Heifer International in India (Heifer’s mission is to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth)

I'm a big fan of the work of Heifer International and I follow them on Twitter at @Heifer

"Heifer’s mission is to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth.

By giving families a hand-up, not just a hand-out, we empower them to turn lives of hunger and poverty into self-reliance and hope.

With gifts of livestock and training, we help families improve their nutrition and generate income in sustainable ways. We refer to the animals as “living loans” because in exchange for their livestock and training, families agree to give one of its animal’s offspring to another family in need. It’s called Passing on the Gift – a cornerstone of our mission that creates an ever-expanding network of hope and peace."

Recently they've being doing some excellent work in India.

In April 2010, Heifer International staff and a team from non-profit service organization, BLT Helps, traveled to Rajasthan, India to witness Heifer’s work in action.

Documented by renowned photographer Brigitte Lacombe, the photographs and videos in this collection provide a glimpse into the lives of the people who are working diligently to change the course of the future for their communities.

If you are a webmaster or a blogger (with more time than me!) there are some great assets from this trip, including Lacombe's photos, videos featuring women from Rajasthan, interviews, articles, banners and more.

All of this can be found at: http://www.heiferoutreach.com and any blogger or webmaster is free to use these assets

If you are able to post any of the aforementioned content, you’ll be helping to turn the spotlight on the importance of self-sustaining agriculture, in both India and around the globe, to lift communities out of poverty.

If it's not too much trouble, please send Mike Wierzenski a link to where the content is placed on your site. You can reach him at mwierzenski AT bltomato.com

For more information, you can visit the following links:

Teen Volunteer Experience Blog

Youth Volunteer Experience Blog

Apples and onions cross frontier in disputed Kashmir (IHT)

Reuters
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
By Aftab Borka
Trucks loaded with apples, onions and nuts crossed the frontier in divided Kashmir for the first time in decades Tuesday as nuclear-armed India and Pakistan opened a trade link aimed at easing tension.
The decision, taken only last month, to allow limited trade across the front line in Kashmir symbolises attempts to solve a bitter dispute over the Himalayan region by creating "soft borders" allowing the free movement of goods and people.
"I'm quite confident that this beginning will lead us to proper and regular trade and commerce," Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, prime minister of Pakistani Kashmir, told reporters.
But Khan cautioned against hopes the opening of trade across an old cease-fire line and the de facto border, known as the Line of Control (LOC), would lead to a quick solution of the more than 60-year dispute over Muslim-majority Kashmir.
"All these steps, cross-LOC trade, communication, people-to-people contacts, talks, all these things slowly and gradually they are most generally contributing factors towards the ultimate resolution," Khan said.
"But no high hopes should be attached, no wild wishes should be attached to only the one event of today. But this is a great success," he said.
Indian Kashmir's governor, N.N. Vohra, said the trade link was a major step in a slow-moving peace process: "Today is a historic day ... The trade volume will increase."
The South Asian neighbours, who claim Kashmir in full but rule in parts, have fought two wars over the region and were on the verge of a third in 2002 before pulling back from the brink.
Tuesday, white doves of peace were released as 14 Pakistani trucks bedecked with the national flag crossed a bridge into Indian Kashmir carrying rice, onions and dried fruit.
Schoolchildren chanted "Long Live Pakistan" and "Kashmir will become a part of Pakistan" as a brass band played patriotic music.
"A DREAM COME TRUE"
Indian trucks garlanded with marigolds and banners reading "long live cross-border trade" set off the other way loaded with apples, honey and nuts.
"I'm delighted, it's a dream come true," said 35-year-old lorry driver Gulam Hassan Baba.
It was the first time vehicles had been allowed across the cease-fire line and the newly constructed Aman Setu, or Peace Bridge, since a 1948 war.
The opening of trade in Kashmir is the latest in a series of tentative peace moves that have done little to resolve their central territorial dispute, which has for decades hobbled regular trade across their international border further south.
But it does go some way towards meeting one of the demands of separatist groups in Indian Kashmir, who have been leading months of anti-India protests, some of the biggest in years.
India has moved slowly on opening up Kashmir's borders, believing that they could boost separatist militant attacks on Indian forces from bases in Pakistan. Militants have been battling security forces in Indian Kashmir since 1989.
A bus service connecting Srinagar, Indian Kashmir's summer capital, and Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, was launched in 2005, one of many confidence-building measures undertaken since the two sides began a peace process in 2004.
But because of elaborate security checks, suffocating bureaucracy and mistrust, only 9,000 passengers have travelled between the two sides of Kashmir on the "peace bus" service.
For the time being, trade will take place just once a week, with a limited list of goods allowed. Khuwaja Farooq, head of the Muzaffarabad Chamber of Commerce, said he wanted free trade.
"It should be a permanent feature ... but as of now, nothing seems permanent," he said.
(Additional reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq; Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Alex Richardson)
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/10/21/asia/OUKWD-UK-KASHMIR-BORDER.php



