Rape fear keeps US students out of India...

The frequent incidence of rape in India has created an adverse image of India abroad. US ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, on her maiden visit to Jharkhand, on Tuesday highlighted this saying how this was possibly a factor in American students not coming to India.

She said: "The concern for personal security and perceived increased danger to women as a result of the rape cases was perhaps a factor in US students' decision regarding study in India." Powell said this in response to a question - "Why aren't American students coming to India for studies?" - asked in the course of a chat with students' at the Xavier Institute of Social Science (XISS) in Ranchi.

The students at XISS agreed in the presence of Powell that they too face sexual harassment on the streets. "Even we Indian girls face a lot of cat-calls and are subject to teasing outside the college campus almost everyday," said a student, who was part of the interaction session but did not want to be named.

 When asked to elaborate, Powell said : "What I said was one of the factors for US students decision regarding study in India." Last year, a female student from Chicago University, who was on a study trip to India, in an account posted on CNN iReport said that India was full of adventures and beauty, but also relentless sexual harassment, groping and worse. Full story...

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India and the globalization of servitude...

Angus Maddison has noted that India was the richest country in the world and had controlled a third of global wealth until the 17th century. The village was the centre of a rural economy that was an economic powerhouse of entrepreneurialism. The British Raj almost dismantled this system however by introducing mono crop activities and mill made products, and post independent India has failed to repair the economic fabric.

If anything implies that India’s social and economic fabric requires restoring, it is the findings of the 2014 global MultidimensionalPoverty Index. Out of its 1.2 billion-plus population, India is home to over 340 million destitute people and is the second poorest country in South Asia after war-torn Afghanistan.

Some 640 million poor people live in India (40% of the world’s poor). Just 20 years ago, India had the second-best social indicators among the six South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan). Now it has the second worst position, ahead only of Pakistan. Bangladesh has less than half of India’s per-capita GDP but has infant and child mortality rates lower than that of India.

Former Indian Finance Minister P Chidambaram once claimed that his government’s economic neoliberal policies were pro-growth and pro equity and envisaged 85% of India’s population eventually living in well-planned cities. That would mean at least 600 million moving to cities. He stated that urbanisation constitutes ‘natural progress’. After 24 years of a shift towards neo-liberalism and increasing urbanisation, to what extent has the process thus far been ‘pro-equity’ or ‘progressive’? Full story...

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Thousands of citizens in India killed by reckless Big Pharma drug trials...

The second largest country in the world, India, has become a hotbed of pharmaceutical fraud, as unscrupulous drug companies, mostly from the West, continue to use India's generally poorer populations as human guinea pigs in unethical and flat-out inhumane clinical trials. And India's Supreme Court is finally taking action against this massive organized crime ring by ordering India's health ministry to justify its approval of 162 global clinical trials to take place in the country.

Because it is a rapidly developing nation with lax regulatory protocols, India has been a primary target of the pharmaceutical cartel in its never-ending quest to dominate the medical systems of the world. Major drug companies have been largely successful in swindling the Indian government to approve trials for all sorts of "new chemical entities" (NCEs), many of which have been tested on rural Indians in poorer communities, where there is minimal access to proper medical care.

The situation has apparently gotten so out of control in India that several human rights advocacy groups have taken to the legal system for a remedy, filing a petition back in February pressuring government officials to take action. India's Supreme Court listened and, following a recent hearing, agreed to give the government an ultimatum that forces it to provide evidence backing the science behind its approval of these trials. The health ministry reportedly has just two weeks to comply with this order.

"Clinical trials of NCEs are being conducted without following proper protocol, and companies are taking advantage of poor people," says Amulya Nidhi, coordinator of Health Right Forum, a non-profit campaign seeking to end illegal and unethical drug trials in India. Full story...

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A dystopia of extremes: in India a spectre is haunting us all...

In five-star hotels on Mumbai’s seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai literary festival: famous authors and notables from India’s Raj class. They step deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their home.

It is Children’s Day in India. On page nine of The Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly two million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half are stunted owing to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40 per cent. Statistics such as these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a banyan tree are poignant evidence.

