03/12/2014

A New Look for Indian Railways – India Real Time – WSJ

Indian Railways is trying to get a makeover.

“We want to improve passenger amenities,” said Suresh Prabhu, India’s new minister for railways, via a video conference at an event organized by the Asia Society in Mumbai Wednesday.

India’s nationalized rail network carries around 30 million passengers a day and has a budget for 2014/15 of 654 billion rupees ($10 billion.)

So what will the new railways look like? Mr. Prabhu gave some clues Wednesday.

Better food: Train travelers have long grumbled about the quality of food served on Indian trains including watery dal (lentil soup) and thick rotis (Indian bread.)

Mr. Prabhu said he’s considering a plan to set up base kitchens that will make good quality food to supply trains.

He’s also exploring an option to tie up with restaurants along train routes, so that commuters can order food from those restaurants, and the food would be delivered onto the train by Railway staff.

Some private websites have lately started  offering this facility on their own, such as travelkhana.com,  yatrachef.com and railtiffin.com.

Mobile ticket booking: The Indian Railways’ website irctc.co.in, which allows travelers to book tickets online, is one of the most-frequently visited websites in India.

Now, Indian Railways wants to introduce an option for travelers to be able to book train tickets on their cellphones. Mr. Prabhu didn’t clarify if he was referring to a new app for this booking.

He said Wednesday that a technical glitch has delayed the launch, but passengers can expect it soon.

Cleanliness: The Railways are looking to improve the quality of toilets and waiting spaces at train stations, said Mr. Prabhu. “We also want to improve the coaches,” he said. The plan is to retrofit existing train coaches and set up a factory for making new coaches, he added.

“In the next few months we should be able to put in place a complete blueprint” to achieve these goals without denting the rail finances, said Mr. Prabhu.

via A New Look for Indian Railways – India Real Time – WSJ.

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03/12/2014

Under Pressure: The 10-Story Machine China Hopes Will Boost Its Aviation Industry. – China Real Time Report – WSJ

The engineers started closing the rollerdoor the moment they saw a foreigner walking toward them.

Standing around laughing in blue overalls and yellow hard hats, they went quiet the moment I started walking up the drive. I asked if I could take a peek behind the door. They said it was a secret.

Still, I managed to catch a glimpse of two floors’ worth of the 10-story-tall machine Beijing hopes will play a major role in driving China’s aviation and aerospace industries: an 80,000-ton closed-die hydraulic press forge.

Repeated requests for a tour of the forge were declined. Both Zhang Jian, the head of propaganda at Erzhong Group, the company that built and operates the forge, and Wang Yu, the secretary of the board of directors of Erzhong’s Shanghai-listed unit, said that the forge is “confidential.”

It’s not immediately clear what about the machine – which is painted green with Erzhong Group printed across it in red Chinese characters – is so secret.

The machine is the biggest of its kind in the world. The biggest forge in the U.S. can exert only 50,000 tons of pressure, and is operated by Alcoa AA +0.93% in Ohio. France has a 65,000-ton machine, and Russia has a machine capable of exerting 75,000 tons of pressure.

But the technology China is using is nothing new. It is based on modifications of Russian designs from the 80s, according to a person involved in the development process.

More sensitive is was China can potentially do with it.

Press forging involves shaping a piece of metal under high pressure by squeezing it into a mold. That alters the flow of the metal’s grain – its internal structure – allowing engineers to create stronger and lighter components than would be possible by just beating them into shape or welding them together. Greater pressure results in stronger components.

The Erzhong forge can exert up to 80,000 tons of downward pressure using five columns. Flipped upside down, it could lift China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier, with room to spare for a handful of submarines. Airbus is using the Russian forge to make landing gear components for the A380, the world’s biggest passenger plane. Having the world’s biggest forge should allow China to produce large components of higher strength than possible elsewhere.

The technology was pioneered during WWII by Germany, which didn’t have a sufficient supply of steel and so had to mold its air force out of more brittle, but lighter metals, according to Tim Heffernan, a writer who has researched the U.S. forge program. The end of the war brought the start of the jet age, and the U.S. government provided support for the building of forges around the country, so that the country was able to produce light planes that were sufficiently strong to withstand supersonic speeds.

