A decline of American living standards should not be accepted as the price for the enrichment of TNCs and their principals. There are serious calls right now to raise the age for social security benefits to 80, which is one year under the life expectancy of the average American male. In other words, pay for up to 60 years into the SS system, and die within a year of benefits eligibility. These calls are based on the notion that life expectancy will climb, despite the fact that it is currently declining. Another factor that is usually not addressed is the quality of life that exists in the last few years, which is likely not very good. Along with cuts to healthcare in the private sector and cuts to Medicare, life expectancy will likely decline substantially. To even propose that people in their 70s in poor health should still be working is simply inhuman. If they are physically able to, and have the desire to do so, that should be their choice. But what is being thrust upon the American people is the notion that you should "work until you die", a happy collateral being that TNCs will continue to get fatter on the back of your declining lifestyle, health and well-being.

 To answer the question I posed at the beginning of this post, it is the hijacking of American national interests by the TNCs, the stateless superclass and their proxies in the US political system which has led to this point. As with any hijacking, you have two choices: co-operate with the hijackers, or defeat them. Co-operation means capitulation- and, in this instance, the price of capitulation is giving up the notion of national independence- and that is clearly unacceptable. The only choice is to retake the country.

 I believe in compassionate capitalism. The profit motive should not be the only driver. We are not automatons or egg-laying chickens. We are a society, and ultimately need to thrive inclusively. The "global economy" is not the Darwinian mechanism it is claimed to be, nor is the milieu of political and economic sovereignty(as in the China example) of this "global economy" a natural condition of economic Darwinism. Americans need to wake up, and retake the rudder of the nation from the TNCs who have hijacked it. Otherwise, we face the next logical step in this process: unhindered movement of (cheap) workers globally, effectively relinquishing nationality and governance to the global corporations. One can discern the early implementation of this step in the "blue card" program of the EU and the "guest worker" proposals in the US. Private corporations, operating in a tightly meshed and almost invisible web of proxies, are already in control of many aspects of government, from police forces to prisons to military units to lawmaking to electronic surveillance to schools, in addition to their undeniable control of the allocation and spending of public funds. The boiling frogs story is appropriate in this context. It is time that we frogs realize that the water is about to boil.

Indian notions of skin color and beauty

Something else has crept into the Indian lexicon since I've been gone. Increasingly, I find Indians referring to certain other Indians as "white", when in fact they are merely lighter-skinned than other Indians, and rather brown when compared to Caucasians. Usually, this is done in an admiring tone, as if the person in question excelled in some intellectual contest and grabbed "whiteness" as a prize. Not for nothing is India's top-selling skin-lightening cream(which I suspect is nothing but a high-SPF product) called Fair and Lovely. So I've been paying attention to Indian attitudes toward color, and the standards for beauty. It's a hot topic, and Indians bridle at any overt references to racism, which is really what it amounts to when it forms the basis for social and professional discrimination.

 That Indians have an obsession with light skin, I have long been aware. After all, Bollywood(before it conferred that nickname on itself) set the tone many decades earlier by all but refusing to consider dark-skinned actors for leading roles(Rekha was one major exception). In other regional cinema, too, the same prejudice prevailed. Notable exceptions which come to my mind are the Bengali actors Mithun Chakraborty and the strikingly attractive Nandita Das, both of whom also have Caucasian features, which apparently compensates for their dark skin. When I was a child, you could bet that if anyone was regarded as having "film-star looks", the #1 attribute was light skin. Indians do have more aquiline noses, generally speaking, than Arabs, for example, but they tend to have weaker chins and less prominent cheekbones. So having strong chins and prominent cheekbones, considered Caucasian or "Aryan" attributes, have also figured into the Indian appreciation of what constitutes good looks along with, certainly, light skin and light eyes.

