The Week Gone By

• The Political Parties are virtually showing the heaven with their promises.

• The Pakistani State is in a miserable state innumerable attacks. God can save Pakistan. Hey Allah!!!! Bachao in becharey Logon ko

• G-20 Summit was concluded by laying some restrictions on the transparency of the banks
  

• London Summit pledges $1 Trillion to boost the global economy
  

• Brahmos Block II Launch was successful
  

• Global Condemnation on North Korean Rocket Launch
  

• India on the verge of winning first ever New Zealand series in 41 years.

Plight of White Gold and Power loom Sector

In 70’s a farmer could buy 15 grams of gold by selling 1 quintal of cotton. During 90s obscene subsidies given to cotton growers from USA and European traders, Indian farmers were made to pull down the prices of cotton. By 2005 he need to sell 5 quintals of cotton in order to buy 15 gm of gold. By 2008, he need to sell 9 quintals of cotton to buy 15 gm of gold. Within a span of 3 years the gap widened by almost 2 folds. The cotton prices were plummeting further. The standard of living of the cotton farmers was depreciating further. Vidarbha is the region where most of cotton is grown. During Maharastra Assembly Polls, Congress promised of increasing the price of Cotton from Rs.2200 to Rs.2700 per quintal. Congress had betrayed after elections by not keeping their promises.

The input costs were exploding. In 1991 Local seed cost was Rs.9 per kg. By 2004 the price went up to Rs.1650-1800 for just 450 gm of seeds. Because of introduction of BT Cotton into the market, the prices were reduced. Today, it is about 650-800 rupees per less than 0.5 kg which is many times higher than Rs.9 per kg. Govt did nothing to stopping the subsidized cotton coming from USA. There were no import duties. In 2006 farmers were killing themselves at the rate of one in every 6 hrs average.

From 1997-2007, about 180,000 farmers committed suicides. This is reminding me the plight of the farmers during British rule in the 19th century. In the UPA regime, the Govt waived the loans of farmers of 71, 000 crores worth. But most of them waived in the Marathwada region where the power base of Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar exists.

Coming to the Power loom Industry, there were many people who committed suicide in 2008. Many people committed suicide between 2001- 2008.Sircilla is the place famous for Handloom and Power loom Industry. About 8 Lakh families are dependent on weaving. There are about 20, 000 Looms. 8000 looms stopped completely. Government is encouraging weavers to use Technology Up gradation Fund (TUF) but without capital. A textile park was built with Rs.7.73 crores far from being of any use for the weavers. It seeks to produce using High power jet looms which further reduces the work of the weavers. Most of them are committing suicide or else falling ill due to lack of proper nutrition. Weavers are unable to support their families even for chaaval and end up in debts and finally committing suicides. According to guidelines of Asian Development Bank for rural finance restructuring minimum lending balance is Rs. 25000. But most weavers need less than this and hence are unable to get loans.

There is not much difference between British rule and democratically elected Govt. It was because of the peasant movements’ actual struggle for independence started. Even today after 150 years there is not much improvement in the lives of peasants. Let us hope that at least the coming Govt does some good to the peasants

Source: The Hindu

- Optimistic Indian

In Search of Belonging

Today I would like to take you all through the new world of online social networking that we are in. We all are part of it, in fact we are living in the times where these networking websites have become quintessential for communicating with people. We are now into these online public spaces. What makes these public spaces public is the fact that we don’t exactly know the audiences we are talking to and we are trying to understand the norms to be followed in such public spaces.
For example if we are in a conference room we know that we need to sit facing the person who is lecturing and not show our backs to him, but in the case of social networks we do not exactly know the norms we need to follow.
There are 4 properties that we need to consider when we are trying to interact with people online on public spaces.

Persistence: What you say sticks around, there would be things which you would have said 5 -10 yrs back which you are not necessarily proud of but they still exist and this won’t allow us to forget about it. On the other hand there can be some pleasant conversations which you would like to have with you forever. How do we deal with who gets the access to that persistence?

Searchability: It gets very easy for people to know where you are, you become more searchable.

Replicability: Copy pasting the conversations, this can be a nasty tool. You can just start a huge fight just by copy pasting a few comments here and there. It’s hard to identify which is the original and which is the copy when you are conversing on a Instant Messenger. But in case of an online networking sites you do it in front of a large audience so it takes care of the problem.

Invisible Audiences: we don’t necessarily know who we are speaking to, I am writing this article today by having a rough idea of who my audiences are but I don’t know who is going to read this once I post it, I don’t know when they will get access to it and when they read it.
The reason why these 4 properties are crucial is because they change the rules of “Context”. How do you know what the assumptions are? How do you know how to interact?
We understand that when we get into a bus we are supposed to sit on the seats and not stand on them, we have been socialized into that. This is not the case when we are on a social networking site.
We are in a massive confusion of what CONTEXT means, who are these audiences how do we speak to them? How do we interact with them?
We see people getting more and more desperate to seek attention on these websites, they are willing to put all their private activities public just to seek attention. Online public spaces are providing people with a platform where they can go out of the ordinary norms and get away with it.
Forgetting things is a gift we have and I think we are losing that gift, there is no way out of these online networking sites, and we cannot avoid them. They have already become a part of our life. We have to learn to deal with it, because the future is about mobile and its going to get a lot more complex than this.
The problem is these technologies are taking us to a place where we have less and less control of what the context is and thus we are losing privacy on a different level.
Parts of this article are taken from the lecture I heard of Danah Boyd, a prominent speaker on social networking.

By Srikanth Achanta