Reserve Bank of India Governor Duvvuri Subbarao said that some sectors of the economy are showing signs of a recovery, but he added that it would be difficult to say when the economy will actually start reviving. India's monsoon is likely to hit Kerala on May 26, ahead of the normal onset of the monsoon on June 1, the India Meteorological Department said. City workers demolishing part of a Mumbai slum on Thursday bulldozed the home of a Slumdog Millionaire child star. Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail was asleep in his shanty when a police officer woke him up and told him to leave, he said. Shortly after that, about 30 homes were destroyed. A police officer took a bamboo stick to hit me and I was frightened, said 10-year-old Azhar. Eight Oscars and $326 million in box office receipts have so far done little to improve the lives of the film's two impoverished child stars, Azhar and Rubina Ali. They have been showered with gifts and brief bursts of fame, but their day-to-day lives are little changed.Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, stretches as his mother, father, and a friend look on outside the family home in a slum in Bandra, suburban Mumbai, India, Jan. 25, 2009.
Thursday morning, city workers flanked by policemen arrived as part of a slum demolition drive common in India's crowded chaotic cities. They didn't give prior notice. We didn't even get a chance to take out our belongings, said Shameem Ismail, Azhar's mother, who has lived in the shanty town for more than 15 years. She has no legal right to the land. I don't know what I am going to do, she said, sitting on a bed she had dragged from the wreckage. Next to her was a plastic bag stuffed with belongings. Slumdog filmmakers say they've done their best to help. They set up a trust, called Jai Ho, after the hit song from the film, to ensure the children get proper homes, a good education and a nest egg when they finish high school. They also donated $747,500 to a charity to help slum kids in Mumbai. Producer Christian Colson has described the trust as substantial, but won't tell anyone how much not even the parents for fear of making the children vulnerable to exploitation. Canon to Invest 1 Billion Rupees in India. Pawar eyes PM's post; woos Third, Fourth Front Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar is eyeing the prime minister's post with sources telling CNN-IBN that the Maratha strongman hopes to unite the Third and Fourth Fronts to fulfill his ambition if the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance fails to reach the 272. The first exit polls from India's monthlong national election gave a slight lead to the ruling party, reaffirming expectations that coalition bargaining will determine who leads the world's largest democracy. Voting has concluded and the official vote count is expected Saturday, giving parties 2 weeks to form a new government by a June 2 legal deadline.Indian voters stand in a queue to cast their vote outside a polling station during the last phase of voting in Kolkata Wednesday. The Big Count Key facts on India's vote tally and forming the next government May 16: Counting begins 8 am Indian Standard Time; results expected by the late afternoon. Votes will be counted from all five voting days in the national parliamentary elections that were held between April 16 and May 13; voting was held in 28 states and 7 union territories. 714 million voters were eligible to vote but turnout is expected to have been about 56% nationally. Votes will be counted by electronic counting machine under the supervision of a local election official in each constituency. Any demand for a recount of votes made by a candidate or his counting agent after the result sheet has been completed and signed will be rejected. May 16-17: Intense negotiations begin between major political parties to garner the 272 votes needed to form a coalition government; no single party is expected to garner a simple majority. May 17 onwards:
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh officially submits his resignation to President Pratibha Patil; Mr. Singh to continue as caretaker prime minister until the new government is formed. President will invite the leader of the party with the most votes to form the government. The leader has to submit a list of 272 members and allies to prove it can form a government. June 2 onwards: The 15th Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament, will be constituted by June 2. If no party can prove its majority by around June 15, there will be a hung parliament and a decision must be taken whether to hold another election. The new government prepares to present the budget by June 25. The notoriously