Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
Image copyright AFPImage caption Embankments have been washed away in Bangladesh
Millions of people across Bangladesh and eastern India are taking stock of the devastation left by Cyclone Amphan.
A massive clean-up operation has begun after the storm left 84 dead and flattened homes, uprooted trees and left cities without power.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has arrived in West Bengal state to conduct an aerial survey.
Authorities in both countries had evacuated millions of people before the storm struck.
Covid-19 and social-distancing measures made mass evacuations more difficult, with shelters unable to be used to full capacity.
Officials also said people were afraid and reluctant to move to shelters for fear of contracting the virus.
The cyclone arrived with winds gusting up to 185km/h (115mph) and waves as high as 15ft.
Image copyright REUTERSImage caption Roads have been blocked by falling trees in BangladeshImage copyright AFPImage caption Many people have been injured in wall collapses in Bengal
It is the first super cyclone to form in the Bay of Bengal since 1999. Though its winds had weakened by the time it struck, it was still classified as a very severe cyclone.
Three districts in India’s West Bengal – South and North 24 Parganas and East Midnapore – were very badly hit.
In Bangladesh, there are reports of tens of thousands of homes damaged or destroyed and many villages submerged by storm surges in low-lying coastal areas like Khulna and Satkhira.
The affected areas include the Sunderbans, mangroves spread over an area of more than 10,000 square kilometres that spans both India and Bangladesh – the swampy islands are home to more than four million of the world’s poorest people.
Image copyright MUKTIImage caption Many homes, built of brick and mud, have been washed away
Those in the Sunderbans say it is too early to estimate casualties in the area, which is now cut-off from the mainland by the storm.
“There are houses which have collapsed and people could be trapped in them but we don’t know yet,” Debabrat Halder, who runs an NGO in one of the villages, told the BBC.
He recalls cyclone Bulbul in November 2019, which was followed by a huge incidence of fever, diarrhoea and flu, and is afraid that that the same may happen again.
And worse, he adds, is that the flooding from contaminated sea water, has likely destroyed the soil.
“Nothing will grow in this soil,” he says, adding that it will likely take years to convert it into fertile land again.
Image copyright MUKTIImage caption The Sunderbans delta is frequently hit by severe stormsImage copyright MUKTIImage caption Crops have all been destroyed by the flooding
Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, and one of India’s biggest cities has been devastated. Its roads are flooded and the city was without power for more than 14 hours.
The state’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, said the devastation in Kolkata was “a bigger disaster than Covid-19”.
But assessment of the damage is being hampered by blocked roads and flooding in all these areas.
Image copyright JOSHY MALIYEKKALImage caption Drinking water reeking of alcohol started flowing out of the apartment taps
Residents of an apartment building in southern India were left in shock after a mix of beer, brandy and rum started gushing out of their taps.
The smelly, brown liquid began flowing from kitchen taps in the block of flats, in Kerala, on Monday morning.
Bemused residents then contacted the authorities for help, and discovered their water well had been contaminated by officials – albeit accidentally.
It emerged 6,000 litres of confiscated alcohol had been buried nearby.
The alcohol, which officials had placed in a pit after it was seized on court orders, had seeped through the soil and into a well – the same well which supplied the residents of the 18 flats in Thrissur district with drinking water.
“We were so shocked,” Joshy Malyiekkal, owner of the apartment complex, told BBC Hindi’s Imran Qureshi.
Luckily, the strong smell put people off consuming the water. However, the discovery meant there was not only no drinking water for the families, but they were also unable to wash.
“The children couldn’t go to school and even their parents couldn’t go to work,” Mr Malyiekkal said.
Image copyright JOSHY MALIYEKKALImage caption The contaminated water from the well being pumped out
After residents complained, officials acted to rectify the mistake.
But the process of pumping the well clean is likely to take a month, according to residents, leaving them reliant on deliveries from authorities.
“They’ve been supplying about 5,000 litres of water daily but it is not enough to cover all the families in our building,” Mr Malyiekkal said, pointing out the well was their main source of water.
Officials from the department did not respond to questions from the BBC.
The state of Kerala has the highest consumption of alcohol in the country.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – In this teeming capital city of more than 20 million people, a worsening drought is amplifying the vast inequality between India’s rich and poor.
