The Week Gone By

• UPA has comeback to power at the center with a decisive mandate. Manmohan Singh is set to be the Prime Minister again. He is the only PM to come back to power after Nehru, after serving a full 5 year term.

UPA - 262, NDA - 157, ThirdFront - 67

This was Congress best performance in 18 years.

Cong - 206, BJP - 116

Even in AP, Cong has come back to power.

Cong - 157, TDP - 90, PRP - 18, TRS - 10, LSP - 1

• Biggest and most complex Elections Process in Largest Democracy has finally ended.
  Election commission has done a commendable job, despite some irregularities. Voter turnout is about 58.43%, a slight increase than previous election.

• Despite recession, one sector that seems to be growing in India is Telecom. India added 8.97 million subscribers in April alone.

• Nearly 20 children who acted in the Oscar-winning 'Slumdog Millionaire' have been thrown on the streets after Mumbai civic authorities demolished nearly 50 huts in a slum , terming the slum unauthorised.

• YV Reddy, former Governor of RBI, widely acclaimed to be the man behind saving our banks from financial meltdown, authored a book called ‘India and the Global Financial Crisis: Managing Money and Finance', illustrating the reasons for this crisis and ways India can get out of this, amongst others.

Lone Indian voter defies mob

This is a story of a brave young voter in Bihar. This is a direct abstract from BBC news.The man was first threatened, then ostracised and finally fined when he mustered the courage to cast his ballot. It happened soon after villagers of Dharhara - in the Nalanda constituency - suddenly announced a poll boycott in protest over the lack of development in their village. As a result, none of the 900 or so voters in Dharhara turned up to cast ballots in the village's primary school building.

'Under pressure'

Tinish Kumar, 26, defied the ban.
At the end of the day he was counted as the lone voter in his village, even though protesting villagers gathered near the polling booth and tried physically to force him from doing so. “They tried to prevent me using all sorts of pressure but I just ran out to the booth and cast my ballot," an unfazed Mr Kumar told the BBC. "I wanted to vote because of the development our chief minister, Nitish Kumar, has done in the state, even if it has not come to our village yet." Tinish is currently studying a business course by correspondence. He drove his motorbike for three hours from the state capital, Patna, to reach his village to vote on 7 May. His mother, Usha Sinha, is a member of the village committee and his father, Kaushal Kumar, is an agriculturist. They did not cast votes "under pressure from villagers".

"A group of them invaded our house in the evening and abused us and threatened us with dire consequences for our son if he dared cast his vote,” Usha Sinha said. She told the villagers that her son had done nothing wrong. Fearful of a backlash, she telephoned local legislator Sharvan Kumar and the police for help - but it did not come. Ms Sinha said: "I'll go and try to meet the Bihar chief minister at his weekly people's court and tell him about what has happened on his own home turf.

"Casting a vote is an individual right and exercising it is everybody's prerogative."
Soon after the first incident of intimidation, a man appeared beating a drum. He called on the villagers to attend an urgent meeting in the village. Most went, but Tinish Kumar and his family wisely avoided it. "Later we heard that they have decided to ostracise us from our caste community and imposed a fine of 15,000 rupees ($301) as a penalty but no-one has ever approached us for this cash," said Tinish's father, Kaushal Kumar.

Village head Uma Kant Sinha did not vote - along with her husband Vijay Paswan - and left the village on polling day "to avoid an unnecessary confrontation with the villagers". "But what Tinish Kumar has done by casting his vote is amazing. We all should vote and we'll do it next time," Uma Kant Sinha told the BBC. Retired professor of maths Kumar Awadhendra Narayan - a neighbour of Tinish Kumar in the village - also supported what Tinish Kumar had done.

However, the villagers who boycotted the poll stood by their action. The boycott call was taken not for individual benefit but for the development of the village as a whole. You can see yourself the village has no drainage system, no road, no electricity and no primary health centre," said Vinod Kumar. Villager Mohammed Mahtab and Mohammed Mustaq nodded in agreement. Usha Sinha remains unruffled. "Why should I fear and succumb to their social pressure? My son has not committed a crime. I feel proud of him for daring to cast his vote," said Usha Sinha. But Tinish Kumar's stand for democracy was not replicated by all in Bihar. In Nalanda, the turnout was an abysmally low 39%. “http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8050308.stm"


-Srikanth Achanta

Is Obama Still Campaigning?

Dealing with worst recession since 1929, with unemployment rate reaching an all time high in a quarter century, everybody acknowledges that in these times of joblessness, the toughest job is that of the president of the United States. America and the rest of the World are closely and eagerly watching as to how he will ride this recession.

Apart from the controversial/arguable huge stimulus plan, some of the major plans being proposed like ‘Buy America’ clause, disallowing the bailed out companies to hire H1B employees and the recent tax plans to curb the outsourcing, aimed at bringing America out of shambles and facilitate American workers with more jobs may not prove to be the prudent steps and may well not serve the purpose intended.

The so-called "Buy American" clause in the $900 billion stimulus plan would have made it mandatory that only U.S.-made goods be used in projects funded by the bill. Many argue that American companies are having a competitive edge by hiring foreign workers and every such job in turn creates more jobs for American workers and many see the latest taxation claim hurts American companies more than the outsourcing destinations and they may well end up paying 70% of their revenues in taxes and will struggle over finding cost competitiveness. Also, most of the large American companies have more than 50 percent of their revenues coming from markets outside the US and would be affected by the proposed tax reforms.

Americas success story can be attributed to it being one of the largest free markets and all such measures are being viewed as Protectionist and “Populist” postures and may even back fire and deepen the recession Worldwide.

While the Indian IT sector can lobby the US on all these points, it is right time for the industry to seize this opportunity to look inwards where a huge domestic market awaits it and also focus on other destinations, gradually reducing its high dependence on US, insulating ourselves from the cold when US sneezes.


- Vikranth