unreliable exit polls the first available since voting began on April 16 because their release was banned while voting was under way gave no party an outright majority in parliament, setting the stage for weeks of political wrangling and horse-trading to reach a governing majority in the 545-member body. The incumbent Indian National Congress and its allies were projected to have won 185-205 seats, according to CNN-IBN news channel. The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies were seen with 165-185 seats. Indian exit polls have been very inaccurate before in a country with a voting population of at least 714 million people. In 2004, pollsters predicted the then-incumbent BJP to return to power. The final vote tally favored Congress, which formed the United Progressive Alliance coalition. To gain a governing coalition, both of the major parties will try to form alliances with a swath of regional parties projected to win a dozen or more seats. On Wednesday, a regional party in the big southern state of Andhra Pradesh said it is throwing its lot in with the BJP, while a number of others said they are open to joining whichever proves to be the strongest party. The biggest prize in the last phase of voting was the southern state of Tamil Nadu and its 39 seats. A showdown between two regional parties there could leave the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam as an influential swing player in the process of building a coalition, analysts say. The head of the party left the future of her party open. There are feelers from many places, but I'm not responding to any overtures now, J. Jayalalitha said. The polls also suggest a disappointing result for some of the smaller parties. The Third Front, an independent bloc of leftist and regional parties, is likely to poll far below the needed numbers to form a government without support from Congress or the BJP, the polls showed. Kumari Mayawati, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, whom many analysts expected to become a kingmaker in a coalition, was projected to get no more than 35 seats, short of the 50 some analysts had predicted. A question for Congress is whether it will need to rely on the Left Front, a group of leftist and Communist parties, to form a government. The Left was part of the ruling alliance for most of the last government and used its effective veto to stymie some economic and business-friendly changes others in Congress had favored. It quit the government last summer to protest the U.S.-India civilian nuclear technology deal. The Left Front was projected to win as many as 40 seats.
Indian Sikh voters holds up their voter ID cards while standing in line to cast their vote at a polling station in the village Gumtala on the outskirts of Amritsar.
India's elections may have an unintended beneficiary: the economy. Political parties and electoral authorities may spend between $2.39 billion to $4.33 billion on the race, most of it on transportation and materials and services such as banners, flags and advertising, according to Mumbai-based Kotak Securities. By contrast, the government's two fiscal packages since December total $4.05 billion. The election-related stimulus could add 0.3% to 0.7% to gross domestic product in the current financial year, Kotak says. The central bank expects growth to have slowed to 6.5% to 6.7% in the fiscal year that ended March 31, from 9% in the previous year, and to ease to about 6% this year. US envoy visits Advani, raises eyebrows The overheated grapevine at the close of election season put conspiracy theorists in clover on Wednesday when charge d'affaires of the US embassy, Peter Burleigh, drove over to visit BJP's prime ministerial candidate L K Advani. He had met senior leader Venkaiah Naidu earlier this week coming on the last day of the five-phase elections. Once the dust from India's month-long election has settled, the new government will have to grapple with the twin challenges of a gaping budget deficit and an economy crimped by the global slump. The risk for investors is that an unstable coalition forms the next government and ramps up borrow-and-spend policies, prompting rating agencies to downgrade India's debt back to junk. Most political parties have campaigned on a raft of promises that range from higher wages and rural employment programs to free health insurance and more subsidized food for the rural poor - all hot-button issues. Don't Let the Facts Get in the Way Of a Good Election Scene One – The grungy, dimly-lit upstairs conference room at the Press Club of India on Monday afternoon. About 20 journalists, maybe less, sit under the creaking fans; a lone, dusty water cooler surrounded by glasses sits on a table at the back. Two officials from National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms take their seats behind a desk and unveil the latest statistics on the quality of people India gets to choose its politicians from: Total number of parliamentary candidates facing criminal charges: 1,114, or 15% of all candidates. In 2004, the percentage was 24%. The reduction is presented as a welcome development. It's still roughly one in six. Congress has fielded the most: 114. Bharatiya Janata Party: 113. Bahujan Samaj Party: 105. Samajwadi Party: 55. Among the criminal counts: 1,379 charges of a heinous nature including murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping and extortion. 