Amartya Stands For Industry

Amartya Stands For Industry,


Polavaram Shadow Over Refugees

Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time - Thirty Three

Palash Biswas


Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: palashchandrabiswas@gmail.com

The Telegraph - Calcutta : FrontpageCalcutta, July 23: Amartya Sen’s reasoning has forced the Opposition to tweak … We stand for government intervention in land acquisition for industry and …
www.telegraphindia.com/1070724/asp/frontpage/story_8098274.asp - 31k - 23 Jul 2007 -

Case for and against mega dams

G.S. GANESH PRASAD

PERSPECTIVES ON POLAVARAM — A Major Irrigation Project on Godavari: Biksham Gujja, S. Ramakrishna, Vinod Goud, Sivaramakrishna — Editors; Academic Foundation, 4772-73/23 Bharat Ram Road (23, Ansari Road), Darya Ganj, New Delhi-1 10002. Rs. 795.


The Polavaram dam (renamed as Indira Sagar) is one of the fast track projects taken up by the Government of Andhra Pradesh with a view to improving the irrigation facilities in the State. The project originally conceived in 1941 had been making a slow progress until recently. The State Government of late has initiated measures to hasten the implementation of this project which has already witnessed intervention of the judiciary on a number of issues related to rehabilitati on and submergence of forests. Political parties and civil society organisations have threatened agitation against the construction of this dam which according to them has severe environmental consequences and would affect a vast population.
http://www.hindu.com/br/2007/07/24/stories/2007072450031400.htm

Chemical Hub - Ek Nihshobdo Ghatok (A Silent Killer)

From Platform publications, 45 Beniatola Lane, Kolkata 700009

The government of West Bengal has decided to build a chemical hub in the aftermath of Nandigram - the only question right now is where. This article analyses the effects of such a plan. Topics covered include the experience of other countries with chemical industries ( Brazil’s Valley of Death, Japan - the Minamata Disease), the bloody histories of chemical corporations such as Dow, and the effect on the environment and public health.

Click here to read article [Bengali, PDF, 23 pages] »
http://sanhati.com/front-page/305/

So called Nobel Lareate NRI Dr Amartya Sen stands for land aquisition reqired for Industrialisation and Urbanisation. Left Front is succesful to maintain its hold on Haldia against United Oppositoion! Left won the election with a slogan in favour of Buddha`s capitalist Development, Petrochemical Hub and SEZ drive. Laxman appears on TV screen sidelining the first Woman President Mrs Pratibha Patil, who incidentally assumed office today! Laxman Seth is being held for Nandigram disater in CPIM party circles and a powerful leader of Midnapur CPIM, the Keshpur Vetern Deepak sarkar has emphasised to control him for public good and party interest in his confidential report to the CPIM state secretary cum Left Front Chairman Biman Bose. But Seth is projectd as a hero and saviour of Buddhadev in Bengali media, electronic as well as Print.

Only yesterday I spoke to Malkan Giri Refugee Leader Shridam Biswas on phone and infotrmed him about submergence of Malkangiri refugee colonies in Polavaram Project. I also talked to Mr Ujjwal Biswas, another orrissa Refugee leader based in Bhuvneshwar. Neither of them knew a word about this. Late in the night I got Mr siddharth Bharve, the Bamcef laeder in Gwalior and informed him all about West Bengal, Orrissa, Chattisgarh and Andhra refugee afairs and Polavoram project. He assured me that returning Mumbai he would ensure that Bamcef as an organisation takes up the Burning Issues!

I understand the limitation of Bengali Refugee leaders out of Bengal as no RTI helps them to know their destiny. Orrissa and Chhattisgargh governments are keeping murderous silence and preparing for Eviction Drive!
What about Andhra?
What about Wetst Bengal?
What about rest of the country?
Has Ms Mayawati, projected as the future prime minister of India, taken any stance in light of his casteology?
What about all thos Ambedkarites boasting to overthrow the Brahminical System?
At least, in West Bengal I could not get any response from any SC, ST and minorities?

Ruling Left Front in West Bengal survived a high-pitched campaign by opposition’s grand alliance to retain power today in Haldia Municipality, close to the trouble spot of Nandigram, the epicentre of campaign against land acquisition for industries in the state. The Front, which had made a clean sweep in the previous elections to the municipality in East Midnapore district five years back, won 19 of the 26 seats, but conceded seven to the Trinammol Congress-led ‘Mahajot’ (Grand Alliance) that included Congress and the BJP.