The politicians, civil servants and corporate lobbyists who live in substantial houses and apartments in central Delhi pay very little to get limitless supplies of piped water – whether for their bathrooms, kitchens or to wash the car, dog, or spray a manicured lawn. They can do all that for as little as $10-$15 a month.
But step into one of the slum areas in the inner city, or a giant disorganized housing estate on the outskirts and there is a daily struggle to get and pay for very limited supplies of water, which is delivered by tanker rather than pipe. And the price is soaring as supplies are fast depleting.
India’s water crisis is far from even-handed – the elite in Delhi and most other parts of the country remain unaffected while the poor scramble for supplies every day. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official residence and those of his cabinet are in central Delhi, as are those of most lawmakers.
That may help to explain why it took until this week for Modi to call for a massive water conservation program, the first big initiative by the government despite years of warnings about dry reservoirs and depleted water tables, policy makers and water industry experts said.
Telecom sales representative Amar Nath Shukla, who lives in a giant unauthorized housing sprawl on the south side of Delhi, says he is now paying 700 rupees ($10) for a small tanker to bring him, his wife and three school-age children 2,000 liters of water, their weekly quota.
A year ago, Shukla would buy two of the rusty, oval-shaped tankers a week for 500 rupees each but he cut back to one as the price climbed 40 percent.
“Why should a densely populated settlement get so little of water and why should the sparsely-populated central district of New Delhi receive so much of extra supply?” asked Shukla.
More than 30 other residents Reuters spoke to in his Sangam Vihar district also complained about the quality of water.
“Until last year I was drinking the water sold by a few local suppliers but then I fell ill and the doctor asked me to buy water bottles made by only big, reputed companies,” said Dilip Kumar Kamath, 46, waving a prescription which listed abdominal pain and stomach infection as his ailments.
WATER GANGS
Delhi’s main government district and the army cantonment areas get about 375 liters of water per person per day but residents of Sangam Vihar on average receive only 40 liters for each resident per day. The water comes from boreholes and tankers under the jurisdiction of the Delhi water board, run by the city government.
But residents say some of the boreholes have been taken over by private operators associated with criminal gangs and local politicians. These gangs also have a major role in providing private tankers, which are all illegal, making people liable to price gouging.
And all this when temperatures, and demand, are soaring. Delhi was the second driest it has been in 26 years in June, and recorded its highest ever temperature for the month at 48 degrees Celsius on June 10.
Monsoon rains reached the capital on Thursday, more than a week later than usual, with only a light drizzle.
Most private tanker operators in Delhi either illegally pump out fast depleting ground water or steal the water from government supplies, various government studies show.
In Delhi, nearly half of the supply from the Delhi water board either gets stolen with the connivance of lowly officials or simply seeps out via leaky pipes, several studies show.
The board’s 1,033 tanker fleet is well short of the city’s requirements. Hundreds of private water tankers are operating this summer, though there are no official numbers.
WATER WARS
The water scarcity is even more acute in the Bhalswa Dairy locality of northwestern Delhi, more than 30 km (20 miles) from Sangam Vihar. The water from a couple of community taps and hand pumps are too toxic to use, forcing people to queue up for a government tanker that comes just once a day.
As a result, fights frequently break out when people, mostly can-carrying women and children, sprint towards the arriving tanker. Last year, at least three people were killed in scuffles that broke out over water in Delhi.
“Fights over water supplies have gone up since May and these fights now constitute almost 50% of our daily complaints,” said a police official at the Bhalswa Dairy Police station, who declined to be named.
Some tanker operators have also started selling bottled water, underlining concerns over the quality of water in their tanks and how costs for ordinary people can mount, said the police official.
Nearly 200,000 people living in the Bhalswa area are vulnerable to liver-related disease such as jaundice and hepatitis, said Kamlesh Bharti, president of non-governmental organization Kamakhya Lok Sewa Samiti, which works in the areas of health and education.
The Bhalswa area is next to a big waste landfill, which has contaminated both surface and groundwater in the area.
According to UK-based charity WaterAid, about 163 million people in India, roughly 12 percent of the population, do not have access to clean water close to their homes, the most of any country.