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Tata finds a new home for Nano factory (IHT)

Villagers celebrating near the proposed site of the new Nano factory.

Tata Motors will open its factory on what is now a government-owned cow pasture.

(Ajit Solanki/The Associated Press)

Tata finds a new home for Nano factory
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
MUMBAI: The car billed as the cheapest in the world has a new, $416.6 million home.
Tata Motors said Tuesday that it would manufacture the ultra-cheap Nano on what is now a government-owned cow pasture in the western state of Gujarat after two years of increasingly violent protests from farmers forced the company to pull its factory from West Bengal.
"We now have a new home," Ratan Tata said, speaking in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat.
Tata said the new factory would initially produce about 250,000 Nanos and that the company would do its best to launch the 100,000 rupee, or $2,100, car by year's end, as planned - possibly by initiating production at existing factories in Pune and Pantnagar.
He said he did not anticipate that the delay and relocation would cause any "appreciable loss" on the company's books.
The new factory and ancillary vendor park, which Tata says will generate 10,000 jobs, will be housed on 450 hectares, or 1,100 acres, that Anand Agricultural University had been using to graze cattle. The deal will halve the campus's size.
The Gujarat government acquired an additional 20 hectares of land from farmers adjacent to the campus in Sanand, outside Ahmedabad city, for an access road - the deal was completed in just six hours on Monday, said three locals who sold their land.
"I have no problem whatsoever if the government wants land," said Nazirkhan Pathan, who said he sold two acres to the government for 1,100 rupees a square meter, far more than the market price. "After all, it will bring prosperity to the entire state."
Suresh Rangarajan, a Tata spokesman, said the company picked the Gujarat site because the land has been in government hands for a century and work could get started quickly.
He said that seven farmers sold their land to make way for the access road. "They are very forward-looking," he said. "They want investment and development."
Tata's venture in Singur, West Bengal, collapsed Friday after intensifying protests by farmers and opposition party leaders who said the state's governing Communist Party hadn't fairly compensated locals for their property.
The mood in West Bengal was mixed Tuesday evening.
Manik Das, 36, an opposition party activist, vowed to continue protesting until she gets her two acres back. "It does not matter to me whether Tata set up their plant at Gujarat or anywhere else," she said. "I want my land back - not the money."
Bonani Ghosh, 35, had started a canteen for Nano plant workers. "My lifestyle as well as my family's got more comfortable after running this canteen," she said. "With Gujarat being selected for the production of the car, we have no more hope."
It's not yet clear what will happen to the abandoned plant site, but the West Bengal minister of industry, Nirupam Sen, has said that by law the land, which he insists was acquired legally, cannot be returned to farmers.
The Tata dispute was not the first time that West Bengal leaders have faced allegations of using strong-arm tactics to wrench land from poor farmers.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say that at least 30 people were killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in Nandigram, West Bengal, after villagers protested last year, eventually forcing the authorities to scrap plans for a shipyard and a petrochemical plant spread over more than 8,900 hectares of farmland.

