India's Economy: Will stimulus package solves the crisis?

Indian annual growth is slipping from it's 9% mark of 2007, stocks are down 40%, and foreign stock market investors are moving away from Indian soil. Corporate India blames the ruling coalition for failing to make reforms and no realization of any ripple effect. The country is reeling from 11.4% inflation. rising interst rate and large govt. deficits---so India has gone within six month from hero to zero status of 7% growth rate.

The greater crisis India faces today could have been avoided by skillful and thoughtful planning. India imports 75% of its oil to meet demand, which have grown exponentially as its economy expands and also subsidizes 60% of the price of such fuels as diesel. Populist ruling Congress government spent $25 billion on waiving loans made to farmers and hiking bureaucrats' salaries without realizing the hole they are making to the pocket of Indian economy. If we add this to the fertilizer subsidy of additional $25 billion we are making allmost deep into pocket of $100 billion which is close to 10% of GDP of India and in layman this is equl to the collection of entire country's income tax in a year. It's ridiculous to stop India's new planned infrastructure more on upgrading education and health-care facilities. The official debt is 10% of India's GDP the government completely missed the opportunities to fix it. How can congress government don't see the hole in the economic tunnel, no significant forecast and planning, infact no significant reform was done during thier past four years. we understand as a citizen about the coalition compulsion---but the country comes first.

A plan to build 30 Special Economic Zones is virtually suspended because New Delhi has not sorted out how to acquire land (a major issue in both urban and rural India) without a major social and political upheaval.

Agriculture is in mess, fertilizer subsidies are given to Industry which looks at more use, more sells more revenue and more bottom line--profitability. No thought behind use of fertilizer like how much, where, what --- technologically our agriculture in India is woefully unproductive. It's amaging the research expenditure we have with the ICAR, DST, DBT and incredible flopp with the applied result. scientist are just making their formula and solution in the lab which is of no use to common man. If we have to buy seeds, fertilizers , equipment and plant protection and extension from multinational companies than what we have as an Indian R&D product. this is pretty dismal situation where there is complete lack of accountability at the top and at the bottom people's outcry no body can hear. They seems to born, live and die as ignorant miserable forgotten class. We can be proud Indian to see this great inability of change by the people who belongs to India.

Can you believe that 60% of the India's labor force is employed in agriculture and what we get is less than 1% to overall growth. India's rice yields are a third those of China and half of Vietnam's--you must be kidding, but this is fact. India need to look for improving governance structure and accountability, raise educational achievements, and control inflation. Also need is to be fiscally discipline, transparency in its financial markets, increase agricultural productivity, and improve infrastructure, the natural open environment, and efficient use of resources as well as energy.

In India, we need leadership who's mind and conviction stays within the development perimeter.
Can you belief, we have best brain like PM Manmohan Singh, a graduate from Oxford and Ex-FM P Chidambaram from Harvard and it's misery to see their populist policy of pay hike for beauraucrats and waving loan of farmers this is just parallel to what Bush administration has done for US. How many time we will do it time and again to enhance appeasing policy just for vote.

The wealth created by the BJP govt. reforms has made itself evident in the luxury cars and apartments in India's big cities, leaving much of India full of aspirations but few means to achieve them. There is a severe shortage of colleges, yet a plan to build 1,500 universities gathers dust. The Communists which is finished around the globe is still thriving in West Bengal lacks outlook like China communism and are against both globalization and industrialization, so without new factories being built, employment growth has been almost stagnant, rising to just 2%—a disappointing rate in a country where an estimated 14 million youths enter the workforce every year, but just 1 million get jobs in the regulated, above ground economy. This is really interesting that people around India has not been made wiser to understand what is good for them instead what the politicians brings "hollow committment" during last month of parliament election. I think the young, energetic India has to come forward to save the country. We need a self-less motivated individual who can manage, explore and fix the basic rudimentary grassroot problem and connect India to prosper. As a campaign supervisor for Organising America, Our dream was to create a force from the grassroot to decide the nation and fix the redudnacy. In fact support of all stimulus package and plan of President Obama is well connected through 5 million volunteer across America. This is the way the revival can come to india---if we take 1 person to cover 100 people to teach, make understand and provide support for deciding write or wrong we need just a 1 million volunteer to make change. India needs to take a promise in this election to change the way we shape our country and work for the education, health , energy and infrastructure to connect the rural coomunity to think, work and hope for better future.

