Special summer courses by Sahara NGO in Hyderabad

By HNN Bureau

Hyderabad based, NGO, Sahara, working for the welfare and development of poor and needy is conducting summer special training courses in Spoken and written English, Personality Development, Planning for life, M.S Office, DCA, DTP, Tailoring, Embroidery, Mehandi design, Beautician, and many more. Apart from the training programmes free career and family counseling is also provided. The unemployed youth, young women, school and college students who are in need of improving their skills and learn new skills for livelihoods can avail this opportunity, said Mr.M Narsing Rao, Secretary of this organization in a press release.

Further details can be had from Sahara- Counseling, Resource and Training Centre (CRTC), 911, Tirumalangar, Beside Sunita Apt, near police lines bus stop, Amberpet, Hyderabad-500013. Contact phone: 9394730216/9440483089. email: sahara_ngo@rediffmail.com, he added.

Lavish Muslim Marriages & Impact on Society

By Samiya Anwar

Well heard, “Marriages are made in Heaven but celebrated on Earth”. Every county, every religion, big or small every type of family-poor, middle-class, higher middle-class or rich all celebrates weddings. Why not? It is something more than a festival or eve of a New Year or ones birthday. Marriage is a sacred institution to be preserved by the members of society.

It cannot be denied weddings are notoriously stressful. We all want a perfect wedding. Isn’t so? So why not make it a big event we all think before hand. Right from the search of a partner to the main event we want everything to be more lavish, more majestic. And a lot of people especially girls spend entire life planning for their wedding. Also many, dreams of a perfect celebration of wedding that will be etched in the memory forever. The Big Day of the bridegroom should be a special one not only for then but also for the families, friends, relatives and all knower. The wedding ceremony is celebrated with splendid grandeur.

Unlike all religions Muslims wedding is regarded as more traditional. The same rituals are followed from the time of Moguls. It is said to be more conventional event for Muslims.

It is stated in the Holy Quran that wedding is the most important act and sunnah of Holy Prophet. Moreover man and women are described as “garments of each other” and Muslims consider the marriage as the ground of society and family life. But unfortunately our society seems to have become more Western in its values than it was a few decades ago. There was of a simple and sober occasion of Prophet’s wedding mentioned in hadiths. There was no wedding feast. It is no much expense too. But as of now, marriages are highly expensive though traditionally grounded with norms.

Firstly, there is a ceremony of Istikhara following a grand betrothed. These days engagement is not restricted to the family dinner and a ring. Now, people have begun to book Function Halls for the engagement ceremony too. They are spending the same amount of money on betroth of that of a marriage. The same expensive bridal dress and groom kit, make-up and mehandi at parlors, gold or diamond ring, lavishing dinner, hundreds of guests, photo and video shoot, etc. it is no more an intimate gathering but an announcement of beginning of a new relationship, a new life indeed.

And once the engagement ring twinkles on the finger the real preparations are begin for three-day wedding ceremony which is more splendid than betrothed. Some have manjha ceremony held for 7 days prior marriage where haldi ki rasam takes place among the members of family. Here making clothes to bridegroom parents and family members are essential. There is no hard and fast rule; people do it according to their convenience and pleasure. But the three-day celebration is a compulsion for every Muslim wedding.

A day before marriage, the Mehndi ceremony is mainly held at the bride's place. It is mainly a ladies function where a mehndiwali or a relative applies mehndi on the hands and feet of the bride. But now-a-days bride goes to a parlor for mehandi and have a get-to-gather with friends in the evening. There is a dance, music and all types of masti done a day before wedding. For groom it is a bachelor party held among his friends and cousin who are usually of same age. This event gives a festive touch to the celebration. On the wedding day, nikah is organized and follows with delicious biryani. No Muslim wedding is complete without chicken, mutton and varieties of sweet dishes. It is called main event as bridegroom is announced as a husband-wife. Everything about this day is special and includes large sum. And lastly there is a reception after a day or two from groom’s side which is usually very marvelous. A big feast is organized. It is a fun and joyous occasion that brings together the two families. They bless the newly weds on this day.

From the decorations to dinners, for each and every thing you need to spend money. The rich-looking weddings are in. The perfect wedding all should be perfectly well. Saba (name changed) says “she has been planning her wedding since she was five year old. The princess inside her escorts for everything she plans for the big day. Along with the dress, jewelry, make-up and hairstyle are extremely important. She wants something unique from the regular make-up. It is not just the wedding place to be booked; the bride needs an advance booking from a make-expert, hair stylist and spa treatment. From the invitation card to the photographs, the wedding day must be memorable with a unique mix of traditional and modern object”.