Almost all middle-class residents in the city have either water purifiers at home or they buy big cans of water from Bisleri, India’s top bottled water brand, Coca-Cola Co (KO.N) or PepsiCo Inc (PEP.O).
Bottled water suppliers reported a nearly three-fold jump in sales in India between 2012 and 2017, according to market research company Euromonitor.
India’s dependence on groundwater and the country’s failure to replenish aquifers have exacerbated the crisis, said V.K. Madhavan chief executive of WaterAid.
Both individual households and myriad industries mostly use fresh water and the reuse and recycling of water “is almost an alien concept” in the country, Madhavan said.
Still, Delhi authorities said the plan to build three dams in the upper reaches of the Yamuna river, which passes through the city, would help Delhi overcome the shortage.
It will take 3-4 years to construct them, said S. K. Haldar, a top official of the Central Water Commission.
But issues such as land acquisition, resettlement and environmental clearances could make such an aggressive timetable untenable, Madhavan said.
Image caption Hatkarwadi hasn’t seen decent rains in three years
Every morning Dagadu Beldar, 75, wakes up and cooks rice and lentils in his village home in India’s western state of Maharashtra. After that, there’s little else to do.
For the past three years, Mr Beldar has lived alone in his gloomy one-room hut in Hatkarwadi, a stony hillside outback ringed by forests. Drought forced his wife and three sons out of the village. The earth was parched and the wells were dry. There was little water to drink and bathe in, and the family’s millet farm lay barren.
Two sons found work at a sugar factory in Sangli, a cane-growing district some 400km (248 miles) away. Their mother looked after the third son, who went to school there. Hatkarwadi had become a bad memory.
With age, Mr Beldare is going deaf. He mostly keeps to himself in his dark room.
“He’s a very lonely man. He hasn’t seen his family in three years. All because of water,” says Ganesh Sadgar, a neighbour.
Image caption Dagadu Beldar lives alone after his family left the village because of lack of water
Across the lane, 75-year-old Kishan Sadgar’s only son left home a decade ago to work in a sugar factory far away. He lives with his wife and a pet dog. “My son hardly comes home,” he says. “And when he comes he wants to leave after two or three days because there’s no water here.”
A few doors away, Saga Bai lives with her 14-year-old deaf mute daughter, Parvati. Her only son, Appa, left home years ago to work in a factory. “He hardly comes home. He says he will come only if it rains,” says Ms Bai.
And Ganesh Sadgar, the only graduate in the village, is unable to find a bride because “no woman wants to come here because there’s no water”.
Hatkarwadi is located in Beed, a sprawling sun-baked district which has been impoverished by lack of rain. Not long ago, more than 1,200 people lived in its 125 squat homes. More than half of them, mostly men, have left, leaving behind bolted, abandoned homes. These water refugees eke a living in faraway towns and cities, where they have found work in cane farms, sugar factories, construction sites or as taxi drivers.
Image caption Yashwant Sahibrao Sadgar locked his home and left the village a year ago because of lack of water
“There is no water. Why should people stay here?” says Bhimrao Beldar, the 42-year-old headman of the village.
The night before I arrived in the village, there had been a brief burst of rain. Next morning, promising grey clouds seemed to be the harbinger of bountiful rains. By mid-afternoon, however, the sky began burning again, extinguishing any such hopes. That’s how fickle hopes are here. The last time the village had “decent rains” was three years ago.
The cruel summer has sucked the life out of Hatkarwadi. The earth is brown and cracked. Cotton and millet farms have withered away. Only two of the 35 wells have some water left. There are a dozen borewells, but the fast receding water table is forcing farmers to drill deep – up to 650ft – to extract water.
Image caption The only source of water is a few functioning borewells
Even a minor gale snaps electricity lines, so the borewells often don’t work. Water tankers – the lifeline of the drought-hit – refuse to supply because of the precarious state of the narrow strip of tar which serves as the connecting road to the village.
There’s nothing to feed the animals, so 300 buffaloes have been moved to a fodder camp uphill where the animals live with their owners under tarp. Some 75 new toilets built under a federal government programme to end open defecation lie unused because there’s no water. Most villagers borrow drinking and bathing water from well-to-do neighbours who own borewells.
