Handloom is no longer a lucrative business

Handloom is no longer a lucrative business, but I don’t know of any other vocation. I tried to be different and experimented with these alternate fibers, says Shekhar, who hails from a family of Telugu-speaking Chettiars – weavers for generations. He also claims the medicinal properties of the natural fibers prove to be healthy too, e.g aloe vera for the skin.

Shekhar sells his sarees in Chennai and Bangalore. “Recently I got orders from Delhi, but I couldn’t accept it as I don’t have enough manpower.” Even though many government officials have visited this place, no government support has come through for him or the thirty odd families involved in it. “This could be developed into good business with government aid. It could benefit the agricultural workers too for they’ll get to supply raw materials. Besides, these sarees are eco-friendly,” he reminds.

But what about durability of the sarees? “Better than silk sarees... No one has complained yet,” states Shekhar.

As Shekhar plans to extend his repertoire to include shirts, he hopes to get the attention he deserves. Meanwhile, pointing at the four women spinning away at their respective handlooms, he said, “This is women’s empowerment too. But no one is listening,” laments Shekhar. With the landlord hankering him to vacate the current premises with his wife and children before month end, his list of woes only seems to get longer.

As the heat under the asbestos roofing became unbearable, I left after placing an order for an aloe vera saree. It was the least that could be done…

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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...And then there was light

Massive shortfalls have made power cuts a frequent, long-lasting and painful part of our daily lives. But lone warriors like Siddappa and evangelists like Anil P. Joshi are trying hard to make power cuts a thing of the past in the future. Exclusive report and photos by TSI's N K Suprabha

When life is enveloped in darkness, can you dream of light at the end of the tunnel? Farmer Siddappa, who has lit up his modest dwelling in Somapura village of Karnataka’s Gadag district with a self-invented wind power unit, has proved that you can. All you need is a bit of innovation.

Less than 400 kilometers away, India’s IT hub Bangalore is grappling with a severe power crisis. Siddappa, a poor, unlettered peasant who lives in a remote rural zone that has no electricity, has harnessed the wind to generate his own power. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

“My hut was like a dark dungeon – no light would ever enter it. We had to light a kerosene lamp even during the day. And then kerosene became scarce. My children found it difficult to do their homework,” says Siddappa, explaining the motivation behind the creation of his home-grown power generation unit.

He is a minor celebrity in the area for his is the only house among 37 dwelling units here that has electricity. What’s more, Siddappa doesn’t have to pay any power bills nor does he have to suffer outages. His windmill, mounted on a tree in his farm, has blessed him with light.

Siddappa, in his 40s, has had to slog for years and deplete his savings in this voyage from darkness to light. His windmill is a true marvel. The four wings of the contraption are made of metal sheets and fixed to a tree. The wings revolve when the wind blows and, magically, light up Siddappa’s house and life. “It took me 10 years and Rs 5000 to realise my dream,” says Siddappa, clambering on to the tree to explain how his invention works.

“The government would not give power connection to a house which is so far away from the main road and stood alone in an isolated farm. There are several other lone houses in this region which are still deprived of electricity” says Siddappa’s wife, Bheemavva.

She recalls: “I would often harangue him for wasting his time. But he was single-minded in his pursuit. There were times when he wouldn’t come back home at night. He kept chipping away. We now understand why he was so obsessed.”

A power unit that sits atop an adjoining hill was Siddappa’s inspiration. He would climb up to watch the plant – it is owned by a multinational power company – and figure out how wind power really worked. Once he got the hang of things, he embarked upon his mission.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Paved With Good Intentions?

Zack Furness, author of the forthcoming book entitled ‘One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility’, poses some well-meaning questions at the mobile class…

In the early 1960s, a technology historian and public intellectual named Lewis Mumford stood out as one of the most vocal critics of urban automobile transportation in the United States. In particular, he saw the ever-increasing use of cars as one of the main factors deteriorating social life in cities and he posed a question that is as relevant today as it was almost a half-century ago: “Does the city exist for people, or for motorcars?” Mumford was certainly not the first person to call attention to the everyday problems associated with urban driving or the development of vast landscapes around the automobile, but as a prominent writer and intellectual in New York City he influenced a wide range of activists, scholars and city planners who have been instrumental in rethinking America’s collective obsession with the automobile.