188 constituencies score a hat-trick: Three or more candidates face criminal charges. Uttar Pradesh has 40 of the 188. Scene Two The ballroom of the Hotel Oberoi on Tuesday evening. The invitation reads: Public Diplomacy Division, Ministry of External Affairs, cordially invites you to the release of the documentary film "Indian Elections: A Mammoth Democratic Exercise. The main act: Shivshankar Menon, foreign secretary, and Navin Chawla, chief election commissioner. The audience: About 250 diplomats, foreign journalists, government officials. The purpose: To marvel at India's brilliance in conducting elections and to celebrate, so the documentary tells us, India's undying commitment to the electoral process. The movie showcases: A grizzled grandfather in an orange turban saying, as he produces his voter ID card, My freedom is in my pocket. How Indian elections since independence mean the country has broken free of humbling social traditions like caste and other social hierarchies.A tea seller in Old Delhi who has stood for election 11 times and lost every time. Barkha Dutt
The fact that the election commission has developed zero tolerance level for any form of malpractice and that Indians believe voting is like a spiritual exercise. It was a startling contrast within the space of almost 24 hours. don't mean to demean the foreign ministry's efforts. Conducting elections in a country the size of India is an overwhelming task that is admirably and ably handled by, as the documentary noted, almost 7 million polling personnel. To the moviemakers' credit, they did spend some time OK, a little time on problems: Money power, and the lack of urban elite voters. And this was clearly a public relations exercise for people unlikely to spend any time upstairs in the press club. Still, at times it veered dangerously toward a disconnect that happens all too often in Indian officialdom, both business and political: A belief that if you ignore something awkward and tout the successes, the awkwardness won't exist. It was a common response among business people and the self-appointed protectors of India's image to the novel White Tiger and the movie Slumdog Millionaire.The takeaway was not: These raise interesting and disturbing issues we need to address. Or even: An entertaining look at India's seamy underside. Instead, it was: Why make this movie? Why write about those things? Why portray India that way? Except that the India of 1,114 political candidates facing criminal charges does exist. Yet it is rarely, if ever, talked about, which is a sure sign that it will never be fixed. Ditto during this election campaign for: The faltering economy, corruption in public life, national security, poverty, hunger, access to good healthcare, Pakistan. And on, and on. India, sadly, rarely gets the chance to debate such issues with any honest assessment of reality, let alone actually make strides in dealing with them. Official India is much more comfortable crowing about its energetic, pulsating vibrant democracy. That leaves it vulnerable to a criticism more often leveled at my profession: Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Indian politicians hoping to erode the control of the ruling Congress party have turned to the war in Sri Lanka to help deliver one of the country's biggest election prizes. The party that dominates voting in the southern state of Tamil Nadu which has 39 seats up for grabs Wednesday could prove pivotal in forming India's new government as parties scramble for coalition partners. Election results will be announced soon. Only a short stretch of sea separates Tamil Nadu and the northern part of Sri Lanka, where Tamil Tiger rebels are staging a bloody last stand. Over the past few days, as many as 1,000 civilians, including women and children, have been killed.
Patients at a makeshift hospital in Sri Lanka's conflict zone in a photograph, according to the pro-rebel group that supplied it, taken after a mortar shell hit the facility Tuesday, killing dozens of people seeking treatment.
