tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post4466442088896209008..comments2024-03-27T15:36:44.737-07:00Comments on Haq's Musings: India's Covid Crisis Decimates Country's Middle ClassRiaz Haqhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-77026081494537697502023-07-30T07:38:13.407-07:002023-07-30T07:38:13.407-07:00India’s #Modi's Wild Vanity Project Already Ha...India’s #Modi's Wild Vanity Project Already Has Eight Dead #Cheetahs. #Indian prime minister’s PR attempt to reintroduce big cats to #India was doomed from the start, scientists and conservationists say. #BJP #Hindutva https://www.thedailybeast.com/indias-wild-vanity-project-already-has-already-killed-eight-cheetahs-from-south-africa<br /><br />Twenty cheetahs were shipped to India from Southern Africa in a historic intercontinental translocation designed to restore the big cats to the country for the first time in 70 years.<br /><br />The first delivery was timed to coincide with the Indian prime minister’s birthday last year. Amid huge fanfare leading up to the big day, enormous billboards across major cities in the country advertised this achievement of Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.<br /><br />Cheetahs—the agile big cats known for their remarkable speed and striking appearance—were declared extinct in India in 1952. Now Modi—the most powerful Indian leader in decades—seemed to be saying he could turn back time and bring these beautiful creatures home to a resurgent India.<br /><br />The results, so far, of this grandiose plan have been tragic.<br /><br />The first eight cheetahs arrived from Namibia last September, and another 12 cheetahs from South Africa were introduced to the Kuno National Park—located in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh—in February this year.<br /><br /><br />Hopes across the country were sky high, but even before they arrived, scientists and conservationists were raising major concerns about this unprecedented plan.<br /><br />Kuno National Park emerged as the location for the reintroduction of cheetahs, beating out 10 surveyed sites in five central Indian states, according to the government’s action plan. Studies by conservation researchers, however, disagreed.<br /><br />The action plan, devised by the Wildlife Institute of India, says that this decision was influenced by Kuno National Park’s “suitable habitat and abundant prey base.” Scientists, again, disagree.<br /><br />While the ambitious plan to reintroduce cheetahs was being put into action, there were murmurs of concern among India’s wildlife community. They said the plan was “ecologically unsound” besides being costly and “may serve as a distraction rather than help global cheetah conservation efforts.”<br /><br />Modi ignored their fears. In 2012, the Supreme Court of India had already intervened by putting a stay on the government’s plans to import cheetahs, and in 2013, the apex court reaffirmed its position, emphasizing the necessity for the government to present a comprehensive study before any consideration could be given to introducing cheetahs from Africa.<br /><br />In 2017, the National Tiger Conservation Authority in India made an appeal to the apex court to reconsider its decision. Following the appeal, the Supreme Court granted permission in 2020 to introduce the cheetah on an “experimental basis.”<br /><br />Many raised objections.<br /><br />‘Flawed from the start’<br />As time passed, the fears of the wildlife community began to materialize as one by one, the big cats started losing their lives. Since March this year, a total of eight—including three cubs born to a Namibian cheetah named Jwala—have lost their lives at the park, adding to the growing toll of cheetah deaths.<br /><br />Many argued the grand project—which cost $6 million so far—is on the brink of failure.<br /><br />Dr. Arjun M. Gopalaswamy, a renowned big cat scientist in India told The Daily Beast: “The project was already flawed but now these unforeseen deaths, inexplicable deaths have made it far worse than what we thought.” He says the project is now at a “salvage point.”<br /><br />India, despite the mounting demographic pressure, has lost only one large wild species of mammals since its independence from the British in 1947—the cheetah. And hence its reintroduction “has a very special significance for the national conservation ethic and ethos.” The Indian government believes that bringing back the cheetah will have “equally important conservation ramifications.”<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-52968070311556323082023-07-12T10:11:44.663-07:002023-07-12T10:11:44.663-07:00In the absence of real data, India's stats are...In the absence of real data, India's stats are all being manufactured by BJP to win elections. <br /><br /><br /><br />Postponing India’s census is terrible for the country<br /><br />But it may suit Narendra Modi just fine<br /><br /><br /><br />https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/01/05/postponing-indias-census-is-terrible-for-the-country<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Narendra Modi often overstates his achievements. For example, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister’s claim that all Indian villages have been electrified on his watch glosses over the definition: only public buildings and 10% of households need a connection for the village to count as such. And three years after Mr Modi declared India “open-defecation free”, millions of villagers are still purging al fresco. An absence of up-to-date census information makes it harder to check such inflated claims. It is also a disaster for the vast array of policymaking reliant on solid population and development data.<br /><br /><br /><br />----------<br /><br /><br /><br />Three years ago India’s government was scheduled to pose its citizens a long list of basic but important questions. How many people live in your house? What is it made of? Do you have a toilet? A car? An internet connection? The answers would refresh data from the country’s previous census in 2011, which, given India’s rapid development, were wildly out of date. Because of India’s covid-19 lockdown, however, the questions were never asked.<br /><br /><br /><br />Almost three years later, and though India has officially left the pandemic behind, there has been no attempt to reschedule the decennial census. It may not happen until after parliamentary elections in 2024, or at all. Opposition politicians and development experts smell a rat.<br /><br /><br /><br />----------<br /><br /><br /><br />For a while policymakers can tide themselves over with estimates, but eventually these need to be corrected with accurate numbers. “Right now we’re relying on data from the 2011 census, but we know our results will be off by a lot because things have changed so much since then,” says Pronab Sen, a former chairman of the National Statistical Commission who works on the household-consumption survey. And bad data lead to bad policy. A study in 2020 estimated that some 100m people may have missed out on food aid to which they were entitled because the distribution system uses decade-old numbers.<br /><br /><br /><br />Similarly, it is important to know how many children live in an area before building schools and hiring teachers. The educational misfiring caused by the absence of such knowledge is particularly acute in fast-growing cities such as Delhi or Bangalore, says Narayanan Unni, who is advising the government on the census. “We basically don’t know how many people live in these places now, so proper planning for public services is really hard.”<br /><br /><br /><br />The home ministry, which is in charge of the census, continues to blame its postponement on the pandemic, most recently in response to a parliamentary question on December 13th. It said the delay would continue “until further orders”, giving no time-frame for a resumption of data-gathering. Many statisticians and social scientists are mystified by this explanation: it is over a year since India resumed holding elections and other big political events.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-22579200383880453092023-04-02T09:31:36.379-07:002023-04-02T09:31:36.379-07:00'India needs educated PM': Arvind Kejriwal...'India needs educated PM': Arvind Kejriwal targets Narendra Modi in Assam | Deccan Herald<br /><br />https://www.deccanherald.com/national/national-politics/india-needs-educated-pm-arvind-kejriwal-targets-narendra-modi-in-assam-1205990.html<br /><br />Continuing his criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his educational qualifications, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday said an educated PM would not have gone for "dangerous" decisions like the demonetisation and three "anti-farmer" laws.<br /><br /><br />"I listened to Narendra Modi's speech where he said he went to a village school only and could not do further studies. But I want to ask you today, shouldn't the Prime Minister of a great nation like India be educated?" Kejriwal asked the crowd during his maiden rally in Assam capital Guwahati on Sunday afternoon. The rally was organised by the Assam unit of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as part of its organisational expansion programme in the state, where BJP has been in power since 2016.<br /><br /><br />"India is a poor nation and someone not going to school due to poverty is not a crime. But our Prime Minister should be educated. The Prime Minister did demonetisation which took our economy 10 years backward. Someone fooled our PM and told him to ban the notes to end corruption. Did demonetisation end corruption? Someone told our PM that demonetisation will end terrorism. Did demonetisation end terrorism?" Kejriwal asked.