Tuesday, March 27, 2012

India impact on global health; Most visible of India's invisible class; An MA in English who did it in Hindi; Bank balance sheets to shrink by $1tn

1 India impact on global health (The Wall Street Journal) It’s difficult to overestimate the impact India’s private sector has had on global health. That was one of the messages of a new report on emerging economies and healthcare. In fact, India’s private sector arguably has played a bigger role in reshaping global health than has financial assistance from national governments, argued David Gold, head of Global Health Strategies initiatives, a New York-based non-profit that launched the report in New Delhi on Monday.

“The impact that the Indian pharmaceutical industry and India’s vaccine industry have on driving access to lifesaving drugs and vaccines has been extraordinary,” Mr. Gold said. In recent years, India’s pharmaceutical companies have revolutionized the industry by offering drugs and vaccines at low prices, dramatically increasing access for people around the world. A turning point was when, in 2001, Cipla introduced high quality HIV/AIDS treatments at a fraction of the existing market price. Other Indian firms, including Ranbaxy Laboratories, followed Cipla’s model and today India supplies 80% of HIV/AIDS medicines used by patients in developing countries, according to Médicins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian aid organization. Indian companies have also produced cheaper vaccines, including one for meningitis, designed mainly for African patients.

For all its achievements, India still faces important challenges at home. The country’s healthcare infrastructure is poor and many, especially children, suffer from malnutrition. India’s healthcare services are unlikely to significantly improve any time soon. Although malnutrition was one of the focus areas of the recent federal budget, the country spends just 1% of its gross domestic product on healthcare, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

2 Most visible of India’s invisible class (The Wall Street Journal) India’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has been thrust into the spotlight lately due to the Supreme Court’s ongoing case regarding the decriminalization of homosexuality. Hijras are somewhat unaccustomed to this scrutiny. Despite having existed in India for thousands of years within a unique subculture, the group has remained deeply marginalized by mainstream Indian society. As one activist said, “Hijras are the most visible of the invisible class.”

The term “hijra,” is the commonly accepted name for male to female transgendered people. They belong to a special caste, and their group dynamics and defined roles within Hindu culture differentiate them from Western male to female transgendered people. Once committed to the way of life, younger hijras typically have three ways of earning money, each with diminishing degrees of social acceptability: 1) Bhadai: providing blessings on auspicious occasions such as the birth of newborn babies. 2) Mangti: Begging at street signals, and other public spaces. 3) Pun: another word for sex-work.

3 An MA in English who did it in Hindi (Financial Chronicle) India’s higher education gross enrolment ratio is 11%, which is merely half of the world average and way behind developed countries (54%). A TeamLease labour report highlights the three tragedies in Indian higher education of low enrolments in colleges, lack of physical access to educational institutions and pursuing degree for social signalling value that don’t lead to employability or jobs. It suggests that India is in a higher education emergency because of the challenges of enrolment, physical access, and employability.

Mohit Gupta, senior VP of TeamLease, says: “The higher education situation in the country is pathetic. We once interviewed a candidate from one of the smaller towns in North India. He was an MA in English but could speak only Hindi. When asked why, he replied, ‘I am an MA in English but did it in Hindi!’”

4 Bank balance sheets to shrink by $1tn (The Financial Times) Investment banks are to shrink their balance sheets by another $1tn or up to 7% globally within the next two years, says a report that foresees a shake-up of market share in the industry. Higher funding costs and increased regulatory pressure to bolster capital will force wholesale banks also to cut 15%, or up to $0.9tn, of assets that are weighted by risk, a joint report by Morgan Stanley and consultants Oliver Wyman predicts. In addition, banks are expected take out $10bn to $12bn in costs by reducing pay, firing employees and paring back investments in areas that are no longer considered core. The report says investment banks have taken out about 7% of capacity last year and will cut up to another 10th in the next two years.

5 Executions as a tool to deter Arab Spring (The Guardian) Middle Eastern countries have stepped up their use of capital punishment, executing hundreds of people as rulers across the region seek to deter the wave of uprisings sweeping the Arab countries. Despite a significant reduction in the number of countries that used the death penalty worldwide last year, there was a sharp rise in executions in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen, according to Amnesty International’s annual capital punishment survey. China remained at the top of the list of the countries with the worst record of executions last year. Authorities in China maintained their policy of refusing to release precise figures on the death penalty in the country, which they consider a state secret.

Amnesty said it had stopped publishing figures on China, available from public sources, because they were likely to "grossly underestimate" the true number, but reported that the country had executed thousands of people, more than the rest of the world put together. According to Amnesty, at least 676 judicial executions are known to have been carried out in 2011 globally, excluding China, up from 527 in 2010. More than half took place in Iran, which executed at least 360 people. But reports about the regime's campaign of secret and mass hangings of prisoners have made it impossible for Amnesty to publish the true figures there too.

6 Father of the e-mail attachment (The Guardian) Twenty years ago this month, 100 American web geeks opened their inbox to find a bizarre email. Inside the message were two attachments. The first was a photograph of the Telephone Chords, and a capella quartet comprising four hirsute IT researchers. The second: the Chords’ recording of an old barbershop favourite, Let Me Call You Sweetheart.

But the attached content wasn't the weirdest thing. It was the attachment itself. This was the first functional attachment ever, or at least the first one most people could actually open. People had sent attachments before, but they were mostly useless because recipients couldn't open them unless they shared the sender's email system. This was the first time someone had sent something that was compatible across most email programs. Two decades and a day later, Nathaniel Borenstein's cardigan is now grey. But his eyebrows are as bushy as ever, and he sits cross-legged on a sofa next to London's Regent's Canal, scratching his ankle, and laughing about his brainchild. Each day in 2012, we send around a trillion Mime attachments (the technical term for the standardisation system invented by Borenstein and his collaborator Ned Freed) but in 1992, Borenstein says, it was a niche sport.

7 Dumbest criminal (Johannesburg Times) A man has been arrested after he asked for work from the owners of a house he had earlier robbed - pitching up wearing the same clothing he allegedly stole. According to the owner of the house in Nahoon Valley Place, East London, the man knocked on his front door asking for gardening work on Sunday at about 11am. He was decked out in the resident's shoes, socks, belt, a pair of trousers and one of his fiance's blouses. "When I opened the door I was surprised because he was wearing our clothing," said the resident. The man said he immediately went to the back garden and noticed their storeroom had been looted.

"My fiance and I were busy packing to move into a new house and most of our clothing and new linen were being kept there," he said. "I could not believe the audacity of this guy. I detained him after that and called the police but they did not pitch after 45 minutes," the resident said. The man then escaped but was later caught by security guards.

8 Extra Strong horns for India drivers (Dawn) German carmaker Audi makes special horns for its vehicles sold in India where local drivers hoot so much as they fight their way through chaotic traffic, the firm’s country director has revealed. “Obviously for India, the horn is a category in itself,” Michael Perschke, director at Audi India, told Mint newspaper. “You take a European horn and it will be gone in a week or two. With the amount of honking in Mumbai, we do on a daily basis what an average German does on an annual basis.”
Roads in India are often in poor repair, ranging from pot-holed major highways to dirt tracks in cities, while bullock carts, cows, rickshaws and bicycles often compete with cars and trucks for space. More than 133,938 people died on India’s roads in 2010, according to the National Crime Records Bureau – a rate of 366 deaths a day.

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