Pharma business----Great concern: Polluting Indian water

Last year news broke out that the US water supply was contaminated with pharmaceutical.The source of the problem might be the big pharm's, but the more immediate culprit was hard to determine - it was your neighbor, you kids teacher, maybe even you. We had contaminated our own water system simply by over medicating ourselves. Our own waste was literally polluting those of who were using the meds and the rest of us who might be med free. A couple of weeks later we all forgot about it, after repeatedly being reassured that the amounts in our water system were so small that they posed "absolutely no danger." Who knows if we were right or wrong to simply let that pass as another unfortunate and supposedly benign consequence of modern life. Now another story about medicated water systems is hitting the news - this one internationally, and perhaps of even more dire consequence.It seems researchers have recently analyzed waste water in Patancheru, India and were shocked to find enough of a single ant-biotic (Ciproflaxin) being spewed into one stream each day, to treat a city of 90,000 residents. But it wasn't just the anti-biotic, it was a medicine cabinet full of meds floating through the supposedly cleaned water - a cocktail of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients. Medication treating everything from hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments.

The story on the U.S contamination last year was found in drinking water that was provided for 40+ million people, but the water tested in India contained 150 times the highest level in the U.S. In fact, half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers said."If you take a bath there, then you have all the antibiotics you need for treatment," said chemist Klaus Kuemmerer at the University of Freiburg Medical Center in Germany, an expert on drug resistance in the environment who did not participate in the research. "If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you're treated for everything. The question is for how long?"Researchers have found that human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain pharmaceuticals. Some waterborne drugs also promote antibiotic-resistant germs, especially when - as in India - they are mixed with bacteria in human sewage. Even extremely diluted concentrations of drug residues harm the reproductive systems of fish, frogs and other aquatic species in the wild. Other research found tadpoles exposed to water from the treatment plant that had been diluted 500 times were nonetheless 40 percent smaller than those growing in clean water. The discovery of this contamination raises two key issues for researchers and policy makers: the amount of pollution and its source. Experts say one of the biggest concerns for humans is whether the discharge from the waste water treatment facility is spawning drug resistance."Not only is there the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolving; the entire biological food web could be affected," said Stan Cox, senior scientist at the Land Institute, a nonprofit agriculture research center in Salina, Kan. Cox has studied and written about pharmaceutical pollution in Patancheru. "If Cipro is so widespread, it is likely that other drugs are out in the environment and getting into people's bodies."So who is to blame you might wonder? The approximately 90 factories that manufacture generic drugs for most of the world in the area. Patancheru became a hub for largely unregulated chemical and drug factories in the 1980s, creating what one local newspaper has termed an "ecological sacrifice zone" with its waste. Since then, India has become one of the world's leading exporters of pharmaceuticals, and the U.S. - which spent $1.4 billion on Indian-made drugs in 2007 - is its largest customer.

A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, representing major U.S. drug makers, said they could not comment about the Indian pollution because the Patancheru plants are making generic drugs and their members are branded. A spokesman for the Generic Pharmaceutical Association said the issues of Indian factory pollution are "not within the scope of the activities" of their group.Drug factories in the U.S. and Europe have strictly enforced waste treatment processes. At the Patancheru water treatment plant, the process is outdated, with wastewater from the 90 bulk drug makers trucked to the plant and poured into a cistern. Solids are filtered out, then raw sewage is added to biologically break down the chemicals. The waste water, which has been clarified but is still contaminated, is dumped into the Isakavagu stream that runs into the Nakkavagu and Manjira, and eventually into the Godawari River. The victims are amongst the poorest villagers in India in the surrounding areas."I'm frustrated. We have told them so many times about this problem, but nobody does anything," said Syed Bashir Ahmed, 80, casting a makeshift fishing pole while crouched in tall grass along the river bank near the bulk drug factories. "The poor are helpless. What can we do?
(Source: Associated Press)

Great Global Challenge---Economic Meltdown

There’s growing concern among economists and investor analyst that the global financial system is hanging by a few well-worn threads that could snap at any time. The $10.4 trillion real estate “bubble” has attracted the most attention, but the shaky derivatives market, hedge funds, and falling dollar are equally worrisome. 20 years of deregulation has created an economic monster which is increasingly unmanageable and threatens to bring down the whole system in a heap.

America is know officially under recession! Understanding the what really happened, how it happened, who is responsible will guide to fix it for our survival. Do we know the way we can harp on this crisis. Sept-October 2008 and today, we have a long dilemma and who knows what is the future of the entire globe. I am slowly thinking that this is really embarassment for the people who manage us. We should get new people to run the show around the globe and crack down the nexus between company and politics.

'Slumdog Millionaire' : Poverty and History

The story of an impoverished street child (Jamal)in Mumbai, which has won 10 Oscar nomination (http://www.oscar.com/oscarnight/), is a stereotypical Western portrayal, that ignores the wealth and progress their country has seen.
Indians are groaning over what they see as yet another foreign depiction of their nation, fouliness, corruption and impoverished.