The CPI(M) bagged 17 seats, while another Front partner CPI claimed two seats. For the Mahajot, Trinamool Congress candidates won half a dozen wards, while the PDCI clinched one, according to state election departnment sources here.

In 2002, the ruling Front nominees had emerged victorious in each of the 25 wards, that constituted the muncipality then.

It is clear now that Buddh`s train for Capitalist development has no chance to derail!
So far SC and ST leaders as well as minority leaders in West Bengal, out of Nandigram and singur Arena have been detached despite the fact that Nandigram Singur uprising happens to be first breakthrough in the Brahminical Dominance in Bengali Politics, Society and Economy! It opens all the windows of National dalit movement. But Dalit orgs countrywide have failed even strating a positive intiative in this direction. The ST SC and minority enslaved population seems to be quite happy as the mobile votyebank for different Brahminical parties including Left as well as Right besides centrist Congress remains intact.
Haldia Verdict portrays the filure very well as Mamta Bannerjee, a Brahmin remains the challanger against another Brahmin Buddhdev Bhattacharya. Rest of the polity consists of entertained masses of WWF audiance.
Missing the Wood for the Trees - A paper on land acquisition, past and present

By Abhijit Guha, courtesy Frontier

In the wake of unprecedented massive peoples’ resistance against the acquisition of fertile agricultural land in West Bengal a discourse on land acquisition has emerged. There are many stakeholders in this discourse. The state government, the opposition, the smaller partners of the Left Front Government (LFG) and the civil society are the major players in this discourse. The issues, which are at stake, revolve round the location of industries, compensation and employment of the displaced persons and above all the relationship between agriculture and industrialisation in the state of West Bengal. While all these issues are hotly debated among the stakeholders amidst claims and counter-claims no one really seems to be serious or even knowledgeable about the nature and functioning of the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (LA Act) which is the legal instrument of acquiring land for private companies in India even after 59 years of Independence. Everybody is now busy with the Special Economic Zone Act and its various undemocratic and authoritarian characteristics but nobody demands or makes any concrete plan or suggestion to overhaul the LA Act which stipulates only monetary compensation at market rate, ignores the local self-government, shows no concern over communal property rights and the environment, gives supreme power to the government to acquire land for a ‘public purpose’ which remains undefined and makes no provision for resettlement and rehabilitation for the displaced persons. The government, the civil society leaders including the noted intellectuals, the opposition and the partners still remain surprisingly dumb on the pro-people changes that have to be worked out to transform the LA Act in line with the democratic and egalitarian spirit of the Indian Constitution as well as congruous with a sustainable future of the country. It is true that making of good law is not enough. There are many good laws in India! But making a good law by scrapping an old one is the first step towards social justice and it requires a strong political will which all the political parties of the country badly lack. The distant upshot of this situation is undoubtedly grave because the people of West Bengal who have now risen against the neoliberal agenda of globalization to protect their rights over natural resources and livelihood will ultimately fall victim of state repression and confusion in the absence of a long term goal of the heroic fight they have waged. Given the ensuing controversy it makes sense to make an anatomical dissection of the main culprit—the Land Acquisition Act enacted by colonial masters more than 122 years ago. After all, Indians can’t make changes in the system unless they know it properly.
http://sanhati.com/front-page/317/

Refugee and dalit leaders in Bengal have been busy to prove thir loyality to CPIM bargaining maximum personal milage! They forgot everything about Citizenship Amendment Act, Deletion of more than twenty lac Voters` names in West Bengal in only last years Assembelly Elections and other problems. They no more complain of Untouchability and pose themselves as more Brahminical then Brahmins. Tagore is quoted every where and nazrul persecuted. Tagore is sophisticated. Thus, sophisticated package for literature, music, culture and folk for global marketing is quite in vogue and entire Bengali Intelleigentsia is indulged in vulgar protitution.
So called Nobel laureate Dr Amarty Sen represents well this sophisticated market oriented psyche of Bengali Intelligentsia who are not commited to any other ideology but to Post Modern Manusmriti of US Zionist Brahminical Neo Galaxy Order!
I have been called several times by the people from Jangi Pur, Murshidabad, where multi purpose National Identity cards are distributed as a pilot project for nationwide campaign. I discussed the refugee leaders without getting any response.
Meanwhile,The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Andhra Pradesh Government to furnish a scheme as to how it proposed to rehabilitate and provide relief to those to be affected by executing the Rs. 16,000-crore Polavaram project.

