The silver colored material spewing gamma radiation that slipped into a scrap dealer’s shops causing at least six persons to fall ill has exposed gaps in India’s mechanisms to preserve radiological safety.
Department of atomic energy official said that the scrap dealer and five workers have fallen ill with symptoms of radiation exposure after they tried to work with scrap that contained a highly radioactive element called cobalt 60.
Cobalt 60 is used as a source of radiation in cancer radiotherapy and in industrial inspection equipment, but scientists investigating the incident said the origin of the material found in the scrap dealer’s shops was still unknown.
If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being honest with you and wants nothing from you. These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes, nonetheless.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of the ancillary ones.
As many as 3,000 children die every day in India as a result of malnutrition
India is condemning another generation to brain damage, poor education and early death by failing to meet its targets for tackling the malnutrition that affects almost half of its children, a study backed by the British Government concluded yesterday.
The country is an “economic powerhouse but a nutritional weakling”, said the report by the British-based Institute of Development Studies (IDS), which incorporated papers by more than 20 India analysts. It said that despite India’s recent economic boom, at least 46 per cent of children up to the age of 3 still suffer from malnutrition, making the country home to a third of the world’s malnourished children. The UN defines malnutrition as a state in which an individual can no longer maintain natural bodily capacities such as growth, pregnancy, lactation, learning abilities, physical work and resisting and recovering from disease.
AHMEDABAD — Three informers who risked their life to sneak into Pakistan several times and spied for the Indian Army and the Border Security Force (BSF) for years on end have been released from jails in Lahore and Rawalpindi but were shocked to find their family members down and out. The trio, two from Punjab and one from Jammu and Kashmir, told journalists that the Central government had promised them before dispatching them on the spying missions that their wives and children would be looked after well but when they returned home, they found that their dear ones led a wretched life.
Sunil Bhola (50), Prakash Chand (60) and Ratan Lal (45), who were presented before the media by a non-government organisation (NGO), have demanded adequate compensation from the Manmohan Singh administration through a suit filed in the Delhi high court. Kishore Paul, an NGO official, told Khaleej Times that the Gujarat high court had last year ordered New Delhi to pay Rs500,000 to the family members of a Gujarat-based informer, an ex-BSF jawan, who is in a Pakistan jail since 1993.
According to Prakashchand, who worked as a BSF informer, he visited Pakistan at least 20 times and claimed that his inputs had led to the arrest of three dreaded militants of Babbar Khalsa International but the Indian government had not paid him a penny till date.
The three former ‘spies’, who have spent between four to eight years in jail, said that 18 other Indian espionage agents were still languishing in jails in the neighbouring country and also described the tale of their ‘inhuman torture’ during detention.
Bhola, father of four, said that he had witnessed the liquidation of many other ‘spies’ by Pakistani security agencies who had also threatened to kill him.
“Inhuman torture was a daily routine. We were tied upside down and given electric shocks. I did not see the light of day for countless months,” he said, pointing to the injury marks on his hands.
KARACHI: The image of ‘India Shining’ is one that applies to only about 30 per cent of the Indian population, but it is taken by many around the world to apply to the majority of the population, when in fact the remaining 70 per cent of Indians have very little to do with that image at all, according to a British academic at the University of London.
That’s the last survivor from last week’s failed Indian moon mission Chandrayaan I.
Only kidding.
Before anyone calls me a jealous Pakistani, let me say that it is an impressive feat for a developing nation and one that has the world’s largest concentration of poverty to launch space expeditions. It proves that the Anglo-Saxons don’t have a monopoly over talent and hard work. It is instructive that India’s last colonizers, the Brits, are yet to send any craft to space. Britain’s last meaningful contact with space was when many Brits thronged to movie houses to watch the space thriller Armageddon a decade ago.
So it takes courage, determination and vision to plan space missions. And the Indians did it last October when they placed their space craft in moon’s orbit. As talented, hardworking people, their neighbors to the west, the Pakistanis, too are working on a space program. In fact, it is one of the best-kept secrets in a country that is not very good at keeping them.
But unlike India, Pakistan has no delusions of grandeur and it is not preparing for future interstellar domination warfare. Pakistan’s concerns are modest: communications, business and research.
The Indian economy grew fast in the last five years, but remained far behind China’s. India’s big population makes its GDP look big, but also means it has the largest number of poor people, infant deaths, maternal deaths in childbirth, and highest child malnutrition in the world. India cannot end Maoist violence in 160 of its 600 districts or insurrections in Kashmir and the North-East. The Indian state looks weak and incompetent even as the Chinese state looks strong and competent.
The gap between China and India has become glaring in the current global financial crisis. China has become a major global player, second only to the US, while India is barely on the radar screen. Many blame the US for financial excesses that triggered the meltdown. But the US says the problem originated in the massive trade surpluses of China, which accumulated foreign exchange reserves of $2 trillion, eight times as big as India’s.
SRINAGAR: A large number of Kashmiris took to streets at Maisuma in Srinagar against subjecting of a shopkeeper to brute force by Indian troops here on Tuesday.
Pitched battles were witnessed between the demonstrators and the troops. People took out a procession from Medical College Srinagar to Lal Chowk to protest the anti-people policies of the puppet administration.
Indian troops, in their fresh act of state terrorism, martyred one innocent Kashmiri youth during a siege and search operation at Kalihand in Doda district. [link]
Another candid video, not aired by any news or TV channel, that shows Indian soldiers assaulting kids in a play ground in occupied portion of Kashmir.
Unarmed teenagers, outnumbered by the policemen are beaten up like animals by the Brave Sons of India in a playground. When a news reporter attempts to stop soldiers, he gets a kicking too.
In the video you can clearly hear Hindi words “maro, maro salay ko, maro” – “Beat him, beat the bastard”, whereas, Professor William Baker mentions details about a 82 year old Kashmiri Muslim woman who was raped by 10 Indian soldiers.
Note: The video contain images that are extremely violent, user discretion advised.
Scenes like these are a daily occurrence in occupied Kashmir. The UN and western media has always looked the other way when it comes to Indian brutalities in occupied Kashmir – the true face of the so called biggest democracy of the world.
There are many similarities in the way the Indian and Israeli brutalities are executed on innocent civilians. Innocent civilians are murdered, their homes are burnt and demolished and before every election a massacre of Muslims is carried out. A recent example being the Mumbai attacks that were staged right before state elections in India, while the Israeli attacks on Gaza just before the February 18, 2009 elections in Israel.
The biggest similarity in the two cases is the continued and shameless claim of both terrorist states of being ‘victims of terrorism’ and ‘innocent’. The unarmed children brutally assaulted and murdered in Kashmir and Gaza would beg to differ, however.
Will India launch punitive strike(s) against Pakistan? Highly unlikely. India would have already struck if it had a choice. It doesn’t have a choice for two major reasons:
1. Indians know, they can start a conflict, but where and how the war ends will not be in their control.
2. By tangling themselves in a war, they run a too realistic risk of delivering a mortal blow to their service-based economy, which may not even survive the brinksmanship Indians are engaging in.
Will India launch punitive strike(s) against Pakistan? Highly unlikely. India would have already struck if it had a choice. It doesn’t have a choice for two major reasons:
