continuously updated blog about China & India
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Beware the Waking Dragon
WSJ: “The Indian government sold 9.5% of power producer NTPC Ltd. on Thursday, which will raise around 114 billion rupees ($2.1 billion) as it seeks to plug its fiscal deficit by selling stakes in state companies.
The NTPC sale followed the successful auction Friday of a 10% stake in oil producer Oil India Ltd. The government raised more than 31 billion rupees in that sale, which attracted strong demand from foreign investors.”
The Hindu: “Social uplift of women is must to ensure success of schemes aimed at development of women and children, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi said here on Wednesday.
Sonia Gandhi in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Empowerment of women impacts the health of the girl child. The UPA government has recently promulgated an ordinance regarding atrocities against women. Similarly, laws have been enacted for tackling domestic violence, provide property rights, and reservation for women in local bodies,” Ms. Gandhi said.
Speaking at the launch of the Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (Child Health Screening and Early Intervention Services programme) at the tribal town here in Thane district of Maharashtra, Ms. Gandhi hoped that the objective of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) initiative to benefit 27 crore children would be achieved through effective implementation and monitoring.
The scheme will be extended to cover all districts in the country in a phased manner, she said.
Challenges in health sector for welfare of women and children were immense, she said. “Despite best efforts, infant mortality is an area of concern. 40 per cent children are still affected by malnutrition,” she said.”
via The Hindu : News / National : Sonia launches national child health screening programme.
Reuters: “China’s role in operating a strategically important port in Pakistan is a matter of concern for India, its defense minister said on Wednesday, as New Delhi and Beijing jostle for influence in the region.
Indian policy-makers have long been wary of a string of strategically located ports being built by Chinese companies in its neighborhood, as India beefs up its military clout to compete with its Asian rival.
Management of Gwadar port, around 600 km (370 miles) from Karachi and close to Pakistan’s border with Iran, was handed over to state-run Chinese Overseas Port Holdings last week after previously being managed by Singapore’s PSA International.
“It is a matter of concern to us,” Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony told reporters when asked about Chinese control of the port.
When complete, the port, which is close to the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil shipping lane, is seen opening up an energy and trade corridor from the Gulf, across Pakistan to western China, and could be used by the Chinese Navy, analysts say.
“It will enable (China) to deploy military capability in the region,” said Jay Ranade, of the Centre for Air Power Studies and a former additional secretary at the government of India. “Having control of Gwadar, China is basically getting an entry into the Arabian Sea and the Gulf.”
China has also funded ports in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, and Chittagong in Bangladesh, both India’s neighbors.
“Gwadar is a more serious development than the others,” Ranade said, as the Pakistani port gives China base facilities.”
via India concerned by China role in Pakistan port | Reuters.
See also: https://chindia-alert.org/political-factors/geopolitics-chinese/
The Times: “One of India’s top technology bosses has attacked the growing tendency towards conspicuous consumption among his country’s business elite, saying that some of the excesses were repugnant in a nation of such poverty.
Azim Premji, the billionaire philanthropist and chairman of Wipro, the IT services group, said that practices such as flying in American bands for weddings at $1 million a time were damaging in India, where official statistics last year suggested that 360 million people were living in the depths of poverty.
His words come as Delhi considers imposing higher taxes on the super-rich as it tries to close a yawning budget gap.
The country’s ultra-wealthy should be devoting more of their earnings to philanthropy, Mr Premji said. He declined to be drawn on whether he thought the elite should be subject to higher taxes, emphasising instead the importance of giving away wealth voluntarily. The 67-year-old is one of Asia’s leading philanthropists and in 2001 founded the Azim Premji Foundation, an educational charity to which he has handed billions of dollars.
Mr Premji said: “In India the very rich are demonstrating too much conspicuous wealth in terms of lifestyle. That I think has not been the culture of India in terms of the previous rich, [who] always had very moderate, regulated lifestyles. That is getting a lot of visibility. If you go for parties and you go for weddings and in a country of our poverty some of those make you sick.”
India’s economy has slowed sharply, with growth of 5.5 per cent forecast for this year, down from expansion of over 8 per cent early in the decade. Mr Premji said that his country’s boom had been hyped in the past and that its image had been damaged recently by the economic slowdown and policy indecision.
Mr Premji, ranked as India’s third-wealthiest person by Forbes, warned that unemployment in his country could turn into a “complete disaster” if growth did not accelerate sharply.”
via The party has to stop, technology tycoon tells India’s mega rich | The Times.
Salman Rushdie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Hindu: “Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen said here on Sunday that the Muslim groups who protested against author Salman Rushdie’s visit to the city were distracting attention from “the real disadvantages” that the community faced.
“A lot of people who are enormously disadvantaged have enormous reasons to complain about other things,” Professor Sen said in response to a question on the controversy at the Kolkata Literary Meet, one of the events in the 37 International Kolkata Book Fair.
Professor Sen said that communities such as the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Muslims in West Bengal were not as privileged as the rest “in terms of the even-handedness of progress.”
“To subvert that issue into a completely different kind of issue and getting offended about something else — that is distracting attention from the real disadvantages that they face,” Professor Sen said.
The author of The Argumentative Indian said the militancy seen in recent developments restricted the conversation: “Anything that makes the Indian constructive argumentative tradition more militant — that people have the right [to deem an act as offensive] and therefore you cannot say those things — becomes a limitation because it restricts the conversation,” Professor Sen said.”
via The Hindu : News / National : “Muslims have bigger problems than Rushdie”.
See also: http://chindia-alert.org/political-factors/indian-tensions/
The Hindu: “Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Saturday strongly pitched for utilising MNREGA to increase agricultural production, saying the flagship scheme can play a big role to usher in second green revolution in India.
