1 UK jobless at 17-year high (The Guardian) George Osborne is facing growing pressure to take action to tackle long-term unemployment in next month's budget, after official figures revealed that 860,000 people have now been out of work for more than a year. Office for National Statistics showed the unemployment rate stuck at a 17-year high of 8.4% in the three months to December and the number of women claiming unemployment benefits at the highest level since 1995. The number of people out of work was up by 48,000 on the previous three months to 2.67 million, almost a third of whom have been unable to find work for more than a year.
Young people are also still bearing the brunt of the downturn, the ONS data showed, with 1.04 million 16 to 24-year-olds out of work in the three months to December, an increase of 22,000 on the previous three months. The unemployment rate among this group is 22.2%.
2 More quantitative easing likely by Bank of England (The Guardian) Sir Mervyn King left the door open on Wednesday to further doses of electronic money creation as the latest Bank of England snapshot of the economy said the UK would crawl its way through 2012. The Bank predicted a strong pick-up in output in 2013 and a slightly higher level of inflation than anticipated three months ago, but King warned that the economy was going through challenging times, in which "substantial headwinds" were hindering the recovery. In the City, analysts were left divided by the report, with some expecting further asset purchases when the current £50bn quantitative easing (QE) programme ends in May and others convinced that the Bank would call a halt to at £325bn.
3 When unemployed roam London streets (The New York Times) For almost two years, Nicki Edwards has been looking for work — any type of work. She is 19 years old, well-spoken and self-possessed. But like many young people in Britain, she could not afford to remain at her university, making it impossible to find a job. London’s youth riots last summer have closed even more doors to people like her.
Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50%. Greece’s is 48%, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30%. In Britain, the rate is 22.3%, the highest since such data began being collected in 1992. (The comparable rate for Americans is 18%.)
Experts say that the majority of those who took to the streets in London last summer were young people who were unemployed, out of school and not participating in a job training program. Classified by statisticians as NEETs (not in education, employment or training), they number about 1.3 million, or one of every five 16-to-24-year-olds in the country.
4 Is hope a fiction for poor in India? (BBC) "We try so many things," a girl in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai tells Katherine Boo, "but the world doesn't move in our favour". Annawadi is a "sumpy plug of slum" in the biggest city - "a place of festering grievance and ambient envy" - of a country which holds a third of the world's poor. It is where the Pulitzer prize winning New Yorker journalist Boo's first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers is located. Annawadi is where more than 3,000 people have squatted on land belonging to the local airport and live "packed into, or on top of" 335 huts. It is a place "magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich's people's garbage", where the New India collides with the Old. Nobody in Annawadi is considered poor by India's official benchmarks. The residents are among the 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when India embarked on liberalising its economy.
There's a bunch of young scavengers and thieves, ravaged by rats and high on white correction fluid, who live, work and die quickly. They are the young flotsam that India breathlessly parades as its demographic dividend when, in reality, the children, tired and brutalised, are already past their sell-by-date. The people of Annawadi are also caught up in the hideous web of corruption and official venality which hurts the poor most, and lead utterly dehumanising lives in a city that aspires to become India's Shanghai. It is far removed from the dreadful stereotype of the happy-poor Mumbai of Slumdog Millionaire.
5 Did the India general win? (Bikram Vohra in Khaleej Times) I am no great student of jurisprudence but having read and then reread all the news items on India General VK Singh’s court case I have been groping in the dark for a light and all I could get was a wet matchstick. Did he win? Did he lose? What was the verdict? Did the date change? Does he gain a year? What, what, what?
They say he did recover his honour. One of the attorneys was quoted to that effect. The same attorney said he is an honourable man and the media echoed the statement and no one in the government was blamed for any mess up since there was no mala-fide intent so these disparate elements. Where did someone like myself lose the plot? As far as I see, the General did not win his case but the attorney says that having received the court verdict and being satisfied with it, the General was swimming with logic when he withdrew his case because there was no reason to fight on. Really? What then was the point of it all if May10, 1950, has become mutually acceptable to General and the government alike. Am I the only cretin who is confused? And now that the government is smelling like roses rather than the manure that it should be reeking of, this case is closed.
Interestingly, the Congress will stand by in tearful farewell when the General departs on May 31, his honour in tact (though skeptics like me have no idea how it returned). The General will either get a governorship, a public sector plum job or be dispatched as an ambassador of goodwill. After all, with the elections round the corner what a nice patty cake ending to a story I never understood. Did you?
6 Four-hour rule for food in Singapore (The Straits Times) If your buffet meal tasted fresher than usual on Wednesday, here's why. New rules that mean caterers have to make sure their food is eaten within four hours have kicked in. The regulations have forced firms to tighten their schedules so meals are not left standing around for too long before an event. At least one firm has had to completely overhaul its operations. Indian restaurant chain Riverview Tandoor has hired three chefs who specialise in cooking on site, said its director of sales and operations Bhandari Rajender Kumar.
7 India: Despite the government (The Wall Street Journal) The book about India released a few years ago called “In Spite of the Gods” would better have been named “In Spite of the Government.” Because government has failed to supply basic needs, NGOs and private enterprise have stepped in to try to fill the gap. India is estimated to have over 3 million NGOs. But now we’ve come to a stage where even private facilities are stretched. For example, last month parents of pre-school age children were frantically trying to get nursery admission. They stood in queues for hours just to get an application form, and thousands of application forms were given out for dozens of places.