Today society has become such that the significance of successful marriage has become a pricey affair. The expensive marriages have almost become a must, even for low-income families. People are afraid and fear of others. They think what "people" will think, if the wedding ceremony is not costly. It is a mad, mad, mad world. Always there is something unexpected happens here because people are crazy. They are crazy to meet societal expectations. They say, marriage is only once, so why not make it big, impressive and magnificent. Anything they will do to make it fanciful. But in view of Bushra (name changed)” today the kind of publicity and massive wedding people go for is more like of a “Pomp and Show”. She thinks marriage is a private affair and not be stricken to the whole community. There is nothing to show off your bags full of money with a costly wedding. Simplicity should be maintained”. However Nisha (name changed) has been working from past two years to save the money for her wedding. She wants a big high-class wedding.

In effect, we can see today’s youth feels much pressurized to get marry when they want it. The cost of organizing the engagement and wedding is very expensive and they take years to accumulate the amount for the big day in life. Also some parents or bride/groom even end up taking loans for the wedding. It has become a source of worry to many. With the recession hit and economic slowdown, few Muslims end up delaying the marriages and rest of them still spends lakhs of rupees in the celebration. Every one wants a perfect and well-organized wedding if they money or if they have don’t. It is a kind of societal compression. Anyhow, “It is the best day of your life”, a tired old cliché. But absolutely true, right.

The Nano and its Discontents

By Muneeb Faraaz

As the Nano is launched to the accompaniment of thunderous acclaim in the national and trade press, HNN Auto Experts raise several searching questions on the appropriateness of the Nano model of industrialisation.

The launch of the Nano car marks the culmination of a long and controversial journey for its manufacturer, Tata Motors. For India’s corporates and its middle-class, the arrival of the ‘world’s cheapest car’ is a proud moment when their country ?nally enters the world-stage. Such an air-brushed story, however, elides the serious questions that lurk within the cross-country transposition of the Nano factory.

Despite being touted as a success story of corporate India’s capabilities, the Nano’s cheapness is only possible due to the largesse bestowed upon the Tata’s by that bete noire of the free-market, the lumbering Indian state. It is an open secret that the Nano is deeply discounted because of very large Government subsidies that have neither been scrutinised nor justi?ed. While the Chief Minister of West Bengal had claimed the TINA factor in rolling out the red carpet for this car project at Singur, his Gujarat counterpart feels even less compelled to explain his executive decisions that made the move to Sanand attractive.

How is it, one might ask, that inveterate, ideological foes are united in their embrace of the Nano ? The obvious answer lies in their political calculus, based on middle-class support for the Nano model of industrialisation. How- ever, the explanation for this groundswell of support has to go beyond the usual political and economic analysis. To fully understand the sociological and psychological underpinnings of the Nano saga, we have to step back a full century in time.

A hundred years ago, in September 1908, the ?rst Ford Model-T was rolled out in Detroit. Inspired by the ‘dis-assembly lines’ of a Chicago slaughterhouse, the assembly-line technique was introduced to keep up with the growing demand for the car. With this move, the modern age of mass production, mass consumption, and if one might add, mass destruction was inaugurated.

Since the late eighteenth century, thanks to Adam Smith, the relationship between division of labour and eco- nomic productivity was well understood. In his Wealth of Nations, Smith had introduced the pin factory metaphor where each worker perfected just one specialised task rather than crafting an entire pin. However, the jump from a simple pin factory to the vastly more complex Model-T assembly line was a leap of faith. By ushering in the biggest increases in economic productivity since the Industrial Revolution, the Model-T assembly line would go on to transform the social, cultural, and economic landscape of America and beyond.

Thanks to the productivity of the new assembly line, Henry Ford was able to pay higher wages that converted his workers into his customers. The subsequent reshaping of the way of living and thinking by the assembly line has been crucial to American economic and military domination in the twentieth century. Beyond cars and wars, every aspect of modern consumerism is fuelled by assembly line production. Not only do assembly lines determine how we work, but also what we eat, and where we live.

