Tag: India

Anti-Porn Witch Hunts Are So Creepy When They’re In India

This Boing! Boing! link is fascinating, I think, because it really highlights just what partisan hacks the authors of that particular blog have become.

Here’s the short version — a kid in India uses his cell phone to take video of some girl giving him a blow job. Someone posts a copy of the video for sale on an Indian subsidiary of Ebay.

Here’s where things start to get bizarre — the Indian government arrests the president of the Ebay subsidiary, Avnish Bajaj, and charges him with disseminating obsenity because, (after all, the video was offered for sale on his service.)

One can imagine the well-placed outrage, for example, if the U.S. Justice Department ordered the arrest of the CEO of EBay in this country because someone posted an obscene video for sale.

In the Indian case, it turns out that Bajaj is an American citizen and so the U.S. government is actively intervening on his behalf with the India government. But instead of lauding the government for looking to protect the rights of its citizens, the move is derided by the usual suspects,

Update: Fleshbot picked up an interesting/creepy angle on the story as reported by Agence France-Presse: the incident is
reportedly being followed at the “highest levels” of US government as well. Fleshbot’s editor asks, “Yes, the manager of Baazee.com is an Indian-born US citizen, but still. Is this the sort of case the US State Department usually gets involved in? We’d have thought they were busy with other things, like … oh, war and stuff.” Link

And reader John McCarthy says, “According to todayÂ’s Salon, CondiÂ’s on the trail of the India phone sex scandal.”

[Condoleezza] Rice is understood to have telephoned the U.S. ambassador in India, David Mulford, about the case. The Bush administration’s national security advisor and future secretary of state has let it be known that she is furious about Bajaj’s humiliating treatment. He is, after all, a U.S. citizen.

Again, I can’t imagine Boing! Boing! treating so cavalierly the arrest of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government for such a tertiary (non-existent actually) role in disseminating obsenity. The obvious comment that comes to mind about the administration’s role is that it is nice to see them defending the rights of Mr. Bajaj, and that hopefully they can start to take the rights of Americans living on U.S. territory as seriously as they take the rights of Americans living in India.

Instead, the U.S. efforts to protect Bajaj are simply (emphasis added)”intersting/creepy.” What the hell is creepy about protecting Bajaj from an anti-porn witch hunt? Oh, that’s right, since John Ashcroft and George W. Bush aren’t leading the witch hunt, the story’s just not the same.

More than 170 Million Indian Children Receive Polio Vaccination

In what was billed as a major effort to eradicate polio from India, more than 170 million children under five were vaccinated against polio over a three day period earlier this month. Simultaneously, another 80 million children in 24 African nations were also vaccinated.

The goal is to eradicate polio from India by the end of 2005.

So far this year, India has reported 85 cases of polio, the lowest number ever since polio statistics have been recorded. In 1994, when efforts to eradicate polio from India began in earnest, there were 4,791 cases reported.

Deepak Kapoor, chairman of Rotary International in India which has played an important role in polio eradication in India and other parts of the world, told New Kerala,

If polio can be completely wiped off by next year, it would be a great victory, not just for India, but for the international community as a whole. It would induce a renewed confidence in our efforts against other diseases such as malaria and AIDS.

Unfortunately, eradicating polio in Africa might prove a bigger challenge. Planned vaccinations in Ivory Coast, for example, had to be canceled due to the unstable political and military situation in that country.

Sources:

India starts ‘final’ anti-polio push. Ania Lichtarowicz, The BBC, November 21, 2004.

India inches closer to eradicating polio. New Kerala, November 21, 2004.

UN giving kids in India polio shots. United Press International, November 21, 2004.

Indian Newspaper Claims Drug Research Is At a Standstill There Due to Animal Rights

The Times of India published a story in September claiming that biomedical research in that country has come to a near standstill due to a committee run by animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi which is blocking almost all research involving animals.

Gandhi is a former government minister and animal rights activist who heads the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals. According to The Times of India, Gandhi and her committee are “making it virtually impossible for medical scientist to use large animals for experiments” in India.

According to the Times, for example, an Indian company was recently prevented from using 15 rabbits for safety testing of a new drug. It did the logical thing and outsourced the testing to a nearby country, the result being that the test was still done but at a higher expense and requiring more time to complete.

The Times also claims that the Committee has prevented tests designed to quickly diagnose virus outbreaks. According to the Times,

At the National Institute of Virology, Pune, scientist could not conduct any tests on monkeys to get quick results as they struggled to contain a mysterious outbreak in Andhra Pradesh which went on to claim the lives of some 200 children. “The scientists did whatever they could in the laboratory. But tests on monkeys would have given some immediate results,” says a senior Indian Council of Medical Research (ICRM official). The same story was repeated during another epidemic of brain fever in Assam.