In a resource-constrained economy where one cannot rely on the government to provide services, as the Airtel advertisement rightly says, “Har ek friend zaroori hota hai” (“Each and every friend is necessary”). In India, our friends, relatives, neighbors and contacts become invaluable. They become our godfathers – the ones we turn to in our time of need. Here, being well-connected does not mean having 500 Facebook friends, high-speed Internet, or a combination of smartphone, tablet, and laptop; it means knowing a lot of influential people. If you’re ever faced with a crime situation, and are offered a gun or a contact to save yourself – leave the gun, take the contact.
In India, having many friends is not just nice but crucial. One may be able to help with securing your toddler’s school admission, another with getting your husband that coveted job interview, yet another with finding you a good gynecologist who won’t unnecessarily advice a Caesarian birth just to earn more money, and a fourth with getting permission to dig that tube well to ensure water supply for your home.
8 India is world’s top rice exporter (The Wall Street Journal) Amid all the depressing news about a slowdown in the economy, a plethora of scams and poor performance in cricket, India has at least one reason to celebrate: It has overtaken Thailand to become the world’s top exporter of rice. In less than five months after lifting a ban on exports of non-Basmati rice, India is shipping out more of the staple grain than any other country in the world, thanks to its cheaper prices, rising output and ample stocks. India’s rice stocks are big enough to hypothetically take care of the entire world’s import requirements for a year. Neighboring China, a traditional rival in several fields, isn’t a major trader in rice, though it remains the world’s largest producer.
India exported at least 2.7 million metric tons of rice from October through January. Thailand and Vietnam exported 2 million and 1.5 million tons, respectively, during the four-month period, according to industry and government estimates. Price-conscious customers in Africa and Indonesia are snapping up Indian rice, taking advantage of the bumper output. India’s federal government has forecast India’s rice output in the year that started Oct. 1 at a record 103 million tons, a 21% increase since 2000-01. Inventories are more than comfortable as the government was holding a stockpile of 31.8 million tons rice at the beginning of this month – that’s more than double the country’s mandatory minimum buffer requirements and just about equals the total global annual trade in rice.
Thailand and Vietnam have been comfortably perched as world’s top two rice exporters for years but the balance of trade recently started shifting – and not only due to India removing export restrictions in early September. It’s also because the Thai government has been buying rice at artificially high prices since early October to fulfill a pre-election promise to farmers. Thai rice is now at least $100 per ton costlier than India’s.
9 Investment banking is bad for health (The Wall Street Journal) Add investment banking to the list of things that could be dangerous to your health. A University of Southern California researcher found insomnia, alcoholism, heart palpitations, eating disorders and an explosive temper in some of the roughly two dozen entry-level investment bankers she shadowed fresh out of business school. Every individual she observed over a decade developed a stress-related physical or emotional ailment within several years on the job, she says in a study to be published this month.
Investment banking has long been a beacon for ambitious people who crave competition, big money, steak dinners and paid-for town-car service. The 100-hour workweek, these ironmen and ironwomen tell themselves, is just the opening ante in a high-stakes game. During their first two years, the bankers worked on average 80 to 120 hours a week, but remained eager and energetic, she says. They typically arrived at 6 a.m. and left around midnight. By the fourth year, however, many bankers were a mess, according to the study. Some were sleep-deprived, blaming their bodies for preventing them from finishing their work. Others developed allergies and substance addictions. Still others were diagnosed with long-term health conditions such as Crohn's disease, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disorders.
10 India police: Stars of fake shootouts (The Wall Street Journal) The officer, Senior Inspector Pradeep Sharma, was once so widely revered that two Bollywood movies have been inspired by his exploits. Today Mr. Sharma is in jail, charged with killing a real-estate broker on behalf of a business rival in 2006, in what is known in India as a "fake encounter"—a murder that is falsely reported as a police shootout.
Faked police shootings are common in India, according to civil-rights groups, police officers and senior government ministers. In an interview, one of Mr. Sharma's close friends and police colleagues openly acknowledged that police shootouts have long been staged. India's policing crisis exposes how the nation, despite modernizing its economy the past 20 years, hasn't kept pace with improvements to its law enforcement and the judiciary. The phenomenon of the faked shootout grew in the 1990s, when gang warfare raged in Mumbai. The city recently has tried to rein it in by suspending or firing some cops, but the phenomenon has already spread to India's far corners.
The National Human Rights Commission recently reported that, over the past two decades, it has received more than 20,000 cases of people allegedly dying in judicial custody, and more than 4,000 complaints of people dying in police custody. Referring to the use of fake shootouts, former Mumbai police commissioner Julio F. Ribeiro said: "The middle class was, and is, in favor of it." People "are convinced that the judicial system doesn't work, so they support taking the shortcut and killing anyone suspected of wrongdoing," he said. India's courts are indeed overstretched. Currently there is a backlog of 30 million civil and criminal cases combined, according to the National Bar Association.
11 India public sector banks hiding bad loans (The Times of India) India’s finance ministry has written to several public sector banks pointing out that they have not set aside billions of rupees to cover for loan defaults, and have consequently overstated profits. The communication was sent to state-owned lenders earlier this month and is based on inputs received from Reserve Bank of India. As the regulator, RBI conducts Annual Financial Inspection of banks. In case of one bank, the extent of under-provisioning was in excess of over Rs 50bn over a three-year period. Had the bank set aside funds in line with RBI stipulations, the lender could have ended up reporting losses, the finance ministry pointed out.
12 What CEOs do with their time (Mint) Break-up of a 55-hour week of a CEO: 20 hours in miscellaneous activities including travel, exercise, and personal appointments, 18 hours in meetings, 6 hours working alone, 5 hours at business meals, and 2 hours each at public events, on conference calls and making phone calls.
13 Jayachandran’s cartoon in Mint, on castes and the Uttar Pradesh election.
http://www.livemint.com/2012/02/15195531/Drawbridge.html?h=B
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