<br /><br />"It's the 21st Century and youths of the 21st Century are aspirational. They believe in science and technology. They want employment and prosperity of India and only an educated PM can bring that prosperity. A less educated or illiterate person can not bring prosperity. A private company asks for an MBA, MA and BA degree for a manager's job. But shouldn't there be educational qualifications for the country's topmost manager as the Prime Minister?" he asked.<br /><br />Punjab CM Bhagwant Singh Mann addressed the rally before Kejriwal in which he also slammed BJP.<br /><br />Both Kejriwal and Mann slammed their Assam counterpart Himanta Biswa Sarma saying the latter was only doing "dirty politics" and failed to provide jobs, hold examinations in a fair manner and could not improve amenities such as schools, hospitals and other infrastructure. "Today he is threatening me on TV to put me behind bars. Am I a terrorism, why will you catch me?" Kejriwal asked while referring to Sarma's warning on Friday about filing defamation cases in case the former made corruption allegations. "Today I want to invite him to come to my home for tea when he visits Delhi next. I will take him around in my car and the finest schools and hospitals we have provided to the people of Delhi," he said. Both Mann and Kejriwal asked why Sarma's wife was running a private school in Guwahati. "If a CM's wife runs a private school, will the government improve the government schools?" he asked. Both promised that AAP will provide Delhi and Punjab-like facilities if people voted them to power in the Assembly elections in 2026.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-5083390547038753912022-11-22T08:13:38.644-08:002022-11-22T08:13:38.644-08:00PM Modi: The Joke Indians are Not Allowed to Crack...PM Modi: The Joke Indians are Not Allowed to Crack<br />4 April 2022, by THOMAS Rosamma<br /><br />https://www.ritimo.org/PM-Modi-The-Joke-Indians-are-Not-Allowed-to-Crack<br /><br />Parul Khakhar, a poet from Gujarat, posted a poem on Facebook in May, expressing her anguish at the sight of bodies flowing down the Ganges at the height of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. ‘Shav vahini Ganga’ – Ganges the Carrier of Corpses – was read widely, translated into several languages and shared on social media. The state government’s literary mouthpiece came down heavily on the poet, claiming it was “misuse of a poem for anarchy”.<br /><br />Ganges, the Carrier of Corpses<br />Translated by Salil Tripathi<br />Don’t worry, be happy, in one voice speak the corpses<br />O King, in your Ram-Rajya, we see bodies flow in the Ganges<br />O King, the woods are ashes,<br />No spots remain at crematoria,<br />O King, there are no carers,<br />Nor any pall-bearers,<br />No mourners left<br />And we are bereft<br />With our wordless dirges of dysphoria<br />Libitina enters every home where she dances and then prances,<br />O King, in your Ram-Rajya, our bodies flow in the Ganges<br />O King, the melting chimney quivers, the virus has us shaken<br />O King, our bangles shatter, our heaving chest lies broken<br />The city burns as he fiddles, Billa-Ranga thrust their lances,<br />O King, in your Ram-Rajya, I see bodies flow in the Ganges<br />O King, your attire sparkles as you shine and glow and blaze<br />O King, this entire city has at last seen your real face<br />Show your guts, no ifs and buts,<br />Come out and shout and say it loud,<br />“The naked King is lame and weak”<br />Show me you are no longer meek,<br />Flames rise high and reach the sky, the furious city rages;<br />O King, in your Ram-Rajya, do you see bodies flow in the Ganges?<br /><br />https://www.ritimo.org/PM-Modi-The-Joke-Indians-are-Not-Allowed-to-Crack<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-20055594106185697932022-09-21T20:38:48.726-07:002022-09-21T20:38:48.726-07:00India's Economic Situation 'Bleak'; We...India's Economic Situation 'Bleak'; We Know the Issue but Not the Solution: Pronab Sen<br />In an interview with Karan Thapar, the country's former chief statistician said that India will miss the RBI's target of 7.2% growth for this financial year and that it'll come around 6-6.5%. (real growth going forward will be around 4%)<br /><br />Pranab Sen: Demonetization and COVID lockdown dried up the informal credit and killed a large percentage of small and medium enterprises.<br /><br />https://thewire.in/video/watch-indias-economic-situation-bleak-we-know-the-issue-but-not-the-solution-pronab-sen<br /><br />https://youtu.be/p3avEIThSN8<br /><br />In an interview where he paints a bleak and disturbing picture of the state of the economy, India’s former chief statistician professor Pronab Sen has said that we can identify the problems that are retarding growth but we don’t know how to tackle them.<br /><br />Worse, professor Sen says he is not sure if the government has diagnosed the problems because it has not spoken about them and its silence can be variously interpreted. Consequently, he says that India will miss the RBI’s target of 7.2% growth for this financial year and that it will growth will only come in somewhere around 6-6.5%.<br /><br />However, he points out, in real terms growth will actually be just 4% which, he adds, is at least 2.5% below the growth India needs to create jobs for its population. This means, professor Sen points out, we can boast of being the fastest growing economy but it’s equally true that we are considerably falling short of the rate of growth we need (6.57%) to create sufficient jobs for our people which, in turn, will boost consumption and spending and create incentives for investment.<br /><br />In these circumstances, professor Sen said that first quarter growth of FY23 at 13.5% is clearly disappointing.<br /><br />In a 42-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, professor Sen, who is currently the country director of the International Growth Centre, identified two critical areas where the Indian economy faces serious problems about which we are not sure what we should do.<br /><br />The first is the MSME sector which, he added, has undoubtedly shrunk in size over the last two years. The problem is not a question of encouraging and helping existing MSMEs so much as creating the environment for new MSMEs to emerge. The specific problem is that the informal credit line on which they depend has dried up and we don’t know how to revive that credit line. The government does not have a clear way of doing so.<br /><br />And, the problem afflicting MSMEs, professor Sen says, is the reason why manufacturing has only grown year-on-year by 4.8% and why joblessness and unemployment are an increasing concern. Most jobs are created by MSMEs or the wider unorganised sector and that seems to have stopped or, at least, is not happening in sufficient measure.<br /><br />The second problem professor Sen identified is the critical services sector of trade, hotel, transport, communication and broadcasting services, which represent 30.5% of employment but is still 15.5% below pre-pandemic levels. Once again, he said we don’t know what we need to do to boost this sector back to pre-pandemic levels. He pointed out that many MSMEs work in this sector and its future is, therefore, directly linked to MSMEs.<br /><br />Professor Sen also pointed out that the global situation will not be of much help to India. Interest rates are likely to remain high and exports, which have been a support to the economy until recently, will face problems in markets like Europe and America and, therefore, fail to provide the boost to growth they have previously given. However, he believes oil prices could come down.<br /><br />He believes India is clearly locked into a K-shaped recovery and the arms of the K are moving further and further apart.<br /><br />Whilst scoffing at commentators and newspapers that have called for broad-based reforms, without identifying what they would be, professor Sen said that the key reform needed would be credit lines that would service MSMEs and provide funds for new MSMEs to start up.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-87772503394372026852022-06-12T10:59:54.663-07:002022-06-12T10:59:54.663-07:00https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/90-women...https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/90-women-india-are-shut-out-workforce-431950<br /><br />For Sharma's students, getting married before finishing school can change the trajectory of their lives. In India, when a woman marries, she typically moves in with her husband and in-laws. That can make it difficult to leave secluded villages where policing of choices is common and employment opportunities are scarce.<br /><br />"We try to educate our students," Sharma said. "We explain to them that if they study, they will be in a good spot. If they don't, we describe what their position will be like. 'The rest is up to you,' we tell them. You live life the way you want to create it."<br /><br />In 2015, Modi started a campaign called "Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao," which roughly means "Save Our Daughters, Teach Our Daughters." It's an initiative aimed at keeping girls in school and reducing sex-selective abortion. The government has also tried to eradicate child marriage. Last year, Modi's administration passed a proposal to raise the legal marriage age for women from 18 to 21, which is what it is for men.