Source:

Production of new drugs getting delayed. Times of India, September 24, 2004.

Men Accused of Raping Three Women in Revenge for Lower Caste Wedding

According to the BBC, tension and conflict arose in an Indian village earlier this year when a young woman from an upper-caste Yadav family eloped with a 19-year old man of the Dalit caste, which is the lowest in India’s bizarre caste system. So several dozen Yadav men did what any self-respecting upper-caste man would — they first paraded the young man’s mother and aunts through the village and then gang raped them.

Police have arrested eight people in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh for their alleged involvement in the attack. Witnesses told police that about 30 men were involved altogether in the gang rape..

India’s caste system is abolished by law, but, as this incident underscores, it is still solidly entrenched in practice.

Source:

Men held over ‘caste gang-rape’. The BBC, July 10, 2004.

Developing World Going Mobile

Mobile telephone services continues to route around damaged state-run landline systems in the developing world.

In India, only 7 percent of the population has a telephone. But that has increased from 1 percent compared to a decade ago, thanks in large measure to cellular service that is cheaper and easier to obtain than India’s state-run landline system.

The BBC reports that usage costs for mobile phones in India hovers at around 1 cent a minute, making it much more affordable than traditional telephone services, and that as many as 1.5 million Indians sign up for mobile phone service every month.

Meanwhile the BBC reports that Africa has the world’s fastest growing mobile phone market, expanding at an annual rate of 65 percent. About 6 percent of people in Africa use mobile phones and that number is expected to expand to as much as 20 percent by the end of the decade.

Source:

A mobile vision for Africa. The BBC, July 5, 2004.

Mobiles outstrip India landlines. The BBC, July 2, 2004.

India On Pace to Become Most Populous Country

For World Population Day this month, a number of news outlets noted that India is currently on target to surpass China as the most populous country in the world by 2035. But a lot of the reporting typified the sort of errors that the media have long made about population growth. As an example, consider The Scotsman’s take on population growth in China compared to India (emphasis added)

According to figures produced for the United Nations World Population Day, which falls today, China is currently the world’s most puoplous country with 1,289 million, followed by India with 1,069 million, and the US third a long way behind with 292 million.

The main reason is that India has never followed China’s Draconian “one child” policy. At the height of the birth control campaign by the Chinese communist government couples who stopped at one child were given preferences in education, healthcare, housing, and jobs. Couples who produced an “out-of-quote” child could be fined or lose access to education or other privileges.

Though the policy has been softened, the impact of the period when it was applied most harshly is now being felt.

“Between the 1960s and the 1980s, China experienced one of the most rapid declines ever recorded in a national population. In just 15 years, the number of children a woman would expect to have fell from about six to just over two,” says Professor Nancy E. Riley, an expert on population and social change in China at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine.

As a democracy India has not been able or willing to use coercion, though it has tried persuasion. A study called India Project by a team of experts from the London School of Economics, led by Professor Tim Dyson, estimates that on current trends India’s population will touch 1.4 billion by 2026, 1.5 billion by 2036 and could approach 1.6 billion by 2051.

It’s truly amazing that a newspaper can produce such pathetic reporting.

First, the reporter emphasizes that China’s total fertility rate has fallen, supposedly due to coercion there, and gives the impression that India has not see comparable gains because it is unwilling to adopt a one-child policy. But in the same period, without any coercion, India’s total fertility rate fell 42 percent. The current rate is 3.1 and falling. That was a very impressive feat, but one you would never know about from reading The Scotsman.

Second, The Scotsman attributes the large decline in fertility from the 1960s to the 1980s to the one-child policy. But since the one-child policy wasn’t instituted until 1979, it’s ridiculous to attribute all of the drop to the one-child efforts. In fact, the bulk of the large drop in fertility in China occurred before the one-child policy was instituted. The TFR in China fell from 6 in 1970 to 2.8 in 1979, all without the draconian policies that The Scotsman asserts is singularly responsible for the decline.

Third, The Scotsman sets up a classic false dichotomy that just won’t go away. In this world, countries have only two choices — dictatorship and declines in population growth or democracy and increases in population growth. But the countries with the lowest total fertility rates in the world are democracies — countries like Italy and Spain.

Reporters might actually want to look at the data instead of simply inserting every population story into the same erroneous molds.

Source:

India to overtake China as most populous nation. Ian Mather, The Scotsman, July 11, 2004.