The domination of the assembly line in our contemporary lives is so complete that it has transformed citizens vested with rights and duties into individual consumers fully preoccupied with exercising their choice to buy from an array of goods. Thus, the assembly line is not merely a technical innovation. Rather it is a ‘technics’ - a set of ideas, values and methods embedded within mass production - that has permeated the very fabric of our society as well as our minds. It is in this sense that we must view the Indian middle-class conception of car-ownership as a ‘right’ and their enthusiastic support for the Nano as a triumph of Henry Ford.

Admittedly, a century of assembly line production has resulted in economic prosperity for hundreds of millions around the world. However, this rapid global rise in living standards has imposed large social and ecological costs, mostly borne by people at the bottom of the heap. Further, the modern assembly line has reduced individuals to mere cogs in the wheel of global economic production.

Recognising such problems, in?uential thinkers have countered the preeminent role occupied by the assembly line model in economic production throughout its hundred-year history. Frederick Taylor, one of the founders of modern scienti?c management recognised the monotony for the worker even as he advocated the assembly line method in the interest of increasing productivity. In the early 1930’s, the Italian Marxist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci observed that the combination of Ford’s assembly line and Taylor’s scienti?c management were primarily responsible for the prevailing ‘hegemony’ in America. For Gramsci, Fordism was central to the idea of ‘American- ism’.

Contemporaneous with Gramsci’s critique, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic, Brave New World is perhaps the most enduring portrait of the impact of the Model-T assembly line on our lives. Huxley’s satirical technopia is set in seventh century A.F. (After Ford). The year 1908 when the ?rst Model-T rolled out heralds the beginning of the ‘era of Ford’ in Huxley’s calendar. The assembly line is so overwhelming of society that Huxley’s characters worship “Our Ford” and wear T’s instead of the Cross. Recognising the bleakness of the world he had created, some ?fteen years later, Huxley admitted that if he were to rewrite the book, he would present a third alternative that is neither utter destitution nor a disastrous technopia.

The intimate relationship between economic production on the one hand, and justice, freedom, and dignity on the other ?nds its most clear and profound expression in the life-work of Mahatma Gandhi. As the world enters the second century A.F., we will do well to look back at Gandhi’s fundamental critique of mass production. Gandhi’s pioneering critique contains a grammar for both resistance and renewal that is at once social, moral and aesthetic.

While he was the pre-eminent leader of India’s struggle for political independence, Gandhi’s fundamental con- cern was with individual freedom and dignity. Indeed, by 1935, Gandhi formally retired from Congress politics to devote all his energies to the social and economic rejuvenation of India. During the inter-war period, many Indian leaders and intellectuals saw the Bolshevik experiment as an antidote to the depredations of global capitalism. However, for Gandhi the choice between socialism and capitalism was a false one since it hardly mattered for the common man whether the state or the market controlled the levers of the political economy. Indeed, Gandhi recognised early on that the combination of state socialism and assembly line industrialisation leads to less, and not more freedom for the workers.

For Gandhi, freedom and dignity for all required representative democracy to be ?rmly tied to political decen- tralisation. The crucial insight he provided was that such a deepened conception of democracy was possible only with economic decentralisation. Thus, in Gandhi’s political economy, the primary focus is neither the state nor the market but freedom and justice for every individual in society. Consequently, Gandhi demanded that the interests of the state and the market be made secondary to that of society. However e?cient, assembly-line industrialisation was no answer to these considerations as it inevitably robbed the individual worker of his or her basic freedom and dignity.

It is an unrelenting pursuit of the ideals of freedom and dignity that lead Gandhi to advocate reorganising India around its villages. His insistence on the village as the locus for politics and economics did not stem from a Luddite view of the world. Rather, unlike his Marxist detractors, Gandhi recognised that an agrarian transformation that delivers justice and equity was far more complex than the mere possibility of escaping from the ‘idiocy of rural life’. India’s inescapable reality was that people needed to be provided healthy and useful work in their place of living. If freedom, justice and equity were to be available to all, in Gandhi’s pithy summarisation, mass production had to be replaced by ‘production by the masses’.

In the peculiar and self-serving vocabulary of our times, to the new middle class, the Nano represents ‘freedom’ and a ‘me-too’ model of consumer justice. At the same time, the Nano model of industrialisation is being presented as the only way to resuscitate our ailing agrarian economy that has been driven to desperation out of sheer neglect. However, we must see the Nano for what it truly represents. On the one hand it represents the Indian maturation of the seductive allure of the assembly line. On the other hand, it represents a particularly insidious coming together of state and market forces that greatly imperils the best of our values.

