Link Banana

Specifically: Why does India have so few Olympic medals? Tyler Cowen and others speculate. I do believe that cricket remains my favorite explanation.

To fight their public urination problem, officials in Musiri, Tamil Nadu, India are paying people to use the restroom.

Dozens of people are queuing up to use toilets in Musiri, a remote town in Tamil Nadu state, where authorities are succeeding in keeping street corners clean with the new scheme.

The urine was also being collected and tested for its efficacy as a crop fertiliser, an official of Tamil Nadu’s  agricultural university said.

The poor of Musiri, are earning upto a dollar a month and very happy to keep the street corners clean.

(via Neatorama)

I suppose this was only a matter of time. Quoth Slashdot:

Students studying computing in the UK and US are outsourcing their university coursework to graduates in India and Romania. Work is being contracted out for as little as £5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It’s causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect.”

The irony, of course, is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway.

The Financial Times recently ran an interesting story profiling seven “average” people from the country of 1.1 billion.

A generation ago, the “Indian dream” would almost certainly have involved a ticket to Vancouver, London or New York. That is less true today. Daru, like so many of her peers, thinks she can best build her future here. “India now has enough opportunities for my generation,” she says. “I have friends who have gone to the US and to the UK to earn some money, but then they come back. I see a lot of youngsters thinking of coming back to their friends and family.”

(via MeFi)

Thought-provoking piece Mark Gimien about the irrelevance of the much-touted Gini coefficient in capturing the inequalities of everyday life. His conclusion:

When economists talk about inequality, they are talking about something that can easily be captured in an equation about national income. When noneconomists talk about inequality, however, they have in mind not their neighbor’s wallet, which they can’t see, but their own, which they can. They are thinking of what they can and cannot afford, and also of the most visible extremes of wealth and poverty around them. That’s why India’s Gini index may be lower than our own, and yet it will be the rare person who will say that India is more equal in any sense that matters. When we talk about inequality, it’s not about resentment of the next door neighbors’ pool. It’s about gut issues: whether we feel poor, whether we feel that those around us are poor. That’s why it’s worth thinking about in the first place. Unfortunately, the usual way that economists talk about and measure inequality tells us next to nothing about it.

Just a small chart to scare the pants off of those who recently found out that the “BRIC” countries are serious about growing. And that the United States is, well, not growing as fast as them. More embarrassingly, because the recession the US is also forecast to grow slower than Japan or the Euro area.

If you’re willing to accept the fact that The Times of India’s website commits no small number of sins, Gems Sty found an interesting story about the impact cellphones have had there.

For the cellphones are now in the hands of people who would not have presumed, a generation ago, to put themselves on those eight-year-long waiting-lists. If you are chauffeur-driven these days, you can be sure that your driver carries a cellphone. If you visit a friend in a Delhi suburb, the istri wallah on the side-streets — with his wooden cart, using a coal-fired steam iron to iron clothes from the neighbourhood — carries a cellphone, to know which apartment needs his services. Farmers carry cellphones; just being able to call the nearest town to find out whether the market is open and what prices are being charged saves a farming family hours of fruitless walking. In Kerala, fisherfolk carry cellphones, so they can call in to the coastal towns after their catch, to know where they should sail to in order to obtain the best prices for their fish.

The cellphone is not a panacea; it will not single-handedly usher in the development that our country has been striving for since Independence. But it is making a huge difference. Above all, it has empowered the Indian underclass in ways in which 45 years of talk about socialism singularly failed to do.

This is such a simple idea I’m amazed I’ve never heard of it before. The BBC has a new nature documentary filmed in India’s Perch National Park with hidden cameras, and a few attached to elephants (I wonder if that constitutes animal cruelty?). Looks interesting. More pictures at The Daily Mail.

(via BB Gadgets)

Tomorrow Ford is supposed to announce the sale of its high-end Jaguar and Land Rover brands to India’s Tata Motors — the company that recently announced a $2500 car. We truly live in a changing world.

Tata is likely to pay about $2bn (£1bn) in the deal, although analysts will be keen to see the exact price and terms.

The agreement will bring to an end a lengthy sale process which started last June when Ford announced its intention to sell the companies as a package.

Calvin Trillian does some reporting on Kolkata’s (Calcutta’s) person-powered rickshaws, and the government’s never-ceasing efforts to abolish them.

While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw wallahs come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.

(via Passport)

It’s also probably worth noting that Robert Kaplan takes a similar (but slightly bleaker and more coherent) tour through Kolkatta in The Atlantic.

The Economist’s obituary for Baba Amte make me sad for his death, even though I’d previously never heard of the man.

HE HADN’T meant to touch it. As he grubbed in the rain-filled gutter to pick up dog shit, human excrement and blackened, rotten vegetables, stowing them in the basket he carried on his head, he brushed what seemed to be a pile of rags, and it moved a little. The pile was flesh; it was a leper, dying. Eyes, nose, fingers and toes had already gone. Maggots writhed on him. And Murlidhar Devidas Amte, shaking with terror and nausea, stumbled to his feet and ran away.

Most people thought he was crazy to be doing that job anyway. Scavenging was a job for harijans, outcastes. But Mr Amte, a handsome man in his 30s, was better known as a big-shot criminal lawyer in Warora, in what is now Maharashtra in central India. He could charge as much as 50 rupees for arguing for 15 minutes. He was a member of the bridge club and the tennis club and vice-president of the Warora municipality, and he kept, outside town, an elegant farmhouse set in lush fields which he had never lifted a finger to cultivate himself. But after living with Mahatma Gandhi in his ashram in the mid-1940s, something had happened to him.