On Tuesday, a mortar shell exploded in a crowd of wounded civilians waiting for treatment at the one medical facility left in the war zone, killing 49 people. The two sides have traded blame for civilian attacks, and the rebels blamed the government for Tuesday's incident; Sri Lankan officials denied responsibility, saying they had ceased using artillery and mortars weeks ago, the AP reported. Sri Lanka's turmoil has come to occupy a bloody place in Indian politics. In the late 1980s, India stationed peacekeeping troops in Sri Lanka; it wound up withdrawing them in 1990 after losing many Indian lives and failing to quash the insurgency. A year later, a suicide bomber linked to the Tigers assassinated Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi during a campaign stop in Tamil Nadu. Indian politicians today differ sharply in how they talk about the war, offering insight into Sri Lanka's charged history in Indian politics and its potential as a campaign tool. Parliamentary candidate V. Gopalswamy stokes his fiery stump speeches with ire against the Sri Lankan government, as well as India, which he says without offering evidence supports the army's war effort. This is genocide, with full assistance of the Indian government, says Mr. Gopalswamy, who leads a regional party. Manick Tagoore, a candidate from the ruling Congress party, says the war has driven Mr. Gopalswamy to distraction. People want to know about their roads, their children's education, their children's health, says Mr. Tagoore. The issue is development, in this country. Across India, many voters may see the concerns of national security, foreign policy and the slowing economy as less relevant than the state of local schools, hospital and infrastructure. But in Tamil Nadu, a foreign war is close to home.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have fought for a separate state for a mostly Hindu ethnic group; Sri Lanka's government is controlled by the Sinhalese, who are largely Buddhist. The civil war has raged off and on since 1983. In India's current election, Congress party leaders particularly the Gandhi family have sought to distinguish between the Tamil Tigers and the Tamil people. The Tigers are a terrorist organization. The Tamils of Sri Lanka are innocent civilians, said Rahul Gandhi, who was 20 years old when his father was killed. I'm not fond of the Tigers, and you can understand why. Rahul and his mother, Sonia, who leads the Congress party, have returned regularly to Tamil Nadu in the 2009 campaign. They hope for a repeat of the 2004 elections, when the party's coalition partners swept the state's seats. Their main opponent, the Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party, has taken a more provocative stand: That Tamil rights can be protected only through a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka.
India's inflation rate eased after rising for three consecutive weeks and economists tip more declines due to comparison with last year's high readings. The inflation rate as measured by the wholesale price index was 0.48% in the week ended May 2, compared with 0.70% in the previous week, data issued Thursday by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry showed. It was above the median 0.30% estimate. Wholesale prices are rising at their slowest pace on record. India's exports in April shrank 33% from a year earlier, contracting for the seventh month in a row as demand from key western countries weakened following a deepening global recession. Indian companies seeking overseas assets will increasingly turn to local currency financing to fulfill their global ambitions amid the global credit crunch, a senior banker with Citigroup Inc. said. Financing for M&A is readily available in local rupee denominated terms. It is generally more cost effective and easier to roll over given current liquidity, Sameer Nath, Citigroup's head of India mergers & acquisitions, said. Even though converting the rupee for acquisitions won't be easy, mechanics exist that make it possible to structure a domestic-currency denominated deal, such as using hedging tools to manage foreign exchange risk. DLF Ltd. said some of its founders sold a 9.9% stake for about 38.6 billion rupees ($783 million), raising cash for India's biggest realty company by sales. The founders sold 168 million shares at just above 230 rupees ($4.67) apiece, a 2.6% discount to the closing price of DLF shares Tuesday, the company said. DLF, based in New Delhi, didn't identify who sold the shares. Voting is drawing to a close Wednesday in India's largest election ever, and a slowing economy, terrorism and the rural poor have been front and center in the campaign. But of growing concern are the country's teeming new megacities, which are swelling rapidly even as jobs dry up and funding for infrastructure disappears.
One of India's Crumbling Utopias
