Posts tagged ‘India’

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25/11/2014

India-Pakistan Sparring Opens Door for China in South Asia – Businessweek

For a senior Afghan diplomat sitting in India’s capital, it’s easy to explain how a region with a quarter of the world’s people can account for only five percent of global trade.

Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping

“India and Pakistan need to overcome their problems,” M. Ashraf Haidari, deputy chief of mission at Afghanistan’s embassy in New Delhi, said in an interview ahead of this week’s meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or SAARC. “Summits happen, leaders come, there’s all this consensus and declarations announced. But unfortunately it doesn’t happen in reality.”

As leaders of eight SAARC countries meet in Nepal this week for the first time since 2011, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has more reasons than ever to turn the bloc into a regional force to counter China’s growing influence in South Asia. Doing so will require him to overcome differences with Pakistani leader Nawaz Sharif.

So far, things aren’t looking good. Modi’s government scrapped talks with Pakistan in August, which was followed by the worst border fighting between the countries in a decade. At the same time, China has promised SAARC nations part of a $40 billion Silk Road fund to finance infrastructure investments.

“SAARC won’t be able to counter China’s influence,” said Nishan de Mel, executive director and head of research at Colombo-based Verite Research Pvt., a policy research group. “China tends to have an approach that isn’t too demanding and isn’t politically difficult for the partner country and where the partner country will tend to see benefits quite quickly. India’s approach tends to be more hard-nosed.”

via India-Pakistan Sparring Opens Door for China in South Asia – Businessweek.

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25/11/2014

Priyanka Chopra in Pink Rubber Gloves Joins Modi’s Clean India Campaign – India Real Time – WSJ

In pink rubber gloves and a surgical mask, former Miss World and Bollywood movie star Priyanka Chopra is the latest celebrity to be enlisted to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Clean India Campaign.

In an 11-minute-film posted on YouTube, Ms. Chopra can be seen beginning a cleanup of an area where she filmed part of the movie “Agneepath.”

“I remember that there are people who live here and children who play on mounds of garbage and that is their life,” Ms. Chopra says in the short film as she directs a group picking up garbage in Versova in Mumbai. “The idea of doing this is to create something that is long-lasting,” Ms. Chopra adds during the video. “ I wanted to do something a little more than just cleaning a few piles of garbage.”


Embed from Getty Images

The film ends with shots of the area spruced up with murals and flower pots.

The Clean India campaign is Mr. Modi’s plan to create a sanitized India by 2019 in honor of the 150th anniversary of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. Ms. Chopra is the latest Bollywood star to get involved after Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan who have both been pictured with brooms in hand pledging support at the prime minister’s request.

via Priyanka Chopra in Pink Rubber Gloves Joins Modi’s Clean India Campaign – India Real Time – WSJ.

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25/11/2014

Mrs. Modi, This Is What You’re Entitled to as Wife of India’s PM – India Real Time – WSJ

Narendra Modi’s wife wants to know what privileges she is entitled to as the spouse of India’s prime minister.

Six months into the role, Jashodaben Chiman Modi has asked police why she must use the bus when her security detail travels in a government car and what perks she should be getting as the wife of the country’s most-powerful man.

“I am the wife of the prime minister and as per formal procedure, I want to know what other services am I supposed to get,” Mrs. Modi wrote in a submission under India’s right to information law, according to a spokeswoman at the police station where the document was received.

An odd request for such a person to make you might think but here’s the thing.

Until he filed election nomination papers in April ahead of national polls, Mr. Modi had never mentioned his wife publicly.

The pair had an arranged marriage in their teens and Mr. Modi left her soon after the ceremony. The couple have lived apart since though they are not divorced.

But, after Mr. Modi swept to power in May, his wife, a retired school teacher, was allotted 24-hour protection from five security commandos by the Gujarat police.

In the RTI application submitted Monday, Mrs. Modi stated that “I want to know under which legal clauses/provisions and acts of [Indian] Constitution have I been given the security cover,” according to the police spokeswoman. Mrs. Modi could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for the prime minister was not immediately available for comment.

Referring to the assassination of former prime minister of Indira Gandhi by her security guards in 1984, Mrs. Modi said she “is frightened by the presence” of the commandos and “asked for all the details of her personal bodyguards,” the spokeswoman said.