Alcoa’s forge has been producing parts for Boeing and Airbus for decades. The company says it supplies almost all forged wheel and brake components for U.S. military aircraft and helicopters, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the U.S. military’s newest fighter jet.

Erzhong hasn’t explicitly said what the forge will be used for, but academics involved in its development process said there are potential military applications.

The first component produced by the forge at its official launch in April last year was the landing gear for the C919,  China’s long-awaited and much behind schedule narrow-bodied passenger aircraft being built by the Commercial Aircraft Company of China.

via Under Pressure: The 10-Story Machine China Hopes Will Boost Its Aviation Industry. – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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02/12/2014

South Asia’s hydro-politics: Water in them hills | The Economist

IT IS a thrill trekking beside the upper Marsyangdi river in northern Nepal. On view are spectacular waterfalls and cliffs, snowy Himalayan peaks, exotic birds and butterflies. But just where tourists and villagers delight in nature, hydropower engineers and economists have long been frustrated; in such torrents they see an opportunity that for too long has been allowed to drain away.

Himalayan rivers, fed by glacial meltwater and monsoon rain, offer an immense resource. They could spin turbines to light up swathes of energy-starved South Asia. Exports of electricity and power for Nepal’s own homes and factories could invigorate the dirt-poor economy. National income per person in Nepal was just $692 last year, below half the level for South Asia as a whole.

Walk uphill for a few hours with staff from GMR, an Indian firm that builds and runs hydropower stations, and the river’s potential becomes clear. An engineer points to grey gneiss and impossibly steep cliffs, describing plans for an 11.2km (7-mile) tunnel, 6 metres wide, to be blasted through the mountain. The river will flow through it, before tumbling 627 metres down a steel-lined pipe. The resulting jet—210 cubic metres of water each second—will run turbines that at their peak will generate 600MW of electricity.

The project would take five years and cost $1.2 billion. It could run for over a century—and produce nearly as much as all Nepal’s installed hydropower. Trek on and more hydro plants, micro to mighty, appear on the Marsyangdi. Downstream, China’s Sinohydro is building a 50MW plant; blasting its own 5km-long tunnel to channel water to drive it. Nearby is a new German-built one. Upstream, rival Indian firms plan more. They expect to share a transmission line to ill-lit cities in India.

GMR officials in Delhi are most excited by another river, the Upper Karnali in west Nepal, which is due to get a 900MW plant. In September the firm and Nepal’s government agreed to build it for $1.4 billion, the biggest private investment Nepal has seen.

Relations between India and Nepal are improving. Narendra Modi helped in August as the first Indian prime minister in 17 years to bother with a bilateral visit. Urged by him, the countries also agreed in September to regulate power-trade over the border, which is crucial if commercial and other lenders are to fund a hydropower boom. Mr Modi was back in Kathmandu for a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation, on November 26th and 27th. Governments think the normally rudderless body could find a purpose in energy integration—though the talks were poisoned by poor relations between Pakistan and India. Another big Indian hydro firm agreed with Nepal’s government, on November 25th, to build a 900MW hydro scheme, in east Nepal, known as Arun 3. Research done for Britain’s Department for International Development suggests four big hydro projects could earn Nepal a total of $17 billion in the next 30 years—not bad considering its GDP last year was a mere $19 billion.

All Nepal’s rivers, if tapped, could feasibly produce about 40GW of clean energy—a sixth of India’s total installed capacity today. Add the rivers of Pakistan, Bhutan and north India (see map) and the total trebles.  Bhutan has made progress: 3GW of hydro plants are to be built to produce electricity exports. The three already generating produce 1GW out of a total of 1.5GW from hydro. These rely on Indian loans, expertise and labour.

Why a Himalayan cross-border hydropower rush now? In Nepal projects were once scuppered by local politics, a ten-year civil war, suspicion of India and a lack of regulation that put off creditors. Slowly, such problems are being tackled. The war ended in 2006. It helps, too, that the terms of the projects look generous to the host. For Upper Karnali, GMR will set aside 12% of electricity production, free, for Nepali consumers. It will also give Nepal a 27% stake in the venture. After 25 years of operation the plant will be handed to Nepal.