Nandita Das, a Bengali actress, director and producer

 A long-standing, and annoying, habit of people from the north of India is to refer to south Indians as dark-skinned or even "blackies"("kala log" or "kallu"), a term the British used for Indians during the Raj. Generally speaking, the bulk of north Indians have similar skin tone to the bulk of south Indians, the difference being that north India has a greater percentage of lighter-skinned people than the south. There are plenty of South Indians who are lighter-skinned than the majority of North Indians, and this generally invokes consternation when a North Indian meets them("Are you an Anglo?", "Are your parents from the north?"). There is, of course, a historical reason behind the genetics, but it is something that is generally played down, because of religious reasons for propaganda. There is a tendency to decry Muslims as illegitimate progeny of Arab invaders, in order to portray them as being un-Indian and thus "foreign", "alien" and unpatriotic. In reality, while a fair number of Muslims probably do have some degree of Arab blood in them, the amount of foreign blood in them is likely quite a bit less than non-Muslim Indians who are light-skinned. The overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims I have encountered are dark-skinned.

In the centuries before the Arab Muslim conquests of large parts of India, areas of the north were subjected to repeated invasions by peoples to the north, west and even north-east(Mongolians) of India. These invasions predictably left behind more than mere destruction, desolation and, occasionally, architectural, linguistic and epicurean influence. Frequently, they left behind genetic stamps on the local population. It is delusional to think or believe that such co-mingling was entirely or even mostly consensual. But the descendants of such relationships tend to look upon their altered and more Caucasian features with pride, oblivious to the probability that those very features were the outcome of less than chivalrous unions with alien invaders, something usually only portrayed for Indian Muslims.

In the south and east of India, European features are also the outcome of the migration of mixed peoples from the north and northwest,  as well as offspring of Arab and other West Asian and southern European traders and of course European cohabitation over the past four hundred years. But all over India, dating way back to some period of unrecorded history, the acquisition of lighter skin and/or Caucasian features has also often carried with it a social reward: higher status in India's caste system, which is so pervasive that it has enfolded alien cultures which came to India as well. All except for the Zoroastrians(or Parsis), who avoided casteism by excluding the progeny of mixed-marriages and forbidding conversion into their religion, and to a lesser extent, the Jews who similarly discouraged conversions but permitted a degree of intermarriage. Zoroastrians still very much retain the skin color and features of their Persian ancestors.

The role of skin color in caste is hotly debated in India, with those disagreeing pointing to the fact that some South Indian Brahmins, for example, are darker-skinned than North Indian farmers of the Vysya caste. I think that argument is akin to claiming that the French are not Caucasian because the Scandinavians have fairer skin. Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that in India, dark skin is to this day associated with a lower caste status and is subject to overt and covert discrimination. Regardless of what some may claim, a simple walk around talking to people on the streets and in the villages will confirm this perception. Interestingly, there is a community in Karnataka, as also in some other parts of India, known as Siddis, composed entirely of the descendants of African slaves. They are still distinctly identifiable as African, despite a degree of co-mingling, and they remain outside the mainstream, not necessarily socially ostracized, but definitely excluded from greater integration, to put it delicately, even with the most discriminated-against local Indian castes.

Siddi farmers in Karnataka

The reason I thought of writing on this topic is because I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that this obsession with light skin and notions of beauty based on the Caucasian standard is behind the apathy, disdain and even outright contempt that Indians seem to have for their fellow Indians, even if most are not consciously aware of their own attitude. This contempt is probably the primary reason behind India's failure to modernize its systems and procedures to go along with increasing prosperity for some of its people. There is an endemic attitude- which elsewhere would be clearly seen as racism- that somehow the poor, who usually look less Caucasian than the rich, exist to serve those "above" them, and that any change in that relationship is undesirable even though some collateral spillover does happen. I call it "shades-of-brown racism". That attitude manifests itself in a reluctance to improve conditions outside one's own home, lest it should have the inadvertent effect of improving the living conditions of the unworthy. There are luxurious private social clubs in India which charge an absolute fortune for membership, and yet I find that immediately outside their high walls is almost always a picture of neglect and decrepitude. I have referred to this in another post as the "local" mindset, which values anything foreign above its Indian counterpart, sometimes with reason, often without. Anything foreign, that is, with one notable exception: African products, including art, music and manufactures, are generally dismissed as inferior, as are Africans themselves. I think it is well worth pondering why that is so.