The leviathan once known as Bombay is the centre for most of India’s foreign trade, global financial dealing and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on the Mithi river, people are forced to defecate in ditches, by the roadside. Half the city’s population is without sanitation and lives in slums without basic services. This has doubled since the 1990s when “India Shining” was invented by an American advertising firm as part of the Hindu nationalist BJP party’s propaganda that it was “liberating” India’s economy and “way of life.”

Barriers protecting industry, manufacturing and agriculture were demolished. Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered what had been forbidden territory. Limitless “growth” was now the measure of human progress, consuming both the BJP and the Congress, the party of independence. Shining India would catch up China and become a superpower, a “tiger,” and the middle classes would get their proper entitlement in a society where there was no middle. As for the majority in the “world’s largest democracy,” they would vote and remain invisible. Full story...

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Gender equality in India among worst in world...

When India's Human Development Index is adjusted for gender inequality, it becomes south Asia's worst performing country after Afghanistan, new numbers in the UNDP's Human Development Report 2013 show. Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, which are poorer than India and have lower HDIs, all do comparatively better than India when it comes to gender equality.

The new UNDP report, released on Thursday, ranks India 136th out of 186 countries, five ranks below post-war Iraq, on the HDI. The HDI is a composite indicator composed of three equally weighted measures for education, health and income.

 On the newly constituted Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which identifies multiple deprivations in the same households in education, health and standard of living, only 29 countries do worse than India (though data-sets are from varying periods of time across nations). The MPI puts India's poverty headcount ratio at 54%, higher than Bangladesh and Nepal. Full story...

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Female tourists shun India after rape attack...

Women travelers have turned their back on India after the notorious gang rape and murder of a Delhi student in December highlighted the scale of sexual violence in the country.

A survey by Indian chambers of commerce found a 35 per cent decline in the numbers of female foreign tourists since the 23 year girl was raped and mutilated by six men on a Delhi bus before she was dumped on the road and left to die.

The attack provoked protests throughout India and forced the government to introduce new tougher sentences for sexual assaults on women and fast track courts to reassure women it was concerned for their safety. It also led India’s media to give greater prominence to reporting rape and sexual assault cases amid wider soul searching about the attitude of India’s men and families to women.

But according to the survey of Indian tourist businesses by Assocham, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, thousands of men and women planning holidays in India are no longer prepared to take the risk.

 Two brutal attacks on foreign visitors in India in the last two weeks have reinforced the fear. The trial of six men accused of gang-raping a Swiss woman who was attacked in front of her husband in Madhya Pradesh as they camped overnight in a forest during a cross country cycle holiday, began on Saturday. The men held her at gun-point and restrained her husband back as they each raped her. Full story...

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Air India pilots suspended for leaving cabin crew in charge of plane while they slept in business class...

Two Air India pilots have been suspended after reporting to leave a plane on autopilot in the hands of cabin crew while they slept in business class.

The pilots left the cockpit for 40 minutes while they had a nap, leaving two flight attendants in charge of flying the plane who accidentally turned off the autopilot, The Times of India reports.

The two pilots are reported to have rushed back from their seats to steer the plane back to safety once they realised the auto-pilot had been turned off.

An Air India source said the crew members’ actions “made a mockery of air safety”.

“It is standard procedure to ensure the presence of a second person in the cockpit if the pilot is not able to operate the aircraft. But what actually happened after this made a mockery of air safety,” the source told The Times of India. Full story...

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Switzerland is more corrupt than India, says CBI chief...

Where is corruption most rife: in India, the country from which, depending on your estimate, between $500bn and $1.5tr in illicit funds have been spirited overseas since 1947; or the countries in which those funds are deposited?

That was the question raised by AP Singh, the head of India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, in a speech to the first-ever Interpol Global Programme on Anti-Corruption and Asset Recovery, which opened in New Delhi on Monday. Singh pegged the amount of illegal Indian money held abroad at $500bn, or nearly 30 per cent of India’s 2010 GDP.

According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index 2011, the answer to our question is clear. In TI’s ranking from best to worst, India clocks in at 96 out of 192 countries, while Switzerland sits pretty at number nine. (New Zealand tops the list, perceived as the world’s least corrupt country.)

(...)

But Singh might be letting India off lightly at the expense of the Swiss and others. In 2008, when the German government offered to provide the names of foreign citizens with money deposited in Lichtenstein’s LTG bank, countries like the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy and Finland accepted.