More than making the case against the Nano in economic and ecological terms, we must not accept the danger- ous claim being put forth that automobile ownership must not remain an entitlement of the rich alone. We must not accept this specious notion of equity. Confronting the power of the global assembly line will require us to draw upon our deepest resources. Here, Gandhi o?ers us salutary lessons and some answers that will require us to look within and make some hard, serious choices.

India: Low-cost, high-tech hub

By Swati Prasad

India is fast emerging as a hub where domestic and multinational corporations are busy churning out a host of low-cost, entry-level products for emerging markets.

Rajdeep Sehrawat, vice president of Nasscom, told HNN, "This is the biggest untold story about India." Nasscom is India's trade body and chamber of commerce for the country's IT-BPO industry.

From laptops to mobile phones, and from cars - such as the $2,500 Tata Nano - to motorcycles and consumer durables, India is now home to several low-cost innovations.

Both Indian and multinational companies are utilising India's talent pool for developing low-cost products. From mobile handset manufacturers, such as Nokia and Motorola, to IT giants like HP and Dell, to automobile manufacturers such as General Motors and Suzuki Motor, manufacturers from various industries have set up R&D centres that focus on developing entry-level products.

Sehrawat said: "The last time we took stock, there were some 650 captives operating in India." Even companies that do not have operations in India have also established R&D facilities in the country, he added.

Ravi Bhamidipati, executive director of performance improvement at PricewaterhouseCoopers India, said in a phone interview: "From plain and simple cost arbitrage, India is today offering tremendous value arbitrage."

According to Bhamidipati, India's advantages emanate from the fact the country's rich talent pool is able to span the entire value chain, from low- to high-skill jobs.

Sehrawat said: "Low cost does not mean low technology. Simple, low-cost solutions often require very complex technology." He added that the technology behind Tata Nano, for instance, is "extremely complex" and neither cheap nor simple.

George Paul, executive vice president of marketing at HCL Infosystems, noted: "We often underestimate the innovative prowess of the domestic players, and have so far been looking for technological innovations from the West."

He said: "With the launch of innovative products like Tata Nano and HCL MiLeap [an ultra-portable laptop], that perception is slowly but surely changing." HCL has R&D centres, dubbed HCL Labs, across three locations in India.

"The HCL Labs serve as hubs of technological innovation and the design centres of future HCL products and solutions," Paul explained. The latest innovation from the HCL stable is the newly launched MiLeap range of 'Leaptops', or what HCL describes as mobile devices that are similar to laptops, with an ultra-small form factor. The devices are priced at $331.

"India is emerging as an R&D powerhouse. It's not that India is doing only simple coding work for the global products. Indian captives are today a major source of innovations", Sherawat added.

India's large and growing domestic market is helping both home-grown and multinational corporations. Bhamidipati said: "India has a very strong domestic market that is increasingly getting more prosperous. Unlike other economies, India is not dependent only on exports."

In addition, the requirements of the Indian market are unique. "The solutions for India are very different from the solutions multinationals undertake for the developed world," Sehrawat said.

A small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) in India is very different from an SME in Munich or Montreal. For this reason, several technology vendors have developed products especially for the Indian market.

For example, HP builds a range of desktops, including its range of Compaq Business Desktop PCs, out of its lab in Bangalore.

HP said in a statement: "These business PCs have a high-performance machine that has the ability to withstand harsh Indian working conditions and delivers productivity and efficiency consistently. With a small form factor, these desktops are ideal for organisations that struggle with challenges such as space limitations, data security and power consumption, especially in the ITES [IT-enabled services] sector."

Indian companies, too, are looking to ride the low-cost wave.

Following the launch of the Tata Nano in January this year, Indian automotive company Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) announced it is developing a platform for low-cost utility vehicles. Expected to roll out by the end of 2009, these vehicles will be available from $9,400, compared to the $14,000 price of some competitors. M&M also has plans to launch an ultra-low-cost tractor for India's rural market.

India's school for better politicians

By M H Ahssan

It's poll time in India and aspiring politicians are making a beeline for a school set up exclusively to groom the future leaders of the country.

The unique Netagiri (leadership) school was established on 26 April 2001 in Ranchi, the capital of the eastern state of Jharkhand, with just 26 students on its roll.

Today, the school has more than 200 registered students who visit it every Saturday to take the weekly afternoon class.

India is getting ready for general elections which start on 16 April and go on until 13 May.

Ever since the election dates were announced, those with political ambition have been trooping in to take lessons and a few ready tips for their political future.