It's local- Part One

 In the last decade or so, I've been hearing this phrase rather frequently in India. "It's local". At first, I just took it to mean not imported. With time, though, I was able to place it in context, and realized that it meant "of inferior quality".  The flip side of this phrase means, of course, that anything made overseas is, by perception, superior to anything made in India. Perhaps that explains to some degree India's overwhelmingly negative balance of trade.

 Over the years, I've been a critic of India's economic policies, the so-called "liberalization". Not so much for changing the status quo, but the manner in which it was done, and the enormous corruption and ineptitude with which it was, and continues to be, accompanied. Yes, India has transformed. There are real highways built and being built, high-rise apartment buildings in far suburbia, shopping malls seemingly in every upscale neighborhood, a forty-fold rise in two and four-wheeler sales, European designer kitchens in upper middle-class homes, and apparently every international brand name has an Indian presence.

  It's a morphing which is startling and seemingly ubiquitous to a people accustomed to a century of glacial change, but otherwise unremarkable. Unremarkable, because when you look at even a country like Rwanda, which was devastated by a long-running civil war and genocide, you find growth rates which have averaged over 8% over the past decade, GDP has more than doubled, Kigali's grocery supermarkets are better than any I have seen in Bangalore and it is considerably cleaner. Unremarkable, because the same or similar transformation has been occurring worldwide with the advent of globalization, which makes India's rate of progress less than unique in the global context. What is different for India is that it is, more or less, a single market of over a billion people, thus theoretically simplifying business activity, and making it stand out even among faster developing economies. It also lets the Indian government invest in military hardware and research on a scale that cannot be done by less-populated developing countries- unless they band together in a common defense infrastructure- allowing India the luxury of posturing as a major military power.

Kigali's master plan

 However, the legacy of the past continues to haunt modern India, with 90% of the population- contrary to government claims- still in what most other countries would consider poverty. The population has increased by 500 million in the past 40 years alone and is projected to increase by another 500 million in the next 30 years, the vast majority continuing in the subsistence-level poverty of their parents, making more difficult, by orders of magnitude, a task which as far back as the mid-1970s was already considered almost impossibly daunting. The disconnect between the wealth accruing to a small segment of the population and the disregard for the welfare of the people at large was exemplified by the (in)famous words of Lalit Bhanot, secretary general of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee, who said that foreign notions of cleanliness and hygiene may "differ from our standards". Yes, our standards are "local", at least for the proletariat. One wonders if Mr. Bhanot would tolerate in his own home the same standards he found acceptable in the Games Village, or if his standards at home are noticeably different from western standards. "[T]here has been a dispute with [Planning Commission] figures because there has been a perception with everyone that within the planning commission they have one standard for the poor and another for the rich," says Nikhil Dey, a social activist.

 Most Indians I've spoken with seem to be in denial of the reality, and get quite upset at the suggestion that progress has not, in fact, touched just about every Indian. They point to cellphone penetration, which is apparently at 70%(close to 800 million) now. The fallacy of this claim seems not to impinge on anyone's consciousness. About 350 million Indians are below the age of 20, most of them in families earning less than $80 a month. Realistically, how many poor Indian families, together accounting for almost 900 million of India's 1.1 billion, provide cellphones to their children? Even among the relatively better-off, say those earning upto $200 a month, I would say that cellphone usage among their children is extremely low.