India declined to pursue the accounts of its citizens, prompting Transparency International India to report allegations “that this money belongs to the rich and powerful politicians, industrialists and stock brokers and that is [the reason for] the reluctance on the part of Government of India.” Full story...

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Rape cases are making tourists wary of visiting India...

Dheeraj Dixit used to make $2 a day snapping photographs of the tourists milling around the Gateway of India, the imposing monument at the southern tip of Mumbai. But a recent series of well-publicized attacks on women in India, and the international outcry over them, have Mr Dixit worried.

"India's image is spoiled when incidents like this happen," Mr Dixit, 38, said ruefully while hustling for customers on a recent evening. "It's unfortunate, and it isn't good for business."

Visits to India by female tourists dropped 35 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. That three-month period came after the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi in December, which brought protesters to the streets and shined a spotlight on the harassment and intimidation women face every day in India.

 Although the per capita rate of rapes reported to the police in India is below that of many developed nations, some experts believe that many sexual attacks go unreported and that the actual number is far higher. The public outrage over the December attack led to the passage of a new sexual offense law in March that imposes stronger penalties for violence against women and criminalizes actions like stalking and voyeurism. Full story...

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Monsanto and the subjugation of India...

After a study of GMOs over a four-year plus period, India’s multi-party Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture recommended a ban on GM food crops stating they had no role in a country of small farmers. The Supreme Court appointed a technical expert committee (TEC), which recommended an indefinite moratorium on the field trials of GM crops until the government devised a proper regulatory and safety mechanism. As yet, no such mechanism exists, but open field trials are being given the go ahead. GMO crops approved for field trials include rice, maize, chickpea, sugarcane, and brinjal.

The only commercially grown genetically modified (GM) crop gown in India at this time is Bt cotton. It is hardly the resounding success story the pro-GMO lobby would like us to believe.

Pushpa M Bhargava is founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India. Writing in the Hindustan Times, he states that:

(...)
Yet India seems to be pressing ahead with a pro-GMO agenda regardless. Little surprise then that Bhargava argues that the Central Government departments in India act as peddlers of GM technology, probably in collusion with the transnational corporations which market GM seeds.

There is no ‘probably’ about it and the collusion goes beyond GMOs.

The World Bank/IMF/WTO’s goals on behalf of Big Agritech and the opening up of India to it are well documented. With the help of compliant politicians, transnational companies want farmers’ lands and unmitigated access to Indian markets. This would entail the wholesale ‘restructuring’ of Indian society under the bogus banner of ‘free trade’, which will lead (is leading) to the destruction of the livelihoods of hundreds of millions. Full story...

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Why do so few tourists visit "Incredible India?"

(...)

Tourism could have been a panacea for India’s economic woes: a source of both revenue and employment. But, according to the World Bank’s figures from 2011, Malaysia attracts nearly 25 million tourists, Mexico 23 million, Ukraine 21 million, Thailand 19 million, Singapore 10 million, Egypt 9.5 million. In sharp contrast, India attracts under 6.5 million visitors. Fewer than Indonesia. Fewer than Bulgaria. Only half as many as Poland. Vietnam, about the size of Madhya Pradesh, attracts just as many foreign tourists as India. A comparison with China, apparently India’s rival and de facto benchmark, is embarrassing. At 57 million foreign tourists a year, China is behind only the United States and France as the world’s most visited country. To add salt to India’s wounds, consider this: Venice alone has 6.5 million annual visitors, as many as all of India. According to the Mastercard Global Cities Index for 2013, Bangkok has overtaken London as the most visited city on the planet, among cities where visitors spend at least one night. Bangkok gets nearly 16 million visitors. It is the first of seven Asian cities — including Singapore, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Seoul and Shanghai — that receive more visitors every year than India.