In April, the apex court had permitted the authorities concerned to process the applications seeking various approvals for the execution of the project but said that they should not pass any final order on the applications.

When the matter came up on Friday before a three-judge Bench comprising Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice S.H. Kapadia, senior counsel K.K. Venugopal, appearing for the State pleaded for granting permission for execution of the project.



On the other hand,CPI(M) today dubbed the Left Front’s victory in the Haldia municipal election as "people’s verdict for industrialisation" but sidestepped the question whether the process of setting up a chemical hub there would now be accelerated.

"The result clearly indicates that people want industrialisation and jobs," CPI-M state secretary Biman Bose told reporters here. He, however, said it was quite natural that rural people would take time to realise the positive benefits that industrialisation brought to improve their quality of life.

Moreover, the Opposition’s slanderous campaign with communal overtones misled a section of the rural people which enabled them to secure seven seats, he said. Asked whether the victory would give fillip to the state government’s move to set up a chemical hub at Haldia which was to have come up at Nandigram, Bose said it was entirely a government matter. "It is a hypothetical question and I cannot answer."

The CPI(M) was on the defensive after the Opposition registered victory in the seven seats mostly in rural areas of Haldia riding on the wave of what the opposition called the "farmers’ resentment against the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government’s policy of industrialisation by acquiring farmland".

Vidya Bhushan Rawat
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Maoist shadow looming over Polavaram project
Friday July 20 2007 11:36 IST
KHAMMAM: With the Naxal shadow looming large over Polavaram project, there is tension in most of the villages that are likely to face submersion when the project gets under way.

The rehabilitation programmes of the government for the project ousters are also going on at a tardy pace thanks to the Maoist threats.

There are reports that several farmers, who wanted to move out to other areas, have decided against it. The killing of pro- Polavaram Congress leader and Velerupadu mandal Congress president Mandava Rami Reddy last week at Banjaragudem village has only added to their fears.

Following the killing, at least 10 grass roots level Congress leaders have resigned their party posts and have also decided not to make any pro-Polavaram project noises.

The people of several affected villages in Kukkunur, Velerupadu and Burgampahad are re-thinking on accepting the rehabilitation package or not. Until the other day, these people were seen requesting the government to include these mandals in the rehabilitation package list.

As many as 10,150 houses were surveyed in the 33 revenue mandals of Kakunuru mandal, 8140 houses in 39 revenue villages of Velerupadu mandal and 2,563 houses in nine villages in Burgampahad mandal and a notification for R&R package was issued on July 7.

But now, these villagers are reluctant to talk to the officials. The Maoists had issued a diktat warning the people of dire consequences if they accept the R&R package.
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IEA20070720011510&Page=A&Title=Southern+News+-+Andhra+Pradesh&Topic=0

For Social action, land rights, right to food and hunger issues support Social Development Foundation at www.thesdf.org

Amartya Sen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (Bengali: ??????? ????? ??? Ômorto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933), is an Indian economist, philosopher, and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998, for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, and political liberalism.

From 1998 to 2004 he was Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, becoming the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college. Amartya Sen is interested in the debate over globalization. He has given lectures to senior executives of the World Bank and he is honorary president of Oxfam.

Among his many contributions to development economics, Sen has produced work on gender inequality. He is currently the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.

Did Amartya Sen get the Nobel?-India-The Times of IndiaDid Amartya Sen get the Nobel? 8 Oct 2004, 1440 hrs IST , IANS … The city sessions court has admitted Subodh Chandra Roy’s petition for hearing. …
timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/877917.cms - 40k - Cached - Similar pages

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and StupidThe city sessions court has admitted Subodh Chandra Roy’s petition for hearing. … published in a Bengali translation of one of Sen’s books on economics. …
www.poorandstupid.com/2004_10_03_chronArchive.asp - 87k - Cached - Similar pages

‘Prohibiting the use of agricultural land for industries is ultimately self-defeating’
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen speaks to Sambit Saha of The Telegraph on land acquisition for industrialisation, one of the most important issues facing Bengal and large parts of the country.

Q: What are your views on farmland acquisition for industry and the Singur-Nandigram controversy?

Amartya Sen: That is a very complicated question and has many aspects. Let me separate them out.

First of all, the need for industrial priority in West Bengal, which is a big long-term question and an extremely important issue.