 So how does one account for the 800 million cellphone numbers in use? Simple: multiple phones and multiple SIMs. Even my housekeeper has a dual-SIM phone- as does her husband- and she keeps a couple of "spare" SIMs(which she refers to as "shims") with her. It's cheap enough to do so, unlike most cellular accounts in the west. Most middle-class to affluent people also keep multiple phones and SIM cards, and many of their children do, too. A group headed by Suresh Tendulkar, former chairman of the PM's Economic Advisory Council, reported that 42% of rural Indians(or approximately 300 million people) live on less than Rs. 15(25 US cents) per day. I don't think using a cellphone is exactly a priority for them. So claiming mobile penetration of 80% and projecting it at 98% in two more years is simply delusional, just like various other projections being made in and about India.

 What leads modern, educated and otherwise rational Indians to think that India is on the cusp of achieving developed status or becoming a superpower is that things are being seen in India, in the past decade alone, that have never been seen since Independence. One sees sleek new cars on the road, never mind that their sales total just 2%, in per capita terms, of any western country. There are swanky new high-rise buildings, with luxury apartments replete with Jacuzzis and wading pools, dotting the landscape. None- or at least not most- of this was the case even twenty-five years ago. So it does seem like there is tremendous change going on. But the reality is that this change positively impacts a relatively tiny percentage of the populace- in my estimation, fewer than 100 million. For validation of that estimate, look at first and second-world countries with a population of less than 100 million, and compare economic activity and consumption of consumer durable goods.

 Elite Indians are also unduly sanguine about the runaway population growth, arguing that as the rest of the world ages, India's young population would be able to fill in the depleted workforce. This seemingly sensible argument falls on its face, though, when one understands that in order to fit into a modern workforce around the world, the hundreds of millions of young Indians would need to be educated and healthy, two criteria that are not only inapplicable right now, but also not being adequately- if at all- planned for. Fifteen years ago, there was a rush among western companies to invest in the Indian consumer, having been misled(mostly by expatriate Indians) into the belief that India had a middle-class of 300 million and growing. Today, with a population which has grown an additional 150 million in the meanwhile, there is still no sign of that USA-sized middle-class, and it may or may not actually materialize in the foreseeable future. Truth be told, India's growing poor will eventually be a ball-and-chain shackling the country, not a fill-in for the shrinking global workforce, diverting and consuming resources which would otherwise aid a general rise in living standards. Think of it as the other side of the same coin which allows India its military strength.

 There was an ad in today's local paper from the State Bank of India, which boasts of having Rs. 1 lakh crore(Rs. 1000 billion or less than $20 billion) in mortgage loans. This is one of the largest banks in India. A loan portfolio of $20 billion wouldn't cover even 100,000 homes in a western country, let alone millions. If 100,000 new middle-class homes/apartments were being built in Bangalore this year, it would be huge news, and yet it would scarcely make a dent in the housing situation of this city of 9 million, growing at several hundred thousand a year. It's a stark illustration of the fact that the overwhelming majority continues to eke out their existence, even while the affluent continue to grow their wealth. The rising tide of affluence should have lifted more boats in India than it has done. The failure lies in the lack of foresight, the lack of planning, the corruption and, not least of all, the "local" mindset. The "local" mindset creates an affluent class which is unconcerned with the welfare of the population at large, or with the environment outside their personal properties, and more involved with propping up their own western-inspired lifestyles, cocooned from the real India of the un-deserving masses.

I clearly need more space to address this topic!


Read more on the "local" mindset in Part Two.