Besides, she also asked for information about the “other honors and benefits” she is authorized to receive as the prime minister’s wife.

via Mrs. Modi, This Is What You’re Entitled to as Wife of India’s PM – India Real Time – WSJ.

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25/11/2014

India names special envoy for China border talks | Reuters

India on Monday named its powerful national security adviser as a special envoy on China, opening the way for resumption of talks on the disputed border, where tensions have risen in recent months over border patrols and stiffer defenses.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shakes hands with India's National Security Adviser Ajit Doval at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing September 9, 2014. REUTERS/Lintao Zhang/Pool

Ajit Doval, a close aide of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will lead the negotiations with Chinese State Councillor Yang Jiechi to try and reach a settlement on dispute over the 3,500-km (2,175-mile) border that has clouded rapidly expanding commercial links.

In September, the two armies were locked in a faceoff in the Ladakh sector in the western Himalayas just as Chinese President Xi Jinping was visiting India for the first summit talks with Modi.

Both leaders vowed to work together to resolve the border row that has defied a solution even after 17 rounds of high level talks over the last decade and negotiations even earlier between the diplomats of the two countries.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) disputed by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 square km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

Doval, a hardliner on national security issues, will conduct boundary negotiations as well as strategic consultations with China, Modi’s office said in a statement.

New Delhi has vowed to beef up defenses along the border to narrow the gap with China’s network of roads and communication links. Beijing has expressed concern about India’s plan to build roads and border outposts in Arunachal Pradesh in the east, which it refers to as south Tibet.

Indian officials say Chinese border patrols have been intruding deeper into their side of the de facto border, in a sign of assertiveness that has fueled concern in the region.

(Reporting by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

via India names special envoy for China border talks | Reuters.

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22/11/2014

So What Does Obama’s Immigration Reform Mean For India’s High-Skilled Workers? – India Real Time – WSJ

President Barack Obama’s immigration reforms unveiled Thursday in the United States bring little sunshine for those in India’s technology outsourcing industry who are waiting for him to boost the number of skilled-work visas or H-1Bs.

The president’s reform plan bypassed Congress to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.

To be sure, the reform measures also contained minor benefits for businesses with workers from overseas. “We will make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates, and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders have proposed,” said Mr. Obama in a prime-time address in the U.S.

But that means very little for India’s outsourcing firms that have long been lobbying to increase the number of H-1B visas so they can send more Indian programmers and engineers to their clients in the U.S.

Indian software exporters such as Tata Consultancy Services 532540.BY +0.35%, Infosys and Wipro send thousands of skilled Indian workers to the U.S. every year to cater to the technology needs of their clients.

The immigration reforms bill, introduced last year, sought to triple the number of H-1B visas available to 180,000 a year but was pulled after many lawmakers argued that the changes would result in an influx of illegal immigrants. It is still uncertain when the reform bill will be considered again.

As a result, industry and market watchers weren’t expecting the president to make any path-breaking changes to increase the number of skilled-worker visas issued annually. In fact, most of the changes announced are on expected lines.

via So What Does Obama’s Immigration Reform Mean For India’s High-Skilled Workers? – India Real Time – WSJ.

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21/11/2014

How Indians and Chinese Study in the U.S. Shows Degrees of Development – China Real Time Report – WSJ

A record number of international students—close to 900,000 scholars–studied at U.S. colleges and universities last year and more than four out of ten of them were from India or China.

How the best and brightest from China and India choose their expensive American degrees demonstrates the differing levels of development between the world’s only billion-person economies.

Chinese students tend to choose undergraduate courses focused on business, while Indians opt for short graduate programs in more technical subjects like science and math.

A report from the Institute of International Education published this week has the figures. China continued to be the biggest exporter of students to the United States by far. It had more than 274,000 students stateside, which was a 17% increase from the previous year.

India was a distant second but still had more than 102,000 college and university students to America. That was a 6% increase from the year before, and the first rise in the number of students from the subcontinent in five years.

Back in the school year which ended in June 2010, China passed India as the biggest source of foreign freshman in the U.S.—a title India had held for years. China has been adding to that lead ever since.