<br /><br />But in many villages, national laws are distant abstractions. Local customs are still set and enforced by local panchayats, essentially a group of elders, almost all men. And while Modi's campaign to educate India's daughters received lots of publicity, recent government audits found that much of the initiative's funds remained unspent.<br /><br />Even in urban metropolises, where literacy rates are far higher and jobs are more abundant, the pressure on women is overwhelming.<br /><br />Anjali Gupta, who lives in Mumbai, said she was barely hanging on. First, the coronavirus lockdowns devastated her family's small grocery store, forcing them to exhaust their savings to survive. Then her parents started pushing Gupta and her three sisters to get married, fearing that they would be left destitute without husbands.<br /><br />Gupta tried to reason with them. She had already spent about $1,300 studying for a master's degree in pharmaceuticals and nutrition. She was training with a homeopathic doctor. She wanted a career. "I explained that my situation is different, my generation is different," Gupta said.<br /><br />But after an uncle died from the coronavirus, Gupta's father pleaded with her to drop out of school, a prospect that induced migraines and endless arguments. Her parents started bringing prospective grooms home. Gupta worries the inertia will eventually overpower her.<br /><br />"It shouldn't be this way," she said. "I want to do and learn more. I'm only 22."Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-68399186153145554982022-06-12T10:58:58.869-07:002022-06-12T10:58:58.869-07:00https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/90-women...https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/90-women-india-are-shut-out-workforce-431950<br /><br />"If I run away again, my mother will curse me," said Bhuniya. "Now, there's nothing left. My account is empty and there's little work in the village."<br /><br />The story echoes across India. During the pandemic, Rosa Abraham, an economics professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, tracked more than 20,000 people as they navigated the labor market. She found that after the first lockdown, women were several times more likely to lose their jobs than men and far less likely to recover work after restrictions lifted.<br /><br />Pandemic Impact on Employment<br />How India's Covid lockdowns affected employment for men and women<br /><br /><br />Increased domestic duties, lack of childcare options after school shutdowns, and a surge in marriages — which often confine women's autonomy in India — help explain the difference in outcome.<br /><br />"When men are faced with this kind of a huge economic shock, then they have a fallback option," Abraham said. "They can navigate to different kinds of work. But for women, there is no such fallback option. They can't negotiate the labor market as effectively as men do."<br /><br />Dreams of freedom or a well-paid office job were replaced with what she called "distress-led employment," essentially unpaid work on a family farm or taking care of the home. Prior to the pandemic, Indian women already performed about 10 times more care work than men, around three times the global average.<br /><br />"It is the unfortunate situation that the decision to work is often not in the hands of the woman herself," Abraham said.<br /><br />The decline in workforce participation is partly about culture. As Indians became wealthier, families that could afford to keep women at home did so, thinking it conferred social status. On the other extreme, those at the lowest rungs of society are still seen as potential earners. But they tend to work menial or unpaid jobs far from the formal economy. In the official statistics, their labor is not counted.<br /><br />In many villages, patriarchal values remain ironclad, and a stigma against girls persists. Though illegal, sex-selective abortions are still common. Akhina Hansraj, senior program manager at Akshara Centre, a Mumbai-based organization that advocates for gender equity, said Indian men often think "it's not very manly if their wife contributes to the family income."<br /><br />"They want to create this dependency," Hansraj said. "People believe if women get educated, they might work and become financially independent and then they may not obey and respect the family."<br /><br />Marriage is a sticking point in India, where most weddings are still arranged. After the first lockdown, in 2020, the country's leading matrimony websites reported a spike in new registrations. In some states, marriages among children and young adults — many of them illegal under Indian law — jumped by 80%, according to government data.<br /><br />Madhu Sharma, a Hindi teacher at the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society, a girls' school in the northern town of Anupshahr, said she might intervene in three child marriages a year. During the pandemic, when the campus closed, the number increased three to four times.<br /><br />"Before Covid, children were always in touch with their teachers and also with me," she said. "After Covid, when the children had to stay at home, keeping in contact with them became a big challenge."<br /><br />Financial considerations often tipped the scales in favor of marriage. Social distancing and warnings against large gatherings meant parents could hold small, less-expensive ceremonies at home, rather than the multi-day celebrations that are common even in the poorest pockets of society. During the direst stretches of the pandemic, some families married off daughters because they couldn't afford to feed another mouth.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-22901104798358068722022-06-12T10:58:16.266-07:002022-06-12T10:58:16.266-07:0090% of Women in India Are Shut Out of the Workforc...90% of Women in India Are Shut Out of the Workforce<br />A small fraction of women in India had formal employment before the pandemic. Covid made it so much worse.<br /><br />By Ronojoy Mazumdar and Archana Chaudhary<br />June 1, 2022, 5:01 PM PDT<br /><br />https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/90-women-india-are-shut-out-workforce-431950<br /><br />For years, Sanchuri Bhuniya fought her parents' pleas to settle down. She wanted to travel and earn money — not become a housewife.<br /><br />So in 2019, Bhuniya snuck out of her isolated village in eastern India. She took a train hundreds of miles south to the city of Bengaluru and found work in a garment factory earning $120 a month. The job liberated her. "I ran away," she said. "That's the only way I was able to go."<br /><br />That life of financial freedom ended abruptly with the arrival of Covid-19. In 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a nationwide lockdown to curb infections, shutting almost all businesses. Within a few weeks, more than 100 million Indians lost their jobs, including Bhuniya, who was forced to return to her village and never found another stable employer.<br /><br />As the world climbs out of the pandemic, economists warn of a troubling data point: Failing to restore jobs for women — who have been less likely than men to return to the workforce — could shave trillions of dollars off global economic growth. The forecast is particularly bleak in developing countries like India, where female labor force participation fell so steeply that it's now in the same league as war-torn Yemen.<br /><br />This week's episode of The Pay Check podcast explores how the coronavirus accelerated an already worrying trend in the world's second-most populous country. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of working women in India dropped from 26% to 19%, according to data compiled by the World Bank. As infections surged, a bad situation turned dire: Economists in Mumbai estimate that female employment plummeted to 9% by 2022.<br /><br />This is disastrous news for India's economy, which had started slowing before the pandemic. Modi has prioritized job creation, pressing the country to strive for amrit kaal, a golden era of growth. But his administration has made little progress in improving prospects for working women. That's especially true in rural areas, where more than two-thirds of India's 1.3 billion people live, conservative mores reign and jobs have been evaporating for years. Despite the nation's rapid economic expansion, women have struggled to make the transition to working in urban centers.<br /><br />Closing the employment gap between men and women — a whopping 58 percentage points — could expand India's GDP by close to a third by 2050. That equates to nearly $6 trillion in constant US dollar terms, according to a recent analysis from Bloomberg Economics. Doing nothing threatens to derail the country on its quest to become a competitive producer for global markets. Though women in India represent 48% of the population, they contribute only around 17% of GDP compared to 40% in China.<br /><br />India is an extreme illustration of a global phenomenon. Across the world, women were more likely than men to lose jobs during the pandemic, and their recovery has been slower. Policy changes that address gender disparities and boost the number of working women — improved access to education, child care, or flexible work arrangements, for example — would help add about $20 trillion to global GDP by 2050, according to Bloomberg Economics.