It's local- Part Two

 The tragic disconnect between the wealthy and the poor in India is probably best exemplified by the creation of an artificial Indian village, where the rich pay $150 a day(or the equivalent of six months income of real inhabitants of real Indian villages) to play at being peasants. The Gini index for India is greatly skewed by the lack of proper data- or intentionally distorted data- and the unwillingness of government to acknowledge the ongoing failure of projects ostensibly designed to lift people out of poverty. Those Indians who escape the clutches of poverty do so serendipitously, in spite of rather than because of government actions. It's not that government initiatives and policies cannot help. They can, indeed, as China has shown. The failure in India is the failure of intent or, if you prefer, of the "local" mindset. Recently, the Chief Minister of Karnataka, Sadananda Gowda, was compelled to resign, and was replaced by Jagadish Shettar. Mr Shettar's selection of his cabinet, as indeed his own appointment, was embroiled in caste-based controversy. This should have been at least mildly surprising to supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which currently rules the state, because the BJP has always- officially, at least- railed against caste politics and communalism, and portrayed itself as a "clean" party. Some of the ministerial appointees were upset that they weren't given the most "lucrative" portfolios(that is, posts which have higher corruption potential), as reported by The Deccan Herald. The national BJP leadership takes a predictable stand: "It's local." That a party which runs on a national platform of honesty, integrity and patriotism so openly and irresponsibly bases the composition of a State cabinet on caste and lucre spotlights the fundamental apathy of Indians to one another. It's a chase after personal wealth accumulation, principles and the nation be damned. It's as "local" as one can get.

 No doubt some who read Part One are wondering what my objections were to the "liberalization" initiated by then-Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister(and current PM) Manmohan Singh. I should bring some clarity to my remark. Unlike China- and before that, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea- India's liberalization failed to provide needed protections to its citizens during the process, particularly for the poor; for food and income security, and to a lesser extent, to protect existing and nascent industries against undue economic pressures while they adapt to competition and develop survival skills. To be sure, some industries are still protected, but a large part of the new industrial infrastructure is owned or controlled by MNCs, who are free to(and do) take their profits wherever they please. Take a look at the automotive sector: barring Tata and Mahindra, the rest of the four-wheeler sector is controlled by entities with no commitment to national objectives. Contrast that with China, where foreign participation is limited to a minority stake, with mandatory technology transfer. That policy, combined with China's active industrial espionage and nurturing of its domestic high-tech industry, has enabled the Chinese to go from making poor copies of Soviet-era fighter jets to putting together its own manned space program and GPS system in less than two decades.

 By contrast, India is still unable, despite having some expertise in launching satellites, to build its own turboprop trainer airplanes, and is buying them from a country not particularly known for aeronautical prowess. India buys its short-haul jets from Brazil, which is still considered a developing economy, and doesn't impinge on the Indian consciousness as a technically advanced country. While India has apparently developed long-range nuclear capable ballistic missiles, it is still unable to produce one of the staples of modern warfare: tank shells. Having previously made arrangements with a supplier from tiny Israel, India is now looking once more to Russia for this critical armament. India has also failed to develop a reliable automatic weapon for the infantry- again, a staple of the modern military. Not exactly what one would expect from a country which brags of having "arrived on the world stage" and aspires to be acknowledged as a "global military power".

 In the meanwhile, food insecurity is growing, with farm laborers helping cultivate grain crops whose prices are influenced by commodities sharks on the other side of the world, at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, compelling them to compete for these staples of life with people earning hundreds of times more than they do. I recall a few years ago when grain prices suddenly skyrocketed. It was attributed to President Bush's ethanol initiative, which allegedly put extraordinary demands on the global grain market. That has turned out to be just so much equine excreta(because Brazil has greatly expanded their own ethanol program for many years without significant impact on global grain prices), but what was accomplished- and what was the intent all along- was to open the door to the acceptance of global grain price volatility manipulated by those without(i.e., outside of) the actual production and distribution system. Money for nothing, like taking candy from a baby.