Known for its baroque monuments and lush gardens, Lucknow could face the same fate as Mumbai and Kolkata, which became synonymous with poverty and decay in the 1970s and 1980s. This capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh was once an orderly place known for its baroque monuments and lush gardens. Today, Lucknow has more than 780 slums, overflowing sewage pipes and streets choked by gridlock. Its population of 2.7 million, nearly triple the number in the 1980s, is adding as many as 150,000 new residents a year. Shami Shafi, a 35-year-old laborer in Lucknow, has seen his daily income drop by half in recent months to 50 rupees, or about $1, for carrying bags of potatoes and other goods in a local market. But I'm not going back to my village, he says. If work gets harder to find, I'll just go to another city. Across India, poor migrants keep streaming into cities like Lucknow, many of which are woefully mismanaged and ill-equipped to handle the influx. India has at least 41 cities with more than one million people, up from 23 two decades ago. A half dozen others will soon join the megacity list. Urban experts say the risk is now rising that some of these cities could face the same fate as Mumbai and Calcutta, which became synonymous with poverty and decay in the 1970s and 1980s. Indian politics has long been dominated by rural constituencies 70% of the population still lives in the countryside. But urban voters are seen by candidates as increasingly crucial. Both of the main political parties have tried to capitalize on rising urban discontent by promising to deliver more spending on power, roads and other infrastructure. Although city planners have tried to learn from Calcutta and Mumbai's untamed sprawl, they haven't been able to manage the growth in Lucknow, which suffers from over-crowding and weak infrastructure. Patrick Barta reports from India. There is no doubt that India's future is in the cities, says M. Ramachandran, secretary at India's Ministry of Urban Development.What's happening in India is part of a world-wide challenge. Megacities are sprouting around the globe. But in billion-person India, the trend is on steroids.The country already has 25 of the world's 100-fastest growing urban areas, according to City Mayors, an international urban-affairs think tank. Pune, near Mumbai, has more than four million people. Kanpur, in north central India, has more than three million, as does Surat, in western India. India is expected to add 10 million people a year between 2000 and 2030 to its 5,161 cities. If India fails to get a handle on its new urban areas, it could be saddled with more bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could doom the country to years of subpar growth, says Dharmakirti Joshi, an economist at Mumbai ratings agency Crisil. India's gross domestic product has been growing faster than that of most other developing countries, averaging 8.8% a year in the past five years, according to the International Monetary Fund. But economists say inadequate roads, electricity and other infrastructure shave one to two percentage points off growth each year.India's New Megacities Face Pressure Officials have taken some steps to improve things. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission was launched in 2005 by the national government to help more than 60 major cities by spending $10 billion to upgrade sewers, water supply, roads and other necessities. But that falls far short of the $52 billion the government estimates it will take to fix India's urban infrastructure. Lucknow offers a case study of the challenges India's newer metropolises face. The city is famous as a center of high culture dating to the 1700s and 1800s, when it was ruled by a group of extravagant Persian noblemen known as nawabs. They built giant pleasure gardens and baroque monuments, some of which remain, and they left a legacy of courtly manners, poetry and fine cuisine. The city has changed dramatically in recent years. As the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India's most-populous state, Lucknow has attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural areas, swelling the city's population. Yet the city hasn't completed any major new sewage infrastructure since before the country won independence in 1947. As much as 70% of residents don't have sewage service, leaving much of the waste to flow directly into the main river, the Gomti, which has become a stinking cesspool. Traffic has overwhelmed downtown streets, and trash collection is inadequate. Much of Lucknow's rubbish is left to rot in piles or strewn about in residential neighborhoods. I just see the city crumbling every year, says Mr. Joshi, the Mumbai economist. "It used to be a beautiful city. The number of slums in Lucknow has quintupled since the early 1970s, according to the Vigyan Foundation, a social-advocacy group in Lucknow. As many as one million people are living without proper sanitation, water supplies or other services, according to social activists. Many of the slums are located along railway beds or in flood plains, exposing residents to floods and other dangers. In one of the slums, a community called Azad Nagar, nearly 1,000 residents live in handmade thatch huts with packed mud floors and roofs held in place by trash and rag piles. Monsoon floods washed away much of the slum last year, but it was quickly rebuilt. Residents say cholera killed one child and snakes got another. At least it's better than in the village, says Shanti Kashyap, a 32-year-old mother of four who moved there from a rural town about 70 miles away. In the village, you work all day long in the field and don't even get two meals. Now her husband works as a wall painter, earning about 100 rupees, or $2, a day. Of course, slums have always existed in Indian cities, including in Lucknow. But many advocates hoped India's modernization would reverse slums' growth. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening. Part of the problem: Lucknow, like many Indian cities, is managed by a bewildering array of government bodies that don't always coordinate activities. In theory, Lucknow is led by an elected mayor and 110-member Municipal Corporation, similar to a U.S. city council. Together, they share oversight of basic services such as water, housing and roads. But in practice, the elected officials' authority is sharply limited by the half-dozen or more other government bodies that wield power in town.