Automobiles can undoubtedly provide solutions to certain people’s transportation problems, and it is also true that the customs, cultural practices and rituals associated with cars are as interesting and diverse as the people who use them throughout the world. Moreover, there are certainly places where cars are the only logical form of mobility because of constraints posed by weather, geography, a lack of public transportation and/or bicycling infrastructure, or the basic demands posed by an economic system in which time equals money. But the allure of the car is hardly about the mere process of getting from point A to point B… Indeed, the production of decades of TV commercials, galaxies of print advertisements, archives of promotional films, and forests of literature have not been intended to simply advocate a faster way of getting to work or an easier way to haul food and kids to (or from) the market. Rather, such techniques have historically been used to sell something much more expansive than the automobile itself – an entire ideology and belief system associated with


personal transportation and the values of autonomous mobility (auto-mobility). The core principles associated with this paradigm are familiar to most, and they are not altogether different than when US bicyclists first advocated for the construction of ‘good roads’ and highways in the 1890s. They are: freedom, independence, and above all else, the importance of being ‘modern’. These are all fabulous principles, in theory, but more often than not the appeal to such grand ideas are used to mask the realities of a system in which the ‘freedom of the road’ most commonly translates as “GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY!”

The ideology of automobility, as it were, is thus not only the desire to own or need cars but the myopic belief that things always have been and always will be this way. Consequently, instead of asking critical questions whether cities should be designed for people or cars, or whether ‘freedom’ means proliferating a transportation system that marginalizes the poor, decimates the environment and stands as one of leading killers of people under 25 (worldwide), we are too often placated by the idea that driving is always a luxury, if not the product of a romantic ‘love affair’ that countries like the US supposedly have with the car. Similarly, instead of asking what it really means to live in a ‘modern’ world, or whether it’s wise to promote simplistic individual solutions for complex social problems like mobility, we are too easily smitten with the idea of driving shiny new cars down shiny new roads…

There are clearly no easy answers to these questions. But it seems like we all need to start asking them, debating them, and thinking critically about how something as mundane as getting from point A to point B can severely impact the ways we live and our ability to collectively imagine something different. Perhaps most importantly, we should probably figure out what we mean when we talk about ‘progress’ these days…instead of just trying to drive there really fast.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Journey towards the unknown

The deep, festering wounds inflicted by two assassinations – first of Liaquat Ali Khan and then, 56 years later, of Benazir Bhutto – have pushed Pakistan to the edge of uncertainty. Coupled with the 1979 “judicial murder” of then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the forced elimination of Liaquat and Benazir has made Pakistan unstable.

The death of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah in September 1948 had already dealt a heavy blow to the newly-formed nation. The assassination of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan on October 16, 1951, at a public meeting at Municipal Park, (now Liaquat Bagh), Rawalpindi, plunged the country into a serious constitutional, political and identity crisis. “After Jinnah, Khan was the only leader with nationwide standing. His murder shifted leadership to regional satraps. These leaders had their support base in one province or another. This leadership found it difficult to create consensus on constitution-making cutting across boundaries. Pakistani politics got fragmented as a result,” Dr Hasan Askari-Rizvi, Pakistan’s top defence analyst and a distinguished scholar told TSI. The uncertainty and chaos that engulfed Pakistan after Liaquat’s assassination under mysterious circumstances could be gauged from the fact that between 1947 and 1958, Pakistan had as many as seven prime ministers from different political parties and groups. Palace intrigues became the order of the day.

The security forces shot dead Said Akbar, the assassin of Khan, on the spot, thereby erasing any clue as to who masterminded the brutal murder. “The assassination was important in the sense that after Jinnah, Liaquat was the only leader of any substance. His death created a big vacuum that was, it seems, the objective of the assassin. The bureaucracy took complete control of state power and thereafter the army ruled the country for decades,” says Dr Syed Jaffar Ahmed, chairman, Pakistan Study Centre, Karachi University.

“Major changes in the government followed Liaquat’s murder. Khawaja Nazimuddin was moved from the position of governor general to that of prime minister. Malik Ghulam Mohammad, the then finance minister, became governor general. Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, another top bureaucrat of the colonial era, took over as finance minister. Nawab Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani, a senior bureaucrat too, became the interior minister. These three constituted a troika, which held real power after Liaquat’s death. All the three were from Punjab. That was the beginning of the rise of the Punjabi civil bureaucracy,” noted Baloch leader Mir Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo in his autobiography published posthumously recently.