<br /><br />For workers like Bhuniya, 23, the pandemic had heavy consequences. After losing her job, she struggled to afford food in Bengaluru and eventually returned to her remote village, Patrapali, in the state of Odisha. Bhuniya doesn't think she'll have another opportunity to leave. She no longer earns a steady income, but her family worries about her safety as a single woman living in a distant city.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-3654518568774202042022-04-28T18:51:00.831-07:002022-04-28T18:51:00.831-07:00#India #Covid-19: 'My father did not have to d...#India #Covid-19: 'My father did not have to die'. The oxygen cylinder placed under hard vinyl bench on which he lay did not work. His ambulance was slowed by random police checkpoints, his condition worsened before he reached hospital #Modi #BJP @BDUTT https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61244109<br /><br />In April 2021, when the news first came that my father had Covid, I was at a crematorium in Mumbai, fighting back tears, as an elderly man in a wheelchair waved goodbye to his wife.<br /><br />Covid was already my whole life. I travelled more than 30,000km (18,641 miles) by road across India, through the first wave and then again thousands of kilometres by both air and road through the more lethal second spell.<br /><br />I'd been the chronicler of death and despair; but now the news had come home.<br /><br />I am forever haunted by my decision to take my dad to hospital in a private ambulance.<br /><br />------<br /><br />Last summer hundreds of thousands of people died when an unprepared India was hit by a catastrophic second wave of Covid-19 and its health care system buckled. Journalist Barkha Dutt, who was chronicling the pandemic, lost her father to the virus in April 2021. Here she writes on her loss, and other daughters who suffered the same fate.<br /><br />It's been a year since I have been able to hear music; a year since the death of my father to Covid at the peak of India's insatiable second wave.<br /><br />So, a few days ago, the faint strains of a familiar tune felt like a jolt to the system.<br /><br />Guantanamera Guajira Guantanamera…<br /><br />My hand trembled as I heard the chords of the Cuban folk song that has been variously sung to invoke romance, patriotism, protest and change.<br /><br />Inside I was shaking.<br /><br />Memory can be a beast.<br /><br />For my sister and I, this was Papa's Song that marked the milestones of our lives, played out on scratchy cassettes when we were kids, remastered for an eight-track system in our teens, graduating to CDs when we went to college and finally heard on loop at his desktop. Here, he was surrounded by grandchildren, dogs, meccano sets, and odd looking wires - bit parts of kettles, speakers, coffee makers - machines he was repairing for friends, sometimes opened up for the sheer joy of tinkering with them.<br /><br />SP Dutt - 'Speedy' to friends and family - was one of the hundreds of thousands of Indians taken by a virus that pummelled our health system into submission. In the wasteland of a nation's grief, April was indeed the cruellest month as oxygen ran out, hospitals shut their gates to patients who died on the streets, vaccines were delayed and elections were mockingly on schedule.<br /><br />We could only turn to each other, daughters desperate to save fathers, as institutions collapsed.<br /><br />In Mumbai, Samridhi Saxena, reached out in the hope that I could help her father with an oxygen cylinder. He was struggling with a rare neurodegenerative disease.<br /><br />From Patna, Manisha called to say her 53-year-old father may die because the hospital where he was admitted no longer had oxygen.<br /><br /><br />In Bangalore, 21-year-old Bharini asked me: "How strong am I expected to be?" She lost her biological parents in an accident, now her adoptive mother had died from Covid.<br /><br />Journalist Stutee Ghosh and I mirrored each other's gnawing guilt - that somehow we were letting down our fathers; but also the guilt of knowing that even in our worst moment, we were better off than hundreds of thousands of other Indians, just because that our dads were in hospital and not stranded on the road.<br /><br />Her father, like mine, didn't make it. And over the weeks, her grief mutated into rage at "the indignity in death for so many who are dying and not even being counted by the government".<br /><br />We were bereft. As daughters. And as citizens.<br /><br />Before my father died, we always valorised our mother, Prabha Dutt, who we lost when I was 13 years old to a brain haemorrhage. As India's first woman war correspondent, who died at 40, she was the stuff of legend.<br /><br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-71983711459111307802022-01-24T14:36:09.335-08:002022-01-24T14:36:09.335-08:00In last 5 years under #Modi, income of poorest 20%...In last 5 years under #Modi, income of poorest 20% #Indians fell 53%, the 2nd lowest quintile (lower middle class) saw 32% decline in their household income. Upper middle (20%) & richest (20%) saw their household income rise by 7% and 39% respectively #BJP https://indianexpress.com/article/india/income-of-poorest-fifth-plunged-53-in-5-yrs-those-at-top-surged-7738426/<br /><br />------<br /><br />While the pandemic brought economic activity to a standstill for at least two quarters in 2020-21 and resulted in a 7.3% contraction in GDP in 2020-21, the survey shows that the pandemic hit the urban poor most and eroded their household income.<br /><br /><br />Splitting the population across five categories based on income, the survey shows that while the poorest 20% (first quintile) witnessed the biggest erosion of 53%, the second lowest quintile (lower middle category), too, witnessed a decline in their household income of 32% in the same period. While the quantum of erosion reduced to 9% for those in the middle income category, the top two quintiles — upper middle (20%) and richest (20%)— saw their household income rise by 7% and 39% respectively.<br /><br />The survey shows that the richest 20% of households have, on average, added more income per household and more pooled income as a group in the past five years than in any five-year period earlier since liberalisation. Exactly the opposite has happened for the poorest 20% of households — on average, they have never actually seen a decrease in household income since 1995. Yet, in 2021, in a huge knockout punch caused by Covid, they earned half as much as they did in 2016.<br /><br />How disruptive this distress has been for those at the bottom of the pyramid is reinforced by the fact that in the previous 11-year period between 2005 and 2016, while the household income of the richest 20% grew by 34%, the poorest 20% saw their household income surge by 183% at an average annual growth rate of 9.9%.<br /><br />Coming in the run-up to the Budget, the task for the Government is cut out.<br /><br />“As the Finance Minister is finalising her budget proposals for 2022-23 to give shape to the roadmap for economic revival of the country,” said Rajesh Shukla, MD and CEO, PRICE, “we need a K-shaped policy too that addresses the two ends of the spectrum and a lot more thinking on how to build the bridge between the two.”Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-83581650630465617472021-12-29T10:36:40.988-08:002021-12-29T10:36:40.988-08:00#India's staggering COVID-19 death toll could ...#India's staggering COVID-19 death toll could be 6 million, by far the highest #COVID19 death toll in the world -- greater than the #US at more than 811,000. #Modi #BJP #pandemic #Delta #OmicronVariant - ABC News - https://abcn.ws/30UZSLO via @ABC<br /><br />Even though omicron is quickly becoming the more dominant form of Covid in the U.S. and elsewhere, quick action has bought time for scientists to decode the extent of its transmissibility and severity. South Africa identified and broadcast details of the new variant just weeks after seeing a spike in cases in one province.<br /><br /><br /><br />By contrast, for much of 2020, India’s efforts tracking the virus were sparse, meaning the exact origin of delta still remains murky. To date, the country has only sequenced and shared 0.3% of its total official infections to the GISAID database.<br /><br />India has been held back by the fact that only a handful of government laboratories and states were making consistent efforts in the first year of the pandemic to map the virus, even as millions were being infected in the country’s first wave, according to people familiar with the matter. Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist and biostatistics chair at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, said India’s sequencing efforts were hurt by “bureaucracy, politics and a sense of exceptionalism that we have conquered Covid and there is no need to worry about variants.”<br /><br />“The need to share data and samples is so key,” she said. “When South Africa started collaborating and sharing with the rest of the world, progress also increased like a process of contagion: exponentially. India is always protective of its own data.”<br /><br /><br /><br />Inside India’s scientific agencies a lack of institutional dynamism, along with a culture of subservience to Modi’s government — highly sensitive to commentary on its handling of the virus — had taken hold, said one former official. That meant critical questions weren’t being aired by experts out of fear they’d derail their careers, the person said. In many cases, India’s health ministry simply wasn’t listening to or making decisions based on advice coming from those expert bodies, according to this official.