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Farmers and factories fight over land in India (IHT)

A demonstration in support of the Tata car plant in Singur, India. Land clashes have held up many industrial projects in the country. (Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

By Somini Sengupta
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
SINGUR, India: Barely a month before the introduction of the world's least expensive car from a new factory on these former potato and rice fields, a peasant uprising has prompted Tata, one of the most powerful Indian conglomerates, to suspend work on the plant and consider pulling out.
The standoff is the most prominent example of a dark cloud hanging over India's economic transition: How to divert scarce fertile farmland to industry in a country where more than half of the people live off the land?
At the heart of the challenge, one of the most important facing the Indian government, is not only how to compensate peasants who make way for India's industrial future, but also how to prepare them - in great numbers - for the new economy India wants to enter.
In recent years, clashes over land have dogged several major industrial projects in almost every corner of this crowded democracy of 1.1 billion people, most of them rural and poor.
In the eastern state of Orissa, betel leaf farmers have held up a $12 billion project by Posco, the South Korean steel maker, occasionally kidnapping company officials. In western Goa, several proposed Chinese-style special economic zones were scrapped after sustained public protests. And outside Mumbai, India's commercial capital, village councils have insisted on a referendum this month on an economic zone proposed by Mukesh Ambani, the country's richest man.
In nearly all of these cases, the peasants who resist most intensely are often those who know they are qualified to do little beyond eke out a living off of the land.
If that fundamental anxiety feeds their protests, farmers and farmhands, often egged on by the politicians who seek their support, also stage protests to ratchet up the price of the land or to renegotiate deals.
The target of their ire is often the government, which in most cases acquires the land and turns it over to industrial developers. The central government has not finished a long-awaited national policy on compensating those who lose their land.
"If the price is right, people will sacrifice the emotional attachment, but if you no longer have the guarantee of living off the land, then what do you do?" said Subir Gokarn, chief economist for Standard & Poor's in India. "The people who are being displaced are not the people who see themselves as benefiting immediately from the employment opportunities."
Medha Patkar, one of the best-known opponents of large industrial projects in India, said, "Land is livelihood, it's not just property."
Last month, in this rich farm belt in the state of West Bengal, protesters laid siege to the new Tata Motors plant, on one occasion preventing workers from leaving.
The protesters want the government to return roughly a third of the 997 acres, or 403 hectares, that the state acquired for the Tata factory. Some of the land was taken by force from farmers.
Their demands have since led the state government, controlled by an elected Communist administration, to sweeten the deal without taking apart the factory site.
On Sunday, in a bid to assuage protesters, the government announced a more generous compensation package for those who had been evicted. It included a 50 percent increase in the price paid for the property and job training for one member of each displaced family. The governing party and its opponents have been staging competing protests this week.
That new deal only revealed the deep wedge of anxiety that the factory has driven through this cluster of villages.
"We are farmers," said Tayab Ali Mandal, of the village of Joymolla. "We know only farm work, we don't know any paper-pencil work." He gave up his land last year, but bitterly. Now he wants it back, and he rejected the government's latest offer of a job in the plant.
He said he would rather have his 16-year-old son continue to work in a small factory embroidering clothes, a traditional craft in his community. "I won't go inside that place, even to urinate," he said. "We are disgusted by that place."
Gopal Santra and his clan, who refused to accept money for the land they lost, said they hoped the renewed agitation would prompt the state to raise its offer even more.
The Santras owned land across the street from the Tata plant, which they sold a month ago for more than four times the price the state is now offering. Still others, like Sheik Muhammad Ali, who welcomed the Nano, Tata's flat-faced, pint-size car, to his fields, threatened to put the naysayers in their place.
Ali had readily given up his land and through his contacts with government officials, started a business supplying cement to the developer.
On Sunday, he was seething at the protesters who had halted work on the plant for the past two weeks and in turn, his business.
"There's a limit to our patience," he said. "If you take my plate of rice, will I just let you go off with it?"
Bidyut Kumar Santra, a rare high school graduate in Joymolla, was among the lucky few to get a job on the assembly line, and, in turn, realize how poorly equipped he was to keep up with events on the factory floor. The engineers all spoke English, to him an alien tongue.
"I feel ashamed, like what kind of education did I get?" Santra said the other day. He vowed to make certain that his son, who is in first grade, learned to speak English.
The villages of Singur, where the Nano was to be produced, stand at the crossroads of two Indias.
For Tata, it is ideally located along a new national highway heading north to New Delhi, the capital, and near an important east-west artery.
For farmers, it is ideally located on the fertile delta plains of the Ganges River and fed by irrigation canals, making the earth so rich and red that it yields two rice harvests a year, in addition to potatoes, cucumbers and squash.
West Bengal lured Tata here with heavy incentives, including a generous land lease and tax breaks from the state's industrial development agency.
Some of the details of the company's contract with the government have emerged in recent days, prompting the company to go to court, where it blocked further disclosures.
If Tata were required to give back 300 acres of land from the factory site, as the opposition demands, it would have to evict auto parts makers who are setting up shop next to the main Nano plant.
Their proximity allows Tata to save on the cost of production. Those savings and the generous land and tax deal allow Tata to sell the Nano at a price of less than $2,500.
The plant's fate is uncertain. Tata, while welcoming the government's proposed compensation package, has remained silent on its plans.
The company has several other plants where it could produce the Nano in time for the Hindu festival season in October, traditionally a time of big spending.
Tata has dangled the possibility of making the Nano elsewhere if the cost of production and the price of car rise too high.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/17/business/land.php