 Legitimate hedging of crop production has given way to unrestrained speculation which literally takes the food out of the mouths of the world's poor. Commodities trading used to be a low-key, lusterless, bordering-on-boring but necessary component of price stability for industrial inputs and farm incomes. Now it's become a high-stakes gambling activity, with superstar billionaire traders and princely returns to the select few at the cost of food security for hundreds upon hundreds of millions of the world's poorest. Countries like India should de-link their domestic commodities from the global market until such time as the people are able to accommodate world prices. Persistent double-digit inflation is destroying the lives of people on fixed incomes, as they constantly adjust to making do with less. Savings are losing real value even at the highest rates of interest currently available, with inflation running higher than the best rates, making it a double-whammy for people living on interest income: higher prices year-over-year and erosion of their capital base. No doubt some part of the population is seeing their incomes and assets grow quite satisfactorily(and some even spectacularly), but the overwhelming majority are suffering declines in real per-capita incomes, assets, food and water availability, and of course access to education and health care. No number of shopping malls, luxury apartments and other indicators of the high life for a tiny minority can nullify that fact, even if they do provide a convenient veil for those of the "local" mindset.


 In liberalizing India's economy, there should have been some sacred cows protected until such time as the people were able to deal with them without undue suffering. One, and the most important, is the food chain. "Globalizing" grain prices is nothing but disaster for people surviving on less than 50 US cents a day. Another is the financial system, including banking and insurance. While certainly the system needed to be modernized, there was no reason to open up the sector to foreign players at this time, particularly the insurance sector which is almost money for nothing in the virtually unregulated Indian market, and when there is no technology or value-addition being brought to the table. I have argued other points as well with people, such as the unaffordably liberal dispensation of hard-won foreign exchange, which has never been the hallmark of a country seriously building up export earnings as the catalyst for internal growth. For all the talk about the Indian economy being internally driven and not dependant on exports, the reality is quite the opposite. Exports(over $300 billion in 2011), and the multiplier effect from them, probably account for half of the real GDP of the country. Add in the effect of NRI remittances, and it's easy to see how precariously dependent India is on foreign sources of income.

This is the outside of a new restaurant in Bangalore. A perfectly walkable sidewalk has been rendered unusable for pedestrians, who will henceforth have to take to the street. Sure it looks nice, but is it worth having people run the risk of being mowed down by traffic? Why you bother, yaar? Its "local" problem, no?



 But it isn't all government alone to blame. I think there is a cultural indifference to what is perceived as "not mine", and to the effects of one's actions on society. Walk around any "upscale" neighborhood in any city in India. Odds are, you will find beautifully designed and executed homes, some with features like fountains and gazebos until recently only seen in estate homes. The patches of lawn will be immaculate emerald green. There is likely expensive paving, cladding and panelling, pride in displaying a meticulous sense of style and wealth. But that ends immediately beyond the property wall, where you will find sidewalks that are either rendered unusable by the homeowner making them an extension of his garden or using it as a parking space. If neither is the case, you will probably find them in a state of perpetual neglect, unpaved or broken, with trash strewn on them and in the gutters alongside. Money, obviously, is not a constraining factor in keeping these small public spaces in front of these expensive homes tidy and usable, and it is not a constraining factor in many less expensive neighborhoods either. What is a constraint is the mindset that nothing outside the walls deserves any consideration or upkeep. That is someone else's problem, easily dismissed as something "local".


If you aren't bored to death already, go on to Part Three!

It's local- Part Three

This is a Domino's outlet in Indiranagar, Bangalore. Two things are immediately apparent: the business owner doesn't care about the environment immediately outside the restaurant, as evidenced by the trash around the tree and the state of the sidewalk, and he/she/they do not care about the need of pedestrians to move unimpeded on the sidewalk, rather than have to take to walking on the road in this busy area. Another example of the discourteous "local" mindset.

 This is a pivotal time for gated communities in India, which have no current legal basis for gated security. There is a dispute under way in Bangalore, which I am almost certain will be resolved by new legal provisions to maintain the security and privacy of these communities.  The futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in their brilliant book "Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century", predicted what a future India would look like. In brief, they said that India would have islands of prosperous secure gated communities, populated by those either working for MNCs or catering in some way to employees of MNCs, and earning globally competitive incomes and living western lifestyles, surrounded by masses of the proletariat living in continuing poverty barely touched by anything resembling progress. It's a powerfully prescient scenario, as the current unfolding of precisely such communities bears out.

