Sunday, February 26, 2012

Faster growth or poverty alleviation?; Cities and airports; Qatar is world's richest country; 'Face' of Gujarat meets 'saviour'; Aussies can be smug

1 Faster growth or poverty alleviation? (TN Ninan in Khaleej Times) India is doing relatively well on economic growth — an annual average of 7.9% — but as is often the case, poverty levels fall as incomes rise, but inequality grows. And such trends certainly make the government vulnerable in a populous democracy with 32% under the poverty line. How India meets the challenge of inclusive globalisation holds lessons for developing countries.

Underlying the debate is disagreement on basic facts, about how many “poor” people are in India. The government’s basic poverty line was redefined for 2004-05 as 19 rupees per day in urban areas and 15 rupees in rural areas — 50 rupees today are equal to US$1. On that basis, government said that 37% of the population was below the poverty line, revised to 32% for 2009-10. Another way to measure inequality is to look at the ratio of income between the top 10% and bottom 10% of the population. In India, the top 10% earns 8.6 times more than the bottom 10%. So India should expect to see inequality increase as its economy grows, the argument goes.

Is there a way of squaring the circle? Yes, if the large subsidies that go to the middle class could be cut to make way for programmes directed at the poor, if government delivery systems could be made efficient and less corrupt, or new methods adopted to ensure targeted delivery. Yet either plan would ruffle many feathers — and the media lends a megaphone to middle-class concerns, and the government would have to withstand a political firestorm. The problem is that the government, racked by scandal and riven by internal dissension, is in no position to run that gauntlet.

2 Cities and airports (MJ Akbar in Khaleej Times) Cities once had airports. The same airport now has every city. An airport once smelt of local history, or was perfumed by its culture. Stressed tourists began their tryst with Hawaii through military crates sitting around the tarmac since World War II. The tiled roofs and open walls of Denpasar offered the languorous smile of Bali. The gridlock of Tokyo began at Narita. Delhi offered sufficient evidence that the Third World still had some way to go before it reached the Second; its airport was a punishment posting for professionals and a trial for visitors.

Most airports now resemble the same mall playing cheap tricks on those trapped within its monotonous glass and chrome. The predictable brands that define modern merchandise occupy stalls in curved rows, offering leftovers at false prices. The fast food is neither particularly fast nor really food, just churned from a giant machine. Even the colourful bazar of Istanbul airport, once redolent with the chatter and spice of the 13th century at the foot of the Blue Mosque, is now an antiseptic, amorphous collection of trinkets produced by some politically correct junk manual.

3 Qatar is world’s richest country (The Financial Express) Qatar has been ranked as the world's wealthiest country in a new list compiled by US magazine Forbes. The Gulf State with a population of 1.7 million topped the list as the world's richest country per capita, thanks to a rebound in oil prices and its massive natural gas reserves. Adjusted for purchasing power, Qatar booked an estimated gross domestic product per capita of more than $ 88,000 for 2010.

Qatar, which will host the 2022 Football World Cup and is also in the running for the 2020 Olympic Games, has been a high-profile investor in recent times. The government is pouring money into infrastructure, including a deepwater seaport, an airport and a railway network. In second place on the list was Luxembourg, with a per capita GDP on a purchasing-power parity basis of just over $ 81,000. In third place was Singapore, which thrives as a technology, manufacturing and finance hub with a GDP (PPP) per capita of nearly $ 56,700. Norway and Brunei rounded out the top five positions in the list followed by the UAE, the US, Hong Kong, Switzerland and the Netherlands. A trio of politically and economically fragile African nations were listed as the poorest countries -- Burundi, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where GDPs (PPP) per capita are $ 400, $ 386 and $ 312, respectively.

4 The ‘face’ of Gujarat riots meets his ‘saviour’ (Soutik Biswas, BBC) How does it feel, I ask World Press Photo award winning photographer Arko Datta, to meet the subject of his best-known picture for the first time? Ten years ago, Arko's picture of a tailor named Qutubuddin Ansari became the face of religious riots which left nearly 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead in Gujarat. In the picture, Mr Ansari, then 28 years old, is standing on a narrow veranda. He is wearing a light checked shirt stained with dried blood. His faintly bloodshot eyes are glazed with fear. His hands are folded in an expression of obeisance, hiding a mouth agape. It's a disturbing study of fear and helplessness.