Hatkarwadi is a speck on the map of Beed, where more than a million people have been hit by the drought. Deforestation has reduced forest cover to a bare 2% of the total area of the district. Only 16% of the farms are irrigated. When monsoons are good, the rain-fed farms yield cotton, soya bean, sugarcane, sorghum and millet for 650,000 farmers.
Image caption Most of the village’s 35 wells are dry
For the last six years, Beed has seen declining rainfall. Irregular rainfall patterns have been playing havoc with crops. A 10-day-pause in rainfall can end up damaging crops. Last year’s abundant rains – 99% of the average yearly rainfall of 690mm – still led to crop failure because there were four long interruptions.
The main Godavari river is running dry. Nearly all of the 140 big and small dams in Beed are out of water, as are the 800-odd wells. Two of the major dams now have what officials call “dead water” – low lying stored water, contaminated with sediments and mud. This is the water which is being pumped into ponds from where nearly a thousand tankers pick up supplies, spike them with chlorine and transport them to 300-odd thirsty villages.
Image caption Saga Bai says her son returns to the village ‘only when it rains’
Half of Beed’s 800,000 cattle have been moved to more than 600 cattle camps because of lack of fodder. More than 40,000 people have taken up work under a jobs for work scheme, and officials are opening it up for others to prevent people from going into penury. The drought hasn’t spared people living in towns: the 250,000 residents of Beed town are getting piped water only once a week or sometimes a fortnight.
“This is the worst drought in a decade,” says Astik Kumar Pandey, the senior-most official of Beed. “We are hoping that our drinking water supplies last until end of July and then we have abundant rains”.
The crippling drought in Maharashtra is part of a larger climate catastrophe which has gripped India. More than 40% of the land, by one estimate, is facing drought and more than 500 million people living in at least 10 states are badly affected.
Media caption ‘Men don’t care about drought as women fetch the water’
P Sainath, the founder and editor of the online People’s Archive of Rural India, says the lack of water is an “explosive problem”. But drought alone has not contributed to the crisis, he says. It also has to do with the appropriation of water by the well-to-do at the expense of the poor, and the skewed allocation of water.
“The transfer of water from the farms to the industry, from food crops to water guzzling cash crops, from rural to urban areas, and from livelihood to lifestyle purposes for multiple swimming polls in urban high-rises has also led to this situation.”
Back in his office in Beed, Astik Kumar Pandey peers over a live map tracking the movement of GPS-tagged water tankers in the district. It’s a dense mass of red (stationary tankers picking up supplies) and green (tankers on their way with water) trucks clogging the heart of the district.
“This is how bad the situation is. We are hoping that the rains arrive soon”.
Doctors say drink contained anti-bacteria compound used by catering industry
Woman took ‘one sip and found it tasted bad’
Fast food chain McDonald’s apologised to a customer who was served milk tea contaminated with disinfectant at one of its stores in eastern China. Photo: Weibo
Fast food chain McDonald’s apologised to a customer who was served milk tea contaminated with disinfectant in one of its stores in eastern China, damaging her digestive tract.
The restaurant said on Monday that it had reached a settlement with the customer, a woman surnamed Huang, after she suffered vomiting, a sore throat, a stomach ache and was taken to hospital on Friday for treatment.
Huang – who was still in hospital – suffered the symptoms shortly after taking a sip of the drink in a restaurant at Changle Airport in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, the Strait Metropolis Daily reported.
“She just had one sip and found it tasted bad. But she already swallowed some of it,” Huang’s husband, surnamed Tang, told the newspaper.
McDonald’s apologises after advertisement showing Taiwan as a country draws criticism
When the lid was removed from the cup there was a strong smell of disinfectant, Tang said.
“I asked staff workers about the drink, but they just took it and smelled it, without giving any explanation. They threw the drink into the rubbish when we were not looking, but we took it back,” Tang said.
Doctors said the woman’s symptoms were caused by sodium dichloroisocyanurate, a chlorine compound widely used to kill bacteria in water by the catering industry and by the leisure sector in swimming pools.
On its Weibo feed, McDonald’s described the incident as unintentional and said staff would be given more training.
“McDonald’s has paid great attention to the incident and is deeply sorry for the error made by a staff member of our restaurant,” it said.
McDonald’s said that it would improve staff training after the customer was given tea tainted with disinfectant. Photo: Weibo
Image copyright AFP
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CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 