It is sometimes underestimated the extent to which Bengal has been de-industrialised. Bengal was one of the major industrial centres in the world, not only in India. In European writings, Bengal has again and again come up as being one of the most prosperous areas in the world as an industrial base. The kind of reputation that some parts of Italy gained later.

It is often said that historically, Calcutta was founded 300 years ago by Job Charnock but it is also true that there was an urban settlement based on trade and industry, apart from agriculture, in this area. This we see not only from Indian records but also from the writings of Ptolemy and Pliny the Elder. The Europeans were aware of that.

Very near from Calcutta, there were industrial areas of huge prosperity. There is also mention in the writings of Fa Hien who came here in 401 and spent 10 years. He went back by boat. He took the boat from Tamralipta, which is very close to Calcutta. Effectively, it was greater Calcutta. So this has been a trading and industrial area for a very long time.

When Charnock came and the Battle of Plassey happened, there was not only English but the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Flemish and the Danish merchants. They were all interested in the industrial products of this area. Under the British, there was de-industrialisation of classical industry but new industries came in the form, for example, of jute. But gradually that went off after Independence and there was further de-industrialisation.

The policy of the Communist Party itself was not well thought-out. The industrial agitation may have given the workers a little bit more rights, but they lost many more rights by the industries withdrawing out of Calcutta.

Jyotibabu was aware of the problem and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has tried to carry the understanding forward by trying to make it possible to have a big industrial base here. And it is extremely important.

It is also very important to recognise that production of industrial goods was based on the banks of the Hooghly and the Ganges, which are fertile areas anyway. So to say that ‘this is fertile agriculture land and you should not have industry here’ not only goes against the policy of the West Bengal government but also against the 2,000-year history of Bengal.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070723/asp/nation/story_8094453.asp

Singur land gifted to Tatas’

Our Legal Correspondent
KOLKATA, July 24: The land in Singur acquired under the Land Acquisition Act has been gifted to Tatas by the West Bengal Government, said Mr Siddhartha Shankar Ray, resuming his argument in the Singur land acquisition case before a Division Bench of the Chief Justice, Mr SS Nijjar, and Mr Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose of Calcutta High Court today. To substantiate his point Mr Ray cited a number of judgments of the House of Lords.
Mr Ray, who appeared with Mr Kalyan Bandopadhyaya, submitted that the state government’s notification for acquisition of land did not disclose for whom the land was being acquired. There were contradictory statements in the government affidavit about allotment of acquired land.
From that affidavit it was clear that the value of the land had been paid by the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation which had gifted it to Tatas.
This land acquisition, Mr Ray stated, was not for any public purpose but for the Tata company.
In Haryana, Maruti company was producing 400,000 cars in a year but only 400 acres of land had been given to that company. Here in Singur in the case of Tatas there was no assessment of production of cars. It was also not disclosed how many persons would be given employment. No details about employment were given by the government. What socio-economic development would take place after the implementation of the Tata motor car project was also not mentioned anywhere in the state government’s
affidavit.
Hearing continues.
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=163727

West Bengal land acquisition Bill deferred

KOLKATA: The tabling in the West Bengal Assembly of a bill, considered critical for the future of industrialisation, has been deferred.

It seeks to amend the existing legislation on land availability to facilitate acquisition for purposes of industry, commerce and infrastructure development.

The delay comes at a time when the Industries and Commerce Department expects the flow of investment to touch the Rs. 90,000-crore mark soon.

Nearly eight months after the West Bengal Land Reforms [Amendment] Bill 2006 was first referred to an Assembly select committee, it was unanimously decided on Tuesday to extend the term of the panel till the next session of the House, following differences among the members over certain details.

Members on the committee, representing different parties, have not been able to reach consensus on the Bill. The differences are not confined to the Opposition and exist among some constituents of the ruling Left Front.

According to the proposed amendments, land acquired would have to be used for purposes of industry, commerce and infrastructure within three years, else the government could reclaim it.