The Netagiri school has produced several state, district and community-level politicians.

The classes are conducted from an oval hall in the house of Raj Ranjan, whose father and brother were both former Congress party politicians.

Mr Ranjan says he founded the school after the death of his politician brother Gyan Ranjan to carry forward the political legacy of his family.

"The lack of awareness on the part of the general public towards issues related to them compelled me to start this school," Mr Ranjan told the HNN.

"I started the school to make the society in general aware about the political situation of our country. Through education, aspiring politicians can serve their society and country better," he says.

The school with rows of red plastic chairs runs for two hours every Saturday afternoon and the three-month course covers subjects like political science, social psychology, economics and sociology.

Students have to pay a one-off enrolment fee of 50 rupees (about $1).

There is no age limit for admission to the school but "obviously the students must be over 18 years - the age at which Indians get their voting rights under the constitution", Mr Ranjan says.

The present batch of students at this school ranges between 18 and 70 years.

A local tribal, Lilendra Munda, 21, is the school's youngest student, while 70-year-old Sukhdeo Lohra is the oldest.

For the last two years, Mr Munda has been pedalling 40km (25 miles) on his creaky bicycle to get to the Netagiri school. One day, he hopes to represent his area Burmu, near Ranchi.

"I have learnt more here than I did in my school. Here I have learnt about community development, social welfare schemes undertaken by the government and also how to make common people politically aware," Mr Munda told the HNN.

The oldest student, Sukhdeo Lohra, has been in active politics and even contested, although unsuccessfully, the last state assembly election from Lohardaga as an independent candidate.

Now, he has formed a political party, Manav Vikas Party (Human Development Party), and is planning to run again from Lohardaga in the forthcoming general elections.

"Besides political lessons, in the Netagiri school we learn lessons of life," Mr Lohra says.

Another student, Murtaza Ansari, 60, has been coming to the school ever since it was founded.

A regular, he has hardly missed a class in the last eight years.

"I was educated at a madrassa (Muslim seminary) but here I got the direction of my life. Now I work for the welfare of the poor through a trust which I founded some time back," Mr Ansari says.

He too aspires to running for the state assembly one day.

The school also has some seasoned politicians on its rolls. They include senior Congress party leaders PN Singh and Ajay Rai.

Mr Rai is the first fully groomed student of the Netagiri school who later became the president of a local labour organisation and state Congress leader.

"The government, the market and the society are all inter-connected and I learnt it from this school," Mr Rai told the HNN.

Among the school's students are about 20 women who come here regularly to nurse their political ambition.

School teacher Meenu Ranjan and documentary filmmaker Rashmi Sharan have both been attending the Netagiri school as "it helps in building their confidence to interact with common people on issues concerning them".

Sadia Sadaf, Yasmin Khatoon and Rukhar Pravin have been coming to Netagiri to learn about politics and political economy.

The school's founder-principal Raj Ranjan says: "It's my personal effort to improve society by creating well-informed future leaders who would serve society better.

"Only then will my purpose of setting up this school be achieved."

High growth, low votes

By M H Ahssan

Political parties in India who have delivered high economic growth have lost elections in the past. Economist Arvind Panagariya on how the state of the economy impacts voting behaviour in the country.

Predicting election outcomes in India is a hazardous activity; inferring them from economic performance is even more hazardous.

Going by per-capita income growth, one would predict a resounding victory for the ruling Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA).

At 7.4%, per-capita income growth during the first four years of the UPA rule has been by far the highest of any four-year period in India's post-independence history.

Yet, if the electorate goes by the contribution the present government has made to the accelerated growth in incomes, it would hand the latter its worst defeat.

The UPA government has perhaps done the least of all governments since the 1991 Narasimha Rao-led Congress administration to advance economic reforms.

At the outset, it committed itself to not reforming India's archaic labour laws. Sadly, it also failed to deliver in areas it had assigned high priority.

Early in its tenure, the UPA had identified pension reform, further opening of the insurance sector and rapid build-up of the country's infrastructure as high-priority areas.

More than four years later, legislation to set up a pension regulatory authority and raising the share of foreign investors from 26% to 49% are languishing in parliament.

In the entirely uncontroversial area of infrastructure, the government lost the momentum its predecessor, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, had achieved.

Even trade liberalisation, which greatly accelerated under the NDA government and was initially continued by the UPA, has come to a standstill in the past two budgets.