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India farmers threaten new protests at Nano car site (IHT)

CALCUTTA: Indian farmers have threatened to resume protests that have blocked construction of a factory to build Tata Motors' low-cost Nano car unless talks aimed at resolving a dispute over land bring results soon.

"We have not given up the protests," said Partha Chattopdhayay, a senior leader of the Trinamool Congress, which has halted its demonstrations for seven days. "We have only suspended our agitation."

The West Bengal government has agreed to a land-based solution for the farmers but ruled out major concessions within the Tata Motors site. The factory and its ancillary units were being built on about 1,000 acres, or 400 hectares, of land. About 400 acres, earmarked for ancillary units, are under dispute.
After the first meeting of the committee Tuesday, a member representing the farmers said they wanted to regain land that had been designated for the project area.

"We have demanded 300 acres," said Rabindranath Bhattacharya, a Trinamool Congress leader.
Tata Motors said that separating the ancillary units from the main plant would increase the project's cost.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/10/business/tata.php



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Big risks for rising number of child brides (IHT)

LONDON: The number of girls in poor countries who marry before the age of 18 will double to 100 million in the next decade, putting many at risk from AIDS, a report said on Thursday.
A global food crisis is making matters worse by pushing more families in the developing world to send young daughters into marriage to deal with poverty, the survey from humanitarian group World Vision found.
Child brides suffer because they often end their education early and are more likely to be injured or to die during childbirth because their bodies are not fully developed.
"Complications during childbearing and delivery are most common in this age set, significantly raising the risk of death, premature delivery, infant mortality and low birthweight," the report said.
An estimated 3,500 girls marry each day before their 15th birthday and another 21,000 do so before they are 18 -- figures the humanitarian group said would balloon in coming years.
While the practice occurs worldwide and in wealthy nations too, it is most common in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Central America, the report said.
The highest child marriage rates were in Bangladesh where nearly 53 percent of girls married before the age of 15, followed by Niger at almost 38 percent, Chad at about 35 percent, and Ethiopia and India at about 31 percent.
"It is most prevalent in communities and households where the starkest poverty mixes with cultural traditions and lack of education to limit a girl's perceived value and potential," it said.

http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/04/asia/OUKWD-UK-CHILDREN-MARRIAGE.php






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Religious violence in India also has economic undertones (IHT)

A defaced portrait of Jesus hung on the wall of a destroyed home in a village in Orissa state, where mob violence has killed at least 16 people since last week. (Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