Today slum dwellers make up 60% of Mumbai's population, that is approximately 7 million people. The eventually spread into the areas neighboring Byculla, such as: Mahim Creek, Parel, Dadar and Matunga and whereever else they can find space, even in roads. The conditions in the slums are terrible. Slum inhabitants constantly have to deal with issues such as, constant migration, lack of water, no sewage or solid waste facilities, lack of public transit, pollution and housing shortages. Infant mortality is as high as it is in rural India where there are no amenities.




Slumdog Millionaire wooed the people around the world, yet it failed to make its mark when it released in the country where its plot is set. What went wrong? Sounds absurd, but it's true that the movie which got hold of 4 Golden Globe Awards recently, has got mixed reviews by Indian viewers. As people came out of the cinema halls after watching the first day release on 23 January in India, they were not-so-happy about the depiction of the nation where only escalating dirtiness, corruption and impoverished was shown. I agree that due to our roots from India we feel that showing negative true depiction hurt us pretty deeply, however glorifying the success of unknown to known is also true story about sucees of Indian around the globe.

gruel problems have been shown, not its progress. Slumdog Millionaire, set in Mumbai, is a story about an orphan rogue, Jamal Malik, who lives in slums of the commercial capital of India; facing all the hardships. One day, he wins a fortune on a game show and gets hold of his childhood love. The movie is a clever concoction of Indian and foreign talent, and English and Hindi dialogues. Based on a novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, Slumdog Millionaire is directed by Briton Danny Boylem.

"If anyone has any objection to the depiction of poverty in the film they should first come forward and take initiative to remove it. Only talking won't help! Scams like Satyam computers are doing a better job of giving a bad name to our country than the depiction of poverty in a film. We should not shy away from showing the truth. We can not shut our eyes from the fact that a large section of our country continues to live abject poverty which can not be removed by not being shown in a film. We need to work on grass-root level to remove this problem

It won the Golden Globes and is a favorite heading into the Oscars but does it live up to the hype?

Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
Written by Simon Beaufoy based on the novel by Vikas Swarup

YOUTUBE: watch the trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIzbwV7on6Q




Cast
Dev Patel ... Jamal Malik
Freida Pinto ... Latika
Anil Kapoor ... Prem Kumar
Irrfan Khan ... Police Inspector
Ayush Mahesh Khedekar ... Youngest Jamal
Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail ... Youngest Salim
Rubiana Ali ... Youngest Latika
Sanchita Choudhary ... Jamal’s Mother
Tanay Hemant Chheda ... Middle Jamal
Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala ... Middle Salim
Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar ... Middle Latika
Madhur Mittal ... Older Salim
Ankur Vikal ... Maman
Mahesh Manjrekar ... Javed


We need to stop taking themselves so darn seriously. Slumdog does more to bring India and Indians into the hearts and minds of Westerners than the propaganda film you folks seem to want. Whether it’s a story about the poor or the rich or the middle class is not what’s important to us. Movies that win awards and are beloved by world audiences are honest and uplifting and real. That’s Slumdog. f you think that Westerners are too focused on India’s poverty, etc. then you lack perspective and exposure to Western films. Western filmmakers focus a very harsh lens on their own society too.

I suggest you watch “Million Dollar Baby,” the American film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2004. While working as a waitress, Hilary Swank’s character, who is a dirt-poor, struggling athlete, sneaks a leftover from her customer’s dinner plate and puts it in her pocket, saying “It’s for my dog,” when another customer notices. But the audience knows she doesn’t have dog. She’s eating other people’s scraps just to survive. She’s an American, living and working and struggling to make something of herself in America. But you never hear Americans complaining that the film shows the “dirty underbelly” of American life. To say that would be to miss the point and the spirit of this beautiful film. What’s worse is that this kind of comment would disrespect real-life Americans who live or have lived an equally harsh existence.

It’s Bollywood, not Hollywood, that ceaselessly indulges in feel-good fantasy films with two-dimensional characters that never seem to live the real India…the India I see and experience whenever I visit. This is not what Western audiences want out of Indian films or American films or any film. And this is why the overwhelming majority of Bollywood films are not likely to be successful here.


“Slumdog Millionaire” continued its unlikely rise from low-budget underdog to the highest Hollywood heights, winning the Screen Actors Guild Award for best cast of a motion picture in LA on Jan 25, 2009. The prize, which is tantamount to best picture from the guild, follows top honors at the Golden Globes and the Producers Guild Awards. I am sure that next month at Gala Ceremony the picture will bag atleast 5 awards.


So please, get over yourselves! Get comfortable with reality. The sooner we do, the faster we will build confidence and respect to the people who needs our help. Its easy to point out faults in other societies, rather than look under your own rug! India needs to have shared vision to fight poverty and inequity of wealth in our society and community. Let's work together for better India and its great culture and history!