A costly National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, some additional opening up to foreign investment in the telecommunications sector, construction of new airports in Bangalore and Hyderabad, and the setting up of a Food Safety and Standards Authority and Competition Commission after four arduous years remain the main achievements of the government.

Will the excellent performance of the economy benefit the UPA? Or will its near paralysis in carrying forward the reforms hurt it?

At least the past experience does not offer an affirmative answer in clear terms.

The government of Mr Rao, which came to power in June 1991, is credited with launching the most far-reaching and systematic economic reforms.

The reforms not only stabilised the economy following the 1991 balance of payments crisis, they also delivered the hefty 6.5% per annum growth during the last three years of his tenure.

Yet, he lost the 1996 election.

In a similar vein, led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP-led NDA government undertook massive reforms in virtually all areas of economic activity during its tenure from 1998 to 2004.

Those reforms made a significant contribution to the shift in India's growth rate to the current 8% to 9% growth trajectory. In the last fiscal year of the NDA government, 2003-04, the economy grew 8.5%.

Yet, the NDA government lost power to the UPA.

The popular view is that the NDA lost the election because its reforms, highlighted via its "India Shining"' slogan during the election campaign, mainly benefited the urbanised, industrialised India and left the rural poor behind.

But this view scarcely stands up to close scrutiny: according to the available evidence, the proportion of the poor below the poverty line significantly fell in both rural and urban areas during Mr Vajpayee's rule.

Regional inequalities and the rural-urban divide did rise, as has happened in every country experiencing rapid growth at low levels of development, for the simple reason that rapid growth concentrates in a handful of urban agglomerations.

But that did not drive the election outcome either: there was neither an urban-rural nor a regional divide in the voting pattern.

The BJP-led NDA lost in richer states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu while winning in the poorer states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

In the former group of states, it lost in both rural and urban areas while in the latter group it won in both.

In recent elections, two factors seem to have critically influenced the eventual outcome: coalition formation and anti-incumbency at state level.

Today, Congress has only 153 of the 272 seats it needs for a majority in parliament. The UPA consists of 11 parties and still needs the outside support of half a dozen other parties to achieve a majority.

A dramatic example of the importance of coalition politics is provided by the role played by the southern regional party, the DMK, in 2004.

It had been with the NDA in the 1999 election but switched allegiance to the UPA in the 2004 election. Its 16 seats, subtracted from the NDA and added to the UPA, provided the balance of votes the UPA needed to from the government.

In recent years, voters have returned state governments to power only when the latter have provided decisively good management and delivered perceptible improvement in living standards.

Therefore, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat represent a handful of the cases in which the electorate returned the incumbent governments back to power.

In most cases, the electorate has handed punishing defeats to incumbents even if it has meant replacing them with another equally incompetent government.

In turn, the anti-incumbency factor at state level has spilled over to parliamentary elections. That factor substantially contributed to the losses the BJP, the dominant partner in the NDA, suffered in the 2004 election.

If the voters this time around vote on the basis of improvements in their lives, the UPA stands an excellent chance of returning to power.

Growth in agriculture, which employs 60% of India's workforce, has been 4% in the past four years. Prosperity in rural areas is also apparent from the spread of phones. Rural tele-density today is more than 13%.

Making the conservative assumption that each household has four members, this figure implies every other household in rural India now has a cell phone.

Even the sales of motorbikes and automobiles in rural areas are now on the rise. As for urban India, some slowdown in the economy due to the crisis notwithstanding, its face has been dramatically transformed in the past four years.

Why have the average or worse performing incumbents fallen out of favour with the voters?

After all until the 1980s, the electorate had routinely returned the incumbent governments to power. In a Wall Street Journal article in 2004, Jagdish Bhagwati and I hypothesised that the key factor behind the change in voter attitude was the "revolution of rising expectations" unleashed by the reforms and the resulting growth acceleration.

As long as India took the Hindu rate of growth, the voter remained in the grip of fatalism: kya karen, bhagwan ki marzi hai (What can we do, this is God's will!).

But once reforms showed him that change was possible and that poverty was not God's will, he became more demanding: If the incumbent won't deliver fast enough, he would try someone else.

In concluding, let me raise a slightly different question. Between the UPA and the NDA, the major contenders, who will provide a better government in the next five years?

Reform advocates who are also social liberals face a dilemma in answering this question.

The UPA is bound to interpret a victory as vindication of its current policies, which would seal the fate of reforms for another five years.

