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NEW DELHI — On Thursday, as the government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed 30 days in office, Mr. Modi, with a perceptible confidence in his political persona, reached out to the public through a blog post.
His message was marked by a theme of his campaign — that of the political outsider, beset by hostile critics, but nonetheless eager to transform the country through its highest office. He wrote of the “honeymoon period” that previous governments enjoyed — “up to a hundred days and beyond.”
“Not unexpectedly I don’t have any such luxury,” he wrote. “Forget hundred days, the series of allegations began in less than a hundred hours.” He did not specify what those allegations were. Read more…
MUMBAI — On a recent afternoon, 27-year-old Ashwini Agarwal adjusted her sari as she emerged from the crowded outpatient department at the Lokmanya Tilak Hospital, a public facility that houses the oldest of India’s roughly 14 breast milk banks, established a quarter of a century ago.
She had just donated her breast milk to the bank, to be consumed by another patient’s newborn, a woman who would be unable to breastfeed her own child.
Mrs. Agarwal’s second child was delivered at the hospital four months ago through a caesarean operation, and for a few days after the birth, she was unable to breastfeed her own child. Her newborn was fed mother’s milk from the bank in the initial days.
“The doctors told me how important it was,” she said, expressing her relief that they had breast milk in house.
Her husband, who accompanied her to the appointment, was surprised.
“You mean it was another woman’s milk?” he asked. “Is that even safe?”
Dr. Armida Fernandez, 70, who helped to start the bank in 1989 and now runs her own nonprofit, said that the answer to this common reaction was simple. Read more…
“When the Ambassador car was born in 1957 to a newly independent India, it was the height of style and status,” Nida Najar wrote in The New York Times. “It was standard issue to senior civil servants and government officials; its possession implied status, and its ubiquity was a sign of an earlier, seemingly simpler India.”
“But that icon of the Indian road may have reached the end of the line, pushed from its dominance by changing consumer tastes, an opening marketplace for automobiles and fierce competition,” she wrote.
“In May, the car’s manufacturer,Hindustan Motors announced that it would suspend production of its Ambassador, the final stage in a long decline,” she wrote. Read more >>
“India is the world’s second-largest tea grower after China. Yet, even as the country produces quality specialty varietals that are as highly regarded as wines from France and whisky from Scotland, its industry is antiquated,” wrote Saritha Rai in the Dealbook blog of The New York Times. “With the backing of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, Accel Partners, Kaushal Dugar, a Singapore-trained financial analyst, is among those slowly bringing the sector into the modern era via his online tea retailing start-up, Teabox. The bulk of India’s production — about one billion of the total 1.2 billion kilograms (2.6 billion pounds) — is consumed by the domestic market, where mass-market brands from the Indian conglomerate Tata and the multinational Unilever hold sway. But the remaining 200 million kilograms is a market ripe for shake-up.” Read more »
MUMBAI — A call center worker far from his native Hyderabad; a Chennai-based developer checking out e-books in Tamil; and a young, homesick cab driver in Mumbai who keeps track of comings and goings in his village in Uttar Pradesh — all are customers of a mobile news application trying to tap into a growing market of online Indian-language readers.
NewsHunt, which can be accessed on smartphones, delivers 100 newspapers and 10,000 books in 11 Indian languages and English. It was started in 2009 by its parent company, Verse Innovation, to serve the growing literate population — 74 percent of India, according to the latest census.
In December of 2013, NewsHunt began offering its readers a selection of 10,000 books, adapted for mobile reading, in nine Indian languages and English.
But Virendra Gupta, the chief executive officer of Verse, said that while 70 percent of its users are bilingual — accessing newspapers in both English and an Indian language — they tend to read Indian languages eight to nine times as frequently as English content. Read more…
“Considering the infamy of the Swiss bank account in the Indian imagination, data released last week by Switzerland’s central bank, the Swiss National Bank, contained a surprise,” wrote Manu Joseph in a Letter from India in The International New York Times. “Indians, not all of them shady, held about $2.3 billion in Swiss banks last year. That’s 40 percent more than in 2012, but just a third of what they had parked in 2006. Indian accounts represented just 0.15 percent of the total holdings by foreigners in Swiss banks in 2013. When Indians talk about their country’s illicit money, which is chiefly tax-evaded funds and income by illegal means, there is, of course, righteous contempt. But there is also a swagger over the sheer size of this shadow economy, because, after all, it is Indian. So a mere $2.3 billion was not what most Indians would have expected their rich and corrupt to have stashed in their Swiss nests.” Read more »