However, seeds of transforming Pakistan into a client state were already sown during Khan's era. He ignored the invitation of the former Soviet Union to visit that country and instead rushed to the US and declared that he had come there so that America may “discover” Pakistan. In subsequent years, the policy of subservience was consolidated. Pakistan joined notorious security pacts such as Seato and Cento and allowed the US to set up a base near Peshawar.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Taste of the thunder

India no more ignores any security glitches

18th October, 2009. It was an ordinary Sunday for most of the Indians. But then this Sunday marked a historical day for India. For the first time, the country was resilient against those who break the laws. India detained an American Boeing 767. News channels were busy flashing and discussing this unconventional step by Indian authorities. The plane was coming from Fujairah, UAE, Middle East and was headed towards Bangkok along with 205 American marines. And reasons for detaining the plane were that it didn’t follow the guideline of using Indian airspace, it was grounded by Indian authorities at Mumbai airport. The plane took permission from Indian airport authorities but didn’t bother to seek AOR consent and clearance from the Indian Air Force. As per the norms, any military charter plane of any country needs approval from Indian Air Force, necessarily, in order to use Indian airspace. This norm was ignored in this case and hence, detention was the consequence.

However, this incident has certain positive corollaries for India. This has been the second instance of US violation of Indian airspace. The surprising thing is that US military has been repeatedly ignoring the mandatory procedures required for international air traffic. The US military intentionally violates air traffic out of its overconfidence that no one has the gumption to raise a finger against it. But this incident of detaining the American military plane for violating rules sent a strong signal as well as a warning to them. This made it clear that India is not Afghanistan or Iraq. One just can’t ignore the country’s rules. The blow will remain vivid in their minds. Another important thing that the incident conveyed is that India respects superpowers but not at the cost of law and order or sovereignty.

However, there is another important positive outcome. If we look at the recent past, India detained a UAE plane at Kolkata airport which was headed towards China for carrying weapons without prior approval from Indian authorities. In fact, nothing was informed about the weapons to any of the Indian Authorities. Similarly, a Korean ship was detained for suspicious reasons. Well, what do all these 'detention' incidents indicate? It speaks volumes about Indian military, intelligence and defence mechanisms, which are on high alert. It further exemplifies that the country has realised the need, urgency and importance in sophisticating its intelligence and advancing its defence mechanism.

As the country grows, threats from neighbours or interference of countries like China or Pakistan are ought to get loud. Moreover, with countries using and abusing Indian airspace for their own purpose be it transporting arms or transporting army, it becomes imperative for India to be cautious. With Airspace being used extensively for terrorism and other illegal activities, it is important for India to follow all the security measures. Surprisingly, India is rightly doing so. Long live India!

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Aids fight gets a major jolt

Govt, doctors abandon HIV positive patients

Karnataka’s fight against HIV/AIDS has been hit temporarily. Some doctors, who were rendering free services to HIV positive victims, have stopped work because they allege that they are getting no help from the government. Dr I. S. Gilada, secretary of the AIDS Society of India, blames the state government for the sudden spread of HIV/AIDS in the state.

“HIV cases have come down in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu — two high-risk states. But Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, once low-risk states, have become high-risk zones. Both Karnataka and Andhra have ignored experts’ warnings to initiate awareness campaigns,” says Gilada.

But Dr S. B. Doddamani, deputy director of the Karnataka State AIDS Prevention Society (KSAPS) disagrees. Calling the allegation baseless, he praises the government for taking initiatives to check the spread of HIV/AIDS. “We have not ignored directions given by experts. We always make sure that all the necessary processes are carried out successfully. We are opening more testing centres, blood banks, community care centres,” Dr Doddamani tells TSI.

However, current data, culled out by agencies, tell a different story. Karnataka, which once was a low-risk state, now occupies second place in the number of HIV positive and AIDS patients in India. There has been a surge in the number of HIV positive cases in the state. Interestingly, the government officials have no explanation. Rather they take a different stand. Says Dr Doddamani: “It is not that the HIV/AIDS cases have increased in the state as being reported in the media. Rather, we are finding hidden cases which were already there. We are making the necessary effort to combat the spread of the disease.”