The NDA is more likely to return to the reforms it had vigorously promoted during its previous stint.

But alas, the NDA's prime ministerial candidate LK Advani, who lacks the moderation of his predecessor when it comes to Hindu-Muslim relations, leads it.

India's growing rural-urban divide

By M H Ahssan

Underneath the blazing midday sun, Kusum Thakur stands on her small patch of land and points her finger angrily down toward the earth.

"This land is like my mother, I can't sell it, what else would I do? I've worked on it day and night, it's my life and soul."

She is a formidable woman, passionate and loud. Her family has grown rice here for generations but now she is being offered money by the government to sell the land for a proposed industrial scheme.

The area her land is on, in Maharashtra state in western India, has been earmarked by the government for inclusion in one of the Special Economic Zones (Sez), where companies are given financial incentives to build factories and other infrastructure.

The government argues that this will create jobs and generate income in areas which lie beyond the cities, but Thakur sees it differently.

She says that other farmers have sold their land, sometimes under pressure, only to spend the money on alcohol or a car, which subsequently breaks down.

"So how do they survive now?" she asks.

Thakur's passionate objections are being echoed in hundreds of villages and towns across rural India, where other Sez are being established.

The ongoing debate illustrates the gap in perceptions between urban and rural India.

India's economy has boomed in the past 15 years, but in many parts of the countryside that has made little difference.

In the cities, the manufacturing and services industries have grown by about 10 per cent a year in recent years, whereas agriculture has lagged far behind with a growth rate of just over 2 per cent.

Of course, it is difficult to generalise about a country as diverse as India, and there are some signs of new rural prosperity, such as increased sales of mobile phones.

But, in many places, villagers still feel they have been left behind.

A number of economists, concerned by this growing gulf between city and countryside, have urged successive Indian governments to remove water, electricity, fertiliser, wheat and rice subsidies in rural areas.

They argue that these subsidies tend to only benefit wealthier farmers, and that the whole system has been corrupted.

However, and contrary to the advice of most free-market experts, the current government (led by the Indian National Congress Party) enacted a flagship piece of legislation in an attempt to reduce poverty by increasing government spending.

The legislation, known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, is staggering in its ambition. It guarantees every rural household at least 100 days of work a year, and is intended to apply to the whole country by the end of 2009.

HNN travelled to the parched tribal lands of the Thane district, north of Mumbai, to see NREGA in action.

We came across dozens of men and women building stone walls along the contour line of a hill under the supervision of a forest ranger. The project is intended to stop soil erosion once the monsoon rains hit this area.

Atmaram Janu paused from this tiring work to say that he was grateful for his job.

Like so many rural Indians, he owns a tiny patch of land, so the extra cash he earns here (equivalent to between $1 and $2 a day) makes all the difference.

But Atmaram remains deeply suspicious of politicians.

"What do I think of them?" he asks rhetorically.

"Nothing! They come here and they say, 'come vote, come vote!' and they hand out money; 500 rupees ($10), 200, 100, and then they go away again. I don't want to see their cars here anymore, they don't really care about us."

It is perhaps too early to draw conclusions about NREGA.

Critics say that it is already providing opportunities for yet more corruption, and that many of the new projects are a pointless drain on public finances.

The Congress Party hopes it will convince many rural Indians to vote for it.

It is one of the great paradoxes of modern India; some two-thirds of the population lives in the countryside, and nobody can win an election without massive rural support.

Yet, so many so many in rural India are seeing no benefits, even as their country moves forward.

T20 vs Polls09: A tale of two IPLs

By Rajdeep Sardesai

This season, television ratings are about to witness a new battle and it isn't saas bahu versus Balika Badhu. As a ratings agency SMS suggests, "it's a battle of the Modis". Who will you watch for the next six weeks: the controversial but charismatic Narendra Modi, or the equally controversial but pugnacious Lalit Modi? One Modi is playing out his act in democracy's biggest theatre, the Indian Political League; the other is hoping to make the Indian Premier League season two even bigger than the original. IPL versus IPL, cricket versus elections, batsman versus neta: India's two great passions appear to be in direct and intense competition over the next month.

Ironically, the similarities between the two IPLs outweigh the differences. Both thrive on tense drama and excitement. Elections in this country are a bit like a 20-20 match now: in a period of messy coalitions, no one knows till the last vote is counted just who is ahead. Just as a 20-20 match can witness sudden shifts in fortune in practically every over, elections too are showing a remarkable propensity to swing on a weekly basis. Just a few weeks ago, it appeared that the UPA was in some kind of a comfort zone. Now, a bit like a bowler who suddenly picks up two wickets in an over to change the course of a 20-20 game, the presence of the 'fourth front' has added a new dimension to the election race and made it much more of an even contest.