<br /><br />Attempts to ramp up sequencing in India were also critically curtailed by an inadvertent ban in May 2020 on the import of reagents, the chemical needed to fuel sequencer machines. The `Make in India’ campaign, Modi’s drive to ensure the country is less reliant on places like China, meant publicly-financed labs weren’t able to import items worth less than 2 billion rupees ($26.5 million) for months. India mostly uses sequencers manufactured by San Diego-based Illumina Inc. and the U.K.’s Oxford Nanopore Technologies Plc, which run on patented reagents that can’t be substituted locally.<br /><br /><br /><br />Scientists in India and abroad now provide varying dates for when delta began circulating there. Samples retrospectively added to GISAID show at least one delta-linked lineage in India as far back as September last year, while the World Health Organization places its first discovery there in October.<br /><br />Current and former Indian government scientists say there are often errors when manually uploading information to the database and those datelines are likely to be wrong. December 2020 is when delta was initially sequenced in India, they say. Certainly, the first person to decode the mutations wouldn’t have known its full enormity at the time since not all changes in a virus are significant. Only when you begin to see spiraling outbreaks marked by similar characteristics do you realize that a variant of concern is at play, they said. But Amravati offered the clues needed to make that connection as early as January this year.<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-4249997220133470082021-12-23T10:41:06.666-08:002021-12-23T10:41:06.666-08:00#India's staggering COVID-19 death toll could ...#India's staggering COVID-19 death toll could be 6 million, by far the highest #COVID19 death toll in the world -- greater than the #US at more than 811,000. #Modi #BJP #pandemic #Delta #OmicronVariant - ABC News - https://abcn.ws/30UZSLO via @ABC <br /><br />New research suggests that India’s COVID-19 death toll during its first and second waves might have been significantly undercounted, with the actual number potentially 12 times higher than the official stats -- over 6 million people.<br /><br />That would be by far the highest COVID death toll in the world -- greater than the U.S. at more than 811,000.<br /><br />India was devastated by a crushing wave of the delta variant in April and May, with supply shortages, makeshift clinics and images of funeral pyres burning nonstop.<br /><br />There was a sense at the time that the number of deaths was an undercount and a study in July indicated that deaths could be 10 times the official toll, although that research had limitations.<br /><br />MORE: EXPLAINER: Why India's pandemic data is vastly undercounted<br />The new study, by researchers in the U.S. and India from the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, a public health research institute in Washington, D.C., indicates that the “reported COVID-19 deaths greatly underestimated pandemic-associated mortality” and was particularly acute among older and poorer people.<br /><br />According to government statistics, India logged 478,007 COVID-19 deaths from the beginning of the pandemic, marked at Jan. 3, 2020 to Dec. 21, 2021, and nearly 35 million cases during that time.<br /><br />The study -- which is focused on the Chennai District on the country's southeast coast -- indicates the number is likely much higher, finding that that the death rate there was 5.2 per 1,000, "a 41% increase over typical mortality levels in the city.”<br /><br /><br />The study uses data on "all-cause mortality" within the district, i.e. the death rate from all causes of death for the population in the given time period are considered.<br /><br />“On the nationwide figures, the 5.2 deaths per 1000 resident would indicate over 6 million deaths nationwide if the results could be extrapolated to the entire country,” Professor Ramanan Laxminarayan, an economist and epidemiologist and the study's lead author, told ABC News. He is the founder of the University of Washington's Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in DC, which contributed to the project.<br /><br />Deaths were substantially higher in older age groups.<br /><br />Greater increases in mortality were observed in communities with lower socioeconomic status during the second wave of infections from March 1-June 30, 2021, but not during the first.<br /><br />Laxminarayan said that there were limitations to the study -- Chennai, as an urban area, might have been more affected than many parts of the country which were rural.<br /><br />“But by the same token, Chennai has some of the best public health and healthcare facilities in the country and so the mortality rates in Chennai were likely lower than in other parts of the country,” he added.<br /><br />The study notes that the true burden of disease is still “uncertain” due to restrictions in disease surveillance and a lack of official death records.<br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-17117406773148205702021-12-21T12:43:55.781-08:002021-12-21T12:43:55.781-08:00#Indian man fined 100,000 Indian rupees ($1,322) f...#Indian man fined 100,000 Indian rupees ($1,322) for wanting #Modi’s face cut from #vaccine drive. #India’s PM Modi is the focus of a huge #advertising blitz touting his government’s triumphs in fighting #COVID despite nearly 500,000 deaths. #pandemic https://aje.io/swz2bt<br /><br />An Indian man who went to court to complain about Prime Minister Narendra Modi promoting himself as the face of the nation’s COVID-19 vaccination drive has walked away with a fine for “wasting” the judge’s time.<br /><br />India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister has been the focus of an enormous advertising blitz touting his government’s triumphs in fighting the pandemic despite nearly 500,000 Indians dying of COVID-19, according to official data. Health experts fear the actual toll could be much higher.<br /><br />Modi’s visage has been plastered on billboards and even on the side of passenger planes alongside a triumphant message celebrating India’s recent milestone of one billion administered vaccination doses.<br /><br />The campaign is at odds with the fierce criticism levelled at Modi’s government since the pandemic began, with political opponents dryly suggesting his face should also be printed on the death certificates of COVID-19 victims.<br /><br />Peter Myaliparampil of southern Kerala state had objected to Modi’s face being printed on his vaccine certificate with a message exhorting the public to fight the coronavirus.<br /><br />He told a court that India’s inoculation rollout risked becoming “a media campaign” for Modi’s benefit.<br /><br />In his petition, Myaliparampil said he had paid for his own vaccine and the image of Modi on his certificate “served no utility or relevance”.<br /><br />But the Kerala High Court threw out the case, saying it appeared to be politically motivated and fined him 100,000 Indian rupees ($1,322) for wasting its time.<br /><br />“If the petitioner … is ashamed to see the picture of his prime minister, he can avert his eyes to the bottom side of the vaccine certificate,” the court’s judgement said.<br /><br />Myaliparampil’s lawyer told the AFP news agency they would appeal against the decision.<br /><br />India has recorded more than 477,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, more than any other country except the United States and Brazil.<br /><br />The government has justified using Modi as the face of the media campaign, with the junior health minister telling parliament in August that it created awareness about coronavirus prevention.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-81022457868365839012021-07-22T11:54:53.885-07:002021-07-22T11:54:53.885-07:00Top #Indian newspaper raided by #tax authorities a...Top #Indian newspaper raided by #tax authorities after months of critical coverage.Under #Modi, several critical media outlets have found themselves in tax investigators’ crosshairs, raising fears about the health of the independent press in #India. #BJP https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-modi-press-raid/2021/07/22/facbc01a-eabd-11eb-84a2-d93bc0b50294_story.html?tid=ss_tw<br /><br />“The raid is the outcome of our aggressive reporting, especially during the second wave of the pandemic in April,” Gaur said by telephone. “Unlike some other media, we reported how people were dying for lack of oxygen and hospital beds.”<br /><br />--------------<br /><br /><br />Indian tax authorities on Thursday raided one of the country's most prominent newspapers in what journalists and the political opposition denounced as retaliation for the outlet's hard-nosed coverage of the government's pandemic response.<br /><br />The Dainik Bhaskar Group, whose Hindi-language broadsheet boasts a combined circulation of more than 4 million, was raided simultaneously in at least four locations, including at its headquarters in Madhya Pradesh state.<br /><br />Surabhi Ahluwalia, a spokeswoman for the tax authority, said searches were underway at multiple locations across the country linked to the group, but she declined to share details about the case. She said the department usually conducts searches in matters of tax evasion.<br /><br />But the justification of tax evasion was panned by government critics, who pointed out that Dainik Bhaskar has been persistently needling India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with its coverage, including as recently as this week.