The violence was prompted by the Aug. 23 murder in Orissa of Laxmanananda Saraswati, who had been associated with a Hindu radical group opposed to fellow Hindus' converting to Christianity. Although a letter left at the scene claimed that Maoist rebels carried out the attack, many Hindus blame Christians instead.
Non-Christians have long resented the conversions - the most recent Indian census, in 2001, states that 2.3 percent of the population is Christian - but tensions have increased as India's economy has taken off.
Christian missionaries in India have focused on indigenous and lower-caste groups, including untouchables, or Dalits. Despite laws dating almost to Indian independence in 1947, Dalits are often discriminated against or worse. They are sometimes denied basic amenities, such as clean water; relegated to hazardous jobs; and beaten, raped or killed because of their social status.
Conversion to Islam or Christianity does not erase caste identity completely, but Christianity and other non-Hindu religions offer a possible escape by providing schooling for anyone who wants to attend, including Dalits. Christian education often includes classes in English, which are crucial for anyone who wants to join India's service businesses, including hotels, or to break into even the lowest levels of the information technology industry fueling much of the country's growth.
"Across India today, the disenfranchised and repressed peoples, the tribes and the low castes are exiting the caste system" that is entrenched in the Hindu religion, said Joseph D'souza, the president of the All Indian Christian Council and an advocate for Dalit rights.
They are converting not only to Christianity, he said, but to Buddhism, Islam and Marxist atheism.
"People are in revolt" after 60 years of their rights being trampled, he said, adding, "It has nothing to do with any particular religion."
But the conversions occur as many in India's rural areas, including Kandhamal, see themselves as left behind economically. The area's 650,000 people subsist mainly by growing and selling rice, turmeric, ginger and forest products.

"The conflict is increasing because we are trying to educate the people and enlighten them," said Pastor Thomas Varghese, 56, in an interview in Raikia, where he has lived for 10 years. He said he ran about three kilometers, almost two miles, and spent a night in the jungle to save his life last week, after a mob that included nine people he recognized tried to kill him.
But Pramod Pradhan, a young Hindu farmer in Tiangia village, views the conversions differently, and echoed the feelings of many of the state's Hindus. "Christian missionaries lured Hindus to convert to Christianity. They bring a lot of money to do that."
Padma Charan Panda, an upper-caste Hindu and a turmeric trader who was watching a televised debate on the issue in Raikia, said "Christian traders exploit poor and illiterate" people.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/04/asia/india.php

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Setback at Tata plant reflects Indian divisions over land (IHT)

MUMBAI: The Tata Nano, an Indian creation soon to hit the market as the world's least-expensive car, accelerated head-on this week into the world's largest democracy.
Some farmers in eastern India who sold their land to make way for the Nano factory have since been agitating to get it back. With the protest swelling in recent days, Tata Motors decided this week to stop construction of the plant and shifted start-up production elsewhere. But it is not only a setback for the $2,250 car.
In a country where 740 million people - two-thirds of the population - live scattered through 660,000 villages, the closing of Tata's factory deals a cruel blow to a widespread hope among policy makers and business people: that India will find a peaceful way to wean these millions from their land and move them into productive alternative livelihoods.
"As each generation develops, the children of the rural economy must decide whether they want to continue to work on the farms," Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, said Wednesday in an interview by telephone, his first since it was announced Tuesday that operations in Singur, about an hour's drive from Calcutta, would be suspended.
To enthusiasts of a "new India," the choice of staying on the land or leaving is not a tough one. There is, after all, only so much value that can be wrung from a cow's udders or a cob of corn. Millions of village dwellers have already migrated to cities.

In the village of Jhajjar, outside New Delhi, in the northern state of Haryana, a company called Reliance Industries was trying to do the same thing: buy farmland and put it to industrial use.
But there, under a bright morning sky, a village elder sat in his front yard, offered his visitors spicy tea, explained his deep attachment to the soil and noted that he had shotguns in his house and would fire them at any Reliance land scout who came his way.
This dilemma does not belong to India. Every nation that has industrialized has had to reconcile these conflicting feelings. But in China, Russia, South Korea and elsewhere, fiat has helped to suppress naysayers.
As the United States urbanized a century ago, it did so in a politically insulated world where many Americans still could not vote, and no one had a television beaming potential new grievances into their home night after night. In present-day India, by contrast, "everyone has a veto," in the words of Aroun Shourie, a former cabinet minister.