But doctors are unwilling to buy this argument. Upset with the government’s clumsy approach in dealing with the dreaded disease, doctors have pulled out of free service. They are unwilling to restart their service in remote areas.

Says Dr Satish, who has been providing free service to HIV patients for the last 14 years: “I am really fed up. I don’t want to render free service anymore. Earlier, I used to put my life at risk by travelling to remote villages in Northern Karnataka to treat patients, but not anymore. I don’t want anything from the government. But it should recognise our contribution because it doesn’t even reimburse our expenses. I know many doctors who have stopped rendering their free services because of the government’s attitude.”

Unperturbed by this development, the Karnataka government plans to constitute Community Based Organisation (CBO) to bring changes at the grassroot level. From now onwards, it won’t be banking on NGOs and doctors. But what about patients languishing in the flood-hit areas of Northern Karnataka? The government and the doctors have no answers.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Thank a gentleman called Raj Thackeray

But they have to thank a gentleman called Raj Thackeray for this latest victory. The once formidable urban bastions of the Shiv Sena and the BJP in Mumbai, Thane and Nasik have been demolished by Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. The party has also won an astounding number of seats. This has given a fresh lease of life to conspiracy theories that seem to suggest that the Congress has deliberately encouraged Raj Thackeray to cut the Shiv Sena down to size — just as it had encouraged the Shiv Sena many decades ago to cut the trade union movement down to size. Back then, the Shiv Sena had unleashed mayhem in the streets of Mumbai, just as the storm troopers of Raj Thackeray are doing at the moment. This is clearly a dangerous and worrying trend because the assembly elections do reveal that a considerable number of Marathi speaking voters seem to think there is something right with the divisive slogans of Raj Thackeray.

But the clear loser in all this is clearly the BJP yet again. It has not only lost the Maharashtra elections for the third consecutive time, the voters in Haryana have put paid to any pretensions that the BJP had about being a strong contender in the state. And from the way the BJP leaders seem to be reacting after this latest trouncing; their fascination for the ostrich seems to be growing by the day. They just refuse to see reality, accept it and do some 'real chintan'. There is a clear disconnect between the current central leadership of the party and both India and Bharat. Is the BJP hell bent on making it that much easier for Rahul Gandhi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections?

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Banana Bonanza

NEW technology to delay ripening of bananas could turn India into a top exporter, reports Puja Awasthi

The banana, often shunned by dieters for its calorific value, has become a major player in global markets. In terms of volume it ranks first, though where value is concerned it is placed second after citrus fruits. According to statistics released by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), world exports of bananas in 2006 totalled 16.8 million tonnes ($ 68.1 million). Now consider this: While India accounts for nearly 22 per cent of the world’s banana output and stands number one, it figures nowhere in the list of top exporters. Ecuador, Costa Rica and the Philippines, says the FAO, produce 6, 2.08 and 7.48 per cent of the world’s fourth most widely cultivated food item respectively. But, even though exports from India are steadily rising, set against Ecuador which supplies 29 per cent of the world’s bananas and Guatemala which contributes 7 per cent, India’s share of 0.01 per cent is negligible. Also, on the list of banana exporters, India’s position is a miserable 41st.

But all that could change in two to three years, following the successful testing of a technology by the Lucknow-based National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI) that targets ethylene – a plant hormone-producing gene of the fruit. It is this hormone that causes its ripening, thus prolonging its shelf life. The extended time frame is because regulatory committees have to first grant permission for field testing of the product in at least six locations.

This tropical fruit has to be transported long distances for export (the major importers being EU at 39 per cent and the US at 26 per cent) and is harvested in bunches before it is fully mature. The fruit is transported at 13 degrees Celsius – which permits storage for three to four weeks. After that the bananas are stored at 17 degrees Celsius and treated with low concentrations of ethylene for ripening. The NBRI technology identifies the genes involved in ethylene production and fruit softening, and makes use of fruit-specific promoters to regulate the banana's ripening.

Dr Pravendra Nath, head of the institute’s plant gene expression lab who led the team of 10 which tested the technology, treads cautiously: “There have been no reported publications of this kind of technology, so we can safely assume we are the first to develop it. Normally, a technology needs to be tested for five generations before it can be called successful. But our tests over three generations have given us a high degree of certainty that this behaviour will not break down in future generations.”

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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