China’s rise to the top—it had 200,000 more students last year to the U.S. than it did just eight years earlier—reflects the growing incomes and increasing globalization of the country’s citizens, analysts say.

Chinese students were much more likely to go to the states for undergraduate studies than Indian students. Only around 12% of Indians that study in the U.S. were there for undergraduate studies during the past school year, compared to 40% of Chinese students, the IIE study showed.

It makes sense, said Akhil Daswani, chief operating officer of OnCourse Vantage, an education consulting company in India, an undergraduate degree is a luxury few Indians can afford.

“If you are going to spend $250,000 over four years you have to have a considerable amount of disposable income,” Mr. Daswani said. “Undergraduate schools are marketing heavily (in China). It is the first place they want to go because they are getting so much business.”

When they go for an international degree, Indians prefer to get more bang for their rupee, they tend to go for two-year graduate courses that lead to high-paying jobs.

Close to 80% of Indian students in the U.S. last year were aiming to get technical degrees in science, technology, engineering or math, the study showed. That figure for China was 42%. Chinese students, meanwhile, leaned more towards business degrees. Around 28% of Chinese students were studying business compared to 12% of Indian students.

via How Indians and Chinese Study in the U.S. Shows Degrees of Development – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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20/11/2014

Cheap Electricity for Poor Squeezing Out Solar in India – Businessweek

The villagers of Dharnai in northern India had been living without electricity for more than 30 years when Greenpeace installed a microgrid to supply reliable, low-cost solar power.

Cooking By Candlelight

Then, within weeks of the lights flickering on in Dharnai’s mud huts, the government utility hooked up the grid — flooding the community with cheap power that undercut the fledgling solar network. While Greenpeace had come to Dharnai at Bihar’s invitation, the unannounced arrival of the state’s utility threatened to put it out of business.

“We wanted to set this up as a business model,” said Abhishek Pratap, a Greenpeace campaigner overseeing the project. “Now we’re in course correction.”

It’s a scenario playing out at dozens of ventures across India’s hinterlands. Competition from state utilities, with their erratic yet unbeatably cheap subsidized power, is scuppering efforts to supply clean, modern energy in a country where more people die from inhaling soot produced by indoor fires than from smoking.

About as many people in India are without electricity as there are residents of the U.S., and the number is growing by a Mumbai every year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to bring electricity to every home by 2019 by leapfrogging the nation’s ailing power-distribution infrastructure with solar-powered local networks — the same way mobile-phones have enabled people in poor, remote places to bypass landlines.

via Cheap Electricity for Poor Squeezing Out Solar in India – Businessweek.

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20/11/2014

India Worst Slave Country, Says Global Slavery Index – India Real Time – WSJ

More than 14 million people in India are estimated to live in modern slavery, according to a new index on global slavery that ranks the country first out of 167 countries based on the number of people subject to abuse such as forced labor, servitude or sexual exploitation.

The other countries with the highest numbers of people in modern slavery are China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Thailand. Together with India they account for 71% of the estimated 35.8 million people in modern slavery, says the 2014 Global Slavery Index, a report produced by global human rights organization the Walk Free Foundation. It defines modern slavery as “one person possessing or controlling another person in such a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty.”

Modern slavery in Asia, particularly in countries such as India and Pakistan, often includes entire families who are enslaved through bonded labor in construction, agriculture, brick making, garment factories and manufacturing.

In India, lower castes and tribes, religious minorities, and migrant workers are disproportionately affected by modern slavery the Indian section of the report says.

In 2014, the Ministry of Home Affairs launched the ‘anti-trafficking portal’, which includes  information on criminal justice statistics, anti-trafficking police units, government and law enforcement training, the anti-trafficking legislation, and reporting mechanisms, including the ChildLine hotline number.

India has also improved law enforcement efforts by establishing 215 anti-human trafficking units across the country to investigate human trafficking cases.

Legislation on its own though is not enough to ensure success of a criminal justice response to modern slavery, according to the report.

via India Worst Slave Country, Says Global Slavery Index – India Real Time – WSJ.