“I am of the belief that MNREGA has tremendous potential to increase agriculture production, which we have not been able to tap fully till date. There are many possibilities not only for creating community assets in villages but also providing irrigation facilities to small and marginalised farmers, developing land and promoting farming.
“Manifold increase in the produce of farmers can be made by connecting this scheme with the use of modern technologies in agriculture. There is no doubt that MNREGA can play a big role in fulfilling our dreams of second green revolution,” Ms. Gandhi said at the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act conference in New Delhi.
Acknowledging the challenges in proper implementation of the scheme, the UPA Chairperson said, “We frequently hear complaints of corruption and misutilisation of funds in this scheme. It is very essential to put a check on this.”
The government will take steps to reduce its shortcomings through the tools of modern communication and information, she said while maintaining that it was necessary that social audits happened timely and according to norms.
In his inaugural address at the conference, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said 30 new works have already been added to the list of works permitted under MNREGA, whose focus is by and large on providing employment in rural areas mainly through agriculture.”
via The Hindu : News / National : MNREGA can bring another green revolution: Sonia.
Taking coal to Newcastle and tea to China!
Reuters: “An estate owned by descendants of the 19th century British aristocrat for whom Earl Grey tea was named is turning history on its head by selling English tea to China.
The Tregothnan estate in the southwestern English county of Cornwall started selling tea from its tiny plantation in 2005 and last year produced about 10 metric tons (11.023 tons) of tea and infusions.
Although a drop in the ocean of global tea production, which the UK Tea Council estimated to be about 4.3 million metric tons, Tregothnan has found a niche for its products by trading on England’s historical reputation as a nation of tea-lovers.
“It’s unique. There’s no one else who’s growing tea in England and putting English tea on the market,” owner Evelyn Boscawen told Reuters.
The long history of immersing tea leaves in hot water for a refreshing drink is not lost on the son of the current Viscount Falmouth and a descendant of British Prime Minister Charles Grey, for whom the bergamot-flavored Earl Grey tea is named and whose Reform Act of 1832 sowed the seeds of modern parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage in Britain.
Chinese tea has been coming to Britain since the East India Company first imported it in the 17th century for consumption by wealthy aristocrats.
By the Victorian era, taking tea had become a regular ritual at almost every level of society from elaborate afternoon tea for the rich in country houses to tea and gruel for the working poor as depicted by author Charles Dickens.
But the Boscawens at Tregothnan are bucking the historic trend of tea flowing from East to West by beginning to export some of their wares to China and elsewhere.
“We do see China as an opportunity at the moment,” Boscawen said. “The Chinese are great lovers of buying exotic things from all over the world. Even if it might have come from China (originally).”
Tea, native to Asia, is not traditionally grown in Britain but can be cultivated outdoors at Tregothnan, which is situated in England’s southwest and benefits from an unusual microclimate similar to that of Darjeeling in India.
Less similar to India is the tiny scale of production at Tregothnan, which might be large enough to be considered a small Darjeeling tea garden, the English estate’s commercial and garden director Jonathan Jones said.
“We went into this right from the outset as being able to put the English into English tea,” Jones said. “We weren’t ever looking at being the new India or China, that’s ridiculous.””
via Earl Grey descendants sell English tea to China | Reuters.
See also: For all the Tea in China by Sarah Rose: the smuggling of and transplanting tea from China into India took several years to effect though eventually, British tastes turned to Indian tea in preference to Chinese tea.
Indian rupee collection (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
WSJ: “The Indian rupee rose to its highest level in more than three months against the U.S. dollar Wednesday, tracking strong gains in the euro.
At 1005 GMT, the dollar was trading at 53.37 rupees, after falling to 53.35 rupees–a level not seen since Oct. 23. The dollar was at 53.76 in late Asian trade Tuesday.
The euro touched a fresh 13-month high of $1.35367 Wednesday.
The rupee benefited also from hopes of more monetary-policy easing by the central bank in 2013 to help boost economic growth which has slowed to its weakest in nearly a decade.
Tuesday, the Reserve Bank of India trimmed its key lending rate by a quarter-percentage point to 7.75%–the first rate cut in nine months–and said “it is critical now to arrest the loss of growth momentum.”
The RBI said its policy stance intends to “provide an appropriate interest rate environment to support growth as inflation risks moderate.””
Times of India: “The growing presence of Chinese telecom companies in Maldives and Nepal has put security agencies on alert over fears that equipment used for infrastructure development there might be bugged and misused for intercepting any communication between India and the two countries.
The concerns by the central security agencies which have been conveyed to the telecom department here came against the backdrop of about $5.70 crore loan given by China to Maldives to implement its information technology (IT) infrastructure project, according to official sources.
The Huawei Technologies (Lanka) Co. Ltd, China enterprise business group and the National Centre for Information Technologies, Maldives have already signed an MoU to develop the IT Infrastructure in Maldives under the ‘Smart Maldives Project’, they said.”
via India wary of China’s telecom forays in Nepal, Maldives – The Times of India.
Times of India: “Chinese engineers will repair the second unit of 300MW capacity of YamunaNagar power plant, which is non-functional since last year.
Map of India showing location of Haryana (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Haryana power minister Ajay Yadav said the plant, which is based on Chinese technology, is expected to be functional by February-end after it is repaired.
Yadav said 15 engineers from China will come to Haryana by month-end to resolve the problem cropped up at Yamuna Nagar power plant.
Engineers will remain here till power plant start running properly, he added.
The power plants at Yamuna Nagar and Khader (Hisar) were fitted with Chinese machinery.
Ajay Singh Yadav said Yamunanagar thermal power plant started functioning in 2008-09 but last year the plant stopped generating power because of fault in Chinese rotor which could not be repaired in India.”
via Chinese engineers to repair Haryana power plant – The Times of India.
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 