The truth about Indian tourism is that behind the confident smiles, the claims for rapid growth and unlimited potential, is the reality of too few hotel rooms, inadequate infrastructure, political indifference, mounting garbage, tawdry scams and violent crime, making the claims of ‘Incredible India’ seem as hollow as those of ‘India Shining’, another famously hubristic slogan. According to a Planning Commission draft report for the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17), the benefits of paying attention to tourism are significant. Tourism is the main source of foreign exchange for over a third of developing countries, and accounts for 30 percent of the world’s exports of commercial services. As an export category, it ranks fourth after fuels, chemical and automotive products. It is an industry that creates employment for groups that otherwise struggle to get jobs. In India, women account for 70 percent of the work force in the tourist sector; and nearly half of all tourism workers are under 25 years of age. According to the report, every million rupees invested in tourism creates 78 jobs compared to the 45 created by the manufacturing sector. In 2010, tourism accounted for 53 million jobs in the country. Full story...

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France, Britain ask citizens to be careful travelling to India...

France and Britain on Friday issued travel advisories asking their citizens to be careful while travelling to India in the wake of the alleged gangrape of a Danish women in the national capital.

"Women travellers should exercise caution when travelling in India even if they are travelling in a group," the British Government said in an advisory.

The advisory came two days after a 51-year-old Danish women was allegedly robbed and gangraped at knife-point near the New Delhi Railway station.

"British women have been the victims of sexual assault in Goa, Delhi, Bangalore and Rajasthan and women travellers often receive unwanted attention in the form of verbal and physical harassment by individuals or groups of men. Serious sexual attacks involving Polish, German and Danish women travellers have been reported so far in 2014," the advisory said.

The France Government has also issued an advisory asking its citizens to exercise caution while travelling to India.

"Several recent incidents show that foreign women or expatriates can be the victims of such incidents in India," the advisory said. Source...

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How Monsanto wrote and broke laws to enter India...

Citizens of the United States are being denied the right to know what they are feeding their families. Despite the fact that 90% of American citizens want GMO labelling on their food, big business is doing everything it can to prevent people from accessing their rights. Representative Pompeo’s bill, popularly known as the DARK Act (Denying Americans the Right to Know), has been written almost entirely by the biotech industry lobby. While American citizens are advocating for their rights to knowledge and healthy, affordable food, Monsanto’s legal team is busy on every legislative level trying to prevent this from happening.

Monsanto’s subversion of democratic legal processes is not new. In fact, it is their modus operandi, be it the subversion of LA’s decision to be GMO free by amending the California Seed Law—equating corporations with persons, and making seed libraries and exchange of seed beyond 3 miles illegal— or suing Maui County for passing a law banning GMOs.

Decades before there was a “debate” over GMOs and Monsanto’s PR and law firms became the busiest of bees, India was introduced to this corrupting, corporate giant that had no respect for the laws of the land. When this massive company did speak of laws, these laws had been framed, essentially, by their own lawyers.

Today, Indian cotton farmers are facing a genocide that has resulted in the death of at least 300,000 of their brothers and sisters between 1995 and 2013, averaging 14,462 per year (1995-2000) and 16,743 per year (2001-2011). This epidemic began in the cotton belt, in Maharashtra, where 53,818 farmers have taken their lives. Monsanto, on it’s own website, admits that pink bollworm “resistance [to Bt] is natural and expected” and that the resistance to Bt “posed a significant threat to the nearly 5 million farmers who were planting the product in India”. 84% of the farmer suicides have been attributed to Monsanto’s Bt Cotton, placing the corporation’s greed and lawlessness at the heart of India’s agrarian crisis.

There are three outright illegalities to Monsanto’s existence in India. Full story...

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Why India has become a living tragedy of self-delusion...

(...)

Although there are more children in school, they are now learning less. As per Annual Survey of Education 2011, only 48% of class V children are able to read a class II text, and less than 30% of those in class III can do a 2-digit sum. Some 1.25 crore students come to the job market every year who have no skills. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is at pains to lament, "education in India is in peril".

Mere enunciation of rights to education can be no solution. Andre Beteille termed the UPA move as "the Marie Antoinette Solution" - "they don't have schools, so give them rights..." India's high growth potential is largely predicated by its assumed demographic dividend. This very demography appears likely to end up as the Achilles' heel and worse, with country's youth remaining inadequately educated and trained. There is serious dearth of employable technicians - plumbers, carpenters, electricians. India's 1.4 million schools are in need of 4 million new teachers and 8 million more to be retrained.