A second reason, says Raghuveer Sharma of the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), was radical change that opened India’s domestic power market a decade ago. Big private firms now generate and trade electricity there and look abroad for projects. India’s government also presses for energy connections over borders, partly for the sake of diplomacy. There has even been talk of exporting 1GW to Lahore, in Pakistan—but fraught relations between the two countries make that a distant dream.

via South Asia’s hydro-politics: Water in them hills | The Economist.

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02/12/2014

India’s Farming Women Use Cameras to Share Lessons – Businessweek

Kavita Devi has spent 50 years farming the way her elders taught her. Until recently, that meant working other people’s land in the northeastern Indian village of Gosaibigha in exchange for 10 pounds of rice once a season. But since July, twice a month she’s been joining about 30 women neighbors in saris who file into a makeshift movie theater in a buffalo shed, where they watch videos from a battery-powered, handheld projector shown on a fuzzy brown blanket hung on a wall. In the videos, which run for 8 to 10 minutes, women from nearby villages demonstrate ways to boost rice yield by spacing the seedlings farther apart and using compost instead of fertilizer. “They look very successful,” Devi says later. “I would like to be one of them.” Since July she’s been leasing a small patch to plant her own crops.

A videographer watches as farmers demonstrate techniques in Uttar Pradesh

Technology is transforming the way women like Devi farm. In rural India, impoverished women do most of the labor using methods passed down for millennia. About 100,000 (mostly male) government and private agricultural experts roam the country to teach farmers modern techniques. But fewer than 6 percent of farmers have ever seen one, according to the World Bank, and women are often excluded from those training sessions because they lack legal rights to their husbands’ land.

Digital Green, a nonprofit founded by Microsoft (MSFT) researchers, is trying to change that. The group distributes pocket cameras and tripods to local women and trains them to storyboard, act in, shoot, edit, and screen videos demonstrating farming innovations. Because the villages where the women work often lack reliable electricity, it’s all done via battery-powered projectors. Women who screen the videos keep track of attendee questions and monitor adoption of the practices to help directors improve later versions. Using the audience’s peers as actors is particularly important, says Rikin Gandhi, Digital Green’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “Viewers identify with those featured in videos based on dialect and appearance, etc., to determine whether it is someone they can trust,” he says. Villagers will tune out if they see items that aren’t common in their communities, such as a plastic bucket or a watch.

via India’s Farming Women Use Cameras to Share Lessons – Businessweek.

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02/12/2014

India and France to push ahead with Rafale jet deal | Reuters

The French and Indian defence ministers agreed on Monday to overcome any differences and finalise the sale of 126 fighter jets to India in a deal worth an estimated $15 billion, the Indian defence ministry said.

A Rafale jet fighter is seen on the assembly line in the factory of French aircraft manufacturer Dassault Aviation in Merignac near Bordeaux, southwestern France, January 10, 2014. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/Files

France’s Dassault Aviation (AVMD.PA) has been trying to clinch a deal to sell India its Rafale jets since New Delhi chose the company over other foreign plane manufacturers in 2012. But disagreements over cost and work-sharing have slowed talks, while India’s weak economy has stretched government finances.

On Monday, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian met his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar, who was appointed defence minister last month.

“Both sides agreed to take forward the strategic co-operation between the two countries. They discussed all issues including Rafale. It was decided that whatever differences still existed would be resolved in a fast-track manner,” said Indian defence ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar.

Under the deal, which would provide a major boost to French domestic defence manufacturing, the first 18 planes will be made in France and shipped to India, while the remaining 108 will be produced by state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (IPO-HIAE.NS).

The final phase of exclusive negotiations on the contract should conclude within India’s current budget year ending in March 2015, Dassault Chief Executive Eric Trappier said last month.

via India and France to push ahead with Rafale jet deal | Reuters.

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28/11/2014

Narendra Modi woos Saarc nations, pledges slew of investments to counter China – The Times of India

India pledged a slew of regional investments at Saarc summit this week, seeking to counter China’s growing economic inroads into its backyard as it remains embroiled in bitter rivalry with Pakistan.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said South Asia‘s largest economy would fund regional infrastructure, health facilities and even a communications satellite, and promised to free up its markets to exporters in smaller countries in the region.

Modi, who won a landslide election victory in May, has made clear that boosting India’s influence in its immediate neighbourhood is a key strategic priority for his government.