But the dilemma is also acute here because land has meanings and resonances in India that it does not possess everywhere else.
At the poshest cocktail parties in Bangalore or Delhi, an Indian-looking interlocutor will inevitably be asked her "native place" - not the place you were born, the place you live now, or the place where your parents live. It is the village where your family last tilled the soil - even if they left in 1838.
Land is status. Throughout history, and in many parts still today, Dalits, known once as untouchables, have been confined to land on the outskirts of villages, on the theory that their nearness would pollute the others.
Without a sacred commitment to a particular patch of earth, the entire caste system could not have worked. No one would have been untouchable anymore if it was so easy to sell land and move to where no one knew you.
"They derive their identity from land," said Suhel Seth, a longtime adviser to the Tata Group and the managing partner of Counselage, a strategic branding firm in New Delhi. "It also ties them to a certain social acceptability. Their entire societal being relates to the land that they own."
And so, even where farmers consent to sell their land, he added, "you're creating a sense of displacement, and through that displacement you're creating a sense of insecurity. This is why land has become an emotional issue."
Tata says it has tried to help villagers succeed in a new world, training them, sending them to other plants to learn skills and making plans to employ them on the Nano.
But Arundhati Roy, the novelist and a frequent critic of India's economic policy, said that such efforts touched too few people.
"People have understood that clinging to even the tiniest of landholdings will offer them a better chance of survival and dignity than all the false promises of jobs and prosperity that the government and big companies make before evicting them," Roy added. "For these reasons, the battle for land in India is increasingly becoming a fight to the death."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/business/tata.php

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Indian flood victims hunker down in camps (IHT)

JANKINAGAR, India: Soldiers and aid workers increased their efforts Wednesday to rescue hundreds of thousands of people still stranded after weeks of flooding in northern India, as those safe on dry land settled in at camps that were likely to house them for months.
The three refugee camps housing 7,000 people in Jankinagar town - one near a train station, the other two in schools - had an air of semipermanence Wednesday as women washed clothes and other people set up stalls to sell cigarettes.
In other parts of the flood-ravaged northern state of Bihar, thousands of soldiers and aid workers continued to try to save those still stranded on rooftops, trees and islands of dry land more than two weeks after monsoon rains caused the Kosi River to burst its banks and turn hundreds of square kilometers of Bihar into a giant lake.
Officials say more than half of the 1.2 million people stranded have been rescued. They have only confirmed 38 deaths, but it is widely believed the final toll will be significantly higher.

"How can I go back? The houses are gone, everything is gone," said Kakhrun Lal, 65, who watched four of his cows - his most valuable possessions - drown in the flooding. He sold the other two so his family could have a little money. But when that runs out, he will have nothing.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/asia/india.php

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Protests halt Tata plant for world's cheapest car (IHT)

A protest in front of the unfinished Tata Nano plant in Singur last week. (Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg News)

Protests halt Tata plant for world's cheapest car
MUMBAI, India: This country's project to build the world's cheapest car has driven into a quintessentially Indian ditch.
On Tuesday, the automaker Tata Motors said that political protests over land had compelled it to stop building the plant in eastern India for its much-awaited Nano model. The car was scheduled to go on sale next month for 100,000 rupees, or about $2,250, less than the cost of the optional surround sound system and DVD player on the Lexus LX 570 sport utility vehicle.
Late Tuesday, an executive with knowledge of Tata's deliberations said the company would still begin making Nanos in October, under a backup plan to shift production to other sites. For the first two months, Tata will produce 10,000 cars a month instead of the planned 40,000, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the company.
The Nano has been dogged from the beginning by one of India's most wrenching problems: how to create space for industry by moving farmers off their land and compensating them adequately.
In a tale rich with incongruities, the Communist-run government of West Bengal State invited the Tata Group, a symbol of Indian capitalism, to set up its plant in an area called Singur. It acquired 1,000 acres from farmers on the company's behalf.
As the project advanced, some farmers who had sold their land demanded it back. The main state-level opposition party, the Trinamool Congress, led protests demanding that the land be returned. Most people sympathetic to Tata accused the opposition of inducing the farmers to protest, while Tata's critics said the farmers had legitimate grievances.
The issue simmered for months. But in recent days, protesters began surrounding the plant, blocking roads and preventing Tata workers from reaching the plant. "The existing environment of obstruction, intimidation and confrontation has begun to impact the ability of the company to convince several of its experienced managers to relocate and work in the plant," Tata said in a statement on Tuesday.
The halt to the plant has caused many Indian business people to warn of a chilling effect on investment in the country. It is also unclear how Tata will be able to keep the Nano's cost so low, since part of the affordable price reflects the company's savings on the land in Singur.
"It's a slap on the face for Brand India," said Suhel Seth, a longtime adviser to the Tata Group and the managing partner of Counselage, a strategic branding firm in New Delhi. "Which foreign company will want to come in when India's most respected group cannot set up industry in a state?"
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/asia/03tata.php