Amartya Sen
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1998
Autobiography
I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another. My family is from Dhaka - now the capital of Bangladesh. My ancestral home in Wari in "old Dhaka" is not far from the University campus in Ramna. My father Ashutosh Sen taught chemistry at Dhaka University. I was, however, born in Santiniketan, on the campus of Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati (both a school and a college), where my maternal grandfather (Kshiti Mohan Sen) used to teach Sanskrit as well as ancient and medieval Indian culture, and where my mother (Amita Sen), like me later, had been a student. After Santiniketan, I studied at Presidency College in Calcutta and then at Trinity College in Cambridge, and I have taught at universities in both these cities, and also at Delhi University, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and Harvard University, and on a visiting basis, at M.I.T., Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell. I have not had any serious non-academic job.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1998/sen-autobio.html

Prof. Amartya Sen
This page will automatically be redirected to Prof. Sen’s latest Website in 5 seconds. If the URL does not change please click HERE.
http://www.nd.edu/~kmukhopa/cal300/calcutta/amartya.htm

Articles on Amartya SenOn the occasion of his winning of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics.
www.nd.edu/~kmukhopa/cal300/sen/articles.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Amartya Kumar Sen - Democracy as a Universal Value - Journal of …Article by Sen in the Journal of Democracy 10:3, using ideas more fully developed in ‘Democracy as Freedom’.
muse.jhu.edu/demo/jod/10.3sen.html - 56k - Cached - Similar pages

Kenneth Arrow on Amartya Sen’s Poverty and FaminesThe title of Amartya Sen’s book is more provocative than it may at first seem. Hunger is associated with poverty in that people who are not poor are not …
finance.sauder.ubc.ca/~bhatta/BookReview/arrow_on_sen’s_poverty_and_famine.html - 20k - Cached - Similar pages

Amazon.com: Development as Freedom: Books: Amartya SenAmazon.com: Development as Freedom: Books: Amartya Sen by Amartya Sen.
www.amazon.com/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp/0385720270 - 183k - 23 Jul

Arrest of activist Saroj Mohanty: An Urgent Appeal

July 17, 2007 - Message from Kashipur Solidarity Group

Saroj Mohanty, poet and long-time activist with Prakrutik Sampad Surakhya Parishad (PSSP), which has over 15 years been opposing the entry of large bauxite mining companies in Kashipur, has been arrested. Saroj was picked up at a railway station in Rayagada District, on Saturday, 14 July. He is currently in judicial custody in Rayagada district jail.

The charges against him are completely fabricated but serious. These charges include section 395 of the IPC (Dacoity), section 397 (Robbery or dacoity, with attempt to cause death or grievous hurt), and section 450 (House trespass with intention to commit offence that is punishable with imprisonment for life).
http://sanhati.com/news/320/

Stakeholder analysis wrt land as a resource in the SEZ strategy in Bengal - a paper

By Dheeraj Singh, IIM Kolkata

The State government recently acquired 997.11 acres of land, spread across the five mouzas within the Panchayat Samity of Singur, for the TATA’s small car factory project. This paper performs a stakeholder assessment and looks into the finer details of the entire deal. The idea is to find out the land distribution among the different stakeholders such as middle peasants, small farmers, and marginal farmers, and the distribution of the compensation amount as declared and promised by the state government of West Bengal, given the price of the per acre of land assessed and fixed again by the state agency. The actual distribution provides us the real, fact-based information which can then be used as a basis to make broad assessment and prescribe some policy level initiatives or alternatives.

Click to read paper [PDF, 15 pages] »
http://sanhati.com/front-page/319/

CPI(M) lies about Tapasi Malik’s death - apologist Vijay Prasad disseminates untruths

By Partho Sarathi Ray, Sanhati

The brutal rape and murder of Tapasi Malik, the 18 year old girl who was a highly motivated member of the Save Farmland Committee spearheading the struggle against land acquisition in Singur, had sent shockwaves through the body politic of West Bengal last year. The Save Farmland Committee had accused the CPI(M) cadre who double as night-guards for the fenced off area of land, forcibly acquired for setting up Tata’s factory at Singur. The CBI had taken up the investigation due to strong protests against the incident. However, CPI(M) leaders and the police had tried to pass it off variously as suicide, result of a love affair etc. Most vociferous and prominent among these was Debu Malik, who appeared on several TV channels claiming to have seen Tapasi go towards the fenced off area with a can of kerosene in her hand. Soon, and sure enough, some intellectuals serving the CPI(M) took up the task of adding a new twist to the story.
http://sanhati.com/front-page/307/