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19/11/2014

Why India is doing better than most emerging markets | The Economist

INVESTORS have fallen out of love with emerging markets. Since the start of last year emerging-market stocks have trailed their rich-world peers. Currencies are falling. Worst-hit is the Russian rouble, which has fallen by 30% against the dollar this year. The currencies of other biggish emerging markets, such as Brazil, Turkey and South Africa, have also weakened. For such economies growth is harder to come by. The IMF recently cut its forecasts for emerging markets by more than for rich countries. But India is a notable exception to the general pessimism. Its stockmarket has touched new highs. The rupee is stable. And the IMF nudged up its 2014 growth forecast for India to 5.8%. That figure is still quite low: growth rates of 8-9% have been more typical. But in comparison with others it is almost a boom. Why is India doing better than most emerging markets?

In part optimism about India owes to its newish government. In May Narendra Modi’s Baratiya Janata Party (BJP) won a thumping victory in elections on a pro-growth platform. Since then the BJP has strengthened its position in some key states. So far reform has been piecemeal. Procedures for government approvals have been streamlined. The powers of labour inspectors have been curbed. Civil servants now work harder. That has been enough to sustain hopes of further and bigger reforms. Yet much of the continued enthusiasm about India is down to luck. The currents that sway the global economy presently—the dollar’s strength; slowdown in China; aggressive money-printing in Japan; stagnation in the euro zone and falling oil prices—are less harmful to India than to most emerging markets.

Start with the dollar, which has been buoyed by a resilient American economy and the prospect of interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve. Past episodes of rising interest rates and dollar strength (for instance in the early 1980s or mid-1990s) have not been kind to emerging markets. Bond yields rise and currencies fall as capital is drawn back to America. India has a bit less to fear from such a rush to the exits; its bond markets are tricky for foreigners to enter in the first place. India is also less harmed by slowdown in China, as only around 5% of its exports go there. It is not part of China’s supply-chain, which takes in much of South-East Asia. Nor is it a big exporter of industrial commodities, as Brazil is. And a weaker yen in response to quantitative easing by the Bank of Japan hurts Asia’s manufacturing exporters more than service-intensive India. The misery in the euro zone is of greater concern to Europe’s trading partners in Turkey and Russia than to faraway India. And the fall in crude-oil prices that hurts oil exporters, such as Russia and Nigeria, is a boon to a big oil importer like India. Indeed the deflation that is stalking large parts of the world is helpful to India, which has suffered from high inflation.

India is not impervious to bad news. Some of its recent economic data have looked a little soggy. Exports slumped in October. Car sales have fallen for two consecutive months and there is little sign yet of a meaningful recovery in business investment. This explains, in part, why there have been growing calls (including from the finance minister) for the central bank to cut interest rates soon in response to a drop in consumer-price inflation. The troubles in other emerging markets ought to counsel caution. Any sign that policymakers might be ditching discipline in favour of quick fixes might see India fall from investors’ favour. But for the time being, it is riding high.

via The Economist explains: Why India is doing better than most emerging markets | The Economist.

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19/11/2014

Narendra Modi Is in Fiji. This Shows Why – India Real Time – WSJ

Pristine beaches, blue skies,  it’s not hard to imagine why Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would want to stop by the island nation of Fiji after a hectic few days at the G-20 summit in Australia.

But there’s another reason Mr. Modi has made the newly-minted South Pacific democracy his final port of call during a three-nation tour that concludes Thursday: China.

In 2012, there was an influx of Chinese investors and companies expressing and registering their interest in setting up businesses in Fiji, according to Investment Fiji’s annual report for the year.

Chinese investors accounted for 20% of the projects registered by foreign companies in Fiji in 2012, while Indian investment accounted for 10%, the report said.

China has tried to raise its profile across the South Pacific over the past decade. The 12 South Pacific island nations that make up the region are much less populous than other parts of Asia, but have vast fishing grounds and potentially large deep-sea mineral deposits.

Chinese companies have bought stakes in Fiji’s largest gold mine and invested in its bauxite industry. Foreign direct investment by Chinese companies in Fiji accounted for around 37% of the value of projects registered this year, compared with just 2.9% in 2009.

Trade figures from Fiji’s Bureau of Statistics show that India lags far behind. In 2013, China exported $27.29 million in goods to Fiji, compared to $4.76 million imported to the island from India.

via Narendra Modi Is in Fiji. This Map Shows Why – India Real Time – WSJ.

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