 Like education, health too has been a sad story. As many as 130 million of Indians have no access to basic health care; as Census 2011 shows, half of country's population defecate in the open; 20% of households have to travel more than half a km for drinking water; more than two-thirds of houses (87% rural, 26% urban) use firewood, crop residue, cow dung, coal. The number of physicians per 1,000 population for the world is 1.5, for India it is 0.6; the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population in India is 0.9, much lower than the world average of 3.3. Almost 2 million children die in India before reaching their first birth day. The country boasts of more than 30 million tonne of grains stacked, some of which in open for want of warehouses; yet 40% of its children are underweight and 70% anaemic. According to a WHO 2000 estimate, of the annual 529,000 maternal deaths globally, 136,000 or about 26% of them occur in India. Full story...

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India a dangerous place to live in...

For all those who believe that India is becoming an increasingly dangerous place to live in, here are the numbers that back that belief.

India's rank has fallen seven points on the Global Peace Index (GPI) 2011, which ranks countries according to how peaceful they are. India now ranks 135 out of 153 countries. We are now amongst the 20 least peaceful nations in the world, along with countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At rank 80, China fares a lot better than India. While sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the most violent regions in the world according to the GPI, most countries in Africa and nearly all countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe rank above India.

"India's score remains the same on most parameters used to measure peacefulness. Homicide and crime rates in India, too, are a lot lower than many other countries. The fall in rankings is largely due to an increasing perception of criminality in society," says Steve Killelea, founder of the Global Peace Index. More...

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India's politicians aren't talking about women, but everybody else is...

India’s general elections, which began on April 7 and span four weeks and 10 phases, are now exactly halfway through. And so far, women voters’ turnout has surged compared to previous years, even dwarfing men’s votes in several regions, including Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Sikkim, Lakshadweep, and Chandigarh, an Election Commission official told AFP’s Bhuvan Bagga. In 1962, the difference between men and women’s turnouts was 16.7%. In 2009, it was 4.4%. This year, it is predicted to be even narrower. In the last few decades, India has had both a female prime minister and a female president. It is safe to say that India’s women are ready to demand a place in the political conversation.

After all, it is a conversation that is increasingly about them. A recent survey found that 93% of Indians believe combating gender-based violence should be an election priority. Eighty-eight percent are more likely to vote for a candidate who commits to strong action countering violence against women.

After a horrific New Delhi gang rape in December 2012 first launched phrases like “rape culture” and “victim blaming” onto Indian primetime, the nation’s media and intellectuals have been relentless in scrutinizing how and why India is so lethally violent toward half a billion of its citizens. Some blame Bollywood’s shameless glorification of sexual harassment and female objectification; others fault India’s ancient patriarchal joint family structures. Either way, in the last year, no single issue has galvanized India as thoroughly as its women, their safety, and their lack thereof. Being a woman in India is often described much more often as a plight than a joy. Full story...

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India’s shame, and the world’s...

A democracy is supposed to have the advantage of affording people of any social class, gender, or religious or ethnic group the opportunity to advance. In contrast with authoritarian political orders, democracies should be superior in their openness to change, to everyone’s participation in politics, and to equality before the law. In a word, democracies are based on the politics of hope and the virtues of transparency. Or so the theory goes.

India defies these expectations. Though it has democratic institutions and vigorous political competition, at least among elites, when it comes to human development and human security, India falls very short—embarrassingly so when compared with China. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which measures human development and reports annually on conditions in nearly all countries documents the comparison. Overall, among 177 countries for which data are available, India ranks 135th (in company with Tajikistan, Bhutan, and Cambodia), whereas China ranks 91st (along with Thailand, Armenia, and Fiji). In fact, there are very few categories of human development in which India does better on average than China, which surely explains why developing countries (and many Indian specialists!) looking for economic models are far more likely to choose China than India.

Statistically, among the most telling indicators of human development are those affecting children and women. Infant mortality is exceptionally high in India (44 percent, compared with China’s 12 percent), and life expectancy for children is lower than in the poorest African country. Poor nutrition and sanitation, and limited access to health care, are the observable reasons. Child labor in India, at 12 percent for ages 5 to 14, is also uncommonly high. Full story...

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Monsanto threatens to exit India if govt imposes cuts on GM royalties...

Monsanto Co, the world’s biggest seed company, threatened to pull out of India on Friday if the government imposed a big cut in royalties that local firms pay for its genetically modified cotton seeds.