Intel inside rural India

Mathures Paul
JAIPUR, July 24: Taking PC accessibility and education to rural India is Intel, which has signed a memorandum of understanding with Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd, as part of the World Ahead Program, to address capacity building, ecosystem enabling and technology support to 100,000 ICT enabled Common Service Centres’ (CSC) with a reach over 650,000 villages, including a few in West Bengal.
Intel will provide IL&FS ~ the national level service agency of the CSC project under the department of information technology, ministry of communications and information technology ~ education consultancy to identify ICT enabled programmes and assistance for integrated applications service delivery at CSC’s, besides offering advisory services for wireless implementation towards a rural broadband programme.
“It’s imperative to give children and parents in rural areas IT training. Each Common Service Centre is run by an entrepreneur and Intel simply defines the infrastructure required and provides some of the content. The content provided will be in English and local language,” said John McClure, director-marketing, Intel South Asia.
The technology input cost of each centre would be around Rs 20,000 but would vary with extra services that would be requested. Using CSCs people in rural areas will not only become computer literates but also have easy access to solutions to agricultural problems. The CSC network, Mr McClure said, is a natural extension of the model centre Intel had set up in Baramati in Maharashtra. The centres will be run, based on standards established by IL&FS, by private entrepreneurs.
Mr McClure said through World Ahead Program, the company plans to extend access to PCs with high-speed Internet connection to millions and train one million teachers on the use of technology in classrooms. Intel expects to help more than 30 million students in India by 2008. “Spending money to teach teachers will not produce immediate effects. This is just a catalyst.”
Also on Intel’s radar is healthcare. In November 2006 Dr Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel Corporation, and Mr Sharad Pawar inaugurated the first “digital” community health centre with tele-diagonistics ~ Aarogya Jaal in Rui Hospital. In the six months the total number of out patients visiting Rui has been 11,000. The success of the programme has made the Maharashtra government express interest to scale Aarogya Jaal programme across 15 community hospitals within the district of Pune.
“‘Digital’ hospitals is an important initiative. Patients wear a wrist band with bar code for identification. Information about the patient can be given into the system easily and also via remote access. This way, patients’ records cannot be tampered with. Secondly, remote diagnosis is possible. You don’t have to take the patient to a big hospital, thus reducing treatment costs. Thirdly, as more hospitals go digital, there will be better utilization of resources. Finally, such techniques will help look after the elderly easily,” said Mr McClure.



The other side of India’s tech boom
Monday July 23, 11:43 am ET
By Daniel Pepper

Far from the gleaming high-tech parks of Bangalore and Hyderabad, 25-year-old Mohammed Zayeed hunches over a raised concrete slab in the slums of New Delhi. With surgical precision he disassembles the backbone of India’s booming IT industry for 12 hours a day: removing cream-colored plastic casings from old desktop computers, separating hard drives from circuitboards, and stripping PVC coating from copper wires. He tosses the detritus into towering piles destined for the next link in a long chain of recyclers.


In New Delhi alone about 10,000 people, some young children, dismantle old computers and other equipment known as e-waste - searching for gold, copper, palladium, or anything else to turn into cash. The work can be hazardous. Recyclers expose themselves to toxic metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium. "We know that it’s harmful," says Zayeed, whose monthly income of $75 supports a wife and two children. "But we are poor, so anything that can be recycled is money for us."

E-waste recycling is a booming business in India. A study by Toxics Link, an advocacy group in New Delhi, found that metals from 183 defunct computers could yield as much as $24,000. India currently produces 150,000 tons of e-waste a year and illegally imports at least that amount from the West, says the group’s associate director, Satish Sinha. Currently India has only 22 computers for every 1,000 people, but that number is projected to increase to 120 in the next five years.
http://biz.yahoo.com/hftn/070723/070907_100135848.html?.v=1

President General Musharraf, the Pakistan Army, and the elite have a long history of bolstering Islamic right as a bulwark against the working class and of using various militias to further the country’s and their own geo-political ambitions in Afghanistan and India, claims Keith Jones in an article for the World Socialist Website.Meanwhile, Islamic militants detonated bombs close to military convoys and attacked government positions in Pakistan’s restive northwestern tribal region, sparking gunfights that left 19 insurgents dead, government officials said Sunday.The former chief cleric of a militant mosque being held in connection with a soldier’s killing and a Taliban-like anti-vice campaign in Pakistan’s capital renewed his demand Saturday for Islamic laws.

JERUSALEM - Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday kicked off his first visit to the Middle East as the international community’s new envoy to the region, hoping to add new momentum to fledgling peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A purported Taliban spokesman said Monday the hard-line militia has extended its deadline on the fate of 23 South Korean hostages who were seized last week.