<br /><br />India used spyware to hack journalists and others<br /><br />The Press Club of India said in a statement that it “deplores such acts of intimidation by the government through enforcement agencies to deter the independent media.”<br /><br />Under the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who rose to power in 2014, several critical media outlets have found themselves in tax investigators’ crosshairs, raising fears about the health of the independent press in the world’s largest democracy. Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for journalists, recently placed India at 142nd place in its press freedom rankings, roughly on par with Myanmar and Mexico.<br /><br />Om Gaur, Dainik Bhaskar’s national editor, said his staff’s mobile devices were seized during the raids as a “tactic to harass journalists.”<br /><br />“The raid is the outcome of our aggressive reporting, especially during the second wave of the pandemic in April,” Gaur said by telephone. “Unlike some other media, we reported how people were dying for lack of oxygen and hospital beds.”<br /><br />The tax investigation “is not going to change anything for us,” he added. “We will keep doing good journalism.”<br /><br />As covid-19 roiled India this spring, Dainik Bhaskar splashed photos of funeral pyres on its front pages, reported on corpses floating in the Ganges River and repeatedly challenged the government’s narrative about the disaster and its official death statistics. Gaur, the editor, contributed an op-ed in the New York Times that made waves in his home country.<br /><br />The paper has sometimes taken a less-than-orthodox approach to holding government accountable: As citizens in the state of Gujarat struggled to procure covid-19 medication in April, the paper published the phone number of the BJP’s state president in a massive front-page headline.<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-54219589554896918252021-07-12T16:26:42.859-07:002021-07-12T16:26:42.859-07:00Sashi Tharoor: #India besieged by #Covid19, rising...Sashi Tharoor: #India besieged by #Covid19, rising #poverty, falling #GDP growth & tensions with #China & #Pakistan. #Modi's embrace of the #Quad with the #US, #Japan and #Australia should be seen in this light: it is shield, more than sword https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3140393/coronavirus-poverty-pakistan-india-under-siege-not-ready-war?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=share_widget&utm_campaign=3140393 via @scmpnews<br /><br />The Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government in India led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi marked the seventh anniversary of its ascent to power a little over a month ago without any of its customary fanfare. The subdued air around the government’s conduct reveals a country in many ways under siege.<br />First of all, the deadly coronavirus has besieged India, with the authorities’ response to a devastating second wave bordering between the inept and the irresponsible. So far, close to 400,000 people have lost their lives, though unofficial estimates place the toll much higher. More than 30 million people have been infected; many have had to struggle for basic supplies of medicines and oxygen in the last three months, as hospitals overflowed and the health-care system buckled under the pressure. Only 4 per cent of Indians are fully vaccinated, the government having failed to order sufficient doses even while it was boasting that it had done the world a favour by preventing a major calamity.<br />Next, the economy is under siege. The GDP growth rate has cratered, thanks in part (but not only) to the draconian nationwide lockdown imposed in March 2020 and fitfully renewed since. Some 75 million people were pushed below the poverty line in 2020 and 97 per cent of Indians reported becoming poorer during the last year. Unemployment figures are at the highest levels ever recorded. Tens of thousands of micro, small and medium enterprises (especially those employing fewer than twenty people) have been forced to close. India’s middle class is estimated to have shrunk by 32 million in the last year. It is clear that both lives and livelihoods have been in jeopardy since the Modi government’s re-election in May 2019.<br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-31233858819482930022021-07-11T18:19:06.731-07:002021-07-11T18:19:06.731-07:00#Indian Rupee Slides Toward Year’s Low as #India’s...#Indian Rupee Slides Toward Year’s Low as #India’s Trade Deficit Widens. India’s widening trade deficit & elevated commodity prices are bearing down on the #currency , reinforcing a recent downward trend pushing it toward a new low for the year.- Bloomberg<br /><br /><br />https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-11/rupee-slides-toward-year-s-low-as-india-s-trade-deficit-widens<br /><br />https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1414378178777272322?s=20<br /><br /><br />After months of wild volatility in the rupee, India’s widening trade deficit and elevated commodity prices are bearing down on the currency, reinforcing a recent downward bias and pushing it toward a new low for the year.<br /><br />That’s the view of traders who’ve seen the rupee whipsaw from being Asia’s best performer in the first quarter to its worst in April when another wave of Covid-19 infections took hold.<br /><br />This volatility and the prospect of tapering by the Federal Reserve have also reduced the attractiveness of India’s currency for carry trades, adding to its headwinds.<br /><br />“We expect oil and broader commodity complex prices to remain elevated in the short term, which will weigh on India’s trade balance,” said Standard Chartered Plc’s Parul Mittal Sinha. “We maintain a bearish view on the rupee,” said Sinha, who heads the bank’s India financial markets and macro trading for South Asia.<br /><br />Standard Chartered and RBL Bank Ltd. forecast the currency to depreciate to 76 per dollar by year-end, while their peers at Deutsche Bank AG have a slightly less pessimistic projection of 75.<br /><br />The rupee closed at 74.6350 on Friday while Brent crude, the benchmark for India’s oil imports, was around $76 per barrel, up more than 45% since the start of the year.<br /><br />Amid the devastating human toll that the coronavirus is taking in India, the rate of increase in new infections is slowing, which is improving the prospects for reopening the economy. But as the Covid curve flattens and consumers and businesses become more active, demand for imports is also set to increase, weighing on the currency.<br /><br />Updated trade data due Thursday are expected to confirm the deficit widened to $9.4 billion in June, from $6.3 billion in May. Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. estimates that billion dollar deficits will continue and average in the “double digits” as the economy reopens.<br /><br />Technical indicators also point to further depreciation of the currency given dollar-rupee’s moving average convergence-divergence gauge, a measure of momentum, remains above zero in bullish territory. The pair has room to run before reaching resistance at April’s peak of 75.3362.<br /><br />Yet even RBL Bank’s domestic markets head Anand Bagri, who expects the rupee to weaken, sees pockets of support for the currency, including inflows for equity offerings.<br /><br />Notable among these is a $1.3 billion initial share salesfrom Zomato Ltd., and Paytm’s bid for shareholder approval of a $2.2 billion stock sale that would set in motion the process for the country’s largest ever debut.<br /><br />The Reserve Bank of India also has $600 billion of currency reserves to draw on to curb any sharp fall in the rupee.<br /><br />‘”We expect the RBI to remain proactive with its FX intervention strategy to ensure limited volatility in the rupee and to prevent excessive rupee depreciation from feeding into inflation,” said Kaushik Das, chief India economist at Deutsche Bank.<br /><br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-71317893921559362032021-07-09T11:02:45.526-07:002021-07-09T11:02:45.526-07:00#India’s Biggest Job Creators Being Killed by #COV...#India’s Biggest Job Creators Being Killed by #COVID19 #Pandemic. Small businesses employ over 110 million workers & are the nation’s biggest non-farm employer. Their revival is key to getting jobs on track for domestic demand and #GDP growth. #Modi. #BJP https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-09/india-s-biggest-job-creators-are-being-killed-by-the-pandemic<br /><br />Small businesses may be the bedrock of the Indian economy, helping expand its industrial base and creating jobs by the millions, but the pandemic has shown it’s better to be bigger, according to research by Societe Generale.<br /><br />The so-called micro-, small-, and medium-enterprises haven’t benefited much from the government’s stimulus steps such as liquidity and loan moratorium, forcing them to let go a large swathe of their employees, Kunal Kundu, an economist with Societe Generale GSC Pvt. in Bengaluru, wrote in the report. While the bigger companies sailed through with a minor blip, he said.<br /><br />Read: $277 Billion Package May Not Give Immediate Boost to India<br /><br />Given that small enterprises account for more than 110 million workers and are the nation’s biggest non-farm employer, Kundu said their revival is key to getting jobs on track, and, in turn, domestic demand.