Mahyco Monsanto Biotech (India)(MMB), a joint venture with India’s Mahyco, licenses a gene that produces its own pesticide to a number of local seed companies in lieu of royalties and an upfront payment.

MMB also markets the seeds directly, though the local licensees together command 90% of the market.

Acting on complaints of local seeds companies that MMB was charging high fees, the farm ministry last year formed a committee to look into the matter.

The committee has now recommended about a 70% cut in royalty, or trait fee, that the seed companies pay to MMB, government sources said. The farm ministry is yet to take a decision on the committee’s recommendation. Full story...

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3. Hypnotic trance in Delhi: Monsanto, GMOs and the looting of India’s...
4. How Monsanto wrote and broke laws to enter India...
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Why is Monsanto miffed at the Indian government?

The world’s largest seed maker, Monsanto, is having a rough time in India.

Last week, the Missouri-based company threatened to shut down its business in India after six decades due to “arbitrary” and “innovation-stifling” decisions by the Indian government. Monsanto’s lashing out was primarily at the Narendra Modi government’s move to regulate the selling price of genetically modified cotton crop seeds in Asia’s third largest economy.

This is the first time that the Indian government has fixed prices for Bt cotton seeds—or genetically modified cotton seed—after its introduction in 2002. Under the new rule, the maximum sale price of Bt cotton seeds has been set at Rs800 ($11.9) for 450 grams, starting April 2017. The seeds were earlier sold at prices ranging from Rs830 ($12.3) to Rs1,000 ($14.8).

But what has irked Monsanto the most is the government’s decision to effectively slash the royalty fee it receives by a staggering 74%. Royalty fee is typically paid by local seed makers to Monsanto. Under the new rule (pdf) notified by India’s agriculture ministry on March 8, Monsanto will only get Rs49 ($0.73) per 450 grams of the seed in comparison to the Rs183 it received earlier. Since 2006, Monsanto is estimated to have received over Rs4,400 crore ($654.5 million) as royalty payments, according to the National Seed Association of India. Full story...

Related posts:

1. Monsanto threatens to exit India if govt imposes cuts on GM royalties...
2. GM mustard in India: a case of monumental fraud and unremitting...
3. Modi and Monsanto: a wake up call for India...
4. Hypnotic trance in Delhi: Monsanto, GMOs and the looting of India’s...
5. How Monsanto wrote and broke laws to enter India...
6. Monsanto and the subjugation of India...
7. Organic farming thrives in India as growers revert back to traditional...
8. Monsanto caused 291,000 suicides in India...
9. Thousands of farmers in India rise up against Monsanto..

Indians still smarting over Bush's "You're eating more" comment...

Instead of blaming India and other developing nations for the rise in food prices, Americans should rethink their energy policy and go on a diet, say a growing number of politicians, economists and academics here.

Criticism of the United States has ballooned in India recently, particularly after the Bush administration seemed to blame India's increasing middle class and prosperity for rising food prices. Critics from India seem to be asking one underlying question: "Why do Americans think they deserve to eat more than Indians?"

The food problem has "clearly" been created by Americans, who are eating 50 percent more calories than the average person in India, said Pradeep Mehta, the secretary general of CUTS Center for International Trade, Economics and Environment, a private economic research organization based in India with offices in Kenya, Zambia, Vietnam and Britain.

If Americans were to slim down to even the middle-class weight in India, "many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates," Mehta said. The money Americans spend on liposuction to get rid of their excess fat could be funneled to famine victims instead, he added.

Developing nations like China and India have long been blamed for everything from the rising cost of commodities to global warming, because they are consuming more goods and fuels than ever before. But Indians from the prime minister's office on down never fail to point out that per capita, India uses far fewer commodities and pollutes far less than the West, and particularly the United States.

Many Indians felt that the remarks of President George W. Bush on May 2 were more of the same, though this time they seemed to breed a widespread sense of "We're not going to take this anymore." During a news conference in Missouri, Bush mentioned India's growing middle class, and said "when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up." This came on the heels of a similar statement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that had already upset many in India. More...

See also: Bush blames India for soaring food prices...
And this: Rice tells India and China to eat less!!!