Critics say the previous Congress party government began to take relationships for granted, allowing economic giant China — which shares a border with four of India’s neighbours — to step into the breach.

But the failure of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) to make any significant progress during a two-day meeting underscored the scale of the challenge New Delhi faces.

Cross-border trade among the eight Saarc nations — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — still accounts for less than five percent of total commerce in the region.

“Indians want to keep South Asia as their exclusive sphere of influence,” said Sreeram Chaulia, dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs in Delhi.

“To do that… we need to play the economic game and we need to play the connectivity game better. We have been protectionist, and that is not good,” he said, welcoming Modi’s pledge to help smaller nations reduce their trade deficits with India.

Leaders signed just one agreement, on energy cooperation, at a summit that was overshadowed by the rivalries between India and Pakistan, leading host country Nepal’s Prime Minister Sushil Koirala to say that Saarc had fallen short of expectations.

Nepal, long under the political influence of New Delhi, has benefited hugely from China’s bounty over the last decade, getting much-needed new roads and other infrastructure. Even the venue where the leaders met was built with Chinese money.

It is among several Saarc nations including Pakistan and Sri Lanka that reportedly support full membership for China, which currently enjoys observer status in the regional grouping.

India has resisted promoting its regional rival to full membership status, which comes with the power to veto agreements.

Frustrated by the slow pace of progress towards regional cooperation, it has also sought to woo its neighbours outside the Saarc framework.

via Narendra Modi woos Saarc nations, pledges slew of investments to counter China – The Times of India.

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28/11/2014

Women still outnumbered in top jobs – China – Chinadaily.com.cn

Despite China having one of the highest rates of female employment in the world, only a small percentage of women work in senior positions, said a research report released in Shanghai on Thursday.

Women hold less than 10 percent of executive level jobs in China and have only a 1 in 15 chance of reaching the chief executive suite, the report based on a study by Bain & Co said.

Only about 6 percent of CEOs and 8 percent of board directors are women, and only 27 percent of senior managers are female, according to the report.

The study in May surveyed 850 women who hold a variety of positions in more than 25 industries and 50 cities across China.

Disruption from family commitments is the top obstacle to women advancing in China.

“I wish to excel in my career and take good care of my family at the same time. Sometimes I feel that I might have been expecting too much,” said Meng Xiaoqing, a 25-year-old clerk who has been working for three years for a furniture maker in Shanghai.

Meng said she once aspired to become head of her department, but she dropped the plan because she “might not be able to handle more responsibilities and a household at the same time”.

China has introduced a series of gender parity policies and has promoted equal opportunities for women, but accepted norms and behaviors are somehow disconnected from these policies, said Jennifer Zeng, co-author of the study.

About 73 percent of working-age women in China are employed, compared with 67 percent in the UK, 66 percent in Australia and 62 percent in the United States.

Women tend to be as qualified as men when they enter the workforce, comprising 47 percent of university graduates in China, and they initially progress in equal numbers, holding 46 percent of professional positions, the report said.

“My observation is that enterprises have been investing heavily in improving gender parity, and female employees are better informed than ever about how to protect themselves when gender discrimination occurs,” said Liu Wei, a lawyer at Shanghai Shenda Law Firm.

The real challenge is for companies themselves to counter the prevailing stereotypes, differences in women’s and men’s leadership styles, as well as gender and organizational biases, Zeng said.

Neither men nor women seem to like female bosses, who are perceived as being detail-oriented to the point of micromanaging. As women move up in seniority, they are also more likely to be labeled “aggressive” and “less feminine”, and such stereotypes and labels can undercut women’s confidence levels and make it more difficult for them to work effectively with others.

via Women still outnumbered in top jobs – China – Chinadaily.com.cn.

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28/11/2014

Indian Stock Exchange Rises Up World Rankings, Catching Up With China – India Real Time – WSJ

Indian shares are on a roll and that’s bringing the country’s stock exchanges onto the global stage.

English: National Stock Exchange of India Русс...

English: National Stock Exchange of India Русский: Национальная фондовая биржа Индии (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Friday, the market capitalization, or total value of listed companies, on Mumbai’s BSE exchange reached a new record of 100 trillion rupees ($1.6 trillion.)

The market value of companies listed on Indian stock exchanges has risen by more than 40% over the past year, as investors are betting that Indian companies will benefit from a turn in the local economy and policies expected from the new government that came to power in May.