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Trying to sell luxury goods amid stark poverty (IHT)

NEW DELHI: An old woman missing her top front teeth holds a tot in rumpled clothes - who is sporting a Fendi bib. At retail, the bib sells for about $100.
A family of three squeezes onto a motorbike for their daily commute, the mother riding helmetless and sidesaddle in the traditional Indian way - except that she has a Hermès Birkin bag prominently displayed on her wrist. It costs over $10,000, if you can find one.
Elsewhere, a toothless, barefoot man holds a Burberry umbrella costing about $200.
Welcome to the new India - at least as Vogue sees it.
The August edition of Vogue India presented a 16-page vision of supple handbags, bejeweled clutches and status-symbol umbrellas, modeled not by runway stars or the wealthiest smidgen of Indian society who can actually afford these baubles but by so-called "regular" Indian people. Perhaps not surprisingly, not everyone in India was amused.

The editorial spread was "not just tacky but downright distasteful," said Kanika Gahlaut, a columnist for The Mail Today, who dubbed it an "example of vulgarity." There is nothing "fun or funny" about putting a poor person in a mud hut in clothing designed by Alexander McQueen, she said by telephone.
"There are farmer suicides here, for God's sake," she said, referring to thousands of Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the past decade after debts piled up.
Nearly half of India's population - about 455 million people - live on less than $1.25 a day, according to World Bank figures released last week.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/01/business/vogue.php

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Thousands protest land seizure for India's Nano car (IHT)

Thousands protest land seizure for India's Nano car

KOLKATA, India: Thousands of protesters surrounded a factory building what is billed as the world's cheapest car, the Nano, in the biggest demonstration yet against seizure of farmland for industry in eastern India on Sunday.
Enthusiasm for the Tata Motor's $2,380 snub-nosed "people's car" has been dampened by months of protests by farmers refusing to give their land for the project, now hobbled by cost overruns. The car's planned October launch is also threatened.
Waving flags and shouting slogans, thousands of villagers and activists gathered at the factory site in Singur, an hour's drive from Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.
Many protesters arrived in trucks and rickshaw taxis. Some sat in rows of makeshift stages built along an expressway leading to Singur, a verdant countryside of paddyfields and small houses.
"We have gathered today to get back our land. Money cannot compensate our loss," said Kajal Das, wife of a farmer who lost land to the project.
Thousands of armed policemen guarded the factory. Water canons were on standby.
The protests that the Nano factory faces reflect a larger stand-off between industry in India and farmers unwilling to part with land in a country where two-thirds of the billion-plus population depend on agriculture.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/24/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-TATA-PROTEST.php







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India's growth outstrips crops

JALANDHAR, India: With the right technology and policies, India could help feed the world. Instead, it can barely feed itself.
India's supply of arable land is second only to that of the United States, its economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, and its industrial innovation is legendary. But when it comes to agriculture, its output lags far behind potential. For some staples, India must turn to already stretched international markets, exacerbating a global food crisis.
It was not supposed to be this way.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/22/business/22indiafood.php







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