Chief among them is the Lucknow Development Authority, a group of unelected bureaucrats who have the authority to develop new housing projects and roads within them. But after a few years, when the developments are completed, the LDA hands over management of the projects to the Municipal Corporation, which doesn't always have enough money to maintain basic services such as water, sewage and street lights. The result is dysfunctional government, says U.B. Singh, an urban-studies professor at the University of Lucknow. The mayor has the power to authorize the building of new roads, but not new bridges a big problem in a city that flanks a river and is crisscrossed by canals. Despite rapidly falling water tables, there is no single authority empowered to determine when and where residents can drill wells. Private citizens regularly take matters into their own hands and drill for water themselves, further depleting the resources. There is no concept of city planning, and what does exist only exists on paper, Mr. Singh says. Planning has totally failed here. The mayor and a senior official at the Lucknow Development Authority say they're doing the best they can to follow sound planning guidelines and address residents' concerns. But they say the city is growing so fast that it's hard to keep up. Mukesh Kumar Meshram, vice chairman of the LDA, says the authority is adding thousands of housing units each year. But, he says, obviously the gap is always there. That's why the slums are being created whenever people find open space, they go. Lucknow does have a master plan, drafted by a team of 30 government staffers and finished in 2005. But its primary architect, a state planner named Satyavir Singh Dalal, says that master plans are routinely ignored by developers and politicians who start new projects wherever they please. We have to make a lot of compromises, Mr. Dalal says. In some cases, he says, leaders follow planners' recommendations but take years or decades to get the work done. An earlier master plan in 1992 called for a new ring road to ease the city's traffic woes; it is only now nearing completion 17 years later. Another big problem is lack of money. Mayor Dinesh Sharma, a university professor, says his annual budget is $139 million. He says his administration is focusing on projects it can control, such as an $800,000 program that involves rounding up stray dogs, monkeys and other animals and depositing them at a ranch called Krishna's Garden. The national Urban Renewal Mission project has helped by allocating roughly $150 million to Lucknow for sewage, wastewater treatment and other improvements. City and state officials say the sewage projects, which could be finished later this year, should cover most if not all of Lucknow's wastewater treatment needs. Mr. Dalal, the state planner, says that's unlikely. By his reckoning, about 30% of the city still won't have service after the improvements. Either way, the money is far short of the more than $960 million Lucknow needs to spend on roads, water and other projects, according to Feedback Ventures, that helped prepare a development plan for the city in 2006. Some advocates for the poor argue that money is available; it's just not being spent well. Urvashi Sharma, a local activist, says the Uttar Pradesh state government has allocated huge sums on projects of limited social value, including a $90 million monument being built to honor political leaders near the Gomti River. It involves a massive domed monolith and public meeting area stretching over several city blocks, with a statue of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kumari Mayawati across the street and a gallery of giant stone elephants, her political party's symbol. Navneet Sehgal, the state's secretary of urban development, says the project is an economic stimulus and has created jobs. Meanwhile, people continue coming. They include Ramesh Kumar, a man in his 40s who one recent morning was resting in the shade of 100-year-old Hindu temple where day laborers gather each day to wait for jobs. Mr. Kumar had come to Lucknow from a small village eight days before, leaving his wife and four children behind. He hadn't found work yet. He tried lowering his daily price from 100 rupees to 80 and then 60, without luck. Like many of the workers around him, he was sleeping on the ground by the temple. Living in the city may not be working out well so far. But then again, says Mr. Kumar, we don't have anywhere else to go. India's Department of Telecommunications, or DoT, has ordered a special audit into the books of four telecom operators, including the country's largest mobile phone service provider Bharti Airtel Ltd., a senior official said Wednesday. The other companies whose books will be examined to determine if they are paying less than their share of revenue to the government are Tata Teleservices Ltd., Vodafone-Essar Ltd. India's Suzlon Energy Ltd. Wednesday said that some of its founders have sold 30 million shares equal to a 2% stake of the wind-turbine maker. The founders' total holding in the company has now fallen to 63.82. Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software exporter by revenue, said it has received a five-year contract to provide information-technology support to Volkswagen Group UK. Tatas' nano housing plan takes off in style Tata Group has sold around 3,500 application forms for its low-cost housing project, Shubh Griha near Mumbai, in the first two days of booking, three-and-a-half times the number of apartments the company is planning to build under the project, a company executive said.
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