<br /><br />Here’s how Kundu sees small companies faring poorly compared to larger ones:<br /><br />MSMEs, which have a much higher staff cost-to-sales ratio, saw a 10.5 percentage point drop in the ratio between the second and fourth quarters of 2020, while the drop for the larger companies was only around 5 percentage point<br />Despite large-scale layoffs, MSME’s margins continued to suffer not just because of high and rising input costs, but also because of a sharp increase in their financing cost<br />Small businesses also face a double whammy on the tax front. Currently, these businesses are liable to pay consumption tax as soon as they raise an invoice, irrespective of whether or not the invoices have been settled. Failure to pay goods and services tax, in turn, leads to an additional burden in the form of penalties<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-82051654689679678062021-07-02T12:01:23.348-07:002021-07-02T12:01:23.348-07:00#India #Covid: AI shows #Pakistani Twitter prayed ...#India #Covid: AI shows #Pakistani Twitter prayed for neighbor. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven study which looked at thousands of tweets from #Pakistan posted between 21 April & 4 May says overwhelming number were indeed positive. #Modi #coronavirus https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57683808<br /><br />It is perhaps not surprising that the fractious relationship between historic adversaries India and Pakistan has spilled over into social media in recent years.<br /><br />But at the end of April, as India struggled with a ferocious second wave of Covid-19, citizens on either side of the border shelved their barbs in favour of supportive hashtags like #IndiaNeedsOxygen and #PakistanStandsWithIndia.<br /><br />Experts say it is well known that supportive hashtags do not always mean positive tweets - users often "hijack" them for anything from trolling to wishing happy birthday to a cricketer or Bollywood star.<br /><br />But an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven study which looked at thousands of tweets from Pakistan posted between 21 April and 4 May says an overwhelming number were indeed positive.<br /><br />Researchers, led by Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US, used machine learning tools to identify the tweets that expressed kindness, empathy and solidarity.<br /><br />They collected 300,000 tweets with three biggest trending hashtags: #IndiaNeedsOxygen, #PakistanStandsWithIndia and #EndiaSaySorryToKashmir - the last a reference to the long-running dispute over the Himalayan territory. Of these, 55,712 tweets were from Pakistan, 46,651 were from India and the remaining were from around the world.<br /><br />The researchers then ran the text from these tweets into a "hope speech classifier" - a language processing tool that helps detect positive comments. They looked for patterns to identify if the text had "hostility-diffusing positive hope speech", or words like prayer, empathy, distress and solidarity.<br /><br />Their study found that tweets containing supportive hashtags originating in Pakistan heavily outnumbered those containing non-supportive hashtags and also had substantially more likes and retweets. Their method also amplified the positive tweets, making it easier to find them quickly.<br /><br />"Our research showed that there's a universality in how people express emotions. If you search randomly, you'll find positive tweets a little over 44% of the time. Our method throws up positive tweets 83% of the time," Mr KhudaBukhsh said.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-4756556735834819172021-06-29T21:10:40.863-07:002021-06-29T21:10:40.863-07:00After #COVID surge, some signs of internal dissent...After #COVID surge, some signs of internal dissent against #India's #Modi. Doing badly in #UttarPradesh would be a major setback for the #BJP, analysts say, and could have a knock-on effect on the next general election. #Hindutva #coronavirus #pandemic https://www.reuters.com/world/india/after-covid-surge-some-signs-internal-dissent-against-indias-modi-2021-06-29/ <br /><br />Govind Pasi, a grassroots member of India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), says he got no help from his connections in the ruling party when his wife contracted coronavirus and died at home for lack of proper treatment.<br /><br />Now, he says, he is done with the party that has ruled India since 2014 and with its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi.<br /><br />"I am heart-broken, nobody came to help us when we needed help the most," said Pasi, 45, speaking in Balai village in Uttar Pradesh state. Nearby, on the banks of the Ganges river, scores of bodies of people believed to have died of COVID-19 have washed up.<br /><br />Anand Awasthi, a district vice president of the BJP, said he was aware of the death of Pasi's wife and that the party was trying to get him monetary compensation. He said there was some confusion around her death relating to whether a government database established she had COVID, but did not have details.<br /><br />Pasi is among more than a dozen ground and mid-level BJP members who told Reuters they are disillusioned with the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic that has devastated India. In addition, six state lawmakers in Uttar Pradesh have written letters criticising the government for not responding to frantic calls for help from their constituents, which Reuters has reviewed.<br /><br />A high-profile national level BJP official in New Delhi said he was taking a sabbatical because of the "failings of providing basic medical care, mixed messaging on lockdowns, abysmal medical oxygen cylinder shortages and clear lack of priority".<br /><br />He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing worries about a backlash for stepping out of line.<br /><br />The BJP is a mammoth organisation, claiming 150 million members, and Reuters could not determine the degree to which the unhappiness has spread. But it is highly unusual for those within the party to speak out against Modi, who has dominated Indian politics in his seven years in power and whose control of the BJP has been unquestioned.<br /><br />The BJP headquarters and the prime minister's office did not respond to requests for comment.<br /><br />Kailash Vijayvargiya, a senior BJP leader who is one of its nine general secretaries, told Reuters he had no knowledge of any unhappiness or dissent within the party.<br /><br />"The pandemic was tough for everyone and we know some of our workers also lost their loved ones," he said. "At so many levels we have helped each other and there were times when we could not because the situation has been very difficult."<br /><br />Modi, a Hindu nationalist who gets wide support in the country's majority community, has faced criticism before, including for a shock demonetisation that threw the economy into disarray and haphazard tax reform. But the shortage of hospital beds and medical oxygen in the COVID crisis and the country's stuttering vaccination programme have battered his reputation for action and competence, analysts and opposition leaders say.<br /><br /><br />Analysts say public anger over the handling of the pandemic coupled with even some disaffection in the party rank-and-file could hurt the BJP when it faces its next political test - an election early next year in politically crucial Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state and currently ruled by the BJP.<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-79742017870365021022021-06-23T10:42:07.148-07:002021-06-23T10:42:07.148-07:00Thanks to #Modi, #India Had a ‘State-Orchestrated ...Thanks to #Modi, #India Had a ‘State-Orchestrated Covid Massacre’, says popular #Indian comedian Kunal Kamra.“My people are needlessly dying,” Mr. Kamra says. “Our government has blood on its hands.” #BJP #Hindutva #Islamophobia #Covid https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/opinion/modi-covid-kunal-kamra-india.html?smid=tw-share <br /><br />In the Opinion video above, Kunal Kamra, an enormously popular stand-up comedian in India, puts all jokes aside and takes a serious look at his government’s handling of the pandemic. His assessment is withering: He accuses the nation’s leadership, especially an overconfident Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of putting political vanity before common sense and opening the door to a devastating resurgence of coronavirus infections that have devastated the country.<br /><br />India has been struggling for weeks amid this second wave, which has sickened millions, killed hundreds of thousands and overwhelmed the nation’s health care system. At the peak of the crisis, new infections numbered about 400,000 a day, a record-breaking pace.<br /><br />Since then, the daily counts of infections and deaths have dropped. But Mr. Kamra says that had Mr. Modi and other political leaders responded more quickly and more effectively, a lot of lives and heartache would have been spared.<br /><br />“My people are needlessly dying,” Mr. Kamra says. “Our government has blood on its hands.”Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-84021161486357497732021-06-22T18:13:11.887-07:002021-06-22T18:13:11.887-07:00Third wave abating! #Pakistan's #COVID19 posi...Third wave abating! #Pakistan's #COVID19 positivity rate drops to 1.69%, the lowest in 8 months!! The country last recorded its lowest positivity rate at 1.64% on October 18, 2020. #Coronavirus #pandemic https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/853429-pakistans-covid-19-positivity-rate-drops-to-169-lowest-in-8-months<br /><br />Pakistan's coronavirus positivity rate is down to 1.69% today, according to daily data issued by the National Command and Operation Center. This is the lowest positivity rate recorded by the country in eight months.