The BSE stood 10th among the world’s stock exchanges as measured by market value at the end of October, according to data from the World Federation of Exchanges.

It is followed closely by India’s National Stock Exchange, which is ranked 11th.

Industry experts say India’s standing is likely headed higher.

“It is a matter of time before we make it to the top 5,” stock exchanges in the world, said Kalpana Morparia, chief executive of J.P. Morgan India, in a statement Friday.

If the market cap of Indian companies keeps increasing at its recent pace, the BSE and NSE could soon overtake Germany’s Deutsche Borse and China’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

via Indian Stock Exchange Rises Up World Rankings, Catching Up With China – India Real Time – WSJ.

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28/11/2014

China Soon to Have Almost as Many Drivers as U.S. Has People – China Real Time Report – WSJ

China will soon have nearly as many drivers as the U.S. has people.

As of this week, the number of Chinese motor-vehicle drivers was poised to break past 300 million people, according to the country’s top law-enforcement agency, including 244 million licensed passenger-car drivers. The U.S., by comparison, has about 319 million men, women and children, and nearly 212 million licensed drivers.

Meanwhile, China has 154 million private autos, next only to the U.S., said the ministry. The U.S. government puts the number of cars and trucks there at around 240 million, suggesting China still has a ways to go before it can fill parking lots the way Americans do.

The numbers – a result of China’s wealth accumulation over the past decade as well as the rise a domestic car-manufacturing base – have all kinds of implications for the world’s No. 2 economy. The rise in the ranks of drivers could be good news for an industry facing slowing growth and overcapacity, though it also complicated Beijing’s efforts to wrap its arms around the country’s massive pollution problems.

First, the details: Chinese drivers are increasingly female, both older and younger, and new to the streets.

via China Soon to Have Almost as Many Drivers as U.S. Has People – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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27/11/2014

Inheritance law: A lack of will power | The Economist

IN RECENT weeks China’s leaders have been talking up the need to enhance the rule of law. Their aim is to strengthen the Communist Party’s grip on power while at the same time ensuring that justice is served more fairly. This may improve the lives of some. Many people complain bitterly that courts often pay more heed to the whims of officials than to the law. But in the realm of death, it is the law itself that is the problem. The country’s statutes on inheritance remain little changed from the days when few had any property to bequeath. The rapid emergence in recent years of a large middle-class with complex property claims has been fuelling inheritance disputes. The crudity of the law is making matters worse.

Today’s inheritance law was adopted in 1985 when divorce and remarriage were rare and international marriage nearly unknown. Few owned homes, cars or other valuable property. The law does at least grant men and women equal rights to their kin’s estates, but otherwise it is based largely on tradition. It is specific when it comes to handing down “forest trees, livestock and poultry” but runs out of steam when it comes to newfangled notions such as intellectual property; never mind domain names and digital photographs. A sweeping reference to “other lawful property” is its unhelpful attempt to cover all eventualities. What counts as property? By whose laws? The statute has no answers.

Modest changes were approved in 2003, but woolly areas remain such as in procedures for registering wills. This has led to rancorous court cases like one that last month attracted much public attention. It involved a disputed will and the embattled surviving family members of a famous calligrapher and his estate worth about 2 billion yuan ($326m).

Since the last revisions to the law, society has kept up its blistering pace of change. The divorce rate has risen in each of the past ten years. In 2009 divorces outnumbered marriages. Thus there are now ex-spouses and stepchildren among those squabbling over estates. China’s embrace of globalisation means that some assets (and indeed, clamouring relatives) are located in other countries.

China’s one-child policy has sometimes complicated matters. State media reported on a car crash in 2012 in which both parents died several hours before their sole child, a six-year-old girl. She automatically inherited their assets in that short interval but had no legal heir herself, meaning the assets went to the state instead of other kin.

At a meeting in October Chinese leaders expressed support for amending the inheritance law (though a long-mooted plan to introduce an inheritance tax still looks far from being put into force: the middle class does not want that). Yang Lixin of Renmin University in Beijing says that despite this resolve it could still be several years before the law catches up with reality. It is enough to send legal drafters to an early grave.

via Inheritance law: A lack of will power | The Economist.

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