Ten years later, Arko and I are standing under the same veranda of an awkward looking two-storey building in a crowded lane, running alongside a busy highway in Ahmedabad, capital of Gujarat. The photographer and his subject have just met. Arko recollects that day: Mobs armed with swords and stones from Hindu neighbourhoods across the highway were crossing over and attacking and setting fire to Muslim shops and homes on the other side. People watched this grisly show from their homes across the road. His van sputtered on past the building where Mr Ansari stood when Arko looked back for a moment and saw his subject for the first time. He looked through the telephoto lens, and clicked, "three or four shots possibly, all in a fraction of a second".

Then he turned around and asked the soldiers to stop the van. "Looking through the fog of smoke, we spotted the group of people trapped on the balcony of a burning house. We told the soldiers that we were not moving until they rescued them," says Arko. The rest of the story comes from Mr Ansari: "We were trapped on the first floor for over a day, and we couldn't go down because fire was raging below. "And when I saw the military van pass by, I thought, 'This is our last chance'. I began shouting Sahib! Sahib! to the soldiers and folded my hands, and when I did that they looked back and returned," he says. A few soldiers were immediately positioned outside the house, and later in the day, as the fires below ebbed, Mr Ansari and his friends came down a stairwell.

"My life went into a tailspin. The picture followed me wherever I went. It haunted me, and drove me out of my job, and my state," he says. He ran away to Malegaon in neighbouring Maharashtra to live with his sisters and had been working there for a fortnight when a co-worker walked into the shop with a newspaper carrying his picture. His boss didn't want any trouble and fired him immediately. Next year, he left for Calcutta, but returned after a few months when he heard that his mother had a heart problem.

A few years ago, Mr Ansari bought a two-room tenement with a small tailoring shop for 315,000 rupees ($6,400) from his paltry savings and loans from friends and family. It is a modest home with a raised bed, a television, a few utensils, a shiny red refrigerator and a washing machine tucked away behind a curtain. Upstairs, he and his co-workers stitch more 100 shirts a week, and he earns up to 7,000 rupees ($142) a month. His family has grown to include an eight-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. The eldest daughter is now 14 and wants to become a teacher. Arko has also moved on - he quit Reuters after nearly a decade of rich work, including covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and began a photography school in Mumbai.

Now Arko tells Mr Ansari of a personal tragedy that marked his coverage of the riots. He says he was sent to cover the riots even as his mother was in the last stages of cancer. His wife had called him every day during the time he was taking pictures of the mayhem, imploring him to return to be by his mother's bedside. "By the time I returned, she had slipped into a coma. I never got to speak to her. Three or four days later, she died. I have no siblings, and my father died when I was one. And I couldn't even exchange a last few words with my mum," he says. Silence descends on the room. Then Mr Ansari speaks. "I can understand your pain. Allah sent you to save us, brother. You did a greater good," he says.

5 Five reasons for Aussies to feel smug (Sydney Morning Herald) We’re not Greece, in case you were confused. I suppose our government's about as stable. But our collective fiscal funk has recently compelled Treasury supremo Martin Parkinson to point out this obvious geographical fact. So let's cut through the persistent gloom and doom and look at how our country stacks up.

1: Government debt and deficit. As a proportion of gross domestic product, the IMF says we owe 24%. The US has racked up 100% cent, Italy 120% and Greece 152%. 2: Resources and economy. Remember we were the only Western nation that didn't go into recession during the global financial crisis. One of the reasons was mining. An embarrassment of riches from resources means we can feed the insatiable industrialisation of developing Asia. 3: Interest rates. Here they are relatively high on a world scale, precisely because our economy is strong and needs to be kept in check, but they're also far lower than they were in the 1980s. 4. Employment and wages: Unemployment last month actually fell slightly to 5.1%. Want a little more perspective? In Greece they're contending with unemployment of more than 20% and a 22% cut to the minimum wage. 5: Retirement. God bless super. As controversial as its introduction was - and however inadequate it ends up being - it's a salvation for our sunset years. What's more, it's in our names and our control. Many Greeks are instead getting 12% wiped off their pensions.

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