<br /><br />The country last recorded its lowest positivity rate at 1.64% on October 18.<br /><br />A major decrease was also seen in the daily number of COVID-19 cases detected in Pakistan. <br /><br />In the last 24 hours, 663 new infections have been detected and 27 people have died from the virus, according to the NCOC.<br /><br />The NCOC said a total of 39,017 tests for COVID-19 were conducted in the last 24 hours.<br /><br />The total number of deaths from COVID-19 in the country so far has reached 22,034 and the total number of cases has reached 949,838, while 894,352 people have recovered from the virus so far. The active number of cases currently stands at 33,452.<br /><br />During the last 24 hours, the most deaths occurred in Punjab followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Out of the 27 deaths, 17 people died on ventilators.<br /><br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-9609235135075771362021-06-22T07:21:25.953-07:002021-06-22T07:21:25.953-07:00#India's #economy under #Modi. #GDP is shrinki...#India's #economy under #Modi. #GDP is shrinking, inflation rising. High budget deficits forcing India to borrow heavily. #BJP #Hindutva #CIOVID #DeltaVariant https://news.yahoo.com/india-economy-seven-years-modi-230103338.html<br /><br />https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1407342206730526721?s=20<br /><br />Narendra Modi stormed India's political stage with grand promises - of more jobs, prosperity and less red tape.<br /><br />His thumping mandate - in 2014 and again in 2019 - raised hopes of big bang reforms.<br /><br />But his economic record, in the seven years he's been prime minister, has proved lacklustre. And the pandemic battered what was an already under-par performance.<br /><br /><br />Here's how Asia's third-largest economy has fared under Mr Modi, in seven charts.<br /><br />Growth is sluggish<br />Mr Modi's avowed GDP target - a $5 trillion (£3.6 trillion) economy by 2025, or roughly $3 trillion after adjusting for inflation - is a pipe dream now.<br /><br />Independent pre-Covid estimates for 2025 had touched $2.6 trillion at best. The pandemic has shaved off another $200-300bn.<br /><br />Rising inflation, driven by global oil prices, is also a big concern, economist Ajit Ranade said.<br /><br />But Covid is not solely responsible.<br /><br />India's GDP - at a high of 7-8% when Mr Modi took office - had fallen to its lowest in a decade - 3.1% - by the fourth quarter of 2019-20.<br /><br />A disastrous currency ban in 2016, which wiped out 86% of cash in circulation, and a hasty roll-out of a sweeping new tax code, known as the Goods and Services Tax (GST), hit businesses hard.<br /><br />This spurred the next big problem.<br /><br />Joblessness is on the rise<br />"India's biggest challenge has been a slowdown in investments since 2011-12," said Mahesh Vyas, CEO of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). "Then, since 2016, we have suffered too many economic shocks in quick succession."<br /><br />The currency ban, GST and intermittent lockdowns all reduced employment, he added.<br /><br />Unemployment climbed to a 45-year high - 6.1% - in 2017-18, according to the last official count. And it has nearly doubled since then, according to household surveys by CMIE, a widely-used proxy for labour market data.<br /><br />More than 25 million people have lost their jobs since the start of 2021. And more than 75 million Indians have plunged back into poverty, including a third of India's 100 million-strong middle class, setting back half a decade of gains, according to estimates by Pew Research.<br /><br />Mr Modi's government has also created far short of the 20 million jobs the economy needs every year, Mr Ranade said. India has been adding only around 4.3 million jobs a year for the last decade.<br /><br />India is not making or exporting enough<br />'Make in India' - Mr Modi's high-octane flagship initiative - was supposed to turn India into a global manufacturing powerhouse by cutting red tape and drawing investment for export hubs.<br /><br />The goal: manufacturing would account for 25% of GDP. Seven years on, it's share is stagnant at 15%. Worse, manufacturing jobs went down by half in the last five years, according to the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis.<br /><br />Exports have been stuck at around $300bn for nearly a decade.<br /><br />Under Mr Modi, India has steadily lost market share to smaller rivals such as Bangladesh, whose remarkable growth has hinged on exports, largely fuelled by the labour-intensive garments industry.<br /><br />Mr Modi has also hiked tariffs and turned increasingly protectionist in recent years - in tandem with his rallying cry for "self-reliance".<br /><br />Infrastructure building is a rare bright spot<br />Mr Modi's government has been laying 36km (22 miles) of highways a day on average, compared to his predecessor's daily count of 8-11km, said Vinayak Chatterjee, co-founder of infrastructure firm Feedback Infra.<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-47349888468689488752021-06-21T19:28:39.308-07:002021-06-21T19:28:39.308-07:00Mr. Biden announced this month plans to donate 500...<br />Mr. Biden announced this month plans to donate 500 million coronavirus vaccine doses produced by Pfizer to the rest of the world. Of those doses, 200 million are expected to be exported this year and 300 million in the first half of next year.<br /><br />Outbreaks in countries such as India and Brazil have underscored the gap in vaccinations between rich and poor countries, with many developing nations still struggling to administer vaccines.<br /><br /><br />Of those being donated through Covax, 14 million will go to Latin America, 16 million to Asia and 10 million to Africa. The White House also listed more than two dozen countries and regions that will receive doses directly, including Colombia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, Bosnia, the West Bank and Gaza.<br /><br /><br />https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-to-miss-june-target-for-some-covid-19-vaccine-donations-11624306309?mod=searchresults_pos3&page=1Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-86765867563163463642021-06-20T10:04:51.392-07:002021-06-20T10:04:51.392-07:00#India Official Warns of Early Third #COVID Wave A...#India Official Warns of Early Third #COVID Wave As Highly Transmissible & Dangerous #DeltaVariant Spreads Further Faster. The virus is believed to be responsible for India’s “devastating second wave” and continues to pose a high risk to the unvaccinated https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-20/india-offical-warns-of-early-third-covid-19-wave-times-reports <br /><br />India may be hit by a third wave of Covid-19 far sooner than predicted because people are ignoring guidelines, the Times of India cited Randeep Guleria, director at the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences, as saying.<br /><br />Infections could start rising again in 12 to 16 weeks, the report quoted Guleria as saying. That compares with the four to five months new waves are expected to take to peak, the Times of India reported on Sunday.<br /><br />Guleria earlier told a television channel that a third wave could come as early as in six to eight weeks time, according to the report.<br /><br />He said the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus is believed to be responsible for India’s “devastating second wave” and continues to pose a high risk to a large section of the population that has not yet been vaccinated, according to the Times of India report.<br /><br />India’s confirmed coronavirus cases have surpassed 29 million, with more than 380,000 deaths. Experts believe both numbers are vastly undercounted.<br /><br /><br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-87313246571201290712021-06-19T16:08:24.218-07:002021-06-19T16:08:24.218-07:00#Pakistan donates relief supplies to #Afghanistan ...#Pakistan donates relief supplies to #Afghanistan to fight dangerous #India variant of #coronavirus. Supplies include oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators, ICU ventilators, BIPAPs, digital X-Ray machines, Thermal guns and PPEs kits. #COVID19 https://pajhwok.com/2021/06/17/pakistan-donates-covid-19-ppes-medical-equipment-to-afghanistan/ <br /><br />https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1406387850891841537?s=20<br /><br /><br />KABUL (Pajhwok): Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has handed over Personal Protection Equipment (PPEs) to Afghanistan to combat Covid-19, according to a media report on Thursday.<br /><br />In a statement issued, the NDMA said that on behalf of the government of Pakistan PPEs and medical equipment have been handed over to the Ambassador of Afghanistan to combat Covid-19.<br /><br />SAPM Health Dr. Faisal Sultan was the chief guest of the ceremony held here. Special Representative of Prime Minister for Afghanistan Muhammad Sadiq and Ambassador of Afghanistan were also present on the occasion.<br /><br />The relief items included 500 oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators, ICU ventilators, BIPAPs, digital X-Ray machines, Thermal guns and PPEs kits. The SAPM Health highly appreciated NDMA’s effort to deal with emergencies and its role in combating Covid in Pakistan. The Ambassador of Afghanistan while appreciating the role of NDMA also appreciated this timely assistance in helping Afghanistan to control the pandemic.<br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.com