The cricket league has been built around the concept of city teams owned by powerful corporates. Indian politics is no different. It is increasingly apparent that a 'national' election is essentially an aggregation of several 'state' fights, each being fought on entirely different issues. Like in cricket, in politics too, it's the regional franchises which are setting the pace: the national parties are in seemingly terminal decline, it's the state players who will determine the final winner. Substitute the AIADMK for the Chennai Superkings, the Trinamool Congress for the Kolkata Knightriders, and the Mumbai Indians for the Nationalist Congress party, and there will be a realisation that power today is flowing from the state capitals, not a feeble center.

Even the pattern of ownership is distinctly similar. If most IPL cricket teams are owned by business families, a majority of our political teams are also tightly controlled by family dynasties.

The Pawars, the Nehru-Gandhis, the Yadavs, the Abdullahs, are the effective 'owners' of successful political enterprises much like the Ambanis, the Mallyas, the GMRs are the unquestioned bosses of their franchises. Party legislators, like team players, are almost the 'property' of the owner.

If cricketers have a price, and are being auctioned to the highest bidder, so are our netas. In fact, cricket and politics seem incredibly recession-free. Just as the price of cricketers has increased manifold in the last few years, the netas too are demanding staggering amounts for their support to a particular party. Atleast cricketers can measure their true worth in terms of raw talent; a politician's net worth is directly related to their manipulative abilities.

There is the glamour quotient too. Ok, so the election commission has played killjoy in this election by preventing candidates from spending on the traditional naach-gaana that was once such an integral part of an election campaign. Maybe, we don't have scantily clad cheerleaders at election rallies, but there is enough evidence to suggest that politicians too, like the cricket franchises, are relying on 'star' value to draw in the crowds, if not the votes. Sharukh Khan may have re-invented himself from actor to cricket guru , but even he would find it tough to match the manner in which Sanjay Dutt has been transformed almost overnight from Munnabhai to Amar Singh's bhai. From Salman Khan's special appearances cutting across party lines to Hema Malini's ageing Basanti act to Chiranjeevi's theatrics, there is enough on the campaign trail to rival cricket's star power in the shape of Shilpa Shetty and Preity Zinta.

Which brings one to the critical similarity: in their present avatar, both the IPLs are designed as a form of entertainment being played out on live and instantaneous television. There was a time when elections, like a test match, were spread over several weeks. The campaign was an extended one, politicians planned for it several months in advance. The rival camps shared a mutual respect for each other, there were certain behavioural norms that were expected to be followed. But now, it seems that its open season in politics: abuse and ridicule have replaced debate and discussion. Individual battles have replaced a contest of ideas and issues. Shoot and scoot politics, accompanied by coarse language, is seen to substitute any meaningful attempt to set the agenda for a nation. It's a bit like how the refined technique of test cricket has been replaced by the cross-bat heroics of the 20-20 game.

Last year, during cricket's IPL, the dominant image, in a sense, was the incident where Harbhajan Singh slapped Sreesanth. Replayed across channels countlessly, it seemed to suggest a complete breakdown of the gentleman's game. The enduring images of election 2009 so far been Varun Gandhi's hate speech and Jarnail Singh's chappal throwing 15 seconds of fame. Does anyone remember party manifestos or any attempt in the election campaign to seriously debate issues beyond the usual rhetoric? Manifestos are almost an archival relic, a bit like the solid defensive stroke: nobody it seems has time for the 'boring' basics of politics.

Unfortunately, in the age of instant gratification, we seem to be losing out on our more enduring needs. This is where the two IPLs must necessarily depart. A 20-20 cricket tournament can perhaps still thrive on creating sufficient hype; an election needs more than just dramatic content to be truly meaningful. As we move towards becoming a tele-democracy, maybe the netas and we, in the media, need to realize that amidst the cacophony, it's the silence of the voter that needs to be understood. For come judgement day, its only the silent voter whose voice will echo across a nation.

Post-script: Kolkata Knightriders coach John Buchanan has already created a stir in the cricket world by planning on having multiple captains for his team. Let me stir it up a bit in politics: post May 16, if the elections throw a badly fractured verdict, be prepared for rotating prime ministers!