Posts from — February 2010

India’s Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee, presented his annual budget to Parliament last Friday; he revealed that India had weathered the global slowdown quite well; in fact manufacturing output rose 18.5 percent in November 2009, compared to the previous year, while the overall economy grew at almost 8 percent.  The minister predicted the fiscal deficit would fall to 5.5 percent in the 2010-11 fiscal year from 6.9 percent in the current year. He forecast the deficit would fall to 4.1 percent in 2012-13.

The Congress led government seeks to maintain high levels of public spending to support strategies aimed at the poor, boost a flagging rural economy and modernize the country’s infrastructure. The budget includes a record $43 billion for infrastructure development.

To offset the pain of higher prices, Mukherjee reduced the personal income tax for 60% of the nation’s taxpayers, giving them more spending money (by raising the minimum threshold for taxation). By April next year, a new direct tax code and the goods and services tax (GST) will be introduced.

The target for raising funds through the disinvestment of stakes in state-owned companies has been set at an ambitious $5.4 billion which is 25 times the target for the previous year. This implies that the government may be ready to take on some unpopular decisions in battling employee unions and other vested interest that oppose privatization.

File this under humor.

Travel and Leisure Magazine, believes that New York JFK, Washington Dulles, Atlanta and El Paso are among the 12 ugliest airports in the world.  We’re shocked that no Indian or Chinese locations made it to their list which does include European, Indonesian and other distance airstrips.  Clearly the editors have not traveled to Lucknow (LKO) or Chennai in India (MAA) or had their eyes closed when they went through.

See this link for MAA . When I last went through, it was undergoing major reconstruction. LKO does not have photos that I can find. (taking airport photos in India is often restricted). Now I love both cities and find their airports very convenient in my travels so this is not a reflection of my opinions of these airports overall.  But they are uglier than JFK  or Dulles for any reasonable human being.

Zain(ZAIN.KW) and India’s Bharti Airtel (BRTI.BO) are expected to sign a letter of intent for the $9 billion African assets.

Bharti, India’s largest wireless carrier,  is in exclusive talks until March 25 to buy Zain’s African business, excluding Morocco and Sudan. It is the Indian firm’s third attempt at gaining a foothold in a continent that offers a last opportunity for major subscriber growth.

Bharti had said it will have clarity by next week on funding its offer for Zain’s operations in 15 African countries. The two firms have agreed on an enterprise value of $10.7 billion for the assets, including $1.7 billion of debt on Zain Africa’s books.

India’s Department of Biotechnology has allocated more than (3 billion rupees) over the last five years towards basic and applied research in stem-cell technology and is focused on diseases that affect millions of Indians rather than exotic diseases

The entire government-directed effort is in understanding the fundamentals of how stem cells work and conducting clinical trials to gauge the effectiveness of the therapy. The leading organization doing the fundamental work is the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore. “We are developing model systems–for example, planaria or hydra–to understand how stem cells work,” says S. Ramaswamy, dean of InStem at NCBS, quoted in Forbes magazine’s India edition.

Also active are the federal All India Institute of Medical Sciences,  L.V. Prasad Eye Institute, Centre for Stem Cell Research at Chrisitan Medical College Vellore near Chennai, Tamil Nadu  and the National Centre for Cell Sciences (NCCS) at Pune University. They are trying to focus on regeneration of damaged muscles stroke or cornea damage. Given the prevalence of heart attacks, blindness and strokes, this seems a sensible strategy. The task of these institutes is to locate promising sources of stem cells, apply stem-cell therapy to cure patients and verify if the procedure is stable enough for wider application.

This is exactly the area where private effort, too, has come to the fore. Dr. Satish Patki, along with Dr. Ramesh Bhonde of NCCS, has shown that the membrane lining of the female genital tract (endometrium) is a rich source of stem cells. Dr. Patki is now trying to see whether these stem cells can be used to generate blood flow to the fetus. “Without this therapy the blood pressure of the mother can rise to extremely abnormal levels, and a doctor may have to abort the pregnancy to save the mother,” he says. So far, he has only been able to use the tried and trusted bone marrow stem cells to do this.

India shocks an American grandmother into appreciating her own:

Anne Lamont writes in the LA Times Opinion Section:

I’m doing fairly well for a grandmother who had a monkey tangled up in her hair last month on a ghat in Varanasi at sunset. Back home again now, I can report that in the midst of the zap that is India, with its heartbreaking, gorgeous, hallucinatory, dazzling, kaleidoscopic, mind-blowing grandeur and loud reality — a place where having a monkey’s hand trapped in your dreadlocks is pretty par for the course — I came to three decisions about my own country.

The first is that if the people on the streets of India can keep their humor and good nature, I can keep mine.

I left for the subcontinent the day before the Massachusetts election, and so arrived in a state of rage, despairing that we would ever see healthcare reform. I nearly bit the head off the kindly driver of a tiny rattletrap car — which had broken down by the side of the road to Agra — when he inquired innocently, from under the hood, if I knew anything about wiring.

But after a few days on the subcontinent, I came to the unshakable belief that we will have decent enough healthcare reform, and soon. What’s going to help America rebound from Bush/Cheney is what saved and saves India — love, nonviolence, a lot of help, radical playfulness and perspective. I saw Indians living in spaces the size of my bathtub, giddily colorful amid the squalor and deprivation, making themselves beautiful and focusing on what they do have.

And I remembered that here we have a 59-vote majority, all but a handful of the senators perfectly good Democrats, who’ve passed an adequate healthcare bill, yet we’re mewling and puking and acting like victims. Of course we are coming through the most toxic political cleanup since the Civil War: What happened during the George W. Bush years was in its way as devastating as the earthquake in Haiti, or daily life for much of India — just as many dead, and a constitution nearly destroyed. Suffering is suffering.

So we have to do what is working slowly in the wreckage of Haiti and India: We don’t give up; we take care of each other; we act like grown-ups; we work with what we have; we get our game back.

It’s just like what happened on that trip to Agra. Once I quit sputtering, I gave my driver the blue cord handle of a paper shopping bag I was carrying, and he gamely used it to get the car running again.