It doesn't have to be, though, and a future India could be a more inclusive India. But for that to happen, some fundamental attitudinal changes are necessary. People have been brainwashed by the glittering promise of globalization, that goods and services will freely flow from areas where they are best produced and that everything will work for the best. I am constantly amazed by the ability of people to believe in promises and projections contrasting starkly with conclusions which may be drawn from sober analysis. Take a look at the fundamental premise of globalization: free trade. Is there really free trade? I would argue that some countries permit freer trade than others, but real free trade exists only in the tiniest of countries, city-states, if you will, which are small enough to permit a specialization that serves them well. The American proponents of globalization argue that globalization has brought immense price relief to ordinary Americans because of Chinese sweat shops. The reality is that with declining incomes and rising expenditures, Americans have only been able to absorb the Chinese output through the massive expansion of consumer credit that accompanied the Sinicization of manufacturing and the global outsourcing of middle-class jobs.

Flashback to the 1960s and earlier, when the US was relatively more insular, with import restrictions on competing goods coming from countries with disparate advantages in terms of worker pay, safety, and so on. There were restrictions on interstate banking, let alone transnational banking. Only the wealthy had credit cards, and ordinary people only had store cards, which had to be paid off in months. The average consumer debt was a few hundred dollars, for furniture or Christmas gifts, and was usually paid off quickly. Unsecured debt was virtually unknown. Yet this was a country where people were fairly affluent, could aspire to put themselves through college without taking out huge loans, where innovation, enterprise or sheer hard work could put you solidly in the middle-class, where stock certificates could safely be stored away for a rainy day or for your kids' college funds, where people could look forward to working for 30 years in the same company and retiring on a sufficient pension. It had a balanced international trade, it's national debt was low and barely rose with inflation, and it was a net creditor globally. This was also the same country that people lined up to migrate to.

Now fast-forward to today, and the impact of the globalization which began in 1972 with the induction of Red China into the UN Security Council. The US has become the world's largest debtor, and its people the most personally indebted. Real incomes have declined, higher education and healthcare have become unaffordable. Job insecurity is unprecedented, and research scientists and accountants are being asked to "reinvent" themselves as plumbers, electricians and small businessmen. No longer is it a country that people from Asia dream of settling in, and now Americans seriously contemplate job opportunities elsewhere. Oh yes, fortunes have been made by some, mostly by putting ordinary Americans into debt servitude via personal and government debt. The trillions in profit from government debt along with the additional trillions in consumer and housing debt have found homes somewhere very private. No doubt China has also prospered, but on the back of western debt and incipient insolvency. The big winners here are the MNCs- or, rather, TNCs(Trans-National Corporations)- which have no national loyalties and do not suffer from any desire to be humane. Their goal is simple: acquisitions and profits without borders.

Now, what does this have to do with India, and the "local" mindset? Frankly, nothing if what we want is only rising lifestyles for the few. On the other hand, if we are concerned with lifting all boats, then the needs and aspirations of the many need to be considered. That means giving up the local=inferior or unworthy mindset, being more socially conscious, having the same aesthetic aspirations for your neighborhood as your home, foregoing some entitlements(like a Rs. 2.5 crore imported bathroom sink or luxury weddings in Bali using foreign exchange earned through underpaid laborers), opposing official policies or actions which do not put nation first, and- most importantly- beginning to hold public officials, elected or unelected, accountable for their actions and responsibilities. The problems are not somebody else's, they shouldn't be accommodated with "sab chalta hai" or "swalpa adjust maadu", or dismissed with complacency. China is on the verge of becoming the largest economy in the world but, for all their problems with corruption, official policy puts China first, and globalization and free trade are skillfully given lip-service while they do what they need to. The solution for India will not come from someone else, or from the Bill Gates Foundation or some multi-national conglomerate or NYT columnist beating the "globalization is good for all" drum.

The solution has to be, and is, local. It's you.